Home Writings Messages IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE INTERNATIONAL PEOPLE’S ASSEMBLY IN DETROIT AGAINST THE BANKS AND AGAINST AUSTERITY

IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE INTERNATIONAL PEOPLE’S ASSEMBLY IN DETROIT AGAINST THE BANKS AND AGAINST AUSTERITY

0

By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
October 1, 2013

We, the International League of Peoples’ Struggle, stand in solidarity with the Coalition for an International People’s Assembly Against the Banks and Against Austerity and all the organizations and broad masses of the people in Detroit and the US nationwide that are assembling  in Detroit on October 5-6 to protest the depredations of the banks and austerity program and to put forward just demands for upholding, defending and promoting the rights and well-being of the working class families and entire people of Detroit.

The exploitative system of monopoly capitalism is monstrously cruel. It has run wild  for more than three decades under the neoliberal economic policy of the US imperialists and has ravaged the wage and living conditions of the American people and  the people of Detroit in particular.  This city has long been a center of US industrial production and is now the epicenter for the financial and social war unleashed by the banks against the working class, as pointed out sharply by the organizers of the assembly.

The monopoly bourgeoisie  extracts superprofits by pressing down wages and proceeds to massacre the jobs at every outbreak of the crisis of overproduction.  The financial oligarchy  further goes to work in exploiting the people at an even faster rate through financial manipulations.  The fraudulent lending practices of these banks, which have been carried out through subprime and predatory loans,  have placed 73 per cent of Detroit home owners in mortgage crisis and have caused  massive foreclosures and the exodus of the jobless and homeless from Detroit.

Upon the destruction of the tax base of the city, public education and other social services have been prejudiced and degraded.  The city itself  has been subjected to predatory lending by the banks through interest rate swaps that allow interest payments 1200 per cent higher than the actual bond rate. The Michigan governor has used the exorbitant debt as the pretext for removing all power from Detroit’s  elected African-American officials and replacing them with an “emergency” manager whose main job is to guarantee debt service payments to the banks, declare bankruptcy in order to wipe out the constitutionally protected pensions and carry out austerity measures to inflict more hardship and misery on  the people.

We support the demands of the Coalition and the people to cancel the debt to the banks; guarantee workers’ jobs, pensions and services for the community; stop union busting;  end the undemocratic racist management of the cities and schools; undertake a jobs program funded by the banks to reemploy the unemployed; adopt a moratorium on all foreclosures and foreclosure-related evictions; repudiate student loan debt and increase funding for public education and stop racism and attacks on immigrants, women, the LGTBQ community and the people with disabilities.

The government must bail out the people, not the banks.  Public money must serve the social needs of the people in the US cities and not for wars of aggression abroad. The US must  withdraw its overseas military forces from deployments of military intervention as in the Philippines and aggression as in Afghanistan.  It must cease and desist from threatening to unleash military attacks on countries like Syria and making provocations against countries
like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.   It must stop  fouling  up the environment  and climate in the US and abroad and must take active measures to reverse climate change.

The austerity programs being imposed on Detroit and other American cities, as a result of the economic and financial depredations of the  big bourgeoisie  and the banks, are similar to those being imposed in other capitalist countries, such as Greece, Spain and Portugal, and on a far wider scale in Asia, Africa and Latin America.  The global exploitative system of  monopoly capitalism is the root cause of the economic and financial crisis generating mass unemployment, poverty and misery as well as   the imposition of austerity programs  to further pass the burden of crisis to the people and deprive them of previously hard-won social benefits and social services.

The people of the world are oppressed and exploited by the same malevolent forces of monopoly capitalism headed by US imperialism.  They suffer in common the worsening economic and social crisis and the austerity programs being imposed on them.  They must unite to fight the system that inflicts intolerable suffering on them and strive to achieve liberation from oppression and exploitation.  The imperialist powers have failed to solve  or lessen the crisis and have deliberately aggravated it by always seeking superprofits.  The people have all  the right to desire and struggle for system change, from capítalism to socialism.

It is a matter of social conscience and duty for the International League of Peoples’ Struggle , all its  global region committees, national chapters and  member organizations, to stand in solidarity with the International People’s  Assembly Against the Banks and Against Austerity in Detroit.  We have therefore called on our US national chapter and all its member-organizations to join the assembly and on all our organized forces and allies on a global scale to express  our  solidarity with the assembly.

We look forward to the overwhelming success of the assembly.  We hope that it serves as a strong signal for further resolute  and militant struggles of the working class and entire people against monopoly capitalism and reaction in the US and the entire world.###

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.