i dream of being possible

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grumblings about the economy

one of the things that gets me about that ridiculous times article about the millenial generation

and how we are ‘unemployed’ and don’t know about the ‘great depression’

as if, as far as we are concerned, the economic recession/collapse of 2007 is the great depression

youth unemployment is high? did this happen accidentally? or for no reason?

the current shitty state of the economy, globally, is a direct result of what happend in 2007

and, as we well know, what happened in 2007 disproportionately impacted Black and/or Latin@ households, many of whom lost all their accumulated wealth (as stored by any property they may have owned)

that, for almost 10 years, they’ve been trumpeting about how all the baby boomers are going to retire and open up jobs for us, except that the 2007 financial crisis wiped out a lot of people’s retirement savings and since these same people have been continuously working to dismantle social services like pensions/old age securities/labour unions/healthcare, these people are realizing that, no, they have to keep working because retirement is a bullshit dream available only to rich white people

and that, now that some (but not in the predicted numbers) people are retiring, most organizations are using the opportunity to reduce their labour force by attrition, rather than replacing the open positions

that the majority of jobs created after 2007 have been low wage, service type positions

how all of this has created a large pool of job seekers with university educations, competing for not too many actually professional jobs (I think my province has about 10 job seekers per position – and I live in one of the countries least impacted by the 2007 financial crisis).

how the previous generation has continuously reduced funding for all social services, services that they were happy to benefit from while they were young, but don’t want to pay for anymore because they make enough money

how the situation they are describing has been a fact of life for many communities of colour, and is only largely now impacted white people (and thus is alarming)

how we are still pushing this notion that economies and wealth can continue to grow, year after year, despite the very stark realities that not only is this unsustainable, but that white people are destroying the planet in their quest to prove right, economic theories that have failed over and over and over

/end rant