Fuel prices are rising scandalously again, triggering a predictable general escalation in prices, increasing the cost of living and threatening to further degrade the already difficult living conditions of the Portuguese people. We are told that the fuel price hike is the price to pay for a war waged to bring democracy to Iran. They also want to convince us that this price increase is inevitable and results from a supposedly scientific relationship between supply and demand that would support the balance of freely functioning markets. The problem is that it is not like that at all. The war is not intended to bring democracy anywhere. The increase in fuel prices is not inevitable, nor does it result directly from any economic equilibrium. Much less are markets abstract entities that function in a balanced and free manner. There is no way to build a democracy by bombing the people one claims to want to liberate for that purpose. And the aggression of the US and Israel against Iran has no democratic motivation at its core. It is the political control of the Middle East and the appropriation of its natural resources that is at stake, based on the ambitions of hegemonic dominance of the US and Israel on a regional and global scale. The aggression of the US and Israel against Iran obviously implies serious disruptions in the international supply of oil and its derivatives. These difficulties should be one more (not the only, nor the main, but one more) of the many arguments that justify the demand for an end to the war and the destabilisation that the US and Israel have brought to practically all the peoples of that region. Even in this context, the rise in fuel prices is not inevitable. It results in large part from the exploitation that large economic groups in the energy sector, particularly oil companies, are making of this set of circumstances to increase prices and, thus, increase their already scandalous multi-billion profits. They do so by using the power they have to set prices at their whim, without any consideration for the general economic and social impacts of these decisions. They do so knowing that they count on a political power that is mostly submissive to their interests, which offers no resistance to their intentions, but rather finds a way to accommodate them, even transferring part of their financial impacts to the State and public coffers. They do so by proving that markets are not abstract entities, but rather a concrete reality that results from the composition of powerful economic and financial interests that move exclusively for the objectives of multiplying profits and accumulating capital. They do so knowing that, by taking advantage of the pretexts today to scandalously increase prices and their profits, they will never bring those prices back to the base, even if the pretexts used today disappear. Regulating, capping and fixing fuel prices is, clearly, the solution that is imposed by the democratic duty to defend the interests of the people and national development.