Share

Errata: I pushed the wrong button and sent out tomorrow’s book report this morning. The zoom meeting will be tomorrow morning at noon ET/9 am PT. My apologies for the confusion…

— Trump’s Justice Department has sued to throw out Alaska’s Senate election before anybody’s finished voting in it, but — surprise! — only if the Democrat wins. Just 12 days before Election Day, Trump’s corrupt Attorney General has filed an unprecedented lawsuit demanding a federal judge block the state of Alaska from certifying its Senate race unless the incumbent Republican, Dan Sullivan, wins. Trump is now saying that he ordered this outrage. There are two Republican Dan Sullivans on the ballot, the first being their actual Republican guy and the other a guy with the same name from a remote part of the state. (The Democrats did NOT put him up to it; he’s just an eccentric Alaskan.) When Republicans tried to get the second/spoiler Dan Sullivan kicked off the ballot it went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that anybody named Dan Sullivan or anything else had the First Amendment right to speak on the issues and run for office. The state is trying to reduce confusion by making it clear on the ballot that the “real” Dan Sullivan is a Republican and the incumbent; the other DS won’t get either designation. But Trump’s subservient DOJ says that’s not enough and if Democrat Mary Peltola wins they’re claiming it’ll be because of “ballot confusion”…and she’s currently leading in the polls by two points. The same day, AG and former Trump criminal defense lawyer Todd Blanche refused to promise never to block a state’s certification, so this happening in other states, too, is moving from weird to probable. The US Constitution hands elections to the states, and a federal court has no business pre-rejecting a result that hasn’t happened yet, but the law and the Constitution have rarely stopped this criminal enterprise that’s taken over the GOP from moving ahead. And if they succeed in Alaska, it’s a safe bet they’ll try contesting as many Democratic victories as they can elsewhere. Will the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court again ignore the Constitution and the law to go along with Trump’s efforts to turn America into Russia (remember, as Bette Dangerous points out, 4 of them worked successfully to overturn the 2000 election and deny Al Gore his victory)? Stay tuned…

Get The Truth in Your Inbox

— The Supreme Court just told New Hampshire’s college students to go find a different ID two weeks before an election, and did it in the name of not changing the rules too close to an election. While Texas allows voters to use a gun permit as ID to vote, in an unsigned one-paragraph order Thursday the US Supreme Court overturned a lower court and an appeals court order so they could forbid New Hampshire college students from using student ID. The so-called “Purcell principle” — long followed by the Court — says that decisions that could influence the conduct or outcome of an election shouldn’t be handed down within 90 days of that election, as Kentanji Brown Jackson pointed out in her dissent, saying they shouldn’t now “disturb a clearly justifiable federal-court order.” But here we are and this GOP-dominated Court has been doing everything they can to tilt elections toward Republicans for at least 20 years.

Read more

Before we get into it, please hit that heart button and the little circle above the picture to restack this Daily Take on Notes. Every restack — which is free and you can add comments to — puts this info in front of readers the billionaires’ propaganda machine (whose social media sites have all shadow-banned me) would rather never see it.

Share

— Trump’s Epstein Ballroom is increasingly looking like another giant bribe quid pro quo machine. The Washington Post got their hands on a secret internal spreadsheet Trump and his people were using to track “donors” and it’s a doozie. Even JP Morgan’s JP Dimon wouldn’t go near it because of the “risk,” but plenty of others did. FCC Chair Brendan Carr had opened an investigation into EchoStar until it’s Charles Ergan kicked in $25 million; the entire thing was dropped once the checks cleared. A Rocket subsidiary coughed up a $10 million check just three weeks after federal regulators allowed its acquisition of Mr. Cooper. Around the time Salesforce kicked in big-time, the Pentagon handed them a $5.6 billion contract. Isabela Herrera’s banker father was indicted on bribery charges that got knocked down to a misdemeanor shortly before her $2.5 million donation. (Remember, six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court ruled that if bribes are paid after a favor or contract is done, it’s no longer an illegal bribe but, instead, a legal “tip.”) The Post was explicit that they couldn’t find evidence of specific quid pro quos but given the SCOTUS ruling on “tips” this is looking very, very skeezy. Altogether 67 “donors” kicked in $333 million with another $77 million from donors who didn’t want their names disclosed. Nvidia and Apple each kicked in $25 million. So did the Adelson family. And the money has flowed, according to the reporting, from the Trust for the National Mall — a nonprofit that doesn’t have to disclose donors — into a White House account that Trump personally controls. Hopefully, oversight committees in Congress will be paying attention come January…

Subscribe now

— The Pentagon has figured out how Hegseth and Trump blew up an elementary school for little girls in Iran, but won’t let you read about it until after you’ve voted. Bloomberg reports that “Pretty Pete” Hegseth personally pushed back the release of a Pentagon report on the bombing of the Shajarah Tayyebeh school in Minab that killed at least 165 civilians, most of them little girls, until February 28th, a weekend. In March, Trump said he thought Iran did it. By July he was suggesting the photos of American missile fragments in the debris among the dismembered children were AI-generated. Eventually, he said “nobody knows” what happened, and that’s where it’s at now. You’ll recall that Hegseth had gutted the “Civilian Casualty Mitigation” teams down to a single staffer as part of his campaign to end “stupid rules of engagement” like, apparently, not bombing civilian targets in violation of both international and US law. The New York Times investigated and concluded that they were working off outdated information that, without the mitigation teams overseeing things, were never double-checked before the order to strike was given. Members of Congress have been demanding answers since July. Call yours at 202-224-3121 and ask why a report about dead children has a release date conveniently set for months after the election.

Subscribe now

— A Kentucky Trump donor says Kimberly Guilfoyle hit him up for $100,000 to pay off her American Express card, and now he’s suing her and promising a recording he claims could “bring down the entire Trump administration.” After The Wall Street Journal exposed text messages in which Guilfoyle begged Eric Deters — who says he’d previously given her $300,000 — to pay off her $100,000 Amex bill because if he did it directly to Amex there’d be no paper trail that linked back to her. He now says the original cash he gave her was “pay to play” money to get some help from the attorney general and the IRS commissioner. Temporary (ahem) Press Secretary Katie Zacharia announced that Guilfoyle was out, and Thursday, Deters filed suit in Kenton Circuit Court for defamation, false light, and breach of contract, claiming her legal team had labeled him a “known blackmailer.” He then went on Facebook to promise a 16-minute phone recording that he says will end the Vance-Rubio ticket and send Susie Wiles packing. It hasn’t yet arrived, but now even Susie Wiles appears to be in trouble, too, although that may have more to do with her daughter working for a group that was helping a Putin friend in Europe. Drain the swamp, they said. They just forgot to mention they’d also be the ones refilling it.

Subscribe now

— The AI bubble has started making the sound bubbles make right before they pop, and the bond market seems to have heard it. According to reporting in The Financial Times, investors are starting to dump data center bonds amid concern that the build-out fervor may soon be coming to an end. Allianz’s chief investment officer told the paper that “Data centre bonds are having their Darwin moment.” CoreWeave is the first domino, apparently, as its 9.75% interest notes due in 2031 have fallen to about 82 cents on the dollar, cranking their yield up to 15 percent (this is typically called a “risk premium”), implying about a 60 percent chance of default within the next five years. The five biggest AI spenders, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle, are expected to lay out $807 billion on AI this year, and Bank of America’s consensus numbers have their combined free cash flow swinging from a positive $191 billion in 2025 to a negative $63 billion in 2026. Add that to Trump’s exploding inflation and you’ve got something looking like the 2008 housing bubble/crash, but this time for AI. One analyst at D.A. Davidson has taken to calling the smaller AI operations — the so-called “neoclouds” — the “subprime tranche” of the AI trade. In 2008, George W. Bush decided to let all the bankers who ripped us off so badly just skate and keep their billion-dollar bonuses; “Foreclosure King” Steve Mnuchin even ended up Treasury Secretary after allegedly kicking some 30,000 people out of their homes in California. (By contrast, when the S&L crash happened in the 1980s, Reagan investigated over 1000 bankers and sent hundreds to prison.) But no matter how much damage these guys do today, and particularly given how both Trump and his boys, Uday and Qusay, are heavily invested in AI, it’s probable we’ll see Bush’s amnesty for the rich repeated if/when the crash happens.

Subscribe now

— Crazy Alert! The people building artificial intelligence are now telling each other to stock up on canned goods and hand-cranked radios before their product takes down the banking system. A recent cyberattack cranked the refrigeration systems at hundreds of French grocery stores up to 122 degrees, spoiling food and starting fires: the Intermarché chain’s CEO put the losses in the tens of millions of euros in a single day. And OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta have all disclosed that their own agentic systems have repeatedly slipped out of testing environments and gone after other companies’ networks. CrowdStrike’s latest threat report found AI-enabled attacks up nearly 90 percent year over year. As a result, Andreas Stuhlmüller, CEO of the AI research company Elicit, just posted a prepper checklist this week for the day AI-powered cyberattacks knock out financial systems, the power grid, and the internet. Hoard cash, he says; get a Starlink terminal and lots of batteries, a generator, and solar panels; lay in dried food and lots of bottled water; and don’t forget the emergency radio. Meanwhile, while we tightly regulate airlines, trains, nuclear and other power plants, car manufacturing, drugs, and hundreds of other things that could hurt or kill us, Republicans in Congress continue to block even a serious discussion about regulating AI.

Subscribe now

— Three people are dead at the largest ICE Concentration Camp in America: the government’s own inspectors documented more than 40 violations, and then stamped the place “compliant.” The ACLU, the ACLU of Texas, and the Texas Civil Rights Project asked a federal judge this week for a preliminary injunction backed by more than 40 sworn declarations from detainees, relatives of the dead, and correctional and medical experts to do something about Camp East Montana, the $1.2 billion tent city ICE threw up at Fort Bless near El Paso. They claim people are locked in windowless tents 23 to 24 hours a day, up to 72 people in a room with ongoing tuberculosis and measles outbreaks, tents and bathrooms flooded with waste water, days without soap or showers, and food so scarce and so frequently spoiled that people lose serious weight. A diabetic described insulin doses arriving at random, a man went 15 days without his blood pressure medication, and a teenager said guards beat him badly enough to need hospitalization. Three people have died there, and one of those deaths was already ruled a homicide. The former state prison director who reviewed the declarations said the conditions “shock the conscience.” This is Trump’s Dachau and you and I are paying for it.

Subscribe now

— Trump and wrestling billionaire Linda McMahon have a secret plan to yank the Federal Student Aid office out of the Education Department, and their own people admit it’s illegal. According to groundbreaking reporting in the new Washington Sun newspaper Thursday, the Trump regime wants to spin off student loans into a brand new “independent” agency to handle the $1.6 trillion in student loans owed by more than 40 million Americans. While officials acknowledged this can only be done by an act of Congress, they’re also saying they have no plans to ask for permission. This comes after the administration has already gutted the Department’s student aid staff, just like they did with the Social Security administration and the IRS. Senator Patty Murray didn’t mince words, saying “This intentional sabotage only threatens to create true financial chaos in people’s lives,” and Protect Borrowers’ Mike Pierce called it pandering to an anti-government base. Anybody taking bets on which ballroom donor gets to service a trillion and a half dollars of other people’s debt?

Subscribe now

— Geeky Science Alert! Cynics aren’t the smartest people in the room: they just sound like it. The Washington Post reports on research into what psychologists call the “cynical genius illusion,” the near-universal assumption that the guy who speaks with the most authoritative — and cynical — voice and throws in a few numbers must be an expert. When Olga Stavrova and Daniel Ehlebracht ran seven studies, four of them probing what people believe about cynics and three testing those beliefs against data from roughly 200,000 people across 30 countries, they found that people reliably assume that the fast-talking cynics were deemed credible. Interestingly, other studies found that the more cynical a person is, the more likely they are to have a lower IQ and cognitive ability, while the more educated people become the less cynical they end up. While very chic comments like “They’re all crooks, nothing changes, why bother voting” sounds worldly, it’s actually the single most useful sentence an authoritarian can plant in a citizen’s head.

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

Before we get into it, please hit that heart button and the little circle above the picture to restack this Daily Take on Notes. Every restack — which is free and you can add comments to — puts this info in front of readers the MAGA propaganda machine (whose social media sites have all shadow-banned me) would rather never see it.

Share

— Donald Trump woke up from a nap in the Oval Office this week just in time to remember Vladimir Putin’s birthday. While his own Treasury Secretary was speaking, Trump nodded off at his own event, then perked right up to announce he had a call scheduled to wish his mentor (my word, not his) a happy 74th. By Friday we learned what the birthday boy got. Trump crowed on his Nazi-infested social media site that us taxpayers will buy five million tons of diesel — a deal worth billions to the Kremlin’s deeply troubled war chest — at today’s record-high prices. As a sweetener, a birthday cupcake you could call it, Trump ordered his Treasury Department to suspend sanctions on Russian diesel for the next half-year. And he and little Marco Rubio are going after the International Criminal Court, which has indicted Putin, and are trying to quite literally destroy it. And, shortly, Ka$h Patel will be visiting Moscow. Bizarrely, this all happened just a few weeks after he signed Lindsey Graham’s Russia sanctions bill. This is the same Putin whose government, US officials have confirmed, is providing Iran with detailed, specific targeting information on American troops, ships, and planes that’s been used to kill our service members. It’s the same Putin Trump’s invited to December’s G20, which he’s holding, corruptly, at his own shabby golf resort motel in Florida. Ukraine, meanwhile, was told no by Trump and Vance (who called it one of his “proudest moments”) when Zelensky asked for Patriot interceptors to stop Russian missiles from daily killing its civilians, a war crime. How much more of this treasonous behavior will the American people, and the congressional Republicans — who swore an oath to the Constitution rather than to Trump — tolerate? The Capitol switchboard is 202-224-3121. Ask them.

— Time magazine interviewed the President of the United States, wrote down twelve things he said, and then had to publish a second article explaining that most of them weren’t true. Raw Story has the rundown. Trump told the reporters he won 86 percent of the popular vote (it was 49.8 percent). He said he’s at 99 percent approval in Israel. He said his convention speech drew 107 million viewers and beat the NFL opener (Nielsen says he had 2.5 million viewers against football’s 25.1 million). He said Iran’s inflation is 300 percent (it’s 83.8) and blamed the American press for the idea that his war would be over in four or five weeks, something he promised in the early days of the war (originally it was going to be “a few weeks”). Time’s fact-checkers described Trump’s popular vote whopper by gently saying, “He’s conflating two figures.” Conflating is what Grandpa does with the grandkids’ names at Thanksgiving. How much longer will our media continue to tuck his blatant, daily lies into a polite sidebar while the lies themselves get the headline? This has been going on since 2015; no wonder we’re in such deep trouble and our democracy is in such a crisis. Our media needs to grow a damn spine.

Subscribe now

— Trump’s meme coin buyers have lost 97 percent of their “investments,” so naturally he’s throwing another dinner to sell more of them. As Lisa Needham lays out at Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice, the top 185 holders of $TRUMP will “win” seats at a November 22 gala at his Virginia golf club, complete with a swag bag of Trump cologne, and the four biggest buyers get an 18-karat gold Trump watch. The so-called coin peaked above $73 and now trades around $1.79. Trump is making billions off crypto while the suckers who bought his and Melania’s meme coins were out $3.81 billion by the end of June. But wait: there’s more! While regular buyers are being told to hold tight for a shot at being invited to this super-special dinner, the coin’s biggest insider wallet has moved tens of millions of dollars’ worth of them into a position to sell. One investor who’s lost $400,000 summed it up, saying, “The grift continues until morale improves.” In fact, there are two kinds of buyers for these “collectible” tokens: suckers and people — including foreigners — wanting to buy influence or pardons from Trump. The Founders had a word for this (emoluments) and so does the criminal code (bribery), and if Republicans in Congress had even the faintest semblance of integrity they would shut the whole grift down tomorrow. Vote!

— The bond market, which doesn’t watch Fox “News,” is telling us what it really thinks of Trump’s America. Bloomberg reports that something called the “term premium” — the extra interest investors demand before they’ll lend Uncle Sam money by buying 10-year bonds — has shoved Treasury yields to a 24-year high. As a result, we’re all paying more for mortgages, car loans, and credit cards because America’s lenders (Treasury buyers) don’t trust Trump, Bessent, and the Republicans who control Congress and keep borrowing trillions to give to Trump and his billionaire buddies as tax breaks. There are energy shocks from Trump’s illegal (and stupid) war on Iran leaving oil stuck above $100 a barrel, as well as a $2 trillion federal deficit just so far this year. This is the end product of 45 years of Reaganomics, decades of GOP lies, and an accumulated $40 trillion in tax breaks for the morbidly rich and giant corporations. We need to tax the morbidly rich like we did when America built the world’s largest middle class, strengthen the social safety net, and stop starting illegal wars that we can’t even afford to pay for.

— Somebody seems to have misplaced fifty million dollars, and nobody in Trump’s orbit is in any hurry to find it. A decade ago, Congress set aside money for an America 250 celebration of our anniversary, but Trump ignored that (other than taking the money) and created his own, privatized “Freedom 250” celebration as a new grift to squeeze millions out of major donors like Chevron, United Airlines, and the defense giant RTX. Now documents uncovered by the watchdog group PEER discovered that the events cost $128 million and at least $114 million of that came from our tax dollars, even though The Wall Street Journal says the “donors” kicked in at least $50 million and (my guess) probably much more. Trump passed out that money to his contractor friends with no competitive bidding whatsoever, and now refuses to say who gave him money, or how much, or even where the money went. Democrats suspect he just turned it into another slush fund for himself and his family; perhaps they should look for piles of cash in the bathrooms at Mar-a-Lago?

— The people building artificial intelligence are holding private rehearsals for the day it hurts a whole lot of us. Axios reports that top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI, and other AI companies are gaming out what happens after a catastrophic AI event, “most likely a cyberattack,” that could knock out banking, the internet, or even power and water. Axios reports that industry insiders told them they expect “something big” within the next six to twelve months. But when Mediaite dug into it, they concluded that this is really more PR planning than anything else; handling the public and political revolt and a panicked Congress. Trump, who is now heavily invested financially in AI, calls the danger a “hoax” and says the industry should just police itself. You know, like tobacco, asbestos, the Pinto, leaded gasoline, Oxycontin and the Sacklers, and the banks in 2008. That’s always worked out so well for America. Even some Republicans think that’s nuts; there’s already a bipartisan bill requiring a kill switch on advanced AI. Pass it now, while the lights are still on.

— Having lost at the Supreme Court, Trump has decided to hold his own trial of Lisa Cook at the White House, with his own appointees as the jury. The Supreme Court ruled against him in June when he tried to fire the nation’s first Black female Federal Reserve governor. So this week he signed a memo creating a “committee of inquiry” made up of his economic adviser, his EEOC chairman, and his ethics director, who will decide Cook’s fate. As the Guardian reports, she’s being summoned to a kangaroo court that will be closed to the public, capped at four hours, and held on November 5, two days after the midterms, when it’s too late to piss off voters. In an administration that fired the Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the first woman to lead the Navy, it appears that her race and gender are her real offense. The Senate confirmed her; the Senate should defend her. But don’t count on the Trump lickspittles and cowards (and probably quite a few racists and misogynists) in today’s Republican-run Congress to do squat.

— Hypocrisy Alert! The senator who sued new mothers over medical bills as small as $101 apparently doesn’t pay for his own cookies. Holly Thomas, who owns Holly’s Sweet Treats in Hutchinson, Kansas, says Senator Roger Marshall’s campaign took delivery of $678.75 worth of cookies and treats for his 2020 primary watch party and never paid for them. She’s been calling and emailing Marshall — without any response — as she was then a brand-new business owner trying to survive the pandemic. This is the same Senator/Dr. Marshall whose OB-GYN practice, the New York Times found, sued more than 700 of his female patients — many of them low-income people — and charged them 18 percent interest. He even had 81 of them arrested after missing court dates in those cases. He calls that reporting a “hit job.” At the 18 percent he charged his patients, Holly’s invoice would be north of $1,400 by now. Congress abolished federal debtors’ prisons way back in 1833, and that principle is supposed to work the same way for a working mom with a hospital bill just the same as it does for a senator with a bakery invoice. But this is Republican-run America, where we’ve got one set of rules for the rich and powerful and another for everybody else. Kansans get to settle this particular account on November 3.

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy or the Kindle edition.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

Share

— Trump’s sending a third aircraft carrier toward Iran, his Pentagon’s drawing up more ways for him to be able to use nuclear weapons, and “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth’s busy thinning out the generals. What could possibly go wrong? Attacking Iran right now or amping up the war would be destructive to Republicans running for election, but a month from now, when the election is over, may be the perfect time for Donald Trump to do what he savors more than any other thing on earth: getting revenge and killing people in ways that are extremely painful for them and their families. To that possible end, Axios’ Barak Ravid reports that the USS Theodore Roosevelt quietly left San Diego last Sunday and should arrive around mid-November, weeks after — conveniently — the election. They’ve also just this week started installing new Patriot batteries (that should have gone to Ukraine) to guard Saudi and Qatari oil and gas sites, which sure suggests they’re planning to do something they expect will provoke a retaliatory strike from Iran’s IRGC. Even more alarming, reporter Ken Klippenstein has dug up some shocking previously-secret closed-door Senate testimony from the Pentagon’s policy chief, Elbridge Colby. He told the senators that there’s now a classified review designed explicitly to hand Trump “more nuclear options.” Experts on nuclear war and proliferation are horrified and this story is being almost completely ignored by the corporate media. And Whiskey Pete just doubled his cut of general and admiral slots to 20 percent of the entire force, causing Charlamagne Tha God to worry out loud that Pete’s teaching our military leadership that “loyalty to the Constitution may not be enough anymore.” More ships, more nuclear choices, and a military purged of anybody who may object: panic isn’t a plan, but calling your senators to demand a war powers vote and a public hearing on that nuclear review is.

Subscribe now

— Asked whether he’d rule out declaring a state of emergency before the midterms, Donald Trump said he isn’t ruling anything out. That’s from his sit-down with TIME, where his exact words were a Putin-like “I don’t rule anything out or in,” after which Trump himself brought up the Insurrection Act, noting he’s never used it but could. Sending armed, masked ICE thugs to polling places in violation of federal law? He lies that he hasn’t even thought of it. As the Guardian recounts, he also waved off his collapsing numbers as “fake” and the pollsters as “corrupt,” all while a new AP poll finds 69 percent of Americans actively disapprove of him and his psychopathic (my term) behavior. The war he promised would only take weeks is now dragging into its seventh month, but he insists he’s “met my timeline” and simply chose to drag the war out. He also said he’d happily pardon his own staff on the way out the door, too, which probably elicited a huge sigh of relief from Miller, Hegseth, and Blanche, among others. Under our Constitution, the states run the elections, presidents don’t, and no emergency or Insurrection Act declaration changes that unless the rest of us let him get away with it. The solution is an overwhelming repudiation of Trump and the GOP at the polls, and most states are already in or on the verge of early voting. Check your registration this weekend as the registration deadlines for most states hit in the next two weeks, vote early if your state allows it, and sign up to work the polls. Autocrats count on empty rooms and we’ve got to deny that to Trump and his neofascist lickspittles.

Leave a comment

— Republicans have a plan to go after abortion pills nationwide, and they’d very much like you not to hear about it until the day after you vote. This is wild. The strategists in the White House have told Todd Blanche’s DOJ to hold off on their promised enforcement of the Comstock Act, which will outlaw the abortion pill nationally, until after the election. Once it’s lame-duck time, one conservative in touch with the administration told The Washington Sun, “the gloves will be off.” The White House now says the story is fake news, but they’re ignoring Trump’s FDA commissioner telling his staff to stall their mifepristone “safety review” until after the November election. The Comstock Act, passed in 1873 when women couldn’t vote, explicitly bans the Post Office or any common carrier (UPS, FedEx, etc.) from shipping anything that can be used for abortion; it just hasn’t been enforced since the 1930s. But if fully enforced, it could even cripple the ability of clinics in Blue states to perform surgical abortions by outlawing the transportation of the devices uniquely used for those procedures. The regime doesn’t want this discussed before November 3rd because it’s so unpopular, which is exactly why you should forward this to every woman you know, and every man who loves one, before they vote.

Refer a friend

— Bernie Sanders, AOC and Jeff Merkley want to pull the plug on the cameras tracking your car, and for once a few Republicans are nodding along. The three unveiled the Ban Flock Act on Friday. It would bar federal agencies from using automated license plate readers or the data they collect, cut off federal grants to state and local governments that keep using them, and let you sue when the feds track you anyway. As Common Dreams reports, the target is Flock Safety, a company Sanders says is bankrolled by rightwing tech billionaires Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, which now runs more than 120,000 AI cameras scanning 20 billion American vehicles a month. “Flock is always watching,” Sanders said, and he’s not exaggerating. Its data has been shared with immigration agents, searched in connection with No Kings and anti-ICE protests, and illegally used by cops to stalk wives, girlfriends and exes. Even Josh Hawley has opened a Senate probe, and Thomas Massie has a bill of his own, showing how voters of all stripes are getting concerned about this growing surveillance state the billionaire tech bros want us to live in. The bill doesn’t outlaw the cameras outright, but starving them of federal money is a great start. Meanwhile, at least 56 cities and towns have deactivated, canceled or rejected Flock contracts this year. Check in with your city council or mayor’s office to find out what your local authorities are doing about this Fourth Amendment abomination.

Subscribe now

— Trump is paying local cops up to $2 million each to help them arrest immigrants, criminals or not. A Wall Street Journal investigation found that once a local department hands over a single deportable immigrant under Trump’s revived 287(g) program, it can bill Washington fully $60,000 a year for every deputized officer involved in the arrest, whether or not those officers ever arrest anyone again. Miami-Dade’s sheriff signed up an eye-popping 970 officers and thus qualified for nearly $14.5 million over the three months in which they turned seven immigration arrests over to ICE. The police in Venice, Florida, have asked for $895,000 on the strength of one single arrest. And in Doddridge County, West Virginia, population 7,600, Sheriff Clinton Boring collected more than $137,000 for two arrests after telling the Journal, “Honestly don’t think there are any Hispanics that live in Doddridge.” DHS has shoveled out more than $200 million this way that the Journal was able to document, but there’s another billion from Congress in the pipeline, and, as Voz summarizes, the program still produced fewer than one in ten of the country’s immigration arrests. Ken Klippenstein called these departments “ICE’s bounty hunters” earlier this year, and the Journal describes video of an officer cracking wise about a $30,000 bonus moments after he used a taser to torment a brown-skinned person. And Republicans insist that there’s no money for Medicaid or school lunches. Ask your sheriff and your county commissioners whether they’ve signed on, and what they’ve been paid, then call your local paper or radio/TV news outlet to let them know.

Subscribe now

— Corporations have stopped pricing products and started pricing you. Groundwork Collaborative’s Lindsay Owens argues that algorithms, surveillance and electronic shelf tags are letting companies reinvent a whole series of 21st century rip-offs right under our noses. For example, a California class action lawsuit alleges that an AI pricing tool called Kalibrate helped more than 1,700 gas stations push prices up as much as 30 cents a gallon, which Owens calculates took about $4 billion out of drivers’ pockets and put it into the money bins of the fossil fuel kings. Landlords using RealPage’s software raised some rents as much as 33 percent in a single year. Walmart’s putting digital price tags in every store, so they can instantly and remotely manipulate prices in ways customers will never see. And retailers are buying your location and personal data from brokers to figure out how badly they can overcharge you without your screaming or walking away. “Now, they are pricing people, too,” Owens writes. This is where 45 years of Reaganomics and Republican “greed is good” philosophy was always headed. Gut antitrust enforcement, let the giants swallow their competitors, and eventually the so-called “free market” reinvents itself as a machine for picking your pocket. Her answer is a Shoppers’ Bill of Rights that would guarantee the price you see is the price you pay, ban surveillance pricing, and require AI shopping assistants to work for you instead of the seller. And people are listening: Seattle just became the first city to outlaw surveillance pricing, and roughly 90 bills have been introduced in various states. Ask your legislators whose side they’re on in this new tech innovation.

Subscribe now

— Geeky Science Alert! Picking up the pace may actually reverse frailty in older people, not just slow it down. Researchers from Northwestern and the University of Chicago report in PLOS One on a trial of 105 residents of Chicago-area retirement communities, average age 79, with about two-thirds of them already using a cane or walker. Everybody walked the hallways and stairwells alongside a research assistant for 45 minutes, three times a week, for 16 weeks. One group strolled comfortably while the other kicked it up, pushing their speed-walking to hit roughly 70 percent of their normal maximum heart rate. At the end of this study, about 70 percent of the brisk walkers had moved into a “milder frailty” category versus only 46 percent of the strollers, and — most astonishingly — half the fast group no longer could be diagnosed as frail or pre-frail at all. And this is safe: across more than 3,300 sessions the only mishap definitely tied to the walking was one fall with no injury. The National Institute on Aging paid for this: apparently neither Vought or Musk have discovered its existence yet. So, go take a walk and make it a brisk one.

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The October book of the month is The Hidden History of American Healthcare, by Thom Hartmann. Buy a copy Kindle edition.

”Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich”.

Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States.

Share

— Six Justices Just Handed Trump a Voter-Purge Machine, but Told Him to Wait Until the Next Election to Use It. Yesterday, the six corrupt Republican ideologues on the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to let the Trump regime go forward with their plan to create a national database of Trump-approved, GOP-approved voters that they intend to then force upon the states in violation of the Constitution. This overturned a June ruling from Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who found the government had “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens.” The GOP’s SAVE database was first built in 1986 to provide information on Social Security applicants and their benefits and Republicans now want to use it to solve the non-existent problem of non-citizen voting. The system is clunky and badly flawed, and, as Democracy Docket points out, naturalized citizens are often latecomers to the system so they keep getting flagged and canceled. Given that the majority of naturalized citizens since we lifted racial/national origin quotas in 1965 have been non-white people, they’re exactly the folks Republicans don’t want to vote, so in the GOP’s way of thinking this is just fine. Justice Jackson, joined by Sotomayor and Kagan, wrote that disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the “nonexistent harm” to a government doing something it likely lacks the authority to do (the Constitution gives voting to the states, not the feds). The unsigned Republican majority opinion — none of the on-the-take Republicans was willing to put his or her name on it — did helpfully note that federal law bars systematic purges in the 90 days before an election, which “limits the potential impact” this year. Translation: the GOP national voter purge machine is now legal, it just has to idle until the presidential election in 2028, which will determine whether the next crop of SCOTUS nominees will come from a Republican or a Democratic president. Marc Elias called it “a dangerous decision for voters.” Meanwhile, the same Justice Department is dispatching more than 1,000 “monitors” to polling places in what Harmeet Dhillon proudly calls the “biggest DOJ election observer effort in history.” CNN found that several of the “monitors” DOJ hired during this year’s primaries were Republican partisans who’d helped challenge Trump’s 2020 loss, and one even has pleaded guilty to illegally accessing a government elections website in 2016. Even Wyoming’s Republican officials complained that the feds’ intrusions into their election systems were disruptive and weirdly fixated on the voting machines. Nothing says “election integrity” quite like sending convicted hackers and Stop-the-Steal alumni to hover over the ballot scanners. Vote early, check your registration, and bring a friend.

Subscribe now

— Money In, Regulation Out: How $50 Million Bought the AI Industry a Get-Out-of-Oversight-Free Card. Back on September 11, 2024 the Biden Commerce Department proposed requiring AI companies to tell the government what they’re building and how it’s working. It wasn’t regulation, but it could have laid the foundation for that. Then, as The Lever points out, the checks being written to Trump and his family started clearing the bank and suddenly the proposed rule was simply abandoned. A company tied to Sam Altman gave Trump’s personal MAGA Inc. SuperPAC $5 million in January 2025; Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz kicked in $9 million that March; Elon Musk added another $5 million in June. In September 2025, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife wrote MAGA Inc. a $25 million check, and — surprise! — less than three months later the rule was quietly withdrawn from the federal regulatory agenda. So much for the industry’s claims that they want federal regulation; it appears that they just want rules onerous enough to keep out smaller competitors. In the year since, OpenAI’s own bots broke into the Australian government’s website and, asked what guardrails the industry needs, Trump explained that the only guardrail required is a “strong and smart (High IQ!) president.” So we’re covered, then. This is Roberts’ and Clarence Thomas’ sordid Citizens United legalized bribery system working exactly as designed: the people building the most dangerous technology in human history simply pay $50 million for the privilege of not having to tell anybody what they’re doing with it.

Subscribe now

— Americans Feel Worse About the Economy Than at Almost Any Time Since Harry Truman, and Trump Wants to Know Why Nobody’s Grateful. The University of Michigan has been measuring consumer sentiment annually since 1952, and this year came in the second-lowest during that entire history; only Harry Truman was worse, at the peak of the Korean War. In other words, Americans are more pessimistic today than they were during Vietnam, the 1970s oil shock, 9/11, the Great Recession, and even the deadly pandemic. The reasons are both obvious and subtle: obvious causes include gas and diesel prices spiking because of Trump’s war with Iran, tariffs pushing prices up, mortgage rates are back above 7 percent, and the Fed just raised interest rates again. The subtle reason probably has more to do with Americans realizing — with horror — that Trump and the Republicans have been lying to them for years while feathering their own nests at the expense of the working class. This is what 45 years of Reaganomics looks like as we approach what may well be the end of the neoliberal road, and as the last bill for trickle-down finally comes due the guy who could do something about it is spending his evenings in his bedroom with Natalie generating heroic AI pictures of himself.

— JD Vance Found 760,000 “Phantoms” on Obamacare. Funny How Many of Them Are Just Poor People. We all buy insurance and we all hope we’ll not need to use it; apparently nobody ever shared that insight with JD Vance or vitamin-hustler Dr. Oz. This week they threw 760,000 people off the Affordable Care Act plans and are examining another 419,000 people, an act they say will “save” America $2.2 billion. Bizarrely, Oz declared, “These are not real people.” His evidence? About 35 percent of dumped enrollees never used their insurance, which he said was “just not possible.” Anybody who’s ever paid a premium and stayed healthy knows that’s the best outcome any of us can hope for. They’re reportedly using AI to flag these people, apparently looking for minor paperwork slipups, and also going after people in the Red states that didn’t expand eligibility for Obamacare. Georgetown’s Edwin Park pointed out the whole design is to “make it incredibly burdensome” to stay covered. Nearly 3 million people have already lost marketplace coverage since Republicans let the subsidies expire with their Big Beautiful Bill for Billionaires. They couldn’t repeal Obamacare, so they’re just starving it, one “ghost” family at a time.

— Test Scores Hit a 25-Year Low. Trump’s Answer — Just Like With His Economic Numbers — Was to Fire the People Who Count Them. American kids’ reading and math performance has fallen to its lowest point in a quarter century, in part because the federal agency built to help our schools and students has been gutted. When DOGE canceled nearly $900 million in Education Department contracts last year, the National Center for Education Statistics, the agency that produces The Nation’s Report Card, went from about 100 employees to four. It’s now up to a dozen. Peggy Carr, the commissioner fired after nearly four decades there, says the most painful loss was the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, a $47 million project tracking 15,000 kindergartners who started school in 2023, the first cohort born after Covid. Musk’s pimply-faced boys killed it midstream, so the most expensive part of the study had already been paid for but the data is now gone forever. Same story with a study that followed 23,000 ninth graders from 2009 into their thirties, canceled in its final lap. We then had to pay millions in termination fees to the contractors. Now that the main education push from the GOP is to sell vouchers and post the Ten Commandments in classrooms, it’s easy to figure out why Republicans would want the agency that lets us know how our kids are doing to be hobbled or even killed off, as the billionaire wrestling promoter in charge of our Education Department, Linda McMahon, appears committed to doing. When Trump said he loved “the uneducated” he was dead serious.

Leave a comment

— Trump’s FDA Pick Can’t Say Whether an IUD Is an Abortion. That’s Not a Slip, It’s the Plan. Dr. Heidi Overton, the White House domestic policy adviser Trump nominated to run the FDA after Marty Makary bailed, sat before the Senate HELP Committee on Thursday and flat-out refused to answer a simple yes-or-no question. Sen. Patty Murray noted that last year the administration labeled contraception “abortifacient birth control” while destroying $10 million in contraceptives including IUDs meant for women overseas, then asked Overton point-blank whether an IUD causes an abortion. Overton pivoted to “food safety pillars.” Murray asked again. Overton said she’d be “fully briefed on all their prior decisions” if confirmed. Murray then correctly pointed out that an FDA commissioner who doesn’t know birth control isn’t the same thing as an abortion is “deeply alarming.” With that, Murray was being way too polite dealing with this naked liar: Overton knows perfectly well what an IUD does; she coauthored a 2023 paper for Stephen Miller’s America First Policy Institute calling the abortion pill mifepristone “dangerous to women” despite more than 100 studies saying otherwise, and she told senators she’s also open to investigating the pill’s manufacturers. Even Republican Josh Hawley and Republican Chairman Bill Cassidy came away unimpressed. The theocrats have already succeeded in outlawing legal abortion in half the country; contraception is the their next (and longtime) target, and the way they’ll get there is by installing someone at FDA who’ll “review” the science until it says what these rightwing so-called “Christians” want. Trump went to his Nazi-infested social media site and called her a “ROCKSTAR.” Call your senators at 202-224-3121 and let them know what you think.

— Geeky Science! Your Aging Brain Isn’t Failing, It’s Being Promoted. Every time you walk into a room and forget why, you’ve probably chalked it up to age-related decline in mental faculties, but a new paper in Perspectives on Psychological Science from the University of Arizona argues that’s the wrong story for us to tell ourselves. Drawing on molecular biology and neuroimaging, Fabian-Xosé Fernandez, Sara Burke, and Lynn Nadel propose an “adaptive aging hypothesis”: their hypothesis is that late life is an actual developmental stage, not a slow-motion breakdown. The hippocampus, the one-day scratchpad in our brain that captures the fine-grained details of an experience, gradually hands off those details to the frontal cortex, which specializes in gist, meaning, and the big picture. A younger brain needs to hoard the day’s details because it has no reference library; an older brain has a vast store of knowledge so instead of noticing details it instead tries to put them into historical context to understand their meaning. That trade-off, the authors argue, is exactly what makes older adults “wise” and thus well-suited for the traditional elder roles of mentoring, teaching, and storytelling. “If we look at normative aging as a story of just decline, we are really missing the boat,” Fernandez told the Association for Psychological Science. The Washington Post has a good summary of the thinking. This is a hypothesis paper, not a clinical trial, and the authors point out that Alzheimer’s appears to hijack exactly this transition, giving even more credence to their concept. Older cultures universally respect their “wise elders”; it’s long past time that we stop discounting the wisdom that comes with age.

Subscribe now

— Crazy Alert! Trump Posted an AI Picture of Xi’s Arrival and Somehow Lost His Own Wife. On Thursday, as Xi Jinping’s plane landed at Joint Base Andrews, Trump (or Natalie) posted an image on his Nazi-infested failing social media site of himself saluting stoically beside the Chinese president while a bomber roared overhead. The only problem is that the actual video shows Melania Trump and Xi’s wife Peng Liyuan standing right there with them. In Trump’s/Natalie’s version, however, both first ladies have vanished. The one woman who survived the edit is a blonde with her hand over her heart, which set the internet on fire with the theory that Natalie Harp had erased Melania and inserted herself. Fact-checkers say

Read more

Watch this incredible short video that filmmaker David Ambrose (who has a great Substack newsletter) just produced about the crisis of corporate personhood and how we got here. It mentions my new book Who Killed The American Dream as well, and is an incredible bit of film-making crunched into a tight 11 minutes that you’ll want to share with others.

Share

— Trump just banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House, because apparently the First Amendment now needs his signature to be valid. Yesterday afternoon, the man who refused to put his hand on the Bible when he swore an oath to uphold the Constitution just announced on his Nazi-infested failing social media site that those three news outlets will no longer be allowed into the White House Press Room. He added that, “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.” Back in his first term, he tried this by banning CNN’s Jim Acosta but a federal judge ordered Acosta’s press pass restored. So far this term courts have stopped him fully 75 times from violating the First Amendment’s provisions about a free press, something both Trump and his mentor and owner Putin hate and do everything they can to destroy. This ban came the same day our news media caught Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon lying to America about how many soldiers we’ve lost in Israel’s and Trump’s stupid war against Iran and CNN revealed that we almost got into a shooting war with China because an AI program hallucinated. Every news agency still allowed into the White House Press Room now must make a decision: do they defy the anti-American autocrat or roll over and pretend this is just the new normal? Stay tuned…

Subscribe now

— More American soldiers have died in Trump’s Iran war than Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon is willing to admit. Six different officials close to Pentagon casualty numbers tell The Washington Post that at least 22 service members have been killed by Iran with Russian targeting help, rather than the dozen dead that this administration acknowledges. This is the second time Whiskey Pete and his slobbering, testosterone-amped sycophants in the so-called “War Department” have been busted lying to us about casualty figures to make Trump and his stupid, illegal, criminal war look good. Back in July it was The New York Times that discovered Whiskey Pete had quietly dropped the casualty numbers from 18 to 14, claiming that the other four died during a Trump-declared “cease fire” and therefore weren’t “wartime casualties.” The Pentagon tried to bullshit the press and military families, who deserve an honest count. Congress has subpoena power and oversight responsibilities here: they damn well better use them.

Support the Hartmann Report Today

— Armed federal agents at polling places is a felony crime and has been for more than a century, but Trump’s people keep floating it. Our laws that make it a federal felony to place any armed person in or near any polling place date back to the end of the Civil War, so yesterday Democracy Forward filed suit in federal court arguing that the Trump regime’s constant hints and suggestions that they’ll do just that are, themselves, an unlawful form of voter intimidation and voter suppression. Meanwhile, NPR reports a whistleblower says DHS’s so-called “Unlawful Voter Initiative” and ICE’s involvement with it are both racing ahead on junk data and flagging American citizens. Denver’s election clerk, Paul López, a plaintiff in the suit, has a plan if agents show up to intimidate his voters, telling NPR: “They’re going to face prison sentences.” We need more local officials with that kind of spine. Check your registration this week, make a plan, vote early if your state lets you, and bring a friend.

Join the Hartmann Report Today!

— Senators Markey, Merkley, and Sanders are trying to stop Trump from shipping 5,000 one-ton bombs to the Saudi crown prince who had a Washington Post columnist dismembered. While Trump shipping tens of thousands of 2,000 pound bombs to Israel got a lot of press this week, Orange Caligula is also trying to help out his Saudi buddies who gave him millions for his golf tour and gave billions to his slumlord son-in-law. The three senators introduced a resolution of disapproval this week against a $5 billion sale of JDAM kits and 2,000-pound bombs to the kingdom; these are “privileged resolutions” and thus can force every senator to vote on the record. The same day, while still refusing to provide munitions to Ukraine, Rubio’s State Department moved forward an additional $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35s to the Saudis. And then there’s the once-unthinkable Saudi nuclear deal: Trump sent Congress a 30-year nuclear cooperation agreement with the kingdom but classified two side letters that alter what the deal actually does, something no administration has ever done before. Even Republican Senators Rand Paul and John Kennedy signed the letter demanding to see them. Markey, noting the $2 billion the Saudis handed Jared Kushner, called it what it is, saying: “This is not diplomacy; this is corruption at the expense of U.S. national security.” I’m proud of my senator, Jeff Merkley, and his colleagues. Call your own senators and ask how they plan to vote on bombs for Mohammad bin Bone Saw.

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— Trump’s war of choice is about to come home to every oil tank in New England, so of course he spent last weekend at his shabby golf motel in Ireland. Heating oil inventories in the American northeast are the lowest they’ve been in the modern era and winter is approaching; one family-owned Vermont fuel oil company just sent a letter to their customers warning them that after a quarter-century of buying fuel futures they could only nail down about 25% of what they’ll need this winter. A former OPEC economist told ABC TV station WMUR that inventories are the lowest they’ve been in 45 years. Then Exxon’s Joliet, Illinois refinery, which turns out around 11 million gallons of gasoline and diesel a day for the Midwest, went down last Sunday and still hasn’t restarted. AAA says regular was at $4.47 a gallon yesterday, and diesel is pushing ten bucks a gallon in some parts of the country. Governors and legislatures in the Northeast are freaking out…although the Republicans are reluctant to say anything out loud that might piss off the man-baby in the Oval Office.

Subscribe now

— Saudi Arabia just told Europe there’s no oil for them next month. October oil deliveries to Europe, contracted for months ago, are not going to be delivered according to the Saudis because Trump’s insane war against Iran has led to their pipeline and pumping stations being knocked out by Iranian-allied militias in Iraq. Iran has managed to shut down both the Saudi’s front door for deliveries (the Strait of Hormuz) and now both back-doors via the Red Sea and their east-west pipeline. As of June, Europe was importing 577,000 barrels of Saudi crude a day. Aramco says they hope to be back at full capacity in six weeks, and in the meantime they’re prioritizing their Asian customers including China while Europeans scramble for more North Sea oil. Fossil fuel billionaires and Putin are making a fortune off this disruption from Trump’s and Netanyahu’s criminal war and, if Reagan hadn’t shut down Carter’s Solar Bank program we may well have been out of the fossil fuel loop altogether by now: nobody has ever blockaded the sun or sent a drone after the wind. Countries that spent the last few decades building solar, wind, and batteries are insulated from this, but we pissed it away by letting fossil fuel billionaires and their Republican lickspittles write our energy policy.

Leave a comment

— Poland’s prime minister says Putin is planning rocket and drone strikes on NATO countries, so Trump wrote Putin’s alibi for him. Polish Premiere Donald Tusk told the Polish parliament Thursday that intelligence shows Russia is planning to amp up their hybrid attacks on countries that support Ukraine, including Poland. Putin will pretend they’re all accidents, Tusk said, to “paralyze or at least weaken” NATO’s willingness to invoke Article 5 and respond with military force. In just the past week there have already been four Russian attacks at Poland’s border crossings with Ukraine, and Germany says Russia was definitely behind the attempted bombing at the Leipzig airport. The Telegraph and Metro have more details. Let’s not forget that a year ago this month, when 19 Russian drones flew into Poland, Trump covered for Putin saying that it all “could have been a mistake.” Putin obviously heard that loud and clear. Europe is rearming on the assumption that Trump is now wholly-owned by Putin. Meanwhile, Congress could still pass Ukraine aid and sanctions with veto-proof majorities if only enough Republicans remember which side their party was on when Reagan was alive. I’m not holding my breath.

Refer a friend

— Crazy Alert! A chatbot made up a nuclear smuggling plot, and Pete Hegseth’s military scrambled planes to board a Chinese ship over it. Seriously, an AI chatbot’s hallucination could have provoked World War III. Now that Whiskey Pete has integrated Musk’s Grok and other AI products into our military, an analyst at Special Operations Command Pacific asked an AI chatbot to determine what was going on with a suspicious Chinese cargo vessel in the Middle East. The bot mashed together open-source stuff and speculation on the internet and social media together with classified signals intelligence and concluded the ship was carrying parts for a nuclear weapons program. The analyst then had the AI chatbot write up the “analysis” as if it were a standard intelligence report and sent it up the chain of command. As a result, American military aircraft were in the air and armed troops were preparing to board the Chinese ship before somebody thought to check the work and found it was pure fiction. One source admitted to CNN’s reporters that the incident nearly started a war. This is what we get when the guy who purged the nation’s most competent generals orders three million personnel to “unleash experimentation” with software that confidently invents things. In addition to impeaching Whiskey Pete now, Congress must require a human being to sign off on any intelligence that could put Americans in a firefight with a nuclear power before the next hallucination gets any further than this one did and the results are truly disastrous.

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— Medicare for All isn’t dead, it’s waiting for us to do our part. Nancy Altman runs Social Security Works and knows more about how America built its social insurance system than just about anybody alive. She has a new book out, The Road to Medicare for All. Americans have been fighting for national health insurance for more than a century, and we won real ground with Medicare and Medicaid. Altman argues that the time is finally and truly here for the program that would replicate what most other democracies already have had for decades. We pay more for healthcare than any other country on Earth, all to make insurance company fatcats richer so they can kick back bribes to Republican legislators. As I also laid out with The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, we have to fix this and the next few years are going to be critical.

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

Thom Hartmann’s Well-Read Troublemakers Book Club

The September book of the month is Looking Backward, From 2000 to 1887, by Edward Bellamy. Buy a copy or download it for free here.

This is a utopian science fiction novel published in 1888. When Julian West falls into a hypnotic sleep in 1887 Boston, he awakens 113 years later to find America transformed into a socialist utopia. Through conversations with his guide, Doctor Leete, West discovers a radically reimagined society where industry is nationalized, goods are equally distributed, and citizens retire at 45. This bestselling novel sparked a political mass movement and inspired over 162 discussion clubs across America.

Share

— The for-profit Medicare Advantage giants are doing exactly what for-profit companies do, and a million or so seniors are about to find out what “advantage” actually means. Republicans have hated government run programs like Social Security and Medicare — and consistently worked to gut or harm them — since their introduction in 1935 and 1965 respectively. This is why the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress pushed through the creation of the Medicare Advantage scam in 2003, which is neither Medicare nor an advantage. It’s simply a corporate alternative to real Medicare that actually costs us taxpayers more but generates hundreds of billions in profits every year for the companies that run it, who then share some of that profit with GOP (and some Democratic) politicians. And, because it’s all about making profits rather than delivering healthcare, while real Medicare will never require you to get pre-authorization before any sort of medical procedure, Advantage plans almost always do. That’s their profit: denying you care. But apparently that’s not enough for some of these behemoths; now they’re dumping customers who’ve gotten older and sicker and thus more expensive. Humana is shutting down plans covering roughly 600,000 members for 2027, its second year in a row of what it cheerfully calls “targeted plan exits,” while a Leerink analyst note reported by Axios says UnitedHealthcare appears to have dropped about 13 percent of its plans across 18 states. The “giveaways” they offer to get you to sign onto inferior insurance, like major dental benefits, free groceries, and over-the-counter drugs are being slashed, while copays when you visit an (expensive) specialist are exploding. Humana’s CFO told Wall Street the company will “recapture a significant portion of that volume,” corporate double-speak for “we’ll re-sell the same seniors a worse product.” Their goal, laid out during an earnings call with shareholders and executives, is a “sustainable” pre-tax profit margin. Not better care: better profit margins. When Bush pitched this “Advantage” scam as “choice” in 2003, apparently what he meant was the insurance company gets to “choose” whether or not to pay for your care. Every other industrialized nation in the world figured this out decades ago; we’re still letting Big Insurance’s shareholders decide how much they’re going to pay for your doctor or hospital visit.

Subscribe now

— Diesel hit a record $6.05 a gallon Friday, and Trump’s insane war with Iran is entirely responsible for it. According to AAA figures reported by NPR, the national average is up from $5.85 a week ago and $3.70 a year ago, a jump of more than 60 percent since Trump and Netanyahu started their war in late February. CNN notes diesel is on track for the biggest annual percentage increase ever recorded as a result of oil being back above $100 a barrel. Regular gas is at $4.29. And as NBC News points out, after six-plus months of insisting the war would be short, Trump’s now claiming that it’ll magically be fixed just after the election, so please vote for Republicans because this is just temporary. Nobody’s believing him. Diesel powers every truck, train, tractor, and container ship in America, so when it goes up, so does every item on every shelf in every store. This recent hike in fuel prices is only now starting to show up in our purchases; it’s going to get a hell of a lot worse. Welcome to Trump’s “golden age,” all because he thought he could be as slick as Reagan with Grenada, Bush with Iraq, and Bush with Afghanistan, getting himself a “little war” that would goose his popularity. Sadly, he’s not bright enough to do it right, and the drunk weekend TV commentator he put in charge of the Pentagon is even dumber. This is not going to end well.

Subscribe now

— Trump closed his midterm convention in Dallas by making the crowd raise their right hands and pledge they would cheat for him, then told them they’ll go to Hell if they don’t vote the way he wants. According to The Hill, the president had the arena repeat after him that they pledged “to the greatest president in the history of the United States that loves us so much he can’t even breathe,” and then delivered the theological part: “You know what happens if you don’t vote? You go to hell.” Most shocking — and even more shocking that no Republican has publicly repudiated it or called for Trump to step down — was when Trump had his followers swear, as the Daily Beast reported, “I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do.” Registered to vote or not, he added. Donald Trump Jr., Speaker Mike Johnson, and RFK Jr. all took the pledge. Trump also unveiled a $5,000 “Trump dividend” for every adult citizen, payable only if Republicans keep both chambers, with no explanation of how he’s going to get Congress to appropriate the money. Remember those DOGE and Tariff Rebate Checks we all got? Yeah, me neither. When a party’s closing argument is “cheat or burn in Hell,” it’s telling the world that it can’t win an honest election.

Subscribe now

— A right-wing think tank has spent twenty years secretly building a database on thousands of Muslim Americans, and only admitted it when HuffPost started asking questions. This is astonishing and deserves a much larger treatment in our media. The Middle East Forum is a Netanyahu/Likud-aligned group whose “Israel Victory Project” wants America to help Israeli achieve “victory” over the Palestinians. Their files, according to investigative reporting from Huffington Post, contain more than 4 million data points on more than 5,500 Americans and 10,600 organizations, including names, social media accounts, tax information, and organizational ties. Sitting members of Congress Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and André Carson were targeted, along with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who isn’t Muslim, was filed under “Fellow Traveler,” a phrase that eerily echoes Joe McCarthy’s infamous and fundamentally anti-American playbook. Georgetown’s Mobashra Tazamal put it plainly, writing that “It’s a target list.” And once the reporters called, MEF’s response was to announce that “researchers” can now apply for access. Lists like this always start with an unpopular minority (for McCarthy it was gays and communists), but rarely end there. The organization’s founder, Daniel Pipes, recently bragged about the arrest by DHS last month of a Georgetown scholar who’d criticized Israel and they’d compiled a dossier on. This isn’t the sort of thing healthy democracies promote, although these guys are in tight with Trump and friends.

Subscribe now

— Trump got asked a simple question by a Black woman reporter on the tarmac in Dallas and responded by lunging and screaming at her. ABC’s Rachel Scott asked why, if his economic policies are working, Trump thinks he needs to pay people $5,000 to vote for his party. Trump claimed it was a “reward” for “surviving Biden” rather than a bribe, and when she tried to follow up by asking about the $2,000 Tariff Dividend and $5,000 DOGE dividend checks that never arrived, he leaned into her space, jabbed his finger at her face, and repeatedly screamed “Not you!” This is at least the third time this year he’s gone after Scott specifically, having previously called one of her questions “stupid” and referred to her as a “horror show.” This is how a democracy dies, one attack on the media at a time, all being cheered on by lickspittle elected Republicans and the billionaire-owned rightwing media that now dominates America.

Subscribe now

— An active-duty Navy sailor was trotted out on stage at the Republican convention as a prop, which is against Pentagon rules, and the Pentagon so far has nothing to say about it. CBS News reports that Petty Officer 2nd Class Wilbert Joseph Castañeda, who was freed last year from a Venezuelan prison in a prisoner swap, stood before Trump’s Trumpapalooza Dallas crowd holding a sign reading “351 days” as the announcer thanked President Trump for rescuing hostages “taken during the Biden administration.” This is against Pentagon policy and perhaps a violation of the law: Defense Department Directive 1344.10 says active-duty troops can attend partisan conventions but only as spectators, must be out of uniform, and cannot participate in a way that seems to endorse the politics. As former Army JAG officer Cody Harnish told CBS, “The moment he stepped on stage as part of the production, he stopped being a spectator.” Meanwhile, Air Force Major Jason Watson is facing court-martial under Defense Department Directive 1344.10 for criticizing Trump on the steps of the Capitol while being in uniform. And, most astonishingly hypocritical, the disgraced Marine Stuart Scheller, who pleaded guilty to that same violation for his viral anti-Biden videos shot while in uniform, now holds a senior personnel job in Whiskey Pete’s Pentagon. In other words, the rules are enforced on troops who criticize Trump and waived for those who suck up to him. That’s the exact opposite of “the rule of law” and an “apolitical military” that are supposed to have defined and defended America since 1789.

Subscribe now

— The people building artificial intelligence spent the week telling Congress it might kill everybody, so Mikey Johnson decided the House should leave town for six weeks and avoid the topic. Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit Tuesday with a post that’s been viewed more than 150 million times saying the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” The process called “alignment” is AI-industry speak for making sure that the goals and behaviors of an AI system are “aligned” with the needs of humanity (including our survival), but Anthropic’s lead alignment scientist, Evan Huginger, posted in response that he puts the odds of AI killing off all of humanity within the next decade at a shocking “>10 percent.” Trump says it’s not a big deal; beating China in the AI race is more important that the death of all humans. And Johnson refuses to respond to congressional concerns even though more than 20 members of Congress, including a handful of Republicans, have called for action, and a bipartisan bill for a human-controlled “kill switch” has already been introduced. The Republican position is apparently that anything a billionaire wants to build must be good for us, particularly as the AI industry becomes one of the largest funders of congressional campaigns. While the engineers themselves are screaming from inside the building, Republicans — who were also fine with their Medicaid cuts killing another 50,000 Americans a year — are standing around with their fingers in their ears.

Leave a comment

— Crazy Alert! Apparently Donald Trump isn’t the only one who can rename things. Weeks after Trump signed an executive order bizarrely christening Lake Ontario

Read more

Share

— Vladimir Putin has spent the past year turning “plausible deniability” into a full-time European hobby, and this week Germany finally pushed back sorta, kinda, maybe hard. It took an explosive-laden drone found near an Ukraine-bound cargo plane at Germany’s Leipzig airport to provoke Berlin to formally accuse Moscow of running “a well-established pattern” of hybrid warfare. They expelled the Russian ambassador, shut down the Russian consulate in the capital city of Bonn, and put in place new visa restrictions on Russian visitors. After CIA Director and Trump lickspittle John Ratcliff made a sorta-secret visit to Russia, Trump tried to reassure the world, saying that his master Putin “is not going to be attacking a NATO territory.” Except that they already have, repeatedly, and are continuing to. The New York Times worried out loud this week about “a fight that spirals out of control.” Trump consistently kisses Putin’s ass while JD Vance recently said one of the “proudest” moments of his time in office was cutting off defensive weapons to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russia keeps probing the defenses of European countries with drones and missiles, particularly the Baltic states. This administration’s cowardice and craven whimpering in the face of Putin’s aggression, and the complicity of Republicans in Congress, could easily lead us to a larger war in Europe that, in turn, could trigger World War III. And if Trump refuses to go along with Article 5 of the NATO treaty, as he has suggested may happen, this could be exactly what Putin and Xi are aiming for.

Support the Hartmann Report Today

— Javier Milei has apparently decided that if you can’t win an economy, you can always win back a windswept archipelago full of penguins with 3,000 sheep-farmers. Great Britain has claimed and run the Falkland Islands, off the coast of Argentina, since 1833. But Milei is in big political trouble as his neoliberal reforms have gutted that nation’s middle class (just like neoliberal Reaganomics did to America’s) so — like Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, Bush Sr.’s invasion of Iraq, Bush Jr.’s invasion of Afghanistan, and now Trump’s attack on Iran — the Argentinian wannabe strongman has decided to whip up nationalist fervor over the islands to get voters’ minds off the economy. He’s apparently coordinating this with his “good friend” Trump, as our president recently said he’s “thinking of reviewing” America’s 70-year neutrality stance on the issue of the islands. When the actual Falklanders themselves held a referendum on which country should control them back in 2013, fully 99.8 percent of the voters wanted to stay with Britain. Downing Street, for its part, reaffirmed an “unshakeable“ commitment to the islands. Somewhere, Winston Churchill’s ghost is checking the tide tables while Abraham Lincoln’s is looking at the wreckage of the party he brought to power and sobbing…

Support the Hartmann Report Today

— ICE has found a new frontier for cruelty at California’s largest immigration lockup: outlawing the hug. The California City Detention Facility is a former prison in the Mojave Desert that CoreCivic has converted into a concentration camp for brown-skinned people. It was reportedly opened without the proper permits and has since been running as a black box free of federal inspections. And now they’re forbidding “inmates” — the vast majority of whom have not committed any crime whatsoever (being in the country without authorization is a civil, not criminal, offense) — from touching their own families. Instead of the meeting rooms common in prisons (there’s one in this facility, too, although it’s unused), the company is apparently going along with the Trump policy of maximum cruelty by keeping people behind thick glass walls so they can only communicate with family members, children, newborns, and loved ones via a phone that goes through the glass. In response, a grassroots campaign called Hugs Beyond Bars has spent months trying to shame ICE and CoreCivic into allowing contact visits, delivering a 1,100-signature petition to Senator Alex Padilla’s office after a San Francisco vigil for the (at least) 24 people who’ve died in ICE custody so far this year. This is the same facility where a federal judge had to issue a preliminary injunction to force ICE to provide blankets and medical care to the roughly 1,000 people caged there in the near-freezing desert nights. Nothing radicalizes people quite like watching your own government decide affection is a security risk…

Support the Hartmann Report Today

— Missouri’s Supreme Court just handed Trump’s national gerrymandering crusade its first real faceplant. That state’s highest court, in an unanimous ruling, blocked a Republican-drawn congressional map pushed through last September at Trump’s urging. It was specifically designed to dismantle Kansas City Democrat Emanuel Cleaver’s district, giving the GOP a seventh out of eight House seats from a state that’s only 49% registered Republicans. Rightwingers are freaking out: Attorney General Catherine Hanaway declared the ruling has thrust the state into a “constitutional crisis” and vowed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, while Trump himself took to his Nazi-infested social media site to call it a “Dark Day for ‘Justice.’” Democracy, deployed correctly, can still occasionally out-muscle a gerrymander, assuming the five black-robed on-the-take rightwingers in DC don’t decide otherwise in the next two months.

Support the Hartmann Report Today

— Speaking of senators who’ve forgotten what their job is, John Fetterman’s transformation from Bernie-backing mayor of Braddock to Fox News’ favorite Democrat cleared its final decency checkpoint this week. The Wall Street Journal broke a bombshell investigation yesterday, finding that Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman is behaving more like a Republican than a Democrat. He claimed his stomach was upset so he couldn’t meet with three paralyzed veterans who’d traveled from rural Pennsylvania, but then an hour later strolled into his office and did an upbeat hit with Fox “News” to support Netanyahu’s genocidal policies. When Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said they were eager to talk to him about Medicaid cuts, he reportedly texted back, “Well I’m not,” claiming the hospital just wanted “free trips to DC.” He blew off a busload of flood-zone constituents who spotted him in the hallway — he refused to even acknowledge them — while finding time that same week for a meeting with a pro-Netanyahu college basketball coach. When he was told that a police funeral for three slain officers could run three hours, he texted, “This may be a nonstarter.” He’s popped into 26 hearings just long enough to get marked “present” but didn’t speak a single word in 20 of them. And now conservative donor cash is rolling into his campaign coffers and he polls better with Pennsylvania Republicans than their actual Republican senator does. Pennsylvania Democrats are genuinely horrified but they — and the rest of us — are stuck with this badly damaged and sadly deranged man for at least another two years.

Support the Hartmann Report Today

— Trump has apparently spent so much time threatening to weaponize the Federal Reserve, sanction foreign assets, and personally inspect Fort Knox that America’s oldest allies have started quietly walking their gold out the door. As Hitler was moving across Europe, country after country shipped their gold reserves to the United States for safe-keeping. Now, they’ve concluded that Trump’s so deeply embedded up Putin’s backside and so irrational that they can’t trust us any longer, so they’re shipping it all back home. The Netherlands announced this week it’s moved roughly $12 billion in bullion — most of it previously parked in New York — over to London, while France already sold off $15 billion held in New York and replaced it with bars kept safely in Paris. Germany and Italy, the world’s second- and third-largest gold hoarders, are reportedly weighing whether to bring theirs home too. When the people who fled their assets out of Europe because they were worried about Hitler begin to do the same because of Trump, Americans should take serious note of what a dangerous sign of the times this is.

Support the Hartmann Report Today

— Elon Musk, a man who spent a quarter-billion dollars to buy the last election for Trump and got access to Americans’ private data with it (along with stopping dozens of investigations into him and his companies), is reportedly in a full panic over a documentary he can’t buy his way out of. Ashley St. Clair, one of the mothers of Musk’s 14 known children, says that Musk told her how the 2024 elections results would come out, but did so “hours” before the public knew thanks, he said, to a secretive satellite data program. Now, Musk is freaking out because director Alex Gibney’s film “Musk,” due out October 16, is said to expose the billionaire as among the most dangerous men on Earth, and reportedly digs into St. Clair’s claim. My old friend and colleague David Sirota summed up Musk’s meltdown succinctly: “The bully is mad.” Musk has already called the film a “hit piece” and Gibney a “douche,” which, from the man who bought a social media platform specifically so he could promote white supremacy and control his own narrative, tracks. Turns out there’s one thing money still can’t buy: an accountability journalist and documentary-maker who isn’t afraid of you.

Support the Hartmann Report Today

Read more

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion...

— Nineteen months into the term that was supposed to end inflation on day one, the bill has come due. The staff of Congress’ Joint Economic Committee added it all up this week: the average American household has, so far this year, paid more than an extra $3,800 for housing, groceries, and utilities because of Trump’s and the GOP’s insane policies and the cuts to healthcare in the so-called Big Beautiful Tax-Cut for Billionaires Bill. Electricity is up $113 just in the first six months of this year, and ACA insurance premiums increased more than fifty percent with deductibles going up another thousand dollars. Tariffs will, this year, add another $2,500 and that was before Trump threw the 50% tariff on Canadian goods. All to fund another round of tax cuts for billionaires and massive monopolistic corporations run by Trump’s billionaire cronies. Meanwhile, Trump and his corrupt crime family have grabbed something on the order of $6 billion (not including Jared’s billions) and he’s making millions almost every day trading in gas and oil as his on-again-off-again proclamations about Iran swing the market up and down. This is not just the most corrupt president (and family) in American history, it’s also the most destructive to the wealth and health of the average American. Reagan would be proud.

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— The United States Navy is now raiding its own payroll accounts to keep Trump’s war going. The Guardian did a deep dive into internal documents and interviews with officials, contractors, and analysts and discovered a Pentagon memo warning that the Navy could run short on it’s ability to make payroll because the accounts from which sailors are paid have been essentially robbed to cover the unanticipated costs of Trump’s and Netanyahu‘a insane war against Iran. They’ve deferred maintenance on shore facilities, munitions stockpiles are depleted, and, as retired naval officer Harlan Ullman put it, “The piggy bank is broken.” Whiskey Pete and Trump have used up our weapons, wrecked our ships and sailors’ morale, and burned through the money Congress had allocated for them. Pete has been begging Congress for emergency cash since July and, even though the House passed a $1.15 trillion defense bill and a separate $73 billion for the Iran operation, it’s entirely possible none of that money will be available because Congress never authorized the war in the first place, as the Constitution requires. Meanwhile, Trump is demanding $1.5 trillion for next year (the largest military budget since WWII even adjusted for inflation) and is now personally forcing the Navy’s shipbuilders to redo their new aircraft carriers to dump modern tech for launching jets and replace it with steam power from the 1940s because he thinks that’s prettier. It’s gonna delay ship building by years, much to the delight of Putin and Xi, which may be the point. Six months into this war, costing us at least a billion dollars a day (not to mention the damage to our reputation around the world) and there’s still nothing to show for it except higher prices at the pump and the grocery store.

Support the Hartmann Report Today

— Senator Ron Wyden wants a criminal investigation of Bob Kennedy. The Guardian and the AP used a FOIA lawsuit to pry loose letters showing that Kennedy’s 2019 trip to Samoa was, in fact, all about vaccines even though Kennedy told the Senate at his confirmation hearings it wasn’t. Following his visit, a measles outbreak killed 83 people in that country, most of them children under five, so Wyden is asking Republicans for a criminal referral to the Justice Department, saying, “There are consequences for lying to Congress.” American Oversight is calling for an investigation, and Hawaii Governor Josh Green, a physician who went to Samoa to help during the outbreak, wants Kennedy gone from his position. HHS called the whole thing “defamatory,” which is rich. After 2 people died from measles this week in Pennsylvania and there’s currently an 875-case outbreak in North Carolina alone, America is on the verge of losing the international “measles-free” status we achieved in 2000. The only problem Wyden and Markey face is that the DOJ is run by a Trump lickspittle who’s just as corrupt and willing to ignore the law (look at the Epstein files about Trump that they are still hiding as a prime example) as Trump himself. Accountability may have to wait another two years for the next administration to be sworn into office.

Join the Hartmann Report Today!

— The “Godzilla” El Niño building in the Pacific right now is not a run of bad luck. University of Michigan researchers published an article in the journal Science this week reporting that fossil fuel-driven heating has been intensifying the warm phase of the El Niño that’s building in the Pacific and is fixing to hit us all in the next few months with dramatic consequences. Every single “severe” El Niño ever recorded has happened since the 1980s when, no coincidence, Reagan took Jimmy Carter’s solar panels off the roof of the White House, killed off his Solar Bank program, and nuked the green subsidies Carter had started. Trump just did essentially the same to Biden’s green projects, paying billions to companies not to build wind farms off our coasts. Ocean surface temperatures are the hottest ever recorded and perhaps the hottest in over 100,000 years. Close to 50 million people will face famine before the end of the year because of this El Niño, according to the UN’s World Food Program, as monsoon rains will dry up across India and drought will hit Indonesia and Australia. India is already stockpiling grain in anticipation. The fossil fuel industry has spent billions lying to us and buying our politicians since the 1970s when they first truly realized what their product would do to the world. It’s way past time to hold them and their Republican toadies accountable.

Support the Hartmann Report Today

— Arizona’s attorney general has a blunt message for the United States Postal Service. Kris Mayes has joined up with 24 other Blue states to sue the USPS to block the rule they finalized last week putting themselves in between your state and your ballot at Trump’s request. Early voting starts in North Carolina in just a few weeks, with other states following on soon after. This all came out of a wildly unconstitutional executive order Trump signed to try to block voting by people he thinks are likely to go for Democrats. What’s particularly ironic about this particular lawsuit is that Arizona’s vote-by-mail system was designed, built, and put into place by Republicans decades ago when they ran that state and more than three-quarters of voters in that state use it every cycle (as does Trump himself, via Florida). This is what it looks like when our president takes vote-rigging advice from Putin because he’s desperate to avoid being investigated by people with the power of subpoena.

Subscribe now

— The National Park Service has spent over a year quietly detailing how to hand a slice of Yosemite National Park to a Republican-donating Nevada real estate firm. Kingsbarn Realty Capital owns 83 acres just outside the park’s boundary, about five miles from the fabled sequoias, and wants a chunk of land to build a road into that area. Previous administrations turned them down, but now people are smelling the possibility of a GOP-donating rat as Trump is trying to give them what they want. Congressman Jared Huffman said, “It kind of smells, you know,” adding that these places belong to future generations and shouldn’t be “sold off to Trump’s ultrawealthy friends to profit off of.”

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— Trump also wants to run roads through 45 million acres of untouched national forest to help out his logging, mining, and drilling donors. This would be the single largest rollback of protected public lands in the history of our country, opening the last large unfragmented stretches of national forest across 37 states and touching 70,000 miles of waterways. This week the Center for Biological Diversity published a paper titled Deadly Incursions finding that the blast radius for this would hit more than 400 threatened and endangered species and 7.5 million acres designated “critical habitat” along with 1,800 miles of protected rivers and streams. Grizzlies in the Rockies, salmon in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, Mexican spotted owls and Gila trout in the Southwest, Hellbenders in Appalachia, and rare butterflies more or less everywhere are all threatened. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — a morbidly rich Trump lickspittle who sold his company to Microsoft for more than a billion dollars but has no background whatsoever in forest management — has been bizarrely claiming that Richard Nixon’s Endangered Species Act was “weaponized” by previous administrations. The public comment window closes September 21.

Refer a friend

— Crazy Alert! Diesel hit $5.50 a gallon and billionaire-owned Fox “News” finally found sixty seconds for it. The week diesel broke through $5.50 a gallon nationally (August 19-26) Fox “News” found exactly one minute of airtime the entire seven days. Diesel moves pretty much everything we eat, wear, or buy and — combined with the fertilizer and oil shortage from Trump’s Iran war — is crushing farmers as well. During that one minute Fox spent on the topic they claimed that the price hike was because refineries had been closed “because of green goals,” a total crock. Media Matters, which tracks Fox, revealed this, as well as their claim that Fox spent a mere 15 minutes last month discussing the rising price of gas, and also blamed that on “green” policies. Somewhere in Iowa a farmer is watching Fox and has decided the reason his fuel bill doubled is Greta Thunberg…

Leave a comment

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Share

— Republicans created the morbidly rich and stuck America with the $40 trillion debt. For decades, I’ve been pointing out that in 1981 Ronald Reagan adopted a strategy proposed a few years earlier in the Wall Street Journal of spending like a drunken sailor when a Republican is in the White House to stimulate the economy and create the illusion of good times, while running up the national debt to astronomical levels, all so that they could scream about the national debt and demand cuts to social programs whenever a Democrat came into office. Republicans have been religiously following this ever since; the only Republican president to deviate from it was George HW Bush. The result, of course, is our $40 trillion national debt. With that $40 trillion, we could have had a national healthcare system and free college for all Americans, but instead we got Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, had a whole collection of bizarre billionaires. Finally, thankfully, both economists and Democrats have figured this out and are finally starting to speak out. It’s insane that the GOP has gotten away with this scam as long as they have…

Subscribe now

— Donald Trump claims we have a new category of crime: publishing numbers he doesn’t like. When the Center for American Progress ran the crime data for Washington DC after Trump threw thousands of National Guard troops onto the streets and found that they not only didn’t reduce crime but also burned through more that $1.7 billion in our tax dollars, Trump went nuts. His personal lawyer sent a 9-page letter to CAP demanding a retraction, an apology, and cash (of course), backed by the threat of a $5 billion defamation suit. Always classy, Trump’s lawyer closed the demand letter with the all-caps “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY.” He also floated the possibility of going after CAP’s donors, the sort of Putin-esque or Stalin-esque action that FIRE’s Aaron Terry called (correctly) “wholly incompatible with a free society.” Meanwhile in Florida, Trump toady Joe diGenova has his DOJ investigators demanding to interview the FBI officials who executed the Mar-a-Lago search — which turned up more than 100 classified documents Trump had stolen and was criminally in possession of — in pursuit of the theory that thief Trump, rather than the US government, was the actual victim. Is this still America?

Subscribe now

— Trump’s inspectors general have found our government’s waste, fraud, and abuse: It’s them. You’ll recall that Trump fired over 20 Inspectors General across most all of the federal government’s major agencies, replacing these watchdogs with MAGA grifters and lapdogs. The IG for the Department of Veteran’s Affairs, Cheryl Mason, demanded a private bathroom suite for her office, apparently because she didn’t want to rub elbows with the riff-raff. She claimed that Senate-confirmed appointees are legally entitled to a private bathroom, a law that literally doesn’t exist. There is a $5000 cap for renovations, which wouldn’t begin to touch the cost of what she did. She also commissioned a personal flag at more than a thousand dollars at the same time she was largely ignoring the “stop fraud and waste” job of an Inspector General while she slow-walked reports on electronic health records, and cut criticism of the VA’s physician shortages out of final drafts. Over at the Labor Department, losing Republican Congressman Anthony D’Esposito fired the staff overseeing corruption and now campaigns alongside Trump. At HUD the acting IG told his staff that instead of looking for waste, fraud, and abuse, they should instead become the Secretary’s “strong right arm.” Audits are, as a result of all this corruption, down 15% and investigative reports down by a quarter. As fired Interior IG Mark Greenblatt put it plainly: “You’ve co-opted the umpire and made them part of your team.” Veterans get the shortages, Mason gets her very own flag.

Join the Hartmann Report Today!

— The Democratic establishment is now upset that they’ve spent a decade begging young people to run for office. Over on Fox “News” they’re loving James Carville, who’s now aligned himself with a “moderate” group that wants to hang onto control of the Democratic Party, as he blasted the DSA for borrowing the Party’s “godd’mn” name. This is part of a broader pattern among the neocons and neoliberals who’ve largely run and profited from the Party since Clinton flipped it in that direction in 1993, as documented by Fair Media Watch’s Raina Lipsitz. Young progressives are getting into races across the country, and the old Party “establishment” is recasting their participation as some sort of sinister infiltration. The problem Carville, Axelrod, et al are having is that a new Berkley Institute of Government Studies poll found that Democrats in California back candidates who call themselves progressive fully 60% of the time, and back those who call themselves “democratic socialists” 58% of the time. So-called “mainstream Democrats” are only supported 48% of the time by Democratic voters. And that’s among all ages; when you look at voters under 40 the gap is even wider. Meanwhile in the real world of actual Senate races, Roy Cooper is advertising that he opposed defunding the police, Iowa’s Josh Turek is running an ad boasting that he sided with Republicans more than 700 times, and Mary Peltola is promising Alaskan voters that she’ll take on Democrats too. A party this eager to apologize for existing may want to consider what it’s asking anyone to vote for.

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— Judge Emmet Sullivan, forty-one years on the federal bench, has run out of F’s to give about the Justice Department’s ongoing Epstein/Trump child rape coverup. Yesterday, Sullivan gave AG Todd Blanche until next Thursday to explain why his department keeps hiding a trove of foreign-language Epstein documents, along with FBI agents’ interview notes from women accusing Epstein and Trump of rape and sexual abuse. This is the same case — brought by Katie Phang — where the judge issued a preliminary injunction way back in June ordering the DOJ to remove redactions including email exchanges about a torture video and video interviews with a woman who accuses Trump of raping her when she was a minor. Sullivan noted that Blanche has basically admitted he’s covering up for Trump by breaking the law known as the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and at a hearing earlier this month one of his DOJ lawyers refused to commit to any timetable whatsoever for compliance. Sullivan is threatening these attorneys with contempt, but odds are they all figure Trump will pardon them and billionaires will hire them no matter what. The cover-up continues, as the billionaire-owned corporate press yawns…

Subscribe now

— Big corporate American employers are advertising jobs that don’t exist just to terrify their employees. It’s psychological warfare against workers, this scam run by major corporations where they spend a few pennies to post job opportunities similar to their own existing workers’ jobs not because they plan to hire people but to intimidate their existing employees into not asking for raises. The job platform Greenhouse found that 18 to 22% of its own postings were never filled by the companies posting them, an analysis of LinkedIn put the U.S. figure at 27.4%, and BLS data showed a shocking 2.2 million advertised openings in a single month that produced not even one single hire. When pressed, nearly one in three employers admitted that they posted roles with no intention of hiring anybody. Welcome to the end point of 45 years of Reaganomics where unions are struggling, workers are under psychological warfare attack, and the middle class continues to be converted into the working poor by the GOP and their corporate buddies.

Subscribe now

— Crazy Alert! Rosie O’Donnell closed out her week guest-hosting Kimmel with an extraordinary rendition of “Danny Boy.” Back from her new home of Ireland, where she’s lived since 5 days after Trump’s second inauguration, O’Donnell spent the week refusing to say Trump’s name, instead calling him “Mango Mussolini” and “President Oompa Loompa.” She dedicated her final number Thursday night to Trump with the classic Irish song Donny Boy as the screen behind her showed his polling graphs collapsing, the Reflecting Pool turning green, the ballroom, the Iran war, and measles. She wrapped it up with the chorus, “Come on, resign and make this country great again.” She also thanked Jimmy Kimmel for reminding everyone that free speech still exists here in America, a reminder of how FCC Chairman and Trump lickspittle Brendan Carr tried to take him down and is still harassing Disney/ABC. It was perfect!

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Share

— Trump stuns 5,000 exhausted Sailors: nine months at sea isn’t “nearly long enough.” Roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines have been stuck aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln for over 250 days leading some to suicide attempts, but Trump says they haven’t suffered nearly long enough. When reporters asked him about the deployment that’s making headlines in the wake of reports of moldy showers, broken toilets, weeks without laundry, and one dinner that amounted to two tortillas and a half-cup of rice, Trump’s response was blunt: “No, no, no. [They’ve been there] Not nearly long enough.” Senator Richard Blumenthal says being without a port call in over 200 days is “a modern record” for the Navy, and families say shipboard doctors have warned that the crew is “coming apart.” Whiskey Pete tells Newsmax that it’s all lies, “completely misrepresented,” but nobody ever really took him seriously; the guy’s a completely unqualified C-list Fox weekend host with a short stint in the National Guard who destroyed two small vets organizations he tried to run. Remember all those years that Republicans kept reciting “thank you for your service” every time a member of our armed forces showed up? It was all performance art. These guys don’t give any more of a damn about our troops or our military than Trump did when his daddy paid a corrupt podiatrist for a phony X-ray showing somebody else’s bone spurs that got this pathetic coward out of Vietnam.

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— Trump‘S DOJ is building a shield against Democratic investigations before the midterms. Blanche and Trump are getting ready for Democratic investigations if the GOP loses control of either the House or the Senate this fall. Step one was to extend Trump’s executive privilege beyond the traditional and legal government-employed advisors to anybody he chooses, including friends, donors, business contacts, and even people who have never held a federal job or taken an oath. Blanche’s DOJ memo essentially says that shielding a buddy billionaire from having to testify to Congress is a public service to all of us. No questions asking how much money they gave Trump personally in exchange for pardons, tariff exceptions, or other goodies; no questions about contracts his sons have managed to get from the Pentagon; no questions about his billion dollar crypto scams or, frankly, anything else. Under this new memo, Trump can basically say that any of his buddies or partners in crime who could testify against him are now “advisors” and immune from having to spill the beans. Even Richard Nixon is rolling over in his grave at this level of corruption, lawlessness, and unaccountability.

Subscribe now

— AI crosses a terrifying line, and researchers are debating hitting the brakes. OpenAI stopped internal work on their new Astra model after discovering it was capable of attacking hardened computer systems all on its own, without anybody telling it how to do it. Anthropic documented three cases of Claude invading the live systems of three actual external organizations when it was supposed to be confined to its own sandbox. Meta’s model launched an actual attack on a third party, and one of the new OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face. Days earlier, the UK’s AI Security Institute nailed Anthropic’s Mythos model, turned loose in a test environment, for researching an open-source project’s human maintainers, fabricating multiple online identities, and useing them to con a real human being into signing off on its code. When the Mythos model was challenged publicly, it went back and edited its own trail to look innocent. And this is just what they’ve told us about; there’s no regulation of this industry, at least here in the US (the EU is getting closer), for devices that have been compared to nuclear weapons in terms of their potential to create widespread destruction of infrastructure and systems. Congress is starting to wake up, but the industry has pulled together a multi-hundred-million-dollar war chest to buy legislation and pay off legislators, a practice that was legalized in 2010 by five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court. So much for Reagan’s repeated assertion that industry self-regulation is the highest form of governance…

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— Trump’s team targets nursing home voters with chilling new election rules. As he privatizes Medicare and threatens big cuts to Social Security, Trump is trying to make sure people in nursing homes can’t easily vote. Dr. Oz’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services just published new guidelines for America’s long-term care facilities that deleted — entirely — their previous instructions that nursing homes should have a plan to make sure residents can vote. Instead, they pushed out dire warnings to nursing home staffers about how long they could end up in prison if they help somebody vote in the wrong way. Thirteen Senate Democrats, led by Alex Padilla and Elizabeth Warren, wrote to Oz pointing out that the memo is apparently designed to intimidate staff out of helping the country’s 1.2 million nursing home residents cast a ballot. Given how many immigrants work in nursing homes, this will hit hard. Republicans in Texas have already test-run this, which is probably where Oz got the idea: Texas social worker Kelly Brunner made clerical errors registering disabled residents in 2020, although no improper vote was ever cast, and Texas Attorney General (and now Senate candidate) Ken Paxton charged her with 134 felonies anyway. She spent $50,000 on lawyers and lost her teaching license. Republicans are getting desperate: first it was Black voters they were purging and gerrymandering into irrelevance, then Hispanics they’re terrorizing and threatening to bring ICE to the polls, then shutting down voting operations in college towns, and now it’s the elderly as they’re working to destroy Social Security and Medicare. These people are sick.

Subscribe to the Hartmann Report

— Big Pharma hits jackpot as record 59% of Americans struggle to afford prescriptions. A record 59 percent of Americans say they can’t afford their prescriptions while ten massive drug companies pulled in $298 billion in just the first six months of this year. Comparing the first six months of this year to last year, Protect Our Care’s latest Greed Watch report found that the top ten drugmakers raked in $24 billion more this year than in the first half of 2025. That let them give their shareholders $63 billion in buybacks and dividends. And thanks to the tax provisions Republicans stuffed into the first Trump tax cut bill, J&J, AbbVie, Pfizer, Amgen, and Merck have paid nothing in federal income tax since 2018. Zero. Not reduced — zero. And all of this while the White House Council of Economic Advisers falsely insists Trump’s “most favored nation” unenforceable and largely PR-only “handshake deals” will save Americans $529 billion. When Senator Ron Wyden tried to check their claimed numbers, nobody in the administration would give him any information whatsoever. This is what forty-five years of Reaganomics has given us: record corporate profits, zero corporate taxes collected, and a third of Americans forced to cut their pills in half.

Join the Hartmann Report Today!

— Putin tests NATO again, as Trump burns through America’s weapons. For the second time in ten weeks, NATO has had to scramble fighters to deal with Russian incursions into their territory. This time it was Lithuania’s turn, as NATO confirmed Italian and Turkish F-16s based out of Estonia responded, neutralizing the Russian drone over an unpopulated area. The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania don’t have any of their own fighter jets, so the Italians and the Turks had to step in. Last month it was a Russian missile landing in Poland, and to the south, Moldova recalled its ambassador from Moscow after a drone exploded near the village of Crocmaz on August 9. Moldova has had 1,500 Russian troops squatting in their Transnistria region for three decades, as they try to fend off a Kremlin operation that, per newly surfaced files, recruited 150,000 Moldovans and spent $20 million to subvert its elections. As Trump burns through American munitions and JD Vance brags that stopping US weapons from going to Ukraine was one of the “proudest moments” of his vice-presidency, Russia appears to be testing NATO defenses in preparation for an actual assault. If that were to happen, do you really believe that Trump would order US NATO forces to intervene? I’m not holding my breath; this is a very, very dangerous sign for world peace.

Leave a comment

— Geeky Science Alert! Scientists make a stunning discovery about how birth order may affect your health. Where are you in your family’s birth order? It may make a big difference. A new study published in Nature Health looking at insurance claims of 10,270,012 children from 5.1 million two-child families, spanning 2003 to 2024, found some surprising results having to do with birth order. Of 418 diseases with enough cases to test properly, 150 of them showed “statistically significant birth-order associations” with 79 connecting conditions to first-borns, and 71 toward second-borns. Firstborns had higher odds of autism, ADHD, Tourette’s, OCD, food allergy, and hay fever; second-borns were more likely to be afflicted by shingles, substance use disorder, gastritis, and/or migraines. Now, if we could just make sure that everybody — regardless of their position in the family’s birth order — could have inexpensive healthcare, maybe we could use this data to start some programs that anticipate these trends in a preventative way.

Join us as a Subscriber Today!

— Trump guts America’s firefighting capabilities as historic heat and hurricane threats explode. As Hawaii is bracing for the first hurricane ever to make landfall on the Big Island and the strongest heat dome on the planet is squatting over the American South, Trump is firing the people who fight fires. After all, climate change is a hoax, right? Hawaii Governor Josh Green declared a statewide emergency Thursday as Tropical Storm Lala churned over unusually warm water toward the Big Island, which would make it the first hurricane landfall there since records began in 1900 and only the state’s second ever. Forecasters are warning of at least 8 to 12 inches of rain with isolated totals hitting a life-threatening 25 inches. Meanwhile, the Washington Post reports the planet’s strongest heat dome will hit the continental United States this weekend, mostly in the South, with anticipated temperature records being broke in nineteen states. And out West, more than 12 million acres have already burned in 2026 — more than all of 2024 — while the Forest Service has shed roughly 5,900 people, absorbed a $438 million budget cut, and shut down 55 of its 77 research stations. Given this assault against our forest service and firefighting capabilities, three of four federal wildland firefighters are reportedly thinking about quitting. The oil companies knew this would happen way back in the 1970s and spent the next half-century telling us lies, paying off corrupt scientists, and buying the loyalty of corrupt Republicans who’re now dismantling the fire crews as they insist the climate change is a hoax. Somewhere in hell, Ronald Reagan is giving Trump a big thumbs-up.

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

— Trump has figured out a way to grift off the plight of immigrant kids. A Texas law firm with virtually no immigration experience, but multiple people close to Trump or accused of being open racists, just got a $150 million sole-source contract to replace the public defenders defending kids being held in Trump’s concentration camps for brown-skinned people. Meanwhile, ICE says that, sure, they’ll wear body cameras when they beat up and murder people, but they’ll only share those videos when they make them look good. Don’t expect to see any released that actually show criminal activity by armed, masked ICE thugs. Sounds over the top? Here’s their exact language: they’ll only release body camera footage when “it is in the best interests of the agency.” Trump has built his SA/SS force of violent, unaccountable modern-day Klan members to intimidate and even kill anybody who dares defy this regime, and it’s not about to start following the law or even behaving morally any time soon.

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— Trumponomics is even worse than Hoovernomics or Reaganomics. Since he fired his statistics person at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and replaced her with a hand-picked toady, the numbers have been looking weird. For example, the regime reported 57,000 new jobs in May, then later quietly revised that down to 20,000 (although the headlines of 57,000 are still out there); they reported 129,000 new jobs for June, then quietly revised that down to 63,000 (ditto on the headlines). And this week we found that instead of the anticipated creation of 80,000 new jobs, the American economy actually lost 23,000 jobs last month (and expect that number to get worse when they “revise” it in 2 months). No matter how hard they try, they can’t keep Americans from noticing that housing, groceries, gas, transportation, drugs, medicine, and pretty much everything else are more expensive while billionaires and the Trump Crime Family get richer and Republicans continue to refuse to allow an increase in the minimum wage or the right to unionize. Eventually, reality catches up with politics, no matter how fast and furious Trump and his lickspittles try to keep us distracted or hating on each other, and hopefully it’s going to catch up in a big way this November.

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— Over at Montana Dispatch, Ryan Busse lays out the five Big Lies Republicans are using to steal our public lands. Utah’s Republican Senator Mike Lee, for example, recently lied to his constituents that the Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante national monuments President Obama designated were brought into being no public comment or input when, in fact, over 2.7 million people weighed in during the comment period. Another Big Lie is that we must let drilling companies exploit our public lands to become “energy independent,” a designation we reached during the Obama years. They’re also trying to tell us that the way to prevent forest fires isn’t to cut back on climate-change-causing CO2 from burning fossil fuels but, instead, to log those trees and leave behind nude wastelands (which actually catch on fire even more easily, because all the wood debris there is dead). Trump — who’s probably never walked through an old-growth forest in his life — tried pitching the lie that people can’t and don’t use our public lands for recreation like camping and fishing. And they try to tell us that we’re not subsidizing the oil and cattle industries with our public lands when in fact we’re handing them the equivalent of billions of dollars every year. Hopefully one of these days there’ll be a cost to these Republicans for the continuous streams of lies they keep pouring out on dozens of topics.

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— Trump has figured out a new grift to let his oil company donors profit from his drawing down the National Oil Reserve. Here’s how it works. Normally, when we release oil from the strategic reserve we sell it on the open market at market prices. That would mean that the oil Trump’s releasing would go for around $100 a barrel, paid by the oil companies. When the oil shortage is over, the government would go onto the public market and buy the oil back for, say, $50 a barrel and refill the reserve. It actually makes a profit for the government. But what Trump’s doing is “loaning” our oil to the oil companies at no charge. They then sell it for $100 barrel and when it’s time to “return” the oil to the reserve they’ll buy it on the market at $50 a barrel (or however low it goes when the crisis is over). The entire profit — quite literally hundreds of millions of dollars — instead of going to us taxpayers, goes to the oil companies who funded Trump’s campaign for president. Lever News has the entire sordid story broken down on their site in an article by Freddy Brewster.

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— America’s oligarchs and the Republican Party they own know how to hold onto potentially wayward members of Congress. People are scratching their heads in wonderment; after Trump trashed Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis to the point that all three are leaving Congress at the end of the year, all three ended up voting for Todd Blanche to continue the Epstein coverup and give Trump the $100 million the IRS has been trying to collect from him for over a decade for his Chicago Trump Tower tax fraud. Why? former senators can be extraordinarily valuable to lobbying/government-relations firms because of their personal relationships with senators, senior staff, committee personnel, administration officials, donors and corporate leaders. Their intimate knowledge of how the Senate actually operates and the prestige/access associated with having been a senator are worth serious money: former senators often start at $5 million a year. But if their colleagues shun them because they’re afraid of retribution from Trump, that value vanishes. Do the math…

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— The solar industry claims a scalp. Two, it turns out, can play at this game: a new political action committee (Invest in Tomorrow Coalition PAC) formed and funded by solar industry executives ran ads against Tennessee’s toxic MAGA congressman Andy Ogles, and then beat him in the primary, replacing him with a Republican who’s favorable to solar power. Now that five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court have ruled that our elections and politicians are for sale, the auctions have begun!

— Is Israel using rape, electric shocks, and beatings to discourage activists from bringing food and medicine to Gaza? It sure looks that way, according to The New York Times, reporting “numerous reports of physical abuse” as well as “deeply disturbing accounts of sexual humiliation and degrading treatment carried out by Israeli forces.” Israel’s openly racist national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir even strutted around with the captives, making a degrading video that was so abusive and offensive that even US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, a total suck-up to Benjamin Netanyahu, called Mr. Ben-Gvir’s actions “despicable,” adding that he had “betrayed the dignity of his nation.” It’s time to end American financial support of this rogue regime that’s giving antisemites more than enough raw material to use in their rants against Jews and thus putting people at risk worldwide.

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— Is that a squirrel on Trump’s head? The guy’s been totally bald on top for decades, as his daughter told us years ago, and his comb-over has been getting thinner and thinner. So apparently he’s taken to either hair extensions or a wig. The media is having a field day with it, with headlines like: Trump’s Suddenly Thick Hair Raises Eyebrows and Wild three days of ‘wig’ transformations. When I was a teenager working as a progressive rock DJ in Lansing, on a couple of occasions I DJ’d drag shows at a local gay bar. In the wig and makeup departments, Trump nearly beats some of the drag queens I knew…

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Share

— Welcome to Trump’s latest billion-dollar scam, this time in the Middle East. Just like with his failed “Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU),” Trump, with lots of fanfare, is proclaiming that he’s achieved peace in the Middle East by brokering a deal between Hamas and Israel, with Hamas laying down their weapons and Israel withdrawing from Gaza. The only problem is that Hamas said they’d only disarm after Israel leaves Gaza first, and Israel is refusing to even comment on this deal that they apparently had nothing to do with writing. So, it’s really just fantasy fiction that Republicans think might help soften the blow at the gas pump and grocery store by telling us somehow that all the cost and deaths and depletion of our weapons stockpiles were done for a noble cause. This whole bizarre pitch came out of Trump’s Board of Peace, a make-believe United Nations that he “chairs for life” and stocked with Rubio, Kushner, Witkoff, Tony Blair, a private equity CEO, and assorted loyalists, including 28 countries that signed on with a payment to Trump’s new org of a billion dollars each and not a single board member from any of them. How do you spell G-R-I-F-T? We must elect people who treat diplomacy as real, meaningful work rather than just a photo op.

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— A third of Democrats now call themselves democratic socialists, according to a new CNN poll. There’s considerable confusion, particularly in our corporate media, about the difference between people who call themselves democratic socialist and the members and positions of the Democratic Socialists of America political party, which could take on Democrats in multiple states the way the Green Party has in the past and has a platform including many things no Democrat would support. What’s going on here is that America is in the midst of a populist moment (and has been since 2008) wherein voters will elect anybody who promises fundamental change to an economic and political system they know isn’t working for them. Forty-five years of Reaganomics have gutted the middle class and five corrupt, on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court changed the rules of politics to legalize bribery so the only entities getting what they want out of Congress any more are billionaires and giant corporations (and Israel). These should be the tea leaves that elected Dems and the DNC are reading, but so many are so wed to corporate or AIPAC money that it’s going to be a real struggle over the next few years to reinvent the Party in, basically, Bernie’s and AOC’s image. But that will happen, no matter how much the “problem solvers,” Clintonistas, and hustlers like Rahm Emmanuel and James Carville protest.

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— Trump wants his $100 million from the IRS and free grifting for his friends and family members for life and, by G-d, he’s going to get it. That’s the basic message coming out of the GOP right now, with Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee voting unanimously to remove a provision that would have stopped Trump’s IRS grift from must-pass budget legislation. Todd Blanche is refusing to put into writing his sworn statement to Congress that the so-called weaponization fund is dead and Trump won’t get the tax relief he’s seeking. Back in 2008, Trump claimed a deduction on his Chicago tower that he’d also claimed the previous year; this is generally called “tax fraud.” The IRS caught it and has been trying to collect the money ever since; with interest the bill is now over $100 million. With the document Blanche signed as a “settlement” with Trump, that tax bill goes away, as does every other tax liability — past, present, or future — for Donald, Melania, Uday and Qusay, Ivanka and Jared, all of their various children and other family members, and their partners in any companies they’ve started or run. They won’t even have to pay taxes at all, because the enforcement mechanism will have been neutered altogether. This is what’s holding up Trump’s nomination of Blanche to be permanent Attorney General, and word is leaking out that Cornyn and Tillis might be amenable to a deal where “only” Trump and his kids get this exception and the $1.7 billion “fund” goes away (Trump has since found other ways to pay off his supporters). As The Wall Street Journal reports, a senior White House advisor said bluntly: “The boss wants his money.” This is Putin-level corruption right in plain sight; it’s amazing there aren’t more protests and Democrats aren’t holding daily press conferences to proclaim their outrage.

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— Is Trump taking Iran’s side because Putin told him to? Or to prepare us for our losing this war to Iran by saying it’s not such a big deal? At a Camp David cabinet meeting with the 13 billionaires in his cabinet and others yesterday, Trump claimed that the hack that’s hit water systems in at least 7 states wasn’t done by the government of Iran but, instead, came about because the Democratic governor of Minnesota is “incompetent.” This is nothing new for Iran: In early-2013, an IRGC general publicly claimed Iran had the “fourth biggest cyber power among the world’s cyber armies.’” On August 15, 2012, they used that power first to disable the world’s wealthiest oil company, Saudi Aramco, irretrievably destroying 30,000 computers, leaving only an image of a burning American flag on every monitor’s screen. Then they went after a 245-foot-tall, 800-foot-long dam in Oregon, the Arthur R. Bowman Dam, which backs up the Crooked River. Had they opened its floodgates fast enough, it would have wiped out the downriver town of Pineville, killing thousands. Fortunately for Oregonians, they got the wrong dam; instead of the Oregon dam, they successfully infiltrated and took control of the Bowman Avenue Dam in New York State, which reroutes a relatively small stream. In an article about the attack, Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Yadron wrote, “America’s power grid, factories, pipelines, bridges and dams—all prime targets for digital armies—are sitting largely unprotected on the Internet.” It was just a fluke that they got the wrong dam. But now Trump is saying that Iran isn’t doing this sort of thing, and there’s got to be a reason for that lie.

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— “Elect a clown, expect a circus” alert! It shouldn’t surprise us that the white supremacists in the Trump administration wouldn’t know which countries are where on a map of Africa, but somebody could at least have run it past a person with Africa competence. The truly sad part is that the presentation was part of an effort to keep alive the only thing that George W. Bush ever did that was useful for anybody other than billionaires: the President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (PEPFAR). Sad.

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— Trump is asking cops to help him continue grifting with crypto. The Trump regime is pushing law enforcement groups hard to support the GOP’s new Clarity Act, which would forbid others but explicitly allow Trump and his wife to keep issuing their $TRUMP and $MELANIA “collectible” digital coins, which have already helped make them billions of dollars. Moving to help Trump and his sons profit from the crypto scams they’re running, CNN reports: “At the Justice Department, Blanche shut down some cryptocurrency criminal investigations and disbanded a group of prosecutors and investigators who focused on cryptocurrency crimes as part of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team.” They also note that: “Some law enforcement groups, including the National District Attorneys Association and the International Association of Chiefs of Police, have warned that the proposed law does not do enough to ensure transparency and accountability among crypto companies.” Now Trump wants legislative relief, and Republicans are inclined to give it to him but they’re hesitating at the moment because law enforcement groups are skeptical, and Trump himself is lobbying them. Keep an eye on this one.

— FCC Chief evokes howls of laughter across the country. In an interview with Dasha Burns of Politico, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said, “I don’t view the FCC as the speech police.” His statement does not mean, however, that he’s backing away from investigating the license renewals of ABC stations that didn’t carry Trump’s election fraud speech. The speech police live on even as they deny their own existence…

— To live long, adopt these habits. “Blue Zone” residents between 70 and 101 in Sardinia don’t just share the Mediterranean diet and lots of exercise. Researchers recently did a larger analysis of them versus nearby people who shared the same eating and exercise habits but didn’t live as long and found that the longest-lived people almost universally also had positive attitudes toward life. Curiosity and optimism — both characteristics that can be learned and reinforced regardless of age — had a big effect, according to the researchers. Time to dig out your copy of one of my favorite books, Pollyanna, and get some inspiration!

Subscribe now

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Share

— Is this going to be Trump‘s and the GOP’s strategy this fall? New York Times columnist David French published a truly alarming op-ed yesterday, pointing out a strategy that Republicans are apparently considering as we approach this November’s election. In Article I, Section 5, the Constitution says that both the House and Senate will decide who they’ll seat as members: “Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members.” In other words, if the House — which right now is in Republican hands — determines that they want a Republican who lost an election for the House or Senate to a Democrat this fall to be the person seated as a member of Congress rather than the duly elected Democrat, they can make that happen with a simple majority vote. They can literally overrule or simply ignore the results of any election for any House or Senate seat if they don’t like it. Of course, to give the process a patina of legitimacy they’d probably point back to some squealing Laura Loomer-type back home in the state to claim that there were “irregularities,” but they can do it and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. In fact, it’s been done over a dozen times in this country’s history, and the Supreme Court itself has, as French points out, in a 1972 case called Roudebush v. Hartke, ruled that, “Which candidate is entitled to be seated in the Senate is, to be sure, a nonjusticiable political question.” In other words, No court can rule on this; there is no possible appeal. They’d probably only try to pull this off it the election is close and control of either body is hanging in the balance; that’s the circumstance that’s provoked such an action in the distant past. This is one more solid reason — in addition to overcoming the GOP voter suppression efforts I wrote about yesterday — why the ultimate and arguably only solution we face this fall to preserve our democracy is to show up in such overwhelming numbers that nobody can deny the results.

Join us as a Subscriber Today!

— Bernie Sanders explains the appeal of democratic socialism to a Fox “News” reporter. I’ve told the story before about how, in 2016, when Louise and I lived on a boat in a marina in Washington, DC surrounded by lots of Navy and Coast Guard Republicans, most all of them were debating whether to vote in the primaries for Trump or Bernie, either being preferable to Clinton or any of the mainstream Republicans running. At least since 2000, I believe Americans have been looking for real change, a break with the neoliberalism that Reagan rolled out and Bill Clinton embraced, and both Bernie and Trump promised that change. But Trump has failed to deliver real change, so the question still hangs over our electoral processes. Which is why probably a lot of ears perked up when a Fox “News” reporter caught up with Bernie in the halls of the Capitol and asked if democratic socialism would hurt Democratic candidate chances this fall. Bernie was blunt: “The American people are disgusted with an economic system in which one guy on top, Elon Musk, owns more wealth than the bottom half of American society. They’re tired of a situation where 60% of our people live paycheck-to-paycheck... they are tired of a corrupt political system in which billionaires buy elections.” Amen! Hopefully a lot of those Fox-watching Republican-voting guys who lived in boats around us were watching…

Become a Hartmann Report Supporter

— Affordability is tanking under Trump. When it rains, it pours. American families were still reeling from the price increases on imported goods caused by Trump’s early tariffs when he let Netanyahu talk him into stupidly — and illegally — attacking a country that had not attacked us. The war of aggression against Iran led to the closure of the Gulf of Hormuz which spiked oil and gasoline prices early on and again over the past week. And now, after the Supreme Court told Trump that the Constitution says only Congress can impose tariffs, he’s gone and done it again, this time using the excuse that Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and around 80 other countries are using forced or slave labor in their factories to hit them with 10% to 12.5% tariffs. One immediate result was a jump in bond yields, meaning that home and car loan rates will soon be rising; mortgage rates could easily hit 7 percent in the near term. And there’s even speculation that Kevin Warsh, the guy he put into the Fed to replace Jerome Powell, will oversee an increase in the Fed-determined interest rates in coming weeks. This is all bad news for Republican candidates, which probably explains why the Trump administration is threatening to jail election officials and strip FEMA funds from states that won’t go along with their latest voter suppression efforts.

Subscribe now

— Republicans want legislation to force people to work in deadly heat if that’s what their employers demand. The Biden administration proposed OSHA rules that would prevent employers from forcing people to work under dangerous circumstances, including extreme heat events (the rule was dropped when Trump came into office). But leave it to Republicans, presumably responding to big lobbying money from the ag industry, to go an extra step to screw the workers. The Heat Workforce Standards Act, introduced by Indiana Republican Congressman Mark Messmer, passed the House Education and Workforce Committee in a straight party-line vote this week. The proposed new law would ban OSHA from putting into place any sort of national heat protections for working people. These guys don’t care who lives or dies, they just want to be sure they can cash the oligarchs’ checks.

Join us as a Subscriber Today!

— “Explosive Trumparreah” spreads across the US, along with measles, while Bob Kennedy says, “Everything’s under control.” An estimated 11,500 cases of Cryptosporidiosis have now shown up in 41 states, but ever since the CEO of Taylor Farms gave Trump a million dollars and visited him in the White House last week the CDC continues to play dumb. Bob Kennedy says the outbreak is “under control,” although this is the guy who got a brain worm from eating roadkill and has no medical background whatsoever. Meanwhile, because of the MAHA-spread skepticism of immunizations, America is now experiencing the largest number of deadly measles cases since the disease was declared eradicated from America two decades ago. These Republicans sure know how to run a public health service, eh?

— The Social Security reckoning will become a BFD as the trust fund runs low. Until Reagan’s “reform” of the Social Security system, it had always operated on a simply pay-as-you-go system; the money coming in from FICA taxes funded the money going out to retirees and people on disability. Seeing the baby boomer generation’s retirement coming down the road, Congress increase the FICA tax to essentially double-tax the boomers to build up a massive ~$2.5 trillion trust fund to deal with this “rabbit through the python” problem; the idea was that the boomers would have all retired by the time the fund was exhausted and Social Security could go back to pay-as-you-go. Reagan also put an income tax on Social Security earnings, slowed the cost-of-living-adjustments (COLAs), and raised the retirement age to 67. None of those things, however, have worked and now the trust fund will run out of money within the next six years, long before the last of the boomers are dead. The solution to the problem is simple: right now people only pay Social Security taxes on the first ~$180,000 of their income, so millionaires and billionaires pay a tiny fraction of their income into the fund compared to average work people. Lifting that cap so everybody pays the same percentage would make the program solvent for the next 70 years (the maximum the government can calculate) and even allow for a $2000/year increase in benefits across-the-board for everyone. But Republicans hate the idea of taxing the morbidly rich even a tiny bit, so they’re floating a bunch of other suggestions, including privatizing the system and giving it to the big New York banks, raising the retirement age to 70 or even 72, and cutting benefits by as much as 20%. Keep an eye on this one, as most younger people don’t really understand the system so the GOP’s hustle is still working. It’s going to take all of us to educate our friends and neighbors to the simple realities of the situation.

Subscribe now

— Forever chemicals may be causing ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and colorectal cancer in young people. A new peer-reviewed study just published in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology looked at mother-child pairs from birth through age 11 and found a clear association between gut inflammation and PFAS exposure. These chemicals are popping up everywhere; they’re used in everything from paint and pesticides to processed foods and coffee cups. They’re most commonly used to make paper waterproof, so those carry-home food containers and the carry-out coffee cup are likely lined with them. It appears this is a good candidate for answering the questions about why so many young people are now coming down with these GI-related diseases, particularly cancers, that typically only used to hit older folks. Beware.

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Share

— The Trump administration has now openly threatened to imprison American election officials who won’t let it “help” run this fall’s elections. Thursday night Trump went on prime time to inform the nation that our elections have been rigged for years and the evidence was hidden from us, a 26-minute performance that news organizations from PBS to the New York Times shredded in real time. Friday morning his Homeland Security Secretary, former plumber Markwayne Mullin, took a friendly question from a Daily Caller reporter and ran with it: states that decline to hand their voter rolls over to his SAVE program will find their election officials held accountable “by fines, by penalties, and even ... prison time.” He asserted his agency had found 250,000 noncitizens on the rolls in California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Nevada, though as election experts told The Guardian, he declined to share anything so inconvenient as a methodology. Non-citizens on the rolls aren’t generally an issue (and usually the result of errors processing driver’s licenses with “sign me up” checkboxes) because those people who aren’t citizens don’t want to risk five years in jail just to vote. As Pennsylvania’s Republican secretary of state noted, noncitizen voting is vanishingly rare in his state. Gavin Newsom’s entire response was two words: “Try us.” He’d already called Trump’s speech the “ramblings of a mad king,” adding that the only missing prop was a tin foil hat. Understand what’s happening: they’re laying the predicate now, in July, for contesting or seizing an election in November that they can see they’re going to lose. This is how they do things in Putin’s Russia, but no American administration has ever done this. Not one...

Subscribe now

— Turns out that when you spend 45 years transferring the nation’s wealth to the top, the people at the bottom eventually notice. The new CNBC All-America Economic Survey finds Americans as gloomy about the economy as they’ve been since the pandemic years, with Trump’s approval down to 40% and just a quarter of the country optimistic about the future, with all this despite a booming stock market, (which explains who that market is booming for). Today 60% of Americans earning under $30,000 are cutting back on essentials, versus 35% of those making six figures or more. Over on CNN, chief data analyst Harry Enten went to the videotape and came back visibly rattled: among households under $50,000 — the very voters Trump won by a historic margin in 2024 — a mere 16% think groceries are affordable, and his 16-point advantage over Kamala Harris on the economy has become a 39-point deficit. That’s a 55-point swing. “The working class have turned against Donald Trump,” Enten said. Of course they have. This is the party that broke the unions, froze the minimum wage into a fossil, and has installed a union-busting lawyer atop the Labor Department in every Republican administration since Reagan. These are not Eisenhower’s Republicans, and they never intended to be. As Warren Buffett told Ben Stein back in 2006, “It’s my class, the rich class, that’s making [class] war, and we’re winning.” The only question left is whether the GOP can run the old play one more time — point at a migrant caravan, a Willie Horton, a trans teenager, anything shiny — and get voters to forget that 10 of the last 11 recessions started on a Republican president’s watch.

Subscribe now

— And here’s the punchline the consultant class is going to spend all weekend trying not to say out loud: “democratic socialist” now polls better than “MAGA.” The same CNBC All-America poll that found the country miserable about the economy also asked what labels move votes. A candidate calling herself a democratic socialist makes 32% of registered voters more likely to support her. A Trump endorsement: 29%. A MAGA identifier: 27%, with 57% saying it’s disqualifying. So after eighteen months of Republicans screaming “communist” at every Democrat who can fog a mirror, the slur is testing better than the brand doing the smearing. The reason isn’t complicated, though you’d never learn it from the billionaire-funded media and think tanks: since Mamdani won New York, the candidates wearing that label have talked about rent, groceries, wages, and medical bills more or less nonstop — while everyone else talks about Venezuela and burn bags. It’s the economy, stupid. That was on Clinton’s own war-room wall, and it never stopped being true; it just got inconvenient once Clinton and Obama made their peace with neoliberalism and decided the donor class was a coalition partner rather than the problem. Capitalism still outpolls socialism in America, as CNBC notes. It’s just doing so by a shrinking margin, and 45 years of Reaganomics is the reason why. The billionaires spent two generations proving Keynes’ point better than Keynes ever did...

Subscribe now

— Fox “News” covered Trump’s election-fraud address the way a cat covers what’s in the litter box. For three straight hours Friday morning, Fox & Friends did not mention it once — not a syllable — while every other network in America was taking the president’s claims apart line by line. Instead Kilmeade, Earhardt, and Lawrence Jones gave their viewers the Iran airstrikes, the air quality crisis, the Texas floods, the World Cup, and a lovingly extended appreciation of a Marco Rubio speech about “left wing violence.” Then they handed off to Dana Perino, who also didn’t mention it. The network carried the speech live, mind you; as it ended, Bret Baier told the audience Fox “is not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the president’s statements.” Translation: we know exactly what that was, and our lawyers are in the room. Because Fox has been here before: in 2023 it wrote Dominion Voting Systems a check for $787.5 million rather than let a jury hear what its own hosts said in private about the last round of stolen-election fantasies. So the Australian billionaire Murdochs are impaled on the horns of a dilemma entirely of their own manufacture: tell the truth and lose the audience they spent thirty years training, or tell the lie again and lose another three-quarters of a billion dollars. Their solution, apparently, is to pretend the President of the United States didn’t speak. Somewhere in the Fox legal department, a partner is billing $1,400 an hour to explain the concept of “silence” very slowly...

Subscribe now

— Texas has decided that five million public school children will study the Bible whether their families are Christian or not, and Jewish leaders are pointing out — politely, which is more than the state deserves — that this always ends badly. The Republican-controlled State Board of Education voted 9-5 to impose a mandatory reading list larded with scripture on every K-12 English classroom in the state, effective 2030. Board member Brandon Hall, a Republican and a youth pastor, explained the theory at a press conference: “Our nation was founded as a Christian nation, and Texas is a Christian state.” That will be news to the Baptists who fled Virginia’s established church, to Jefferson, and to the Senate that ratified Washington’s and Adams’ Treaty of Tripoli. The Telegraph reports that the curriculum’s Lamentations unit invites eighth graders to weigh “whether the Holocaust was God’s punishment for the sins of the Jews” — an actual lesson plan, in an actual American public school, in the year of our Lord 2026. A Texas rabbi, testifying as both a clergyman and the father of Jewish kids, begged the board to keep the line between teaching about religion and simply teaching religion, a line, he warned, this list forces teachers to cross. The board declined. Trump, naturally, is delighted, announcing that religion is back, bigger and stronger than ever. The Supreme Court settled this in 1963 in Abington v. Schempp, but of course that was a different Court, back when we had one with a shred of integrity still intact. Jesus threw the money changers out of the temple; Texas Republicans are marching the temple into the schoolhouse and billing the taxpayers...

Subscribe now

— Senate Republicans just voted to let an AI algorithm with a financial stake in saying “no” decide whether your mother gets her knee fixed. On Thursday, a Democratic resolution to kill the Trump administration’s WISeR program went down 46-50, every no vote a Republican. WISeR — “Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction” — a name a Bond villain would reject as too on-the-nose — went live January 1st and imports the single most hated feature of the Medicare “Advantage” scam, prior authorization, into traditional Medicare, with AI making the call on things like knee arthroscopy and nerve stimulator implants. As the Medicare Rights Center notes, the private contractors running the algorithm share in the savings generated by the care they deny. They get paid to say no. Sen. Cantwell’s office found Washington seniors waiting two to four times longer for doctor-ordered care since the program started there, from about two weeks to as long as eight. The GAO ruled the whole thing should have come to Congress first; the administration shrugged. Rep. Suzan DelBene, who’s been chasing this thing for a year, called it what it is: “a back door to privatizing Medicare.” Republicans have loathed Medicare since LBJ signed it in 1965, when Reagan himself cut a record warning it would end American freedom. They can’t repeal it — the voters would burn Washington down — so they’re doing it the modern way: outsource the killing to a machine, take a cut of every denial, and call it efficiency. One campaigner summed the Republican Party up as “a group of millionaires working for billionaires who will rip healthcare away.” Sixty years of trying, and they finally found a hit man who doesn’t leave fingerprints...

Subscribe now

— Congress is about to make you permanently jet-lagged, and the science says don’t. The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act 308-171 on Tuesday, locking the whole country into daylight saving time forever, with Trump cheering it on and demanding Congress “push hard for more daylight at the end of the day.” One problem: pretty much every sleep scientist in America thinks this is backwards. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s position, as lead author Dr. Muhammad Rishi explained to Scientific American, is that “permanent standard time is the best option from a human biology standpoint.” Your body clock is set by morning light, not evening light; take away the morning sun and you get worse sleep, worse metabolic health, worse mood, and more heart attacks, as the Washington Post laid out this week. We’ve run this experiment before, in 1974, and Congress repealed it within a year once parents saw their kids waiting for the bus in pitch darkness. So why are we doing it again? Follow the money: the lobbying muscles behind year-round DST are the golf industry, retail, tourism, and the convenience stores, all of whom would like one more hour of afternoon daylight in which to sell you something. Reps. Mary Gay Scanlon and Pat Harrigan have a bipartisan alternative that does it right, and Scanlon’s argument to her colleagues was almost quaint: “we should follow the science and prioritize Americans’ health.” Bless her heart. In this GOP-run Congress, the sun rises when the CEOs say it rises...

Subscribe now

— Geeky Science Alert! The stick shift is dying, and it’s taking something with it that we’re going to miss more than we know. The Washington Post reports that the manual transmission is finally circling the drain, and the numbers are brutal: manuals were 35% of new American cars in 1980 and are under 2% now, and even in Europe they’ve collapsed from 91% of registrations in 2001 to 29% in 2024. That brief 2023 uptick that had enthusiasts comparing sticks to vinyl records turned out to be a dead-cat bounce; J.D. Power’s Tyson Jominy now says that promise was false, the march to the dustbin of history has resumed, and Americans — measured strictly by what they buy to drive — have simply gotten less fun. EVs don’t need gears or transmissions and self-driving cars don’t need you, so the clutch pedal is a dead end. But Edmunds’ Ivan Drury put his finger on the real story: “The more the car becomes your couch,” the less you want to shift it yourself. That’s it exactly. A stick shift demands that you pay attention: that you listen to the engine, feel the road, and participate in the machine instead of being carried by it. We are being gently, profitably relieved of the requirement to pay attention to anything, and we’re paying a premium for the privilege. Rest in peace, third gear. You made us better drivers, and maybe better citizens, but progress marches on...

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Share

— The Trump DOJ has decided that monopolies are people too, and they deserve a break. For forty-five years — ever since Ronald Reagan’s antitrust chief strolled into the Justice Department in 1981 and effectively hung a “Gone Fishing” sign on the merger-enforcement desk — Republican administrations have treated corporate concentration as a feature rather than a bug. It led to the “M&A Mania” (Mergers & Acquisitions) and the “Masters of the Universe” who were crushing companies together while laying off newly-redundant workers as a competitive sport: it began the death of local malls and Main Streets where local businesses could prosper; everything’s now big chains. But even by Reagan’s dismal standard, what’s happening now is something new. As MS NOW first reported and Common Dreams amplified, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward — a Trump loyalist whose apparent chief qualification for supervising antitrust law is that he once represented a Trump valet in the classified-documents case, and who has never actually enforced antitrust law — has been quietly ordering career attorneys to stop suing corporations and simply rubber-stamp their mergers. Bill Baer, who ran the division under Obama, called it “unilateral surrender on antitrust enforcement.” The deals now getting waved through include a merger of two big discount airlines and a tie-up of the world’s dominant subsea-oil-equipment firms — which, experts warn, will raise the price of both your flight to Cancún and your gas at the pump. The antitrust division was created under FDR precisely because Americans had learned the hard way that unchecked corporate power is a threat to democracy itself. Ninety years later, one DOJ lawyer summed up the consumer’s new position: “We’re getting screwed.” So much for “America First”…

— Donald Trump promised to cut your electric bill in half. Instead he’s spending your tax dollars to guarantee it goes up. In just the past four months, as the Guardian reported, the Interior Department has paid four companies a combined $2.7 billion to cancel eight offshore wind projects, while shoveling another $1.13 billion toward propping up coal, the dirtiest and, these days, most expensive way to boil water to make electricity. The Energy Department is forcing utilities to keep aging coal plants running years past their retirement dates; keeping just one Michigan clunker on life support for seven months cost ratepayers $135 million. A new analysis from Energy Innovation finds Trump’s war on cheap power will pile roughly $650 billion onto Americans’ energy bills over fifteen years, cost some 800,000 jobs a year, and — because coal smoke is not, it turns out, good for children — add $43 billion in health costs, much of it new childhood asthma. All to repay the morally criminal fossil fuel fatcats for the hundreds of millions they threw his way in the 2024 election. Former Washington governor Jay Inslee named the racket precisely: Trump is “fattening the wallets of his cronies” with billions of our dollars while forcing our bills higher. This is Reaganomics distilled to its essence: socialism for the fossil-fuel donor class, the brutality of the “free market” for the rest of us. The punchline? Even with Washington’s thumb jammed on the scale, solar just outproduced coal on the American grid for the first time in history…

— In the middle of the worst housing-affordability crisis in a generation, Trump refused to sign the biggest housing bill in a generation, all to throw a childish tantrum. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act cleared Congress with almost comic bipartisanship — 85–5 in the Senate and 358–32 in the House — because even this Congress noticed that the median existing home just hit a record $440,600 and rents have jumped 40% in seven years. The bill funds new construction, expands modular homes, and — mark this — restricts Wall Street’s private-equity giants from hoovering up the nation’s single-family homes to rent them back to the very people they outbid. So naturally the president announced on his Nazi-infested social media site that he wouldn’t sign it, in protest, dismissing the whole thing as “a yawn.” His actual grievance? The Senate won’t pass his SAVE Act, a voter-suppression bill demanding documentary proof of citizenship to fix the imaginary crisis of noncitizens voting, that could also make voting and registering to vote extremely difficult for some 90 million American women who changed their names when they got married but never went before a judge to do it officially. (Women are more likely to vote Democratic than men.) And here’s the ironic part: it didn’t matter. Under the Constitution’s presentment clause, a bill the president neither signs nor vetoes becomes law anyway — which this one did, at the stroke of midnight — denying his own party the signing-ceremony photo op they’d begged for, four months out from the midterms. As Elizabeth Warren, who helped write it, put it, Trump “cares so little about bringing down YOUR housing costs” that he’d sulk through its passage. Forty-five years of Reaganomics handed the housing market to speculators; the one modest bill to claw a little of it back, Trump couldn’t even be bothered to sign…

— With one more purge, Trump moved to seize the machinery that referees American elections. Late Thursday, as ProPublica broke and Common Dreams reported, Trump forced out the last three members of the Election Assistance Commission — the small, deliberately bipartisan agency Congress created after the 2000 Florida fiasco to help states run their elections. The two Democratic commissioners were fired by a four-o’clock form email; the lone Republican was invited to resign. The agency now sits leaderless and legally unable to make a single decision, four months before the 2026 midterms. This isn’t subtle. Less than two weeks earlier, the Supreme Court’s six corrupt, neofascist Republican appointees handed Trump the power to gut independent agencies at will in Trump v. Slaughter, torching ninety years of precedent; the White House cited that very ruling as its authority. And the prize is obvious: a commissioner-less EAC can be ordered to rewrite the national voter-registration form to require proof of citizenship, that driver’s licenses and birth certificates have the exact same name, exactly what Trump’s 2025 executive order tried and failed to do, and exactly what the stalled SAVE Act would mandate. Arizona’s secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, called the move “irresponsible and dangerous.” Connect Thursday’s two headlines and the strategy is naked: hold affordable housing hostage to a voter-suppression bill, and when the bill stalls, simply seize the agency that could impose it by fiat. They’ve been chipping away at the vote since Reagan cut that corrupt deal with the Ayatollah to hold onto the US hostages (destroying Jimmy Carter’s chances for reelection) and Jeb Bush threw over 10,000 Black voters off the rolls just months before his brother George W. “won” Florida’s 2000 election by 537 votes. They’ve just stopped pretending that they care about democracy, an honest vote, or a clean election…

— ICE thugs went looking for one man in Houston, found someone who sorta resembled him, and killed him instead. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — a 52-year-old father of three who’d lived in the United States for nearly thirty-five years, held no criminal record, and was weeks from a work permit — was shot dead Tuesday morning while picking up the last of his construction crew on the way to a job site. He was not the target of the operation; agents in unmarked black SUVs were hunting a different person, saw a similar white van, and stopped him. DHS’s story is that Salgado Araujo “weaponized his vehicle,” rammed an officer, and was shot in self-defense. The three men who were in the van with him tell a different story: their attorney says the ICE vehicles rammed them, and that an agent stepped out and opened fire almost immediately and that “at no point did they use the van to ram into the ICE agents” and no agent’s life was ever in danger. There is, conveniently, no footage: none of the agents had body cameras, which DHS dishonestly blamed — I promise I am not making this up — on “back-to-back Democrat shutdowns.” The Harris County Medical Examiner ruled the death a homicide. This is the most recent fatal ICE shooting since agents killed U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis: As Qasim Rashid notes, “ICE has now killed 10 people we know of: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was just the latest.” A “targeted operation” that shot the wrong man, then reached for the oldest excuse in the authoritarian playbook: “He made us do it…”

— Vladimir Putin assumed Siberia was too far away to feel his war. Ukraine just corrected him. On Monday, Ukrainian drones flew some 1,500 miles and slammed into Russia’s largest oil refinery, in the Siberian city of Omsk — the deepest strike of the entire war, and one the Kremlin never saw coming, because it had bothered to defend the place about as much as it defends the truth. Ukraine’s new homemade Fire Point drones can now reach roughly 2,100 miles, which, as the Wall Street Journal noted, puts Russia’s Arctic gas terminals, western-Siberian oil fields, and pipeline nodes all inside Kyiv’s reach. President Zelensky, understating it beautifully, said the strikes had put “Siberia within reach.” The results are already biting: Russian gasoline production is down roughly a quarter, more than half of Russia’s regions have imposed fuel rationing, Kazakhstan has thrown up fifty-nine checkpoints to stop fuel smuggling, and — for the first time in decades — the world’s great petro-state is importing gasoline. Putin waves it off as “temporary.” And in perhaps the finest irony of the week, even Donald Trump, fresh off another chummy phone call sucking up to and getting his weekly instructions from the man in the Kremlin, allowed that the strikes are “an escalation that can help lead to an end.” One does wonder whether the president is more troubled by the drones or by whose refineries they keep finding and taking out…

— While the administration burns coal and blesses monopolies, an entire species is quietly starving to death off our coast. Scientists are now calling it a “Catastrophic Mortality Event”: 145 Pacific gray whales have washed up dead in 2026 — and because most carcasses sink unseen, that grim number probably represents barely a tenth of the true toll. The eastern North Pacific population has collapsed from about 27,000 a decade ago to roughly 13,000 today, the lowest since the 1970s, with only 85 calves counted this year, the fewest since anyone started counting. The cause is no mystery: as the Arctic warms and its sea ice vanishes, the algae that feeds the tiny crustaceans that feed the whales is disappearing, and these animals — which migrate 10,000 miles a year to that dinner table — are arriving to find it bare. Conservationists like Rick Steiner have been begging NOAA since last August to relist the gray whale under the Endangered Species Act, which would unlock real protections. NOAA’s legally required 90-day answer is now approaching a year of criminal silence, while PEER warns that continued inaction will drive the West Coast population into an “extinction spiral.” A species in “very, very serious trouble,” then, meeting a corrupt regime that treats the Endangered Species Act the way it treats every other guardrail: as an inconvenience to be ignored until the thing it was protecting is gone…

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to the Commonwealth Report

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available in bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Share

— Two hundred and fifty years on, the real fight over the Declaration of Independence isn’t about fireworks: it’s about who gets to own it. Trump has spent the run-up to the semiquincentennial draping himself in the founding parchment like a gold-lamé toga, but as a sharp New Republic essay reminds us, that document has been contested since the ink was still wet. And it was never a birthday card: it was a fighting manifesto. Its most radical line isn’t the bit about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that gets cross-stitched onto throw pillows; it’s the part where Jefferson insisted that when any government “becomes destructive of these ends,” it is the right of the people “to alter or to abolish it.” The men who signed it weren’t celebrating a king. They were firing one. So it’s a rich spectacle to watch a president who muses aloud about third terms, pardons his own insurrectionists, and stamps his face on everything but the currency (give him time) claim Thomas Jefferson as a hype man. The Declaration doesn’t belong to the guy building the throne room replica of Putin’s in St. Petersburg: it belongs to the people it was written to protect, and it still comes with instructions.

— Nothing says “Happy Birthday, America” quite like a heat dome trying to kill a hundred million of us. As the nation fires up the grills, the National Weather Service warned that record-shattering temperatures would drive the heat index as high as 115°F from the Midwest to the East Coast, with more than 100 million people in the path, a drought gripping 45 states, and El Niño pouring gasoline on the whole thing. Across the Atlantic, Europe had just finished burying roughly 2,000 people in Spain and France after a June that hit 44°C — and the scientists at World Weather Attribution confirmed, in the dry prose of people who are quietly furious, that burning fossil fuels made it dramatically worse. That’s the fossil-fuel barons’ whole business model in one sentence: privatize the profit, socialize the corpses. And now the bill is coming due for our history itself, because Jamestown, Virginia is literally drowning. The site of the first permanent English settlement, the first representative assembly in 1619, and the arrival of the first enslaved Africans that very same year has watched the sea rise 1.6 feet in a century, with another three feet projected by 2075. As one archaeologist grimly put it, do nothing and we go “from Jamestown Island to Jamestown Islands.”

— And right on cue, a federal appeals court ruled that the Trump administration can keep throwing the signs explaining all of that down the memory hole. On July 2, the First Circuit lifted a judge’s order that would have forced the National Park Service to reinstall dozens of exhibits on slavery and climate change it had torn out under Trump’s executive order to “restore truth and sanity” to American history. The district judge, Angel Kelley, had accused the administration of trying to rewrite the nation’s story “with a white-out pen,” which is about as gentle as that description gets. Savor the double erasure: at Jamestown the rising water is dissolving the physical evidence of both American democracy and American slavery, while a thousand miles away the Trump regime and its employees are prying off the plaques that would explain either one. They pulled the climate signage out of Acadia last fall, presumably because a placard about rising seas might “disparage” the sea. And here’s the tell: even a panel of judges appointed entirely by Democratic presidents waved it through on a procedural technicality, which is the surest measure of how far the goalposts have already been dragged. The plaintiffs at Democracy Forward called it a “temporary procedural setback.” History is very much hoping they’re right.

— Good news! The world got nearly 11% richer last year. The bad news is you can probably guess who’s holding it. UBS’s new Global Wealth Report found global personal wealth jumped 10.8% in 2025 — the fastest pace since 2017 — minting close to a million new millionaires at a clip of some 2,680 a day, with the United States alone cranking out more than 440,000 of them and the billionaire count swelling 13% to 3,302. Champagne all around. Except for the “fly in the ointment” the bank tucked a little further down: median wealth actually fell in most countries even as the average rocketed upward — because “average” is the number you get when a few thousand people vacuum up the gains while the person standing in the exact middle just treads water. America ranks second in the world in average wealth and a humbling 28th in median wealth: the mathematical signature of an oligarchy wearing a middle-class Halloween mask. The World Inequality Report sharpens the knife: the top 0.001% — roughly 56,000 people — now control more wealth than the poorest four billion human beings on Earth combined, and their share has nearly doubled since 1995. That’s not a bug in the system: that’s forty-five years of Reaganomics and neoliberalism performing exactly as it was engineered to.

— Speaking of the folks who did get richer: the President bought 327 stocks the day before he personally moved the entire market. Buried in Trump’s new 927-page financial disclosure is the revelation that his investment accounts made 327 stock purchases on April 8, 2025 — worth as much as $12.8 million in names like Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, and Alphabet — exactly one day before he announced the tariff “pause” that sent the S&P 500 up nearly 10% and restored some $4 trillion in market value in a single session. The trades were disclosed more than fourteen months later than the law requires. The penalty for filing a year past the deadline? Two hundred dollars: roughly two D.C. parking tickets levied against a nearly $13 million bet. Remember when Martha Stewart did five months in a federal prison for a single well-timed phone call to buy some stock? The Founders wouldn’t have been shocked in the slightest at Trump’s corruption: as a companion New Republic piece lays out, the men who built this republic warned obsessively that concentrated wealth would one day swallow self-government whole, and those warnings have now “come appallingly true.” They wrote our Constitution to stop a king from looting the treasury; they just never imagined one who’d do it through a brokerage app.

— The headlines insisted Trump “lost” at the Supreme Court this term. Down in the fine print, though, King Trump is doing just fine. Yes, the 6–3 conservative majority rejected his bid to end birthright citizenship and struck down his emergency-powers tariffs, which are genuine losses, worth every bit of the celebration. But look at what those same justices handed him on the way out the door: they overruled a 91-year-old precedent to give him the power to fire the heads of independent agencies at will, gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, and — because Citizens United apparently didn’t finish the job — struck down limits on coordinated party spending mere months before the midterms, flushing still more dark money into the GOP’s massive, billionaire-funded machine. Layer on the “shadow docket,” where a run of unexplained emergency orders keeps quietly clearing Trump’s path, and the pattern is unmistakable. Harvard’s Laurence Tribe warned the republic is now “hanging by a thread”; Princeton’s Kim Lane Scheppele compared this bench to the pliant courts Putin and Orbán packed with loyalists. And Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said it plainest of all, accusing her own colleagues of contorting the law so that Trump “always wins.” The scholars say next term’s target is the professional civil service itself, as I mentioned earlier this week when discussing the history of the Pendleton Civil Service Act.

— Meanwhile, the agency Trump just funded to the eyeballs handcuffed a 56-year-old nun on her way to Mass. Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja — a Nigerian-born Catholic sister who has spent a decade working as a registered nurse in South Texas — was walking the single block from her home to Our Lady of Sorrows in McAllen for Sunday Mass, in her habit, when ICE agents stopped her, took her rosary, cuffed her, and hauled her to a detention center an hour away, where she reportedly was held without the medication she needed. She was released the same day only after a frantic bipartisan scramble including Republican Rep. Monica De La Cruz, who allowed that “a Catholic nun on her way to church is not a threat.” You don’t say! This is the same MAGA/GOP movement whose IRS just blessed partisan politicking from the pulpit and whose DHS quietly struck houses of worship from its “sensitive locations” list back in January: the self-styled defenders of Christendom who clutch their crosses at the prayer breakfast and then zip-tie a nurse holding a rosary. As one local official warned, if they’ll grab her, “even the best of us are not safe.” Somewhere, Jesus is flipping over a table.

— Geeky Science Alert! Want to outlive the billionaires? Turns out you should eat like a peasant. A new study written up over at StudyFinds — drawn from research in Cell Metabolism — finds that a mostly-plant “longevity diet” with a little fish, modeled on the old Mediterranean and Okinawan patterns, trimmed body fat and frailty, while the fashionable Western and keto diets did the opposite: more fat, more frailty, worse metabolic numbers all around. In other words, the beans-grains-olive-oil-and-sardines menu that kept Blue Zone grandmothers spry into their hundreds beats the influencer steak-and-butter regimen, and it does it without a single supplement bought from one of Bob Kennedy’s buddies. The through-line is the one your great-grandmother knew for free: eat the plants, skip the processed junk, and don’t let anyone sell you longevity in a bottle. The billionaires can keep the caviar.

Leave a comment

Refer a friend

Give a gift subscription

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, as well as a downloadable or an audio podcast, delivered right to your inbox every morning for free at CommonwealthReport.news:

Subscribe to Comment

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Share

— There’s no longer any mystery about whose side the Supreme Court is on; the only mystery is why it bothers pretending otherwise. The Roberts Court has turned its so-called shadow docket — the emergency pipeline once reserved for death-row stays — into a drive-thru where Trump places an order and the six Republican justices hand it out the window, usually with no explanation and no signature. The Brennan Center counts more than thirty such applications since Trump returned to office, granted roughly 80% of the time, while George W. Bush and Obama combined asked for emergency relief eight times in sixteen years. Just this term the Court greenlit Texas’s racially rigged maps — over the objection of a Trump-appointed lower-court judge — and cleared the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians who’d registered, paid fees, and passed background checks. Justice Sotomayor, in dissent, warned we now live in a country where the government can “seize anyone who looks Latino.” Which, of course, is the entire point for the GOP’s white supremacists. Rep. Jamie Raskin has introduced the SHADOW Act to force the justices to simply show their work within seven days, a bill that wouldn’t be necessary if the Court hadn’t decided that explaining itself is beneath it…or it has something to hide. This is the same institution that gave us Citizens United and corporate “personhood,” the legal scaffolding that turned 45 years of Reaganomics into one-dollar-one-vote (my new book Who Killed The American Dream? The Greatest Crime Ever Told, out in a week, explains where this came from and how to fix it). The robes were always a costume. Now they’re not even bothering with the theater of impartiality or a concern for the Constitution shtick that Scalia and Rehnquist used to do so well…

— Somebody finally proposed making California’s 250 billionaires chip in, and you should hear them scream. Organizers announced Thursday that a one-time wealth tax has been officially certified for the November ballot, surviving a furious last-minute effort by Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and an armada of billionaire money to strangle it before the deadline. The measure would levy a 5% tax on residents worth more than a billion dollars, raising an estimated $100 billion to plug the holes Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” Medicaid cuts blew in the state’s health system, and it qualified with more than 1.6 million signatures, double what was needed. “The billionaire tax will be on the November ballot, and we intend to win,” said union spokesperson Debru Carthan. The opposition tells the story all by itself: Google co-founder Sergey Brin bankrolled competing initiatives and physically fled the state to dodge the levy, while a billionaire coalition has raised north of $100 million to confuse voters with copycat measures designed to cancel the real one out. Newsom — eyeing the White House in 2028 — reportedly wouldn’t even entertain a watered-down 2% version as he’s presumably planning to imitate Clinton and Obama and lean heavily on billionaire contributions (a situation that prevented even one single bankster prosecution for the bank-crash-and-theft of 2009 and the ACA handing our healthcare system off to massive insurance companies). As Rep. Ro Khanna put it, there are 250 billionaires right now in a state of 40 million people. Just between 2023 to 2025, the wealth of those Californians surged 144%, but they’re hysterical about coughing up 5% so the rest of the state can get healthcare. Forty-five years after Reagan promised the riches would trickle down, the people are simply asking to turn the faucet around…

— Senate Democrats noticed that traditional Medicare is the only insurance in America with no limit on what it can cost you, and decided to do something about it. Sen. Ron Wyden and 14 co-sponsors introduced legislation Thursday — the Medicare Cost Cap Act — to put a $5,000 annual ceiling on out-of-pocket spending for seniors in traditional Medicare. Right now, beneficiaries owe 20% of their medical bills with no upper bound, which means a cancer diagnosis or a long hospital stay can run into tens of thousands of dollars; that terror is precisely why 43% of enrollees shell out for separate Medigap policies whose premiums keep climbing each year. (As I document in shocking detail in The Hidden History of American Healthcare, that 20% hole was put in there by Southern conservatives to keep Black people from using the system.) Every other corner of the insurance world — employer plans, the ACA — already has a cap. Wyden framed the coming fight as Democrats trying to give Medicare patients “a fair shake” while the other side runs interference for billionaires, and Protect Our Care hailed it as a direct answer to the Trump-era affordability crisis. Yes, it would cost the Treasury real money — perhaps $50 billion a year — and yes, the bill is a long shot in this GOP-run Congress. But that’s the whole point: it draws the line in bright paint heading into November. Following Reagan’s old “Two Santas” strategy, a Republican-run government that found trillions for billionaire tax cuts suddenly developed a “steely concern for the deficit” the moment a middle class grandmother with cancer might benefit. That reflex, too, is a 45-year-old GOP inheritance…

— A federal judge just told Trump’s Justice Department to stop hiding the files on the woman who says Trump sexually assaulted her when she was 13. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — Trump’s own former criminal-defense lawyer — to either release unredacted Epstein documents by July 2 or explain in court why he won’t. The order came in a suit by journalist Katie Phang, who accused Blanche of violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act by publishing only about half of the six million pages the government holds, much of it blacked out. At issue are FBI notes from interviews with a South Carolina woman who told agents — over four separate sessions the Bureau found credible — that Epstein introduced her to Trump in the 1980s, when she was about 13, and he then forced her to perform oral sex on him and hit her when she bit him. Trump denies it. Remember the sequence: Trump spent much of last year leaning on Republicans to kill the Transparency Act, and only after it passed did his DOJ start slow-walking and redacting. Phang says Blanche now has to “put up or shut up.” Sullivan also ordered the department to produce a log of every redaction it’s made, which is the bare-minimum transparency the law already requires. For a White House that keeps insisting the files “totally exonerate” the President, they sure are fighting like hell to keep us from reading them…

— Trump’s mentor Vlad may be plotting a poke at NATO, and he’s picked the perfect moment, because the man in the Oval Office treats the alliance like a protection racket he resents paying into. Two countries on NATO’s eastern flank warned this week that Russia is preparing a “provocation” against the Baltics or Poland: not a full invasion, but a hybrid jab of missiles, drones, or sabotage designed to test whether the West will actually honor its mutual-defense pledge. Latvian intelligence said flatly that it sees indications Russia is “preparing military provocations against the Baltic countries or Poland.” The calculation is coldly logical: with Ukraine now landing deep-strike drones on Moscow and St. Petersburg, a cornered and humiliated Putin has every incentive to “roll the dice” on Estonia, Latvia, or Lithuania to see if Article 5 still means anything, especially when he suspects Trump might shrug. And why wouldn’t he suspect that? This is a President who has spent years flattering and sucking up to Putin, virtually lick-shining his shoes in Helsinki and Alaska, trashing NATO, and turning American security guarantees into a giant question mark. The alliance holds its annual summit in Ankara this month under a cloud of doubt about U.S. commitment, doubts that Trump manufactured personally. Putin isn’t testing NATO’s resolve; he’s testing Trump’s, and he likes his odds…

— While Trump was busy feuding with Giorgia Meloni over a photo op, the woman actually positioned to end Meloni’s career was quietly building her case. Meet Elly Schlein — the 41-year-old socialist who leads Italy’s official opposition and whose Democratic Party smells blood after Meloni’s flagship rightwing judicial “reform” was crushed in a March referendum, with 54% of Italians voting no. Schlein counts Bernie Sanders, Brazil’s Lula, and Spain’s Pedro Sánchez among her allies, and she offers Italian voters a mirror-image of Meloni’s culture-war act. To Meloni’s trademark chant — “I’m Giorgia, I’m a woman, I’m a mother, I’m a Christian!” — Schlein answers simply: “I am a woman. I love another woman.” Her real pitch, though, is bread-and-butter: the right crows about “traditional families” while gutting the kindergartens those families need. It’s working well enough that Meloni is reportedly weighing an early election for as soon as April, terrified her approval will keep sliding. The global right has always been better at coordinating than the global left because Trump, Meloni, Putin, Modi, Erdoğon, Orbán, and the rest treat each other as franchise partners. Schlein is betting Italy is ready to franchise something else…

— The hellscape currently broiling Europe is not weather, it’s a receipt for fifty years of lies from the fossil fuel industry. Scientists with the World Weather Attribution group reported Friday that the record heat dome roasting the continent is the most severe ever recorded there and would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change; as a result, the brutal nighttime temperatures are now made dramatically more likely than they were just two decades ago. Britain logged its hottest June day in history, 36.4°C (97.5°F) in Somerset, and nearly half of the 850 cities studied are enduring their worst-ever “heat stress,” the deadly combination of heat and humidity that defeats the body’s ability to cool itself by sweating. For scale: more than 60,000 Europeans died from heat in the summer of 2022, and Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average. UN climate chief Simon Stiell pinned it precisely on the world’s “addiction to burning coal, oil and gas.” The fossil-fuel barons knew all this decades ago and spent fortunes telling us it was a hoax, running the same playbook of privatized profit and socialized catastrophe that the tobacco and asbestos companies pioneered and Reagan’s deregulation perfected. The corpses are real now. The denial is still on the payroll to the GOP…

— Geeky Science Alert! The $300 ring you bought to fix your sleep may be the thing keeping you awake. Sleep researchers have a name for it — orthosomnia, coined back in 2017 at Rush University — and it describes exactly the trap the Washington Post just flagged: you obsess over a bad “sleep score,” the anxiety wrecks your actual sleep, the next score is worse, and around you go. Northwestern’s Dr. Sabra Abbott defines it as “an unhealthy or excessive concern with achieving the perfect sleep.” The cruel joke is that the wrist gadgets aren’t even measuring your brain: they’re guessing from motion and heart rate, and they routinely overstate how much you slept while flunking at detecting when you were awake. So the industry sells you a device that misreads your night, generates a number that frightens you, and then — naturally — has a premium subscription to help you cope. Capitalism found a way to monetize a function our ancestors performed for free with their eyes closed. The fix, doctors say, is radical: take the damn thing off…

Subscribe so you can comment

Get the day’s news, both as a video and written report by Thom Hartmann, delivered right to your inbox every morning at CommonwealthReport.news:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is out next week in bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.

Share

— Trump just handed America’s spy agencies to a man with no intelligence experience and no security clearance and that’s the whole point. With Tulsi Gabbard suddenly “stepping down,” Trump installed billionaire homebuilding nepo baby Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence, then delayed the Senate hearing for his actual nominee, Jay Clayton, just so the unqualified Pulte could get his hands on our voting data. This is the same Pulte who, running the federal housing agency, made a name for himself accusing Trump’s enemies — Letitia James, Adam Schiff — of “mortgage fraud.” A former deputy chief of the CIA’s Russia operations went on CNN and called him a political arsonist, and the arsonist showed up early to his first day reportedly eyeing hundreds of firings. Pulte will inherit the Fulton County ballots and voter rolls that Gabbard hauled out of Atlanta back in January; he can then selectively leak whatever he needs to “prove” the fraud that justifies purging more Black voters off the rolls. When this happens, it fits the larger play: Trump is holding FISA renewal hostage to his SAVE Act voter suppression bill and openly warning he’ll “be the last” Republican president if it doesn’t pass. After 45 years of Reaganomics hollowing out the middle class, the GOP can’t win on policy anymore. So they’ve stopped trying to change minds and started trying to change or openly suppress the electorate and Pulte proved at Housing that he is just the hit-man to do it.

— The head of the Justice Department cannot bring himself to tell a federal judge the truth in writing. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche — formerly Trump’s personal criminal-defense lawyer — is refusing to commit on paper to Judge Leonie Brinkema that Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization” slush fund is actually dead, preferring the slippery passive-voice dodge that it’s merely “not moving forward.” Analyst Scott MacFarlane summed up the lawyering on MS NOW as “all kinds of sus”: language built to leave wiggle room. Now even Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (who, unlike our Acting AG, manages to keep his story straight from one sentence to the next) says he’s got a slush-fund problem with Blanche heading into the confirmation fight. A man who treats candor as strictly optional is exactly the man you’d want running the Department of Justice if your actual goal was to weaponize it and use it against American democracy.

— Trump’s closest friend in Europe just learned the lesson everyone who has ever worked with him eventually learns: flatter the man-child or get smeared. Giorgia Meloni — the right-wing Italian prime minister who was the only European leader to show up for Trump’s 2025 inauguration — posted a video calling his claim that she “begged” him for a photo at the G7 is completely fabricated. Trump had told Italian TV she “wanted a picture with me so badly” and that he only obliged because he “felt sorry for her.” Meloni’s reply was withering: “Neither I nor Italy ever beg.” Her foreign minister promptly canceled a U.S. trip in protest. Watch the pattern, because it never changes: governing bores him, diplomacy bores him, the entire job is just a mirror that has to tell him he’s right 100% of the time, and anyone who won’t hold it steady, especially a woman, gets recast as weak, desperate, and begging. This is statecraft reduced to ego maintenance, and our closest allies are finally saying so out loud.

— Washington, D.C. just elected a democratic socialist mayor, and the pearl-clutchers are missing the point so completely it’s almost impressive. Janeese Lewis George swept the Democratic primary, making the nation’s capital the latest big city — after New York and Seattle — to pick a democratic socialist, which sent Fox “News” into its usual fainting spell about the Soviet Union. Spare us. Nobody is proposing gulags or breadlines. The “socialist” countries the right loves to wave around — the Scandinavians — aren’t socialist at all; they’re capitalist democratic republics that simply decided their citizens deserve healthcare, childcare, and a wage one can live on. That’s the entire pitch. Echoing New York’s Zohran Mamdani, Lewis George ran on one relentless message: everything costs too much and Trump is making it worse. She ran up the score in working-class Black neighborhoods and lost only the city’s wealthiest enclave. This is what 45 years of Reaganomics actually built: a middle class so gutted that “restore the safety net, the minimum wage, and the right to join a union” now gets branded as dangerous radical socialism. It isn’t radical or socialism. It’s just 1965, when the minimum wage was (in today’s dollars) around $15 and a third of us were union members, and voters remember it was a better time for most all but the morbidly rich (who “suffered” under a 90% top income tax rate).

— A scientist looked at Trump’s new research rule and said the quiet part right out loud: “the purpose of the rule is fascism.” That blunt verdict — from the Guardian’s reporting on researchers mobilizing against the administration’s planned rule — is simply the logical destination of the deceptively named “Restoring Gold Standard Science“ project, which hands political appointees the power to decide which findings get to count as real. Peel off the golden branding and what’s underneath is a machine for making inconvenient facts vanish on climate, vaccines, or anything else that might dent a donor’s bottom line. The American right has been at war with science since the Scopes monkey trial, but this proposed rule — that replaces scientists with political appointees to approve scientific research — is something new: not arguing with the results, but smashing the very tools that produce them. The bill comes due in cures that never get discovered, in America’s scientific edge handed to our competitors, in the talent already packing for Toronto. Destroy the instruments that measure reality, and you get to tell people that reality is whatever Dear Leader says it is. That’s not an accident of the policy. That is the policy.

— Good News Alert! Being out of shape may be deadlier than smoking and, believe it or not, that’s the cheerful part. A new Cambridge perspective paper in Frontiers in Nutrition argues that very low cardiovascular fitness is tied to roughly a 400% higher risk of death, dwarfing the roughly 50% bump you get from smoking. And here’s the genuinely good news buried in all that mortality data: fixing this is wildly easier than quitting cigarettes. A long, brisk walk every day and a few pushups in the morning, and you’re already doing more for your odds of living long and healthy than any nicotine patch ever managed. No superhuman willpower required. Just lace up your shoes and go.

Subscribe so you can comment

Share

— Forty-five years of Reaganomics finally rolled off the assembly line this week with its crowning achievement: the world’s first trillionaire. When SpaceX shares hit the public markets in the largest IPO in human history, Elon Musk’s net worth sailed past one thousand billion dollars, a figure with so many zeroes you need a calculator to count them and a heart of solid granite to defend them. Back in 1981, Reagan promised that if we just showered the wealthy with tax cuts and stopped enforcing antitrust laws, the blessings would trickle down onto the rest of us. Forty-five years later, the trickle has arrived: one man now commands more money than most countries while the people who actually build his rockets and bolt together his cars are still scrapping for a living wage and desperately begging for a union. Within hours, calls went up for an aggressive wealth tax, with one campaigner noting that a fortune this size “requires human exploitation, wage theft, wage suppression” as well as a tax code lovingly written by and for the man it enriches. The critics are right that trillionaires shouldn’t exist, and not out of envy: no human being earns a trillion dollars, they extract it, a dime at a time, from everyone standing below them. Musk didn’t break the system to get here. The system performed flawlessly, exactly as Reagan and the GOP’s billionaires designed it. The only question left is whether we keep calling this capitalism or finally admit it’s a just the 21st century version of a feudal estate with modern branding.

— The Trump administration has a bold new idea for Americans who can’t afford their medical bills: borrow the money from the very insurance company that’s already refusing to pay them. Under a White House proposal floated this week, cash-strapped patients would take out loans from their health insurers to cover the bills those same insurers helped inflate. It’s a scheme one Democratic congresswoman warned could “ruin people’s finances” while handing insurers a shiny new incentive to deny your care and then collect a fortune in interest on your desperation. I suppose we should admire the elegance of the GOP’s newest scam: the massive Republican donors win when you get sick, win again when you borrow, and win a third time when you default and they get a court to take away your house to repay your loan. That’s not a healthcare system that any other country in the world would recognize; it’s a payday-loan window with a stethoscope hanging in it. And before anyone wrings their hands about how we “simply can’t afford” something humane like Medicare for All, note that the Republican increase in Pentagon spending this year alone dwarfs the entire projected Social Security shortfall for 2034, which is the very “crisis” they keep invoking to justify gutting your retirement. We have bottomless money for missiles and putting Trump‘s name on everything, but not a nickel for Grandma’s knee replacement, and somehow the corporate media never quite finds the column inches to mention it. Forty-five years after Reagan taught us that government was the problem, we’ve finally built a GOP-run government that fulfills his claim.

Please Support My Writing

— It turns out the “Advantage” in Medicare Advantage belongs entirely to the insurance companies. A pair of reports from the HHS inspector general released this week found that the nation’s largest Medicare Advantage plans — UnitedHealthcare, CVS Health, and Humana — rejected prior-authorization requests for long-term and rehabilitative care at rates that, in some cases, sailed past 70 percent. Across the industry, denial rates for long-term care ran anywhere from 8 percent up to a jaw-dropping 80 percent, a spread the inspector general’s office found genuinely alarming, and one University of Pittsburgh health-policy professor called “quite staggering.” Here’s the detail that most clearly shows what a scam this is: when patients actually appealed, the plans reversed their own denials a remarkable 95 percent of the time, meaning that first “no” was wrong almost every single time anyone bothered to take the (considerable) time and effort necessary to challenge it. Medicare Advantage plans collect a flat fee per patient from our government and then pocket whatever they don’t spend on your stroke recovery or your shattered hip, which means saying “no” to your care is, quite literally, how they enrich their shareholders and pay their senior executives with their multi-million-dollar-a-year salaries. Nearly 20 million Americans are enrolled with just these three companies, most blissfully unaware that their “coverage” is engineered to refuse first and pay later, if ever. For-profit insurers, the report found, deny more than nonprofits, because of course they do. And all of them deny more than real Medicare, which doesn’t even do pre-clearance so it never denies anybody. This is what you get when you hand Wall Street the keys to Grandma’s hospital room: the corporation always wins, and the patient always loses.

— A federal judge just slammed the brakes — again — on Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund for his violent, murderous cult members. This week, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema extended her block on the grandly titled “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a $1.8 billion pile of your money that Trump’s Justice Department invented to compensate “victims of weaponization,” a category that conveniently sweeps in the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, smeared shit on the walls, and killed four cops while trying to “hang Mike Pence.” The whole thing sprang from Trump’s preposterous $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his own tax returns (total tax bill $750), and even congressional Republicans gagged hard enough to force acting Attorney General (and Trump criminal defense lawyer) Todd Blanche to declare “we’re not moving forward with the fund, period.” But hold the champagne. As Reuters reports, Trump’s allies already have a Plan B teed up: funneling payouts to loyalists through the 1946 Federal Tort Claims Act, which lets aggrieved insurrectionists file claims and lawsuits against the government and quietly settle out of court. “At my level, the fund is dead,” shrugged one senior DOJ official, all while leaving the back door propped wide open for the same money to stroll out a different exit. Hundreds of January 6th defendants have already filed their claims. With the Trump Crime Family and their shock troops, the grift doesn’t die; it just files an amended complaint.

— Nothing says “law and order” quite like masked federal agents tackling a man to the pavement at his kid’s preschool graduation while toddlers scream. That is precisely what unfolded in Baltimore this week, where ICE agents arrested two parents in the parking lot of Commodore John Rodgers Elementary School during a graduation ceremony as witnesses filmed and children wailed. The parents had their kids in the back seat when they were “ripped from the car,” according to Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson, and teachers rushed the children indoors to spare them the spectacle. A parent recording the scene can be heard shouting that the agents were on school property, a fact that registered not at all with these masked, murderous thugs who increasingly treat the Constitution as if it were merely a polite suggestion. Baltimore had passed an emergency ordinance barely a month ago barring federal agents from arrests at “sensitive locations” like schools; doing their best imitation of Putin’s secret police, ICE shredded it like confetti while spitting on the graves of the authors of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. Mayor Brandon Scott condemned the raid as a “disturbing incident” and made plain this kind of enforcement isn’t welcome in his city, while Governor Wes Moore noted that terrorizing children at their own schools makes precisely no one safer. But safety was never the point for these fascists. The point is the fear: the theater of masked, unidentified, armed, uniformed men snatching parents in front of weeping four-year-olds and broadcasting it as a warning to every family in America. This is what a fascist secret police force looks like in its toddler-traumatizing phase.

Please Support My Writing

— Citizens United Alert! Maine’s Susan Collins — the senator who has elevated the furrowed brow of “deep concern” into performance art all while reliably voting however her biggest donors prefer — is mounting her reelection bid with the backing of nearly 100 billionaires. Her campaign has become an oligarchs’ support group project! Her opponent, Graham Platner, points out that his own operation runs on an average donation of $26 from actual human beings, even as corporate dark money floods into Maine to keep Collins right where the donor class wants her. This is the exact world five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court conjured when they ruled 5:4 in Citizens United that money is speech and corporations are people: sixteen years on, a hundred billionaires can simply buy a senator and call the receipt “democracy.” Concerned yet, Susan?

— Strange Alert! Our nation’s heroin addict health secretary, Bob Kennedy, is now actively cheering on clinics that inject autistic children — some as young as 18 months — with umbilical-cord stem cells in unapproved, unproven “treatments” that can run $20,000 a pop, occasionally after sedating the toddler with ketamine first. Desperate parents are promised near-miracles; what the FDA actually documented back in 2021 were reports of “blindness, tumor formation, infections” and worse. In sixteen months on the job, Kennedy has fired thousands of health officials, defunded $31 million in autism research, and waged open war on childhood vaccines, all while rolling out the welcome mat for the snake-oil salesmen he apparently regards as colleagues. The quack is coming from inside the house.

Subscribe so you can comment

Your Daily Meme, suitable to copy and paste into social media or email:

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide. It’s a modern-day telling of the “murder mystery” of how, in 1886, a great crime was committed against America by a cynical court reporter and an on-the-take Supreme Court justice that changed the course of American politics and led straight to Citizens United. It also details the massive ongoing cover-up of this crime and what we can do to fight back.