GOLD hit a record high on Wall Street on Monday as increasing numbers of frightened investors dumped the dollar and sought safety by purchasing gold, boosting the spot price to $1,944.92 an ounce,
At the same time, the dollar index – which measures its price against a range of currencies – fell to its lowest since September 2018 following the increasing attacks by the US on China.
Later this week the US Central Bank meets to decide on monetary policy, boosting the gold price further. Gold is within striking distance of $2,000 an ounce.
Meanwhile, a desperate Republican Party has proposed to Congress to spend an additional $1 trillion (£776bn) to try to stem the economic collapse. The plan includes $100bn for schools and issuing stimulus payments of up to $1,200 to most Americans.
The US has already spent more than $2.4tn on virus relief measures, posting billions of dollars in aid to businesses and individual households in a desperate measure to assist Trump to a second term as President.
The proposal would reduce the $600 weekly unemployment benefit supplement for workers to $200 until states can set up a more targeted system that replaces 70% of a person’s previous wage. The Republicans ‘want to continue’ the unemployment supplement, which expires this week. ‘But we have to do it in a way that does not slow down reopening,’ implying that workers are refusing to go back to work and will have to be forced back!
Republicans also say that they intend the legislation to protect businesses from workers’ coronavirus health claims!
The US has lost 15 million jobs since February, with nearly one-in-five US workers collecting unemployment benefits and more than half of adults living in households that have seen a huge drop in income, according to a survey by the US census.
Democrat Chuck Schumer said that the Republican plan amounts to a ‘30% pay cut’ that ‘will delay benefits for weeks, if not months, as we slide into a greater recession.’
Meanwhile, the US class struggle on the streets is sharpening with Trump’s special forces attacking workers. The Democrat mayors of Portland, Chicago, Seattle, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Kansas City, Missouri and Washington DC are urging Congress to halt Trump’s deployment of federal forces.
‘We call on Congress to pass legislation to make clear that these actions are unlawful and repugnant,’ they wrote in a letter to the leaders of both parties in the Senate and House of Representatives.
The deployment of federal agents to Portland and Oregon has seen many workers warning that Trump is starting a civil war with armed militias forming throughout the country.
Portland has marked the 62nd consecutive day of anti-racism protests with clashes between anti-racism protesters and authorities near the city’s federal courthouse.
One person was shot dead at an Austin, Texas, protest on Saturday and two others were struck by gunfire at a demonstration in Aurora, Colorado on Sunday.
A black militia group marched through Louisville, Kentucky, on Saturday demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, a black woman killed by police who burst into her apartment while a racist armed gang stood by!
Attorney General William Barr defended the Justice Department’s use of federal agents to crack down on protests in Portland in a congressional testimony yesterday, saying that attacks on the federal courthouse there represent ‘an assault on the government of the United States.’
45 people were arrested in Seattle during a protest over the deployment of federal agents to Portland and a standby force to Seattle. Protesters in Los Angeles clashed with officers in front of the city’s federal courthouse.
Many US workers are demanding that the massively powerful American trade union movement must take general strike action to end Trump’s attacks on the mass of the American people and to bring his emerging dictatorship crashing down.
Trump is trying to remain in office by using armed federal forces against workers to try to build up support for an anti-socialist dictatorship.
The leaders of the US trade unions must call a general strike to bring him down and to create the conditions for the working class to go forward to a Socialist United States of America where the working class will rule over a socialist planned economy to serve the people, and the gang of desperate and bankrupt capitalists will be dispatched to the ‘dustbin of history’.
