On Monday morning, March 13, President Biden announced that all the depositors will get their money, including uninsured depositors with more than $250,000 in the bank. Most of these are Silicon Valley technology start-ups and include a few larger businesses such as the streaming technology company Roku.

This stands in contrast to the mainly African American depositors at Freedom National Bank, which failed in 1990. Under pressure from the public, the federal government paid uninsured depositors, many of which were large non-profits serving the Black community, but only 50 cents on the dollar.

At the founding of the United States, African American slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person. Since then, the systematic national oppression of African Americans, that is, the unequal treatment on the basis of nationality, has maintained a gigantic wealth gap between white Americans and African Americans.

African Americans have lower income, higher unemployment, and lower rates of home ownership. In the words of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, “Of the good things in life he has approximately one-half those of whites; of the bad he has twice those of whites.” (Where Do We Go From Here, Chaos or Community, 1967). But the wealth gap is a chasm, with white American households having a median wealth of $187,300 in 2019, while African American households owning only $14,100. Thus on average, white American households have more than 13 times the wealth of Black Americans.

While the average African American household has only 7.5% of the wealth of white American households, the number of Black-owned banks is even smaller. There are only about 26 of these banks, plus another 19 Black-controlled credit unions in the entire United States. This means only about one-half of one percent of all banks are owned by Black Americans, along with a slightly smaller percentage (0.4%) of credit unions.

Black-owned banks are not only restricted by national oppression and the huge wealth gap, but also by monopoly capitalism where huge banks buy, take over, or feast on the failures of smaller banks. Many of the former depositors at Silicon Valley Banks, as well as depositors of other smaller banks, are heading towards the big four monopolistic banks that have more than half the deposits in the country. These big banks – Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo – are widely known as “too big to fail.”

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With the bankruptcy filings of General Motors and Chrysler, the UAW leadership has given up even more without a fight. Gone is protection against unemployment. More than a dozen plants will close, cutting 20,000 or more jobs. Pensions and health care benefits will be cut even more. Wages are being cut to match nonunion autoworkers, whose wages are also being cut, leading to another ‘race to the bottom.’ The UAW has agreed to no strikes for five years, giving up the fundamental fight-back for workers.

The ‘new’ GM that emerges from bankruptcy will be 60% owned by the federal government. Contrary to what the right wing is wailing, this is not socialism, but state capitalism. The goal is to ‘restore profitability,’ which means cutting the jobs, wages and benefits of workers, so that the government can eventually sell GM back to wealthy investors.

The federal government is pushing GM to close more than 2500 car dealerships, causing even more job losses. Fewer dealers will reduce competition and lead to higher prices (and more profits!) in the future. Two more auto parts makers (Visteon and Metaldyne) have already filed for bankruptcy and more are sure to follow. Michigan and the midwest, already reeling from double-digit unemployment, will suffer even more.

Rather than organize workers to fight, UAW was holding rallies made up mainly of paid union staffers with the tired old line of “Buy American” in recent weeks. The problem is not imports, it is that GM and Ford have not been investing in U.S. auto plants to compete with new factories built by German, Japanese and Korean automakers over the last three decades. Rather, they have been investing their profits from U.S. car sales to expand production in Brazil and other developing countries. Even as auto sales in the United States were tanking late last year, Ford opened a brand-new, billion dollar car plant in Russia. Further, the UAW has failed to organize any of the new car plants.

The bankruptcy of the UAW concession strategy and attempts to ‘partner’ with the auto corporations is plain for all to see. What is needed is a renewal of efforts to put the UAW and other unions following their path back on a class-struggle basis. This means organizing the workers to fight management, not trying to cut deals or rely on the Democratic Party. It will be a hard road, but it is what must be done.

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Fight Back!: For months we’ve heard about the economic and financial crisis and how it’s playing out in the auto industry. The corporate media doesn’t report on what it means for workers.

Gregg Shotwell: I’m retired since November, 2008 but I’m in contact with workers. The peculiar situation now is the average worker has come to realize they are not just fighting the company; they are fighting the union and they are fighting the government. They really feel like everything is stacked up against them.

It’s become increasingly clear that the union has blocked the rank and file out of negotiations. So workers and retirees feel abandoned. They’re up against a three-headed dog: the union, the company and the government.

Most critically, in the last labor agreement that came out with Chrysler, workers didn’t have any information on the contract they were going to vote on until the day they were to vote on it, but they were told this: If you don’t pass this contract, the company will go into bankruptcy and then everything will be in jeopardy. So the workers were voting with a gun to their head.

In the contract, certain plants were guaranteed to stay open. As soon as the contract was ratified, Chrysler went into bankruptcy, and announced additional plant closings. After all the concessions they made, they still didn’t get any security.

But the worst thing and this is the most important part of what happened in this last set of negotiations, the union agreed that in 2011, when this contract expires, if they can’t settle the next contract, they agree to non-binding arbitration, and compensation would be set at non-union levels.

This is not a contract: this is a death warrant for the union. The union de-certified itself. There’s no longer any benefit to membership. If they agree in advance we will accept non-binding arbitration – this goes along with the no-strike clause. They’ve abrogated voting rights.

This is a moving target. In 2011, Toyota will have ratcheted down their compensation because they only set their level of wages at the union level to keep the union out. That’s no longer a threat to them any more. Now they can go back to workers in their factories that don’t have any union and say to them, “We going to have to cut a dollar or two an hour; we’re going to have to cut health care; we’re going to have to stop contributing to your 401k.” So by 2011, the average non-union wage is going to be that much lower than it is now.

So what the union has done is decertify itself as the bargaining agent for workers.

Fight Back!: Is there an initiative by any force to fight any part of this?

Shotwell: There is a lot of anger out there so there are opportunities. We’re seeing a lot of reactions – a lot of spontaneous activity right now, especially in the Detroit area and in Michigan, where Chrysler workers are demonstrating and picketing, demanding to keep their plants open.

The other part of the fight back is the potential for a broader movement. This crisis isn’t new, it’s just broader. We can go back and look at steel and rubber and textile and electronics and airlines and PATCO and Staley and say, “Y’know, they’ve been picking us off one at a time for years and years.”

But now everybody is impacted and there’s not a safety net for anyone, because if it’s not your pension it’s your 401k, or it’s that your house isn’t worth anything any more; or you’re forced to relocate but you can’t afford to uproot; or you’re losing your job or your pay is being cut; and it doesn’t matter if you’re a knowledge worker or a salaried worker or a laborer, everybody is in this position. Everybody’s angry and threatened and recognizing that these mechanisms and these organizations that were supposed to secure your life, are no longer valid. All the rules have changed. I think there’s a real possibility that we can have a much more united resistance because everyone is under attack, not just one industry or one union.

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The bailout bill created a $700 billion ‘Troubled Asset Relief Program’ or TARP to buy bad loans from banks. This was supposed to free up banks to lend more to homeowners and small businesses in need of credit. Backers of the bailout said that only half would be spent and the other half would have to be approved by Congress, saying that this would guarantee accountability. To pass the bill, the Bush administration and leading Democrats in House promised that there would be Congressional oversight of the bailout.

What a bunch of crap.

After the passage of bailout bill, the Bush administration did not buy any bad loans but instead began to put the money directly into banks. This was done with no requirements for what the banks were to do with the money. At the same time, the bailout out bill allowed the Federal Reserve to start paying interest on deposits that banks have at the Fed. What happened is that ‘excess reserves,’ or cash that banks have parked at the Fed, soared from less than $2 billion in August to more than $800 billion by the end of December. So instead of making more loans available, the bank bailout actually made it more profitable for banks not to lend.

The Congressional Oversight Panel issued a report on the TARP Jan. 9, reporting that the bank bailout had done nothing to reduce foreclosures. In 2008 more than 2 million homes went into foreclosure, almost twice as many as the year before. The Bush administration’s Hope Now program to help homeowners facing foreclosure, which was not a part of the bank bailout, only received 347 applications and has not processed a single one.

On Jan. 12, President Bush asked for the other $350 billion of TARP funds at the request of the incoming Obama administration. On Wednesday, Jan. 21, the House of Representatives voted 270-155 against giving $350 billion more to banks. But unlike last September, when the House voted down the first bank bailout bill, there were no headlines, no drop in the stock market – in fact almost no news coverage at all. Why? Because Wall Street knew that they were going get the money despite opposition in the House.

What Congress and the corporate-controlled media did not tell the people was that in order to block the second half of the money, the House, the Senate and the president would have to oppose the bill. Once it was clear that President Obama supported the bill and it was passed by a 52-42 vote in the Senate, then the opposition of the House had no effect.

Why are both the Republicans and the Democrats pushing for more bailout money now? For one, Bank of America is in trouble. Bank of America is one of the largest banks in the world, whose empire includes mortgage lender Countrywide and investment bank Merrill Lynch. Countrywide was a leader in issuing subprime mortgages, while Merrill Lynch was turning these mortgages into bonds; they were at the core of the financial crisis that exploded last year. Bank of America has consistently opposed giving homebuyers facing foreclosure relief through bankruptcy courts and has paid out billions of dollars in dividends to its shareholders and billions more in bonuses. Bank of America already received $25 billion from the U.S. government last year, and right after the Senate vote, received another $20 billion from the government. In addition, the government guaranteed $118 billion dollars of loans that Bank of America made.

Last November the American people voted for change. But when we see the same old policies of bailing out the big banks that helped create the economic crisis, we have a right to be mad at the Democrats and the Republicans who are putting Wall Street first. The chairman of the Federal Reserve has said that giving more money to the banks is “unavoidable.” We say it is unacceptable. We demand a clear accounting of what happened to the billions doled out banks! We demand a moratorium on foreclosures and for homeowners to be able to work out their mortgages in bankruptcy courts! No more bailouts of the banks that created this financial crisis!

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