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This crisis began when the housing bubble burst. Capitalist banks were lending money to profit-seeking real estate developers to build houses. The same banks were lending money to
<!--end paragraph--> <!--begin paragraph-->mortgage companies to make as many loans as they could. The goal was to boost profits.Soon there were more houses than the workers and the middle class could buy. The prices of homes fell. Mortgages could not be refinanced. Workers could not pay the steep increases in interest rates built into their loans. Banks stopped lending. Millions of households went into foreclosure.
<!--end paragraph--> <!--begin paragraph-->Put simply, people became homeless because there were too many houses! Not too many houses that were needed or already here, but too many houses that can be sold at a profit. Furthermore, the workers who build homes and all the workers who make the things that go into homes are losing their jobs because these homes can no longer be sold at a profit.
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That is the essence of all the capitalist crises that have occurred since the first crisis in 1825. It is the crisis of overproduction.
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Now the crisis of overproduction is sweeping the auto industry. From the auto industry and the housing industry it is spreading throughout the economy. The stock markets are plummeting because the financial bailouts, the pumping of trillions of dollars into the banks, cannot stop the capitalist economic crisis.
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Profits consist of unpaid labor.
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Under the system of capitalist exploitation wealth flows to the top, and the level of inequality is obscene.
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the super-rich who have all the levers of power in society, owned 34.3 percent of the wealth in 2004.
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Racism and national oppression
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distribution of wealth under capitalism
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the median wealth (that is, savings and other assets) of households by race in 2004 was $140,700 for whites, $20,600 for African Americans and $18,600 for Latin@s
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Oppression and economic discrimination also fall on women and lesbian, gay, bi and trans people under capitalism
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sex and gender bias as a way to divide and conquer.
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The growing witch-hunt against undocumented workers has the same poisonous, divisive goal.
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How else could 1 percent of the population dominate the workers and oppressed
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As the present crisis engulfs wider and wider sections of the workers, the potential for bringing about that unity is growing stronger.
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The Pentagon is nothing more than an enforcer for U.S. capitalism
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A system in which people are homeless because there are too many homes must go
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in which workers are losing their jobs and being plunged into poverty because they have produced too much wealth
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which cannot provide jobs and education but imprisons 2.4 million people
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majority of them Black and Latin@, is bankrupt
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where production takes place for human need, not for profit. The class that produces the wealth, the multinational working class, should own and distribute that wealth.
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Trillions of dollars are now being used to bail out the banks and fund the Pentagon under capitalism. Under socialism, that money would guarantee that everyone would have a decent job and income, free health care, affordable housing, free education, low-cost transportation, healthy, reasonably priced food and much more. The well-being of the multinational working class would be the goal of society, not their exploitation as it is under capitalism.
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