The Wall Street Journal reports in an article titled “Trump Tells Aides to Prepare for Extended Blockade of Iran” that:
“President Trump has instructed aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iran, U.S. officials said... In recent meetings, including a Monday discussion in the Situation Room, Trump opted to continue squeezing Iran’s economy and oil exports by preventing shipping to and from its ports. …
“For now, Trump is comfortable with an indefinite blockade, which he wrote Tuesday on Truth Social is pushing Iran toward a ‘State of Collapse.’”
So, Putin and America’s billionaires who religiously read the WSJ are officially tipped off to prepare for what may well be a worldwide repeat of the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s. Or at least a revisit to the GOP’s infamous Nixon-era crises of the 1970s, Reagan’s “Black Monday” 22% market crash, Bush’s 2008 “Great Recession,” and Trump’s 2020 massive botched-pandemic-response economic melt-down.
Trump and his people didn’t bother to say one word to average Americans — no press conference or warning — but they sure made certain that their billionaire buddies are informed.
And, of course, they’re not at all worried by this; recessions and depressions are when the morbidly rich like Trump and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet make their greatest fortunes. Businesses are failing, stock prices collapsing, and people are losing their homes, all fantastic buying opportunities for wealthy, cash-rich predators investors.
For example, when a handful of greedy Wall Street CEOs crashed the American economy in 2008, home prices (and, thus, homeowner equity) collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to banking predators like “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin, and tens of millions of others were underwater.
The stock market plummeted by over 50% in the last year of Bush’s presidency. On October 9, 2007 the Dow was at its all-time peak of 14,164 but by March 5, 2009 it had collapsed to 6,594. No bankers were ever prosecuted.
While millions of Americans lost their jobs and were wiped out as the Bush Crash started today’s homelessness crises, the top 1 percent saw it as one of the finest buying opportunities of the new century.
Working-class people were desperately selling their homes and unloading the stocks in their 401Ks at a loss just to pay the bills, as wages plummeted in the face of a loose labor market.
But the morbidly rich were doing great.
Between 2009 — the bottom of the Bush Crash — and 2012 when the recovery finally began under Obama, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their income grow by over 31 percent. Fully 95 percent of all of the income increases in the country were seized by the top 1 percent of Americans during that period.
As the economy recovered, rich people who’d bought stocks at the market bottom rode the S&P 500 up by 462 percent to 2020. A billion dollars invested in 2009 became $4.62 billion in just 11 years, a period during which the combined wealth of American billionaires went up by over 80 percent.
Then they did it again 10 years later!
The Trump/Covid Crash of 2020, “mismanaged” in a way to create maximum pain for working people, presented America’s morbidly rich with another brand new and huge opportunity to get even richer on top of a crisis brutalizing the rest of America.
As the market collapsed under Republicans and Trump, average Americans, now out of work, were again selling their homes and stocks at a loss just to buy food and medicine. But for the wealthy, it was a gift from God.
March 16, 2020 — just after Trump declared a pandemic and lockdown — the Dow sustained the largest single-day crash in its entire history. For the investor class, Trump and his billionaire buddies, this was an even better opportunity than the Bush crash of 2008!
Fewer than three months later, on June 4th, we learned that the seven richest people in America had seen their fortunes increase by fully 50 percent.
And with Trump’s massive tax cut for his fellow billionaires, they could keep most all of it: by that time the average American billionaire was paying less than 3 percent in income taxes (a situation that persists to this day).
Just during that one single terrible pandemic year of 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies documents, U.S. billionaires saw their net worth surge 62 percent by $1.8 trillion. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27% in that one year alone.
American billionaires’ real taxes have fallen by 79 percent since Reagan’s election in 1980, and a 2012 analysis found that as much as $32 trillion of that is safely squirreled away in tax-fraud offshore shelters, about the same amount as their tax avoidance has left us as a national debt.
Which is why working-class Americans and our media should stop pretending that downturns are random acts of God. They’re predictable outcomes of GOP policy choices that get repeated whenever a Republican is in the White House — ten of the last eleven recessions happened when a Republican was president— and this one is being engineered right now in plain sight.
Republican deregulation weakens guardrails. Trade chaos disrupts production. Inequality hollows out demand. Tax breaks for the rich force cuts to government support for poor and middle class Americans. And when the system finally buckles, the losses to average working class people mean huge profits for the morbidly rich.
And this downturn could easily be the biggest one of our lifetimes, a singular achievement the Trump Crime Family will profit from massively, along with their billionaire cronies. As CNN reports, “About half the stuff Americans buy comes from Asia” and Asia is melting down from a lack of Middle Eastern oil. It’s hitting the rest of the world, too:
“The Middle East ships about 25% of the world’s polypropylene and 20% of polyethylene, two of the most-used plastics. It also accounts for a quarter of the world’s sulphur and 15% of its fertilizer.”
Not to mention a fifth of the world’s oil, most of the world’s helium, necessary to run MRI machines and make precision chips, and other crucial commodities. As Martin Wolf wrote for yesterday’s Financial Times:
“Fifty per cent of the world’s seaborne trade in sulphur passes through the Strait of Hormuz. So does 34 per cent of trade in crude oil, 29 per cent of liquefied petroleum gas, 19 per cent of liquefied natural gas, 19 per cent of refined oil products, 13 per cent of chemicals, including fertilisers, and nearly 10 per cent of aluminium. This is a chokepoint of the world economy.“
The oil shock has become so bad in Asia that, CNN notes, “Several major petrochemical producers, including South Korea’s Yeochun and PCS in Singapore, have declared ‘force majeure,’” meaning they can no longer honor their contracts to supply their customers because of circumstances out of their control.
And now it’s starting to show up here in the US in ways that go far beyond just the price at the pump.
Some are wondering if Trump’s efforts to bring down the world economy — which are explicitly helping Russia — are because Putin told him to do it.
That’s possible; our joining Netanyahu in illegally bombing Iran has also been a big boon to Putin’s regime, both in justifying his similarly illegal bombing of Ukraine and in jacking up world demand for (and the price of) Russian oil, which Trump has conveniently dropped sanctions on.
But it’s just as likely that this is simply the same type of stupid decision-making that has caused Trump to run every one of his dozens of companies except those subsidized by Russian or Middle Eastern money straight into the ground. Or it’s a two-fer, that benefits both American billionaires and Putin.
However it came about, buckle up. Hegseth’s pathetic performance before Congress yesterday tells us explicitly that the Trump regime has no plan to work out a peace deal with Iran any time soon.
While Putin, the Trump kids, and their fellow billionaires are rubbing their hands in glee, it’s going to be a hell of a year for the other 99% rest of us.