The modern executive branch of the US government is designed to work in the general interests, not only of the entire class of US capitalists, but also for the general welfare of the US economy and, as a result, manages the interests of the entire petty bourgeois and labor-aristocratic classes. But what does this mean? There are three classes that directly benefit from the US empire’s stability and economic success: 1) the big imperialist bourgeoisie, the finance capitalists invested in US firms like Bill Gates, the Kochs, etc.; 2) the petty bourgeoisie, those who own their own capital but also have to work; and 3) the labor aristocrats, roughly defined here as those proletarians who receive more than the global average pay for their labor-time.² It is the political expectation that the executive branch will look out for the interests of these three classes. Affordable college and healthcare and access to purchasing land (usually in the form of housing) is part of that understanding. Most division between the Republicans and the Democrats actually comes down to which section of these classes to favor the most.

The Fed has generally played a neutral role in these feuds, leaning toward the Democratic camp of stability to benefit the petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats. The reserve system regulates the country’s money supply, which has a direct impact on the velocity of exchange (how quickly money or credit changes hands; in other words, how many transactions occur in any given time), on the total price of all commodities produced in the US market, and on the total number of those commodities produced. These figures are interdependent and related to one another on a push-pull basis, and they trend toward an equilibrium. That equilibrium can be expressed through the following equation:

(p * q) / v = m

Where p = the price of all commodities produced in the economic unit (the US market), q = the total number of commodities in that unit, v = the velocity of money, and m = the total money supply.³ Changes in any of these variables will cause subsequent changes in the others as they move toward the above equilibrium.

Inflation is reflected in the variable (p). For instance, all things remaining equal, if (m), the money supply, increases, either (p) or (q) must increase, or (v) must decrease. The regulation of this process is central to the purpose of the reserve system to prevent, on the one hand, runaway hyperinflation, and on the other, the velocity of money trending toward zero, either of which would cause a catastrophic collapse in the US economy, freezing transactions and halting production. For more details on the role of the Fed, see “The Inevitable Capitalist Crisis Looms” in the Red Clarion.

The thing now under dispute is the Fed’s overnight bank funding rate,⁴ the rate of interest which other banks must pay to one another or to the Fed if their own money supply is below the reserve amount required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for large broker-dealers to ensure the bank can cover its loans at the end of any given day. This rate determines the interest rate for all lending in the US economy. All other lending rates are set somewhere higher than this Federal rate. The lower the lending rates, the more speculative investments will become as money can be loaned with less risk to the lender and thus the borrower. The reason this number is the source of conflict among the ruling class is because it embodies a contradiction in the interests of the major classes invested in the performance of the US economy.

For the big bourgeoisie, it is objectively better for their capacity to invest and make profits if the interest rates are zero. Although the Fed had historically always maintained some interest rate, in the wake of the 2008 crash the Fed set the interest rates to 0%. The US economy had been on this “life support” rate from 2008 until the 2020 economic crisis triggered by COVID-19. An interest rate of zero, however, will not remove excess money from the economy. At the beginning of 2020, the money supply was at 4,000 thousand billion USD. Today, the money supply is at 19,000 billion USD, reflecting a nearly five-fold increase.⁵ It also tends to make banks more unstable (as they will lend far more than they can safely cover), and increase the velocity of money by encouraging increased lending and investment. As a consequence, either the total number of commodities in US markets must fall (and why would they? There has been no change in production) or the price of commodities must rise. This rise is inflation.

The rise in the price of articles of consumption – consumer commodities – has a negligible effect on the big bourgeoisie. They can afford any increase, however large, because personal consumption is a marginal amount of their overall money. Even the rise in the price of means of production – raw materials, machines, factories, land, etc. – would lag significantly behind the gains made as a result of zero-percent lending at the federal level. Indeed, even if the banks should fail and the economy collapse, history has proven that the big bourgeoisie are shielded from the worst effects of that crash and would be able to buy up the resources of those smaller bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie that are driven into bankruptcy, default, or foreclosure for pennies on the dollar, further concentrating their stranglehold on the country’s economic resources.

Conversely, the labor aristocrats cannot weather such a storm and consumer inflation, particularly of necessary staples like food and healthcare. It can drive labor aristocrats into the ranks of the working proletariat and cost them their comfortable class-basis – their homes, their long-term investments, etc. It is in their interests to keep interest rates high, reduce or slow the rate of inflation, and ensure that the banks remain stable.

The petty bourgeoisie, possessing economic relations that are both bourgeois and proletarian, tend to be more like the labor aristocracy when it comes to this question than the big bourgeoisie. Inflation in the costs of the means of production will inevitably drive a significant portion of the petty bourgeoisie out of their class and down into the proletariat as the continued running of their businesses becomes financially untenable. The upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie – those able to draw on reserves of credit or who are becoming regionally powerful and are on the cusp of entering the lower ranks of the big bourgeoisie – tend to prefer the lowering of the interest rates so they can attempt to grow their money-capital and progress out of their class and enter the big bourgeoisie.

What, then, does this grand jury indictment mean? The Fed has consistently kept the interest rates higher than they had been since 2008 for the past several years. President Trump, acting as the hammer of the big bourgeoisie, has made repeated demands that the Fed lower those interest rates.

On Sunday, January 11, the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, released a video statement in which he said that the subpoenas are an attempt to force him to capitulate to the White House’s political demands. That, in essence, Trump will force him out unless he does not agree to lower the federal interest rate. This matters for three reasons. First, it is an unprecedented breaking of ranks and airing of internal political differences between the Fed and the White House. Second, it suggests a continued feud within the ruling class over how to distribute the spoils of empire. Third, if the Fed does lower the interest rate and if, as a result, inflation explodes more than it already has done, this will result in the proletarianization of large numbers of labor aristocrats and petty bourgeoisie, the closure of many routes available to students and young people intent on entering those classes, and an overall increase in the size of the revolutionary mass base.

For us, the first issue means we have an opportunity to expose the machinery of the state and how it functions. We must also be aware of the concurrent risk here; the left-liberals, the Democrats mostly, will use the extraordinary nature of this rupture to bang their anti-Trump drum and try to recuperate their ramshackle coalition. This risk is real and requires our active intervention to minimize the number of petty bourgeoisie and labor aristocrats who are ideologically drawn back into their orbit.

As to the second reason, we must be extremely wary of declaring that the imperialist bargain between the big bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the working class is breaking down.⁶ However, we do have the benefit of the bourgeoisie’s own mouthpieces such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times to help understand their perspective. Although both sources have been moderate in their reporting of the Powell investigation, both have taken soft pro-Powell and anti-Trump stances.⁷ We can also look to the stock market, which has registered constrained disapproval as investments were moved from stocks into gold.⁸

If there is a fracture between elements of the big bourgeoisie, that group supporting Trump’s nationalist position (as opposed to the old neoliberal internationalism of capital) is growing and the neoliberal position is dwindling.⁹

Therefore, we must begin to prepare for our third conclusion. Trump has rarely allowed himself to be stymied by decorum or procedural niceties. He now holds the US Supreme Court by a wide margin should any of his actions be enjoined by a federal judge. We should first prepare immediate agitation, not demanding that Trump step back and allow Powell to continue as chair, but exposing the manner in which the Federal Reserve serves to stabilize an inherently unjust and exploitative world order. We must do our utmost to ensure the masses correctly understand that any complaints from the Democrats about Trump’s behavior aren’t on their “behalf,” but rather are intended to secure the supply of anesthesia with which they have been dulling the class struggle for a century; that the Democrats are attempting to lull US workers and petty bourgeoisie back to sleep so the empire can continue to burn, loot, and rape the world in their name.

In the intermediate term, we should prepare for a potential economic crash that may result in the unleashing of the contradictions contained by the Fed and its policies since 2020: a collapse in the real estate market and a subsequent depression triggered by numerous bank failures.

Careful attention must be paid in the coming weeks to the way in which this mini-crisis is handled by the state and by the political actors. We must continue to weigh evidence of one kind or another, and determine where the chips will fall so we can formulate a concrete plan of action. As of today, it seems that Trump is routing the supporters of neoliberal stabilization and preparing to enter a new phase of class warfare. This aligns with the White House strategy on increasing friction with ICE and the kidnapping of President Maduro: a global assault on behalf of the big bourgeoisie and the upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie to repudiate the imperialist power-sharing that had been achieved during the last century.¹⁰ Washington has exploded the “rules-based order” it went through pains to establish over the last hundred years by acting unilaterally, in defiance of international law, and stating the geopolitical-economic interests which it is pursuing, rather than hiding its maneuvers behind high rhetoric of “democracy.”

1. The US central banking system. 
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2. Here we are using the term labor aristocracy, as elsewhere in pieces published by Clarion staff, to mean anyone who is paid more for each hour of labor than the global average. For more, see Lauesen, Torkil. Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future (Iskra Books, 2025). ︎
3. See Marx, Karl. Capital, Chapter 3. This is consonant with Adam Smith’s understanding of the velocity of money.
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4. Also called the “Federal Funds Rate.”
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5. The M1 money supply over ten years, as reported by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Accessed at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M1SL.
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6. See, for instance, H.W. Edwards’ groundbreaking work Labor Aristocracy, Mass Base of Social Democracy. ︎
7. The Economist, which represents British capital, has much more firmly presented an anti-Trump position on Powell as well as on the ICE killing of Renee Good. The re-emergence of national (as opposed to international) capitalist planning in the US empire has rattled many cages in Europe. See, for instance: Financial Times, “Justice department’s probe into Jay Powell galvanizes Fed leaders to repel Donald Trump’s attacks,” Jan 12; Wall Street Journal’s, “The Fed Fights Back,” Jan. 13.
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8. On the following Monday, the day after Powell’s video, trading was muted and the DOW opened down 500 points. The transfer of money out of the stock market and into commodities represents a fear that the value of the stock market may fall.
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9. Hatred of the Federal Reserve’s regulatory power has been poured into the Libertarian movement and thus embodies a certain kind of right-liberal settlerism. This has been the preserve of an alliance of right-leaning big capitalists and upper ranks of the petty bourgeoisie since at least the early 2000s. It seems this logic is now winning over more and more of the big capitalists themselves.
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10. The neo-liberal position on immigration has always been the Democratic party line: “We need immigrants to do the jobs no one wants to do, that are too difficult, grueling, intense, or low-paying for real Americans!” The ICE sweeps represent a new ideology that flatly denies this rather grotesque logic and embodies instead the naked nationalist nativism in Washington.
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You are now expected to sit down and shut up about real issues and wait patiently for another five months so Harris can get into office and “start making changes.” Never mind that she’s already in office as the Vice President, never mind that this means at minimum another five months of unrelenting horrors. If you dare to demand an end to the new Holocaust you’re “helping Trump” who will surely be even worse, somehow. Speaking out against the genocide is now, incredibly, considered counterproductive for the cause of ending it. Harris might end the genocide, you see, and Trump surely will not, so getting her into office is our top priority now! You simply must stop protesting the ongoing genocide, or you’re helping Trump commit theoretical genocide! It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so deeply sick. 

With Tim Walz as her pick for Vice President, Harris has catapulted herself from a miserable failure of a former presidential candidate to the darling of the so-called “progressive left” movement. The genius of the imperial propaganda machine can’t be denied. Feeling the pressure of mounting discontent towards the savagery of the Palestinian genocide, the empire has reinvigorated mass support for its campaign of inhuman butchery by dangling the carrot of “progressive” legislation in front of our noses yet again, with the ever present stick of Trump threatening us if we fail to obey. 

Walz’s speeches to voters play off his history of supporting the rights of the empire’s workers. Before a cheering crowd of UAW workers, Walz declares that Harris will stand up for collectivized labor and stick it to the “transnational gangs” and the “billionaires and corporate greed.” Harris smiles behind him. The irony of this declaration being made on behalf of a multimillionaire who is presently committing the most heinous crimes against humanity at the behest of those very same billionaires appears entirely lost on the crowd.

Who is Tim Walz? It should hardly matter at this point which lackey of empire is placed at the helm of the extermination machine, but this man in particular deserves a closer investigation, which may reveal some insights into what the hell is actually going on here. As governor of Minnesota, Walz has made a name for himself as one of the last holdouts of the bygone age of American “social democracy.” A proponent of raising the minimum wage, police accountability, workplace safety, welfare expansion, gun control, and cannabis legalization; and an opponent to corporate bailouts, the war on Iraq, and conversion therapy, Walz truly is the squeaky clean “progressive” that the Democratic voter base have been begging for since time immemorial. He’s stood on picket lines, started a Gay Straight Alliance when he was a school sports coach, and even wrote his master’s thesis on Holocaust education. What else is there to even say? He’s a “progressive” dream come true!

Except…

Walz is of course an ardent zionist. This should hardly come as a surprise at this point, with the Biden regime’s uncompromising commitment to assisting the zionist entity’s campaign of slaughter in every way it possibly can, including purging the Democratic Party of all anti-zionist speech. Somehow however the promise of a potential taste of “progressive” legislation at long last has led much of the so-called “progressive left” movement to simply ignore this uncomfortable and inconvenient fact. And make no mistake, Walz is as deeply and enthusiastically committed to his zionism as the next murderous imperialist ghoul. He has personally met with Netanyahu in the past, repeatedly voted in favor of the zionist entity during his stint in the House, and went as far as to vote against a U.N. resolution affirming that zionist settlements in the West Bank are illegal. But what’s a little “international law” and “settler-colonial ethnic cleansing” anyway? Look at everything he’s done for Minnesota! 

He has of course made excuses for his zionism: “You can hold competing things: That Israel has the right to defend itself, and the atrocities of October 7 are unacceptable, but Palestinian civilians being caught in this… has got to end.” This empty genocide denial and apologism is apparently sufficient to brush the issue under the rug for most so-called “progressives.” For anyone taking the matter seriously however, the problems should be quite clear already. 

Remember that master’s thesis on Holocaust education? Titled “Improving Human Rights and Genocide Studies in the American High School Classroom,” it argues that the Holocaust inflicted on the Jewish people by Nazi Germany was not unique in the grand scheme of history, and should be taught “in the greater context of human rights abuses,” “To exclude other acts of genocide severely limited students’ ability to synthesize the lessons of the Holocaust and the ability to apply them elsewhere,” he wrote. This all sounds very good. It is in fact, an essential perspective for properly understanding how and why genocides happen. It appears difficult to square this with his history of Zionism. Or is it?

On June 2, just shy of eight months into the ongoing genocide against Palestine, Walz spoke at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas (JCRC). In addition to his typical laundering of the genocide, the unambiguous condemnation of the “terrorism” of the Resistance, and the crocodile tears about how “unsafe” Jewish students supposedly felt at the campus protests against the genocide, he had the following to say:

“We need to do better on Holocaust education. We need to do better on ethnic studies. And I tell you this as a teacher and as governor, too. We don’t need test scores or anything to tell that we’re failing. People’s misunderstanding of what’s happening or what has happened in the Middle East is just stunning in many cases. And I think that lack of information, that lack of knowledge and the way people throw around certain terms or seem to try and rewrite history, it’s apparent to me that… we have got to educate, especially our young people, about the true story. We have to make sure they know.  

And as so many of you know, this is a really interesting study in this, especially at this time, we passed the law — but who writes the curriculum is gonna be really, really important. So to make sure — and JCRC being there — making sure we’re held accountable, that this curriculum is correct and how it’s being delivered is done right.”

Here is a man who studied genocide and wrote a master’s thesis on how it happens and how to teach this to people. He knows what “israel” is doing, and he knows what he is doing. By this point on June 2 he had watched eight months of babies starving to death, eight months of innocent children shredded by bombs, and then went on stage to spout this horrific rhetoric. He is weaponizing his education and his position as an educator and legislator to whitewash the genocidal crimes of the zionist entity and make pro-zionist genocide propaganda a feature of Minnesota’s educational system. This is grotesque and inhuman on what should be an almost inconceivable level, if only we hadn’t witnessed nearly a year straight of this kind of bald-faced arrogant hypocrisy from every imperial media outlet.

One thing is clear from this. Walz is not a friend to the working class. And he is not even trying to hide this fact. It’s no coincidence that after ten months of daily atrocities the empire is, for the first time in decades, putting a “social democratic progressive” on the campaign trail. Walz is offering everything the “progressive” movement has ever dreamed of (or at least a vague gesture towards such, which appears to be more than sufficient), if only they will agree to one little compromise. Open complicity.

Harris and Walz are not going to put an end to this genocide. Nobody in the imperial administration is. Anyone who believes this after ten straight months of lies about Resistance “terrorism,” lies about October 7th “mass rapes,” lies about ceasefires, lies about the “aid pier” (which was used once to commit a massacre and then quickly dismantled and forgotten about), lies about stopping weapons shipments, and lies about the upstanding morality of the IOF, is quite plainly living in a fantasy. 

They’re hardly pretending to care anymore. Biden just signed off on another $20 billion weapons shipment, and Harris has openly rejected issuing an arms embargo against “israel.” Both Harris and Walz have been clear on their commitment to the zionist entity’s “right to defend itself” and they will continue to support that “right” to torture, rape, and butcher Palestinian men, women, children, and babies, on an indefinite basis. They know that you know what’s really going on, and that’s the point. The cruelty is the point. 

The empire is building more than 90 “cop city” counterinsurgency training camps domestically while its people grow ever more discontent, its global power slips, and its finance system and the world climate both teeter on the brink of catastrophic collapse. The empire wants the whole world watching in stunned horror as it commits unspeakable atrocity after unspeakable atrocity, because then the whole world knows exactly what fate awaits them if they dare step out of line. Every dismembered child and starved skeletal infant is a brutal message to you and me and everyone else on this Earth what the empire is willing to do to those who assert their humanity and attempt to break free of its near universal enslavement of our world. 

Walz offers you a way out: Just accept that this is normal and everything will be okay for you. Like everything else, it’s a lie, one which will likely be fatal for those who buy it. But the empire doesn’t have the final say in the matter, and its depraved cruelty belies a deeper reality. 

The true underlying message of all of this is that the empire is afraid of us.