Trust me, I know that correlation is not causation, but damn, that is one sharp coincidence.
This corrupt Supreme Court has a lot to answer for. That graph comes from Paul Krugman
Amid the bloody shambles, one big question is, who put The Gang That Couldn’t Think Straight in power? In an immediate sense, Trump was put over the top by low-information voters — defined by G. Elliott Morris as voters who don’t know which party controls Congress. But the groundwork for the MAGA takeover was laid well before by the Roberts Supreme Court and by right-wing billionaires that the court enabled.
A few weeks ago I wrote about Billionaires Gone Wild, the extraordinary influence acquired by a tiny group of ultra-wealthy men. I shared this chart on campaign contributions, based on estimates from Americans for Tax Fairness.
That data explains a lot about the current state of the nation.
So if you want to understand how this country has degenerated to such a state, how we can be spending nearly $2 billion a day attacking Iran without a clear endgame in sight, while children go without healthcare, nursing homes are understaffed because their workers have been deported, home electricity bills skyrocket due to data centers, consider who benefits and who isn’t hurt.
This is a billionaire’s war, waged at everyone else’s expense.
How many billionaires, or even millionaires, are actually serving in the military right now or are even luxuriating in a hotel somewhere near where the missiles might fall? How many will be materially hurt by a rise in gas prices, the destruction of reliable information sources, the lack of availability of vaccines or healthy food?
If you can’t tell who the winners and losers are, you’re one of the losers.
That looks historic, as in historians 100 years from now will point to Citizens United as THE event which triggered the Great American Decline!
I wonder what the billionaires are actually getting out of this? I mean, should we “win” (we won’t because there’s no reasonable definition of what “win” even means), yeah, we get control over Iranian oil…but not all of the billionaires are tapped into oil stocks. Yeah, weapons makers are making a payday because obviously we now have to buy a lot more (this seems to happen often – every 5 years or so we bomb somebody and it seems the only real justification is that weapons makers need to keep the cash flow), but again, not all of the billionaires are in weapons either.
And then the next reality is gonna hit: this war is showing how cost-INeffective our weapons are in the drone age. 4 million to take down a 30,000 drone is not cost effective (esp when they have thousands more), and Ukraine has shown that even cheaper drones not only can stop a frontal ground assault with almost no casualties, but can assemble a tactical picture of the entire front faster and more accurately than our expensive million dollar satellites can ever do. Yeah, long as this administration is in charge, they’ll keep buying the expensive stuff…but if smarter heads ever get in charge again, that is over. It is clear there has to be a different way to handle the new type of warfare Iran and Ukraine are waging.
So the rest are primarily tapped into stocks and as we saw, those are just tanking. The supposed “but the Dow is above 50,000” ended less than an hour after she said that stupidity and has only dropped more (almost 10%) since.
So who is really gaining from all of this?
Besides Putin (47 is suggesting pausing oil sanctions against Russia to try to lower the price – i note he’s not talking about the US reserve which Biden successfully (and profitably) managed in 2022), and, well, the Saudis.
This isn’t a billionaires war as such, because I don’t see which billionaires really are cleaning up because of it.