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Opinion
Trump's Iran War Is an Affordability Disaster
You can’t say affordability is your top priority and then start a war in the Middle East.
Mar 08, 2026
We are one week into Trump's war on Iran. Gas prices are already up more than 11%. The Dow Jones has erased all of its 2026 gains.
These are the real, immediate costs of a new war of choice. Wars in the Middle East are expensive, and ordinary people pay the price.
The War Tax at the Pump — and Beyond
Twenty percent of the world's oil travels through the Strait of Hormuz. That path is now shut off. The results are predictable.
Every gallon of gas now carries a war tax. And this is only the beginning. War with Iran means the constant threat of strikes on oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or the UAE. Secretary Hegseth has said the campaign could last anywhere from three to eight weeks—and that the U.S. can "sustain this fight easily for as long as we need to." As long as this conflict goes on, prices will stay up.
This war is illegal and most Americans are against it. The cost is already hitting them at the gas pump, at the grocery store, and in their retirement accounts.
And it doesn't stop at the pump. Oil prices affect the entire supply chain. Nearly everything Americans buy moves by truck at some point between the factory and the shelf. When fuel costs go up, shipping costs go up, and those costs get passed on to the consumer. Affordability was already the number one concern of voters going into 2026. People remember what it felt like when the grocery bill became something to dread. This war risks bringing that back.
The bottom line? You can’t say affordability is your top priority and then start a war in the Middle East.
Remember When They Wouldn't Shut Up About the Dow?
When the Dow crossed 50,000 in February, Trump posted on Truth Social that he had hit it "three years ahead of schedule" and predicted 100,000 before he left office. Attorney General Pam Bondi was lampooned for bringing up the Dow during a hearing that had nothing to do with the stock market. Now that argument is in peril.
By Thursday, the Dow had wiped out all of its 2026 gains, turning negative for the year after dropping nearly 800 points on March 5th alone. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq are down too.
If the Dow at 50,000 was the administration's achievement, so is the Dow at 47,500. You don't get the credit without the blame.
"A Big Fat Mistake" — Donald Trump, on the Last Middle East War
The man who started this war spent years arguing against the cost of Middle East wars. That argument was central to his political rise.
At the 2016 Republican primary debate, Trump went after Jeb Bush directly: "Obviously the war in Iraq was a big fat mistake, alright? George Bush made a mistake... we should have never been in Iraq, we have destabilized the Middle East." He mocked Jeb for taking five days to decide whether Iraq was a mistake. The crowd booed. Trump didn't back down. That moment helped define his candidacy.
In his 2021 farewell address, Trump declared he was "especially proud to be the first president in decades who has started no new wars." On election night 2024, he told supporters: "I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars." His 2026 New Year's resolution, posted publicly, was "peace on earth."
Forty-eight hours after that resolution, he ordered a military raid on Venezuela. Two months later, he launched the war on Iran.
At a 2018 White House infrastructure event, he said: "We've spent $7 trillion in the Middle East. What a mistake... We're trying to build roads and bridges that are falling down, and we have a hard time getting the money. It's crazy." He was right. Money spent on bombs cannot also be spent on schools, hospitals, and bridges.
The roads that were falling down when Trump gave that speech are still falling down. And now we're adding another war to the tab—on top of tariffs already squeezing family budgets—with no clear goal and no plan for what comes next.
The People Know Better
A University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll found only 21% of Americans support U.S. strikes against Iran. Three-quarters said no before the first bomb dropped. They knew—from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from two decades of watching—what a war in the Middle East costs and how it ends. The gas prices and the stock market are just the receipts.
The work now is making sure that the majority speaks up.
This war is illegal and most Americans are against it. The cost is already hitting them at the gas pump, at the grocery store, and in their retirement accounts. If we have to pay at the pump, the politicians who started this war should pay at the ballot box.
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Imperial Oil Grab: The Abduction of Venezuela’s President as a Prelude to the Attack on Iran
Make no mistake—the ultimate goal of the empire remains regime change. A pliant nation under its thumb is all the United States craves from oil-rich nations.
Mar 08, 2026
Venezuela and Iran hold the largest and third-largest petroleum reserves in the world, respectively. Both have been targeted for regime change by Washington. The world’s hegemon naturally seeks access to such resources. Yet it would be simplistic to think that would be only for narrow economic motives.
Dominion over energy flows—especially from countries with large reserves—is central to maintaining global influence. Washington requires control of strategic resources to sustain its position as global hegemon; a goal reflected in its official policy of “full spectrum dominance.” The 2017 National Security Strategy establishes “energy dominance” as an instrument of imperial power.
For Venezuela and Iran, sovereign control over their vast hydrocarbon wealth is a prerequisite for exercising even a modest degree of independence and some regional and global influence within a geopolitical landscape dominated by the US and its allies.
Venezuela-Iran nexus
Venezuela and Iran were founding members of the OPEC alliance of oil-producing countries in 1960. Both countries rejected Western dominance and nationalized their considerable oil sectors. In Iran, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh established the National Iranian Oil Company in 1951, precipitating the CIA-MI6 coup that deposed him. In Venezuela, President Carlos Andrés Pérez nationalized the oil industry in 1976 through the creation of state oil company. The PDVSA was later expanded and reoriented by President Hugo Chávez after 2002.
In a prescient address at Tehran University, Venezuelan President Chávez admonished:
If the US empire succeeds in consolidating its dominance, then humankind has no future. Therefore, we have to save humankind and put an end to the US empire.
Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution and Iran’s Islamic Revolution are both of necessity anti-imperialist projects that have forged ties with Russia and China, Washington’s two major-power “strategic competitors.” The hegemon’s response reflects its broader pattern of targeting resource-rich, independent states that resist integration into the US-led “world order.”
Both countries have been targeted for their non-aligned foreign policy. Iran occupies a central position in the resistance to Zionism, supporting Hezbollah, the former Syrian government, Ansar Allah (the Houthis), and above all the Palestinian struggle. Likewise, Venezuela has been among the strongest supporters in Latin America of Palestinian self-determination, severing relations with Israel in 2009. Venezuela, too, has been the main supporter of the beleaguered Cuban government.
In 2015, US President Barack Obama declared Venezuela an “extraordinary threat” to US national security as an excuse to impose unilateral coercive measures on Caracas. Two years later, President Donald Trump intensified the hybrid war against Venezuela, modeled on the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran.
Washington has repeatedly signaled its disregard for international law: Obama’s drone strikes on US citizens in 2011; Trump’s killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020; the January kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro and “First Combatant” Cilia Flores; and on February 28, the murder of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In short, the US-led empire has demonstrated its readiness to capriciously employ lethal force whenever deemed expedient—with confidence that it will face few immediate consequences from the international community.
Oil markets and the timing of war
The US-Israeli attack on Iran of February 28 was anticipated. Iran’s Defense Minister Aziz Nasirzadeh and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi both warned of an imminent strike. Nasirzadeh was killed in the attack, while Araghchi survived. Israeli officials had earlier described previous attacks as “only the beginning,” while President Trump publicly acknowledged that a strike “could very well happen.”
Energy markets had also been anticipating escalation. Official agencies, market commentary, and the corporate press repeatedly warned about potential oil supply disruption, especially via the Strait of Hormuz chokepoint. Oil market indicators reflected these concerns, with oil prices surging in the days preceding the attack.
For years US policymakers had explicitly linked Iran sanctions to oil-market management. Foreshadowing the present escalation, the US announced in 2019 that ending Iranian oil waivers was intended to drive Iran’s exports to zero, while coordinating with major producers to keep global markets “well supplied.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo based the pace of reducing Iranian oil exports on “market conditions.”
At the same time, US officials openly discussed Venezuela’s vast oil resources as strategically significant. This convergence suggests that Venezuelan oil capacity played a role—at least indirectly—in the timing of Washington’s Iran policy.
Oil-market stability therefore acted as a timing constraint on Washington’s Iran policy. In this context, Venezuelan oil assets could potentially be an offset option to buffer the impact of supply disruptions in the Middle East. It was expedient for the US to stabilize the Venezuelan oil supply prior to upending the Iranian one.
Thus, Washington’s Venezuela strategy was in part to secure oil assets to cushion markets. The same senior personnel and “maximum pressure” logic applied to both countries. Elliott Abrams, for example, held roles relating to both Iran and Venezuela during the first Trump administration. US interdictions of Iranian petroleum shipments to Venezuela in 2020 further illustrated how the two sanctions theaters intersected.
At the same time, Venezuelan oil was only one factor. Washington had already identified Saudi and Emirati production capacity as critical to maintaining global supply should Iranian exports disappear. Restoring Venezuela’s oil infrastructure to former levels will take time. So US intervention there may mainly serve a psychological purpose—helping calm markets during the Middle Eastern conflict.
Venezuela’s resilience
Despite the January 3 seizure of President Maduro, Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution survived the decapitation with a seamless continuation of leadership under interim President Delcy Rodríguez. This outcome compelled the US to negotiate rather than outright conquer—as they did in Iraq and Libya and are attempting to do in Iran. Still, the strategic balance of power is heavily titled in Washington’s favor.
So far Venezuela has avoided Iran’s fate: an ever mounting death toll, massive infrastructure devastation, widespread destruction of cultural institutions, and the assassination of top political, religious, and military figures. The US president has even floated the threat to “wipe them [Iran] off the face of this Earth.” The same USS Gerald R. Ford—the world’s most technically advanced aircraft carrier—was part of the January 3 attack on Venezuela and is now deployed off the coast of Iran.
Against this backdrop, President Rodríguez received the CIA director, cabinet-level energy and interior secretaries, the commander of US Southern Command, and the US diplomatic envoy. On March 5, Washington and Caracas announced an agreement to reestablish diplomatic and consular relations.
Venezuela’s new Organic Hydrocarbons Law reflects changing conditions since the original legislation was enacted a quarter of a century ago. Higher cost structures for heavy and extra-heavy crude require major investments, while Venezuela’s ability to attract foreign capital has been strangled by US sanctions.
The new law preserves state ownership of PDVSA and majority state ownership in joint ventures. In contrast, opposition politician María Corina Machado’s “Venezuela, Land of Grace” program would privatize it all.
An ephemeral détente
But make no mistake—the ultimate goal of the empire remains regime change. Washington’s kidnapping of President Maduro was intended to demonstrate the empire’s dominance. Yet it also revealed its limits: the durability of the Bolivarian Revolution and the reality that even great powers must sometimes negotiate with governments they oppose.
As Venezuelan oil analyst Franco Vielma observed, the country’s leadership has developed “creative resilience, strategic prudence, and pragmatic flexibility.”
“They have their strategy, and we have ours,” said Venezuelan President Rodríguez. The contest between imperial domination and national self-determination therefore continues.
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When the Cruelty Is the Point, What Is Left? Radical Empathy
Radical Empathy must be fierce, stubborn, creative, persistent. We must hold on to each other, build community, be willing to take risks and accept consequences. Seek alternatives.
Mar 08, 2026
We always knew that humans could be monsters. We knew about Nazi Germany. We knew about the European slave trade, and about Jim Crow and its ritual lynchings. We knew about Europe’s genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and about the cruelty of European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and across the world. We knew about the genocidal wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.
But we also knew about the other end of the spectrum: the people in Europe who hid escaping Jews in their attics. The abolitionists, the Underground Railroad. The nonviolent movement in India that freed millions from British colonization. The pacifists who went to prison in refusal to kill. The Suffragettes; the labor movement; the civil rights movement; South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement; the liberation movements in South America, Africa, and Asia; the Western anti-war movements that finally brought the horrific US-sponsored wars in Southeast Asia to an end.
Somehow, we (or perhaps I should just say I) saw these opposing forces as continuous struggles, continuous choices, continuous needs to resist, build alternatives, create community, connect. A flux with, more or less, equal chances of success if we just kept going. Somehow, we also held a common belief, especially following the traumas of World War II, that there were universal human values, that we as ‘humanity’ could name them and subscribe to them, and that they could protect us from the evils that haunted our world. This seemed to give us space to act for the good, the just, the value of the universality of human rights.
Today, I’m not so sure of that.
There is no time to waste, no neutral space "in the middle." Clearly, in our own innocence, we have not taken seriously enough the depraved power of greed and cruelty, nor understood how far evil has reached. They have grabbed it all… almost.
Like so many others, I am unable to ignore the news about the latest horrific war, launched by the US and Israel against Iran, also unable to ignore the Epstein files and the revelations of the systemic corruption, the evil—no other word for it—that is built into the structures of power that rule not only the US, but the entire "Western" world and all that it dominates, while pretending to represent "democracy" and "human rights."
And the direct connection of these forces to the most evil, or at least the most visibly evil, disaster of our current period: the ongoing genocide in Gaza. And the connection of that genocide with the global arms trade, the US-UK-EU-Israel weapons and surveillance deals. The establishment of concentration camps in Albania for refugees seeking safety in Europe, the cyber-technology that identifies desperate people at the EU border in Eastern Europe by the warmth of their bodies, and sics Frontex attack dogs on them.
"The cruelty is the point." I’ve read this so many times about Israel’s policies and practices toward Palestinians, so extreme in Gaza, only slightly less so in the West Bank and Jerusalem. Children shot in the head, chest, genitals—target practice for Israel Defense Forces soldiers. TikTok videos making fun of Palestinian mothers grieving for their murdered babies. Israeli soldiers blowing up hospitals, universities, schools, refugee camps, and then sharing this online as if they are party jokes. Even a so-called "humanitarian aid program," luring starving people with food, and then shooting them as they desperately scrounge for a pack of flour or rice.
"The cruelty is the point."
And now the back story is revealed: Epstein’s circle of powerful white men, linked to child trafficking, rape, torture of the most defenseless, the most innocent, the least resilient. Meanwhile, these men run the most powerful countries in the world, lead the international banking establishment, steal resources from the citizenry, protect each other, trade off deals, influence, and wealth: "the Epstein class," as it is now being called. Within this cabal of evildoers are the so-called "trans-humanists," wishing to leverage their power to give themselves eternal life—while meanwhile calling for the killing of "all the poor people."
Look at them.
Blank, empty eyes. Stiff bodies. Angry faces. Immature, not as innocent children, but as confused, grown-up boys who never learned the most important lessons, who think they’re powerful because they have a lot of money. People who have understood nothing of the essence of life, people who have probably never held a baby in their arms, never grown a garden or helped a neighbor, never walked through a forest in wonder. Rich kids with simple, underdeveloped spirits, lured by superficial values and massive monetary wealth, now imagining their own eternal longevity. Men coming from loveless backgrounds, who, in our societies dominated by competition, individualism, and greed, have come to own the Earth’s resources and rule our world. (Mostly white) men, compensating for their own moral voids with fantasies of unlimited power, fueled by cruelty.
It is easy to trace the origins of this evil: oppressive medieval Christianity, white European supremacy, patriarchy built on the violent domination of women, greed and vacuous cruelty. Domination through violence and fear of violence.
The cruelty is the point.
Well, guess what. There are other forces alive in today’s world. Decades of resistance to domination and colonialism, the learnings of movements across the Global South, the freedom that Western hegemony for a few decades inadvertently released on its majority population, and access through social media to some of the reality of the actual horrors perpetrated in our names have together led to a worldwide awakening to fundamental injustices, and a worldwide longing for a livable, connected, survivable future.
How to capture this reality, how to describe the alternative to the evil cruelty that so dominates the stories of our time?
Let’s consider the idea of Radical Empathy, which, I believe, is our only hope.
What is Radical Empathy? We know these two words but, together, what do they mean?
Empathy is the ability to feel what the other feels, not the "sympathy" of feeling sorry for someone, but the ability to identify with the feelings of the other, to engage with those feelings as one’s own. To connect with other people, with other living beings, to connect with the planet and all life on it. Perhaps we can describe empathy as a mix of compassion, identification, and solidarity.
And radical means going to the roots, going all the way to the source. Radical has often been interpreted simply as extreme, but that does not do the concept justice. Radical means rooted, grounded, solid, strong.
Combine these two, and see here a powerful concept to help us resist the cruelty and evil now dominating our airwaves, threatening the future of all human and other life on our beautiful planet, threatening the planet itself.
Radical Empathy must be fierce, stubborn, creative, persistent. We must hold on to each other, build community, be willing to take risks and accept consequences. Seek alternatives. Stand in solidarity with all who resist oppression and the violence of power and greed.
We must hold and nurture our sense of humor: not joke telling, but the ability to see oneself in perspective, gently; the ability to use our creativity and the power of the unexpected to flip the story, turn reality around and move it in another direction. We must have the courage to stand up to unjust power, take the risks, and accept the consequences.
And we artists must nurture artistic bravery, using the power of the arts to tell truth, to build community, to turn our capacity for Radical Empathy into a force for good.
There is no time to waste, no neutral space "in the middle." Clearly, in our own innocence, we have not taken seriously enough the depraved power of greed and cruelty, nor understood how far evil has reached. They have grabbed it all… almost.
What they do not yet control: our spirits, our creativity, our ability to defy cruelty, to invent and reinvent Radical Empathy. And, thank you life, they do not control the youth of our world, who increasingly stand bravely against the organized cruelty of today’s powerful.
There is no guarantee that Radical Empathy will prevail, that the powers of connection, compassion, and love will be able to carry us to a place of repair, redress, reconnection, rebuilding, for all who have suffered from the unlimited cruelty of our time. There is no guarantee that our children and our grandchildren will grow and thrive in a world of compassion and connection.
But even if we do not succeed to turn the global tide, we will still be living our best possible lives as changemakers, planting seeds of change, creating islands of survival.
I remember, reading Joanna Macy, her admonition to embrace your grief. Look straight at the horrors, acknowledge the dangers, the threats to our world, the destruction, the cruelty.
And then look beyond, choose, and move together.
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America Runs on Care Work, and I’m Tired of Pretending Otherwise
The labor that sustains human life gets pushed to the margins, while the labor that scales software gets paraded on magazine covers.
Mar 08, 2026
A few days ago, I stared at a federal bar chart on my laptop and felt my stomach drop. I started asking people a party-trick question: What’s the biggest occupation in America? Almost everyone guessed something visible: teachers, retail, fast food, office work. That’s what our culture trains us to notice.
Then I pulled up the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) “largest occupations” data, and the answer was sitting there in plain English: Home Health and Personal Care Aides, 3,988,140 people.
I’m not reading that as an abstract statistic but something I see daily through my work in running CareYaya, a social enterprise that helps families find affordable in-home care support. I hear the voices behind those numbers every day: the exhausted daughter trying to keep her job, the older man determined to stay in his own house, the care aide who shows up anyway even when her own life is fraying.
What hit me wasn’t just the size of the workforce, but the silence with which society treats caregivers.
Care work sits at the intersection of everything America avoids looking at directly: aging, disability, dependence, death, and the truth that every “independent” adult is one accident, cancer, or dementia diagnosis away from needing help.
In a country that can’t stop talking about “the economy,” I rarely see the economy described the way it actually functions at street level. I see caregivers keeping older adults safe so that family members can work, so the bills get paid, so other industries keep humming. I see care work acting like the hidden scaffolding under everything else.
And, I see how quickly that scaffolding gets treated as disposable labor.
When I talk to families, they often whisper about their difficulties getting care support almost like they’re confessing a moral failure. “We’re trying,” they tell me, as if the need for help is some private weakness instead of a predictable part of aging or serious illness. When I talk to care aides, they talk about the stress from the care work. They talk about rushing between clients. They talk about loving the work and sometimes still not being able to make rent.
PHI’s snapshot of the direct care workforce puts numbers to what I keep hearing, that median annual earnings for direct care workers were just $25,015. I read that figure and think about what it really means in 2026 America: The largest job category in the nation is, effectively, a low-wage backbone.
I also think about who gets stuck holding the bag. Care work is still treated as “women’s work” in the cultural imagination, and that bias leaks into policy, pay, and prestige. I watch the same pattern repeat: The labor that sustains human life gets pushed to the margins, while the labor that scales software gets paraded on magazine covers.
What makes me angrier is that this isn’t a small sector we can ignore until later. The BLS projects 17% growth from 2024 to 2034 for home health and personal care aides, with about 765,800 openings each year on average. This is not a “future” problem but rather a present problem that is going to grow much worse, faster.
And yet I keep watching public conversations drift toward fantasy. I hear endless speculation about AI replacing workers, while the largest workforce in America can’t even get a stable ladder, a living wage, or basic respect. I hear investors pitch “aging tech” like it’s a consumer gadget category, while the core issue is whether a real human being can afford to do this work and stay in it.
I don’t think this is an accident, but rather, a choice embedded in our system.
Care work sits at the intersection of everything America avoids looking at directly: aging, disability, dependence, death, and the truth that every “independent” adult is one accident, cancer, or dementia diagnosis away from needing help. So we do what societies often do with uncomfortable truths. We outsource them, we underpay them, and we call them “personal responsibility.”
Even the funding structure says it all. Medicaid is the main payer of long-term services and supports in the US, and a recent Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services brief says so plainly: “Medicaid is the largest payer for long-term services and supports (LTSS) in the United States.” I read that line and think about the whiplash families face when they confront a vast public health need paired with political rhetoric that treats caregivers and recipients like line items to be squeezed.
So when I’m asked what to do, I start with a moral stance and then I get practical.
I want a country that pays the people who keep elders safe, like they truly matter. I want Medicaid rates and payment models that stop forcing providers into churn, and stop forcing workers into poverty. I want training and advancement pathways for care workers, and I want the caregiving workforce to have real power: bargaining power, scheduling power, and dignity at work.
I also want us to stop acting surprised when the care workforce pipeline breaks. If the biggest job in America is care, then the “care crisis” isn’t a niche issue, but a core labor rights issue; a public investment issue; and an economic issue that’s as critical as housing, wages, and healthcare.
When I look back at that BLS bar chart, I don’t see a pop-quiz type question anymore. I see millions of workers holding up millions of families. I see the work that makes the rest of American life possible.
And I can’t unsee the insult of how little we talk about it.
If I want anything from readers, it’s this: I want you to say the name of the job out loud, and then demand that we build an economy that treats it as essential, because it is.
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