The Communist Party USA has issued a statement condemning the proposed $700 billion-$1 trillion financial industry bailout as “a plan that gives a blank check to Wall Street with no oversight” devised by the rightwing and the banks. After providing background on the situation, the statement goes on to call on Congress “to slow down the process,” and provides the following list of demands it wants to see in any bill addressing the matter:
1) Protect homeowners faced with foreclosure by restructuring mortgage rates to be in line with family income.
2) Create economic stimulus for working people and small business
3) Provide $100 billion in emergency relief to state and local governments wracked with budget cuts and diminished tax revenue
4) Bar CEO severance packages and cap the pay of executives receiving a bailout
5) Regulate banking and finance with transparent public oversight
6) Maintain public control over monopolies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that have a decisive role in the economy
7) Control speculation and increase revenues by taxing large financial transactions
8 ) Ban predatory lending and cap interest rates on all types of debts
9) End the war in Iraq, which is draining $700 million a day from public coffers
Notable to this is that if the Libertarians and the Communists BOTH oppose this ridiculous bailout, then it must be pretty bad!
Oh, I see.
See wikipedia article on Ukrainian famine.
Maybe at times, but I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the case for most of the deaths.
They didn’t because they couldn’t.
They could, but starvation was used as a political weapon.
^as efficiently as laissez-faire capitalism
Carelessly mixed italic and emphasis tags…
They didn’t because they couldn’t. Tens of millions of people died of starvation in the U.S.S.R. because the government lacked the ability to feed them; such was not a case of neglect or abuse — socialism is incapable of efficiently producing and distributing goods. Between lacking economic calculation and divorcing profit from success, socialism can never produce nearly as efficiently as laissez-faire capitalism.
True, that is what we want, but the stalinist form of communism allows for market failure. They sure diddn’t bail out the Ukrainians when they were starving with famine.
s/ever/every
Communists don’t want a bailout. They want something worse — government ownership of everything. Under such a scheme, ever venture is receiving a bailout 100% of the time.
I meant it in the “line item veto” sense for the unitary executive
Vetoing is unconstitutional????
Stalin preferred the ice pick to the veto pen, although both are unconstitutional in my view
Who have they endorsed for President?
Of course, the Soviet Union under Stalin wouldn’t have supported a bailout either.
Plus I actually respect them above the three.
Wow, so one can now fairly say that John McCain, Barack Obama, and Bob Barr are more communist than the Communist Party!