Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Is Blackstone The Next Lehman Brothers?
Here’s something that should worry every working person. Blackstone just slammed the door on investors trying to pull their money out of its giant private credit fund. The fund holds 79 billion dollars. This week investors asked to cash out 10 percent of their shares. Blackstone said no, you only get 5. Last quarter they let everybody out. Now they’re capping the exits for the first time ever. And they’re not alone. The whole two trillion dollar private credit market is under a cloud. Switzerland’s Partners Group did the same thing days earlier, and warned the panic is spreading from private credit into private equity. We’ve seen this movie before. In 2008, Lehman Brothers froze up and the whole economy crashed down on regular folks. When the rich start running for the doors, that’s when you watch your wallet.
Who’s Secretly Bankrolling The Attack On Black Voting Rights?
Now follow the money. When the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in the Louisiana case, the groups that pushed for it were swimming in secret cash. A watchdog called True North Research found seven conservative nonprofits that filed briefs took in nearly 105 million dollars in dark money between 2021 and 2024. That’s seven times what they got before. Stephen Miller’s America First Legal Foundation grabbed more than 58 million all by itself. The money moved through donor-advised funds, which let billionaires hide their names while they rewrite the rules. One researcher put it plainly. “It’s making it harder for people to vote.” That’s not democracy. That’s a hostile takeover of our democracy.
Why Is Trump Handing Coal Plants Your Tax Dollars?
Here’s one that’ll make your blood boil. President Trump is using his wartime powers, the Defense Production Act, to prop up more than a dozen dying coal plants. The price tag is 700 million dollars of your money. The Sierra Club called it “disgusting and reprehensible.” And here’s the kicker. At the same time, the administration is paying companies billions to NOT build offshore wind farms. Pay billions to kill clean energy, then pay hundreds of millions to keep dirty coal on life support. One climate scientist said, “So much for the free market.” This is socialism for big coal, paid by you, and it’ll make your kids sicker and your power bills higher.
Are You Ready For AI Worms That Learn And Take Over Everything?
Now buckle up for the scary one. Researchers at the University of Toronto just built a computer worm powered by artificial intelligence. Old viruses follow one set of instructions. Patch the hole and you stop them. This thing is different. It learns. It thinks. It hunts for new weaknesses on its own and rewrites its attack as it spreads from machine to machine. They built it with free AI models anybody can download, at almost no cost. One expert called it a fundamentally new threat. The good news, they did it in a sealed-off lab. The bad news, if a few researchers can do it cheap, so can the bad guys. They ran it on a fake company network and watched it spread on its own. The age of self-learning malware just arrived, and most of us aren’t ready.
Will Trump’s Ocean Cuts Leave The World Flying Blind?
And finally, the Trump administration is ripping out one of the most important science tools we’ve got. The National Science Foundation is dismantling most of the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a 368 million dollar network of deep-sea sensors that’s been running for over a decade. Those sensors track ocean heat, currents, carbon, and coastal flooding. They feed your weather forecasts and hurricane warnings. Scientists say tearing it out will severely degrade those predictions and leave us, in their words, flying blind. And we’re paying for this taxpayer equipment whether it’s switched on or not. One oceanographer called it penny wise and tons foolish. They’re throwing away gear we already paid for and bought and installed. With hurricane season already here, that blind spot could cost lives.
And that’s the way it is, Today Friday, June 5th, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
