Since late February, U.S. and Israeli forces have launched a brutal war on Iran, dropping over 30,000 bombs and killing more than 3,400 people. While they have claimed to only attack military targets, they have bombed whole neighborhoods, schools, and hospitals, reducing them to rubble and totally destabilizing the whole society. And despite so-called “ceasefires,” negotiations, and statements from Trump that deals may come soon, the war rages on and the U.S. continues to bomb Iran. At the same time, Israel continues its genocide of Palestinians, and has begun an invasion of southern Lebanon, fully backed by the U.S.
This war in Iran and continued military support for Israel has cost the U.S. military an estimated $1.2 billion every single day since it started, totaling over $72 billion so far. On top of this, Trump is now demanding a record $1.5 trillion for the military budget for next year!
The billions already spent on this war – and the trillions lined up for future wars – are coming straight out of our pockets, paid for by gutting our health care, closing our hospitals, and cutting programs millions of us depend on.
Trump’s budget signed last July cut $911 billion from Medicaid over ten years. Because of these cuts, an estimated 446 hospitals across the country that serve many Medicaid patients are at risk of closing or slashing services – hospitals that serve 6.6 million patients a year and employ over 275,000 health care workers, in communities that are mostly Black, Brown and poor.
Also, Trump’s budget ended health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act last year. For 22 million people, premiums more than doubled overnight, and now an estimated one third of people insured through the Affordable Care Act already had to cancel their health care coverage due to the excessive costs. Millions of these people are now going uninsured.
The damage of this war doesn’t stop inside Iran, the broader Middle East, or the U.S. In response to the attacks by the U.S. and Israel, Iran has restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway that one-fifth of the world’s oil and gas passes through every day. Global oil prices have soared more than 50%, along with the price of many other goods, from fertilizer to food. Workers everywhere are paying higher prices, and for working people in countries that depend on energy imported from the Middle East – countries across Southeast Asia, much of Africa, and parts of Latin America – the situation is much worse, and threatens to destabilize whole countries.
The government of the Philippines, for example, has declared a national state of emergency since March due to excessive prices, as they import an estimated 98% of their oil from the Middle East. They have been forced to ration energy, shorten the work week, and have forced universities to close and shift to remote learning as students cannot afford fuel to get to school and it is too expensive to keep the lights on. This is how the U.S.-Israeli war machine disrupts the lives of millions of people outside the Middle East, who have no part in any of this.
While this war imposes death and suffering on working people around the world, we see who is getting richer as a result. U.S. weapons manufactures have already made tens of billions of dollars from this war. The CEO of Lockheed Martin, a major U.S. weapons manufacturer, said that this war is “a golden opportunity right now.”
The oil companies and big banks are making record profits too. British Petroleum (BP) made $3.2 billion in profits from January through March; Shell made $6.9 billion in that time; and the big Wall Street banks made $47.7 billion in profit in that time. This is who wins from this war – the bosses, the billionaires, the military contractors, the oil companies, and the big banks.
This war exposes the real priorities of this insane system. The U.S., supported by Israel as a junior partner in the Middle East, is waging a war to further dominate the globe and is willing to risk the lives of tens of millions of people in the process. The only ones who’ve benefitted from this war are the billionaires and capitalists, those who use their control over the state to direct resources to wage wars abroad and use ICE to terrorize the population here, while slashing funds for programs we rely on.
We don’t have to accept any of this. Working people here and abroad have nothing to gain from this terrorist war. As we see the disruption to all of our lives and the world economy, as they cut all of our social services, just imagine what the money wasted on this war could have paid for. We have every reason to oppose this war in every way we can, and fight for a world that reflects the interests of working people, not the profits of a tiny class of billionaires who destroy our lives as they get richer.
