GLOBAL CHAOS AS TRUMP’S IRAN WAR SENDS MARKETS DIVING. President Donald Trump’s unprovoked and unconstitutional war against Iran is sending shockwaves across the global economy in the form of skyrocketing oil prices and diving financial markets, Brad Reed noted at Common Dreams (3/9).
The prices of both Brent crude oil and WTI crude oil futures on March 9, the 10th day since Trump ordered the attack on Iran, surged past $100 per barrel, as countries across the Middle East announced production cuts in the wake of chaos and destruction caused by the Iran war.
The impact of the price surge on the US stock market was immediate, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average opened Monday trading down by more than 600 points, while the Nasdaq dropped by 300 points.
According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, both Iraq and Kuwait have announced oil production curbs because they have been unable to ship their supply through the Strait of Hormuz and have thus run out of space to store excess petroleum.
JPMorgan Chase analyst Natasha Kaneva noted to the Journal that this is the first time in recorded history that the Strait of Hormuz has ever been completely closed off for shipping, and warned the economic consequences would be severe.
“To me, it was not just the worst-case scenario,” Kaneva said of the strait’s closing. “It was an unthinkable scenario.”
The Journal wrote that Trump’s decision to launch a war with Iran has already sparked “the most severe energy crisis since the 1970s,” which is now “threatening the global economy.”
Petroleum industry analyst Patrick De Haan wrote in a March 9 analysis that US drivers should expect to feel the impact of this oil shock in the coming days.
“Gasoline prices in many states could climb another 20 to 50 cents per gallon this week, with price-cycling markets potentially seeing increases as early as today,” De Haan projected. “Diesel may rise even more sharply, with increases of 35 to 75 cents per gallon possible as global distillate markets react.”
In a March 9 analysis posted on his Substack page, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman dove into the logistics of stopping and restarting oil production, and argued that the impact of the strait’s closure will grow significantly as time goes on.
“As the Strait remains closed, producers are shutting down, and this isn’t like turning off a tap that can be quickly restarted,” Krugman explained. “There’s apparently a real nonlinearity here: a two-week closure of the Strait has much more than twice the adverse impact on global oil supply as a one-week closure. If this goes on for multiple weeks... oil prices, which retreated slightly off their highs early this morning, could go much higher.”
Krugman said that the shock was not yet bad enough to make an economic crisis inevitable because the US is much less dependent on oil than it was in the 1970s.
Nonetheless, Krugman cautioned, “the situation is scary.”
Punchbowl News noted that Trump has not been helping his party by expressing indifference bordering on hostility to Americans’ concerns about how his war will impact their personal finances.
“Short term oil prices, which will drop rapidly when the destruction of the Iran nuclear threat is over, is a very small price to pay for U.S.A., and World, Safety and Peace,” Trump wrote in a March 8 Truth Social post. “ONLY FOOLS WOULD THINK DIFFERENTLY!”
TRUMP’S ‘SLAUGHTER AT SEA’ CONTINUES, AS US MILITARY KILLS 6 MORE IN EASTERN PACIFIC. With the Trump administration’s unprovoked war on Iran spiraling out of control, sending oil prices skyrocketing and leading to war crimes allegations against the US, the public’s attention has largely shifted away from the White House’s bombings of boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean—but the killings of six men on March 8 made clear that the administration has no intention of ending its deadly attacks on boats it claims, without providing evidence, are involved in drug trafficking, Julia Conley noted at Common Dreams (3/9).
US Southern Command said in a social media post Sunday evening that, at the direction of Gen. Francis Donovan, it had struck a vessel “operated by designated terrorist organizations.”
The announcement echoed previous communications about lethal boat strikes since last September, claiming that the vessel “was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” but citing no evidence the US forces used to make that determination.
The bombing was the 42nd strike carried out by the Trump administration in six months, according to Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America.
The New York Times reported that at least 156 people have been killed in the boat strikes, while Isacson placed the number at 158. He emphasized that the victims’ “guilt for a noncapital crime” remains unknown.
Drug trafficking in the Latin America region has typically been treated as a criminal offense, with US law enforcement agencies sometimes working with the Coast Guard to intercept boats suspected of carrying illicit substances to the US, arresting those on board, and confiscating the drugs.
Under President Trump’s second administration, the Department of Defense has insisted boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific pose an imminent threat to the US and that an influx of drugs from Latin America qualifies as an attack on US soil.
The deadly bombings the Pentagon has carried out as a result have led legal experts to accuse Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others involved in the strikes of war crimes and murder.
Trump claimed to Congress in October that the US is in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels in Venezuela, but Congress has not authorized attacks on boats or inside Venezuela.
On March 13, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights was scheduled to hold its first-ever hearing on the legality of the US boat strikes, following a push for action from human rights groups.
‘WHILE NO ONE’S LOOKING,’ TRUMP DOJ SETTLES ANTITRUST CASE WITH LIVE NATION-TICKETMASTER. The Trump Justice Department on March 9 reportedly reached a tentative deal with Live Nation—the owner of Ticketmaster—to settle a Biden-era antitrust lawsuit that aimed to break up the company, accusing it of illegally monopolizing the live entertainment industry, Jake Johnson noted at Common Dreams (3/9).
News of the settlement, which would not require a breakup of Live Nation, came days after the trial began, with a lawyer for the Trump Justice Department’s decimated antitrust division saying last week that the company abuses its market power and earns its massive profits “through illegal action.” The antitrust division’s counsel in the case, David Dahlquist, was apparently not made aware of the settlement until he appeared in court March 9.
Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project, said it is “highly unorthodox for the Justice Department’s lead litigator to be left out of the loop on the settlement and highly prejudicial to the jury’s deliberations.”
“According to every observer, this trial was already going well for the Justice Department and states,” said Hepner. “They had just won summary judgment and a jury had already heard evidence of Live Nation’s longstanding pattern of retaliation against venues who had attempted to open the market to competition. State AGs are once again left to clean up the mess left by this Administration’s incompetence.”
Under the settlement, which must be approved by a judge, Live Nation “would pay a fine of up to $280 million and divest itself of at least 13 amphitheaters across the country as it opens up its ticketing processes so that competitors can share in the sale of tickets,” the Associated Press reported.
The National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), a trade group representing thousands of independent live entertainment venues, festivals, and promoters, noted in a statement that the reported $280 million settlement amount “is the equivalent of four days of [Live Nation’s] 2025 revenue, which means they could potentially make it back by this Friday.”
“The reported settlement does not appear to include any specific and explicit protections for fans, artists, or independent venues and festivals,” said Stephen Parker, NIVA’s executive director. “Reported details also indicate that ticket resale platforms could be further empowered through new requirements for Ticketmaster to host their listings, which would likely exacerbate the price gouging potential for predatory resellers and the platforms that serve them.”
“If these facts are true,” Parker added, “NIVA views this as a failure of the justice system.”
The antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation was filed in 2024 after a nearly two-year investigation launched amid mounting public outrage aimed at Ticketmaster, spurred in part by its botched presale of Taylor Swift concert tickets in 2022. Then-President Joe Biden’s Justice Department filed the complaint in partnership with 30 state attorneys general, most of whom vowed to continue the fight without the Trump administration’s support.
“For years, Live Nation has made enormous profits by exploiting its illegal monopoly and raising costs for shows,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James. “My office has led a bipartisan group of attorneys general in suing Live Nation for taking advantage of fans, venues, and artists, and we are committed to holding Live Nation accountable.”
The settlement deal comes weeks after Gail Slater, the former head of the Justice Department’s antitrust arm, was pushed out by DOJ leadership. Prior to Slater’s removal, Live Nation executives and lobbyists had reportedly been negotiating the terms of a possible settlement with senior Justice Department officials outside of the antitrust office, heightening corruption concerns.
Emily Peterson-Cassin, policy director at the Demand Progress Education Fund, said in a statement that “this settlement amounts to a slap on the wrist that tinkers around the edges of the real problem: Live Nation’s monopoly.”
‘’FBI HAS THE RECORDS’: 2020 ARIZONA AUDIT INFO SUBPOENAED. The FBI has served the Arizona State Senate a grand jury subpoena for voting records related to the 2020 presidential election in Maricopa County, Arizona, in the latest sign that the federal government is working to investigate an election that President Donald Trump lost more than five years ago, Brad Reed noted at Common Dreams (3/9).
As the New York Times reported March 9, the grand jury subpoena “was issued in recent days to the Arizona State Senate, which oversaw a sprawling but partisan audit of the vote result that was ordered by Senate Republicans in Maricopa County” months after Trump lost the 2020 race to former President Joe Biden.
Warren Petersen, the Republican president of the Arizona Senate, confirmed that he had received and complied with the subpoena, and revealed in a social media post that “the FBI has the records” related to the post-2020 audit.
As noted by MS NOW reporter Vaughn Hillyard, the audit in question was conducted by Cyber Ninjas, a now-defunct online security firm that confirmed Trump’s defeat in the Grand Canyon State.
“The Cyber Ninjas found that, in fact, Joe Biden had won the county, per their hand count, by 360 more votes than originally believed,” Hillyard explained.
The Trump administration’s subpoena of the audit records comes at the same time that it is demanding Democratic Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes hand over his state’s voter registration data.
As explained by the Brennan Center for Justice, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) is “seeking access to highly sensitive voter information, including partial Social Security numbers,” as part of its subpoena.
The Brennan Center also said it teamed up with the Campaign Legal Center to file a brief to oppose the Trump administration’s lawsuit against Arizona, which it described as “part of an unprecedented nationwide effort to force states to turn over private voter data.”
The FBI in January executed a search warrant at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operations Center that allowed federal agents to seize 2020 election ballots, tabulator tapes, digital data, and voter rolls.
Shortly after the raid, Fulton County Commissioner Mo Ivory predicted that this kind of operation would likely be spreading to other counties and states.
“Fulton County is right now the target,” Ivory said. “But it is coming to a place near you. This is the beginning of the chaos of 2026 that is about to ensue.”
TRUMP’S UNIQUELY UNPOPULAR WAR ON IRAN. You almost couldn’t design a more unpopular war. Not only do very few Americans support President Donald Trump’s attacks on Iran starting Feb. 28, but our chief ally in the ongoing conflict, Israel, also faces its lowest favorability in the U.S. in decades, Andrew Mangan reported at DailyKos (3/8).
Just 39% of Americans support Trump’s latest attacks on Iran, according to an average of 12 nonpartisan polls that Daily Kos collected. An average of 50% oppose the attacks, and 16% are unsure. (Those do not total 100% due to not all polls containing all response options.)
And there is reason to believe that support for the war is closer to its ceiling than its floor. A CNN/SSRS survey did not allow respondents to choose “unsure” as an option, and when forced to pick a side, 41% of Americans support the strikes, making for only a 1-percentage-point improvement from the average. Meanwhile, 59% oppose them—a 9-point jump over the average.
Historically, wars tend to begin with much higher levels of support. Just days after the U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003, Gallup found that 75% of Americans supported sending in troops. The same was true of the Afghanistan War (89% support in November 2001) and the Vietnam War (61% support in September 1965).
But as those wars dragged on and their financial burdens mounted alongside their casualties, domestic support dropped away. Just five years after the invasion of Iraq, Gallup recorded that 63% of Americans thought sending troops was a mistake. Even the Afghanistan War, started in response to the nation’s worst terrorist attack, hit net-negative support shortly before its end in 2021, after nearly 20 years of fighting.
Fear of starting a “forever war,” like the ones Trump campaigned against in 2024, has driven his administration to downplay how long the war on Iran might last.
“Four to five weeks,” Trump told The New York Times.
But most of the public isn’t buying that timetable. Just 25% of Americans think the war will be over in a matter of days or weeks, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll. That’s roughly the same share that thinks the U.S. will be embroiled in Trump’s Iran war for years (22%). Even the fact that 1 in 4 Americans say they’re “not sure” how long it will go on expresses pessimism about the campaign.
“We are just getting started,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, as if that was what the American public wanted to hear.
Trump has refused to rule out deploying ground troops to Iran, but if he did that, public opinion would likely sour even further. Just 24% of Americans support a hypothetical troop deployment, while 58% oppose it, a survey from the Angus Reid Institute found.
At the same time, it is easy to imagine Trump claiming premature victory in the near future, only for the conflict to carry on or metastasize, much like former President George W. Bush’s boast of “Mission Accomplished” just six weeks after the U.S. invaded Iraq. The war lasted for another 400 weeks.
WHY TRUMP BROKE HIS PROMISE TO MESS WITH TEXAS SENATE RACE. Republicans were breathing a little easier on March 4 after Donald Trump said he would intervene to end a bruising GOP runoff in the Texas Senate race.
Yet nearly a week later, Trump still hadn’t made good on his promise to endorse in the race and force the candidate he doesn’t pick to drop out. And a new poll from a Democratic super PAC shows Republicans will be in trouble in November no matter which GOP nominee emerges—which could keep Trump on the sidelines, Emily Singer reported at Daily Kos (3/9).
“Cornyn is radioactive with the MAGA base. Paxton has baggage. And James Talarico is leading,” Lauren French, spokeswoman for poll sponsor Senate Majority PAC, wrote in a post on X.
After neither Sen. John Cornyn nor Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton received at least 50% of the vote in the state’s March 3 Republican primary, Senate Republicans both publicly and privately lobbied Trump to endorse Cornyn, practically begging their Dear Leader to get involved and push Paxton out of the May 26 runoff election because they view him as the less electable candidate.
Anonymous Republicans told reporters that Trump would be backing Cornyn, whom establishment GOP leaders view as more in line with the Texas electorate.
However, the reports led prominent right-wing figures—including Trump’s eldest son—to go berserk about the possibility of the president picking Cornyn over MAGA darling Paxton. That possibly spooked an already hesitant Trump from getting involved in the GOP civil war playing out in the race.
On March 9, Democrats released an internal poll that found Talarico leading both Cornyn and Paxton in a November matchups.
“Public Policy Polling’s newest Texas survey finds no meaningful difference in electability between John Cornyn and Ken Paxton,” the PPP polling memo says, along with head-to-head findings that show Talarico leading both Cornyn (44% to 43%) and Paxton (47% to 45%).
The poll also found that Cornyn is more unpopular than scandal-tarred Paxton—who has been impeached, indicted, and had affairs with at least two women who were not his wife—eliminating the establishment Republican argument that Cornyn is more electable.
According to the poll, just 24% of Texas voters have a favorable view of Cornyn, while a slightly higher 30% have a favorable view of Paxton.
Cornyn’s approval rating is lower likely because Republican voters view him far more unfavorably than Paxton—yet another data point that could keep Trump from getting involved. The poll found just 38% of Trump voters view Cornyn favorably, while 55% view Paxton in the same light.
That data point alone could keep Trump on the sidelines, since he could view an endorsement as betraying his voters.
Trump, for his part, is close with Paxton, as he (unsuccessfully) aided in Trump’s illegal plot to overturn the 2020 election and has fought Trump’s culture war battles in the courts. Cornyn, on the other hand, said Trump should not have run again in the 2024 election and only endorsed Trump once it became clear that he was going to be the GOP nominee. Even a possibly dementia-ridden Trump is sure to remember that slight.
Even if Trump endorses Cornyn, Paxton said he wouldn’t heed Trump’s demand to drop out of the race, which at the end of the day would leave Republicans with the same ugly proxy war they were looking to avoid. And polling released ahead of the primary suggested that Trump’s endorsement may not even be enough to help Cornyn win.
Ultimately, it looks like Texas’ Senate race will be competitive. The national electoral environment looks to be increasingly hostile for Republicans as Trump has broken his campaign promises of lowering prices and keeping the country out of new foreign wars.
And Talarico—who has made his Christian faith a cornerstone of his campaign—is a uniquely intriguing Democratic candidate.
The PPP poll found that he has a positive favorability rating, with 41% of Texans viewing him favorably as opposed to the 35% who hold the opposite view, even as Republicans have hit him with attacks on his policy positions.
“These numbers suggest a close race regardless of who the GOP nominates,” the PPP memo stated. “The Texas Senate race will be highly competitive; driven by Talarico’s broad approval, and Cornyn and Paxton’s liabilities.”
REPUBLICAN SENATOR PULLS TRICK BY ANOINTING HIS SUCCESSOR. Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont) pulled a bait-and-switch on GOP primary voters March 4, withdrawing his name from the ballot minutes before the filing deadline and thus denying potential successors the chance to prepare to enter the race, Emily Singer noted at Daily Kos (3/5).
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Daines had coordinated with his successor of choice—Montana U.S. Attorney Kurt Alme—to ensure Alme was the only Republican on the ballot.
Even Donald Trump appeared to be in on the scheme. He immediately endorsed Alme in a post on Truth Social. “Kurt is exceptional, and I will be giving him, based on Steve’s strongest recommendation, my Complete and Total Endorsement,” Trump wrote.
The collusion led the political handicapping outlet InsideElections.com to recategorize the seat as more competitive, going from “Solid Republican” to “Likely Republican.”
Still, Montana’s Senate race remains a reach for Democrats.
Trump won the state by 20 points in 2024. That was too much for Sen. Jon Tester (D), to overcome. He lost to Tim Sheehy by 7 points.
However, former University of Montana President Seth Bodnar is running as an independent, and he seemingly has Tester’s backing. If a blue wave crashes across the 2026 midterms, then an open-seat race with bad blood on the Republican side could lead to problems for Trump’s party.
Ultimately, this is the second time in a week that Montana Republicans have tried to pull the wool over GOP voters’ eyes with last-minute retirements that have denied potential candidates the chance to gather the signatures to run.
Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana announced on Monday that he isn’t seeking reelection. He and Trump immediately backed right-wing radio host Aaron Flint to be his successor, a sign that there was collusion in this instance as well.
Of course, it’s incredibly hypocritical of Republicans to deny their voters a choice of nominees in races—something Trump is also trying to do in Texas with an allegedly forthcoming endorsement in the GOP primary runoff.
It was Trump himself who slammed then-President Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race and anoint then-Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor, calling it a “coup” and a “vicious, violent overthrow of a president.”
House Republicans even reprimanded Democratic Rep. Chuy García of Illinois for doing the very thing Daines just pulled.
It turns out that Trump and his party thinks it’s wrong for a politician to anoint a successor only when they are a Democrat.
Go figure.
THE ONLY REFUGEES LEGALLY SETTLED IN THE US SINCE OCTOBER WERE WHITE SOUTH AFRICANS. Not a single refugee who isn’t a White South African has been legally resettled in the United States since October, according to the State Department’s most recent arrivals report, Stephen Prager noted at Common Dreams (3/5).
The report, published in February, shows that from the start of October 2025 and the end of January 2026, just 1,651 people were admitted under the US Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP), which allows those fearing persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group to apply for refuge in the United States.
Aside from just three, every single one of them was from South Africa.
Three Afghan refugees were also reported to have been settled in Colorado in November. But since then, their admission has been indefinitely suspended, and those who have entered may be at risk of deportation.
During that same period a year earlier—the final months of the Biden administration—a total of 37,596 refugees arrived in the US, with the greatest numbers coming from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa.
The Trump administration dramatically curbed refugee admissions during its first year in power. On his first day back in office last January, President Donald Trump suspended USRAP processing, leaving around 600,000 people in the pipeline suddenly stranded, including roughly 10,000 who’d already booked flights.
Around 130,000 of those refugees had already been through the State Department’s meticulous and taxing vetting process, and were instead “left to languish in refugee camps around the world after being given the promise of safety and a new life in America,” as a group of Democrats in Congress put it.
The next month, however, Trump carved out an exception to the suspension exclusively for White South Africans, who he has falsely claimed face a “genocide,” and severe “discrimination” from land redistribution policies intended to correct extreme apartheid-era inequalities.
