Public Meeting and Discussion
March 6, 7pm Campus Center Room 911-15
Over the past three decades a few of the richest Americans have attained unimaginable wealth while most working class people saw their wages remain stagnant or decline. Individuals have accumulated record levels of debt, as wages have not kept pace with the skyrocketing cost of gas, higher education, food, and health care, and they've had to borrow to make up the difference. Banks have been all too eager to lend, taking advantage of peoples' desperation to make billions off of high interest predatory loans such as sub-prime mortgages, throwing the economy into turmoil in the process.When the dust from the sub-prime mortgage crisis settles, it is likely that millions of US residents will have lost their homes. The crisis is spreading to other areas of the economy, creating a credit freeze that has forced already heavily indebted consumers to cut back on spending. Since two-thirds of the US economy is based on that spending, the resulting slowdown in production has meant that hundreds of thousands have lost their jobs, with many more losses on the way. It is not clear how the financial elite will pull itself out of this mess, but government intervention in the form of the recent economic stimulus package underlines the hypocrisy and ideological bankruptcy of the neoliberal "let the market decide" model.
While the economy crumbles, the US government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a devastating, unjust, unpopular, failing war in Iraq. Join us as we talk about the root of the problems with the economy, what the alternative is, and how we can get there.
