Portents of Yet Another U.S. Debacle in Iran?

Eve Ottenberg

October 19, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

Donald “Blockade Everybody” Trump has said he is waiting till after the midterms to attack Iran again. This assault, he vows, will be the biggest blitz of the Iran War (though more recently he downplays the whole putative project), and he even rumbles that U.S. forces may invade (Ho! Ho!) But if it is the biggest, so will be Tehran’s response: so Israel would get barbecued, the remaining U.S. bases in the region would be obliterated, zero, zilch, nada, zip oil would leave the region and maybe an American aircraft carrier or two would be sunk. For all these reasons, Trump’s threatened blitzkrieg would be lunacy, and is very unlikely ever to happen. It’s such obvious lunacy, especially given that Tehran has defeated Washington pretty consistently so far, that one must wonder if this appearance of insanity isn’t the point, namely Richard Nixon’s “madman” approach to foreign policy.

It could be. The so-called thinking would be to cow the Persians at the prospect of a homicidally deranged Trump. If so, it ain’t gonna work. They already know he’s homicidally deranged. After all, he initiated this criminal, idiotic, utterly unprovoked war for, well, no apparent reason. So they know he’s bonkers. But they also know that unless he wants to go down in history as the next Adolf Hitler, by using nukes in a pointless, unprovoked war, he’s basically impotent.

Meanwhile, The Hormuz Letter, an IRGC outlet that posts regularly on X, announced October 8 that the U.S. is preparing an “intense three-day military campaign against Iran, targeting Iran’s energy facilities, infrastructure, missile and drone arsenal and IRGC command posts and headquarters, with U.S. military commanders ready to begin the large-scale operations in the coming days, per the NYT.” An hour later, The Hormuz Letter cited the U.S. state department as having called off any attack, but then removed this post; so clearly in the Trump/IRGC propaganda war there’s lots of jockeying and things are fluid. All this, while Trump boasts about the millions of barrels of oil transiting Hormuz. But according to OilPrice.com on X October 7, “Kpler’s Michelle Brohard suspects some Gulf producers are quietly paying Iran tolls for safe Hormuz passage, possibly 10-20% of cargo. The claim is unverified, but it may help explain why Brent sits near $100.”

Tolls in Hormuz will be a feature not a bug going forward, and the world will get used to it. Turkey charges fees for ships transiting the Bosphorus and Dardanelles, and of course the Suez and Panama Canals charge tolls. It’s not the end of the world. Indeed, if tolls in Hormuz keep the world’s economy humming, then they’re quite definitely not the end of the world – unless regarded from the perspective of climate change; but even some of the most committed environmentalists advocate for a SLOW phase-out of fossil fuels, precisely in order to protect the economy, people’s livelihoods and to keep the transition seamless enough that humanity doesn’t turn against it.

Chiming into the lunacy, unsurprisingly, we have Israel. There, various big shots have mouthed off publicly about attacking Iran sooner rather than later, leading to breathless media speculation that it’s all a Netanyahu plot to cancel the Israeli election. I have no doubt he’d like to cancel the election, but it seems unlikely Jerusalem, or more accurately re geographic targeting, Tel Aviv, is ready or able to face down Iran’s supposed hypersonic missiles. Last go round, Iran’s very fast missiles did not miss. Israel lucked out, in that few of these super-duper missiles were deployed, because Tehran was busy depleting its slower, older missiles first. That luck will not hold. Lots of the older missiles are gone. That leaves the hypersonics, which Iran allegedly and quite likely has, and also its simple, newer, faster missiles – for which Israel has no defense. Those fatuous dimwits in the west who believe that Patriot air defense can cope with this threat, get nothing but pity from the armament cognoscenti.

Aware that he has caused a global energy catastrophe, and even worse, boosted the price of regular gas at the U.S. pump to $5 per gallon to say nothing of prices in the grocery store where you can’t buy three small items for under $20, on October 10, Trump announced a deal with Vladimir Putin to waive U.S. sanctions on Russian diesel shipments until April 7, 2027. That’s a long time. It indicates that a sunshine ray of sanity has penetrated the petrified gray matter in the cranium of the current white house jefe. There’s no oil for Europe. The Saudi’s are getting creamed by the Houthis and so won’t be shipping diesel. Hormuz is bottled up. Russia hasn’t been exporting oil thanks to the so-called geniuses in the CIA assisting with Kiev’s targeting of Moscow’s energy facilities, and the U.S. needs its oil, especially its diesel for shipping per Moon of Alabama on X September 8. So the big boss on the Potomac extends an olive branch to the Kremlin, knowing full well that Moscow and Tehran are allies. But oh well, that’s life.

What does that Persian/Russian alliance mean? I’ll tell you. Or rather let military expert Will Schryver on X October 10: “It is rumored Russia and Iran are colluding to defeat U.S. sanctions by having Iran ship diesel to Russia, payment for which is obtained from Russian diesel sales into the global market. Therefore, it is possible any increased supply in global markets could be Iranian exports.” Oh, those crafty Eurasians! The yokels, crooks, nutcases and dunderheads in Washington don’t stand a chance.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian president for life Volodymyr Zelensky told Trump he can take his peace pipe and shove it, because he, Zelensky, doesn’t care how badly everybody needs Russian oil, “We will burn Russian refineries,” in the soothing elocution of one of his henchmen. This intransigence has led to yet another act in the Trump show, as our dear leader threatens all sorts of fire and brimstone on the proxy he’s been arming to the teeth ever since he returned to the oval office. All I can say is if you believe this theater, you get some kind of prize and it’s not a good one. Kiev is Washington’s client and doesn’t make a move without the Empire’s approval. Trump’s going to cut off Starlink? And let Washington’s and NATO’s massive, multi-year investment in their steel porcupine right on Russia’s border, namely Ukraine, go to waste? I don’t think so. That’s about as likely as Trump imposing an arms embargo on Israel. He will not abandon Tel Aviv on the Dnieper and Zelensky knows it. So, by the way, does every sentient being in the Kremlin, which is filled with a lot more sentient beings than, say, the white house.

Those in the Kremlin reportedly gave nothing in exchange for Washington’s minimal sanctions relief: no promise to negotiate a ceasefire, no vow of restraint in military attacks, nothing. That’s because realism dominates within the Kremlin. They know very well who does the targeting for Ukraine’s attacks on Russia, which kill civilians and blow up infrastructure, and it ain’t Santa Claus – it’s the CIA. Just as Putin has insisted, starting back in December 2021, in his letter to Genocide Joe Biden that the “root causes” of Russia’s complaint against Ukraine be addressed by the U.S. That means no Ukraine in NATO, no more genocide of Russian speakers in the Donbas. This Trump will not do. Neither one. So that means the war will continue, Moscow knows very well it’s fighting the entire west, yet it moves slowly and steadily, like the winner in Aesop’s “The Tortoise and the Hare.”

Just as the sporadically violent stalemate in the Persian Gulf will continue. All Iran must do to win is to survive. It has done so. The monstrously swollen heads in Washington and Jerusalem did not dream that would happen. They committed the fundamental error of believing their own ridiculous propaganda and in so doing committed a crime and worse, as they say, a blunder. So Trump’s useless fulminations against Iran will continue, but the jig is up, because Washington can’t win against either Tehran or Moscow, whom it has thrown into each other’s arms. Along, of course, with China.

Americans, take note of this sorry prognostication re Trump’s wars on Iran and Russia: Don’t expect prices to drop until he leaves the white house.

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is “Perspective and 58 Other Stories.” She can be reached at her website.

Inflation Watch: How Does In-Store Price Manipulation Bias Our Inflation Data?

Dean Baker

October 19, 2026

FacebookTwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The Guardian has had a series of pieces in the last year looking at ways that stores and landlords rip off customers and tenants. In the case of stores, one piece found evidence that convenience stores charge prices at the checkout counter that are higher than the price listed on the shelf. A prior piece reported that Dollar stores also frequently charge people more than the shelf price.

Another one reported on fees and fines that landlords often impose on top of rent. In addition to these practices being unethical, and likely illegal, they also raise the question of whether they may lead to an understatement of inflation in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and other measures of inflation.

The problem from the standpoint of the CPI is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) price checkers would be recording the prices listed on the shelves. If the price people get charged when they pay at the checkout counter is higher than the shelf price, then the data they collect would be understating the true price of the product.

There is a similar story with rental fees. If landlords start to tack on fees for items that would ordinarily be covered by rent (e.g. garbage collection or normal maintenance) and these fees are not accurately reported to the BLS survey person, then the data would be understating the true rent that people are paying.

Whether these practices affect the CPI in an important way depends on two factors:

1)  The size and extent of these concealed price increases;

2)  Whether these are new practices.

The Guardian pieces provide some evidence to indicate they are large enough to make a noticeable difference in measures of inflation. The investigations of both the convenience stores (7-11 and Circle K) and the Dollar Stores found that gaps between the price at the checkout counter and the shelf were common. And they rarely make the mistake of charging people less than the shelf price.

The evidence in the convenience store piece suggests that the overcharges could be large enough to matter. It gives one example where the net overcharge on seven items was $9.30 on a tab of $52.17, or 17.8 percent. It also cites examples where the pump price for gas was around 10 percent higher than the price advertised on the station’s sign. (I believe a price checker would typically look at the pump price.)

The fees tacked onto rents were also large relative to the rents people were charged. The Guardian piece found that the fees charged by the real estate management company Greystar averaged 20 percent of rents for the units in question. It’s not clear if the practice of charging these sorts of fees is a common practice or whether Greystar is an exception.

It’s also not clear if it’s a new practice. If there are large fees being charged to tenants that are not picked up in the CPI, that would mean the price levels are being understated. But if these fees have been charged for years, it would mean that inflation has not been understated.

The findings of these investigative pieces raise important questions for our measures of inflation. If stores and landlords are ripping off customers and tenants, it is likely that the CPI is not capturing the prices people are paying. It is important to end these sorts of rip-offs, but it is also important to try to incorporate their impact in our price measurements.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

Dean Baker is the senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. 

President Apocalypse

Tom Engelhardt

 October 19, 2026
Facebook

TwitterRedditBlueskyEmail

A Winner on a Losing Planet

Do I even faintly believe the times I’m living in?  The simple answer is: no.

Every now and then, I try to imagine going back in time to tell my long-dead parents about the world of President Donald Trump, which just happens to still be mine as well. Of course, they simply wouldn’t have believed it, not for a single second.

To put it in the context of their time on this planet, the only equivalent I can imagine would be if Sen. Joseph McCarthy, that anticommunist nightmare-and-a-half of the 1950s, hadn’t flamed out, been censured by the Senate, and died young but somehow had made it to the White House. But even he undoubtedly would have fallen short in terms of chaos and cruelty, if judged by the standards of Trump World. A President McCarthy might have been catastrophic for America, but Trump is on another level, an apocalyptic one.

Trump’s capacity for ushering in world-wrecking havoc is made possible by a character constructed almost entirely of flaws. His second term has been defined by global aggression and hostility. Yet he recently complained bitterly — and in a fashion it’s hard to imagine any other politician ever doing — because he wasn’t awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. As he put it, “The United States of America, represented by me as your president, should have received the Nobel peace prize, but didn’t. And this is an indelible stain on the country of Norway, and those people that made such a disgraceful and embarrassing decision.”

This is not only a petty man, but also a delusional one. As president, Trump has presided over more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and outright wars who nonetheless swears that he “settled” eight conflicts and should have “won 8 Nobel Peace Prizes, not just 1.” This includes a war between Egypt and Ethiopia that, of course, never happened and a failing war with Iran that drags on to this day.

If you’re going to “end” a war with bombs and missiles, then there are, of course, going to be casualties. A few thousand or more Iranians killed, obviously, and tens of thousands injured, not to mention ever-rising American casualties.

Frighteningly, the Iran war may not even be enough for him. He’s already starting to hint (if there even is such a thing as “hinting” in the all-too-blunt world of Donald Trump) that he might join Saudi Arabia in taking on the Houthi rebels in Yemen. “We’re going to look at it” was how he put it. I should really have added “again” there, since he essentially began his second term in office by attacking those same Houthis — killing large numbers of civilians in the process. But after the U.S. burned through $1 billion and failed to even achieve air superiority in Yemen, Trump ended the stalemate. Despite having vowed the Houthis would be “completely annihilated,” he announced a cessation of hostilities last May, leaving the group in control of most of Yemen’s populated areas.

Given American history — think the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, among other places — there’s nothing faintly strange about endless American military operations thousands and thousands of miles away from Washington, D.C., even for a president who said, upon taking office in 2025, that he would measure success by “the wars we never get into.”

A Grim Presidency

You would hardly know it from the mainstream press but one of those 20 Trumpian conflicts is the forever war in Somalia. And that war has an increasing domestic component. Recently, the Department of Homeland Security raided the home of Somali American Rep. Ilhan Omar in the Washington, D.C., area, aiming in some fashion or other to discover information that might help denaturalize her and so make it possible to eject her from this country.

As the president put it on Truth Social, Omar “left Somalia with NOTHING, and is now reportedly worth more than 44 Million Dollars.” Of course, who would know better about such things than the president of the United States who, in these years, is estimated to have made literally billions of dollars while in office?

And yet, the never-ending war in Somalia, the nearby conflict we may reenter against the Houthis, and the failed war in Iran should be considered the lesser of the potential disasters that will sooner or later be associated with Trump. After all, he clearly has the urge to do nothing less than end this very world of ours, at least as we’ve known it, even if in a distinctly slow-motion fashion.

I’m not even thinking about nuclear weapons (although he admittedly still is). No, I’m thinking about the president who, at the United Nations in 2025, called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” And since then, he has indeed done everything he could think of to ensure that this planet would get hotter yet. His Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has recently repealed “rules that limit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants fueled by coal and natural gas.” And that’s just to start down a long list of what should truly be considered Donald Trump’s ultimate war on this planet of ours — including blocking wind power development and doing the same with solar power.

All of this is happening as global warming reaches unprecedented levels, sea level rise is accelerating, northern forests and tundra are releasing more carbon dioxide than they absorb, the Greenland ice sheet has lost about 129 gigatons of ice (or roughly 129 billion metric tons), and other major ecological systems like tropical coral reefs, the Amazon rainforest, and Antarctica’s ice sheet are being pushed toward catastrophic tipping points.

While Trump campaigns for eight Nobel Peace Prizes, his war on humanity’s only home continues unabated, a slow-motion destruction that threatens us all. My parents couldn’t have imagined a leader in the White House who would put McCarthy to shame and push the country — and the world — to the precipice of doom: a commander-in-chief worthy of the name President Apocalypse.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.