By Gavrielle Gemma
Trump’s tax cuts went into the bank vaults of billionaires, instead of creating jobs. The treasury is being looted by military war profiteers, banks are reaping record profits, and wages can’t buy the products workers need to get by. Around the world capitalists are sending workers on a race to the bottom. These factors are intensifying the inherent tendency of capitalism to produce crisis after crisis with the working class and oppressed picking up the tab every time.
The monopoly for-profit media (in all, six companies) are sounding the alarm of an imminent new recession. Hundreds of articles are being written but not one considers what a crash would mean for working people, only how best to save the capitalist system and the obscene profits that it guarantees the rich.
While imperialist countries cooperate to occupy and loot other countries and scour the world for arms contracts and cheap wages (enforced by U.S. weaponry given to local puppets), they also are fierce rivals for market domination. This led to both WWI and WWII, which left hundreds of millions dead. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are united in their devotion to the imperialist cause. That is why both vote to increase the military budget time and time again. Different style, same outcome.
In 2008, the “Great Recession” began.
The last inevitable bust happened when Bush Jr. was in office, and the capitalist government ran to bail out the banks and others who caused the crash. First, they instantly found $700 billion ($700,000,000,000) of our money and gave it out to the banks and insurance industry in a program called TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program).
Obama was elected in 2008 and many workers, Black and white, believed he would feel their pain already under way. Instead, Obama continued the bank bailout and allowed the Federal Reserve Bank (the Central Bank of the U.S.—with our money in it) to hand out $14.4 Trillion dollars ($14,400,000,000,000) of free money, without interest, to desperately prop up the teetering capitalist system. A University of Missouri study says $29 Trillion, but the true figure is kept a state secret. Other Central Banks around the world did the same. Nothing was done to stop the bleeding in the working class.
Immense suffering of the people ignored.
Demonstrations by workers and youth demanded to bail out the people, not the banks, but this did not happen with the force needed, a point we’ll come back to again. Here’s what did happen.
30 million jobs were lost. Nine million homes were foreclosed. (The current Secretary of the Treasury Mnuchin was named “foreclosure king” for his role in this massive swindle). Pensions were cut by more than 25%, and in some cases completely wiped out. Across the globe more than 90 million jobs were lost and poverty soared.
Recovery for corporate profits not workers’ wages.
While many jobs have replaced those that were lost, most are at much lower wages and without benefits, and millions are temporary or part-time jobs. Banks, however, are reporting record profits of $240 billion, with just six raking in $100 billion, in part because of the sickening tax cuts and handouts to the rich, sold to us as incentives to create jobs, which is a lie. The banks also make massive profits from low wages, opioid deaths, destruction of the environment, mass incarceration of U.S. and migrant workers, and the warfare capitalist state. The banks and corporations either hoarded tax savings or used it to buy their own stocks. Goldman Sachs Bank (GS), best friend to Trump, Obama and the Clintons, scored especially big from the tax cuts. The current Trump cabinet has 5 Goldman Sachs executives running our lives. The ex-president of GS, Gary Cohn, is president of the Economic Council.
Repeat history or organize?
It is often said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Whether in 2020 or 2022, capitalist recession or depression is inevitable. Relying on saviors such as the Democratic Party, warfare or bailing out bosses is not the way to go. We need to understand how capitalism is a dying system of total anarchy meant only for the 1%.
The global workforce produces all the wealth in society which is stolen by capitalist free loaders who scapegoat the poor and immigrants while they hide in their gold-encrusted mansions. The election of social democrats to capitalist government will not stop this, and most often they collaborate with the capitalists to enact anti-worker measures and cuts to social programs. It is this collaborationist policy that has led millions of workers in Europe who have historically voted socialist to look to the fascist parties as happened during the period of depression in Germany when the Nazis rose to power.
As revolutionary socialist workers, the New Orleans Workers Group is building an independent organization of workers fighting for our own class interests. We need to prepare now in our minds and work to get this message of struggle, global solidarity, workers unity and independent action out. Join us.