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When a worker can’t pay his or her credit card bill, that’s their problem. When a working class family can’t keep up with their mortgage, they are foreclosed and thrown onto the streets. But when the capitalist bankers lose hundreds of billions in wild speculation, the federal government comes to their rescue and makes the tax payers foot the bill! This is theft on a grand scale. Billionaire bankers are protected while millions of workers lose their jobs and homes.
Working people didn’t make this crisis, why should we be the ones who have to suffer? We didn’t create the housing bubble, create predatory lending practices, gamble away billions of dollars in the Wall St. casino. Now the government is creating a fund with our money to take over the bad debts of the bankers and corporate capitalists. For the rich, it’s “heads we win tails you lose,” showing once again that the “free enterprise system” is nothing more than a myth.
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The system works for the capitalists, not for the people. The bailout plan is so thoroughly undemocratic that even the head of Senate Banking Committee, Christopher Dodd. said of the Wall Street bailout on Sept. 19: “None of us have any idea what the details are.”
It’s time to fight back. We have unemployment insurance because we fought for it. We won the right to unionize because we fought for it. Now we have to fight against mass layoffs and for a moratorium on foreclosures. Make the greedy capitalists who created the crisis pay. Their vast fortunes should be expropriated and used to provide jobs, housing and healthcare for the people who go to work every day, who make this country run.
In the end what is needed is to do away with this corrupt and destructive system. The capitalist system itself must be abolished and replaced with one based on human solidarity, sustainability and socialist planning. If we act together, the workers—not the banks—can win. A united, working-class movement would truly be “too big to fail.”
The PSL La Riva/Puryear campaign demands:
* An immediate moratorium on foreclosures, evictions and rent hikes.
* No layoffs—jobs for all.
* Extend unemployment benefits at full pay for everyone without a job.
* Open the books of the banks for a workers’ inspection
* Criminal prosecution of banking, finance, insurance and all other executives whose companies have benefited from the foreclosure crisis.
* Take the $430 million spent everyday on the occupation of Iraq to fund people’s needs. Hurricane and flood victims must have a government guarantee that they will receive all necessary assistance.
* An aggressive sales tax on the stock market.
* Creation and funding of jobs programs throughout the country to eliminate unemployment.
