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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We have already discussed the executive branch of the federal government in a prior article. Citizens of the U.S. are told from the time we’re old enough for a civics lesson that this is not only a democracy, but is the democracy, the pattern upon which all modern democracy is based, the model to which all modern democracies should aspire. This series is written with an eye to answering a question: is the United States a democracy? Is the power of the state vested  “in the people,” as our civics teachers say? What does that mean? If the U.S. is a democracy, then a democracy for which class?

The U.S. is a federated bourgeois republic, with two major “layers” of politics: federal and state. Each of these layers has its own “branches” as theorized by Montesquieu in the 1700s (for more on this, refer to our article, The Executive Gambit). The Congress is the legislative “branch” of the federal government, which makes laws and sets budgets. But let us see how exactly the senes, the old men, of Washington and the representatives in the House control the affairs of the U.S. state. Are they, in truth, exercising a power that is ultimately vested in the people, or are they merely the representatives of a moneyed — that is to say bourgeois — class?

The Functions of the Congress

Neither of the houses of Congress begin their work in full session. Rather, the partisan process requires that a bill be introduced to a subcommittee of the House and the same bill be introduced to a subcommittee of the Senate. The composition of these subcommittees is rigorously controlled by agreement between the Democrats and the GOP. That is to say, anyone who is not approved of by one or both of the two sitting bourgeois parties will not sit on a subcommittee and therefore will lack the power to review legislation.

A draft bill must first make it out of the subcommittee, which requires the approval of one or both parties (depending on the current political landscape and the makeup of the subcommittee). From the subcommittee, the bill is moved up to the committee that oversees it. There, it must be forwarded by majority vote to the full body of the House or Senate (depending on which chamber the bill is in). The majority leadership determines the calendar for when a bill is heard in the full session. This means that, if a majority of the party with a majority in the House does not wish to pass a bill, even if a majority of the House members are in favor, the Speaker of the House can simply refuse to bring it to the floor for a vote and let it languish and die. This has been codified as the so-called Hastert Rule. Because a bill must pass both houses of Congress in order to be given to the president to sign, a derailment at the House by the Speaker kills all legislation.

The House has strict rules about speaking on bills… the Senate does not. This means that the Senate can kill a bill exactly like the House does, but rather than through the maneuvering of the Speaker, this is done through the Senate filibuster. Because debate is generally unlimited, the Senate can only bring a bill to vote if the body invokes the rule of cloture. It requires three-fifths of the Senate to vote for cloture to end debate.

The Congress also has the power to impeach and try federal officers, such as the president, as well as to investigate and exercise oversight on the administrative and executive agencies (which were discussed briefly in The Executive Gambit). Although the Congress technically declares war, since the Korean War at the earliest, the executive office has unilaterally decided when the U.S. capitalist empire is at war, even though no formal declaration of war has issued. Declarations of war as a matter of state are passé. This is because the U.S. is in a state of continuous warfare, against all peripheral states. The only question that is left to decide is when and where that simmering war requires the use of open violence.

Congressional Elections

The amount of money involved in Congressional elections is estimated at between $8-10 billion USD for 2020-2022, or half of one percent of the entire gross domestic product of the U.S. in any given year.

Every two years, the entirety of the House (435 seats) is up for re-election. This ensures that House candidates must continuously spend money to stay elected. The average winner of a House seat must spend approximately $2.5 million every 2 years in order to stay in place. Senators, who are elected on a rotating basis with terms of 6 years each, spend on average $26.5 million to maintain their seats. The re-election rate of incumbents in the House is 93.5%, and in the Senate 100%.

In addition, House elections are dominated by political machines. These are disciplined and hierarchical party organizations that operate on patronage at the local level. Political machines control cities and neighborhoods through the patronage system (jobs, grants, etc., in exchange for the mobilization of votes) and through the coordination of campaign efforts. In machine politics, everyone marches in the same direction or they lose ballot access, find their office sidelined, or otherwise drop out of electability. The recent indictment of Eric Adams demonstrates the manner in which a political machine operates. Of course, political machines make a party vulnerable to the “law and order” elements in its opposite party, and the bourgeoisie take great delight in exposing the corruption of their neighbors while shielding their own rotten machinery.

The House is especially susceptible to this process because of the way state-level legislatures are in charge of shaping the Congressional electoral districts. On either side of the aisle, aggressive redistricting has been used to divide up large blocks of population that would vote for the party’s opponents into bite-sized groups that are then lumped together with friendly voters, essentially removing seats from the contest and “granting” them to the party that controls the state. The legislative warfare behind redistricting has been stepped up to a new height in the right-fascist strongholds of the U.S. South.

A System of Cooptation

As we have seen, because of the way the Congress is structured, all “progressive” politicians are co-opted into the fold of the Democratic Party or else find themselves sidelined. Empire-wide organizations exist to help corrupt these politicians and convince them to adopt the legislative agendas supported by these so-called lobbyists. Congresspeople need money for their campaigns. They must be supported by the business interests of their districts. They cannot turn their noses up at party politics for fear of being sidelined and replaced.

The function of the House is thus to absorb radical energy (where it exists) and to break it on the wheel of the subcommittee and the lobbyist campaigner. The show put on when votes are called is merely that; politics are not done in public in Washington, but behind closed doors where the working class is never admitted. All real politics take place at fundraisers and dinners, at donor meetings and lobbying events, at closed party palavers and in the palaces of the ultra-rich. Policy cannot be made in public because the ruling class cannot afford to show the people how its legislative sausage is made.

The mark of a real progressive or, heaven forbid, a Communist, would be that, after election, they stand in the way of all reactionary legislation. Such a politician (one we will never live to see) would use whatever influence they have to expose corruption and back-room dealing from both parties. They would attack the government itself, restrict the expansion of government bureaucracy, choke the state repressive apparatus of funds, and provide relief for the poor and working class while tightening the leash upon the most egregious of the capitalists.

The average age in the U.S. Congress is 58 years old. Over half the members of the Congress are millionaires. 72% of Congresspeople are men — whereas only 49.51% of the population is. 10% of Congress is Black — as against 12% of the U.S. population. 0.9% of the Congress is American Indian — as against 3% of the overall U.S. population. This is the effect of both history and the electoral process, which requires multiple millions of dollars to retain a seat in office. Congressional salaries are set at $174,000, but the expenses required to commute to the capital and live in Washington during Congressional session far outstrip this meager stipend; the cost of living in Washington D.C. is roughly $80,000 a year.

We are told that demographic representation is part of democracy. The ideologists of the bourgeois state (schoolbooks, the talking heads on television, and the political theorists in academia and the media that do their daily lip service to their bourgeois masters) insist that we can have a complete democracy where all demographic categories are represented in the institutions of power. My god, they complain, haven’t we had a Black president? This is meant to show that the injustices of the system are cured and the halls of power are not forbidden to anyone. Even if there were equal representation for women, for Black people, for any of the oppressed nationalities or those suffering from social oppression, in the halls of Congress, their representatives would still be of a different  class, a hostile class.

 The only way to break the stranglehold of these aged white capitalists on U.S. government is to undermine the power of the Congress itself, and eventually replace it with a truly representative institution: a single chamber that is both legislative and executive, which is elected by the working people, and in which each seat is subject to the instantaneous recall of the working people. There is, of course, no road to achieve such a state without the preparation among all the people to confront this corrupt government and do away with it. In short, the only way to sweep clear the encrusted privilege of the old order is to force it out. Until the day we do, we, the people, will always be subservient to they, the bourgeois capitalist class.

Representative Schiff has been at the head of Democratic lawfare efforts against the Republicans, which marked him as a target of the extreme right wing of the Republican party. He took charge of the 2020 Senate trial of Trump and also served as a long-time member of the dreaded House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees the actions of the executive-branch intelligence agencies like the CIA, Defense Intelligence, FBI, and Homeland Security. It also has authority over the Departments of Defense, Justice, and State.

Schiff became a proponent of lawfare — the use of legal proceedings to wage political warfare on an opponent’s party — in 2018 with his “Open Letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” This was essentially a love letter to the FBI from Schiff, who had started his political career as a prosecuting attorney, a cop in a suit.

There is a narrow difference between the normal operation of the U.S. state regarding political corruption and the more aggressive lawfare that has been increasingly carried out by both parties since 2016. Only in periods of extreme internal dispute have the courts and intelligence services been used by one party against another. Examples of this escalation include Watergate and the Clinton impeachment. More and more routinely, on a more and more regular basis, both parties have begun using legal procedures to attack their ruling class opponents directly.

Schiff may have begun this last round of lawfare by opposing the Trump regime, but he now faces the sharp edge of the sword his party drew. The far-right clique in the GOP that has governed the party for the past six years brought a motion to censure Schiff; this resolution held that he should be fined $16 million if it’s determined he “lied, made misrepresentations, and abused sensitive information.” Although the resolution was voted down on Wednesday, it signals an increasingly sharp battle within the legal structures of the U.S. Empire. The ruling GOP clique alleged that he “purposefully deceived his Committee, Congress, and the American people” and “used his position and access to sensitive information to instigate a fraudulently based investigation, which he then used to amass political gain and fundraising dollars.”

Schiff warned that the motion represents a “clear attack on our constitutional system of checks and balances.” Although it’s usually a mistake to lend credence to the words of any bourgeois politician, Schiff is waving the flag in warning because he knows the Democrats are in danger of being outflanked. Their devotion to process and norms, to playing “within the rules” of the bourgeois republic laid down by the slave owning founders they revere almost as gods, has hampered the Democrats’ ability to respond to the far-right clique in the GOP.

This ruling clique is preparing a war on two fronts, and the lawfare front represents only one. The second front is extra-legal: the paramilitary and military wing of the ruling clique (we can’t yet call it a self-contained and actualized party) that exists in every police station and gun club in the Empire. This illegalist front has already flexed its strength once on January 6, 2020. It’s only a matter of time before these two fronts opened by the GOPs ruling clique — the legalist and illegalist — meet.

We can take some comfort knowing that the illegalist wing suffered setbacks in the wake of January 6, but those setbacks are temporary. The men who have been incarcerated are biding their time, strengthening their ties to active white supremacist militants in the prisons, and waiting while the legalist, lawfare strategy proceeds. Although the Congressional lawfare front is in the ascendent and dominant position, it won’t be long before these two frontlines switch places again.

On 21 December 2022 Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the comedian-president of Ukraine, was flown on a U.S. Air Force jet out of his war-devastated country to beg for alms from his American masters in front of the U.S. Congress. Zelenskyy is the representative of the fascist-infiltrated government in Kiev and serves at the pleasure of a loose coalition of Banderite leaders — men who profess loyalty to the vision of the ultranationalist, antisemite, and murderer Stepan Bandera who organized mass executions during World War II. Before his televised debut, Zelenskyy stopped over at the White House to receive assurances from the decaying Joe Biden that the Banderite government of Kiev would continue to receive U.S. support. The U.S. imperialists, through their gerontocrat mouthpiece Biden, announced that they would not abandon the U.S. commitment to Ukraine. Indeed, the mobile corpse at the head of the U.S. executive said that he had “never seen NATO or the EU more united about anything at all.”

With these promises in hand, Zelenskyy delivered his speech to the U.S. ruling  classes with a bald-faced recognition of the truth — ”Americans won this victory.” Despite the fact that Ukraine is even now being reduced to a smoldering ruin, despite the fact that millions and billions of dollars in war machinery and materiel is being destroyed, Zelenskyy began by recognizing the power of the U.S. propaganda machine. He praised that the “victory” Ukraine has already won is, in Zelenskyy’s own words, a “hearts and minds” victory, a triumph of propaganda and intelligence. He thanked, in essence, the most powerful media presence in the world. With the U.S. imperialist war-lobbying machine at his side, how can he lose? In fact, by June of 2022, Ukraine had already lost 50% of its military equipment. On June 13 one of Zelenskyy’s advisors, Mykhailo Podolyak, tweeted that Ukraine needed at least 1,000 howitzers, 300 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), 500 tanks, 2,000 armored vehicles, and 1,000 additional drones.

An estimate of Western-donated totals indicates somewhere around 200 howitzers, 51 MLRS, 250 tanks, and 700 armored vehicles have made it into Ukraine.
Zelenskyy went on to use the language of decolonization to describe Ukraine: Yet we have to do whatever it takes to ensure that countries of the Global South also gain such victory.” He hasn’t lost his gift for comedy! The “Global South” is dominated and colonized by the very U.S. Empire that Zelenskyy serves. The largest, most powerful empire in the world can’t “decolonize” anything!

This battle is not only for territory, for this or another part of Europe. The battle is not only for life, freedom and security of Ukrainians or any other nation which Russia attempts to conquer. This struggle will define in what world our children and grandchildren will live, and then their children and grandchildren.

Here, Zelenskyy appeared to be auditioning for yet another role — the battered president standing up against fascists, painting the Russian Federation with the same brush as Nazi Germany. This kind of rhetoric harkens to the world-shattering conflicts of World War I and II and, in good European style, Zelenskyy casts this war as one between democracy and destruction, between a free way of life and a dictatorship. But, like everything else in his presidency, for Zelenskyy this is nothing more than an act; this is no war between democracy and totalitarianism. Zelenskyy’s own government is shot through with fascists, and this big man of democracy role is merely a kind of sleight of hand. The real script is being written by the heirs of Stepan Bandera. Only a comedian could, with a straight face, defend the erection of statues to the antisemite and murderer of Poles Bandera, whose paramilitary Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists killed 35,000 Ukrainian Jews and between 50,000 and 100,000 Poles.  A fine deflection from his own Banderite government!

It’s of no small moment that Zelenskyy stood before the U.S. Congress to make this impassioned but bankrupt plea. It was the U.S. Empire and its machinations that put Ukraine on the frontlines. It is the insatiable drive of the U.S. imperialists for the natural resources of the Russian Federation, the pathological refusal of the U.S. ruling class to integrate Russia into the world-imperialist machine, and the bloody-minded desire of U.S. Cold Warriors who were sad to see the war end in their favor that put Ukraine on the path to war. For thirty years, the U.S. Empire has manipulated little Ukraine. The president of that embattled country must come to the U.S. and nowhere else to hold out his cap and beg for bullets, guns, bombs, even nuclear war. After all, Zelenskyy merely asked the U.S. to hold up the bargain its agents have been whispering in his ear since he took office. Make us like you, he says. Make us part of the imperialist West. And if his countrymen down to the last must die to fulfill the Banderite ambition? So what!

Zelenskyy went on to describe the Russian onslaught. “Every inch of that land is soaked in blood; roaring guns sound every hour. Trenches in the Donbass change hands several times a day in fierce combat, and even hand fighting.” But who, oh President Zelenskyy, invited that war? Who was it that loudly courted NATO, that loudly asked for the U.S. Empire to involve itself in the affairs of Ukraine? Whose government was it that waged a war of ethnic cleansing in the Donbass for the past three years? Oh, well, of course, Mr. Zelenskyy has nothing to say on those subjects.

But he admits that the Russian forces “have a significant advantage in artillery. They have an advantage in ammunition. They have much more missiles and planes than we have ever had.” The unspoken corollary: the U.S. must make up the deficit. You got us into this, Zelenskyy says without saying, now it’s up to you to get us out.

Of course, Zelenskyy couldn’t help but accuse the Russian Federation of what Ukraine itself has done. As early as February, Zelenskyy was releasing the prisoners in Ukraine to form penal battalions to fight the Russians. Yet, the comedian-president said to the Congress that “They [the Russians] sent convicts to the war.” And again, he cannot resist the comparison of Russian president Vladimr Putin to the Nazis: “[J]ust like the brave American soldiers which held their lines and fought back Hitler’s forces during the Christmas of 1944… [b]rave Ukrainian soldiers are doing the same to Putin’s forces this Christmas.”

But President Zelenskyy reminded Congress that the $68 billion USD sent by the Congress up to November 2022 is not enough money to win the war. “Financial assistance is also critically important.” The gross domestic product of Ukraine is only $200 billion USD; Zelenskyy warns that the entire output of the country is insufficient to win the war.

And what does winning look like, to this comedian president? “Ukraine has already offered proposals which I have just discussed with President Biden,” he said. Peace to President Zelenskyy looks like the Russian Federation voluntarily cutting the price of its gas and oil, guaranteeing food exports from Ukraine, releasing all of its prisoners, delivering over the sovereign regions of Donetsk and Luhansk back to Ukrainian war criminals and Banderite fascists, withdrawing all troops, submitting to an internal war crimes tribunal, and signing a peace treaty. Victory, in other words, is the complete capitulation of the Russian Federation and the return of the Banderite militias to the Donbass where they will continue to murder unopposed.

Zelenskyy, who once told a reporter that the fact that he was Jewish “barely makes 20 in [his] long list of faults,” under whose administration statues of the notorious antisemite and killer Stepan Bandera have multiplied, whose administration is staffed by open far-right fascists, demands that the U.S. help his government reconquer the Donbass so those same fascists can return to their ethnic cleansing. So much for the vaunted democracy and freedom! He then went on to say “We’ll celebrate Christmas. Celebrate Christmas even if there’s no electricity.” Throughout his speech he said the word Christmas no less than nine times.

At a time when the decrepit Biden White House has proved its value to the U.S. capitalist class by crushing the railroad workers movement, at a time when the consumer price index in the U.S. is soaring and inflation is spiraling out of control, at a time when student debt relief was dangled only to be canceled, at a time when the domestic population of the U.S. Empire desperately needs some kind of monetary relief, Biden and the other cronies of the big capitalists have chosen to spend over $60 billion in war machinery, ammunition, and supplies for the Ukrainian army rather than to give any relief to the U.S. working classes. Zelenskyy is their reasoning. The rugged face of the handsome actor-president serves as a stand-in for argumentation. It now merely needs to flash his photograph in the news or mention his name on the radio for standing ovations and tearful protestations of loyalty to Ukraine to spill from the lips of regular U.S. citizens (nearly always in the form of the fascist phrase Slava Ukraini).

This is a war against Russia; this is a war against the Empire’s European partners; but this is also a war against the working class. It is a war against the working class in Russia, which suffers. It is a war against the working class in Ukraine, which chafes under the fascist yoke. It is a war against the working class in the U.S. Empire, which must make sacrifices so the U.S. government can enact its capitalist masters’ bloody will in Eastern Europe and remake the map of the world.

We must not be duped by Washington or Kiev. When they send in the clowns, we must be prepared with the real facts that led to this conflict. When they cry crocodile tears about human rights abuses, we must remind them who created the abuses, who funded the murderous fascists that perpetuate them, who even now send money and materiel to them so they can continue their depravities. We are not fooled by the funny man from Ukraine.

Washington, we see your hand in the shadows.