Saturday Report 7/11/26 — Trump refuses to sign the biggest housing bill in a generation, ICE shoots the wrong man in Houston, and the referees of our elections get purged...

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— 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…

Comments on Friday’s Daily Take:

Police State: Are We Already There and Just Don’t Know It?

We have allowed this cancer to thrive and metastasize throughout our government. Should the victim survive, will we have the skill and courage and fortitude to fully excise it and prevent its return?

~ Tom Halstead

This must. Be stopped .. somehow .. when the day comes, I would hope that we fully prosecute them all, including miller just as WW2 criminals were..

~ Gene Wood

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