I’m mashing political/economic concepts together to demonstrate how ideologies have long term consequences.

The creditor class have been subjugating nations and funding wars for centuries, kicking into high gear with the “enclosure laws”–policies that forced peasants off their land and into wage labor, resulting in the “primitive accumulation” beginnings of capitalism.

Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” opened up new ways in which to accumulate capital, a concept Naomi Klein has brought up to date with her Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. What’s key to understand is that the modern day “robber barons” don’t care how many ways of life are disrupted, or how much infrastructure is destroyed – they make fortunes rebuilding it in the most tasteless styles and for the most obscene purposes imaginable. (Think of Trump’s casinos or Trump Plaza). They don’t care how many workers or common people die, men, women, or children, because they regard us as inferior and dispensable. The Epstein Files provide a window into their depravity.

Since deindustrialisation, the US economy has been financialized, dominated by Wall Street, hedge funds and venture capitalists–the creditor class. This financial class operate as a shadow-government behind elected politicians. I’ve come to think of Wall Street as the beating heart of the deep state.

Their wealth depends on wholesale privatization of assets, usually at fire-sale prices after a disaster, one natural or manmade, as well as the wholesale indenture of individuals, households, companies and nations, to ensure a constant flow of income, in the form of compound interest, into their bank accounts.

The US/Israel attack on Iran should be viewed in this light: a manmade disaster with a geo-strategic purpose. BRICS and multipolarity, or even simply non-Western development, is viewed as a financial threat, reframed as a security threat. We see this constantly in the way the corporate media depicts it. And from the perspective of our feral elite’s narrow class interests, that’s not entirely wrong. Iran was outside the petrodollar, the US financial system and most egregiously selling oil to China for Yuan.

The US empire is based on control of energy flows and payments, and this is a desperate war to save the petrodollar. An energy powerhouse like Iran trading outside the petrodollar is the ultimate anathema, especially because the process is coupled with the BRICS drive towards setting up independent payment systems. Heterodox economist Michael Hudson says that the “long-term U.S. plan is to consolidate and weaponize its control over Middle Eastern oil, its transportation and the investment of its oil export revenues, and to use Israel and al Qaeda/ISIS as its client armies to block independent oil-producing countries from acting in their own sovereign interests.”

The Trump doctrine is not just a military campaign against Iran. It is a simultaneous resource-securing operation running across the entire Global South while the corporate media fixates on explosions and intercepts. It’s all about a bigger U.S. play: Control of strategic chokepoints, and of energy transit more generally, so as to deny China access to energy markets and so to curtail its growth.

Americans need to understand that democracy, human rights, or freedom have nothing to do with US foreign policy, while for a long time the spoils of empire have been accruing essentially only to the very top of the social and economic pyramid — to the oligarchy. Nowadays I would argue that it’s almost exclusively Wall Street, the military-industrial complex and the corporatocracy that benefit from the US’s endless wars and the dollar-centric system. Ordinary Americans have not benefited from it for a long time.

There has been much debate whether Israel or the US is calling the shots but I think it’s neither and both. There’s a transnational class of financial elite that operates above the national level that includes members from both countries as well as bankers from the City of London, EU etc. Indeed, there is an Epstein Class, a western deep state that maintains power over governments, flaunts the law, and manufactures reality due to the control of the corporate media narrative.

Pay attention to the economic indicators as the US/Israel attack proceeds. The oil and gas flows that are trapped in the Persian Gulf. The insurance market for tankers. The lack of fertilizer affecting agriculture. The stock markets of allied nations And, most importantly–the actions of the financial class that rules the world.