Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Is Wall Street About To Party Like It’s 1929?
Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, the biggest hedge fund on earth, went on a podcast and said the quiet part out loud. Jeremy Grantham calls this the biggest investment bubble in American history, and Dalio agrees. He says the AI mania has pushed markets into territory we haven’t seen since 1929 and 2000. Here’s what 1929 looked like. The Dow peaked at 381 in September of that year. Speculators bought stocks on margin, putting down as little as ten percent and borrowing the rest. When the selling started on Black Thursday and Black Tuesday in October, the loans came due and there was no money to pay them. By the summer of 1932 the Dow sat at 41. That’s an 89% wipeout. Thousands of banks failed. One in four Americans lost their job. Dalio says the same machinery is running today. SpaceX went public in June and is already trading below its IPO price. Anthropic and OpenAI are chasing trillion-dollar valuations. “Wealth is not the same as money,” Dalio said. You can’t eat a stock certificate. When this thing pops, working people will clean up the mess. Again.
Who’s Hacking the Water Coming Out of Your Tap?
Cyberattacks have hit water and wastewater systems in at least 12 states. That’s up from seven just last week, per an FBI and EPA warning. Hackers got into internet-facing control devices, changed passwords and IP addresses, and knocked operators out of their own systems. Some utilities lost pressure. Some flooded. Some had to switch back to running the plant by hand. More than 30 water facilities in Minnesota got breached in a single week. Michigan reported nine. Rapid City, South Dakota found trouble at its wastewater lift stations. Multiple officials point to Iran, though nobody has confirmed it. President Trump waved it off and blamed Minnesota’s leadership instead. Governor Tim Walz fired back, pointing at the federal cybersecurity workers this administration cut loose. Michigan State Police said “all systems continued to operate safely” with no known public health impact. Here’s the part that ought to scare you. American water systems run on shoestring budgets and decades-old equipment. We’ve been warned for years, and instead of hardening the pipes, we gutted the agencies that were supposed to do it. Turning on the tap and crossing your fingers is not a good strategy.
AIPAC Spends a Record $30 Million To Sink One Candidate
Michigan Democrats vote today, and one lobby has spent more on this single race than it’s ever spent on any race in its history. AIPAC and its super PAC, the United Democracy Project, have dropped more than $30 million trying to beat Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive epidemiologist running for the open Senate seat. That’s according to an analysis from the investigative outlet Sludge. Across the whole 2026 cycle, AIPAC has now spent at least $104 million dollars. That’s the second cycle in a row over the 100 million mark. And it doesn’t count the pop-up PACs and dark money groups that AIPAC allies seeded. The super PAC still had eighty million sitting in the bank at the end of June. Here’s the tell. Most of those ads never mention Israel. And only about two percent of the super PAC’s money comes from Michigan donors. Bernie Sanders put it plainly. “Let’s elect Abdul El-Sayed,” he wrote Monday. Whatever you think of the candidates, ask yourself this. Should out-of-state billionaires or Big Money get to pick who represents Michigan? Right now, that’s what it’s looking like.
Why Is It Ninety Degrees Inside the Arctic Circle?
The Arctic Circle is supposed to be one of the coldest places on the planet. This week it’s been hotter than Orlando. The Selagoncy weather station near the edge of the Arctic Circle hit 93 degrees. Another station, Olenyok, hit almost 91. That’s from data collected by the service Ogimet and flagged by climatologist Maximiliano Herrera. Meteorologist Alan Gerard told Scientific American it’s “not surprising” to see all-time records this far north. The Arctic is warming as much as four times faster than the rest of the world, and the reason is a loop that feeds itself. Sea ice melts. Less white surface means less sunlight bounces back to space. The dark ocean soaks up the heat. More ice melts. Gerard warns a building El Niño could make 2027 hotter still. Meanwhile here at home, Central Park hit 100 degrees for the first time since 2012. Parts of Montana touched 111. Every one of these records is a bill coming due for 60 years of oil industry lies. And the men who got rich selling that lie will not be the ones who pay it.
Rumors On A Phone Screen Killed Eighty People
An Instagram account called Haraga Ceuta posted a video claiming Spain’s border with Morocco was about to open. It wasn’t true. It didn’t matter. Within hours, Facebook users were tracking coast guard patrols. TikTok videos showed people where to swim. Buses packed. Trains filled. Taxis ran nonstop toward the Moroccan city of Fnideq. By the time anybody in charge reacted, roughly sixty thousand people had reached the Spanish enclave of Ceuta. That’s the biggest migration surge between the two countries in years. More than 80 people died. Some drowned. Others were crushed in a stampede. Both governments blamed smugglers and what Morocco called the exploitation of digital platforms. But a Moroccan geographer named Mustapha Azaitraoui asked the question nobody in power wants to touch. “Nobody addressed how these individuals managed to breach the border,” he said. Look underneath the rumor and you find the real fuel. Thirty-seven percent of Moroccans between 15 and 24 have no work. Even college graduates sit near 20% unemployment. Desperate young people weren’t chasing a lie. They were chasing a way out. The lie just told them when to run to.
Geeky Science. Are You The Mosquito’s Favorite Restaurant In Town?
If you’re the one at the barbecue swatting like a windmill while your brother-in-law sits there untouched, science has finally taken your side. Researchers at Florida International University rounded up 119 volunteers in Miami and stuck each of their arms into a tube called an olfactometer. At the far end they released three mosquito species. Aedes aegypti, Aedes albopictus, and Culex quinquefasciatus. Then they watched who got picked. Turns out you’re not one flavor. You might be irresistible to one species and completely boring to another. The team counted 246 kinds of bacteria across all those arms, and only one showed up on everybody. Three bacteria kept turning up on the popular people. The authors say these microbes “may broadly signal the presence of an attractive host.” Someday that could mean a repellent that actually works, or a skin cream that rewrites your microbiome so the bugs lose your address. Until then, you’re not paranoid. You’re delicious. And that’s the peer-reviewed science talking, not me.
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, August 4, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
