The financial crisis that has been heating up since early 2007 reached the boiling point in late September. Credit markets virtually stopped functioning. A full-blown panic swept stock markets worldwide. The U.S. economy is in the throes of a recession that could turn into a Depression lasting for years. In these dire straits, the Wall Street speculators who set off this crisis are demanding that the government rescue them with a bailout priced at $700 billion. The actual costs will be far higher, a trillion dollars or more. Meanwhile, the Democrats are pushing hardest for the Bush bailout of the banks. Presidential candidate Barack Obama blames "greed" for the crisis on Wall Street (capitalism without greed?) and says there must be no "blank check to Washington" -- meaning he's for putting in a few conditions as window dressing. Following in the Democrats' footsteps, the AFL-CIO labor bureaucrats called a demo for "No Blank Check for Wall Street." Yet no amount of regulation will stop the boom-bust cycle of capitalism. Meanwhile unemployment lines are growing and a million families were thrown out of their homes by bank foreclosures in the last year. While the fat cats, Democrats and bureaucrats are all going for the Bush bailout to prop up U.S. capitalism, revolutionary Marxists oppose this trillion-dollar giveaway to the Wall Street speculators, calling instead for a program of transitional demands leading to the expropriation of the banks and the entire bourgeoisie through workers revolution.

Counter-advice to the corporatist advice.

Historic ILWU Dock Workers’ Action Points the Way

May Day Strike Against the War Shuts Down All U.S. West Coast Ports

On May 1, every port on the West Coast of the United States was shut down to demand an end to the U.S. war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The historic May Day walkout by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) is the first time ever that an American union has struck against a U.S. war. The union ranks defied the rulings of an arbitrator, who twice ordered them to go to work. They overcame the capitulations of the ILWU leadership, which didn’t want the work stoppage in the first place, tried to water it down and cowered before the threats of legal action while waving the flag. The employers’ Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) declared the May 1 port shutdown an “illegal strike.” But after all the huffing and puffing from the bosses’ mouthpieces, the dock workers pointed the way to defeating the imperialist war by mobilizing working-class power. In the end, it was more than a work stoppage. The dock workers’ May Day strike against the war was a first step, a show of what it will take to bring down the warmongers in Washington. Their “symbolic” action was felt all the way to Iraq, where dock workers in two ports stopped work in solidarity with the ILWU. But it was only a beginning. What is needed is not only industrial action but a political offensive against the Democrats and Republicans, the partner parties of American imperialism, to build a class-struggle workers party. May Day Strike Against the War Shuts Down All U.S. West Coast Ports (3 May 2008)