Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Is America Calling This a Deal When It Looks Like a Surrender?
Word out of Washington this morning is that American and Iranian negotiators have hammered out a tentative framework, and Trump is sitting on it. Look at the terms before anybody calls this a win. Sixty day ceasefire. Unrestricted shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. A staged end to our naval blockade. Iran clears its mines on its own timeline. In exchange, Iran offers a pledge not to build a bomb and agrees to talk later about its uranium, sanctions, and frozen funds. That’s not Iran backing down. That’s America accepting a truce after a war it never should have started. And the war hasn’t even stopped. The U.S. just hit an Iranian military site, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard struck back at an American airbase in Kuwait, and Israel is ordering mass displacement across south Lebanon. This whole thing has been a disaster from the first bomb, and a shaky truce on Iran’s terms won’t undo the damage. We got dragged into a war, and now we’re calling the exit a deal.
Can a Corporation Vote? In Delaware Now It Can
A Delaware judge just took Citizens United to its logical, terrifying conclusion. Superior Court Judge Craig Karsnitz ruled that corporations, trusts, and LLCs can legally cast ballots in the town of Fenwick Island. The ACLU sued, calling it unlawful vote dilution for actual human beings. The judge tossed the case. Under Delaware law, he said, a corporation is a person, and persons get to vote. Remember, Delaware is home to more than two million business entities. That’s roughly double the number of flesh and blood people who live there. The state’s budget leans on the billions in fees those corporations pay every year, so the deck was stacked. The judge even wrote that a humanoid robot isn’t a person, but a corporation is. Think about that. The Supreme Court said in 2010 that corporate money is speech. Now a court says corporate entities can vote. The fiction of corporate personhood just swallowed the ballot box, and your voice gets a little quieter every time it does.
Who Got Don Junior a $620 Million Pentagon Loan?
ProPublica just blew the lid off another Trump family payday. The Pentagon announced a $620 million loan last year to Vulcan Elements, a tiny North Carolina magnet startup with fewer than fifty employees. There’s another $80 million for its partner and $50 million from Commerce on top. The catch? Donald Trump Junior’s venture firm, 1789 Capital, holds an undisclosed stake. Everybody swore Junior had nothing to do with it. But Defense Department records show the request came from Peter Navarro, a White House adviser and a friend of Junior’s. Pentagon staff worked nights to push it through in weeks instead of months. Vulcan’s valuation rocketed from around $200 million to roughly $2 billion. ProPublica says this is the first time a federal contract has been directly traced to White House intervention for a Trump linked company. As one observer put it, the corruption is so blatant we’ve gone numb. That numbness is exactly what they’re counting on.
Is the Trump Team Really Going to Shut Down Your Airport?
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin says he may pull Customs and Border Protection agents out of airports in so-called sanctuary cities that won’t help round up immigrants. He told Fox he wouldn’t halt the flights, but quote, “we won’t be able to process them because we won’t have officers there.” That means international flights to Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, and Washington could grind to a halt. An immigration policy expert called it a sign of madness and said it would stab the U.S. economy in the back. A retired air traffic controller pointed out American citizens couldn’t even re-enter the country. The Atlantic reports Mullin already pulled travel industry executives into a room to warn them. So a president sitting near record low approval, with prices already crushing families, wants to cause apocalyptic chaos at America’s biggest airports. That’s not border security. That’s collective punishment, and you’re the target.
Israel’s War Minister Just Said the Quiet Part Out Loud
Israel’s defense minister, Israel Katz, declared this week that the mass departure of Palestinians from Gaza will go ahead at the right time and in the right manner. He calls it voluntary emigration. Human rights groups call it what it is, ethnic cleansing. Israeli civil rights lawyers say it plainly. Creating conditions where people can’t survive and then calling their flight a choice isn’t voluntary, it’s forced expulsion, which is a war crime. Katz made the announcement while celebrating the killing of a Hamas commander along with his wife and three children. Back in March, Israel’s cabinet approved his plan for a directorate to manage this migration. And pushing for mass departures flatly violates Trump’s own ceasefire deal, the one Israel signed last year, which promised Gaza would be rebuilt for the people who live there. More than seventy thousand Palestinians are already dead. Now the plan to empty the land is being stated openly, and Washington keeps sending the weapons.
Why Is Inflation Roaring Back? Follow the War
Here’s the bill coming due. Inflation just hit its fastest pace in three years. The Fed’s preferred gauge climbed to 3.8 percent in April, the highest since May 2023, and the war with Iran is the engine. The fight has choked off shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, spiking energy costs and snarling supply chains for everything from fertilizer to aluminum. Gas prices jumped more than twelve percent in a single month and they’re up over fifty percent since the war started in late February. And remember, prices were already climbing before the first bomb dropped, thanks to Trump’s tariffs. Trump won in 2024 promising to bring prices down. Instead his trade wars and his shooting war are doing the opposite, and working families are paying for both at the pump and the grocery store. The powerful start the wars. The rest of us get the bill. With midterms looming, voters are noticing.
And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, May 28, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
