The U.S. stock market continues to rise from its recent lows and some of the mainstream media is declaring that economic recovery is here.
This week the Dow Jones industrial average is inching toward 8500. But despite the claims by some media sources that the “end of the recession is in sight,” the Dow at 8500 is still a far cry from its highs above 14,000 in 2007.
We are witnessing a bear market rally—a little upward bounce in an overall downward trend of the market. The Wall Street banks are sitting on $8.5 trillion of tax payers’ money given to them by the Bush and Obama administrations.
The bankers got their million-dollar bonuses and golden parachute retirement packages secured.
This current economic crisis comes as the consequence of a parasitic capitalist economic system that was built on the backs of enslaved Africans and the theft of the land of African and Indigenous peoples.
While the bankers and their politician buddies in both Republican and Democrat parties celebrate, the economic reality being felt by millions of people in the U.S., especially those in the African community, is dire.
Corporations and businesses are laying off workers in record numbers. Four million jobs have been lost in the past year in the U.S.
Chrysler Corporation reported a loss this year of $4.7 billion in its bankruptcy reports this week. General Motors announced they will close 1000 to 1200 outlets resulting in losses of up to 137,000 jobs and $1.7 billion in state and federal tax revenues.
In 109 U.S. cities the official unemployment rate is higher than 10 percent. When those who have stopped looking for work, are underemployed or who are locked up in the colonial U.S. prisons are counted in, the real overall unemployment rate is over 25 percent and the colonized African community unemployment rate is in the range of 50 percent.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week that pre-foreclosure filings in the U.S. numbered 604,590 in the first quarter of this year, and California’s foreclosures soared 59 percent. The modest increase in home sales last month was the result of purchases of foreclosures fueled by the $8000 tax credit for first time homebuyers.
According to the New York Times the statistics for the real economy over the “last six months were brutal.”
The Commerce Department reports that the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the overall output of the U.S. economy, decreased by 6.1 percent between January and March of this year, after falling at a rate of 6.3 percent in last year’s fourth quarter. The New York Times notes, “if that pace were to continue, nearly $1 trillion would be wiped out this year from the nation’s economic output of $14.2 trillion last year.”
This means that all over the U.S. in African communities like Detroit, Gary, Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Brooklyn or Oakland, whole neighborhoods are boarded up, foreclosed, stripped and abandoned. A whole generation of African young people face a job market with absolutely nothing to offer. Mass homelessness, everyday hunger and relentless poverty stalk the community, as Chairman Omali Yeshitela once said, like a lynch mob.
After giving trillions of dollars of the people’s money to the bankers at the same time that unemployment is driving down tax revenues to an all-time low, the U.S. government is facing a budget deficit that is four times higher than last year’s record deficit of $454.7 billion.
According to Bloomberg News, the U.S. government will have to sell a record $2.4 trillion in new treasury bonds to try to finance the debt.
For the first time China, the largest lender to the U.S. debt, made it clear in March that it was “nervous” about the safety of the U.S debt, and was not confident that the U.S. can continue to repay its loans that total nearly all the wealth in the entire world.
It’s clear there is only one answer: the movement led by African workers to liberate and reunite Africa and African people everywhere. Once liberated Africa with its vast resources will be the largest and most powerful economy on the face of the earth.
