Stuff Fascists Like

Monday, March 9, 2026

Fascist Move of the Day

Lindsey Graham on Fox News: "We're gonna make a ton of money" from the Iran war — as 1,200 Iranians lie dead, oil hits $100, and weapons stocks soar.

Source: Common Dreams, March 9 2026

Historical Parallel

In 1934, Senator Gerald Nye of North Dakota opened hearings that would run for two years and become one of the most explosive investigations in US Senate history. The Nye Committee was trying to answer a question that had nagged Americans since the Armistice: why did we go to war in 1917? What they found was damning. Arms manufacturers — DuPont, Bethlehem Steel — and the Morgan banking house had made hundreds of millions of dollars from Allied war loans and weapons contracts. They had financial stakes in an Allied victory. They had lobbied for US entry. The committee called them "merchants of death." The public was so outraged that Congress passed the Neutrality Acts, designed to prevent the same thing from happening again.

The Nye Committee spent two years trying to prove, against fierce resistance, what Lindsey Graham said out loud on Fox News on Sunday morning.

Source: Wikipedia: Nye Committee · US Senate Historical Office — Merchants of Death

The Full Dispatch

On Day 9 of the US-Israel war on Iran, with more than 1,200 Iranians dead, oil surging past $100 a barrel, and the Pentagon estimating the war costs roughly $1 billion per day, Senator Lindsey Graham went on Fox News and hailed the profit potential. "We're gonna make a ton of money," he said. He also promised: "We're going to blow the hell out of these people." When asked about the enormous financial cost, he dismissed the figures and warned of "what comes in the next two weeks." A classified National Intelligence Council report found that even a large-scale assault is unlikely to oust Iran's entrenched government. Graham did not mention the report. He mentioned the money.

The Nye Committee investigation (1934–36) spent two years building a careful evidentiary case that arms manufacturers and financiers had a stake in WWI and pushed for US involvement. Senator Nye had to subpoena documents, interview executives under oath, and fight hostile witnesses to establish what is now on public record: that "merchants of death" shaped US war policy for profit. The findings caused such a national scandal that Congress passed neutrality legislation intended to prevent it ever happening again. None of it prevented WWII, but the moral outrage was real and widespread — because at the time, the proposition that the US went to war for money was considered monstrous and required proof.

Lindsey Graham required no subpoenas. He said it on morning television. The weapons contractors and LNG companies that stand to make tens of billions from the Iran war and its effect on global energy markets don't need to be exposed — their stock prices are already public. The difference between 1934 and 2026 is not the war profiteering. It's the inhibitions. Nye had to prove it was happening because people would have been horrified if it were true. Graham announced it because he has calculated, correctly, that no one will do anything about it.

Graham also called the war a "religious war that will determine the course of the Middle East for a thousand years." There is no stated objective. There is no timeline. There is no exit strategy. The White House has not ruled out a ground invasion. The intelligence community says the bombing won't achieve regime change. But it will, as Graham correctly notes, make someone a ton of money. The Nye Committee tried to prevent a world in which that sentence could be said out loud, in public, without consequence. We are now in that world.