In order to answer these questions, we have to examine several different layers of government through several different “branches.” We’ve all heard the division of the U.S. government into the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, a scheme that was originally put forward from the French monarchist and aristocrat Charles Louis de Secondat, better known by his title, the baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (generally, we just call him Montesquieu), in the middle of the 1700s. It’s from Montesquieu that we get our political theory of the “separation of powers” and “checks and balances,” but originally the terms were used to mean checks and balances to prevent a monarchy from devolving into an autocracy.

Because the U.S. is a federated bourgeois republic, it has two major “layers” of politics, federal and state, and each of these layers has its own legislative, executive, and judicial branches. There are also a welter of local offices at the state level which are generally swapped back and forth between the prominent petit-bourgeois lawyers, business owners, and members of the local Chamber of Commerce.

In order to narrow the topic and provide clear examples, we will focus on the federal level and its three “branches.” For now, it suffices to note that the lower down on the state scale that one descends, the more intimately full of graft and naked political repression the system becomes.

Since the 2024 U.S. presidential elections are coming up, we will focus on the electoral process for the country’s executive branch.

The executive branch is embodied in the presidency; all other federal executive officers of the U.S. government are appointed by the president, and most judicial offices are as well. Many of those officers can be fired for any or no reason, giving them a theoretical absolute loyalty to the person of the president. Violation of this loyalty, violation of a presidential directive, or even just irritating the president, can cause an officer to be removed from their job. 

Although the executive branch was initially conceived of as being fairly small and circumscribed to the power to execute wars and engage in foreign diplomacy, the power of the branch has grown in leaps and bounds since 1860 and it is now by far the most powerful constituent of the U.S. government. The executive branch now includes every administrative department of the federal state: the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, the Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, the Treasury, and Veterans Affairs. There are hundreds of executive agencies that fall under the president as well including the Administration for Children and Families, Agency for International Development (USAID), the CIA, Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, NASA, the National Labor Relations Board, the Small Business Administration, the Social Security Administration, the Postal Service, the CDC, the Census Bureau, and on and on. This massive array of bureaucrats and functionaries answer to the White House.

Electing a President

How is the president chosen? Well, here we have one of the central myths of the American ruling class, and that is the primacy of voting during presidential election season.

By law, candidates for president must:

• Be natural born citizens of the United States,
• Be at least 35 years old, and
• Have been residing in the United States for 14 years prior to running.

These factors alone do not qualify someone to run for the presidency, however. They must also pass the hurdles set forward for ballot access in each of the 50 states and the city of Washington D.C. in order to appear on the state ballots. A candidate who does not appear on a presidential ballot materially is unable to win the presidency. It is functionally impossible to raise sufficient awareness among the entire voting population of the U.S. to get the number of write-in votes required to secure even a single state delegate, let alone the presidency. Some states do not permit write-ins — Arkansas, Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota do not permit write-in candidates.

Altogether, that makes 57 delegates unavailable for write-in candidates. A majority of 270 electoral votes, out of a total 538, is required to win the presidency. Thus, the total pool of available electors to those who do not make ballot access is only 481. A candidate that didn’t have ballot access would be required to win 56% of the electoral college (of which, more below) in order to win the presidency. If no one wins the required majority of electoral votes, the sitting House of Representatives elects the president.

In nine states, candidates don’t need to do anything special to be eligible to receive write-in votes. In fully 31 states, write-in candidates need to file special paperwork for write-in votes to count for their candidacy, which represents yet another hurdle to outsiders.

Ballot Access

What’s required for a candidate to appear on the presidential ballot? In the 2024 election, as in most U.S. presidential elections before it, the Democratic and Republican candidates appear on the ballots automatically. This is because the Democratic and Republican parties write all of the election rules and sit as the Secretary of State in every state.  In order to appear on the state ballots, independent candidates or those running from parties other than the two dominant ones are required, in most states, to garner a number of signatures to present to the state government. This ranges based on the state; Idaho requires only 1,000 “verified” signatures, while Florida requires an enormous 145,040 signatures and California an overwhelming 219,403 signatures.

To appear on every ballot in the U.S., candidates would have to collect a total of 952,807 verified signatures. To be verified, generally a signature must also have an associated street address which can be confirmed. In almost all states, these petitions are collected, examined, and processed by the Secretary of State — a state official appointed by the state governor and a member of one of the two major parties. How the Secretary of State confirms and strikes names off the petitions differs depending on the state, but typically one-third of the submitted signatures are immediately invalidated at random and the remaining half are checked to see if the names comport with state records of addresses. Should any address be incorrectly entered or not updated in the state’s own record, that name is struck from the petition. Petitioners generally understand that, in order to pass through these filters, they must gather double the number of signatures that the law requires. This means that, in order to appear on every ballot in the United States, a third party candidate must gather 2 million signatures. No third party candidate has ever appeared on every ballot; the most that any third-party ever appeared on was the run by Ralph Nader in the year 2000.

136 million people, 54% of the voting age population, voted in the 2016 presidential election, and that was a particularly high turnout. That means, before any vote is cast, third party candidates must gather roughly 2% of the eligible voting population, that is, the group actually voting, in signatures. The infrastructure required to stage even a preliminary campaign of this nature doesn’t spring up overnight, nor is it free of charge, and it only represents the very first hurdle for a third electoral party.

Again, it is impossible to stress strongly enough that these petitions are examined and often thrown out by party incumbents from one of the existing parties — parties that have automatic ballot access, and are integrated at every level with the state government and, in many places, with the state election machinery. Of late, Democrats have been suing to remove ballot access from third parties on various manufactured grounds: misleading petition-gatherers, voters who asked for their signatures to be removed, unverified signatures, etc. Anything to keep the monopoly of power concentrated in as few hands as possible.

The Electoral College and Delegate Apportionment

Should one, fighting off both the Democratic and Republican party machines, manage to appear on a ballot or become a potential write-in candidate, and should one win a portion of votes in any given state that would permit one to have presidential delegates sent to the so-called Electoral College, the electoral process presents itself as the next gatekeeper. Each state determines how the delegates it sends to the Electoral College (a meeting of “electors”) are required to vote. 

In most states, the political parties each create a slate of electors. Thus, there is a Democratic elector list and a Republican elector list. The U.S. presidential election is actually to pick which party will send electors to the vote for president. Some states have laws requiring the electors to vote for the party candidate that wins the state’s popular vote. 21 states have no laws preventing electors from voting for whoever they want to. Of the 30 states that have laws governing electors’ votes, many of them are non-binding and have no sanctions attached, relying on the elector’s pledged word.

In 48 states and Washington D.C., the winner of the state’s popular vote takes all the electors to the Electoral College. That means it is not enough for a third party candidate to build up a broad base of diffuse support; to win electors they must win states outright. The votes of these electors are then tallied and read into a joint session of the Federal Congress and the President of the Senate declares the winner of the election. At each step of the way, candidates may be disqualified by the hurdles they face, all of which are administered by partisan members of an existing bourgeois party.

The Cost

The biggest prohibiting factor is the cost of running an election. In 2016, Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign spent $768 million and Trump’s campaign spent $398 million. The analysts at MediaQuant estimated that Trump received approximately $5 billion in free media coverage through news and other sources while Clinton received around $3.24 billion. In 2020, the total amount of political spending rose to $14 billion by all parties. This money is spent on paid advertising, consultants, and travel, but it is also used to establish on-the-ground operations and campaign centers.

Who supplies the money for these campaigns? How is it possible to compete? The capitalist class overwhelmingly pays for presidential campaigns. Hilary Clinton’s 2016 run was financed by Facebook founder Dustin Moskovitz ($35 million), hedge fund president Donald Sussman ($21 million), the Pritzkers ($12.6 million), the Saban Capital Group ($10 million), George Soros ($9.5 million), Slim-Fast owner Daniel Abraham ($9 million), Newsweb founder Fred Eychaner ($8 million), Euclidean Capital manager James Simons ($7 million), Henry Laufer of investment firm Renaissance Technologies ($5.5 million), Laure Woods ($5 million), etc.

The existing capitalist parties themselves devote resources to these campaigns. They are legal entities with a legal corporate existence under U.S. law. The Democratic Party, for instance, during the 2022 midterm elections, spent $200 million on administrative staff, nearly $100 million on campaigns, $200 million on fundraising efforts, $750 million on media purchases, $100 million on strategy, and $300 million on party salaries. Between Democrats and Republicans, nearly $4 billion dollars was spent during that election cycle.

It is impossible for a campaign to succeed without the backing of the moneyed interests of the capitalist class. There is simply no way to assemble enough resources in a single place to challenge this behemoth system — and this is on top of the other hurdles that the campaign faces above.

The Final Line of Defense: The Constitution

“Even if the capitalist class were law-abiding enough, or had miscalculated public opinion enough, to wait until the socialists had got a majority at the ballot box in some presidential election, they would then refuse to vacate their offices, or to recognise the election, and with the Senate and the military in their hands would calmly proceed to seat those candidates for President, etc., who had received the highest votes from the capitalist electorate…. We have often seen the capitalist class invoke the aid of the Supreme Court in order to save it some petty annoyance by declaring unconstitutional some so-called labour or other legislation. Now I can conceive of no reason why this same Supreme Court cannot be invoked to declare unconstitutional any or all electoral victories of the socialist party. 
… I consider that if the capitalist class appealed to the Supreme Court and interrogated it to declare whether a political party which aimed at overthrowing the constitution of the United States could legally operate to that end within the constitution of the United States the answer in the negative which that Court would undoubtedly give would not only be entirely logical, but would also be extremely likely to satisfy every shallow thinker and fanatical ancestor-worshipper in the country.”

James Connolly, Ballots, Bullets, or –, The International Socialist Review (Oct. 1909)

As we have outlined in other articles, the capitalist class has now, and has always had, complete capture of the United States Supreme Court. In addition, it has the loyalty of the highly reactionary caste of career members of the Armed Services and, as James Connolly noted as long as a century ago, it commands the allegiance of the entire legislative branch of the U.S. state. Further, it has control of an impressive apparatus of intelligence services created in the wake of World War II, which it, as we have covered, has parlayed into an all-pervasive system of repression.

The argument here risks expanding into other parts of the system of state control; the judicial and legislative branches are beyond the scope of the current work. The executive branch alone, however, commands sufficient power in the form of the police (which are part of the state-level executive apparatus), the armed forces (federal-level executive), and the intelligence agencies (federal-level executive as well) to act as a final backstop.

Should anyone ever manage to weather the storms listed above and, against the will of the moneyed owners of property, accede to the presidency, they would also be forced to face those three mighty arms of capitalist class-power. This is entirely discounting the possibility of what the kids are calling “ratfucking” — outright stealing an election for the chosen representative of capital.

Remember the limits, the horizon set by the owners of the real power in this country, when it comes to “elections.” Free and fair — but free and fair for which class?

At this year’s State of the Union, Joe Biden had a narrative to sell the people of the U.S. Empire: According to Biden’s story, when he entered office, the economy was reeling, but now, under his tenure as President, the economy is on the mend, with millions of new jobs “created” in the last two years, and unemployment at historic lows — nevermind the ongoing housing and cost-of-living crisis, the continual depression of wages, a crisis of overproduction and waste, and an impending financial crash. According to Biden, the COVID-19 pandemic is over; in Biden’s story, COVID-19 isn’t still killing thousands of people every week, while the Biden regime stands by, condemning those thousands to death. According to Biden, “our democracy remains unbowed and unbroken” two years after Trump’s attempted coup d’état of January 6th, 2021 — nevermind that basic human, civil, and democratic rights for women, LGBT people, and Black people are under assault in courts and legislatures and police departments at every level of government across the U.S. Empire. According to Biden, his administration has “defended a stronger and safer Europe” by funneling billions of dollars in arms to Ukraine’s fascist Zelenskyy regime, to fuel the ongoing proxy-war between NATO and the Russian Federation.

As we will see, Biden’s narrative is a simple one: consolidation. Although the regime toyed with, for example, undermining the right-fascist capture of the Supreme Court by adding new, left-leaning justices through a planned expansion of the court by adding new, left-leaning justices, that plan was never really on the table. Biden allowed it to be leaked to the press, publicly announced he was considering it, and even went so far as to appoint a commission to study the subject. Instead, we have a morass of half-measures designed to stabilize the dangerously out-of-kilter economy and social environment into a new equilibrium, one that is substantially rightward of where it stood in January of 2016. That is the actual function and outcome of the Democratic strategy of “compromise.” Above all, this State of the Union Address is an effort to rally the fractious and divided masters of the country, to get them all on the same page, to restore the shaken stability of capitalist class-rule in the face of increased labor agitation and rising consciousness of governmental misdeeds.

And who does Biden look forward to compromising with? His State of the Union begins with an effusive congratulations to GOP Senator Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy was one of the most vocal defenders of the now-disgraced Trump regime. He voted to strip $500 million from abortion funding. He voted against the house resolution to condemn racism against Asians because he believed the COVID-19 virus was created by or in China. He was part of the planned legislative assault on LGBT people and supported the so-called Defense of Marriage Act to deny legal recognition to same-sex couples — indeed, went so far as to join in a legal brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of that heinous act. 

As Biden said: Congratulations, Mr. McCarthy! 

Already, media conglomerate Comcast, through one of its many media arms, MSNBC, has already begun casting the State of the Union as a triumph, and Biden’s recognition of shared class interest with his Republican siblings as “savvy” and “quick-witted.” Thus, should the GOP-fraction come to an agreement with the Democrat-fraction, Biden’s regime will be able to say that they engineered this unity. Should they fight, the words of unity will be cast either as sarcastic and biting or as a heartfelt plea that was snubbed by childish Republicans. Fundamentally, this introduction was an effort at bridge-building, at reminding the GOP (or at least its center and left wing) that the real interests of the ruling class are shared interests.

The new House Minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, delivered high praise by Biden during the speech is, of course, a member of the Clintonite New Democrat Coalition — a caucus within the Democratic Party that brought Bill Clinton to power in the 1990s and saw the wholesale dismantling of economic regulation in the private sector, the passage of anti-Black “anti-crime” bills during the Clinton period, of which Biden was himself a prominent partisan crusader in the Senate — and that collectively joined the GOP as a Democratic voting block just last week to pass the atrocious, a-historical, reactionary  resolution “Denouncing the horrors of socialism.”

The typical response from the professional mainstream media pundits and “analysts,” who turn public dissection of ruling-class discourse into a hobby and a sport, to this kind of in-club back-slapping and glad-handing is that  “compromise” is necessary for advancing any agenda in  the U.S. political arena. This obsession of the Democratic Party with unity between the center-left and the center-right serves as a convenient shield for ruling-class ambitions. This broader attitude is merely the wide application of that principle: the unity of the interest of the ruling class. Compromise is based on shared goals. It cannot be achieved by enemies unless they share interests; the interests shared by Biden and the Republicans (up to, but not including, the most extreme-right, which we will address further on) are the basic interests of the ruling class. All Republicans and Democrats share these interests in common, and Biden will carefully and specifically spell out those things they share throughout the course of this speech. This is ruling class language at its finest, even though Biden has barely said anything yet.

Throughout his entire speech, Biden referred to Americans as a nationality, as a “nation.” This is common in U.S. discourse, but why does that matter — in other words, why point that out? In actuality, the U.S. isn’t a single nation, nor is there any “American people.” The U.S. is a settler-colonial empire, a grand prison-house of nations, a vast expanse of stolen land, in which many Indigenous nations are subjugated, oppressed, and hyper-exploited, either as colonies or semi-colonies. 

This idea of the “melting pot” became a shibboleth after the First World War to encourage the complete assimilation of most European and some Asian immigrants (although not, at that time, the former slaves of New Africa, or this continent’s Indigenous peoples, or newer Black and brown migrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, or various “undesirables”) into the white Anglo-American “nation”. This “American” white nationalism was supported by no less prolific a fascist as Henry Ford, who founded the English School in 1914 for just this purpose — that is, to transform his immigrant workers into “true Americans.” Ford’s graduation ceremony saw his workers step off a symbolic immigrant ship, pass through a melting pot, discarding their “ethnic” clothing — the last vestiges of the lands, cultures, and languages they left behind, and end their “transformation” dressed in identical suits, waving American flags.

But why this lie? Why is this American melting pot imagery deployed here by Biden? Because the Democratic strategy relies on class-collaboration not only between the white working class, the white petit-bourgeoisie, and the ruling capitalists, but also between the nationally oppressed peoples. How often have we heard that, for instance, Black voters overwhelmingly vote Democrat? Here, in a few swift and well-calculated words, Black Americans — New Africans — are stripped of their nation and join the hundreds of Indigenous peoples, the subject and exploited Puerto Ricans, the captured Chicanx, and the many many refugees fleeing U.S. imperialist violence who were drawn to the stability at the eye of the world-wide storm of U.S. murder; and all of these groups are erased to become simply “Americans.”

The lie of a unified America stands in direct contrast to reality, to the actual, economic truth in the U.S. The different nations imprisoned within the U.S. Empire are subject to intense economic exploitation by the Anglo-American capitalists. Black property is stolen every day, Black lives destroyed for the benefit of white financiers, and the same goes for Latine and Indigenous lives and property. Pretending everyone living within the borders of the empire is part of the same nation is only one of many ways of saying that everyone living here is equal before the law — the biggest lie of all.

Much of Biden’s speech was occupied with hammering on the apparent achievements of his administration in triumphing over COVID, restoring the economy, etc. But COVID is not over, despite the pronouncements of regime propagandists and Biden himself. Even the opponents of the Biden administration pretend the disease has been “defeated” or was never that big of a problem to begin with. Nothing could be further from the truth. Thousands die each week from complications related to the pandemic. Many thousands more are permanently damaged or disabled by the disease. The virus continues to mutate and change so rapidly that the new variants are no longer named, merely given identifying combinations of letters and numbers. Because the capitalist state refuses to take the necessary measures to put an end to the pandemic, it not only continues on, but threatens to break out anew in ever-more deadly and virulent forms.

The capitalist economy is on anything but firm footing. It hasn’t recovered from COVID; in fact, it’s been demonstrably rotten since the 2008 financial crisis. Economists (who are themselves presently all combinations of capitalist propagandist and diviner in some degree or another) grew used to the prevailing post-2008 conditions of the financial markets, in particular a persistent near-0% federal funds rate. From 2008 to 2020, the federal funds rate was kept below 2.5% to make credit easy to come by, and to stimulate investment in risky business prospects. Prior to that 2008 crisis, the federal funds rate floated between 2% and 6% at any given time.

The COVID crisis, which necessitated the shutdown of most elements of the cycle of production to be even partially contained, has exposed the rot at the core of the U.S. financial markets. Only through massive quantitative easing (the buyback of government bonds using freely-extended credit from the Federal Reserve to pump new money, in the form of credit, into the bank and investment spheres), the removal of the overnight bank funding rate, the lifting of the bank reserve requirement (meaning they do not have to keep sufficient cash on hand to cover any given withdrawal), and the termination of most financial regulations kept the U.S. market afloat during the all-too-brief shutdown. The result is that, of all circulating U.S. currency today, 2/3rds of it was created within the last 2 years.

This massive increase to the money supply has gone entirely to the super-wealthy and their investment agencies like Blackrock. The result has been an inflationary spiral. More currency in circulation without a rise in the number of commodities also circulating means prices must go up.

We’ve seen efforts to contain this financial disaster in the sudden and precipitous raising of the federal funds rate by the Federal Reserve. This rate shows no sign of slowing down, and has been raised at every subsequent Federal Reserve meeting for the past year. The current rate is 4.5%, the highest it’s been since October 31, 2007.

The historical unity of the ruling class is realized in the state. Biden then moves on to celebrate shared victories achieved by a combination of Democrats and Republicans. So what issues are the Biden regime proud of “coming together” on? The first is the safety of Europe, or in other words, the nearly-decade long assault on the freedom and security of the Ukrainian and Russian people. Never to look a gift horse in the mouth, the Biden regime and its predecessors not only managed to install a Banderite-fascist government in Kiev, it has also attacked its own allies in Germany and France, forcing their peoples into ruinous de-industrialization by switching from Russian oil to good old U.S. liquified petroleum gas.

The other things of which he claimed to be proud are the Electoral Count Reform Act, the Respect for Marriage Act, and the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.

The Electoral Count Reform Act is an update of an 1887 law that adds safeguards against elector fraud during the presidential election; it does nothing to address the growing threat of right-fascist capture of the executive office. It merely clarifies obscure procedural details and ensures the vice president has no say in the outcome of a presidential election. Having been secure in their power for over 200 years, the U.S. politician is a great believer in procedure. Procedural niceties make the politician comfortable, assure them that all is well, even when their settler-empire is collapsing around their ears. Never mind, no, never mind that the Electoral College itself is the embodiment of the white supremacist demands of slavers, and today embodies bourgeois class-supremacy. Never mind that! We only need to fix down the right procedure for making it fair.

The cowardly vacillation in the face of the impending court-driven crisis that threatens the marriages and the legal marriageability of millions of gay and lesbian couples as well as so-called inter-racial couples by the Democrats and Biden himself was resolved with the totally unsatisfactory Respect for Marriage Act. Rather than enshrining the legal right for all sexuality and nationally oppressed couples to marry in every state in the United States, the act merely ensures that if and when the Supreme Court overturns its landmark Obergefell case — which the court has signaled is only a matter of time — the majority of states that do not recognize gay and lesbian marriages will be required to recognize any that are contracted in states that do. 

The Violence Against Women Act, despite its progressive wording (although its name is curiously lacking any words indicating that it’s meant to stop violence) is actually a vehicle through which the Congress grants $225 million to police and courts to more stringently enforce existing laws. It should not be forgotten that the single demographic most likely to engage in domestic violence are the very police officers the act gives extra funding. The latest renewal of the act extends its “protections” into Indigenous communities that, under Biden’s watch, have had their sovereignty in law enforcement stripped from them by the right-fascist Supreme Court.

Above all, Biden sounded that old fascist drumbeat, the reveille of white-supremacist America. The threat of the “good jobs” going abroad to Asia leaving, as Biden and his fascist coreligionists frame it, a denuded and feeble economy of service jobs. But if there are two words that have always gone together in fascist jargon, they are nation and race. Biden does not here say the word race, but it can be read into the American nation; what is the American nation, in the eyes of the president of the United States? Not the men and women disproportionately jailed by the police, but the white businessmen and defense contractors, snug in their walled compounds of suburbia.

The “problem” with production in the U.S. Empire isn’t that the manufacturing jobs have moved abroad. The loss of intermediate manufacturing (that is, transforming raw materials not into finished products but into the commodities that themselves will be used to create the finished products) isn’t a flaw in the imperialist system. It is the outcome of a century of the profit motive grinding against the power of organized labor in the imperialist West.

No imperialist politician can afford to explain this connection, because it would immediately give the lie to all of their social safety net talk. We should be explicit! Intermediate and even some finished manufacturing jobs have moved overseas because the wages required to hire laborers in the U.S. are too high to maintain the rate of profit the capitalist owners have come to expect — to demand. In exchange for cheap commodities manufactured abroad, there has been a kind of unwritten agreement between the business leaders and white labor. You get cheap phones, cars, refrigerators, electricity, and the cushiest high-end technical jobs are reserved for you here in the U.S. Empire. In exchange, the capitalists get to reap the benefits of labor arbitrage between the low cost of labor in the imperialized periphery (one of the reasons the U.S. keeps bombing these countries is to keep the cost of living, and therefore wages, low).

All throughout the 1990s, the Democrats official position was that this process was actually good. They used coded terms like “technological jobs” and “technological advantage” and told the entire U.S. population that all we had to do was “learn to code” and the United States Empire would reign over the global economy as a country of managers, technicians, and bureaucrats. It’s only now that the network of exploitation underlying the imperialist lifestyle is showing its cracks, only now that the truth is indisputable, only now that we are remembering that even in a country of managers, technicians, and bureaucrats with all of its basic industry exported to the poorest sectors of the world, that there will still have to be a construction industry, a transport industry, a personal service industry, that the Democrats have desperately begun trying to recapture the loyalty of manufacturing workers.

This is what the Democrat pundits mean when they say that Biden is the most labor-friendly president since FDR: when bourgeois politicians say “labor friendly,” they don’t mean that they will vindicate labor agitation in the face of the owning class, they mean that they will help “stimulate” the economy such that more people will be hired. Biden hits this theme over and over again, and in reality it’s no different from the GOP rhetoric about “job creators.”

Biden made a laughable claim that inflation was “coming down.” Inflation, in fact, is not “coming down.” The Consumer Price Index, that is the price of a basket of common consumer items used to estimate overall inflation, has been climbing steadily since the economy reopened after the all-too-brief COVID shutdown in 2020. Perhaps what Biden’s speechwriters meant, in typical political-speak (read: lies) was that the speed of inflation was slowing. A car traveling at 100 miles-per-hour that gains 20 miles-per-hour in the first minute (to reach a speed of 120 mph), 10 miles-per-hour in the second minute (to reach a speed of 130 mph), and 5 miles-per-hour in the third minute (you guessed it, 135 mph) isn’t slowing down. It’s a fatal accident waiting to happen.

The administration is sensitive to the economic crisis that is building within both the financial markets and the consumer markets. That’s why Biden went on to tout his regime’s plan to strengthen the domestic technology economy with ludicrous statements about microchip and semiconductor manufacturing (although you wouldn’t be able to tell, listening to Professor Biden, that there was a difference between a microchip — an integrated circuit composed of semiconductors linked together — and a semiconductor — a material that has specific electrical properties and which makes up the components of a microchip).

Despite lying about the pace of inflation, the president then had to specifically identify the manufacturing crisis that’s leading to the inflation in the price of all commodities that make use of microchips. In the Western imperialist centers, and particularly in the U.S. Empire where excess is a way of life, everything contains microchips, because almost every commodity has a computer installed in it.

But Biden’s speechwriters were once again thinking of more than just the average worker when they wrote this passage. It’s also a message to Biden’s fellow Democratic warmongers and Western-based microchip manufacturers that the slowly boiling trade war with the People’s Republic of China is heating up. We can never let this happen again, Biden said — meaning, the rise in prices that resulted from trade sanctions against the People’s Republic microchip sector. For Biden, microchip manufacturing can be used to sound like he’s restoring the old Democratic contract with labor while also signaling his intent to pursue economic independence from the People’s Republic; together with  his other policies it’s clear why: the Democrats foresee increased economic warfare against China and the non-aligned bloc it represents.

Nevermind that semiconductor manufacturing threatens to collapse an already overburdened water supply system in the U.S. Nevermind that part of the rise in prices of semiconductors is directly attributable to the ill-planned visits of U.S. lawmakers to the island of Taiwan in violation of U.S. treaty obligations with the People’s Republic and subsequent sanctions from the People’s Republic in retaliation prohibiting the manufacturers on Taiwan from importing the all-important quartz sand necessary for their production.

And what role have Biden and the Democratic Party played in combating environmental degradation? More oil and gas drilling approvals than under Trump. Going ahead with the ConocoPhillips plan to drill in Alaska. In fact, far from “tackling the climate crisis,” the Inflation Reduction Act requires the federal government to lease 60 million acres of federal land for fossil fuel extraction every year, which will continue to expand the disastrous emission of greenhouse gasses. And, most horrifically and most recently, the Biden government has caused the worst-ever ecological crisis in United States history.

In the Biden government’s efforts to, one supposes, retain the image of most labor-friendly president since FDR, Biden himself crushed a rail strike last year. Many of the demands of the near-striking rail workers went directly to the safety of the country’s many trains: longer hours, no leave time, no sick time, fewer workers, and fewer safety precautions have resulted in the terrifying derailment of a train carrying vinyl chloride. As a result, Ohio is now filled with toxic phosgene gas and other fumes, the groundwater has been poisoned, and a noxious pillar of black smoke is now rising from the ruined train.

Part of the plan of stabilization and consolidation is the punishment of the most flagrant exploiters, those who are the most exposed in the eyes of the public for gouging the working masses. This was Biden’s next talking point. But, this selective punishment is not out of goodwill or empathetic concern for working people. It is a feature of any system of exploitation that, when its excesses become too egregious, fall too much outside of the accepted norms, that where even other exploiters take notice and wrinkle their noses, the system itself as the representative of the corporate, collective power of the ruling classes takes action to curb them. Too naked a pattern of exploitation, too obvious and flagrant a system of abuse, and it threatens to expose the injustices that are the basis upon which society is founded. That’s what Biden is expressing here, although he’s claiming that “capitalism without competition is not capitalism” as his cover.

In fact, the steady suppression of competition is one of the key features of capitalism. This process is called concentration of production and capital. It is the tendency of competition to drive smaller capitalists out of business, to have their factories, shopfronts, and what-not bought up by the bigger capitalists. As technological breakthroughs in more and more efficient machines mean that any new capitalists have to put up more and more starting capital, small capitalists are barred from competing because they simply can’t scrape together enough money to buy the latest lathe or die-stamping tool.

Competition produces concentration, and in this way, destroys the conditions of competition themselves. Biden is talking like a capitalist of the 19th century — or, perhaps even more accurately, like a fascist of the early 20th century. Let’s look at another speech: “We no longer have the struggle for life, free competition, the selection of the fittest. We note the first symptoms of fatigue and deviation in the capitalistic world. The era of cartels, syndicates, combines, and trusts now begins….The end of free competition…. The very law of supply and demand is no longer a dogma, for cartels and trusts make it possible to influence both supply and demand.” That eerily similar sentiment comes not from our friend Mr. Biden, but from his early 20th-century counterpart, Mr. Mussolini.

There was another topic that he could not avoid: the increase of violence on the part of the U.S. capitalist police state. In one breath during his speech, Biden pretended to care about the rampant abuse and murder of his capitalist police, and then applauded more stringent laws that will enable the police to abuse and murder untold thousands. Gun control is the dialectical compliment of the settler police force, but a Democrat like Biden cannot or will not draw the connection.

In fact, in 1994 then-senator Biden worked with some of the most vile open segregationists remaining in the United States government to pass legislation eerily similar to the 1960s gun control legislation of California, passed to prevent Black Panthers from arming their cop-watch patrols. In fact, what Biden said then, in 1994, wasn’t that he was trying to find common-sense gun control. What he said was “Every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the State of Delaware: Joe Biden.” That same year he compared himself to Richard Nixon. “Every time Richard Nixon, when he was running in 1972, would say, ‘Law and order,’ the Democratic match or response was, ‘Law and order with justice’ — whatever that meant. And I would say, ‘Lock the S.O.B.s up.’”

Lock the S.O.B.s up. That’s the true face of U.S. gun control policy, and the true face of Joseph Robinette Biden.

He also launched a plan to engage in a crusade against fentanyl. This isn’t even simple consolidation of the right-ward shift of the country, it is an intensification of the white terror. Biden’s fentanyl crusade is creating the very problem it pretends to be combatting. It’s well known that once the ban on the sale of alcohol was a fait accomplis in the early 20th century that many politicians in the U.S. prepared to reap the rewards by establishing what were in essence large criminal production networks. It will come as no surprise in 50 years when it is revealed that the politicians by and large responsible for the War on Drugs are shown to have been among its primary beneficiaries.

If you weren’t yet totally exhausted by Biden’s fascistic talking points, he followed this up with plans for closing the borders to “unwanted migration” from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, New border plans? What do they include? Biden himself tells us: more money for the fascist border patrols. These border police even went so far as to brutalize immigrants ahead of Biden’s own visit to El Paso, Texas, in order to make the president look better when he arrived. What words did the president and top Democrat just recently use toward those at the border? That’s right, “Do not show up here.”

What about the rest of this criminally negligent speech? The lies contained within it have mostly been addressed by points above, and are so self-evidently false that they require no reproduction by us to demonstrate it. More hot air about fentanyl and the drug war, false promises about curing cancer, and bloviating about the “peaceful” role of NATO in provoking the Russian-Ukraine war, followed by the same “we’re all in this together” pablum peddled by the addle-pated Biden at every campaign rally he’s ever been to, and interspersed throughout every speech he’s ever given.

The most important thing to listen to is the flag-waving surrounding what he cast as the defeat of the January 6th Movement — the petit-bourgeois putsch attempt that stormed the capitol building in Washington, D.C., and could have installed a second Trump administration if its organizers had any idea how successful it was going to be. Biden’s disdain for the putschists is a signal to the remainder of the GOP, and it tells us everything about what he plans to do domestically. His administration’s plan is a clumsy attempt to split the far-right fascists from the right fascists in the GOP and transform the center (straddling both sides of the aisle) into a bloc capable of resisting the right and the moderate left. In other words, Biden is attempting to shore up the crumbling status quo position at the center of government.

In foreign policy, the entire State of the Union is a declaration of war: war on the Russian Federation, which he intends to escalate (and indeed, in the week since giving the speech has already begun escalating) and war, eventually on the People’s Republic of China, which he signaled over and over again with his talk of the United States Empire standing on its own two feet and relying on no one.

So, we have our outline for the final period of the Biden presidency: war, on every front; with enemies foreign and domestic, and between the ruling class and the working classes but with a concomitant peace: peace between the fractious and rebellious groups within the bourgeois ruling class, so they can present a united front. Well, let him draw his sword. We are forging ours.