By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chairperson, International Coordinating Committee
International League of Peoples’ Struggle
21 October 2008
Through our International Coordinating Committee and member-organizations in the US, we the International League of Peoples’ Struggle convey to all the organizers, participants and the entire American people our firm and militant solidarity with and support for the National Coordinated Actions to Bail Out the People, Not the Bankers! From October 24 to 27.
We welcome the marches and demonstrations in front of the offices of the Federal Reserve Bank, the US Treasury Department, major banks and other financial institutions that are involved in generating and continuing to aggravate the economic and financial crisis that plagues the US and entire world capitalist system. This is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and is on the way to becoming the Great Depression II.
We hold responsible and condemn the US monopoly bourgeoisie for the economic and financial crisis. The root cause encompasses the extraction of surplus value by the monopoly bourgeoisie from the labor power of the working class, the relentless accumulation of capital in the hands of the few and the pressing down of the wage level and social benefits, the repeated and worsening crisis of overproduction, the use of the monopoly capitalist state to gather public resources and deliver them to the giant corporations, the use of imperialist power to exploit cheap labor, market and raw materials on a global scale, the unbridled use of monopoly finance capital for speculation and the unregulated expansion of debt financing to cover the fundamental problems of US and global capitalism.
The monopoly bourgeoisie has accelerated the concentration and centralization of capital in its hands and has benefitted from the policy of “neoliberal globalization” to the extreme detriment of the US working class and the working people all over the world. Now, in flagrant deviation from its hypocritical “free market” dogma, the monopoly bourgeois state shamelessly delivers trillions of dollars to the finance oligarchy and the rest of the monopoly bourgeoisie (no more than one per cent of population) in an attempt to bail them out from the economic and financial crisis of their own making.
Nothing is being done nor will be done by the US imperialist state to rescue or help the ordinary American people, including the American working class and the now impoverished middle class, from the rigors of industrial decline, rising unemployment, unpaid debts, mortgage foreclosures and the aggravating conditions of recession which can no longer be hidden by debt financing. No amount of money from the imperialist state to the monopoly bourgeoisie can stimulate the US economy.
The bailout money poured into the financial banking sector does not flow into the money stream available to the working classes and the people nor to the real economy. A big portion of the bailout money is being used by stronger banks to buy out bankrupted banks. It is also being used to pump up the stock prices of the banks and some other favored corporations in a spurt of speculative frenzy that ends in the dumping of the stocks. In sharp contrast, large numbers of people are losing their jobs and homes and can no longer pay for the products made in the USA and abroad.
We support the mass protests of the American people and their just demand for the US government to declare an economic state of emergency for the specific purpose of adopting and implementing emergency measures to help the people and not the banks. Among the measures are: emergency moratorium on home foreclosures and evictions; return of foreclosed homes on affordable terms; no budget cuts in education, health care and all social services; no lay offs and extend unemployment benefits; no utility shut-offs; debt relief for students, poor and working people; protect public and private pensions; jobs at a living wage; immediate mass reemployment in public works and urban renewal; and further tax rebates for the low income and middle class families.
Trillions of dollars from the US monopoly capitalist state are being provided to the finance oligarchy, the military-industrial complex and the wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan. But there is no bailout money fort the American people who are the real creators of wealth and who have long fleeced by the monopoly bourgeoisie and its imperialist state.
We are glad that the grass roots, community and youth organizations, trade unionists, anti-racist forces, the anti-war movement and others outraged by the state bailout of the banks are moving to arouse and mobilize the people for mass actions in various cities of the US. Only if they act concertedly and militantly can the American people hope to alleviate their suffering and open the road to a better life of greater real freedom, social justice, prosperity and all-round progress.
The US is the center of the world capitalist system. It has generated the economic and financial crisis that is destroying the forces of production and wreaking havoc on the lives of the people on a global scale. Therefore, the American people play an important role in waging resistance against the US monopoly bourgeoisie and in raising just demands. May their example of resistance inspire the people of the world! ###
