The Iran War is a Scam.

Everyone assumes that Donald Trump started the Iran war because Bibi Netanyahu talked him into it, and he didn’t consider the possibility that the Straits of Hormuz would be blocked in retaliation for tens of thousands of airstrikes on Iranian targets. But what if he did consider it? What if his reasoning went like this?

“The United States produces enough oil to supply its own needs, especially with the addition of Venezuelan oil. Therefore, I can force the rest of the world into a record oil supply crisis (not to mention helium, fertilizer, plastic feedstocks, etc.) and the US will be fine.”

Here it gets really dark: what if he planned all along to profit from the oil shortage? With the US supposedly insulated from the supply shock, the oil companies can get increased profits from raising gas and diesel prices, and Trump et al. can profit from insider trading whenever he pretends there’s a breakthrough in peace talks. He figures he can drag it out for a few months, then release it in time for the midterms and then claim he’s won a tremendous victory in the peace talks.

Remember that during his last presidential campaign, he is said to have allegedly gotten a group of oil executives together in private and told them that if they donated a billion dollars to his campaign, they could have whatever they wanted after he got elected. He’s accustomed to making false, cheap campaign promises, so this story rings true to me. After all, Elon Musk alone gave more than a quarter of a billion dollars to the Trump campaign.

The insider trading part of this was nailed down by a Reuters investigation. I won’t link to this, you’ll have to trust me, but they found that about twenty minutes before each Trump announcement of a supposed breakthrough, there is a sudden huge buy or sell order in the oil markets– to the tune of several billion dollars so far. These suspiciously well-timed trades have made the anonymous trader very, very rich.

A Special Forces soldier was recently arrested for the successful bet on a betting market that Maduro of Venezuela would be out of office in the next few days. I think he was just a fall guy because the amount he won was peanuts compared to these oil market trades. Such trades have to have a lot of money collateral behind them, so this is not something the average soldier could do.

There are those who say that Trump cares more about the loyalty of Republican office holders than the possibility that Republicans could lose control of the House and Senate in the mid-term elections coming up. This is based on the fact that he has ruthlessly primaried anyone who is insufficiently loyal to him, like Senator Cornryn. He is making an example of the Senator to show that he wants supporters who are rabidly loyal and equally without ethical scruples.

The extreme gerrymandering and destruction of cohesive districts like Memphis that vote Democratic and happen to be African-American are part and parcel of this urge to dominate the Republican Party. Gerrymandering makes for more extreme politics, especially on the right. Obliterating representation for Black voters seems to be right up his racist alley.

My extremely dark suspicion is that Trump started the Iran war knowing that the Hormuz Strait would be closed. In fact, he planned to profit from it and to steer profits in the way of his friends, the oil companies.

Don’t get me started on what he’s doing to Cuba. Or the fact that probably a million people, mostly in Africa, have died so far because he cut off funding for USAID to give food and vaccines to starving children.