EDITORIAL
Booming Stock Market and Profits Amidst Worsening Poverty and Crisis

Oct 5, 2025

Last week, the stock market hit several more record highs. The partial federal government shutdown didn’t even put a dent in the rapid increase in stock market prices. That’s because corporate profits are booming, with more billionaires getting richer by leaps and bounds.

As for the economy for ordinary people, it is in a deepening crisis, spiraling downward. There are big job losses in manufacturing and construction. Young people can’t get jobs. Long-term unemployment is on the rise. And workers are being forced to work more overtime, or second or third jobs, just to pay the bills.

Meanwhile, rapidly rising prices are forcing most consumers to cut back drastically, with growing numbers not able to afford the basics.

Out of this crisis has come soaring homelessness. The U.S. government counts over 1.3 million students as homeless nationwide. In many school districts, such as New York City, the biggest in the country, almost one out of five students are considered homeless. And this is the tip of the iceberg, with a lot more homeless students than the government admits.

Millions and millions of the working poor—people with jobs—can’t afford a stable place to live.

This is supposed to be a modern society. Yet, the very workings of the economy are barbaric to the extreme, producing fabulous wealth at the same time as ever worsening poverty. That’s because it’s a capitalist dog-eat-dog economy driven by profits. Nothing else counts, but profits. Companies have to increase their profits, or disappear.

So, companies constantly seek to “reduce labor costs,” by forcing fewer workers to do more work, while paying workers less. The profits, which are produced through the sweat and blood of the working class, enrich a tiny minority of capitalist billionaires, who already have so much money, they don’t know what to do with it. So, they gamble their fortunes on every financial market imaginable, from the stock market and real estate to crypto, thus sowing the seeds of the next financial crash and economic catastrophe.

No, the rising stock market is not a sign of economic health and prosperity, but the opposite—it is a sign of the madness and monumental waste of this capitalist economic system, a system, by the way, which is also spawning ever bigger and more deadly wars, as the struggle for capitalist domination extends across borders, over the entire world.

Today, we are told, society is divided between Republicans and Democrats. That is a lie! The real division is between the rich against the poor, the capitalists against the workers.

Donald Trump, the wannabe dictator of the most powerful country on earth, is merely the face of these capitalist billionaires. His disgusting racist rhetoric, his putdowns of women, his crusade against immigrants and so-called foreigners, are merely ways to protect the privileges of his fellow billionaires by dividing workers against each other. Their goal is to sow fear and demoralization amongst ever more sections of the working population. All the job cuts and purges that Trump is carrying out against the federal workforce are no different than what companies do all the time.

Last week at Quantico, Trump told hundreds of military officials that American cities should serve as “training grounds” for U.S. troops. This is not an idle threat, but an admission that capitalism can only produce more chaos, destruction and repression.

There is nothing inevitable about this crisis. The working class already produces more than enough wealth to assure that every single person on earth could live decently. But that can only happen when the working class overcomes its divisions and brings its forces together to rip away control over society from the capitalist class of billionaires and their servants at the head of the government and the state apparatus.