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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 10, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

Mother’s Day

Heather Cox Richardson, May 10, 2026 [Letters from an American, May 9, 2026]

If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced writer and reformer Julia Ward Howe that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change society….

War

Iran used Chinese spy satellite to target US bases

[Financial Times, via The Big Picture, May 05, 2026]

Leaked documents show IRGC secretly acquired system and used it to guide strikes during war in March. Iran secretly acquired a Chinese spy satellite to target US military bases across the Middle East. The China-Iran axis just became a lot more concrete — and a lot more dangerous.

 

Iran has hit far more U.S. military assets than reported, satellite images show

Evan Hill, Jarrett Ley, Alex Horton, Tara Copp and Dan Lamothe, May 6, 2026 [Washington Post]

Iranian airstrikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures or pieces of equipment at U.S. military sites across the Middle East since the war began, hitting hangars, barracks, fuel depots, aircraft and key radar, communications and air defense equipment, according to a Washington Post analysis of satellite imagery. The amount of destruction is far larger than what has been publicly acknowledged by the U.S. government or previously reported….

Experts who reviewed The Post’s analysis said the damage at the sites suggested that the U.S. military had underestimated Iran’s targeting abilities, not adapted sufficiently to modern drone warfare and left some bases under-protected.

Demand destruction vs fuel-superseding infrastructure

Cory Doctorow, 04 May 2026) [Pluralistic]

… In starting this stupid, unforgivable war, Trump has vastly accelerated the process of demand destruction. Rather than buying American oil, the whole world has undertaken a simultaneous, rapid, irreversible shift to electrical substitutes for fossil fuel applications, from induction tops to balcony solar to ebikes and EVs:

https://thepolycrisis.org/01-demand-destruction-us-oil-is-not-winning-the-iran-war/

As Solnit writes, Trump’s stupid war follows on the heels of another unforgivable and cruel blunder: Putin’s quagmire in Ukraine, which catapulted Europe into the Gretacene, with a wholesale, continent-wide shift away from fossil fuels to renewables and the devices they power. Now, the rest of the world is following suit. In South Korea, President Lee Jae Myung is leading the charge to transition the country to renewables, framing fossil fuels as an existential geopolitical risk.

Trump’s demand destruction accelerates Putin’s demand destruction: China and India both increased their energy consumption in 2025 – but reduced their fossil fuel consumption over the same period. In 2025, coal accounted for less than a third of the world’s energy for the first time in modern history. 2025 was the year that solar and wind overtook coal globally.

Meanwhile, Trump and his oil baron buddies keep trying to make fetch happen. On the campaign trail, Trump told the oil industry that if they slipped him a $1b bribe, he would give them anything they wanted, and he’s kept his promise. Trump will let Big Oil drill anywhere they like, from sacred sites like New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon to the Arctic. He’ll even let them take all of Venezuela’s oil. The problem is that banks can see the demand destruction writing on the wall, and they are conspicuously declining to loan the oil companies the money they’d need to get that oil.

Truly, Trump’s a machine for creating stranded assets at scale.

In starting this stupid, unforgivable war, Trump has vastly accelerated the process of demand destruction. Rather than buying American oil, the whole world has undertaken a simultaneous, rapid, irreversible shift to electrical substitutes for fossil fuel applications, from induction tops to balcony solar to ebikes and EVs:

https://thepolycrisis.org/01-demand-destruction-us-oil-is-not-winning-the-iran-war/

As Solnit writes, Trump’s stupid war follows on the heels of another unforgivable and cruel blunder: Putin’s quagmire in Ukraine, which catapulted Europe into the Gretacene, with a wholesale, continent-wide shift away from fossil fuels to renewables and the devices they power. Now, the rest of the world is following suit. In South Korea, President Lee Jae Myung is leading the charge to transition the country to renewables, framing fossil fuels as an existential geopolitical risk.

Trump’s demand destruction accelerates Putin’s demand destruction: China and India both increased their energy consumption in 2025 – but reduced their fossil fuel consumption over the same period. In 2025, coal accounted for less than a third of the world’s energy for the first time in modern history. 2025 was the year that solar and wind overtook coal globally.

Meanwhile, Trump and his oil baron buddies keep trying to make fetch happen. On the campaign trail, Trump told the oil industry that if they slipped him a $1b bribe, he would give them anything they wanted, and he’s kept his promise. Trump will let Big Oil drill anywhere they like, from sacred sites like New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon to the Arctic. He’ll even let them take all of Venezuela’s oil. The problem is that banks can see the demand destruction writing on the wall, and they are conspicuously declining to loan the oil companies the money they’d need to get that oil.

Truly, Trump’s a machine for creating stranded assets at scale….

Ukraine’s rapid rise as an anti-drone powerhouse

[New Atlas, via The Big Picture, May 05, 2026]

Necessity makes the best R&D lab. Kyiv’s counter-drone industry now exports back to NATO. In only four years after the Russian invasion, Ukraine went from being a country knocked back on its heels and scrambling for military aid to emerging as a leading provider of battlefield-tested counter-drone expertise and exporter of anti-drone weapons systems. How did this happen? Let’s find out.

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025

Insane Pre-Crime Strategy Unveiled for Leftist “Extremists” 

Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 05-07-2025]

The White House declared war on the American people today, labeling its political opponents as terrorists, including “Left-wing extremists.” The new label also claims that there are “deepening alliances” between “the far-left and Islamists” — or pro-Palestinian protesters.

The language is contained in the White House’s newly released National Counterterrorism Strategy. It is the first National Strategy to be unveiled since 2021, when the Biden administration issued its document. The Strategy identifies the “left-wing,” “anti-Fascists,” “Anarchists” and “radically pro-transgender” ideologies as threats equivalent to jihadi groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, or narco-traffickers.

The Strategy is the brainchild of White House counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka, an eccentric figure I have reported on, who last year hinted at terrorism charges being levied for political opponents of the administration. The document makes clear he got his wish. Gorka called the Strategy “my life’s work,” ….

“Counterterrorism” Now Officially Means Targeting Trans People

Sophie Hurwitz, May 8, 2026 [Mother Jones]

On Wednesday, the White House released a new “United States Counterterrorism Strategy,” the first such directive since a 2021 Biden-era memo emphasizing the need to combat white supremacist violence, which has now been scrubbed from the White House website.

Wednesday’s document, masterminded by White House “counterterrorism czar” Sebastian Gorka, does not mention far-right violence at all. It identifies “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists” as a security threat of equal severity to “Legacy Islamist Terrorists” and “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs.” The administration will now apparently “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.

Read More

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 03, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

War

War, El Niño, Pestilence, and Famine: The Coming Shock to Global Food Supplies

Craig Tindale [via Naked Capitalism 04-27-2025]

Why Iran’s Oil Infrastructure Is Not Exploding Like Trump Said It Would

Murtaza Hussain, May 01, 2026 [Drop Site News]

Why U.S. Oil Companies Are Not Plugging the World’s Energy Gap

[New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 05-02-2025]

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025

Trump blames No Kings for assassination attempt

[Popular Information, via Naked Capitalism 04-29-2025]

Comey Indictment Shows Justice Dept. Got the Message From Bondi’s Firing

Glenn Thrush, April 30, 2026 [Washington Post]

In naming only an interim successor as acting attorney general, President Trump has established even greater incentives to execute his most extreme demands, current and former officials say.

Read More

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 26, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

War

How Iran has been studying lessons from the war in Ukraine

[FT Alphaville, via The Big Picture, April 20, 2026]

Military journals provide tantalising glimpses into what Tehran’s military thinks and its priorities, including drones. Tehran’s military journals reveal how closely it’s been watching drone and missile warfare.

How Iran war has triggered soaring cost of medicines 

[Aljazeera, via Naked Capitalism 04-25-2025]

To A Conclusion. 

Aurelien [via Naked Capitalism 04-23-2025]

…But we have become so used to the Liberal internationalist way of thinking, where all problems have a reasonable solution and compromise is only a negotiation away, that we cannot recognise and understand a situation where a negotiated solution cannot actually address the fundamental issues that divide parties from each other. But that is the case here. The obsession of the US and Israel with the destruction of Iran, and the Iranian desire to preserve itself and to come to dominate the region, can simply never be reconciled, even by the most brilliant negotiators in history. This one, I’m afraid, will have to be fought out to a conclusion, whatever that might be.

GOP senators ponder giving Trump official blessing for Iran war 

[Responsible Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism 04-22-2025]

Read More

by Tony Wikrent

“A curtain of darkness is settling over our nation.”

Heather Cox Richardson, Apr 11, 2026 [Letters from an American, April 10, 2026]

It feels like something shifted in the United States this week after President Donald J. Trump threatened on Tuesday that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” As professor of human rights, global affairs, and philosophy Mathias Risse of Harvard University’s Kennedy School noted, the Geneva Conventions prohibit “acts or threats of violence whose primary purpose is to terrorize civilians.” He notes that Trump’s threat terrorized 90 million Iranians by threatening them with genocide.

Killing History — DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) declares the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional

Joyce Vance, Apr 08, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

…“You have asked,” it begins, “whether the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (“PRA” or “Act”) is constitutional.” The answer follows immediately: “We conclude that it is not.” There are two reasons, either of which, standing on its own, would have been sufficient to undo the PRA. The opinion explains that they are “interlocking.” The Act “exceeds Congress’s enumerated and implied powers”, and it also “aggrandizes the Legislative Branch at the expense of the constitutional independence and autonomy of the Executive.” In other words, we’re watching another power grab by this administration, a stratagem to expand the power of the executive at the expense of Congress, while claiming it’s the other way around….

[TW: I hope readers who have been here long enough will remember that in the past few years I often linked to law journal and scholarly articles debunking the conservative arguments about “enumerated” powers:

• David S. Schwartz, “A Question Perpetually Arising: Implied Powers, Capable Federalism, and the Limits of Enumerationism,” 59 Arizona Law Review. 573, 575–79, 581–84 (2017)
• David S. Schwartz, Recovering the Lost General Welfare Clause [63 William & Mary Law Review 857 (2022)]
• Jonathan Gienapp, “The Myth of the Constitutional Given: Enumeration and National Power at the Founding,” [Am. U. L. Rev. 183, 194-209 (2020)]
• John Mikhail, “The Constitution and the Philosophy of Language: Entailment, Implicature, and Implied Powers,” 101 Virginia Law Review 1063, 1091–97 (2015) [hereinafter Mikhail, The Constitution and the Philosophy of Language] (parsing the Necessary and Proper Clause to argue that the Constitution’s text implies that Congress possesses many more implied powers than the expressly enumerated powers in Article I, Section 8)
• Andrew Coan and David S. Schwartz, The Original Meaning of Enumerated Powers (pdf)  [Legal Theory Blog]
• Robert D. Cooter & Neil S. Siegel, “Collective Action Federalism: A General Theory of Article I, Section 8,” 63 Stanford Law Review 115, 150, 178–80 (2010) (promoting the authors’ theory of collective action federalism as a way to interpret Article I, Section 8 such that Congress is not limited to the specific instances of regulation provided for in the Constitution)
• Richard Primus, “The “Essential Characteristic”: Enumerated Powers and the Bank of the United States,” 117 Michigan Law Review. 415, 419–20 (2018) (examining the controversy surrounding the first Bank of the United States to uncover alternative understandings of the Constitution’s enumerated power at the Founding) ]

Donald Trump’s Plan To Steal Or Destroy Everything — We should assume it’s underway, starting with the Epstein files.

Brian Beutler, Apr 10, 2026 [Off Message]

Donald Trump now claims to own all of his presidential records. To be more precise, his Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which interprets law for the entire executive branch, recently opined that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional, and thus that any government documents that cross the president’s desk, or pertain to his work, are his to keep, unless he chooses to leave them with the National Archives….

This is bullshit because the president works for the public, not the other way around; he is no more entitled to make off with our documents than you’re entitled to charge a Ferrari to the company credit card….

…And we should suspect the worst, because this action only really makes sense as a fabricated legal defense against actions Trump and his subordinates have already taken or intend to take imminently. There was no reason for Trump to do this unless he means to make off with or destroy a large number of incriminating or valuable public records in short order—not merely at the end of his term. If Trump had sincere, above board motives, he could have challenged the Presidential Records Act in court directly, rather than make a lawless assertion of power and wait for litigants and judges to stop him. The reason an administration of such low character would do this now, years before Trump leaves office, is to begin the process of burying or destroying or privatizing records right away—many months before Democrats regain control of Congress….

Trump’s New Attempt To Keep You From Voting

Joyce Vance, Apr 06, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

Last Tuesday, Donald Trump signed a new executive order designed, to put it simply, to make it more difficult for us to vote.

War

Yes, Trump Might Use Nukes in Iran

Andrew Day, Apr 7, 2026 [www.defenddemocracy.press]

…Maybe these statements were just bluster, maybe not. Regardless, if Tehran doesn’t budge, Trump will feel pressure to follow through and turn Iran into an apocalyptic hellscape before tomorrow morning.

Trump might even be tempted to accomplish this monstrous objective with the use of nuclear weapons. Amid muddled messaging from the White House, one of the most consistent themes has been the declared intention to “obliterate” Iran—and nuclear weapons offer the surest way to do that….

Moreover, Trump doesn’t seem to have internalized the “nuclear taboo,” the idea that strategic planners consider the nuclear option illegitimate and uncomfortable to even contemplate. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC reported during the 2016 presidential race that Trump had questioned a foreign policy adviser about the impermissibility of using nuclear weapons. “Three times he asked at one point, if we had them, why can’t we use them,” Scarborough said.

Campaign officials denied the report, but Trump had said something very similar months earlier during an MSNBC town hall. The moderator, Chris Matthews, pressed Trump on his prior refusal to rule out using nuclear weapons in Europe and the Middle East, leading to a remarkable exchange:

Trump: First of all, you don’t want to say, “Take everything off the table,” because you’d be a bad negotiator if you did that.

Matthews: Just nuclear.

Trump: Look, nuclear should be off the table. But would there be a time when it could be used? Possibly, possibly.

Matthews: OK. The trouble is, when you said that, the whole world heard it. [Then–Prime Minister] David Cameron in Britain heard it. The Japanese, where we bombed them in ’45, heard it. They’re hearing a guy running for president of the United States talking of maybe using nuclear weapons. Nobody wants to hear that about an American president.

Trump: Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?

Arguably, Trump had a point. After all, a president can’t take nuclear weapons “off the table” without thereby negating their deterrence value. Still, the exchange suggests Trump approaches the issue with less gravity and forbearance than the average world leader….

“President Trump is clearly frustrated and looking for an off ramp to end the war, but seems to want to put some kind of exclamation point on the campaign,” Jennifer Kavanagh of Defense Priorities told The American Conservative. “He’s hoping for a big win that he can use to sell the war as a massive success. This could push him to escalate, even as the returns are diminishing.”….

When War Crimes Rhetoric Becomes Battlefield Reality: The Slippery Slope to Total War on Iran.

[JustSecurity, via The Big Picture, April 07, 2026]

Iranian power plants and other critical civilian infrastructure are protected from attacks by the law of war the United States helped craft after World War II. Such an object can lose its protection only if it is used for military purposes by the enemy and its destruction “offers a definite military advantage.” Even then, such an object can be attacked only if, after a case-by-case rigorous analysis, the “concrete and direct military advantage anticipated” outweighs the civilian suffering that is expected to result.

[TW: Aa number of Democratic Senators and Congressmen declared Trump should once again be impeached. Even former prominent Trump boosters such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have begun calling for the use of the 25^th Amendment to remove Trump from office.

[Because the (anti)Republicans in Congress will block another impeachment, I think a more useful and effective response is to introduce and fight to pass a law making it an explicit war crime for any President — absent a nuclear attack on the US or any of its allies, or without a Declaration of War by Congress — to order the use of nuclear weapons. To maintain the deterrent capability of US nuclear weapons, this law must be explicit that it does not apply to an order in which a nuclear attack on the US or any of its allies has already been inflicted or has already begun. This is necessary to maintain US strategic deterrence.

[By contrast, this new law would clearly state that any use of nuclear weapons outside this deterrent role would be a war crime.

[The introduction and debate of this new law can be framed and managed in such a way as to force supporters of the unitary executive theory to admit that either there are limits to presidential authority, or admit that their interpretation of unitary executive theory is not even bounded by the war powers clause of the Constitution. This admission would inflict serious damage on the unitary executive theory, especially in the court of public opinion.

[This would be much more likely to attract the support, or at least votes, of Republican members of Congress, and could be used to great benefit in attacking the unitary executive theory.

[This new law should also include sturdy and robust safeguards for members of the military who refuse unlawful orders. We have already seen Trump’s vindictive attempt at retribution against the Vindman brothers during his Trump’s first term, and the threats to prosecute Senators Slotkin and Kelly, and the Congressmen who joined them in publishing a video remining members of the military their duty includes refusal to obey unlawful orders. Will a JAG lawyer who advises a commander not to obey an order be subjected to retaliatory investigations, abuse, professional damage, and even personal danger by Trump and his agents? Using the hypothetical Seal Team 6 question during the Supreme Court hearing on Presidential immunity – what if Trump orders certain military units or operatives to kill any JAG lawyer opposing illegal orders? ]

Confirmed: Trump admin threatened to overthrow the papacy

Adam Lynch, April 08, 2026 [Alternet, via DailyKos, April 08, 2026]

Pope Leo XIV chronicler Christopher Hale says he has confirmed that Trump’s Pentagon threatened to declare war on the Vatican.

“In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture,” said Hale.

“America has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world,” Colby and his associates informed the cardinal. “The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

As the room temperature grew, Hale said he confirmed that one U.S. official “reached for a fourteenth-century weapon and invoked the Avignon Papacy, the period when the French Crown used military force to bend the bishop of Rome to its will.” ….

Citing a Free Press report, a writer obtained accounts from Vatican and U.S. officials briefed on the Pentagon meeting. According to his sources, Colby’s team picked apart the pope’s January state-of-the-world address line by line and read it as a hostile message aimed directly at President Donald Trump. Hale said what “enraged them most” was Leo’s declaration that “a diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force.”

“The Pentagon read that sentence as a frontal challenge to the so-called ‘Donroe Doctrine’ — Trump’s update of Monroe, asserting unchallenged American dominion over the Western Hemisphere,” said Hale….

The Pentagon’s January confrontation with Cardinal Pierre signals an unprecedented willingness by Trump officials to pressure religious institutions into alignment with administration goals. This represents a potential inflection point: where diplomatic courtesy once governed state-Church relations, coercion may now be replacing negotiation. The Vatican’s refusal to participate in the 250th anniversary celebration underscores that even America’s most prominent religious institution will not compromise its moral authority for political expediency.

The Public Theology We Need Now — Moral compromise is far too common, but we know a better way.

William J. Barber, II and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Apr 11, 2026 [Our Moral Moment]

In the spring of 1933, while the world faced rising authoritarian movements, Franz von Papen traveled to Rome as a delegate of Germany’s new Chancellor. There he began negotiations for an agreement between the Vatican and the German Reich – a Concordant both parties would sign that summer, preparing the way for Hitler’s regime to advance its agenda for the next dozen years without mass resistance from German Christians. The details of the agreement were spelled out in several pages, but the structure was simple, and largely reflected how most Catholic and Protestant churches would negotiate the Third Reich: churches would be free to worship, run schools, and conduct social services as long as their preachers stayed out of politics.

The pastoral ministries of the Church could continue if it silenced its prophetic critique.

When the US President threatened genocide on social media this week, Pope, Leo XIV – the first American Pope – told reporters, “This truly is not acceptable.” He encouraged US citizens to call their representatives in Congress and demand a check on the President’s war powers. This was not the first time Leo (or Pope Francis before him) challenged Trump’s agenda, but it was remarkably direct….

The central question of public theology is always what God requires of us, no matter who is in charge. Throughout history clergy have been accused of being “too political” in times and places where political leaders did not want to have to deal with the challenge our moral traditions offer. The compromise that Trump demands today and that German Christians agreed to in 1933 has been made far too often in human history. It was the basic agreement between white churches and the Jim Crow regime in the American South, between church leaders and the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century, and between many governments and church institutions in between.

But this is not the only story of public theology that we have inherited. Two years before von Papen traveled to Rome to meet with Vatican officials in 1933, a handful of clergy, scholars, and activists traveled to New Haven, Connecticut at the invitation of seven African-American students at Yale Divinity School who had dedicated themselves to “service and sacrifice for Christ.” The students were concerned about the authoritarian movements of their day, both in Europe and in the American South. They also knew God had called them to become leaders in the church who could work together for “the creation of a new social order based on the principles of Jesus.”

Not content to simply wait for their theological school to equip them for this moral leadership, they called on a young scholar from Howard University (Benjamin Mays), a young labor organizer (A. Philip Randolph), a couple of preachers who had built large churches in New York City and Atlanta, and a couple of PhD’s who would go on to lead HBCUs over the next few decades. Only one of their professors, Jerome Davis, helped facilitate the gathering. For a few days, the small group reflected together on this question: how could they practice the militant nonviolent love of Jesus in a way that would bring down Jim Crow? They recorded their resolutions in a document they titled, “Whither the Negro Church?,” then they set about building institutions that could operationalize their vision.

Just five years later, one of those seven students and his spouse traveled with Howard and Sue Bailey Thurman to India, where they met Gandhi and continued the discussion they’d started about nonviolence. Others who’d participated in the seminar worked together to build the Institute for Religion at Howard University, where Thurman became Dean of Rankin Chapel. Mays left Howard to lead Morehouse College, and others from this “Rankin Network” went on to teach and lead at Virginia Union, Lincoln University, Shaw University, North Carolina College (now NC Central University), and other HBCUs. But their growing network came back to Howard for regular meetings and stayed in touch through the “Journal of Religious Thought” that William Stuart Nelson, a Yale graduate, edited.

The public theology of this network did not make headlines for the next couple of decades. Most of its adherents didn’t get big book deals or respected teaching posts….

Before Martin Luther King, Jr., James Farmer, Diane Nash and many others were leaders of the modern civil rights movement, they were students at the HBCU’s shaped by this Rankin Network. There they learned a faith that demanded social action, the philosophy of nonviolence, and the hope that movements could change what seemed immovable. When he was martyred in 1968 after becoming the most recognizable moral leader of the 20^th century America, Dr. King was eulogized by his mentor and college President – one of the handful of people who’d been at that initial seminar in 1931 – Dr. Benjamin Mays….

Trump decided on war with Iran after secret Israeli pitch, New York Times reports

[Drop Site Daily, April 8, 2026]

President Donald Trump authorized strikes on Iran following a February 11 Situation Room meeting in which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, appearing alongside Mossad chief David Barnea and military officials, presented a four-part regime-change pitch that included a video montage of potential replacement leaders such as Reza Pahlavi, the New York Times reported Tuesday. Netanyahu argued Iran’s ballistic missile program could be destroyed within weeks, that the regime would be too weakened to close the Strait of Hormuz, and that Mossad-fomented street protests combined with a Kurdish ground front from Iraq could trigger an uprising. Trump’s immediate response was reported as: “Sounds good to me.” Vice President JD Vance was absent, stranded in Azerbaijan. U.S. intelligence officials pushed back sharply the following day. Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe called the regime-change scenario “farcical,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it “bullshit,” and General Dan Caine told the president the Israelis routinely “oversell” plans that are “not always well-developed,” the Times reported. War Secretary Pete Hegseth was described as the strongest proponent of immediate action.

Here’s A List Of Gulf Energy Infrastructure Damaged In Iran War

[Bloomberg, April 12, 2026, via gCaptain]

Read More

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 05, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

A German Journalist’s ‘Civil Death’

Patrick Lawrence, March 31, 2026 [via defenddemocracy.press]

… With the seizure of his spouse’s bank accounts last Friday, Dogru and his family now face what amounts to a starvation blockade of the kind the Trump regime (not to change the subject) currently imposes on Cuba and Israel imposes on Gaza.

This story reads like something out of Dostoyevsky or Kafka, I have to say. We are talking about a family of five going hungry in the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany as punishment for… what?… for seeing with his eyes open, for thinking about what he sees, then commenting on what he sees?

I would love to suggest various ways readers could support the Dogru family, but there are none. Were someone to donate so much as a loaf of bread to help sustain them the German authorities would count it a criminal offense punishable by a prison term of up to several years.

Strategic Political Economy

Why we need rationing, now

Richard Murphy, April 02, 2026 [Funding the Future]

The UK is in a war economy, and most people don’t realise it yet. The Middle East conflict has already cut global oil supplies by around 20% and gas supplies by roughly 30%. With approximately half of all UK food imported, and global fertiliser supplies under severe pressure, the shortages hitting our shelves and energy bills are only the beginning.

Markets cannot solve this. When supply collapses, markets ration by income and those with money survive; those without do not. That is not a policy choice. That is a failure of government. The energy crisis and emerging food shortages demand an active UK state response.

Drawing on Lord Keynes’s approach at the start of World War II, and John Kenneth Galbraith’s wartime work in the United States, this video argues that the only credible response to this supply chain crisis is a combination of government-led rationing and a serious redesign of the tax system.

It means government intervention in the economy at a scale not seen since the 1940s.

The alternative is leaving resource allocation to the market, which will transfer wealth upward, destroy social cohesion, and risk public unrest. That is not how to manage a war economy. That is a policy choice to let the poor bear the cost of a crisis they did not create.

[TW: Interesting! Can the consequences of Trumpanyahu war be used to drive a regime change of political economy away from neoliberalism? We must try….. ]

Not Getting It Together 

Aurelien, via Naked Capitalism 04-01-2025]

…It’s not so much that numbers can be confused with reality, as that reality in the end is nothing but numbers, and decisions are made and workers rewarded without any kind of real-world check. Everything is possible, therefore, because ultimately everything is numbers.

The modern political class, increasingly dominated by those who have worked in finance, or its close relative management consultancy, therefore largely consist of people with little experience of the real world. Over the last forty years, unsurprisingly, this way of thinking and working, combining symbolic manipulation of numbers and the ticking of symbolic boxes, has become the default in government, and even the military and diplomacy. So the emphasis now is not on the capability to do things and achieve actual objectives, but on the skills of making the numbers look right, and proving that you have carried out the correct steps in the correct order. That is all the system knows how to do….

…It is the nature of a crisis that most attention is focused on transitory daily issues, such that the big picture, if there ever was one, disappears from view. I know from personal experience that in a crisis every long and exhausting day is overwhelmed with meetings, telephone calls, video-conferences, unexpected news or initiatives, requests for interviews, media statements, questions in parliament … the list goes on and on. For those like me who had the temerity to ask what the point of all this was, and about longer-term objectives and plans, the response was typically “we’ll worry about that later.” And quite soon, of course, it’s later, and the system realises that it has no idea how it got to where it is, especially because it actually wanted to be somewhere else. But by then it’s too late.

So the real problem is not so much that the left brain dominates, as that the two modes of thinking are never brought together. This means that quite a lot of left-brain work can go on effectively on auto-pilot, because it develops a life of its own. Thus, ideas for using US ground troops in Iran can rapidly be developed at a technical level, with force composition and generation, potential targets, entry points, logistic resupply, ISR etc, all without the questions of “why are we doing this?” or “what do we hope to achieve?” ever being posed. But of course the output of such activities can be easily expressed in whizzo graphics and AI generated simulations, and it provides the planners with something to do….

Thus, statements of faith in an ultimate Ukrainian victory, or of a future “Free Palestine,” or of the inevitable defeat of Iran, have to be seen, even more than most political statements, as symbolic and metaphorical. They are not deduced from the facts of the situation, nor do there have to be actual processes capable of making them happen. They are battle-cries, slogans for chanting, descriptions of fantasies and in certain cases nightmares. The problem arises when the extreme right-brain thinking that has always characterised politics, exacerbated by the ignorance of modern politicians about real life, collides with the extreme left-brain culture of our modern world as exemplified in government systems, without any transmission mechanism to enable them to work together….

The greatest challenge, as often, is intellectual. Our masters will have to recognise that chains of consequence and causality do actually exist, that Father Christmas is a right-brain myth, and that there are hard limits on what can actually be done, and hard requirements about what needs to be done, and neither can be circumvented with words. In particular, they need to abandon the delusion that only finance matters, and that numbers on paper represent the underlying reality of the world. (Not even Pythagoras would have suggested that you can eat numbers.) This is most obvious in the endless, earnest discussion of what the Iran War will do to “the price of oil.” In a few cases, pundits even realise that “the price of oil” might affect the prices of other things as well. But from their point of view, “price” and “oil” are two different concepts. The idea that there might just not be enough oil, and that that lack may have practical consequences other than price doesn’t get much of an airing. After all, surely if the price goes up, new suppliers will come forward? That’s how the market works, isn’t it? Isn’t it? The idea that the world will soon lose some of its supply of oil-based products, and that this is a hard limit that cannot be got round, has only just begun to register, and, to the extent that it has, pundits appear to believe that we can substitute, say, solar power for oil, and all will be well. Can you use solar power to make fertiliser? Indeed, can you make solar panels at all without oil-based products?

…I doubt if any western country is now equipped, organisationally or even intellectually, to handle problems caused by scarcity of food. Western states now enjoy little absolute food security—a problem I discussed in some detail last year—but our governments are far from even beginning to grasp the nature of the problem, let alone its implications. Ah well, it will be said, people eat too much and anyway too much food is thrown away. Indeed, but that’s not the answer….

As it happens, there is a lot of experience of what happens in situations of severe shortage, and the answer is that the rich buy what they want, the poor buy what they can, and organised crime steps in to put those with money in touch with those with things to sell. The capacity of western states has been radically reduced over the last couple of generations, even as the power of organised crime has grown. We can imagine what shortages of basic medicines would do, and who might wind up controlling their retail sale. In reality, attempts by government to control the availability of everyday necessities will lead nowhere and arouse public opposition. The Internet will have a field day: it will be worse than Covid. This shortage of food doesn’t really exist you see, it’s just the Davos brigade trying to kill off as many people as it can, this time by hunger….

Trump’s planning war crimes

Richard Murphy, April 02, 2026 [Funding the Future]

Donald Trump has signalled his intention to attack Iran’s civilian infrastructure, power stations and desalination plants, and that is a war crime under international law. The law is unambiguous: military gain does not justify targeting civilian populations and the infrastructure they depend upon, and pre-announcing an attack does not reduce culpability. This is the reality of the Iran war that the world urgently needs to confront….

…There is a deeper ideological logic at work here, which is neoliberalism. Neoliberal economics reduces human beings to units in a system, economic cogs with conditional worth. When civilians are treated as expendable targets in a war in Iran, that is not aberration. That is the neoliberal system working as designed.

Margaret Thatcher applied the same logic to UK communities in the 1980s, treating unemployment and social harm as acceptable costs of economic policy. Trump’s Iran policy is the modern expression of that same ideology, now directed at Iranian civilians on a far grander and more lethal scale. The mindset is identical; the human cost is simply larger.

The collapse of moral constraint we are witnessing in the US-Iran conflict is a systemic danger. Neoliberalism, combined with distorted justification, is overriding both international law and basic humanity…

Never doubt that dangerous ideas are a threat to humankind

Richard Murphy, March 31, 2026 [Funding the Future]

…This is the consequence of neoliberal thinking. When, as that philosophy does, you reduce people to being cogs in a machine, those cogs become expendable. Margaret Thatcher treated people in this way when managing the UK economy with supreme indifference to its population in the 1980s. Donald Trump is treating the people of Iran in this way when managing his maniacal war agenda in the 2020s. There is a difference in the scale of the contempt shown, but the indifference to human suffering that underpinned both courses of action is similar.

The fact is that the courses of action required to fulfil the neoliberal agenda of ever-increasing the wealth of a few in society at cost to many have been presumed by all those who subscribe to this ideology as justification for their contempt for their fellow human beings, and as an excuse for the suffering that their ideology has caused to billions around the world….

Trump’s assault on 2026 Election

Trump Will Not Accept the 2026 Results. These Are the Legal Weapons to Force Certification

W. A. Lawrence, Mar 29, 2026 [Glass Empires]

Trump is not attempting to win the election. Trump is attempting to establish the outcome as settled before certification, because a public that accepts inevitability becomes far easier to override.

Since January 2025, actions to expand federal control of election administration have moved from proposal into execution. Courts have blocked portions on constitutional grounds. Legal countermeasures stand ready. Effective use requires speed, coordination, and sustained pressure applied before administrative strain.

American elections transfer governing authority through a statutory and constitutional process requiring convergence of canvassing, certification, judicial review, and final recognition within fixed time limits….

Stage one is voter roll disruption before the election. The SAVE America Act forces all 211 million registered voters to re register in person with documentary proof of citizenship before November, generating mass eligibility disputes designed to overwhelm certification administrators at the moment deadlines permit no unresolved claims.

A parallel draft executive order carries identical provisions for unilateral imposition under a declared national emergency if the Senate fails to act. Trump confirmed the fallback, stating the requirements will govern the midterms whether approved by Congress or imposed by executive authority….

Trump signs executive order creating national voter list, restricting mail-in voting

[Associated Press, via Drop Site Daily: April 1, 2026

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday directing the Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration to create a national list of verified eligible voters and seeking to bar the U.S. Postal Service from sending absentee ballots to those not on state-approved lists. Voting law experts say the move unconstitutionally usurps states’ authority to run elections. Federal funding could be withheld from states that do not comply.

Nearly Two Dozen Democratic States Hit Trump With Elections Lawsuit

Finn Hartnett, April 3, 2026 [The New Republic]

Officials from 23 different states (and the District of Columbia) are taking Donald Trump to court over a brazenly unconstitutional executive order that looks to limit Americans’ voting rights.

The executive order, signed on Tuesday, banned the U.S. Postal Service from delivering mail-in ballots to anyone not on a preapproved list compiled by the USPS itself. Trump and his cronies like to claim mail-in voting is rife with fraud—despite a lack of evidence and the fact that the president likes to vote by mail himself. But the executive order’s solution to this is sketchy at best. Why, and how, does the USPS get to choose who can vote by mail?

Perhaps even more insidious is another section of the executive order, which calls on the federal government to compile its own list of voters in each state, which will then be sent to states 60 days before each federal election—presumably along with a bunch of threats that they better not find anyone who doesn’t match their list voting….

Letters from an American, March 31, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson, Apr 01, 2026

…Trump is ordering the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to work with the Social Security Administration to create a list of verified U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote in each state. The order directs the U.S. Postal Service to send mail-in ballots only to voters on the list, and to mark each ballot with its own unique barcode. It threatens any states refusing to cooperate with the order with a loss of federal funding and directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate anyone wrongfully distributing mail-in ballots. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council notes that “there is no such thing as a federal list of citizens. It does not exist.”

“This is unconstitutional on its face,” election law expert David Becker told Yunior Rivas of Democracy Docket. “The Constitution clearly gives the president no power over elections….

State Dems must stop ICE from stealing the midterms

Cory Doctorow, March 31, 2026 [Pluralistic]

Writing for Jacobin, Eric Blanc points out that Democrats don’t have to sit by passively while Trump – who repeatedly promised that if you voted for him in 2024, “you won’t have to vote anymore” – steals an election:

https://jacobin.com/2026/03/ice-trump-election-theft-laws/

…On March 13, the New Mexico state legislature passed a law banning armed federal officials from showing their fascist asses anywhere within 50 feet of a polling place or ballot drop-box:

https://www.koat.com/article/new-mexico-prohibits-armed-agents-voting-sites/70729595

Other blue states like “California, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington” are contemplating similar laws.

It’s a start, but as Blanc says, what the fuck are the other blue statehouses waiting for? This is a white-hot, hair-on-fire emergency. There isn’t a moment to spare. This should be on the agenda for every union, at every demonstration, at every DSA and Democratic Club meeting. As Blanc says, if we wait until November to find out what Trump is going to do, it’ll be too late. The time to act is now.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 29, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

Tell Your State To Pass This No-ICE-At-Our-Precincts Model Law. Now.

Josh Marshall, March 27, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]

 I found a piece of model legislation published on March 9th by the Brennan Center.

War

Plans, Platforms And Projectiles — The longer-term meaning of the Iran war.

Aurelien, Mar 25, 2026

…the lack of a strategy for Iran—as opposed to a generalised aspiration to do harm when the opportunity presented itself—meant that the US was not really prepared for this war, and that the effects on US power and on its economy and its political and military system, will accordingly be a lot more severe than they might otherwise have been….

…For this reason, as for others I’ll touch on, it seems highly unlikely that there will be a “deal,” with Iran, let alone a detailed agreement. If you can’t even decide what you want, it’s hard to persuade someone to give it to you….

[TW: Worth reading to the end and their discussion of the high-tech “platform warfare” the US developed during the cold war, and which all its expensive weapons systems are oriented around, versus the “projectile warfare” which is now emerging in the context of drones and inexpensive precision guidance. It appears that the Iranians decided to orient their military to “projectile warfare” and are damn good at it.]

America is Achieving Full-Spectrum Energy Dominance — And Nobody is Paying Attention 

[BettBeat Media, via Naked Capitalism 03-23-2025]

…I have said it many times, and I will say it again: the United States does not lose wars. If it did, it would stop waging them. Whether Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, or Libya — failed states are not failures of Empire. They are the victories of Empire. And Empire is on a roll.

Now the same chorus rises over Iran. Left and right, the refrain is identical: this will be a disaster, America is overreaching, Iran will be its graveyard. The same voices. The same blindness. The same century-old script….

…Medhurst argues that the United States, far from stumbling into another disastrous West Asian quagmire, is executing a calculated seizure of the planet’s energy supply — and that the wars on Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine, and now Iran are not separate blunders but sequential steps toward a single goal: total energy dominance. He coins a term for the endgame: the “petro-gas dollar” or the “LNG dollar.” Let us see if the term deserves to stick….

Over 11,000 munitions in 16 Days of the Iran War: ‘Command of the Reload’ Governs Endurance 

[Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies]

Iran’s Ultimatum

“We are at war with the Epstein people. The people eating, frying, and raping kids…”

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 22, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

War

Beijing to Tel-Aviv and Washington: “Israel will cease to exist the moment it uses a nuclear weapon!”

Dimitris Konstantakopoulos, 20/03/2026 [defenddemocracy.press]

In the following paper, we will present the reasons why a nuclear war in the Middle East is now quite possible, the deterrent intervention of China which interrupted a period of dangerous tolerance of Israel by the great powers, and the relationship between what is happening in West Asia and what is happening around Ukraine and the American continent, particularly in Cuba….

These statements, and most likely the information it possesses, provoked an unofficial but very harsh statement from Beijing. This is the first time a major power has interrupted the unprecedented tolerance enjoyed by Israel and its lobbies, a tolerance that has now led humanity to the brink of the abyss.

…Specifically, Victor Gao, vice-president of the Chinese Institute for China and Globalization, when asked what the two nuclear powers, Russia and China, would do if Israel used nuclear weapons, he stated to the American The Cradle, that “the moment Israel uses a nuclear warhead against any country, it will be considered the number one enemy of humanity, it will be the demise of Israel as a state, as a regime, as a country.” He simultaneously warned Prime Minister Netanyahu, the government of Israel, and its armed forces that they will be considered enemies of humanity and responsible for whatever happens, in an indirect but clear reference to the Nuremberg trials that judged the Nazi leaders. Mr. Gao made it clear that what he says does not concern condemnatory statements but an advance notice of actions. He congratulated Mr. Trump on his statement that Israel will not use nuclear weapons and expressed the wish that he acts effectively in this direction.

Mr. Gao adds that any use of nuclear weapons by Israel will lead to an explosive proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East and their use would result in hundreds of millions of deaths and the transformation of the entire region into an uninhabitable zone.

Mr. Gao makes also a reference to the Epstein archives.

The Chinese warning has been phrased in a… Chinese way. Mr. Gao is the head of a small party allied with the Communist Party and holds no government position, so the responsibility for his statement cannot be directly attributed to the Chinese leadership or the CCP. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that it constitutes an unofficial but authoritative expression of the Chinese position on the matter. And to leave us in no doubt on the issue, the Chinese Academy distributed this specific excerpt of Gao’s statements under the characteristic title “What would China do if Israel dropped a nuclear weapon?”….

IDF threatens ‘elimination’ for Russian leaders who ‘wish Israel ill’

Wyatt Reed, Mar 19, 2026 [defenddemocracy.press]

Israel’s veiled threat to Moscow came just after Russian media warned traffic cameras in Moscow were vulnerable to the same exploits that Israel reportedly used to monitor Ayatollah Khamenei’s residence before assassinating him.

Breaking the Nuclear Taboo

Peter Kuznick and Ivana Nikolić Hughes, March 13, 2026 [defenddemocracy.press]

…It would be the ultimate expression of Trump’s unbounded power for him to break the one remaining international taboo – which, despite far too many close calls, has persisted for more than 80 years – detonating a nuclear weapon. There are many indications that, despite the U.S. and Israel’s ability to bomb Iran at will, this war may not be going well for them. But that need not be the pretext for using a nuclear weapon. In Trump’s mind, the more unprovoked, outrageous, and unnecessary something is, the better. Given his fragile ego and rapidly deteriorating mental powers – going off on bizarre rants about poisonous snakes in Peru or the White House drapes – the more unhinged he is, the more he thinks it demonstrates his dominance.

Since the end of the Cold War, many people who pay attention have worried about an accidental or a miscalculated stumble into nuclear war. But with Trump breaking every taboo domestically and internationally, demonstrating that he is above the law and can do as he pleases at every turn, the ultimate taboo waiting to be broken is the nuclear one….

[TW: I wonder if there will be a mass resignation of military officers as Trump stumbles aver closer to using nuclear weapons. But they would lose their pensions. So, probably secret approaches to some (anti)Republican Senators and Congressmen begging for Congress to do something? And if Trump does issue orders to use nuclear weapons, would military officers refuse? Might they even demand Trump be arrested? Trump and Hegseth have pissed all over the Code of Conduct numerous times — Hegseth this past week, by declaring “no quarter” toward Iran, explicitly violated violated the Hague and Geneva Conventions, the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996, and the Pentagon’s own Law of War Manual. The commander in chief and the top civilian official at the Department of Defense should also be subject to the Code.]

Remember the Titan: The Fragility of Trump’s Golden Egg

Jim Stewartson, Mar 18, 2026 [MindWar]

GRAPH: Trump’s Pathologies

…While I hesitate to bring up the dreaded notion of bipartisanship, the best way to try to prevent the explosive scenario, to try and contain the criticality when it happens, is for the political system to present a combined show of force that draws a red line before it happens.

If he’s not given a sandbox to play in, Trump will take the entire playground.

For example, if the Democrats and 20 GOP Senators could find a way to agree publicly that if Trump engages in a preemptive nuclear strike for any reason without consulting Congress, he will be impeached and removed immediately. Even if he was not considering such a strike, just the statement would make clear to him that he is not, in fact, omnipotent….

The South Pars Pulse: Why the ‘Energy War’ is Actually a Thermodynamic Singularity 

[The Ultimate Avatar of Balance, via Naked Capitalism 03-19-2025]

…By treating the destruction of the world’s largest natural gas reservoir merely as a ‘supply chain disruption’, the geopolitical establishment is exhibiting a fatal, terminal blindness. We are no longer dealing with economics; we are dealing with physics.

The strike on South Pars is not an ‘energy war’. It is an unmodelled Thermodynamic Pulse that threatens to liquidate the biological carrying capacity of the entire Persian Gulf.

The Methane Blind Spot

South Pars/North Dome holds an estimated 1,800 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. When upstream infrastructure of this magnitude is ruptured, the result is not just fire and smoke (particulate matter), which the environmental NGOs are currently monitoring. The far greater threat is uncontained venting of raw methane (CH₄).

Methane possesses a Global Warming Potential (GWP) roughly 80 times that of CO₂ over a 20-year horizon. However, in the immediate aftermath of a massive, concentrated release, the ‘horizon’ is not 20 years. It is measured in weeks….

Trump says he’s ‘not afraid’ of Vietnam-style ground combat in Iran 

[Daily Mail, via Naked Capitalism 03-18-2025]

…Speaking from the Oval Office alongside Ireland’s Taoiseach, Micheal Martin, the President fielded many questions about the Iran war.

‘Are you afraid that if you put boots on the ground in Iran, it could be another Vietnam?’ one reporter asked.

‘No,’ Trump shot back, adding, ‘I’m not afraid of anything.’

The Geopolitical Consequences of Defeat

[Policy Tensor, via Naked Capitalism 03-16-2025]

…The only way in which the United States can evade outright defeat is by suppressing and degrading Iran’s ability to hold gulf assets at high levels of risk and keep Hormuz closed.1 If the US cannot, through either the direct application of force or indirectly through military coercion, accomplish this strategic objective, the outcome will be indistinguishable from strategic defeat, even if the war ends in a ceasefire, for then Iran would’ve demonstrated for all to see that the United States does not, in fact, have the military means to impose its will on the gulf.

This means that the dynamics of the interdiction campaign are decisive.

If the interdiction campaign rapidly degrades Iran’s ability to attack gulf assets, that would still not guarantee victory, however. For victory requires the further success of countermining operations if the Iranians mine the gulf, as they have reportedly started doing. Countermining operations are not a solved military problem either. At the very least, they will also take many months. What is clear is that, a successful prosecution of the interdiction campaign to conclusion is a necessary condition for effective countermining operations….

Burning the Lifeboats to Keep the Lights On 

[The Ultimate Avatar of Balance, via Naked Capitalism 03-16-2025]

… something important needs saying: the US’s totally aimless campaign of wanton and indiscriminate destruction in Iran is definitionally tantamount to terrorism. An operation requires a stated strategic objective to qualify as a “war” or military action of some sort, legitimate or not. Trump’s clumsy bomb-fest—during which he proudly boasts he can “bomb” certain Iranian targets “for fun”—does not fit that description, and as such definitionally qualifies as a campaign of terrorism against a sovereign state and its civilian population. Let’s not even mention what the US is currently doing to Cuba, with the blockade having collapsed the nation’s entire electric grid as of yesterday.

The closest the US has come to stated goals in this debacle in fact align with definitional terrorism: the US wants to create economic hardship and infrastructural pain in the country which would spur the populace into overthrowing “the regime”….

 

Things Go Haywire as Israeli Escalation Throws Iran Conflict into Dangerous New Phase 

[Simplicius, via Naked Capitalism 03-19-2025]

Things really hit the fan earlier today after Iran’s largest natural gas field, the South Pars, was struck by Israel. This field reportedly accounts for 75% of Iran’s natural gas production and 80-85% of its electric grid….

 

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