SEATTLE’S chief of police has thrown in the towel and quit on the same day that the city council voted to reduce the police budget and lay off police officers.
Seattle has been one of President Donald Trump’s key battlegrounds in his war to get his supporters to confront and defeat ‘leftists, anarchists and Marxists’ – i.e. the working class.
The fact is that Carmen Best’s decision to quit comes after huge pressure on the police following George Floyd’s murder, with mass demonstrations in Seattle and all over the country. At the same time the US economy has collapsed, with the hungry sleeping on the streets and queuing for food.
Best was the city’s first black police chief, and joined the Seattle police department in 1992 as a military veteran. Now she is to go on September 2nd.
Last Monday, the city council voted to cut more than $3m (£2.3m) from the police’s $400m annual operating budget that will see over 100 police officers sacked – quite the opposite to what the current president of the USA is demanding.
Seattle City Council President M Lorena González said it was necessary to rebalance the police budget due to a loss of government tax funds because of the collapse of the US economy.
Seattle was the site of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. This was set up by local people amid nationwide protests against racism and police brutality after the death of George Floyd in police custody in May.
It was dismantled by police on 1st July who were supported by several hundred federal agents ordered in personally by Trump.
President Trump has made it clear that central to his re-election campaign is his struggle to rid the USA of Marxists, radicals, and Communists, so that US capitalism can rise again.
The Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that his running mate for the vice presidency is to be Kamala Harris. He called her a ‘fearless fighter for the little guy, and one of the country’s finest public servants.’
Trump’s re-election campaign plans to portray Harris as a ‘power-hungry politician’ who will use Biden as an ‘empty shell’ from which to engage in radical government to bring socialism into the USA, if Democrats win the Oval Office and the aged Biden dies in office.
‘The playbook on Kamala is pretty simple’ a Trump campaign source told The Daily Beast. ‘Kamala Harris is a power-hungry politician. She comes across as ruthless. So it’s a believable frame that she’d be running the administration for empty shell Joe Biden.’
Trump has repeatedly asserted that Biden is ‘brainwashed’ and ‘taken over by the Radical left’ who seek to ‘seize the real power’.
In November there is going to be a fight to the finish between the two main capitalist parties as to which is to run the crisis-ridden US and its failed capitalist economy, by making the working class pay for the crisis.
Currently, the USA is a failed state with a massive coronavirus problem – the total cases have reached 5.1 million, with deaths at 164,468. The unemployment rate in mid May reached 21 million, and more than six million workers have dropped out of the labour force since February.
Both Republicans and Democrats are seeking to slash unemployment payments to millions of US citizens who are now sleeping on the streets.
Meanwhile the US capitalist crisis deepens, with gold rocketing to over $2000 an ounce while whole industries are going under.
All this will come to a head, either before, during or after November’s presidential election. A Trump victory will see the working class and the poor taking massive class actions to bring his presidency down.
A Biden victory will see the class sweep the Democrats aside as it pushes forward to win jobs, healthcare and state benefits for all.
There is no way out of this crisis for the US ruling class.
What is required in the USA is the building of a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International that will be able to lead the developing American socialist revolution to its victory, as part of the victory of the world socialist revolution!
