The United States president exercises government power on a day-to-day basis to keep the blood-sucking, war-making U.S. profit system running. This job requires a committee of people, a Cabinet, that assists the president with the constant oversight and adjustment of executive government activity: imperialist war, law enforcement, government finances, diplomacy, preserving capitalism, and more.
In analyzing the role of presidents and prime ministers of their day, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” In 1848 when capitalist classes in Europe were on the rise, they were relatively unified and focused on completing their drives to push monarchs from power and suppress early efforts of workers to organize fightback and revolution.
In 2020, Marx’s description fits the Chinese executive power under Xi Jinping, as rising Chinese capitalism prepares for world war to challenge declining U.S. imperialism (see editorial, page 2).
The U.S. ruling class, on the other hand, is fractured, contributing to the decline of U.S. capitalism’s world power in relation to a rising China. The Donald Trump presidency marked an acceleration of that decline as the “modern executive” was seized by a gang of open bandits with no loyalty to “the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”  
Compared to Trump’s team of outsiders, Biden’s crew is the ultimate collection of insiders and his choices in personnel point to an attempt to return to the smoothly-delivered imperialist and anti-worker policies of the Barack Obama era. Biden’s cynical and manipulative move to install the “most diverse cabinet ever” is a thin veil that seeks to cover the house of horrors the main imperialist wing of the U.S. ruling class has in store for workers everywhere.
The managers of an empire in free fall
Joe Biden, President: He announced that military spending will expand, especially in the areas of cyberwarfare and AI (artificial intelligence) for a more mechanized and efficient surveillance and slaughter of our class overseas, combat roles for transgender workers, and updated equipment for the National Guard who is called in to suppress serious domestic rebellion (Stars and Stripes, 9/10). In 1988, Biden co-authored the infamous “100-to-1” law that targeted Black and Latin workers with mandatory 10-year sentences for possessing small amounts of crack cocaine.  For nearly half a century, Biden has played a lead role in building racism, sexism, and war while serving the interests of finance capital. In 1994, he decried “predators on our streets” and led the charge for Bill Clinton’s Crime Bill, which doubled the U.S. prison population and caged generations of Black and Latin workers. Biden’s slogan sounded a lot like Trump: “Lock the SOB’s up!” (NYT, 6/25/19).
Kamala Harris, first woman Vice
President: In this period of growing fascism and approaching war Harris will continue the long and sordid tradition of Black-led racist assaults on Black workers and sexist assaults on women that are the hallmarks of liberalism. As district attorney in San Francisco and later as California’s state attorney general, Top Cop Kamala “fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions” (theguardian.com, 1/31/19). The cops’ racial profiling of Black workers flourished on her watch. As an attorney general, she criminalized parents of truant children, rather than giving them support..
Tony Blinken, Secretary of State: “...A job in which he will try to coalesce skeptical international partners into a new competition with China, according to people close to the process” (NYT, 11/24). Blinken was Biden’s chief advisor when he cast his 2002 ballot in support of imperialist assault on Iraq as well as a vocal proponent in the Obama administration to launch war in Libya.
Janet Yellen, first woman Treasury Secretary: As Chair of the Federal Reserve under Obama, she crafted the 2008 bailouts and subsequent ‘quantitative easing’ that showered billionaires with cash and left millions to languish in a ‘jobless recovery.’ Expect her to continue Trump-style stimulus bribes to pacify workers while the pandemic rages and to attack Social Security and Medicare, as she has advocated since 2012 (HuffPost, 9/13; NYT, 12/1).
Jake Sullivan, National Security Adviser: This Obama-Era top aide to Hillary Clinton has recently dedicated himself to formulating “U.S. Foreign Policy for the Middle Class: A Perspective from Nebraska” a Carnegie Endowment study which seeks to solve the problem of re-energizing mass support for the U.S. military (NYT, 11/22).
Avril Haines, first woman Director of National Intelligence: Architect of Obama-era drone bombing program that has killed untold numbers of non-combatants across the Middle East and Africa.
Alejandro Mayorkas, first Latin Director of Homeland Security: Author of the  Obama-era DACA program whose false promises drew millions of undocumented youth into providing personal information in the hopes of legal residency. Oversaw the construction of an archipelago of detention centers as Obama’s deputy and innovator in implementation of family separation (vox.com, 6/14). Right-hand man to Deporter-in-Chief Obama as deputy-secretary of Department of Homeland security.
Pocket-Lining warmakers line up to join Jim Crow Joe
Biden’s repeated promises to restore U.S. leadership are backed up by a phalanx of money-grubbing Democratic Party operatives who alternate between government jobs and lucrative positions at defense-industry investment and lobbying firms like WestExec and Pine Island Capital. Past Democratic power brokers like Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt rub elbows with up-and-coming Biden picks like Anthony Blinken and Avril Haines and enrich themselves at the heart of the U.S. imperialist war machine (NYT, 11/28). Michele Flournoy, front-runner to become the first-ever woman Secretary of Defense, earned compensation of $440,000 in 2018 and 2019 from Booz Allen Hamilton, engineering consultants to U.S. imperialism.
This kind of brazen double-dealing at the heart of the empire is an outrage to workers and Trump was able to mobilize his base to propel him to the White House because Hillary Clinton represented more of the same.
Identity politics: different faces, same crime
Racist attacks were embodied by Obama himself, who commanded his Black-manager-led Justice Department to do nothing to punish the kkkops who strangled Eric Garner and shot Michael Brown. If the wave of Black and Latin mayors who were put in charge during the racist decay and gentrification of U.S. cities since the 1970s were not enough to convince you, Obama himself is the best lesson of what “Black faces in high places” gets us under capitalism  - Black-led racism.
The same goes for sexism. The rulers use women as the faces to deliver on sexist policies. Now-disgraced Bill Clinton picked the first ever woman Secretary of State in Madeleine Albright, who famously declared that the deaths of 500,000 children (half of whom were girls) in U.S. imperialism’s 1990s-era bombing and sanctions campaign against Iraq was “worth the price.”  In the same role under Obama, Hillary Clinton was the face of a crumbling US-led world order, which sowed chaos across the Middle East. The ensuing refugee crisis is the largest since World War II—70 million by 2018 and has exposed untold millions of women to increased chances of physical and sexual assault (World Health Organization, 2018).
Workers and youth, looking for an example of multiracial and antisexist leadership, should not look to the rogues’ gallery of Biden’s cabinet. We must instead spark and join struggles against capitalism’s attacks on our class, from racist police murder to school budget cuts, layoffs and more. Class struggle means that we build new leadership from the ground up. We can guarantee victory of our anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles by keeping our eye on the prize: growth of the Progressive Labor Party today to lead communist revolution tomorrow.