US PRESIDENT Donald Trump yesterday unveiled his three-phase plan for opening up businesses in America proclaiming, ‘We’re starting our life again. We’re starting rejuvenation of our economy again.’
Trump’s plan to rejuvenate US capitalism is in fact a series of guidelines but the onus on implementing these is firmly in the hands of state governors.
This is a complete climbdown by Trump, who earlier had asserted that he had ‘total authority’ to direct governors on how and when to halt lockdowns and reopen the economy.
Trump was forced to retreat when governors rebelled against Trump’s assertion of dictatorial powers in defiance of the American constitution that threatened to precipitate an open political split in the US ruling class.
Trump is fast losing control as these governors, fearful of an uprising by workers in their states, rebelled against his presidential authority.
Driving the splits and divisions amongst the ruling class is the fact that US capitalism is gripped by a crisis that has seen companies, shops and restaurants closed down, with over 90% of Americans under stay-at-home orders.
22 million US workers have been thrown out of work in the last month as the coronavirus pandemic rips through the country. This has forced a vast number of American workers to rely on food banks, with reports of queues over a mile long for emergency supplies in major cities and across the country.
The US has now suffered the greatest number of reported fatalities from the coronavirus, ahead of Italy and Spain. More than 670,000 people in the US have been infected with the coronavirus and over 33,000 have died, as of Friday morning.
Every US state is under a disaster declaration while Trump is pushing to reopen the US economy regardless of the health of workers and their families.
Trump is determined to drive workers back despite all the warnings from health professionals that any return to work, without a massive nationwide testing programme for Covid-19 in place, to identify those infected and prevent them from spreading the disease, will only accelerate the pandemic and lead to many more thousands dying .
Already, the giant aircraft manufacturer Boeing has announced it will restart production in its Washington state plant, forcing 27,000 workers back next Monday.
With coronavirus cases now rapidly increasing in the US capital Washington, government officials are panicking that it will potentially cripple the government.
There were over 20,000 patients with confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the capital and the neighbouring states of Virginia and Maryland as of Thursday evening, a figure that has doubled in just one week, according to The Washington Post.
Meanwhile, Newsweek reported on Thursday that a secret military task force (The Joint Task Force National Capital Region) has been set up to secure the safety of the government by moving civil and military leaders to secret locations in the event of orders to evacuate the city.
One unnamed senior military officer told Newsweek: ‘No one wants to talk evacuation, especially when there’s nowhere to go.’
While the US government and military are preparing to hide in bunkers, millions of US workers face a capitalist system that is offering them only two options – stay at home and starve or be forced back to work and risk a Covid-19 infection that can kill them and their families.
Last month, Trump handed $350 billion to US companies to keep them going while American workers got nothing. Now he is demanding they risk their lives to ‘rejuvenate’ US capitalism. What is crystal clear is that nothing can save capitalism in the US or anywhere on the planet from crashing into depression.
There is no doubt that the powerful American working class will break with the bourgeois Republican and Democratic parties and build a revolutionary leadership, a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International, to lead the struggle for power in the USA.
The only way forward for workers in America and every country today is to fight for the victory of the world socialist revolution!
