YESTERDAY saw the big international push get under way to try to rescue the bankers of the world from the crisis of their capitalist system.
There was a 0.5 per cent co-ordinated interest rate cut in the UK, the EU and the US, plus the announcement by Brown and Darling of a gigantic £500bn cash aid for the major British banks.
This follows on from last week’s $700bn Bush bail-out of the US banks. This was, however, negated by last Tuesday’s Wall Street share crash when US share prices also fell by $700bn.
Meanwhile, in the UK, the working class and the poor are to be ruined for the benefit of the bankers and bosses.
The response of the FTSE 100 index to these new developments was to move slightly upwards, and then to collapse down 193 points to 4441, a £45bn fall in share prices, while the Dow Jones index opened and collapsed 192 pts down to 9273 pts.
In other words the £500bn gift to the banks is not enough. It has not even revived the debt-ridden capitalist system, which is more and more resembling a stinking corpse, after a long death agony which began with the 1914-18 world war and the 1917 Russian revolution.
Currently, the government is putting £25 billion at the disposal of the banks so that they may increase their capital.
An additional £25bn in extra capital is available in exchange for preference shares, creating the so-called ‘part-nationalisation’.
£200bn is also available in short-term loans from the Bank of England.
Up to £250bn in loan guarantees is also available at commercial rates to encourage banks to lend to each other.
The £500bn and the £160bn that has already gone into the Northern Rock bank is going to be paid for by the mugging of the working class and the middle class on a daily basis.
This sum of £660bn is bigger than the total departmental spending of the British government for 2007-2008, £586.3 billion!
In fact, as the British government converts the debts of the bankers into the debts of the state to be redeemed by the state, Brown and Darling are taking the slippery icelandic slope onto the rocks of state bankruptcy, and a Zimbabwe-style inflation where paper currency is valueless.
Brown and Darling, the bourgeois servants, who have condemned some bankers for taking great risks to enrich themselves, are taking the biggest risks of all. They are pushing Britain into a catastrophe where the only solution will be a socialist revolution to bury capitalism and bring in socialism.
They are proposing to raise billions to save the banks and at the same time finance wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To do this there will have to be huge cuts in the state budget.
There will have to be big wage cuts in the public sector, with wage increases much lower than the real rate of inflation.
There will also be a big growth in unemployment as the state cuts its expenditure in favour of aiding the banks.
The health and education budgets will have to be cut and there will be a radical worsening of the standard of life for millions of people as the NHS, education and the Royal Mail are completely privatised to raise more rescue cash.
Final salary pensions will have to be completely liquidated, and the state pension faces being cut so that the bankers can survive at the expense of the people and at the expense of progress.
Meanwhile, while the bankers are being fattened by the taxpayers, they will be putting up bank charges and repossessing tens of thousands of workers who cannot pay their mortgages.
All this is going to happen, in order to try and give the outmoded, out of date and dying capitalist system an extra lease of life, when it needs terminating.
Workers already reject the Brown-Darling policy for saving the banks. They must sack their TUC leaders who support the Darling-Brown plan and policy.
There is only one way out of the crisis. This is through the mobilisation of the working class by the revolutionary party to bring down the Brown government, to go forward to a workers government that will expropriate the bosses and the bankers and bring in socialism.