Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Is The Bond Market Screaming About Trump’s War?
The biggest market on Earth just flashed a warning light. The ten year Treasury yield jumped Thursday to 4.71 percent, the highest since January of last year. Before Trump’s war with Iran started in late February, that yield sat below four percent. Brent crude surged seven percent Thursday and touched one hundred dollars a barrel. The thirty year Treasury hit five point one eight percent, the highest since two thousand seven, right before the crash. Traders now put better than one in three odds on the Federal Reserve raising rates next week under its new chairman, Kevin Warsh. One strategist put it bluntly. “Yields aren’t going down unless oil does.” That 30 trillion dollar bond market sets the price of your mortgage, your car loan, and your credit card. 30 year mortgages just hit closer to secen percent. Wall Street bets on war. You pay the bill
Why Is Trump Holding Disaster Money Hostage?
Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration Thursday in federal court in Rhode Island. Homeland Security announced on July 10th that it’ll hold back 20 percent of the grants states use to guard against terrorism and cyberattacks, unless those states rewrite their election rules first. They’d have to switch to paper ballots, hand audit at least five percent of them, and run every voter through a Homeland Security database. States were allocated more than 740 million dollars this year, so at least 148 million gets frozen. The complaint says it plainly. “Congress never gave DHS or FEMA authority to rewrite state election law.” The Constitution hands elections to the states, not the president. So Trump’s starving them of the money that keeps their people safe until they hand him the keys.
Nearly 150,000 Californians Just Lost Their Vote
New state data shows 148,000 mail ballots got thrown out in California’s June primary, a rate of 1.73 percent. That’s up sharply from two years ago. The biggest reason by far was lateness, more than 93,000 ballots. Another 44,000 died over signatures that didn’t match the county’s records, and 8,000 more showed up with no signature at all. Tulare County in the Central Valley posted the worst rate in the state. Experts suspect the Postal Service, because postmarks now get stamped at processing centers that keep getting consolidated farther away. One researcher said the spike “does really demand the question why this is happening.” Meanwhile Trump’s Justice Department is investigating Los Angeles County for slow counting. Actual mail fraud runs four cases per 10 million ballots. The real threat to your vote is a gutted post office.
Is Forced Labor Really Why Trump Wants New Tariffs?
The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s emergency tariffs back in February, so he went shopping for a new excuse. He found one. Yesterday his trade office slapped tariffs on 60 trading partners, 10% on 22 of them and 12.5% on the rest, and declared it’s all about stopping goods made with forced labor. The legal average rate is 3.5%. The Progressive Policy Institute figures the bill lands on Americans at 100 billion dollars a year. Congressman Richard Neal wasn’t buying it. “Today’s forced labor justification is too convenient to be taken seriously.” Brazil, hit with 12.5%, is heading to the World Trade Organization. Forced labor is real and ugly. Using it as a fig leaf for a national sales tax on working families is uglier.
Healthcare: Why Do We Pay The Most And Get The Least?
Progressive Democrats held a shadow hearing on Medicare for All Wednesday, led by Pramila Jayapal and Debbie Dingell, because the majority won’t hold a real one. Doctor Diljeet Singh, who heads Physicians for a National Health Program, told them at least “35 cents of every healthcare dollar is wasted on insurance administration.” Not on care. On paperwork and profit. We spend twice what other rich countries spend per person, and 28 million of us still have no coverage at all. A Yale study found single payer would save about 68,000 lives a year and 450 billion dollars. More than half of House Democrats have signed on. Republicans went the other way, cutting Medicaid and letting insurance subsidies expire. We found 37 billion for the Iran war in five months. The money’s always there when somebody powerful wants it. The question is who gets it
Americans Are Falling Out Of Love With Capitalism
Trump’s whole midterm plan is calling Democrats socialists. Somebody should show him the polling. Fox News finds views of capitalism have collapsed from 30 points positive in 2019 to four points today. Among Republicans, strong support fell from 54% to 41%. Forty-two percent of them now say the economy is “rigged” for the rich, up from 39%. A Wall Street Journal survey found fewer than half of Americans think capitalism is working, down from 60% a decade ago, and only 35% still believe that working harder gets you ahead. Three-quarters say billionaires and big corporations own Washington. That’s not a marketing problem. That’s tens of millions of people looking at 40 years of Reaganomics and finally naming it out loud.
And that’s the way it is, Today Friday, July 24, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
