Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Should the Public Own Half of AI?
Bernie Sanders has a radical idea, and it’s about time somebody said it out loud. In the New York Times, the Vermont senator argues the American public should own half of the big artificial intelligence companies. Think about it. Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Ellison are pouring hundreds of billions into AI and robotics, and Sanders’ own committee report warns the technology could wipe out nearly one hundred million American jobs over the next decade. These billionaires aren’t building this to help you. They’re building it to get richer and more powerful. So Sanders says if the public’s money, our research, our power grids and our data built this technology, then the public deserves to own a piece of it. Otherwise we get the unemployment and they get the trillions. That’s not innovation. That’s a heist.
The Party of White Supremacy Stops Hiding
They’re not even pretending anymore. At the Minnesota Republican convention in Duluth, a delegate called for a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin, the cop convicted of murdering George Floyd. A state representative led it. They held ten seconds of silence for a killer, on the sixth anniversary of the man he killed. And it gets worse. Gregory Bovino, Trump’s ousted Border Patrol chief, posted a photo of himself giving what one journalist called a “Hitlerian greeting,” then flew to a neo-fascist summit in Portugal organized around “remigration,” the mass expulsion of ethnic minorities. One organizer declared, “Weimar conditions require Weimar solutions.” When a major political party honors murderers and its officials salute like Nazis, believe them. They’re showing you exactly who they are.
Trump Guts FEMA Right Before Storm Season
Here’s a story that should scare every American living near a coast or a forest. Donald Trump gutted FEMA, and now, with hurricanes and wildfires bearing down, the White House is scrambling to undo the damage. CNN reports that former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her aide Corey Lewandowski waged war on the agency, stalling payments, driving out senior leaders, and pushing out roughly twenty percent of the workforce. By year’s end FEMA was sitting on more than fifteen billion dollars in unspent disaster money. Now Trump has rehired Cameron Hamilton, the same man he fired last year for refusing to help abolish the agency. One official said they’d sooner have deported Hamilton than give him the job. This is what happens when you put ideologues in charge of saving lives. People could die for it.
Is Trump Building a Wall Around His Own Crimes?
Donald Trump is fighting to claim personal ownership of his White House records, and legal experts say it’s not about his presidential library. It’s about building a permanent shield so no investigator can ever subpoena what he did in office. A Justice Department opinion quietly declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional. That’s the law Congress passed after Watergate to stop presidents from hiding or destroying evidence. Trump fired the national archivist, installed Marco Rubio over the archives, then handed control to a thirty-three-year-old former Nixon Foundation executive. A federal judge pushed back by quoting George Orwell. “Who controls the past controls the future.” Nixon tried to bury the Watergate tapes and failed. Now Trump is trying to finish the job. If he wins, accountability dies with him.
Will Joe Rogan Join Sixty Minutes?
And now for the strange one. CBS is reportedly courting Joe Rogan to shore up its sagging Sixty Minutes. Yes, that Joe Rogan. The podcaster who pulls eleven million listeners a day. Network boss Bari Weiss, who came in to make CBS less “woke,” reportedly loves his reach into the MAGA crowd. One executive bragged that hiring Rogan would give the show “a core connection to over fifty percent of the country.” Critics call it a desperate gamble that trades the show’s credibility for clicks. Sixty Minutes spent decades earning trust with hard reporting. Now its bosses want to hand the chair to a comedian who tells you the media is lying to you. Mike Wallace must be spinning in his grave. When the watchdogs chase ratings, the powerful sleep easy.
And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, June 1st, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
