Out of the Crisis: Building a new era
of justice & peace
by Sam Webb, National Chair
Communist Party, USA
(Based on a speech delivered March
21, 2009, New York City.)
Video
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An excerpt for the speech published in the People's Weekly World
Introduction
Welcome to everyone in Winston Unity Center and to everybody on line.
We are living in very turbulent times. The world is in transition. An
old era — an era of neoliberalism, financialization and rightwing
extremism — is fading away and a new era is being born.
But no one is quite sure what the new era will look like. It resists
easy prediction. It is safe to say that the future of both our country
and the world is still to be written.
As bad as things have been over the last three decades, few thought
they could get much worse. But they have. Depression economics has
entered our vocabulary not simply as a historical event, but as a lived
experience for millions.
Only a short time ago most economists said the economic cycle had been
tamed. In 2004, in a speech titled “The Great Moderation,” Federal
Reserve Board Chair Ben Bernanke said we live in an era in which
macroeconomic instability has been eliminated.
Fast forward five years and the Great Moderation has turned into the
Great Crisis. That which few thought would ever happen again has
happened again, and without much warning.
The social fabric is rupturing. The terrain on which billions of people
earn a living and raise their families feels foreign, even
unrecognizable. Haven’t you heard more than one person say, “Is this
the country I grew up in?”
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