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Our Workplace Press articlesWorking People Should Not Pay for the Great Bailout Rip-off!
With the biggest stars on Wall Street falling, the federal government rushed to the rescue with obscene amounts of taxpayer money. It pumped 85 billion dollars into AIG to keep it on life support and on the very next day injected a fresh 300 billion dollars into financial markets.
Wall Street wasn’t satisfied. So federal officials came up with a proposal for the godfather of all bailouts. They want to use taxpayer money to buy up worthless securities on the books of U.S. financial institutions. The price tag for this latest bail out is supposed to come to 700 billion dollars, according to Treasury Secretary Paulson. Others put the cost at a trillion dollars... or more. And that’s on top of the other enormous bailouts over the past year, including for Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
All told the government is handing almost two trillion dollars over to the biggest financiers and money men in the country – the very people who have created this mess.
Worried about the anger swirling around the country at election time, the politicians resorted to threats. President Bush warned, “Given the precarious state of today’s financial markets ... government intervention is not only warranted, it is essential.” Senator Christopher Dodd, the Democratic chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, threatened: “we’re literally maybe days away from a complete meltdown of our financial system, with all the implications here at home and globally.”
Every major politician pretends that this enormous bailout is needed to save the economy from disaster and to save people’s jobs, homes, savings, 401(k)’s, pensions.
It won’t do anything of the kind. Those financial institutions will greedily snap up the money, but they will use it only to enrich themselves through more speculation. The financial mess will get bigger. Giving Wall Street trillions more dollars is like handing gasoline and matches to an arsonist.
This bailout will not stop the housing crisis from getting worse. It will not stop millions more ordinary people from losing their homes, nor their life savings. Nor will it stop the recession from getting worse, with increasing unemployment and cuts in pay and benefits. The cost of the bailout will push more inflation, the invisible tax that takes a slice out of our standard of living every day.
The money to pay for it all will come from social programs, public services, Medicare, Social Security and education. These bailouts are a rip-off of monumental proportions.
The criminals on Wall Street who engineered this financial crisis should get nothing but a long jail term. Instead, the Democrats and Republicans are working together to give them two trillion dollars.
Working people can have only one response: we have to protect ourselves from the crisis that the capitalists created. The trillions that are going to bail out the capitalists and their profits must be used to build what our society so sorely needs – schools, hospitals, roads, bridges, mass transit, flood control systems, parks and on and on. That same two trillion dollars can be used to create jobs that pay decent wages. It can be put into the schools, so our kids have a decent education. It can be put into health care, so no one need die from lack of medical care.
The working class is the only productive class in society. Producing all the goods and services that society needs, we have the power to defend ourselves. We don’t have to go along with this rip-off.