ARUN GUPTA, arun.indypendent@gmail.com, @arunindy
Journalist Gupta, who has been published by a variety of high profile outlets, wrote the piece “How U.S. Sanctions Torpedoed Kamala Harris,” just published by Jacobin.
[Russia said on Tuesday that Ukraine fired six U.S.-provided ATACM missiles into Russia’s Bryansk Oblast, and Russian President Vladimir Putin officially updated Russia’s nuclear doctrine.]
Gupta said today: “Allowing Ukraine to fire advanced U.S. weapons on Russian territory is not going to change the course of a losing war for Kiev …
“Kamala Harris lost because of the Ukraine War — but not for the reason you think. … Foremost, Biden’s decision to impose a broad array of sanctions on Russia in 2022″ did “not hamper Russia’s illegal invasion. Instead, they led to a Wall Street-fueled commodity bubble that sent inflation soaring. That turned the national economic mood sour as prices of gas and groceries soared, leading to Kamala Harris’s defeat against Donald Trump. Ironically, the sanctions and inflation will seal Ukraine’s defeat and loss of large swaths of territory if Trump imposes an unfair peace on them.”
Also see Gupta’s recent pieces on his Substack: “Harris lost because of Gas, Groceries, and Gaza. But the underlying reason was Ukraine” and his report on Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally.
Gupta says, “The White House slapped Russia with sanctions after it invaded Ukraine. Russia is one of the world’s pre-eminent producers of natural gas, crude oil, industrial metals, fertilizers, wheat, and seed oils. The sanctions wreaked havoc in global markets. Nine days after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, wheat contracts on the CBOT leaped 54 percent. In 11 days Brent crude oil futures skyrocketed to $139 a barrel. In three trading days nickel soared 270 percent on the London Metal Exchange. Fertilizer prices surged more than 30 percent in early 2022. The sanctions failed as Russia reoriented its economy toward China and India, but they roared through the supply chain and slammed into consumers like a tidal wave. In 2021, pandemic-fueled disruptions caused food prices to increase 4 percent. At the time, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said inflation was cooling as the economy came out of COVID and supply chain problems were easing. Instead, U.S. sanctions caused inflation to accelerate. In 2022 food prices soared 10 percent. Gas prices went from $3.41 per gal in January 2022 to $5.03/gal just five months later. Two weeks after Russia invaded, with inflation raging, the Federal Open Market Committee began pushing up interest rates, 4.25 percent in 2022 alone. Drowning under higher grocery and energy prices, consumers were swamped a second time by rising interest rates that made car, credit card, and housing payments more expensive. As much as the sanctions-fueled inflation dragged Harris down, along with her courting and campaigning with billionaires, her campaign faltered because of other foreign policy decisions.
“Exit polling indicates that Biden’s backing of Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, and Harris’s failure to break from it, cost her the state of Michigan. Additionally, harsh sanctions against Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, the drug war in Central America and Mexico, and years of failed U.S. policy towards Haiti, drove much if not most of the immigration at the Southern U.S. border under Biden that Trump successfully exploited. In the end this election is about the economy, but digging beneath the surface, the wars and chaos unleashed by the United States globally torpedoed Harris’s presidential campaign.”