Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Are the Houthis Sinking the World’s Oil Supply?
Yemen’s Houthi rebels just declared a maritime embargo on Saudi Arabia, effective immediately, and they’re threatening to slam shut the Bab el-Mandeb strait, the southern gateway to the Red Sea. Close that chokepoint and you wipe out about seven percent of the world’s oil supply overnight. This lands on top of Iran’s war shutting down the Strait of Hormuz, which has already cut global oil flows by ten percent. The Houthis call it their eye-for-an-eye answer to years of Saudi blockade. Tehran has been hammering oil tankers in the Gulf, killing sailors, and American crude reserves have now fallen to their lowest level in forty years. One observer put it plainly. “The Titanic is now hitting the iceberg.” And back home? Donald Trump promised to cut your electricity bill in half within eighteen months. That deadline hit today. Instead, residential rates are up eighteen percent, roughly twice the rate of inflation. And there’s no relief coming. Utilities just asked regulators for another nine point two billion dollars in rate hikes, up twenty-six percent from a year ago, much of it to power the data centers feeding the AI boom. Another promise made to working people, another one broken while the bills keep climbing.
Did a Judge Just Freeze the Biggest Media Merger Ever?
A federal judge just slammed the brakes on the one hundred ten billion dollar deal between Paramount Skydance and Warner Brothers Discovery. Twelve Democratic attorneys general sued to stop it, and Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin agreed they’d raised serious questions about how anticompetitive this thing really is. She froze the merger for fourteen days. Think about what it would build. One company swallowing CBS, CNN, HBO Max, Paramount Plus, and two major film studios. And who’d run it? David Ellison, son of billionaire Oracle founder Larry Ellison, one of Trump’s closest allies. Paramount says it needs to get bigger to take on big tech, and it’s already hired a Supreme Court litigator to fight this all the way. California’s Rob Bonta warned the merger means “higher prices, lower quality and less content” for all of us. When a handful of billionaires control what you watch, what you read, and what you hear, that’s not a business deal. That’s a loaded gun pointed at a free press, and it’s a Trump ally holding it.
Will Political Hacks Now Control a Trillion Dollars in Science?
The Trump administration wants to hand political appointees control over more than one trillion dollars in federal grants. It’s a sweeping rewrite of the rules that govern research money, and scientists are reacting with what one group called “complete shock and dismay.” For decades, independent experts decided which research got funded, judging proposals on quality and merit alone. Under this plan, Russell Vought’s budget office lets Trump loyalists screen, approve, and kill grants to match the president’s agenda. They could cancel your cancer study midstream just because they don’t like it. The rule bans diversity funding outright, chokes off work with foreign scientists, and buries researchers in paperwork. It’s aimed to take effect the first of October. Nearly ninety-nine thousand people filed public comments against it. Scientists, local governments, even a Republican senator are fighting back. When politicians get to decide which discoveries live and which ones die, you don’t get better science. You get propaganda wearing a lab coat, and the cures we never find are the real cost.
Who Decides What’s Killing You in Louisiana?
For years, industry groups in Louisiana waged a quiet war over who gets to measure the poison in the air. Along the state’s industrial corridor, families breathe emissions from hundreds of chemical plants every single day. Researchers from Johns Hopkins drove a mobile lab through the region and found cancer risks that topped federal estimates in fourteen of fifteen spots, some by more than eleven times. Yet Louisiana’s official monitors sit miles from the plants and skip the most dangerous chemicals entirely. One expert called it “a public health emergency waiting to occur.” Year after year, state lawmakers tried to require monitors at the fence line, and year after year the petrochemical lobby killed the bills. As one longtime scientist put it, if you don’t look for it, you won’t find it. Then in twenty twenty-four, the state passed a law fining residents up to a million dollars for sharing their own air data. Louisiana already ranks fourth in the nation for toxic emissions per square mile. Think about that. The pollution is perfectly legal, but telling your neighbors about it can bankrupt you. That’s who the powerful protect, and it sure isn’t you.
Maine Democrats Rally Behind a Logger to Beat Susan Collins
Maine Democrats are lining up fast behind Troy Jackson, a former state Senate president and working logger with deep labor backing. He’s on track to grab the party’s Senate nomination and face Republican Susan Collins this November. Jackson steps in for Graham Platner, the populist favorite who withdrew after a sexual assault allegation surfaced. Jackson locked up more than ninety percent of the delegates so quickly that two of his top rivals simply dropped out. The nominating convention is set for July twenty-fifth in Bangor, with a crowded field that had included Shenna Bellows, Nirav Shah, and Jordan Wood. This race matters enormously. Maine is one of the Democrats’ best shots to flip a Senate seat and take back the majority. Bernie Sanders backed Jackson for governor earlier this year, and the party’s populist wing sees him as a fighter for working families against the billionaire class. After years of Collins wringing her hands and then voting with her party anyway, Mainers may finally get a plain-spoken working-class choice. Folks are watching to see if this one’s for real.
Billionaires Hire Nanny Armies While You Can’t Afford Daycare
And finally. While millions of American parents can’t scrape together the money for a single day of childcare, the ultra-rich are hiring whole teams to raise their kids. Meet the “CEO parents.” One former fintech executive spends two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year on a live-in family assistant, a weekend nanny, a personal chef, and a housekeeper. Want your toddler potty-trained? That’s a consultant for up to four thousand five hundred dollars. Bike-riding lessons run as high as four hundred fifty dollars a session. A full-time travel nanny? A hundred seventy thousand a year. A private governess can top two hundred thousand. One agency got a request to have a nanny hunt down a limited-edition collectible toy and pay whatever it took. Another placed a caregiver for parents doing diaper-free baby-raising, expected to read the infant’s cues and sprint to the toilet. One of these parents calls all of it being “intentional about where I spend my time.” Meanwhile the average working mom is intentional about which bill she skips this month. Same country, two completely different worlds. And you already know which one the whole system was built for.
And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, July 20th, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
