Although official figures lag several weeks behind reality, we are already in a steep recession.  Last  week, 3.2 million people filed unemployment claims — 10 to 15 times the normal rate. In Connecticut, and probably everywhere, processing time jumped from 3 days to 3 weeks.  Already  as of March 25th the national unemployment rate probably is around 10%, and projections that the rate could rise to 30% are credible. The pandemic is global, so the economic crisis is also global. This comes on top of several years of weakening in capitalist economies despite record stock prices in the US. The crisis hit as many developing economies were already reeling from the collapse of commodity prices, and the oil price war was already putting additional pressure on the U.S. economy.

Already, millions of workers are facing economic and personal crisis, with no savings, no income, and often no or inadequate health coverage. If they are still working, they are faced with finding child care. With half the working class one paycheck away from disaster in normal times, the numbers falling over the edge will soon be in the tens of millions.

Trump and Republican proposals

Trump and most Republicans’ first concern was to protect their wealth in the stock market. When forced to recognize a crisis, they view it as opportunity for personal enrichment for themselves and the business interests they serve, often at the expense of public health — as seen in their encouragement of pharma industry price gouging.

Additionaly Trump and company view the crisis as an opportunity to use the “wartime emergency” narrative as cover for entrenching power, including suppression of opposition; shifting the political balance in their favor as rallying behind the leader. We see this in the daily pre-empting of prime time broadcasting by Trump’s election campaign events, masquerading as COVID-19 press briefings.

Democrats, labor, people’s movements respond

Of congressional Democrats, Bernie Sanders has among the best programs. His  March 24th web conference was a good assessment of what’s needed, and of the massive bill moving through Congress. It is clear that whatever the details of the bill that was just passed, the result will be unprecedented in scope, will provide significant but inadequate relief to many working class people while leaving out many of the most vulnerable, will provide real resources to meet the public health crisis, but totally inadequate to the need, and will provide a giant slush fund for big business in general and selected industries and corporations in particular, with limited oversight. Immigrants, people of color, and women are already bearing the brunt of the hardships, and the final package deliberately excludes from benefits some of those hardest hit.

Whatever its content, the whole elements of the bill that was just passed will be implemented by an incompetent, corrupt, racist, vindictive, lawless administration. We should be prepared to fight to make the benefits that were enacted on paper into reality, and to challenge the inevitable malfeasance, corruption, and outright looting that will accompany the corporate bailouts.

Many elected officials, unions and other organizations, have presented excellent programs and guidelines for what further needs to be done, which are beyond the scope of this report.

A people-before-profits response

We should support the excellent demands made by labor unions, the Working Families Party, Bernie Sanders, and many others. I would like to highlight a few programmatic items we, as the Communist Party, should emphasize. This is not a complete list, and overlaps with proposals being put forward by others. Peoples World articles on some of these points could be a real contribution.

• A body that is exhausted and stressed out cannot fight disease. Our government agencies, form the CDC down through state and local government levels, are exhausted and stressed from two decades of austerity featuring frozen budgets, privatization, and soaring costs. The $150 billion for state and local governments in the Senate bill is not trivial, but stops far short of what’s needed. Every state and local government should get funding to cover 80% to 90% of total payroll, with the ability to expand hiring as needed to meet the crisis.
• Help for individuals should, as proposed by Sanders, be targeted to provide 100% wage replacement for all job losers, and other forms of help for victims of the medical and economic crises.
• Help must go to everyone, including people not covered by unemployment insurance, people who don’t file tax returns, all residents including immigrants with or without documents. This is implicit at least in Bernie’s proposal.
• While workers are laid off from non-essential businesses, they should be redirected as skills permit to essential support jobs in health, transport, utilities, distribution, retail, and government. They, and all workers in essential industries who have to leave home to go to a workplace, should receive hazardous duty pay.
• Trump has declared military production industries as essential and ordered that production continue. Producing submarines, tanks and war planes is not essential! To the extent possible, re-purpose those facilities to meet emergency needs. Otherwise, workers should be sent home for their own safety and that of the community, with income maintenance as for other workers.
• Tax The Rich — Trump poses as a wartime president. The income tax rate for the very rich in WWII was 94%. During WWII there was also an excess profits tax on corporations. Demand Trump put his money (and that of his super-rich friends) where his mouth is!
• Regardless of tax revenue, spend whatever it takes. The Federal Reserve is already doing this, effectively printing trillions of dollars to prop up the financial system. The same should be done to prop up the American people.

What can the Communist Party do?

Beyond the extremely long list of specific measures that need to be taken, and the equally long list of Trump’s villainy, we need a simple narrative that counters Trump’s wartime president persona and presents a positive framework. A universal crisis demands universal, social solutions, not individual, and not leaving things to the magic of the market and the beneficence of the corporations. We need to be able to show what’s wrong with Trump’s and Republican proposals, and what the alternatives are, without appearing to be part of an entrenched partisan divide.

Reach out to clubs/districts to get feedback what’s happening, what are people doing/saying, are local unions, etc. organizing around national demands? What are people saying? Because of the inevitable inadequacies in congressional action and malfeasance in its implementation, where possible, our clubs and members should be in the forefront of neighborhood and other local self-help and mutual aid groups, helping to connect them with broader political and economic demands.

The Peoples World has had excellent and often unique coverage. We should think about how that  can be highlighted in the fund drive. We should help it continue by turning our comments at meetings like this into articles.

The crisis will be with us for a long time. The lack of ability to respond in the manner and on the scale needed has exposed the weaknesses of capitalism’s racism, greed, war, and profits-first priorities. Placing demands that reflect what is really required can open possibilities for reshaping and transforming our health care system and our economy.

In addition to articles, we should consider a longer piece, on socialism and the lessons of COVID, that will develop what an effective response would look like, what the pre-conditions for such a response are, how that is incompatible with capitalism, and how despite fewer resources socialist countries like China, Vietnam and Cuba, have done a pretty damn good job.

Remarks to the National Board, Communist Party USA, 03.25-2020.

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