Saturday Report 8/29/26 — Your Family Is Out $3,800, the Navy Is Out of Money, and Yosemite Is Apparently for Sale

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— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.

— 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.”

— 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.

— 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…

Comments on Friday’s Daily Take:
Put the CEOs in Handcuffs: Trump’s ICE Is Arresting the Wrong People

Bracing and right on the money. I was so encouraged by your subtle potrayal of all the interlocking mechanisms of selfishness, greed and racism that have let us down a path to the unthinkable. That we’ve surrendered our national ideals to a cadre of Nazi-adjacent moral degenerates and short-sighted scumbags and it will take some doing to claw them back and establish reforms in our legal system, the elimination of legal loopholes, and the establishment of much better mechanisms of restraining and punishing the while collar criminals at the top of the heap. Kudos.
~ Leigh Horne

I remember E-verify. That might have helped had it been implemented in full. I sort of remember it being tried for a few years at the most then talk of it disappeared. A totally mechanized agricultural industry might help, not the same as AI. Is that practical? Or are we past what is practical and into the drastic and dramatic and just can’t face it. We’re also running out of water in California. No water, no crops, no jobs, no undocumented workers.
~ Feldman

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