Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Did Lula Just Stop the Far-Right Wave in Latin America?
Brazil’s Lula da Silva just did something nobody in that country’s democratic history had ever done. He lost the first round and won the runoff. Lula beat Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of jailed ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, 51.76% to 48.24%, a margin of about 4.3 million votes. Three weeks ago Bolsonaro led him by more than two million. The polls and the markets had Lula losing. At 80, he’s now Brazil’s first four-term president. Bolsonaro refuses to concede and vows to seek annulment over a court-ordered two-hour voting extension. Lula told the crowd in São Paulo, “This country needs peace and unity.” A far-right loser crying fraud? That playbook was written in America. Now Brazil’s democracy gets to find out if it holds.
Why Did the Pentagon Hand Elon Musk the Keys to Orbit?
The Space Force just gave SpaceX something no commercial company has ever had, enhanced access to the military’s most precise tracking data on satellites and debris in orbit. Those sensors spot objects just 10 centimeters across. It’s restricted because it reveals what American surveillance can and can’t see. In exchange, the government gets observations from SpaceX’s 11,000 Starlink satellites. Here’s the kicker. Musk’s DOGE fired the staff of the civilian program created to run space traffic control, and the administration twice tried to gut it. Now Musk gets the data instead. Cole Donovan, who worked at that program, warned it makes SpaceX “the de facto source for space traffic coordination.” A donor fires the referees, then takes the whistle. That isn’t a free market. It’s a monopoly built with your tax dollars.
Are the Big Banks Bracing for an AI Bank Run?
Axios reports the biggest banks in America, JPMorgan, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo, are writing “day after” plans for a catastrophe caused by artificial intelligence. Customers are handing AI agents access to their bank accounts, and those agents are making moves nobody asked for, some even phoning customer service on their own. Apollo’s chief economist warned that agents told to chase the best return could drain the cheap deposits banks use to make loans and threaten the whole financial system. Jamie Dimon put it bluntly. “You can’t stop it. You just have to, like, manage the hell out of it.” The men who run the money admit they can’t control the machines. When the next crash comes, who do you think gets bailed out, you or them
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Netanyahu Posts a Nuke Over Tel Aviv. Is Fear His Closing Argument?
Two days before Israel votes, Benjamin Netanyahu posted an AI-generated image of an atomic bomb falling on Tel Aviv. He quoted commentator Yuval Bloomberg, who wrote that if Iran gets the bomb, nothing else will matter. The post dismissed everything else in the campaign, Qatar, the ultra-Orthodox draft fight, the Urich affair, as a giant smokescreen, and said Israel has just two more years under Donald Trump to act. Yair Golan, the former deputy army chief who leads the Democrats party, said the prime minister should be kept off social media, adding “the man and those around him have lost it.” Israelis vote Tuesday, October 27. When a leader facing scandal and a tough election reaches for mushroom clouds, that isn’t national security. That’s a man trying to scare his way past accountability.
Can Corruption Sink Ken Paxton in Deep-Red Texas?
The Washington Post reports voters nationwide now rank government corruption second only to the economy, and nowhere is that hitting harder than Texas. Attorney General Ken Paxton was impeached by his own party over bribery and abuse of office allegations. His wife divorced him on biblical grounds. Courthouse cameras caught him pocketing a lawyer’s $1,000 pen. Suburban Republican women tell the Post they’re done with him. Democrat James Talarico tells crowds “we have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.” Elon Musk has poured roughly $168 million into pro-Paxton PACs. Talarico says Musk wants his own personal senator. Polls show Talarico narrowly ahead in a state Democrats haven’t carried since 1994. Election Day is November 3. If Texas flips, it won’t be ideology. It’ll be voters sick of being robbed
Trump Is Poisoning America. Did He Take Another Bribe?
A 6-month New York Times investigation found Trump exempted 202 facilities in 39 states from clean air rules, chemical plants, sterilizers, steel mills and coal plants. About 3.3 million Americans live within three miles of one of them. The rules targeted ethylene oxide, which the EPA found is 30 to 60 times more carcinogenic than once believed. Companies got waivers just by emailing the agency. Follow the money. Medical device lobby AdvaMed gave $1 million to MAGA Inc. the day its CEO dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, then told members “membership has its privileges.” Trump’s air chief, an ex-AdvaMed lobbyist, killed fence line monitoring over his staff’s objections, then left for a law firm. Nine months after a Virginia plant got its waiver, it leaked 580 pounds of cancer-causing gas over homes. That’s government of, by and for the donors.
And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, October 26, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
