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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