Letter: Stop turning gas prices into war propaganda

🎧 Gas Prices, War Propaganda & Who’s Really to Blame

Camas resident Tony Teso offers a reply to letter to the editor by Jonathan Hines

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are those of the author alone and may not reflect the editorial position of ClarkCountyToday.com

In his letter to the editor, Jonathan Hines wants working people in Washington to believe that the pain they feel at the gas pump is the fault of Iran, Obama, Biden, and Olympia — everybody except the oil companies, the war-makers, and the political class that keeps us chained to a fossil-fuel economy.

Tony Teso

This is not serious analysis. It is gas-pump demagogy.

Yes, Washington families are being squeezed. Yes, gas prices are outrageous. Yes, fuel taxes hit workers harder than the rich. But Hines takes a real affordability crisis and uses it to sell the oldest racket in American politics: blame a foreign enemy, demand more “strength,” and pretend militarized foreign policy will somehow make life cheaper for ordinary people.

It will not.

The idea that Trump “fixes” gas prices by escalating against Iran is absurd. If you threaten or restrict oil flows near the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz — one of the most important energy chokepoints on earth — you do not calm markets. You pour gasoline on them. Literally, in this case. Hines wants to blame “appeasement” for instability while cheering policies that make instability worse.

Then there is the tired claim that Obama and Biden “funded” Iran. This is the kind of line that sounds powerful until one looks at it for more than ten seconds. Much of the money in question was Iranian money frozen under sanctions, not bags of U.S. taxpayer cash handed over with a thank-you note. One can criticize U.S. diplomacy with Iran without inventing a cartoon version of it.

But the bigger fraud is this: Hines talks about “Washingtonian families” while offering them nothing but austerity at home and militarism abroad. No serious plan to reduce household energy dependence. No serious plan for public transit. No attack on oil-company profiteering. No demand for windfall-profit taxes. No plan to make working-class people whole. Just more sanctions, more war posturing, and a little anti-tax seasoning sprinkled on top.

This is how right-wing politics works. It finds a real wound, then points workers toward the wrong enemy.

The people gouging Washington families are not Iranian workers, not Iranian children, and not some abstract foreign villain. They are energy corporations, speculators, politicians, and state managers who have built a society where people must buy gas to survive — then act shocked when global conflict sends prices through the roof.

And yes, Washington’s fuel taxes are regressive. The working class should not be used as a revenue sponge. But let’s not pretend the answer is to gut climate policy while leaving oil monopolies untouched. That is not relief. That is surrender to the very system that created the crisis.

A serious affordability program would tax energy windfalls, provide direct rebates to working households, expand reliable public transit, lower utility burdens, and break the political power of fossil capital. It would also reject the fantasy that every international problem can be solved by blockade, bombing, sanctions, or chest-thumping about “strength.”

Hines says it is time to put Washington families first.

Fine. Then stop using Washington families as props for war propaganda.

Put workers first by lowering their real costs of living. Put families first by attacking profiteering. Put commuters first by giving them alternatives to endless oil dependency. And put peace first by refusing to make ordinary people pay every time the empire decides to discipline another country.

The gas pump is not a government ATM, as Hines says. But it is also not a podium for militarist nonsense. It is a daily reminder that working people are trapped between oil companies, regressive taxes, global instability, and politicians who would rather blame Tehran than confront capital.

That is the real crisis. And unlike Hines’s argument, it does not require a foreign enemy to make sense.

Tony Teso
Camas