Consuming Contradictions
Gas station, Snowville, Utah. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Getting a cup of complimentary coffee at my credit union recently, I glanced to the left and saw a younger woman with a mass of pennies placing them into a machine for conversion to cash. “The U.S. Mint stopped producing pennies,” I said to her. “They might be valuable.” She quickly replied. “I need gas.”
Rising gas prices are an outcome of the U.S. war of aggression against Iran, begun five months ago. As a result, inflationary pressures are rising stateside.
One thing is plain as day. Cease-fires between Iran and the U.S. are temporary and connect with fluctuations of oil prices, currently increasing. Rising prices of oil drive price increases at the gas pump.
Meanwhile, this sentence in the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation report stands out like a third thumb. “The index for energy increased 15.7 percent over the past 12 months due in large part to the index for gasoline rising 26.7 percent over the same period.” That spike is despite presidential announcements about how well the war against Iran is going for the U.S. to his dual audiences of MAGA voters and capitalist investors.
Apparently, repetition of a falsification has limitations. Don’t tell the president, though.
Inflation as a result of supply disruptions as we experienced with global value chains during the pandemic is a systemic contradiction. Global economic integration, e.g., the shift of U.S. industry abroad that increases the distances of supply chains, is no risk-free strategy to increase profits and market share for corporate America.
We see in real-time that the global economy which requires oil to operate feeds the imbalance between consumption, production and distribution of commodities such as energy. The shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz and Red Sea with Yemen’s entry into the Iran-U.S. war are driving the decrease in oil production and distribution, and therefore consumption.
Under the current phase of capitalism, or neoliberalism, the government shores up the weakening buying power of the working class with direct support of the corporations and the wealthy. In the case of the Iran-U.S. war, despite the endless American taxpayer outlays for military spending with bipartisan support, the dwindling supply of energy from the Persian Gulf that businesses and consumers rely upon is driving inflationary pressures. The rise of gas prices is proof of that. There’s more.
Spending a bigger chunk of household income on gas means that working families spend less in other areas. Take fast food spending. Consumption of fast food is down 4.0 percent in May 2026 from its peak in September 2025, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Affairs.
It’s unclear how more temporary ceasefires in hostilities between the growing number of parties involved in the Iran-U.S. war, now including Saudi Arabia and Yemen, can solve problems such as the rise of gas prices and fall of spending on other commodities in the U.S. The logic of military conflicts is one of unpredictable outcomes, economically and politically. Claiming to know what’s next is a fool’s errand.
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