Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Since When Does A President Fix A Soccer Match?
President Trump confirmed he picked up the phone and called FIFA president Gianni Infantino to review the red card handed to American striker Folarin Balogun in the World Cup. FIFA then suspended that red card, clearing Balogun to face Belgium. Trump told reporters, “I didn’t know what the hell a red card was.” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, sitting next to Infantino at the game, started working the phones, and a US official admits the government fed evidence into the appeal. Infantino insists FIFA’s judicial bodies are independent. Belgium’s football association is astonished and vowing to fight. Europe’s soccer body says the whole thing crossed a line. Remember, this is the same president FIFA handed its first ever Peace Prize to last year. Here’s the thing. When a president leans on a referee’s call, and his government pitches in with evidence, nothing about that is really about soccer. It’s about a man who thinks the rules bend for him, and an institution happy to bend them. And this time the whole world was watching.
Can One Phone Call Silence A Talk Show? You Betcha!
Back in February, Trump’s FCC chairman Brendan Carr announced he was investigating whether The View broke the old equal time rule. He never filed a single formal demand. He didn’t have to. Since that day, the show hasn’t booked one candidate running in a competitive midterm race. When New York mayor Zohran Mamdani pitched two democratic socialist congressional candidates, The View said no, pointing at the FCC inquiry. The commission’s own Democratic member, Anna Gomez, calls it a “censorship and control campaign.” Broadcasters are now asking her what’s safe to say on the air. This isn’t the first time. A San Francisco radio station backed off political stories after Carr’s people came knocking, and late night shows have felt the same squeeze. Think about what that means. The government doesn’t have to censor a show anymore. It just has to threaten one, and the network censors itself. That’s how you strangle a free press without ever touching the First Amendment. Fear does the dirty work for you.
Private Equity Buys Its Way Into Your Hospital
A new watchdog report warns that Wall Street’s takeover of American medicine is speeding up, and it’s using a clever back door. Private equity firms are teaming up with nonprofit hospitals through joint ventures, borrowing a trusted local name to slip past the regulators. One firm, Lifepoint Health, owned by Apollo Global Management, now runs at least seventy of these deals with more than thirty nonprofit partners. The report says these arrangements help both sides “evade antitrust scrutiny.” We’ve seen where this road leads. Steward Health collapsed. Prospect Medical went bankrupt. Studies show patients at private equity hospitals face higher prices and higher death rates. And the FTC reviews fewer than one in ten of these deals because they’re built to stay below the radar. A bipartisan Senate investigation already found these firms putting profits over patients. Now this report is begging state and federal lawmakers to step in before more hospitals go dark. When your hospital answers to a hedge fund, you’re not a patient anymore. You’re a line item.
Why Is The RNC Suing To Stop Citizens From Voting?
Even Nebraska’s own Republican Secretary of State, Bob Evnen, says he’s baffled. The Republican National Committee is suing to kill a Nebraska law that lets American citizens living abroad, folks who’ve never resided here but have a parent registered in the state, cast a ballot. Evnen says almost nobody even uses it, and he calls the RNC’s focus “a little baffling to me.” Here’s the kicker. That law was written back in two thousand five by a Republican, Deb Fischer, who’s now a US senator, and it passed to help military families serving overseas. The RNC’s filing the same kind of suit in state after state. The Democratic nominee for the job says Republicans are “targeting voters” because they can’t win them. They already got a judge in North Carolina to side with them, though Michigan threw the same suit out. When your own party official is confused, you have to ask what the real goal is. It isn’t fraud. It’s fear, one lawsuit at a time. And we all know the answer.
Are We Willing To Tax Billionaires Or Just Talk About It?
Congressman Ro Khanna is done with the talking. In California this November, Proposition Forty asks the state’s two hundred fifty billionaires to pay a one-time five percent tax on their wealth, raising one hundred billion dollars to save health care for three million people. Governor Gavin Newsom opposes it. The billionaires poured millions into beating Khanna’s primary challenger, who got six percent of the vote. And that scary warning about the rich fleeing? In the first quarter of this year, California pulled in more venture capital than the rest of the country combined. Khanna and Bernie Sanders have a federal plan too, five percent a year on nine hundred thirty eight billionaires, raising four point four trillion dollars over a decade. That kind of money could put a sixty thousand dollar floor under every teacher’s salary and pour a trillion back into Medicaid. As Khanna puts it, “If America has been good to you, you must do good for America.” The money’s there. The only question is nerve.
Did Russia Just Map Every Weak Spot In NATO’s Defenses?
A sobering new study from a London defense institute lays out a quiet Russian drone campaign across Europe. Between August of two thousand twenty four and this past February, researchers counted one hundred forty four drone incursions over thirteen countries. Nuclear sites. Military bases. The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. The report says many of these drones launched from Russia’s shadow fleet of sanctioned oil tankers, loitering in international waters. Germany alone logged fifty eight flights, including over an American air base. The whole operation, the authors write, is “a strategic failure of allied air defence in Europe.” Europe built its defenses for high-flying missiles, not cheap little drones skimming below the alarms. And here’s the chilling part. Not one European government has publicly blamed Russia. Somebody’s been quietly measuring the locks on the door, testing how long it takes anyone to notice. And nobody wants to say his name.
And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, July Sixth, Two Thousand Twenty Six. I’m Thom Hartmann.
