How bad is this Wall Street crash? Posted Friday, March 30, 2001 Source : Peoples Weekly World Just how bad is the current plunge in the stock market? Is it an omen of another Bush recession such as the one that hit during "Poppy" Bush's single term a decade ago? As of the end of March, plunges in the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ index have wiped out an estimated $4.6 trillion, combined. This total is nearly five times the losses from the October 1987 Wall Street crash. NASDAQ has plummeted from $6.7 trillion to $2.7 trillion in this past year alone. The magnitude of this decline is staggering: more than the entire publicly held federal debt; more than the combined Medicare and Social Security trust funds; three times the total value of George W. Bush's proposed $1.6 trillion 10-year tax cut. The wipe-out has hit the high-tech millionaires - the poster children of triumphant "venture capitalism" - like a force 10 hurricane. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) sponsored a fundraiser for fellow senator, Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), a software "millionaire" who narrowly defeated Republican Sen. Slade Gorton last November. Cantwell's millions evaporated overnight and she is now $4.3 million in debt. But far more serious are the losses sustained by ordinary working class people who plowed their hard-earned dollars into 401k retirement plans. Now those plans have sustained huge stock market losses. Many workers say that now they cannot afford to retire at all. George W. Bush loudly proclaimed that allowing people to take part or all of the taxes withheld for Social Security and Medicare and invest the money in the stock market would enable people to get rich quick. It was his argument for privatizing America's two most important safety nets. Bush has fallen curiously silent on his privatization scam, while the modest, but guaranteed, benefits provided by the "socialistic" Social Security system are suddenly more attractive. If the stock market crash turns into a full-blown recession, millions of jobless workers will be demanding jobless benefits and action to provide jobs. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reprinted from Peoples Weekly World. Weekly newspaper of the Communist Party of the USA. PWW website --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
