Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Does America Need a De-MAGAfication?
Paul Krugman, the economist who wrote for the New York Times for nearly a quarter century, posted a video Sunday calling for what he calls a de-MAGAfication of the United States once Donald Trump leaves office. And he didn’t soften it. Krugman said he isn’t going over the top by comparing it to the Denazification the Allies pursued in Germany after World War Two. He wants Trump loyalists blocked from positions of power, and he wants the movement de-fanged. “We really need to do a thorough purging of the United States,” Krugman said. He warned that if we just get rid of Trump and whitewash the rest, it’ll happen all over again. You can argue the word choice. But here’s what matters. A mainstream economist, a Nobel laureate, is telling you out loud this isn’t normal politics. It’s something the country will have to dig its way out of, long after the man at the top is gone.
How Many More Will Die Before We Call It Murder?
On Friday the US military bombed another small boat in the eastern Pacific. Southern Command said three men were killed, called them narco-terrorists, and offered no evidence. That strike pushed the death toll from Trump’s boat-bombing campaign past two hundred people, in more than sixty strikes since last September. The whole thing runs under a nine-month operation Trump named Southern Spear. Legal experts aren’t mincing words. Former Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth put it plainly. “Now more than two hundred Trump summary executions, blatant murders,” he wrote. NYU law professor Ryan Goodman says the consensus is simple. There’s no armed conflict, so these are killings, and the scale now raises the question of a crime against humanity. In the very first strike, US forces killed nine people, then bombed two more men clinging to the wreckage. Colombia’s president has flatly called it murder. Think about that. Our own government is blowing up people at sea, with no trial, no proof, no charges. And calling it a win.
Who Really Owns California’s Elections?
Tomorrow California votes in its June second primary, and the money behind it is staggering. Roughly four hundred million dollars has poured into this one primary, the most expensive in state history. What set it off? A union-backed plan to tax the ultra-wealthy. Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who barely touched politics for decades, has dropped close to seventy million dollars to kill that tax. Billionaire Tom Steyer has put in more than two hundred thirteen million dollars of his own. Crypto moguls, venture capitalists, and tech CEOs are flooding races up and down the ballot. And the experts watching it call this “just the tip of the iceberg.” Here’s the bigger picture. When a handful of billionaires can spend whatever it takes to protect their fortunes, your vote starts competing with their checkbook. And the checkbook never gets tired.
Why Are Women and Black Officers Vanishing From the Navy’s Top Ranks?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has struck at least seven Navy officers off the list for promotion to one-star admiral, officers a board of senior admirals had already chosen. Of the ones he removed, two are women and two are Black men. What’s left is a slate of twenty-two nominees, and not a single woman made the final one-star list. That’s in a Navy where women are about one in five sailors. Across his time in office, nearly sixty percent of the senior officers Hegseth has fired are female or Black. The Pentagon calls the reporting “full of fake news from anonymous sources.” But these promotions are supposed to be merit-based and walled off from politics. Senior officials say they can’t remember anything like it. When you purge the people who don’t look like the boss wants, you’re not building a stronger military. You’re building a loyalty machine.
Is Due Process Dead in Trump’s Immigration Courts?
The Trump administration is taking apart the immigration court system piece by piece, and the latest target is the lawyers. Writing in Common Dreams, professor Jordan Liz lays out how the overhaul “prioritizes cruelty and deportations over justice.” We’ve already watched ICE agents arrest people right outside their own court hearings, the moment they showed up to follow the rules. Now go after the attorneys who defend them, and you’ve quietly removed the last thing standing between a frightened family and a one-way flight. Liz argues this assault on immigration lawyers has to be stopped. Here’s why it matters to all of us. Due process isn’t a perk for immigrants. It’s the promise that the government has to prove its case in front of a judge before it can come for anybody. Strip it from people who can’t fight back, and you’ve weakened it for every one of us.
Want to Escape America? There’s a Boat for That
And finally, if all of this has you dreaming of sailing away, good news. Somebody’s selling tickets. It’s called the Freedom Ship, a proposed floating city nearly a mile long, twenty-five stories tall, built to carry around eighty thousand people. Schools, a hospital, parks, shops, even a little airport on the roof. The plan is to circle the globe forever and never really belong to any country, which means no nation’s taxes and no nation’s laws. They bill it as “a unique place to live, work, retire, vacation, or visit.” A cabin starts around one hundred fifty thousand dollars and climbs into the millions, and the whole thing would cost about ten billion dollars to build. One catch. They first floated this idea back in the late nineteen-nineties, and not a single rivet has been laid since. So here’s your takeaway. While working folks fight over rent and groceries, the dream being sold to the rich is a tax-free escape pod that doesn’t even exist. Funny, until you realize they’re not really joking.
And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, June first, two thousand twenty-six. I’m Thom Hartmann.
