Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Should Super PACs Be Outlawed?
Out in Maine, the money’s flooding in. Not for Graham Platner, the oyster farmer running for Senate. Against him. New reporting this week details a wave of corporate dark money pouring into the state to prop up Susan Collins and tear Platner down. And Platner’s answer is simple. “Super PACs should be outlawed.” He’s right. These outfits let billionaires and corporations dump unlimited cash into our elections while hiding who’s really footing the bill. Platner makes a sharp point. The more money floods our politics, the less we actually talk about the things that matter to working people. Health care. Wages. Whether you can pay your rent. That’s the whole point of the flood. Drown out the real issues with noise. When a handful of wealthy donors can buy the conversation, that’s not democracy. That’s an auction. And right now, working families are getting outbid in their own country. End Citizens United has already endorsed Platner, calling out the corruption behind Collins. The question for the rest of us is whether we let the wealthiest people in America keep choosing our leaders for us.
Why Is Trump Blinding Us to the Climate Crisis?
Here’s one that’ll make your blood boil. The Trump administration is moving to tear down a critical deep ocean monitoring system. Scientists rely on it to track ocean currents, temperatures, and the warning signs of climate tipping points. The kind of data that tells us when disaster’s coming and gives us a chance to prepare. Now they want it gone. One scientist put it plainly. “Blinding the public to climate change won’t make it go away.” It’ll just make it worse, because we won’t see it coming. Think about what’s really happening here. They’re not denying climate change with words anymore. They’re ripping out the very instruments that prove it’s real. If you smash the thermometer, the fever doesn’t break. The patient just gets sicker while everybody pretends nothing’s wrong. And the patient here is the only planet we’ve got.
Is a Corrupt Mortgage Crusader Fit to Run America’s Spies?
President Trump just named Bill Pulte the acting Director of National Intelligence, pushing out Tulsi Gabbard. Who’s Pulte? He runs the federal housing finance agency. He has zero military experience. Zero intelligence experience. What he’s actually known for is pushing mortgage fraud claims against Trump’s political enemies. Now he’ll oversee the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI, and advise the president on national security. The outrage came from both parties. A veteran Republican operative called it indefensible. Senator Chuck Schumer didn’t hold back. “Bill Pulte is a partisan thug with no experience in intelligence.” When you hand the nation’s deepest secrets to a loyalist whose main skill is going after the boss’s enemies, intelligence stops protecting the country. It starts protecting one man. That’s how spy agencies get turned into weapons against the very people they’re supposed to serve.
Trump Wants a Loyalty Test for Your Tax Dollars
The White House budget office just dropped a four hundred and twelve page proposal that would rewrite how the government hands out grants. We’re talking more than one trillion dollars a year. Research grants. Help for local governments. Small business support. Farm subsidies. Under the new rules, political appointees get final say over every dollar, and they can block anything that doesn’t line up with Trump’s agenda or push what they call “anti-American” values. The man behind it is Russell Vought, the architect of Project 2025. The administration claims past grants promoted “a woke policy agenda.” Translation? If your science, your school, or your hometown doesn’t pass a political loyalty test, you don’t get funded. Scientists warn it puts partisan gatekeepers ahead of expert review. That’s not budgeting. That’s using your own tax money as a weapon to reward friends and punish everyone else.
Will Newark Shut Down This ICE Jail?
In Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka has had enough. He’s threatening to sue the federal government to shut down the Delaney Hall ICE detention center. For more than a week, detainees have been on a hunger strike over rotten food, filthy conditions, and no real medical care. One detainee reportedly suffered a miscarriage without proper treatment. Senator Andy Kim got hit with pepper spray outside the gates last week trying to calm things down. And how did the Homeland Security secretary respond? He mocked the hunger strikers and made a racist crack about their food. “This isn’t Holiday Inn.” That’s the attitude at the top. Human beings locked up, denied care, and the people in charge are sneering. When a government treats the suffering of the powerless as a punchline, it tells you exactly who it’s working for. And it isn’t us.
Ebola Is Racing Across Congo
And finally, a warning from the other side of the world. Ebola is spreading fast in the Democratic Republic of Congo. As of today, health officials report more than three hundred confirmed cases and dozens of deaths, with the virus already crossing the border into Uganda. The World Health Organization has raised the national risk to “very high.” This is the Bundibugyo strain, and here’s the scary part. There’s no approved vaccine and no approved treatment for it. A WHO official summed up the fear. “The potential of this virus spreading rapidly is high, very high.” It’s tearing through a region already crushed by war and hunger, where bombs are falling and health workers can’t even reach the sick. Disease doesn’t respect borders. When the wealthy world looks away from a crisis like this, it always comes back around. We’re all connected, whether we like it or not. And a country that rips out its own scientific monitoring at home, the way we saw earlier with the oceans, is a country that won’t see the next crisis coming either, no matter where it starts.
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, June 2nd, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
