9-24-08, 9:25 am

Both confusion and anger reign for most people across the political spectrum about the $700 billion 'bailout' of Wall Street banking and brokerage houses, which the Bush administration is trying to force through Congress right now. The administration portrays the choice as being between bailout or disaster, trying to marginalize debate to create a fait accompli.

First, there really is a far-reaching fiscal crisis and something has to be done quickly to contain it. But Paulson and the Bush administration trying to 'socialize' the losses of major institutions of finance capital on the assumption that the benefits will then trickle down to the masses of people, who will then stop losing their jobs, homes, and pensions.

The truth, however, is that in the $700 billion bailout as it currently stands the working class gets nothing.

The bailout, if passed as is, will not restructure credit to help debt ridden families begin to pull themselves out of the economic quicksand that they are currently in. The 'regulation' will probably make it harder for them to deal with their current debts. The administration refuses to shift the burden of a bailout onto the deregulated financial institutions, which are at the center of the crisis.

One way to pay for this bailout might be to cut military budget, already totaling nearly one half of the world's official military spending. Cut the military budget in half to about $250 billion, which would still make it the biggest military budget on earth. Use half of the money for social investments in jobs and people's needs; the other half could go towards paying for the bailout.

When people are bankrupt or simply cannot pay the debts they have incurred, they are put on a repayment plan. So why not Wall Street? People everywhere are understandably outraged by the vast personal wealth that the top executives of these Wall Street firms have accumulated. But the Bush administration hasn't even mentioned repayment.

Just as Franklin Roosevelt proposed a salary limitation for corporate executives during World War II in order to show sacrifice for the war effort, both compensation caps and payback plans for CEO's and CFO's whose wealth ranges from the tens of millions to the hundreds of millions can and should be enacted. Also, since the capitalist class loves regressive payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, a serious program of reregulation could establish an excess profits fund and attach it to FICA, in effect to make the capitalist capitalist class begin to pay directly a much bigger partof social security and allied programs while reducing the payroll taxes on working people.

Such suggestions might be antidotes to radical right-wing economic policies, which that the nation has long endured and have produced the disaster that we face today.

What is, as all labor negotiators always ask, the benefit for working people and the country in this unprecedented bailout? At present there is no benefit except the usual trickle-down promises. A reasonable position for all non big business sectors of the society to take should be to say: no benefit for working families, no bailout. As all labor negotiators know, the more desperate big capital's position becomes, the more concessions they are willing to make.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.