I. Introduction: The Great Manic Depression
One hundred years ago, the twenties were characterized by economic prosperity. Until the stock market crash giving way to the Great Depression, employment and mass marketing rates soared to create a growth of 42 percent between 1921 and 1929.
It was a time to be alive; it was a time remembered as “roaring.” Never had Americans been so liberated from financial turmoils, and with the stock market buzzed speakeasies and jazz clubs in every corner of the rapidly-expanding urban world. The Italian mafia, nursed from the bottle of the bootlegging industry, burgeoned in the same rooms frequented by the figureheads of the modernist literature movement. In the wake of World War I came an unprecedented zeitgeist of growth, the specific nature of which hasn’t been seen or replicated since.
Few parallels can be drawn between the twenties of the past and those in which we find ourselves now — between economic turmoil, political polarization, and plague, the world more faithfully echoes the decade both before and after. What characterizes the time in which we live now — what sets it apart from ninety years ago — is that it is no longer pure depression that looms above the heads of America.
Raging instability threatens the quality of day-to-day civilian life, and in the last year this is something of which the greater population has become sharply aware. The fragility of economics is nothing new, but amidst (in particular) the COVID-19 pandemic we have discovered a more worrisome and much more ancient disease among us: the suffocating presence of an economic system that strengthens, every day, its strangle upon human liberty and livelihood.
II. The Suez and the Colonial Pipeline: Gas Prices in 2021 Signifying a Breakdown
The six-day blockage of the Suez Canal in March 2021 wreaked havoc across the world’s financial fronts. Ever Given, the massive 400-meter container ship that became stuck near the village of Manshiyet Rugola, resulted in the blockage of over 300 vessels.
By Mar. 25 (the day the canal closed), American imports were delayed by three days due to the obstruction of a waterway facilitating an estimated 12 percent of global trade.
According to CNBC, costs totaled approximately $400 million an hour in goods. Container ships such as Ever Greet were forced to navigate around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, a route that could total up to 15,000 miles — and which was used prior to the ship’s completion in 1869.
This additional time (which could range anywhere within the span of multiple weeks) posed a threat not only to international commerce, but to the lives of thousands of animals. Livestock onboard, according to EU director of NGO Animals International Gabriel Paun, “will run out of food and water in… two days.”
Most of these 200,000 animals came from Romania, a prominent exporter of live sheep. Several times within the past two years, the country has been reprimanded for failure to take adequate measures to protect animals prior to arrival. The sinking of the Queen Hind in November 2019 resulted in 14,372 sheep drowning (only 180 total surviving the ordeal).
A European Commission audit on Romania observed “a general lack of records in the system of controls to ensure animal welfare during transport by sea to non-EU countries” and claimed “there is no evidence of checks confirming that the animals are fit to continue the journey. The absence of documented procedures, records and support to official veterinarians in checking vessels provide little assurances on the effectiveness of most controls carried out.”
“The Queen Hind was an iconic example of the intrinsic failures of the system,” said Reineke Hameleers, CEO of Brussels-based Eurogroup for Animals, in 2020. “The EU likes to pride itself as a global animal welfare leader, but it still makes its hands dirty with this cruel industry.”
Livestock vessels, according to a Guardian investigation, are twice as likely to experience a “total loss” — when damage to cargo is beyond repair, in this case dead — as standard vessels. Additionally, these ships are often unusually old and have been poorly repurposed to carry animals: the Queen Hind, at the time of its sinking, was 39 years old.
A year before this, Romania exported 70,000 sheep to Persia against the will of Vytenia Andriukaitis (the EU commissioner for food safety at the time). His concern was due to the temperature of the ship’s interior, which posed a heat threat to the safety of the sheep. Andriukaitis Tweeted “proper animal welfare conditions cannot be guaranteed” while urging the public to oppose the voyage, which continued as scheduled. Still, many animals died from the high temperatures. What’s more, they were treated cruelly by unskilled handlers and butchers.
The total number of animal casualties due to the 2021 blockage is still unknown and likely exceeds volumes of hundreds. According to Paun, their lives relied on a quick clearing of the Suez within two or three days of the initial blockage; this was obviously not the case.
Global trade’s excessive trust in supply chain resilience and just-in-time manufacturing became the main topic of discussion following the release of Ever Given. Michael Safi, an international correspondent for The Guardian, described the situation as a “worst-case scenario” that could and should have been avoided.
“Container ships have become huge fast, especially over the past decade,” wrote Safi. “Other than the result of technological advances, analysts say the trend is a hangover from the high oil prices of the 2000s – which led shipping outfits to seek to maximise economies of scale – and the low-interest rates that followed the 2009 financial crash, which allowed companies to borrow the vast sums required to build vessels as long as skyscrapers are high.”
Impact upon human livelihood was noticeable. Gasoline prices rose noticeably within a day of the blockage; again, the economic impact is expected to last for months into 2021 if not longer.
III. Cybercrime and Cryptocurrency: New Threats on the Horizon
Again in 2021, gas prices rose following the cyberattack of a U. S. pipeline. The Colonial Pipeline, according to CNN Business, delivers “half of the diesel and gasoline consumed on the East Coast.”
It was shut down after an attack on May 7, in which extortionists hacked the IT network and demanded millions of dollars in cryptocurrency (whose existence, really, parodies the concept of capitalism on paper by reducing the nature of money to obsolete and absurd. The introduction of technological currency, known in this case as Bitcoin, indicates the dollar as it exists now is essentially worthless and carries as much worth as the abstract idea of a highly nonsensical peer-to-peer online system of digital transactions that may or may not be safe).
While the Bitcoin value was retrieved by the federal government, the Colonial Pipeline remained shut down for a week.
Both supply and price of gasoline, upon which millions of Americans rely for fuel to get to work, home and school, remains strained as a result of the pipeline shutdown. As a result of this unforeseen crisis, the economy — and all forced to rely on it — endured long-term hardship.
Cyberattacks are relatively new, but in the time they’ve come to exist they have become rampant in presence and disastrous in consequence. Forty percent of data breaches disclosed in May 2021 involved the use of ransomware: a type of blackmail enabled only by the development of technologies like malware and the increasing value of cryptocurrency.
With new technological advances come new forms of violence, and new instabilities in human safety. They are more frequent and come with heftier prices than ever before.
Given Ever Given was freed the morning of Mar. 29 and the Colonial Pipeline resumed operations after a week — given the system always bounces back, given most civilians probably didn’t even hear of the 128 cybersecurity threats publicly reported in the single month of May — these may seem like isolated and relatively harmless one-time events without lasting long-term consequences. But a look at the past year indicates events like the blockage of the Suez represent parts of a larger-scale breakdown, and we should be treating them as warnings of the dangers posed by commercial reliance upon a single waterway — more broadly, the perils of our world’s submission to capitalism.
When this system sinks, we will take the place of the sheep as the primary casualty. In a way, as the prices of gasoline indicate, we are well on our way. The Great Depression lives as proof we have been forced into such a position in the past, and a warning we will again so long as conditions remain the same.
IV. Capitalism’s Terminal Case of Instability
Safi’s mention of the 2009 economic recession in relation to the blockage of the canal brings to attention an interesting point, one that is more so than ever deeply important to recall: in response to economic turmoil, human society will devise increasingly advanced, and therefore complex, solutions that come with new — oftentimes, larger and more serious — long-term problems.
Rather than solving the problems leading to such a recession, people focused on building larger vessels — on fitting the world to fit the system, rather than the other way around — on obtaining, through any perversions of the world possible, money and power in the form of mass production and exportation.
Industry lay at the forefront of their priorities; it would come at the cost of anything and everything else; this remains the mindset of those diseased by technology. And failing to recognize the limitations of capitalism’s weakness, as well as those presented by the insurmountable strength of the natural world, humanity persists in attempting to implement a system on the verge of breaking down over our heads.
When the economy suffers, we turn more attention to producing — selling — buying more; we rely upon stimulating the very system that has landed us in the same compromising position. This inevitably results in problems created directly by the apparent “solution,” such as the massive-scale degradation of natural resources as we depended on them so heavily for financial stability during the Industrial Revolution.
These complications, as evidenced by the blockage of the Suez, typically aren’t predicted or prevented in a meaningful way (at least, not until long after they have already done irreversible damage).
Before March nothing was done to address the potential pitfalls of ships so large; it is unlikely they will go down in size. Rather, we can expect to see more projects, such as the expansion of the Suez, to accommodate such gigantic vessels. Instead of limiting commerce to prevent these blunders we will keep forcing our environment to adapt to our financial needs, as the human inclination toward excess bleeds into economic policy.
The negative consequences of the events of March 2021 were further exacerbated, and caused to an extent, by the financial desperation of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since the virus’s first appearance in 2019, the face of the workforce, economy, and education have altered worldwide: online work and schooling are now commonplace. Additionally, unemployment rates skyrocketed mid-2020 to leave 14.8 percent of the population jobless — more than 29 million people, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Hispanic and Latino populations saw the most dramatic increase in unemployment rates, from 4.4 percent in February 2020 to 18.9 percent in April of the same year. Rates of Asian-American unemployment also went up from 2.4 to 14.1 percent: a direct result of racist rhetoric and action arising during the pandemic and fueled by politicians’ unchecked outspoken prejudices.
The small-scale impact is already irredeemably devastating. It appears impossible to contort reason into such a position that it might justify the financial turmoil of roughly eight percent of the U. S. population (not taking into consideration the dependents and families of the unemployed, whose quality of life relies heavily upon the financial standing of their caregiver). This appears even more so the case, that the crimes of capitalist instability against humanity are without hope of redemption, when one considers the inflation rates rising alongside unemployment figures — both the cause of COVID-19, a crisis for which such a conditionally successful model of economics was never prepared.
V. Inflation is a Symptom of Illness Within the System
“Pandemics of the magnitude of COVID-19 are, thankfully, rare,” said sources from the White House Briefing Room. “The United States experienced short bursts of inflation in some prior periods of pandemics or large-scale reallocations of economic resources, such as in 1918—driven by the Spanish Flu and demobilization from World War I… That said, in the next several months we expect measured inflation to increase somewhat, primarily due to three different temporary factors: base effects, supply chain disruptions, and pent-up demand, especially for services.”
The news is meant to be reassuring, that with crisis comes the apparently inevitable consequences of economic turmoil guaranteed to pass (until they resurge) with the natural process of time and recovery. The government considers some inflation beneficial as it is interpreted to imply economic growth on a national scale.
“There are going to be some volatile prints on inflation coming up, and the market is going to react to that and try to decipher what that means,” Sunitha Thomas, national portfolio advisor at Northern Trust Wealth Management, told CNBC in 2020. “We think that’s more cyclical than permanent.”
But when considering the interests of the people as opposed to those of business and enterprise, “some inflation” should not be deemed normal — not when wages consistently fail to adapt to those “cyclical” shifts. It is an indicator that something about capitalism is fundamentally unable to be sustained; it is a symptom of an illness in the system that kills off its own citizens through poverty.
From 2000 to 2018, the federal hourly minimum wage rose to $7.25 from $5.15, which was the equivalent of $7.51 in 2018 — a 26-cent decrease in spending power. The national average cost of college rose from $15,333 in 2000 to $23,835 in that same span. To afford tuition entirely off minimum wage, one would have to work 2,977.28 hours in 2000. Two years ago, that number of hours was 3,287.58.
With the CARES Act in March 2020, the government promised to financially aid “individuals, families, and businesses affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The act was passed by Congress on March 25 and signed into law two days later. Citizens were sent $1,200 stimulus checks as early as the second week of April.
Recipients’ response to the CARES Act varied. Some complained the checks came too late, or were too small due to the little purchasing power of $1,200 in the 2020 pandemic economy: in 1700, $1,200 was equivalent to over $77,500. Today, it is not enough to pay 82.9 percent of the population’s federal income taxes, rent a single-person apartment for one month in Chicago, or afford a month’s insulin supply under certain conditions.
The stimulus checks were unable to afford the very things they were meant to help citizens cover: housing, healthcare, and basic survival needs.
VI. Capitalism Infecting Our Ethical Judgment
One Washington Post columnist criticized President Donald Trump’s vehement resistance to the CARES Act delivering stimulus. Jennifer Rubin refers to his pandemic response as an “inexcusable… hissy fit” that left the Treasury Department “‘scrambling’ to get out the checks after Trump’s stalling” when he finally agreed to distribute the stimulus.
It is ironic, given the ways in which war often stimulates the economy, capitalism seems built for peacetime with a lack of disruptions. Though it pulled us from the Great Depression (into which it threw America without warning after the prosperity of the twenties) with the help of World War II, it collapsed under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic — with an estimated cost of $16 trillion in the United States alone (where 60 million claims, in a single year, were filed for unemployment insurance).
The pandemic was only one more installation in a long-winded, desolate story overdue for a final chapter. Capitalism, in cycles of prosperity and recession, continues to straddle a fine line between apparent success and evident failure. A surge in growth pulls us from disaster, only for this economic growth to send the world back into depression (until the next war or hackneyed relief program comes along to save us, for a brief shining moment in history that capitalists will remember fondly).
Such a fragile system could only be sustained in predictable, comfortable office climates and cultures; it has proven in recent years far too dependent on conditions to survive — and when they are less than ideal, when the workforce has to adjust to the state of the outside world, it is hardly effective — and, of course, it is the people who bear the brunt of the burden.
The closure of innumerable small businesses has dramatically changed the lives of citizens, workers, and families for the worse. Rates of unemployment exceeded the predictions of the U.S. Census Bureau, and workers of color were disproportionately laid off first (Asian-American businesses have suffered more so than others as the pandemic fuels anti-Asian racism), with nothing to pull these people from their economic turmoil save a mere $1,400 in stimulus checks provided by the passage of the CARES Act.
VII. Parallels to the Depression
On the topic of the stimulus package, it presents an unsettling number of similarities to President Herbert Hoover’s response (or lack thereof) to the Great Depression in the sense that both men at fault valued the morals of capitalism before those to which all humans ought to be obligated: these men were both infected by ideological adherence that, in their eyes, came before the economic security of their nation’s people.
Hoover’s presidency from 1929 to 1933 is remembered as one of the least successful in history (arguably the worst) due to his bullheaded refusal to extend federal aid to those impacted by the disastrous stock market crash that defined the 1930s.
“Hundreds of narrow economic interests, which Hoover was either unwilling or unable to control, wound up producing the notoriously protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which certainly didn’t address, and may well have worsened, the economic crisis,” says Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker.
Trump’s negligent pandemic response — much like Hoover’s ignorance to the need created by the Great Depression — amplified poor economic conditions and encouraged poverty to thrive in the wake of an absent government.
“Everything (Hoover) did was inadequate to the task of turning things around,” said University of California-Davis history professor Eric Rauchway to the Huffington Post. “In fact… things turn[ed] around right when Roosevelt came into office in March of 1933. So, generally speaking, Hoover had a very long time to try to do things, and he didn’t.”
Sentiments surrounding Hoover echo those expressed by Rubin when she writes “President Trump… was never willing to step into negotiations for a COVID-19 stimulus package when they were ongoing or publicly share his view that the bill’s $600 checks were too small.”
Rauchway goes so far as to directly compare Hoover’s situation — and subsequent inadequate response — to that of Trump amidst the pandemic economy.
“You have a president who is willfully refusing to exercise power that people tell him he has and that he ought to exercise,” he said. “In the case of President Trump, that he has the power to authorize the manufacture for the federal government of the appropriate goods ― in this case, it will be medical equipment. And he’s declined repeatedly to do that while also saying he isn’t declining it.
“Hoover adamantly refused to authorize anything like adequate federal aid to the unemployed. And what little public works he did sign onto he did very reluctantly. He thought that such actions would lead, ultimately, as he wrote, to socialism and collectivism, which of course he was against.
“You know, this is not just saying, ‘Oh well, it’s traditionally the states’ job and the states can take care of it.’ It’s saying that even if the states can’t take care of it, I don’t think the federal government should do it for ideological reasons,” concluded Rauchway.
Both Trump and Hoover were bound to their beliefs beyond reasonable extent, brainwashed by a capitalist upbringing to avoid “handouts” of any kind, at all costs. The irrational fear of anything resembling communism — which, it is worth pointing out, comes more than anything from antisemitism — led both these men to prioritize, before the welfare of their citizens, the maintenance of the poisonous illusion that capitalism was fit to endure either of these economic crises.
In reality, it was in shambles. This bullheaded ignorance, born from blind faith in a broken system, cost millions of Americans their insurance, housing, education, and general livelihood — for which they will never see reparations, without which many of them are currently trying to survive. And should the system that made them go unchecked, history will only watch more men like them plunge a desperate world into economic ruin without lifting so much as a well-manicured finger.
VIII. The Illness Throughout History, and Why it Will Not Cure
Analyzing our very different financial positions a year ago and today, it may still be easy to live in denial and hope the cyclical process of economic inflation during external disruptions will allow the situation to balance out. However, figures show inflation continues to increase without being able to support the livelihoods of those who live with its consequences.
What’s more, 2020 isn’t the first major economic crisis of the new millennium. The 2008 stock market crash — which was the largest point drop in history until the 2020 crash — is fresh in our memories. So are the market drops created by the events of September 11, 2001. Three crises within two decades is an alarming number of disasters for an economy to suffer, no matter how great its prosperous times may be. The memory of yesterday’s thriving market doesn’t feed the hungry.
The past year in particular has forced us to reevaluate what capitalism is really doing for us, how it harms the livelihood of everyone forced to participate, and how much longer we truly believe it can sustain, but a look at history (since long before the Great Depression, capitalism has trudged a rocky and unpleasant road) indicates this system’s stunning inability to survive. It is a miracle we have lasted as long as we have, and that it took a pandemic for society to reach a point of such widespread epiphany.
Major disruptions in the realms of politics, public health, and natural elements outside human control — like the sandstorm wind that allegedly blew Ever Given into its fixed position for a week — should not pose such regular and potent threats to the stability of economics. The concept of value is an abnormally strong force in all societies who allow it to infect their ideologies, and it is threatened by such trivial variables. Nothing has stripped us of our humanity, and the basic decent treatment to which we are all entitled, like the illusion of monetary worth.
Capitalism was not prepared for the blockage of the Suez (while the canal is being expanded, it remains vulnerable in the sense that this project hasn’t been completed and will not be for many years). Nor had it ever thought, it seems, to brace itself for a global health crisis; now we as common people pay a price far greater than $1,200 — our time, our sense of purpose. In all its years of weathering disasters, it has never thought to strengthen or prepare itself for the next one.
Our health, our happiness, and our lives are entrusted wholly and every day to the ever-trembling hands of an easily startled and morally corrupt system, who does not hesitate to let us slip through its fingers — even throw us away, at times — at the slightest provocation.
It shakes more every day because it continues to sicken; like a fever, inflation rates and the cost of living rise at aggressive paces (even as the “cycle” seems to routinely bear temporary prosperity as small compensation for the times we suffer greatly). Gradually the worst parts of this cycle will grow harder to recover from as the state of the economy worsens at a steady rate — as the rate begins to accelerate, as the disease festering within our own society drives it into total degeneration. We are already fortunate beyond comprehension to have recovered from the economic catastrophes detailed in this work.
Our best efforts do little to combat this plague. Rectifications like the stimulus are bandages, not cures, because capitalism was conceived and born in a terminal case of greed which shall remain in its nature so long as it exists. The economic system is fundamentally dangerous — it cannot be cured without being destroyed — and regularly careless with the people to whom it claims to be committed.
The Depression, the recession, the pandemic and the subsequent CARES Act, the blockage of the Suez, and the havoc wreaked by the existence of cryptocurrency on the Colonial Pipeline — and your gasoline prices — indicate this will never change. It is well past time to pull the plug on something dead in both brain and soul, which recognizes the presence of neither in you.
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