Restoring economy key to healing civil unrest in US

The best, and the worst, sides of the US were writ large at the weekend. As a display of scientific ingenuity and private enterprise, it would be hard to beat the SpaceX launch from the Kennedy Space Centre on Saturday. After watching the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule built not by NASA but by South African-born entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, Donald Trump spoke of “the sense of pride and unity that (this) brings’’. SpaceX marks the first human space launch from the US in almost a decade, a partnership between a private entrepreneur and government aimed at revitalising the nation’s space ambitions. The President hoped the launch would be a “partial antidote” to the impact of COVID-19 that has claimed 106,000 American lives and left 40 million unemployed, as well as to the violence convulsing 30 US cities.

The trigger for the violent disorder, the killing of unarmed African-American George Floyd, 46, by a white police officer in Minneapolis last week, has ignited a tinderbox of grievances. Video footage showed that for eight minutes and 46 seconds Derek Chauvin, 44, pinned Mr Floyd to the ground with his knee pressed into his neck. Mr Floyd’s repeated gasps — “I can’t breathe” — were ignored. It was, as Mr Trump, who was initially sympathetic to the public anger, said “a shocking sight’’. Even when Mr Floyd became “unresponsive”, Mr Chauvin kept his knee pressed to Mr Floyd’s neck for almost another three minutes.

Mr Chauvin has now been charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter. He faces decades in jail if convicted. Three other officers who did nothing to stop Mr Chauvin have been suspended and are under investigation.

The riots, as Cameron Stewart writes from Washington, are morphing into something broader than Mr Floyd’s death, police brutality and racism. They have become a catch-all for the grievances of many in a nation stricken by the pandemic and deeply divided by politics, race and wealth.

Even the White House was locked down as protesters converged. They were incensed by Mr Trump’s provocative tweet condemning “THUGS … dishonouring the memory of George Floyd’’ and warning “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. That phrase echoed a notoriously harsh police chief during unrest in Florida in 1967. Mr Trump argued he was merely stating the obvious, as a warning to those looting shops. Atlanta’s black mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, spoke in a voice of reason to rioters in her city: “This is not a protest, this is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. This is chaos … if you care about this city, then go home. If you want to change America, go and register to vote. Do it in November. That is the change we need in this country.”

Five months from the November 3 presidential election, Mr Trump is intent on reopening the US economy and allaying the impact of the lockdown on jobs. But the battle against the virus remains challenging, with hundreds of new cases being reported daily, adding to the 1.8 million Americans who have been diagnosed so far. Mr Trump’s prospects of re-election will depend largely on his ability, in the coming months, to reverse the debilitating effect of COVID-19 on the economy, especially jobs.

Against critics’ expectations, he showed what he was capable of after his election in 2016. True to his manifesto, his corporate tax cuts and pro-investment policies revitalised much of the nation’s rust-bucket manufacturing sector, to the benefit of employers and workers’ salaries. In January, before COVID-19 hit, unemployment in the US was 3.6 per cent, its lowest rate since 1969. And unemployment among African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans was lower than at any time since the US Labor Department began collecting those statistics. Analysts expect the next set of unemployment figures to reach almost 20 per cent.

Rebuilding the nation’s economic base, which Mr Trump is well qualified to do, can only help repair its civil unrest and despair. It will require as intrepid an effort, of a different kind, as the launching of SpaceX.