US PRESIDENT Donald Trump delivered his formal State of the Union address on Tuesday night with the usual boast that under the three years of his presidency ‘America’s fortunes are on the rise’, jobs are booming, incomes soaring and ‘our country is thriving and highly respected again!’
Trump then spent the next 81 minutes running through a list of his ‘achievements’. Millions of jobs created, poverty abolished while American workers under his leadership enjoyed wonderful healthcare provisions, he was particularly proud of achieving this amazing recovery by overseeing a massive rise in the US stock market which has ‘soared 70%’ under his presidency.
Trump’s boom has been artificially created out of pumping trillions of dollars to the banks and corporations and creating a massive debt pile – his only hope is that this debt time-bomb doesn’t explode before the presidential elections in November.
Trump lives in fear of socialism as he made clear when he proclaimed ‘We will never let socialism destroy American healthcare!’
Later in the speech he returned to this theme that socialism was the great enemy of American capitalism when he declared ‘Socialism destroys nations.’
Trump is clearly scared that the US working class, far from running scared of socialism, is in fact embracing it as the only way forward out of a collapsing US capitalist system that enriches the wealthy corporations through tax cuts and hand-outs of trillions of dollars while workers are driven into poverty.
As for the Democrats, they sat in stony silence as they watched Trump riding the wave of triumphalism after their attempt to impeach him failed spectacularly.
The entire address demonstrated the complete melt-down and crisis that is gripping both the two parties of the American bourgeoisie, a crisis that has descended into the farce of Trump’s performance on Tuesday that harked back to his days as a reality TV show host while the Democratic leaders played the role of petulant, impotent onlookers.
The crisis gripping the Democratic leadership was on show in the Iowa caucus this week, where its preferred candidate Joe Biden was humiliated into fourth place while Bernie Sanders (the self professed democratic socialist) and the unknown Pete Buttigieg were fighting it out neck and neck for the nomination.
Partial results put Buttigieg slightly ahead of Sanders, although owing to the convoluted voting procedures it has also been reported that Sanders is ahead in the popular vote.
Sanders won the popular vote for Democratic candidate in the last election only to be manoeuvred out by the Democratic leaders who hated his support for workers and trade unions and installed Hillary Clinton instead. Three years on, Sanders is surging back, winning support from workers and youth whose living experience gives a lie to all Trump’s boasts about US capitalism booming.
As for Trump, he is simply holding on in the hope that the trillion dollars of debt he has run up to sustain this artificial boom will last long enough to see him through to the next election before the credit boom turns into its opposite sending US capitalism into an almighty crash.
This time, Sanders must stand firm and not passively accept being railroaded out of candidacy by a Democratic leadership that hates even his brand of democratic socialism more than it hates Trump.
Instead, Sanders must come forward with his demands for a free national health service in the US and for proper full-time jobs and for the rights of workers to strike, policies that have won him the overwhelming support of the working class.
The massive support for Sanders shows that American workers are not afraid of socialism, indeed they are preparing to go far beyond Sanders as the political crisis gripping the American bourgeoisie drives forward a political revolution that will see the working class and the unions break with the Democrats.
As Trump’s boom explodes into a cataclysmic crash, this will lead to a social revolution by workers and youth to take the power.
The urgent task of the day is to build a section of the International Committee of the Fourth International in the US to lead this socialist revolution to its victory!
