Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Did the Justice Department Just Accuse American-Born Citizens of Voting Illegally?
Trump’s Justice Department handed Los Angeles County a list of 20,000 so-called likely noncitizens on California’s voter rolls, gave officials 48 hours to segregate their ballots, then sued when the state refused. Now the county has checked the list. Officials sampled 200 names and found nearly four in 10 say they were born in the United States. Around 70% had never voted. More than half were canceled or inactive registrations. Assistant Registrar Monica Flores told the court the list “is unreliable.” Meanwhile 28 green card holders were arrested in raids staged for news cameras. Omar Muñoz, 72, recovering from six surgeries, was shackled in his pajamas and marched out of his home. Ana Domínguez, 60, says she’s never voted in her life. This is a manufactured crisis, aimed squarely at the midterms.
Did a Billionaire Buy a Presidential Pardon Through Alina Habba’s Paycheck?
The New York Times reports Venezuelan billionaire Julio Herrera Velutini, accused of trying to bribe Puerto Rico’s governor, pleaded down to one misdemeanor last year. Then his family hired Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer, who at the time was a senior adviser to Pam Bondi with an office inside the Justice Department. The deal guaranteed her more than $50 million over four years as general counsel of a Florida company with no public profile. Herrera’s daughter also gave $3.5 million to a Trump-connected super PAC. Habba started January 1. Weeks later Trump handed Herrera a full and unconditional pardon. Habba says any suggestion her job “had anything to do with securing a pardon is false.” When pardons follow the money this openly, justice becomes one more thing the rich can buy.
Economist Fires Back at Musk, Says Pay Your Taxes Instead of Playing Santa
Elon Musk announced he’ll give one SpaceX share, worth about $146, to every child in America next year, routed through Trump Accounts. Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman answered him directly. If Musk really wants to help, he wrote, “pay more taxes.” Zucman noted that billionaires pay a lower effective tax rate than the average American. The whole giveaway comes to about $10.5 billion, barely 1% of Musk’s $904 billion fortune, and it lets him sidestep roughly $2.5 billion in capital gains taxes. Zucman backs Bernie Sanders’s Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act, a 5% annual wealth tax on about 938 billionaires that would raise $4.4 trillion over 10 years. Musk alone would owe $42 billion. Charity is what oligarchs offer when they’d rather not be taxed.
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Over 900 Women Arrested for Their Pregnancies. Is This the Freedom They Promised?
A new report from Pregnancy Justice counts more than 900 women charged with pregnancy-related crimes in the first three years after Roe fell. That’s nearly one a day, and likely an undercount. Three states dominate. South Carolina with 381, Oklahoma with 222, Alabama with 204, all fetal personhood strongholds. Thirteen cases involved getting, attempting, or merely researching an abortion, with internet searches used as evidence. In 550 cases the only allegation was substance use, some of it prescribed. In 77 cases, a lack of prenatal care was cited as proof of a crime, in states driving OBGYNs out. And in 700 cases, the tip came from a medical setting. Doctors and nurses turned their own patients in. Pregnancy Justice president Lourdes Rivera says this “is already happening.” When the hospital becomes a police station, no woman is safe seeking care.
Police Raid RFK Jr.’s Favorite Vaccine Researchers in West Africa
Judicial police in Guinea-Bissau raided the Bandim Health Project on Monday and seized a batch of hepatitis B vaccines. The project is run by Danish researchers Peter Aaby and Christine Stabell Benn, the pair Robert F. Kennedy Jr. once called “the deities of vaccine research.” Their planned trial would withhold the hepatitis B birth dose from thousands of newborns where roughly one in five adults carries a virus that causes liver cancer. The World Health Organization called it unethical. Guinea-Bissau’s health minister says the government never approved it. Yet Kennedy’s CDC reportedly set aside another $1.6 million in September to push it forward, and Stabell Benn sat on the US advisory panel that voted to end the universal birth dose here. Denmark is investigating the pair for scientific misconduct. Their babies and ours are the experiment.
Crazy Alert. Inflation Comes for the MAGA Hat. Will Trump’s Base Finally Notice?
The Washington Sun dug through the Wayback Machine and found Trump’s red Make America Great Again hat sold for $25 in 2015, $30 on January 6, 2021, and now $55 on the Trump Organization’s store. That’s a 120% jump, nearly three times the 41% inflation over the same stretch. His Victory 47 perfume went from $99 to $249 after they stuck a tiny Trump on the bottle. A Knoxville Trump superstore closed in August even at 50% off. Professor Todd Belt called the hikes “tone-deaf” when 84% of voters say the economy drives their midterm vote and 77% disapprove of Trump on inflation. The man who promised to kill inflation on day one is now gouging his own believers. If the hat costs more, so does everything else.
And that’s the way it is, Today Wednesday, October 21, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann
