"No Banker Bailout"

NYC Local of the SP-USA
Rejects the "Banker Bailout" Proposal.

www.spnyc.org/main/

The Socialist Party USA (NYC local) protests against
the proposed $700 billion Wall Street bailout. This
proposal caters to the wishes of Wall Street bankers
while disregarding the increasing indebtedness and
economic squeeze which most working people are
experiencing. The corporate “bailout culture” sends
the message to all sorts of corporations that public
tax funds are fair game for laying-off bad
investments.

Wall Street is responsible for cleaning up its own
mess. The primary source of the immediate financial
crisis in the banking industry is mortgaged-backed
securities packaged by mortgage lenders and then sold
to banks that were willing to make a market for these
new financial instruments. Bankers made these
purchases with full knowledge of the potential for
loss. To now ask the federal government to cover
these losses violates all the laws of the free market,
which Wall Street rhetorically defends, and creates a
scenario where banks can make no-risk investments no
matter how irresponsible they are. The government
will become an ATM for bad investments.

Millions of mortgages are currently in default and are
now uncollectible. This is the fault of the lenders
who designed schemes in which delinquent homeowners
would face punitive balloon payments with exorbitant
interest rates. This accelerated the broader
financial crisis and forced millions of families out
of their homes. The mortgage lenders are the guilty
parties and should face criminal charges for predatory
lending and false advertising.

The proposed antidote to the crisis may be worse than
the illness. Pumping $700 billion dollars into an
economy which already features rising food and fuel
prices is reckless. The funds sent into the financial
sector will circulate into other equally unproductive
parts of the economy which could spark even broader
inflation. State-relief must serve the dual purpose
of stabilizing the economy while creating momentum for
the development of a new productive economy.

A bailout will enable the unhealthy economic
relationships upon which the US economy is currently
based to continue. The pattern of dependence on
Middle East oil exporters and multi-national companies
producing export goods in Asia is non-viable. The
only thing propping up the domestic US economy is the
return of dollars held abroad through financial and
real estate markets. This results in re-occurring
speculative bubbles. Consequently, the US has
developed a dangerous dependence on imports – oil,
goods and capital – inside of an economy which has
shed its productive manufacturing sector.

Overall, the Socialist Party (NYC local) strives for
the abolition of all financial markets, the guarantee
of housing, healthcare and employment as human rights,
and the creation of an economy based on the production
of goods and services which fulfill the physical and
intellectual needs of the people in it, not based on
financial speculation and usury. While we see these
demands as the only way of achieving a long-lasting
solution to the social problems capitalism engenders,
we recognize the need for immediate action. In this
light we propose that the following measures be
implemented immediately.

• The US government should create a fund to stabilize
defaulting mortgage holders. The fund would extend
credit to homeowners in need of loans to bridge their
way through the financial crisis. In addition,
legislation should be passed to outlaw predatory
mortgages and force lenders to re-negotiate
unfavorable terms with home-owners. A moratorium on
foreclosures should be declared until such legislation
is passed.

• A federal tax of 6% on all incomes above $5 million
dollars should be enacted immediately. This funding
pool should be used to extend low or no-interest loans
to non-profit co-operatives and worker-managed
enterprises for the creation of new manufacturing
projects. This will help create a new productive core
of the US economy.

• The Congress should immediately pass House
Resolution 676 to establish a National Health
Insurance Program. This would remove a major cause of
personal bankruptcy claims – bills from healthcare
procedures.

• Legislation should be enacted to create a “Tobin
Tax” on financial transactions of .02 cents per
transaction. The resulting funds would be pooled to
share with indebted state governments to prevent cuts
in vital social services.

• Emergency legislation should be passed to remove the
wage base on social security payments. Currently, the
employer and employee must pay a 12.4% social security
tax on income up to $97,500. Any income above this
amount is exempt from social security taxes. Removing
this tax ceiling would secure future payments of
social security and allow for an increased payout
thereby reducing the dependency of retired workers on
401k plans tied to outcomes on Wall Street.

No Bailout Without Penalty.

By Todd Vachon

The President has unveiled his plan for a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street; a move that equates to nothing less than big-time welfare for big-time capitalists. Looks like the free-wheelin' free market privatizers have come to the same conclusion as their predecessors 80yrs ago: unregulated capitalism works only for the richest few and only for so long.

Unfortunately the corporately owned media is treating this like just another big bailout, necessary to "save the middle-class." Missing is the fact that this current economic crisis is not simply the result of a few greedy "bad apples", but was in fact a very predictable result of 3 decades of deregulation by Republicans and Democrats alike.

There is also little mention of the very unique and distinct nature of this bailout plan. Beyond the enormous amount of money being fronted by the public there is some rather shocking language in the White House's bill which would hand over unprecedented power to the Secretary of the Treasury Paulsen (former CEO of Goldman Sachs): "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." In simple terms, this gives Paulsen, who is personally tied to the financial industry, an enormous bank account and the ability to cut checks at his discretion with no accountability.

All of this from the administration that could not find it in their hearts to spend $7 billion to fund SCHIP healthcare for uninsured American children. This can be attributed to a very clear ideological agenda which can be summarized in one cliche' statement: "class warfare." The capitalist class gets government aid when it deems necessary, the rest of us are on our own and if we make a bad decision...bye bye house. The tyranny of the very few must be checked and there is no better time than now to stand up as working/middle-class Americans and state our demands: No more trillions for endless war. No more billions for irresponsible Wall Street gamblers. We want infrastructure that doesn't collapse or flood. We want top-quality healthcare for everyone. We want better pay for us and considerably less for the job-cutting CEO's.

This bailout must not be a blank check that investors come running to receive like kids for candy. It must be punitive; something that financiers will not be motivated to pursue unless absolutely necessary. The blatantly irresponsible behavior of these high rollers must be penalized, not rewarded. The Bush administration is bullishly trying to bulldoze their bill through congress like the PATRIOT Act. This is because it is robbery, and given the opportunity to digest it the nervous public and congress would come to this obvious conclusion.

Any bailout for reckless behavior must be punitive. There should not be people lining up to get a piece of it. The fact that there are tells us that this is not a serious bailout and much more like a handout. Capping executive pay and putting a moratorium on home foreclosures are a good starting point when writing an act of this nature. Re-instating a much larger corporate income tax and giving the public a share in the bailed out institutions is the next big step. The notion that the people who made out like bandits while being engaged in incredibly reckless behavior should now get billions of dollars from the American taxpayer is ridiculous. If you are outraged, you should be. Furthermore, you should share your outrage with your elected representatives. While your at it, share your thoughts about the war and the broken healthcare industry as well.

TELL CONGRESS "NO BAILOUT" NOW!

Built From The Ground Up

Statement by Socialist Congressional Candidate, Todd Vachon

From The Socialist, Fall 2008 (Election Issue)

Greetings fellow readers of TS. For those of you I haven’t had the pleasure to meet, my name is Todd Vachon and I am running as the Socialist Party candidate for congress in Connecticut, District 2.

I am not a politician. I am not a lawyer and I don’t have a speech writer. I am a union carpenter, a public school teacher, a father of two and a concerned citizen who loves democracy and believes in self-governance. I unfortunately see plutocracy and corporate governance today in our beautiful country.

The one political party, with it’s right-wing and it’s far-right-wing, is the party of big-business. Both the Democrats and the Republicans are bought and paid for by the same wealth. Unfortunately, the corporately owned media is content to have us think that they are dynamic opposites.

As a member of the working class majority I am tired of going to the polls year after year and having to select the “lesser of two evils.” We all know damn well that this party is no friend of labor except when it comes time to get some votes and foot soldiers.

They, the Democrats, as well as the Republicans, represent the interests of big-business capitalism. Most Americans are not capitalists. Most can’t afford a lobbyist. The only inherent goal of capitalism as a system is the accumulation of capital and the never-ending pursuit of profit at everyone and everything else’s expense.

No where does it say “guarantee meaningful work and a quality life for all.” No where does it say “preserve the environment, produce in a sustainable way and conserve resources.” Nope.

It just says “Make more profit. Get that money.” Profit, profit, profit.

So, let’s take a second to review where this quest for profit has landed us in 2008:

- The U.S. is still illegally occupying Iraq in year number 5 – a war built on lies and manipulated intelligence. $3 Trillion spent and 40% of the money sent to Afghanistan has come back to the U.S. in the form of corporate profit. This must be the biggest fleecing in history. - Tens of Millions of Americans still live without health care and a hundred million more are breaking the bank just to keep their families insured. - Our economy is in recession, part of a regular capitalist cycle every 10-15 years. -Property taxes… sky high. Homeowners are losing their homes at levels unseen since the great depression, mostly do to outstanding medical bills. -The “middle class” has been steadily eroding for 30 plus years under both Democrat and Republican administrations and congresses. -Good Paying Manufacturing jobs? Outsourced and replaced by low paying, part-time and temporary service sector jobs, due in part to bi-partisan, pro-business trade deals like NAFTA. - Our public education system is slowly being privatized. Our children and public school teachers are being hung out to dry to accommodate the desires of the for-profit education industry and it’s incredibly flawed NCLB policy. - Our roads, bridges, schools and other collectively owned assets are in complete disrepair due to never ending budget cuts. This conscious neglect will likely lead our congress to determine that this infrastructure should also be privatized. - Our most basic ideals about law and justice have been tossed out and the two parties continue to pass bills that further erode our civil liberties and even legitimize torture. -Our privatized prison industrial complex imprisons more people per capita than any other nation in the world.... disproportionately people of color, mostly poor, mostly black. -We are among the worst of industrialized nations for deaths by treatable causes, due to our private, for-profit health care system. –The U.S. ranks 139^th out of 171 democracies for voter turnout. Roughly 50% of eligible voters don’t bother to vote. When asked why, they say that it doesn’t matter- I guess a whole lot of people do understand that we haven’t really got much of a democracy at all.

These are the times of “jobless recoveries” and “market-based solutions”, terms which both share the same distinct odor as “Reagonomics” and “Trickle Down” economics. As members of the working class, which constitutes 80% of America, the only thing that trickles down to us is instructions and orders from way up the hierarchical ladder of corporate organization.

Class is not about income, it is about power. There may be a formula to calculate a particular income bracket that constitutes the so-called “middle-class”, but the truth of it is this: The boss determines what we do during our 8 hours, which is the majority of our waking time on work days. The boss determines how much to sell the fruits of our labors to other workers for. The boss determines how much we get paid, unless we organize and demand more, and the boss decides when he doesn’t need us any more because we are hurting profits. Whether we go to work in an office wearing a shirt and tie working at a computer or we go to a construction site wearing a hard hat and swinging a hammer the vast majority of us are working class- We do not own the means of production.

Our primary source of wealth, as working-class Americans, is home ownership. However, most homeowners are really debtors. The banks own our homes and likely our cars as well. Even ignoring this fact our collective percentage of the national wealth is merely 16%! That’s right, the bottom 80% of Americans share just 16% of America’s wealth. The top 1% owns 33% of the wealth and the next 19% own 51%, giving the top Fifth of society control over 84% of all wealth. This is exactly the intent of a market based economy. So, not only do the capitalists enjoy empowering work and the access to information to make well-informed decisions, but they also get paid 500% more than their average worker.

I know I’m ranting a bit, but it’s my specialty. It’s what we Socialists like to do before taking action… and we are all chomping at the bit right now.

Grassroots Politics. Direct Action. These are the only ways that we have ever accomplished anything as a class. We can’t count on fundraising politicians to hand out National Health Insurance and Living wages. They only throw us a bone when we make the alternative worse. The driving force behind change and progress has always been class struggle, and this still holds true today. This is why I am running for congress as the Socialist candidate, to get out and speak to people and help raise class awareness.

No candidate from either of the capitalist parties will acknowledge the systemic nature of the problems I have outlined above. They will do little to slow the current destructive pattern: the wholesale privatization, or Milton Freidmanization of every remaining public entity- modern day primitive accumulation.

No, the Democratic Party, as Edwin Laing said, is “where social movements go to die”

and the Republican Party is where CEO’s go for tax breaks.

The capitalist two-party monopoly and it’s corporate media networks offer us two options that are both acceptable to them, then lead us to think that we have some kind of democratic choice.

As the young Howard Zinn so aptly stated more than 30 years ago: “Totalitarian states love elections, they get the people out to the poles to register their approval for the government. I know there is a difference, they have one party and we have two parties, we have one more party than they do you see.”

It’s high time to change that. The Socialist Party runs electoral campaigns to activate that 50% of voters, mostly low income, to stand up with a real alternative to the same old wage-slave-driving parties. It is true that one congressional representative cannot change the entire system, but he/she can fight for reforms that will improve our daily lives and, more importantly, develop the political consciousness/solidarity among the people who will collectively make the real changes in the long run.

I strongly agree with the statement that “capitalism cannot be reformed”, but am faced with the dichotomy of a socialist candidate. As a socialist running for office within a capitalist system my policy objectives may seem reformist or social democratic at best: real universal health care, graduated income taxation, socialized energy and expanded public transportation.

Such simple taxation and funding of social programs does not equate to socialism, but fighting together for such reforms can help to generate the necessary class solidarity to bring about a truly participatory economy. A sustainable form of production for human use and not for profit that replaces hierarchy with equality, cut-throat competition with solidarity, free-trade with fair trade. A complete democracy that extends from the political sphere of electing representatives to the economic sphere of making decisions about production, distribution and consumption. A society where every human being has food, housing, healthcare and employment. Where full civil rights and liberties are guaranteed to all, where every individual is able to fulfill his or her full potential.

As Eugene Debs said nearly 100 years ago: “The Earth is for all people, this is the demand.”

The ruling class already has 500 plus congresspersons representing their interests in both houses of the congress. It’s time that we stop voting for their representatives and start running and voting for our own.

-Todd Vachon (www.votevachon.com)