Trump’s War Inspires the Return of an Old Scourge: War Profiteers
Photo by Camille Brodard
Harry Truman was certainly not FDR’s preference as his running mate at the Democratic Party’s 1944 convention. An obscure second-term Senator from Missouri, Truman was the pick of the cabal of conservative and racist Democrats who orchestrated the nomination of the country’s most popular president’s new running mate for what would be his fourth term in the White House. They chose Truman because they and the corporate leaders behind them desperately wanted to prevent the ailing Roosevelt from being succeeded by his incumbent, left-leaning VP Henry Wallace, whom they knew, should he assume the presidency upon FDR’s death, would continue and expand on his New Deal welfare state policies. In Truman, they had a conservative, redneck Democrat, but also a Senator who had been making something of a name for himself in the prior two years by calling out, and authoring legislation to rein in war profiteers.
At a time when US soldiers, sailors and airmen in Europe and the Asia Pacific were dying in large numbers fighting fascism on two fronts, Americans were livid at the way many of the nation’s capitalists were gouging both the public and the Pentagon, taking advantage of wartime shortages to raise prices.
It was, in fact, quite similar to the situation today, only the war grifters these days appear to be not just captains of industry producing shoddy products for the troops (though there is that), but the politicians themselves, who reportedly have been taking advantage of early insider tips on President Trump’s latest on-again/off-again war on Iran to buy or sell the stock market and to make illegal bets on the movement of the price of oil.
But the worst war profiteers, at least in my view, of this Middle East Trump fiasco of a war on Iran, are hands down the oil companies, especially those that derive the majority of their crude oil from their own domestic wells or buy it from US sources.
Here’s how the rip-off works: We’re told all the time by economists, financial journalists and politicians that oil is a “fungible” commodity, meaning its value is essentially the same wherever you find it. Like a dollar bill or one-ounce gold bar, it has the same purchase price whether in other currencies or in gold, regardless of whether it is being traded in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, London, or Houston, Texas (unless like China, you are buying long-term amounts of the stuff at a fixed price or a speculator playing with puts and calls on the futures market).
The illegal US/Israeli war on Iran may be the single stupidest move made by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, but it happens to be a great deal for the American energy companies that are pumping so much crude oil out of their own wells that they’ve made the US the number-one oil producer in the world. (A great deal too for the well-connected and crooked people with some source in the White House or Mar-a-Lago who appear to be alerting such people to market-moving presidential decisions concerning the Iran War before Trump announces them on his Truth Social account. )
Now, if oil were not a fungible product traded like corporate stock on commodities exchanges located around the globe, we might expect that with such a glut of oil in the US, the price here would come down quickly. After all, we’ve all seen that happen on a small scale when, for example, there are several competing filling stations at one intersection.
What’s happening now though is something different: Companies in the US, including petroleum refiners, distributors and filling station owners all watch the news feeds (likely on Fox Business) and see crude oil has risen globally to over $114 a barrel, which works out to about $4.20 gallon at the pump, and the next morning at your local station, there’a the new price posted in neon saying;: Regular Gas $4.20/gal.
The distributor who delivered that gas two months earlier was only paying half the amount back then, And even if the retail filling station owner who needs to top up his underground storage tank, and buys it from his own parent company, he is still paying the new world market price.
Note that the owner or leaseholder of the underground oil reserves and the well or nodding donkey pump doesn’t have higher production costs for amortization, labor, maintenance, Insurance premiums or any other costs of doing business! Yet they’re charging their customers 70% more since the world price of oil is being jacked up by investors, hedge funds and speculators as Iran and Washington are both shutting down the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic and blowing up oil port and refining and storage facilities, according to an analysis in the UK Guardian newspaper. That article estimates that windfall profits for the oil and gas industry, should the war, as seems likely, last to the end of this year while oil stays above $100 a barrel, will top $234 billion (that’s over a quarter of a trillion dollars!).
The result of this war stalemate is that the whole oil industry, including the big US oil companies, is raking in Iran war profits that are double what they were a year ago, according to the Guardian. This whole corrupt system has a venerable name and history. It is called war profiteering, and it was rampant in the Civil War and during WWI and WWII, and has been for the decades since then. It even led to some capitalists being raked over the coals by Truman and other politicians in Washington responding to an irate public. Since then however, at least until now, the American public’s attitude (thanks to almost two centuries of indoctrination and propaganda about the wonders of capitalism and “free markets,” has been a mix of grumbling frustration and grudging acceptance.
So here’s a test for Trump supporters who are impotently fuming about the weekly gasoline and diesel costs for their homes and fuel-guzzling pick-up trucks and big-rig semis: Demand that Trump issue an Executive Order that oil and gas prices must be rolled back to their lowest average price over the past decade and kept there until the war on Iran by the US and Israel is ended, with the excess profits rebated to the public..
Don’t hold your breath, though. Trump loves his oil industry captains, all of them big financial backers, and they in turn love him back for how he has undermined their competition, the lower cost renewable energy industry, while continuing to offer them new leases on previously off-limits federal lands and coastal tracts.
