"The Trump-Israel-Iran War Takes
An Atom-Bomb Sized Turn!"
by David Haggith
Excerpt: "As of this weekend, the Iran War has done more to diminish US power in the Middle East than I have seen in my lifetime. I’m going to start with the smallest of events that I’ve said was coming in order to share some valuable information with everyone. Then I’ll move on to the massive turn of events in the Middle East that happened over the past two days due to US ineptitude in this war.
Starting with the smallest point first, which is still of historic significance, diesel in the US just soared past its highest price in history! So, those rising fuel prices I promised would hit this summer are resoundingly and solidly here just as summer nears its close: "Diesel hits all-time high of $6 per gallon, and just about everything will cost more."
The nationwide average price of diesel hit $6 per gallon Friday for the first time, an ominous record for the fuel that powers much of the U.S. economy. The price was $6.05 as of Friday morning, according to data from motor club AAA. The national average price of regular gas was $4.29, up 15 cents since last week. Since the war with Iran began in late February, the nationwide average diesel price has soared by 60%.
“The cost of diesel gets into just about everything,” KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk said in a recent interview. “From running a farm ... [to the] cost of food, but also everything across the economy that’s shipped,” she said. When diesel prices rise, everything “gets that extra fee tacked onto it.” Swonk predicted that the high cost of diesel will be an “inflationary problem” for months to come.
And we made it here even ahead of seeing those “spotty” out-of-fuel signs at gas stations that I said would be coming. I did report on a few, but there was no deeper explanation in those X posts as to whether the gas station owners just didn’t realize their tanks were nearing empty, as sometimes happens, or actually could not get fuel. So, I won’t claim that as an accurate prediction yet, but what that means is that fuel prices are still going higher once actual shortages do start to show up. (At least, one of those did sound like more than the station owner/manager forgot to order fuel in time as the person wondered out loud, “What’s going on?” as in “Why hasn’t my fuel arrived yet?”)
This week, Trump made the surprising (only in that it came from his lips) announcement of the obvious, which is that the war and the high prices on fuel will continue until the day after the election because Iran will do all it can to reduce his power while in office. He’s pathetically blind or just lying, though, to be claiming their pressure will end right after the election due to their desperation for a deal. Not everyone has the short attention span of Donald Trump. The Iranians have been in the long game for decades.
Today, Middle East nations are negotiating with Iran to see if they can get Iran to open the strait. Iran will use the negotiations as a process to keep buying time, as they always do, so that the war of attrition bites deeper into America’s back side. They will say something along the lines of, “Yes, we will open the strait if every nation in this room promises to kick all American military bases out of their country.” That would be a huge win for Iran, and such a negotiation point puts the onus back on the nations that are begging for strait mercy to change the situation in the Middle East. It would achieve one of Iran’s major objectives in this war.
At this point it is actually within the realm of feasibility that Iran could get that kind of agreement and actually kick the US permanently out of the Gulf, and today’s blockbuster event really underscores why nations like Saudi Arabia will be seriously considering such a move. Moreover, the US has a huge financial burden to add to its toppling mountain of debt if it is going to rebuild all those bases, which means it might not press so hard to remain there. A US military official has just admitted the US received major damage: "Navy Secretary Casually Admits Iran “Blew the Hell” out of U.S. Base."
Fox News’s Jennifer Griffin wrote. “Haven’t heard a senior U.S. official admit this on the record until now.” Others noted the Iranian military capacity does not seem to be as depleted as Trump claims. Naturally, the always-lying Trump administration has been underplaying the damage done by Iran; but it eventually gets out as ships limp home in worse states than the US originally admitted.
With Trump now promising a $5,000 economic stimulus check to every single adult American if Republicans sweep both houses of congress at an estimated cost of $1.25-trillion, adding the cost of rebuilding all those military bases and replenishing their military hardware is going to be a tough addition to the price of this war. So, if nations that have experienced heavy damage because of those bases now demand the US go away, the US might not push back as hard as it would when it was a more prosperous nation. That is the cost of having a towering national debt that now looks like the Leaning Tower of Piza.
Yet, the costs of this war are hardly done mounting because Iran plans to do a lot more destruction to US military bases in the region in order to drive the US out and a lot more destruction to US oil infrastructure. And events that happened overnight show how rapidly that can come about!
Most of those costs where that kind of damage was already rendered are not imputed yet into the cost of this war because it is not known if the US will rebuild. Most of the oil rebuilding costs will have to born by US oil companies that are making bank off the war unless the billionaires manage to get bailout money from congress - always a possibility in our brave new world; but that may be a tough sell in congress with the debt tower now leaning so hard that the Treasury secretary was unable with his first-round effort to prop it up at all. The props snapped immediately, showing he’ll need to place far stronger timber under the structure of US debt if he wants to prop it up.
We’re back to massive financial rescue measures or just facing the impossible cost of soaring interest. That is a no-win scenario because, as the war continues to drive inflation up (sure to rise rapidly with diesel not over $6/gallon), interest rates will continue to rise, and with central banks lately casting off Treasuries like sand bags of ballast thrown off a falling financial balloon, financing that interest is a real problem."
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