War Profits Soar While Public Defenders Strike for Survival

The pattern is naked: capital feeds on war while the state starves the courts. In the second quarter, Shell's profits more than doubled on the back of soaring fossil-fuel prices driven by the Iran war. At the same time, the United States has merged its wars in Iran and Ukraine, opening a theater of conflict around the Caspian Sea. The energy giants win; the imperial project expands.

Eleven years ago, former President Jimmy Carter wrote that the United States is "just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence." The quarter just ended proves him right. While Shell's shareholders collect a war dividend, more than 500 public defender workers in New York City and Detroit have gone on strike against poverty wages, healthcare cuts and crushing caseloads. The people who defend the poor in court cannot afford to live on what the state pays them.

The connection is not abstract. Every dollar that flows to the merged war machine is a dollar denied to legal aid, to housing, to healthcare. The Caspian theater serves the same capital that profits from combustion and conflict. The oligarchy Carter named does not merely tolerate this transfer; it orchestrates it. Republicans hauled Anthony Fauci before a Senate hearing; Fauci was subpoenaed to appear at a Senate hearing into Covid-19. These are the noise that covers the signal: a ruling class that profits from combustion and conflict while the defenders of the indigent walk picket lines.

This is how power operates. It fuses energy profits to military expansion, then calls the resulting carnage geopolitics. It funds the war abroad by imposing austerity at home. The public defenders' strike is not a side show; it is the front line. They are refusing to subsidize Shell's quarter with their labor. The oligarchy has unlimited political bribery; the workers have only their withdrawal. The question is which side the rest of the left chooses to resource.