Splinter: Trump’s Oil Inflation Is More Class Warfare

“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” posted President Trump on March 12th, less than two weeks into a three-plus month war and counting that has produced the largest energy shock in history. This week, the CPI report for April came out, and it revealed that inflation is now outpacing wages. This is how the United States “makes a lot of money,” through Americans paying higher prices to multinational corporations. This recent uptick in the chart below is what class warfare from one sect of the financial elites backing Trump looks like.

Inflation is rising faster than wages, putting Americans under growing financial pressure for the first time in about three years.

Consumer prices climbed 3.8% over the past year, while wages rose just 3.6%, meaning many workers are losing purchasing power. #EconSky #Inflation

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— Sean Brodrick (@seanbrodrick.bsky.social) May 13, 2026 at 1:27 PM

Oil is directly tied to inflation because it is the most important commodity on the planet, and the 1970s agreement with Middle Eastern producers to purchase oil in dollars has undergirded the last half-century of fiat money that has inflated the global economy to unprecedented degrees. Oil is the energy that fuels trillions upon trillions of dollars of GDP around the world and fills the coffers of the mega-corporations gobbling up everything within their reach. The energy that powers homes and businesses which create economic value using products created with oil. It is embedded into every fiber of our economy, and when oil prices go up, so does the price of everything that uses oil as an input—namely, everything. 

Amidst the highest inflation in three years, BP’s first-quarter profit was $3.2 billion, the largest since 2023 for the formerly named British Petroleum. “The world’s top 100 oil and gas companies banked more than $30 million every hour in unearned profit in the first month of the US-Israeli war in Iran,” wrote the Guardian. They note that the “analysis uses data from a leading intelligence provider, Rystad Energy, analysed by Global Witness,” and it found bthat Saudi Arabia’s state-owned “Aramco is by far the biggest winner, estimated to make a war profit of $25.5 billion in 2026 if the oil price averages $100.” What a victory Trump has won for Americans!

But Saudi Arabia winning does help some factions in America, while the vast majority of the rest of the country must literally pay for it. Defense contractors benefit from the special relationship between Saudi Aramco’s oil executives and our government which leads to weapons sales that ensure control over their oil fields, and a whole network of evil sprawls out from an agreement around a form of energy choking the world to death. It is why the West established Israel as a forward operating outpost in this oil-rich region. Saudi Arabia has been one of the leaders for decades in blocking international climate action, and their entire strategy is to leverage their oil wealth and join this coalition of capital funding the GOP and conservative parties across the West, opposing any kind of progress that does not enrich their financial benefactors. It is not at all hyperbolic to state that some capitalists are setting the world ablaze for profit, then looting modern-day Rome while it burns. 

The victims of the class war are clear, ranging from the colonized Global South suffering the most from these oil and fertilizer shocks to consumers around the Western world; including many Americans who voted for the tyranny now being imposed upon them. A Farm Bureau survey last month found that 70% of U.S. farmers can’t afford all the fertilizer they need, and outgoing Nebraska Republican Representative Don Bacon said Nebraska and Iowa were experiencing a “recession economy” last year.

Trump started this war at basically the worst possible time for the northern hemisphere, jacking up fertilizer prices right as the planting season began. He has been one of the worst presidents in history for farmers, and he was the first time around as his trade war led to a multi-billion-dollar farmer bailout–but this is why the architects of the class war create the culture war. As George Carlin correctly said in his famed American Dream bit, the “real owners” of this country “don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table to figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.”

Nearly six in ten farmers report worsening finances, and 2025 saw a 46% increase in farm bankruptcies. They were already getting annihilated by Trump’s trade war, but now the dual oil and fertilizer shocks are pushing many farms to the brink. But hey, U.S. energy companies are making lots of money, so who cares? Trump certainly doesn’t, proudly admitting recently that he doesn’t think about the average Americans’ finances. He’s too focused on his ballroom of bribes. 

And while few constituencies have been hit harder financially than farmers have under Trump, it’s not like the bulk of the rest of us working desk and service jobs are all doing great. We get hit as consumers. We need to pay to heat or cool our homes and then for gas to drive us to work where we pay for lunch that gets packaged in plastic containers whose price is skyrocketing, then we stop working in the afternoon and browse the web and shop for an array of items whose prices were going up before Trump and Netanyahu started this idiotic war to embolden Iran’s hardliners and wreck the global economy. Then on the way home we have to stop and pick up groceries to make dinner because burrito taxis aren’t subsidized by Silicon Valley magic ZIRP money anymore, but thanks to Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend’s war on farmers, all of us now pay 44% more for fresh vegetables than we did three months ago. 

But war is good business for many major political donors. Not only have the oil companies seen a windfall thanks to high oil prices, but the big banks have profited as well. JP Morgan’s trading arm reported a record $11.6 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2026, and the BBC noted that the “rest of the ‘Big Six’ banks – which includes Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo, as well as JP Morgan…reported $47.7 billion in profits for the first three months of 2026.”

Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrop Grumman all reported record order backlogs at the end of the first quarter. This makes sense given that America’s self-proclaimed Secretary of War, Dudebro McDaydrink, wasted years of munitions in the early days of the war not accomplishing his goals, and it will take a very long time and a lot of money to refill our inventory. Defense contractors have been perhaps the hottest non-AI trade on Wall Street since Trump came into office, exemplified by Palantir trading at a preposterous valuation around 100 times sales, with its stock rising over 100% since April of last year.

This is all class war. The climate crisis is accelerating. The entire western United States is experiencing record drought and heat while hurricanes swallow more and more of the eastern swath of the country. Efforts to combat the climate crisis causing trillions in damage for everyday Americans are squashed by a multinational coalition of financial interests trying to maintain a leech-like status quo as they invest in sprawling surveillance apparatuses like Palantir. Meanwhile, home insurance rapidly becomes a relic of the past in climate impacted areas like Florida and ensures that the only people who can buy houses in these regions are those with the cash to purchase them outright. Capital continues to reap record profits as stock markets reach all-time highs, all while inflation now outpaces wages and the bond market pushes interest rates up around the world, something that is bad for debtors but good for people with large piles of cash. The system is set up so that no matter where you spend your money, it ultimately goes into a select few elite’s pockets.

That is the point of capitalism, not to deliver the quality goods and services that people want, just to provide enough of what they need to get them to fork over their cash, or to convince Americans to further tap into our record $1.25 trillion in credit card bills. Capitalism is not the simple act of buying and selling goods as its know-nothing adherents portray it to be. It is an inherently extractive enterprise run by capitalists who appoint executives whose legally-mandated job is to make shareholders more money tomorrow than they made them today, and the natural consolidation that takes place in a system whose god is profit maximization has led us to a truly apocalyptic moment where a cabal of severely deranged billionaires have functionally overthrown the American government and now wield the power of Kings.

Much of the future climate hellscape is already locked-in for our children, grandchildren and their children. A conscious choice by the capitalist class to sacrifice their children’s future to embolden their own gluttony in the present. One can only hope that these people believe in hell, and that deep down they all know what awaits them when mankind is finally freed from their deathgrip on society. Luigi Mangione was a shocking moment that told them they will not be missed–quite the opposite.

But like all wars, the class war is messy, and not as straightforward as those rich folks over there versus everyone with a net worth under whatever figure you want to pull out of a hat. Power is malleable to the constraints of the present, and a class war can never maintain solidarity at the top forever, because greed is the only animating principle of the capitalist class, and their interests will inevitably come into conflict. This is why movements rooted in solidarity have won class wars waged by elites throughout history, because they have a longer-term view than just what they can grab within their reach tomorrow, other than guillotines. Oil companies may be making record profits right now, but the people in them who look past next quarter’s profits do not see this as a good thing, in part because American shale companies are over the moon, hoping they can take some power away from these multinational corporations with heavily impacted and increasingly degrading overseas operations.

E&E News by Politico spoke to Mark Jones, political science fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute, and he highlighted how this war is not actually in oil and gas’ long-term interests. “Oil companies operating solely in the United States will get pure short-term profit from the spike in prices, but large international companies may have to shut down assets they’re operating in the Persian Gulf,” wrote E&E News. “While the supply shock afflicting Southeast Asia and Europe could also persuade countries to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, Jones said.”

China is the poster child for this pivot from fossil fuels to the “Age of Electricity,” according to the International Energy Agency’s latest hopeful report that found widespread advancements in sustainable energy outside America. Solar power has become a powerhouse in the global energy industry, and the basic math of its dwindling cost structure is making it a no-brainer for countries who would like to ensure that they don’t have to start rationing energy amidst a huge spike in inflation just because Jared Kushner yet again could not find a way to bring peace to the Middle East as an increasingly unhinged Israel bombs everything it can.

And clean energy has been one of the big winners in the equity markets too. Florida-based NextEra energy has seen its shares rise over 17% this year, and the UK’s Octopus Energy told the BBC that the war had caused a “huge jolt” in solar panel and heat pump sales. Clean energy has a hippie reputation in our rabidly superficial American politics, but it is rapidly becoming big business. It speaks to the failure of imagination by this era’s elites that they did not seek to monopolize the inevitable global energy transition like they have everything else, and now are getting left behind by the ingenuity of China taking over the electrified world outside our Hermit Kingdom for extractive and revanchist capital who dream to drag America back to its days of slave labor.

Capitalism is class war. It is a system that will sacrifice anyone and anything at the altar of profit maximization, and everything in between that end is a means they will spend millions in PR trying to justify. It is not a coincidence that capitalism only existed in small pockets of the globe until the rise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade provided it with an inhuman and exploitative vehicle to take its unsustainable ideas global. As any person who has ever seen a balance sheet could tell you, quite often labor is a business’s largest cost, so a great way to maximize profits is to lower costs as close to zero as you can. This is the short story of the destruction of unions in America over the last century, and it is why the 13th amendment “banning” slavery has a loophole so large you can drive an entire prison industrial complex through it. Louisiana has never really abandoned its status as one of the world’s chief slave colonies.

Trump is the tool the capitalists who led the globe to this deteriorated state have wielded, whipping up xenophobic spirit animals that have inhabited the American public since the days of the Alien and Sedition Acts. This country began as a compromise between slave owners and slave financiers, and while those forces of capital have changed with the times, our Constitution which empowers them has not. Trump is a uniquely lawless figure in American history, but he could not have created this level of destruction without the capitalist class hollowing out America’s institutions first. The oil inflation we will all experience for the foreseeable future is just another stage in this never-ending extractive spiral of America’s capitalist chickens coming home to roost. Many people and businesses will lose their livelihoods in the coming months as our modern Gilded Age accelerates, sacrificed at the altar of a dwindling cabal of capital choosing to destroy the world for their financial benefit.