 "Photo: Ilissa Gilmore")
The presidential nominee of the U.S. Socialist Equality Party said the Wall Street bailout demonstrates a decay of “genuine democracy” and criticized Democrats for supporting it.
Jerome White spoke on the economic crisis in a lecture titled, “The Origin and Implications of the Financial Crisis: A Socialist Perspective,” held Oct. 6 in the McGregor Memorial Conference Center.
The lecture was a part of an ongoing series of talks given by White, and other members of the party, as a national and international campaign tour.
White said the U.S. economy has reached a level similar to the 1930s Depression, but, in many cases, worse than that.
“The U.S., even at the depths of the Depression in the 1930s, was a rising economic power, whose industries were outstripping those of Europe,” he said. “American capitalism had, at that point, extraordinary resources despite the Depression, but today is a completely different situation.
“And as shown by events around the world, this isn’t going away, it’s going to deepen.”
White criticized the approval of the bailout because he said there were no political debates or public discussion on the issue before it was passed.
He said the suggested cost of $700 billion will likely rise above a trillion and that ordinary working people have to foot the bill.
According to White, the money would come from gutting Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Pell grants and other vital programs, and it was the largest theft of public assets in world history.
Billions of dollars would be better spent rebuilding cities, protecting homeowners from foreclosure and providing high quality, low-cost education, he said.
“Students are not being bailed out,” White said, referencing WSU’s recent drop in enrollment by 4 percent. “We reject the lie that there’s no money to address social problems when they can find a trillion dollars for war and a trillion-plus for the bailout of Wall Street.”
Instead of anyone being held responsible, he said, they would be rewarded and this cannot happen.
“We insist that there be criminal investigations into those who were responsible,” he said.
“We insist that the ill-gotten gains of the Wall Street financiers and speculators must be confiscated and placed in a fund to use to protect homeowners facing foreclosure and eviction, to pour billions of dollars into the expansion of public works, to put billions of people to work at decent paying jobs.”
White also criticized Democrats, and the party’s presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, especially, for encouraging the approval of the bill.
“The fact that Obama joined [President] Bush and [Sen. John] McCain in supporting the bailout implicates the Democrats joined Republicans in defending the wealthy elite,” he said.
On every issue, he said, including the Iraq War, the Wall Street bailout and “the attack on Democratic rights”, Obama is “indistinguishable” from McCain, offering voters no choice in this election.
Samantha Briggs, a member of the WSU chapter of Students for Barack Obama, said that any similarity between Obama and McCain is “far-fetched.”
“The reason why I’m voting for Obama is because he’s so different from McCain,” she said. “If they were [the same], the race would be so close.”
She said Obama wants a tax cut for Americans, while McCain wants to give tax cuts to businesses.
“Obama wants to give students a $4,000 tuition credit per year,” she said. “McCain, I haven’t heard say anything about education.
"These are two very different gentlemen.”
White said that it’s a myth that the Democratic Party is for the working class.
“It’s the party of the Vietnam War,” he said. “It’s the party that’s run Detroit for decades and run it into the ground.”
More about the Socialist Equality Party:
According to SEP presidential nominee Jerome White, The Socialist Equality Party is for:
- - Free college education.
- - Pro-choice and socialized medicine; taking profits out of the healthcare industry.
- - The international unity of the working class, and it opposes those who blame immigrant workers or workers of other countries for the loss of jobs.
- - The expansion of democratic rights
- - The closing of all U.S. military bases, the shut down of Guantanamo Bay and other prison camps and the dismantling of the entire U.S. war machine
- - Raising the taxes of the rich and lowering the taxes of workers and young people.
- - Advocating the beliefs of Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky, such as the view that capitalism causes human exploitation and only helps the smallest, wealthiest section of society while causing the larger, poorer section (consisting of workers, students and others) to suffer.
- - Placing power in the hands of workers, who cooperate with each other, rather than compete against each other. It believes the class system is corrupt.
