THE WALL STREET CRISIS AND THE FAILURE OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM
The Wall Street crisis and the failure of American capitalism
By Barry Grey
16 September 2008
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The end of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, two of the largest Wall Street investment banks, one week after the government takeover of the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, marks a new stage in the convulsive crisis of American capitalism.
On Monday, global markets fell sharply in a sign of mounting panic and doubt over the stability of the entire US banking system. Throughout Europe stock markets plunged by as much as 4 percent.
The fall on Wall Street was even steeper, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average losing 504 points, or 4.42 percent. There is every indication that the sell-off will intensify, with the full implications of the collapse of the two Wall Street banks as yet far from clear.
The immediate concern is the fate of American International Group (AIG), the world’s largest insurance company, and Washington Mutual, the largest savings and loan bank in the US, both of which are teetering on bankruptcy.
The sudden demise of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch has removed a huge amount of liquidity from the economy, as paper values built up over decades of speculation come crashing down. This is capital that is needed to finance business operations, and its elimination will inevitably depress economic activity, fueling unemployment and recession, further undermining home prices and consumer spending, and further weakening the balance sheets of already financially shaken banks.
A sea change is unfolding in the US and world economy that portends a catastrophe of dimensions not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The fall of icons of American capitalism such as 158-year-old Lehman Brothers and 94-year-old Merrill Lynch can only lead to the further discrediting of the “free market” ideology of the US ruling elite, as well as its political and economic system. The spectacle of giants of capitalism drowning in debt piled up over decades of reckless speculation must inevitably discredit the social class—the American capitalist class—which is responsible for the debacle.
The bromides that have been uttered by the official spokesmen for the government, the media, Wall Street and the political parties over the past year of mounting financial crisis have lost all credibility. The assurances that the latest government bailout will stabilize the situation, that the US banking system is “fundamentally sound,” that the housing and credit markets are about to “turn the corner,” etc., reassure no one.
On Monday, President Bush mouthed such phrases in a brief White House appearance. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson at a White House press conference evaded questions about who was responsible for the financial disaster and instead declared that he was “focused on the future.”
The presidential candidates, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, made perfunctory statements that were remarkable only for their brevity and vacuity. What is widely acknowledged, even in ruling class circles, as the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression is unfolding in the midst of a presidential election. But it barely rates a mention by either the Republican or Democratic candidate.
Both parties and their candidates tip toe around a financial scandal of world historic proportions because they are equally implicated. They are both bound hand and foot to Wall Street and single-mindedly dedicated to the defense of American capitalism.
McCain issued a statement demanding “reform” in Washington and on Wall Street and pledging to bring “accountability” to Wall Street. This from a multi-millionaire whose campaign is being run by a bevy of lobbyists for Wall Street and other sections of big business.
His Democratic counterpart, Barack Obama, issued a predictably mealy-mouthed statement complaining that “too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren’t minding the store.” While attempting to pin the blame for the crisis entirely on the Bush administration—ignoring the “free market,” deregulatory policies of Democrats Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton—he offered a mutual amnesty between himself and McCain, saying, “I certainly don’t fault Senator McCain for these problems…”
These events are signposts in the historic failure of American and world capitalism. For the working class, they mean a rapid growth of unemployment, poverty, homelessness and social misery. The government, Wall Street and both political parties will seek to place the burden for the consequences of their own greed and incompetence squarely on the backs of working people.
The collapse is devastating ever wider layers of the population, including those who have worked on Wall Street and received some of the financial benefits of the speculative boom. Some 26,000 Lehman employees are not only out of a job, with few prospects of finding similar employment elsewhere, but as owners of 25 percent of the company’s stock they have lost a combined $10 billion, wiping out their savings and retirement funds.
Tens of thousands of employees at Merrill Lynch and Bank of America will lose their jobs in the merger of the two firms, adding to the 110,000 jobs slashed in the US financial services industry over the past year.
The broader implications of the mounting financial crisis were signaled by Hewlett-Packard’s announcement Monday that it was cutting 25,000 jobs.
Many of those who precipitated this economic disaster, on the other hand, will profit handsomely from the debris they have left behind. Hedge funds and other short-sellers, who bet on the collapse of corporations, are even now speculating furiously on the demise of the remaining Wall Street firms, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, as well as big commercial banks such as Bank of America.
William Gross of the nation’s largest bond fund, Pimco, took in $1.7 billion last week by betting on—and publicly agitating for—a government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The emergency talks over the weekend, involving the heads of the major commercial and investment banks and led by Treasury Secretary Paulson and top Federal Reserve officials, centered on rescuing Merrill Lynch and orchestrating an orderly liquidation of Lehman. Under pressure from Paulson and the Fed, Merrill agreed to sell itself to Bank of America, the largest consumer commercial bank in the US.
At the same time, there were frantic negotiations over the fate of AIG, which faces bankruptcy unless it can raise tens of billions of dollars in capital. When US markets opened Monday, AIG was asking for emergency loans from the Fed to stave off collapse.
A failure of AIG threatens to bring down the entire credit system both in the US and internationally, because the company holds a large stake in the multi-trillion-dollar, unregulated market in so-called “credit default swaps.” AIG has sold CDS contracts to banks, hedge funds and big investors all over the world, under which it guarantees the mortgage-backed debt of a wide range of companies in the event that they default. If AIG should go under, the value of the debt which it insures would fall to an unknown level, destabilizing the credit markets and threatening a chain reaction of defaults and bankruptcies.
The events of the past two weeks demonstrate that the American financial aristocracy is plunging the entire country into bankruptcy. These events are themselves climatic moments in a protracted process.
For three decades, the “free market” has been elevated to the status of a secular religion in the US, with the capitalist market as its god and socialism as its devil. This period, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has seen the wholesale dismantling of the productive base of the US economy, at the cost of millions of jobs and the living standards of the American working class.
In the name of the supposed infallibility of the market, the operations of big business have been deregulated, removing all legal restraints on corporate profit-making and fueling the accumulation of ever more obscene levels of wealth in the hands of a financial oligarchy. A vast process of social plunder has occurred, in which the wealth of the country has been redistributed from the bottom to the very top.
The scrapping of huge sections of industry and the immense growth of social inequality are the hallmarks of the historic decline of American capitalism. At the heart of this decay is the separation of the process of personal enrichment of the ruling elite from the material process of production.
The United States has become the world leader not in manufacturing technology or industrial power, but in financial speculation and parasitism. As Floyd Norris, the economics columnist of the New York Times, put it on Friday, “During recent years, Lehman—along with many competitors—went on a borrowing binge to buy assets with as little money down as possible.”
By its very nature, the parasitism of American capitalism has generated corruption and criminality on an unprecedented scale. Wall Street CEOs have awarded themselves tens of millions and even billions in compensation, in an utterly irrational and socially destructive squandering of social resources for the benefit of private greed.
At the end of 2007, for example, the Lehman board awarded CEO Richard S. Fuld a compensation package worth more than $40 million. According to Reda Associates, he can expect to collect $63.3 million if he is terminated. In 2004, he paid $13.75 million for an ocean-front home in Jupiter Island, Florida, adding to his other properties, including a home in Sun Valley, Idaho.
Joe Gregory, a former president of Lehman, used to travel to work in a helicopter. He recently put his 9,500-square-foot ocean-front home in Bridgehampton, New York on the market for $32.5 million.
The Financial Times recently reported that compensation for major executives of the seven largest US banks totaled $95 billion over the past three years, even as the banks recorded $500 billion in losses.
The question of precisely who and what is to blame for the greatest economic disaster in more than three quarters of a century is something that will not and cannot be raised by any section of the political or media establishment.
Since the eruption of the current crisis, there have been no serious congressional hearings, no public investigations, no attempts to hold anyone accountable. Massive government interventions into the supposedly sacrosanct precincts of the “free market,” for the purpose of bailing out giant Wall Street firms, including the biggest government takeover of corporate entities in US history, have been carried out without any public debate or significant opposition from either political party. This, while millions of Americans are losing their homes and their jobs as a result of predatory corporate practices!
Certain conclusions must be drawn from the crisis of the American economic and political system. There is no solution within the framework of the profit system. What is needed is a socialist program that places the needs of the people before the profits and personal fortunes of the ruling elite.
The entire financial system must be taken out of private hands and nationalized in the form of a public utility under the democratic control of the working class, with provisions taken to safeguard the holdings of small depositors and share-holders. It must be subordinated to the social needs of the people and dedicated to developing and expanding the productive forces in order to eliminate poverty and unemployment and vastly improve the living standards and cultural level of the entire population.
Those who are responsible for the economic catastrophe must be called to account. Criminal investigations should be undertaken with appropriate sanctions for those who have plundered the social wealth. A full public accounting should be made of the hundreds of billions that have been diverted to private bank accounts through fraud and criminality. Such gains should be seized and used for the public good.
The only social force that can carry this out is the working class. It requires a clean break with the Democratic Party and the two-party system and the mobilization of the immense social power of the working class in its own party, on the basis of a revolutionary socialist program.
This is the program fought for by the Socialist Equality Party.
See Also:
US bailout of mortgage giants sets stage for wider financial crisis
[12 September 2008]
Record corporate bailout reveals the bankruptcy of American capitalism
[10 September 2008]
US government takes over mortgage giants to stave off financial meltdown
[8 September 2008]
US jobless rate soars as foreclosures break new record
[6 September 2008]
The WSWS invites your comments.
Copyright 1998-2008
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
More US corporate bailouts on the way
By Barry Grey
16 September 2008
Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author
The US government, brushing aside its constant invocations of “private enterprise,” has dispensed hundreds of billions of dollars in cheap loans to prop up the banks. Last March, the Federal Reserve Board paid JP Morgan Chase $29 billion to take over the investment bank Bear Stearns when Bear was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy.
Only a week ago, the US Treasury committed at least $200 billion in taxpayer funds in the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—a move that makes the government responsible for the two companies’ combined $5.3 trillion in mortgage liabilities.
The claims that the government, in allowing Lehman Brothers to collapse, has “drawn the line” on further taxpayer bailouts of failing corporations are false. The government decided to let Lehman fail, in part, to conserve the dwindling funds at the disposal of the Federal Reserve and calibrate hand-outs from the Treasury—which faces record budget and trade deficits and a soaring national debt—to be used to rescue more strategic companies.
The Fed has reportedly agreed to widen its bailout of Wall Street by accepting, in return for low-cost loans to both commercial and investment banks, even more dubious forms of collateral, including shares of stock whose value has collapsed and mortgage-backed securities that can be sold on the market only for pennies on the dollar.
There are growing calls on Wall Street and in the financial press for the government to directly buy the near-worthless subprime mortgage-backed securities and other collapsing credit instruments that are undermining the balance sheets of major financial companies. With the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—which was sanctioned in advance by the Democratic Congress—the legal and structural framework is in place for this wholesale government bailout of the banking system.
See Also:
The Wall Street crisis and the failure of American capitalism
[16 September 2008]
US bailout of mortgage giants sets stage for wider financial crisis
[12 September 2008]
Record corporate bailout reveals the bankruptcy of American capitalism
[10 September 2008]
US government takes over mortgage giants to stave off financial meltdown
[8 September 2008]
The WSWS invites your comments.
Copyright 1998-2008
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
US Federal Reserve announces $85 billion bailout of insurance giant AIG
By Bill Van Auken
17 September 2008
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Following emergency consultations between the Federal Reserve, the US Treasury and the Democratic leaders of both houses of Congress, the Federal Reserve on Tuesday night announced a bailout of the Wall Street insurance giant American International Group (AIG).
According to reports posted by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, under the emergency plan the Fed will provide the failing firm with an $85 billion loan in exchange for 80 percent of its assets.
The reported bailout is a reversal of the policy adopted by the federal government just last weekend, when it failed to intervene to stop the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the country’s fourth largest investment bank. According to the Journal, government officials believed “it would be ‘catastrophic’ to allow AIG to fail.”
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the newspaper said, “concluded that federal assistance would be necessary to avert an AIG bankruptcy, which they feared would have disastrous repercussions throughout the financial markets.”
The bailout is one more demonstration of the systemic crisis confronting American and world capitalism. It is unprecedented and, in some respects, goes even further than the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac barely a week before. Unlike the two mortgage finance giants, AIG is not a government-sponsored institution and is not even directly regulated by the federal government.
Pressure for a rescue of AIG grew after all three major rating agencies downgraded its credit Monday night, raising the prospect that lenders would recall their loans.
It was feared that the failure of AIG, with $1 trillion in paper assets, would have a domino effect, threatening banking and corporate failures throughout the world economy. AIG is one of the largest players in the global, unregulated market (estimated at $62 trillion) in credit default swaps, i.e., private contracts under which companies like AIG guarantee the debt, including mortgage-backed bonds, held by other companies.
While ostensibly an insurance company, AIG engaged in the same financial parasitism as the rest of Wall Street, investing heavily in mortgage-backed securities and writing derivatives on collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) tainted by subprime exposure.
Now, once again, millions of ordinary working people will be forced to pay the price for this reckless speculation carried out in pursuit of super-profits.
AIG was forced in recent weeks to take massive write-downs on its assets. In August, the company announced second-quarter results that included a staggering $25 billion in losses on its derivatives.
The government intervention at AIG follows the collapse over the weekend of two of Wall Street’s largest investment banks. The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the takeover of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America sent shockwaves through financial markets around the globe and sparked fears of a chain reaction of banking failures.
A worldwide sell-off of stocks was capped by Monday’s 504-point drop on Wall Street, the steepest one-day loss since markets reopened following the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In response to the deepening financial crisis, the Federal Reserve Board and its counterparts in Europe and Asia poured hundreds of billions of dollars in fresh credit into the economy. Between them, the Fed, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan pumped $210 billion into the money markets on Tuesday in an attempt to prevent a seizing up of the global credit system. Central banks in India and Australia also carried out major injections into their banking systems.
The immediate trigger for the massive cash infusion was the doubling of the interbank lending rate in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse. The sharp rise in short-term lending rates, which hit a seven-year high of 6.79 percent, was a measure of deep concern that AIG would follow Lehman into bankruptcy, saddling world financial institutions with hundreds of billions of dollars in losses in credit derivatives.
The interbank lending rate rise fed into the global stock market decline, as investors dumped financial stocks. On Tuesday, London’s FTSE 100 fell below 5,000 for the first time in seven years, with HBOS, Britain’s largest mortgage lender, seeing its shares plummet by 40 percent.
The Tokyo stock market fell by more than 4 percent, while in Paris and Frankfurt markets were down more than 2 percent. In Russia, the country’s main stock market halted trading after suffering losses of 11.47 percent.
The Federal Reserve Board shocked Wall Street Tuesday afternoon by leaving US interest rates unchanged. Speculation had run rife in the financial markets that the Fed would cut its federal funds rate by as much as 75 basis points in light of the deepening credit crisis.
The statement the US central bank issued in announcing its decision to stand pat painted a grim picture of the US economy. “Strains in financial markets have increased significantly and labor markets have weakened further,” it stated. “Tight credit conditions, the ongoing housing contraction, and some slowing in export growth are likely to weigh on economic growth over the next few quarters.”
It likewise cited “increases in the prices of energy and some other commodities” that left the outlook for inflation “highly uncertain.” It concluded that the “downside risks to growth and the upside risks to inflation are both of significant concern.”
The decision not to heed the demands of the stock market was attributed by some analysts to the Fed’s conviction that, given the depth of the banking crisis, lowering interest rates would have little or no effect in terms of generating credit for the economy.
“You could cut the Fed funds rate from 2 percent to 1.5 percent. It won’t cause any more lending. The banking system has no capital base to lend,” George Feiger, chief executive at Contango Capital Advisors in Berkley, California, told Reuters news agency.
The announcement of the Fed decision provoked sustained booing from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and stocks resumed their downward slide before rebounding later in the afternoon. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed up 1.3 percent, or 141.5 points, at the end of the day.
Most analysts saw the rebound from Monday’s dramatic market decline as a response to predictions that the government would mount a rescue of AIG.
Furious trading in the company’s shares churned the market. At one point in the day, AIG stocks had lost 74 percent—falling to $1.25, compared to a year high of $70. By the end of the day, they were down 21.2 percent.
In the face of these developments, there was recognition within ruling circles and the major media internationally that world capitalism is facing a crisis of historic dimensions. Comparisons of the present crisis to the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s were widespread.
The Financial Times of London, the sober voice of British finance capital, commented in its editorial Tuesday, “The world has not ended. The international economy has not yet collapsed. But one thing is now quite clear: the banking system as we know it has failed.”
Denunciations of the American financial establishment and the “free market” ideology that Washington has sought to ram down the rest of the world’s throat over the course of decades were also prevalent.
In Germany, the Frankfurter Rundschau stated: “The Americans are exposing the world to a highly dangerous experiment. For ideological reasons they don’t want to save another bank with taxpayers’ money and nationalize it. They are accepting the risk that this policy could end up costing a lot more money and lead to upheavals that no one had even dared imagine.”
The German newspaper added, “If things take a sharp turn for the worse, European taxpayers … will have to pay billions of euros to save local banks, returns from life insurance and other retirement provisions will decline sharply, and the crisis will bestow upon Europe millions of unemployed. Thank you America!”
For its part, the Wall Street Journal, the unwavering champion of “free market” capitalism, published an editorial Tuesday entitled “Surviving the Panic.” It argued for a massive government intervention to buy up all of the worthless paper on the books of Wall Street’s finance houses and thereby secure their profits together with the multi-million-dollar incomes of their top executives.
The newspaper warned ominously, “More major bank failures are a certainty, including some very large ones.”
Its solution? The setting up of a new Resolution Trust Corporation, of the type created during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, which would “provide a buyer for securities for which there is no market.” In other words, the US Treasury’s vaults should be opened up to bail out major Wall Street investors and CEOs who made billions off of a speculative housing bubble that has now burst, precipitating the greatest financial crisis since the 1930s and threatening millions of working people with the loss of their jobs and homes.
Wall Street’s newspaper of record offered no indication of how it would pay for such a bailout for the rich. Undoubtedly, the answer will come after the November election, in the form of a ferocious assault on working class living standards and the dismantling of what remains of America’s tattered social safety net, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
See Also:
The Wall Street crisis and the failure of American capitalism
[16 September 2008]
US bailout of mortgage giants sets stage for wider financial crisis
[12 September 2008]
Record corporate bailout reveals the bankruptcy of American capitalism
[10 September 2008]
US government takes over mortgage giants to stave off financial meltdown
[8 September 2008]
US jobless rate soars as foreclosures break new record
[6 September 2008]
The WSWS invites your comments.
Copyright 1998-2008
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
No return to the 1930s! For the public ownership of the banks!
Statement by SEP presidential candidate Jerome White
17 September 2008
Use this version to print | Send this link by email | Email the author
The bankruptcy of Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers and the forced takeover of Merrill Lynch are the latest demonstrations of the collapse of American capitalism. All the lies and propaganda about the supposed infallibility of the “free market” are being discredited. The people of the US and the world are confronting a financial catastrophe on a scale not seen since the Great Depression.
What is revealed in this crisis is not merely the recklessness, incompetence and greed of America’s financial elite, but the failure of capitalism-an economic and political system that subordinates the needs of society to profit and personal enrichment.
Who is going to pay for this crisis? Here the US corporate and political establishment agrees: working people must accept a drastic reduction in their living standards to bail out the Wall Street investors and banking executives who are responsible for this debacle.
The American ruling class has for decades championed “private enterprise” and the wonders of the market as the pinnacles of human civilization, capable of solving all problems, while socialism has been denounced as evil and oppressive. Over the past 30 years, the operations of big business were deregulated-under both Republican and Democratic administrations-removing all legal restraints on corporate profit-making and the personal accumulation of wealth.
The ruling class responded to the crisis of American capitalism by carrying out a deliberate policy of deindustrialization, which wiped out millions of jobs and decimated cities like Detroit. Vast industrial resources were destroyed, and the savings of workers were plundered in order to free up capital for the most parasitic forms of financial speculation.
Increasingly, wealth was separated from the creation of real value. Corporate corruption and insider dealing became the norm, and vast fortunes were amassed in the hands of a small layer of the population.
The Financial Times recently reported that compensation for major executives of the seven largest US banks totaled $95 billion over the past three years, even as the banks recorded $500 billion in losses. Of course, neither Barack Obama or John McCain suggest that this money should be paid back.
Now that this orgy of financial speculation has produced a disaster, the corporations and banks are determined to roll back the conditions of the working class to the 1930s to pay for the crisis.
Obama and McCain are absolutely committed to the defense of capitalism and America’s financial elite. The next president-whether a Democrat or Republican-will move to gut entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security and support the corporate attack on jobs and living standards.
McCain’s sudden discovery of “greed” on Wall Street is laughable, coming as it does from a long-time defender of the US corporate establishment. Obama’s complaints about a lack of oversight ignore the role of the Clinton administration, whose policies helped fuel the speculative explosion and sub-prime mortgage crisis. Obama is a no less committed defender of the financial elite, receiving more campaign cash from Wall Street firms such as Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs than John McCain.
The Democratic candidate proposes no criminal investigations and refuses to hold anyone responsible, making his proposals for “regulation” thoroughly meaningless. In comments Tuesday, moreover, Obama declared his full support for the capitalist system, saying the “free market has been our engine of our progress,” which “rewarded the innovators and risk-takers.”
It is precisely these “risk-takers” and “innovators” who concocted the debt instruments and derivatives used to funnel billions into the hand of the wealthy. Meanwhile, the working class-which had been declared virtually obsolete in the “new economy”-is, as Marxists have always insisted, the only producer of real value.
It is indicative of the decrepit state of American democracy that the bailout of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, followed by Wall Street insurer AIG-which will essentially double the national debt while providing nothing for distressed homeowners-was taken without the slightest political debate or discussion. This underscores once again that behind the trappings of democracy, the American political system is a plutocracy, i.e., a government of, by and for the rich.
The alternative to capitalism and financial catastrophe is socialism-the reorganization of economic life to meet social needs and not private profit.
I call for:
* A public auditing of corporate finances and the personal accounts of the top management of the financial institutions over the past decade.
* The recovery of the vast sums of money that have been pocketed by the wealthy elite. Those responsible for the economic devastation must be brought to justice.
* A massive public fund to make whole all of the victims of predatory lending and the collapse of home values. All home foreclosures must be immediately halted, and funds made available to provide quality housing for all.
* Trillions of dollars for rebuilding basic industry, cities and the country’s infrastructure. This should be paid for through the establishment of a genuinely progressive tax system that drastically increases taxes on the wealthy, and through the dismantling of the gigantic US war machine.
* Transforming the giant banks and financial institutions into publicly owned and democratically controlled utilities, with measures taken to protect small shareholders. The financial resources of society-which are the product of the labor of millions of working people-must not be left in the hands of a financial aristocracy.
* Reorganizing the economy on the basis of a rational, democratic and egalitarian plan guided by the socialist principle of production for human need, not the enrichment of a wealthy elite.
Insofar as the Democrats even mention the economic crisis, it is to promote economic nationalism and the pitting of American workers against workers in other countries. In fact, the global consequences of the breakdown of American capitalism have demonstrated: (1) the integration of the world economy, and (2) the pressing necessity for the international unity of the working class in the struggle to defend jobs and living standards.
The SEP encourages all forms of mass opposition to attacks on social services, the gutting of jobs and the wave of home foreclosures. This crisis has proven that the capitalist class is unfit to direct economic and political life and that working people must establish genuine democratic control over society.
This requires a political break with the two parties of big business and the building of a mass political party of the working class fighting for a socialist alternative. I encourage workers and youth to support our election campaign, contribute to our fund and, above all, make the decision to join and build the Socialist Equality Party.
Click here to contact the Socialist Equality Party and take part the SEP election campaign.
See Also:
Reject Obama and McCain! Support the socialist alternative in 2008! Build the Socialist Equality Party!
[13 September 2008]
The WSWS invites your comments.
Copyright 1998-2008
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved
