It starts to make sense when you realize that each of those events is basically a fire sale for billionaire investors.
Just look at income inequality before/after each of those events.
This is the truth.
The economic crisis’s have all been real, they all really have been huge events that have restructured life for everyone, it’s just that they’re not accidental, they’re not unforseen consequences of policy decisions nobody could have imagined… they’re engineered, or foreseen with great clarity.
And every time, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the so-called middle-class shrinks even more. Prices go up, we all have to work a few more hours in the week, we get less in return, our future dreams dwindle, and we plug into social media and AI slop and drugs and alcohol to placate us while we say “I just gotta save up enough so I can…”
And those savings NEVER increase. There is always some event, some family crisis, some medical problem or a car breaks down or your parent dies or the company you work at gets bought out and your 6 years of experience only makes you a liability for the new management team who wants to make a culture of “young, energetic pioneers.” (who they can pay less.)
The wealthy are at their happiest and strongest when they exist as they have for centuries, land-owners up high, living off the hard work and struggles of thousands of people beneath them, shaving a bit off everyone’s pay, offloading their problems to people who are already struggling. They want to run around in the manor and keep getting wasted and banging winches while we serfs toil in the fields we don’t own.
I wish upon a star that we could be a generation that takes power back for the average worker and uses our strength in numbers as leverage to have a better quality of life by making the wealthy pay their fair share.
But it’s looking like our historic legacy is going to be that of a fool generation that votes against their own interests and refuses to stand up for themselves.
A very embarrassing time to be an American.
we could be a generation that takes power back
The bigger problem right now is that unlike revolutions of old, this time there are millions of people who adore and cherish their overlords and would literally fight to the death to protect them for no other reason than ideological.
Even if it all went down tomorrow, even if we all locked arms and marched on Washington and installed a group of compassionate leaders who want to make sure all people are treated fairly and that we all had basic rights… we would still have to share this land with the millions of people who hate us for wanting better outcomes. There would still be hostile, evil forces twisting the minds of the stupid into hating their neighbors.
It’s such a larger problem than the wealthy hoarding all the money. We’re facing the absolute limit of human capacity to mitigate outside influence, we have every possible entity, commercial or political, trying to make us feel a thing, make us think a thing, make us serve them. We are attacked all day from every side with malicious lies and narratives meant to make us be quiet and hide. Even if it doesn’t work on most of us, if it only works on a fraction of a fraction of the people, we still have millions who hate you and want you dead simply because you might think that your tax money should go into making all our lives better equally.
The bigger problem right now is that unlike revolutions of old, this time there are millions of people who adore and cherish their overlords and would literally fight to the death to protect them for no other reason than ideological.
This is a message the media owners want us all to accept.
In my experience, very few people want to die or commit violence for some billionaire’s agenda.
Most people just want to live their lives and maybe live to see the assholes in charge have to pretend to care what the rest of us think.
Reactionaries are paper tigers. They’ll flee or switch sides when the going gets rough.
Seeing shit like this play out just makes it harder to keep going. At this point it’s a matter of when I do it, not if. What point is there if it’s only getting worse? I’ve seen my best years by now
I don’t know who came up with this “once a generation” bullshit, but you can see that economic crises were more often than once a decade in 20th century https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_economic_crises#20th_century
If it worked to funnel money to the wealthy the first time why not the second? Or third… and so on.
2002: We lost the house 2008: got evicted from apartment 2020: dad died from covid 2025: let’s see how it goes this time
Less once-in-a-generation and more continuously-for-a-generation
You start noticing this pattern after some decades.
Always accompanied by “we need to temporarily tighten the belt now to keep our properity for the following generations”.
The period before is sold as a great economic time, despite that they called it a crisis back then and also ‘needed’ austerity measures to get back to the prosperity of the previous period.
The western standard of living has been destroyed bit by bit since the post WW2 period with this tactic, not for the multinationals, banks, stock folks OC, that’s where the stolen money goes to.
The ones in power telling us in their paid press how great ‘the econonomy’ is doing bcs stock line go up and BS GDP up.
In reality that means more billions in the pockets of a few oligarchs while income equality is growing.Don’t forget - you were also BORN into a once in a generation economic crisis: The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s was the failure of approximately a third of the savings and loan associations in the United States between 1986 and 1995. These thrifts were banks that historically specialized in fixed-rate mortgage lending.
Wait, I miss this, did a new recession just drop?
We never really recovered from COVID.
If it hasn’t yet it’s about to. 1-5% daily drops across the stock market for the past month pretty much and now with a 10%+ minimum tariff on all imports means everything is going to get way more expensive. I’ll chew a brick if we’re not in a recession by the end of the year
At that point, is it a recession or should we just call the 2020s: depression part 2 AI boogaloo?
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Don’t forget the wildfires.
I was going to say I live in a “50 year flood plain” and I’ve seen 3 floods in the last 16 years.
And the wealthy manage to come out on top every single time.
When you’re the ones manufacturing the crisis, it’s easier to prepare and profit from it
When they should really come out 6 feet under.
It’s the same crisis, in various stages of escalation. The rich are squeezing more and more of the lower and middle class all over the world, and there is almost nothing left to squeeze.
The next few years will bring a massive collapse in government services (the USA is starting) for ordinary people, because that is one of the last things that the rich can still squeeze out.
After that, there will be only the ultra rich and the destitute poor left; and the ultra rich will only be able to take from each other.
This will mean war, and they will send you all into it.
Unless we stop it now. Tax the rich.
After that, there will be only the ultra rich and the destitute poor left; and the ultra rich will only be able to take from each other.
It’s already starting to happen. Half of consumer spending in the US is done by just the top 10% of earners. For an economy built on consumer spending this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
For an economy built on consumer spending this means that you get more economic growth by giving those rich people more money to spend, not by lifting up the other 90%.
You’ve gone and mixed up correlation and causation here.
The top 10% arent spending 50% of the money because they are the glorious saviors of the economy, protecting and nurturing it while us poor people thoughtlessly hoard and save all our wealth. It’s actually quite the opposite.
Except they could still do that level of spending while not perched atop a massive hoard, and the rest could do cumulatively more spending via their sheer numbers if said hoard were distributed more evenly.
That’s why I support a maximum wealth cap. My preferred figure is 1000x median household income. Anything beyond that is taxed at 100%. I don’t even care what the wealthy do with the money over that wealth cap. Donate it, spend it on conspicuous consumption, I don’t care. What matters is that the wealth isn’t pooling at the top, allowing the wealthy to outbid everyone else for things like housing.
Hell, imagine a world like that. Maybe at the end of each year, the rich burn off all their excess wealth by throwing giant lavish parties that they invite the entire populace of their cities to. Or maybe they just cut everyone a check. If you’re forced to burn off all your excess cash, you might as well burn it in a way that makes you popular.
Me when capitalism
Capitalism works if we factory reset it every 10 years or so.
Capitalism works when it’s allowed to work, and part of that is strong social safety nets… For the people, not the companies.
If we’d let banks and businesses fail in 2008 it, it would have been devastating at the time, but we wouldn’t be in this hot mess today. Because the government is so friendly to failed businesses, models that play fast and loose can make huge profits, squirrel away that cash, fail, and then get bailed out by the taxpayer. Meanwhile, slower and more stable institutions get outcompeted in the short term, and don’t get bailed out when they withstand the failing economy events.
Privatize the profits, socialize the losses.
Oh, and we need actual monopoly laws. No way in hell Amazon isn’t a monopoly.
What happened in 2002? Was that from the war on terror?
End of the dot com bubble.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_market_downturn_of_2002
But it happened mostly in 2000:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble
And coincidentally 9/11
The September 11 attacks also contributed heavily to the stock market downturn, as investors became unsure about the prospect of terrorism affecting the United States economy.
Was the 2002 a year of recession? Or is the stock market downturn considered a recession because rich people lost money?
Unlike wealth, losses usually trickle down. When companies go bankrupt their employees loose their jobs. Millionaires actually love recessions, Jack Welch said:
Never miss out on an opportunity like a good recession.
The 2002 recession was not as global and universal as later ones. The dot com bubble mostly affected tech companies, and the internet was not as common as nowadays. I asked my parents once how they felt that recession, when I first read about it later, I was in school in 2002. They said they didnt even know there was a recession that time, in eastern europe it wasnt noticably worse than the chaos of the 90s
There is a simpsons episode about the bubble, s13e18, aired in 2002:
I don’t mean to be that guy, but look which US political party was in charge for each of those dates…
2002 - Bush II, Republican
2008 - Bush II, Republican
2020 - Trump, Republican
2025 - Trump, Republican
Cheat sheet.
I understand now.
How can a partially muscled skeleton scream
He partially has lungs and a vocal chord ?
Though it reminds me of a conversation you can over hear in one of the Divine Divinity
Baldurs Gategames between two skeletons, who talk themselves into how they shouldn’t function, and then promptly fall to the floor in a pile.Edit: corrected the game
