Good Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report. News for the public, not the powerful.
More Proof Trump Just Started a War He Has No Idea How to End
Before the bombs dropped on Iran, Trump’s energy secretary told an interviewer he wasn’t worried about oil supplies. Other advisers privately dismissed warnings that Iran might close the Strait of Hormuz. They thought this would be quick and clean. They were catastrophically wrong. Since the U.S.-Israeli strikes launched February 28th, Iran has threatened to fire on commercial tankers in the Strait, through which roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil flows. Shipping in the Gulf has ground to a near-standstill. Gas prices are spiking. Trump is urging tanker crews to “show some guts” and sail through an active war zone. A hundred and forty U.S. service members have been wounded. The Navy has refused nearly daily requests from the shipping industry for military escorts, saying the risk is too high. Inside the White House, officials are growing pessimistic about the lack of any clear strategy to finish this war. But they haven’t told Trump, who keeps declaring it a complete success. Trump set out to decapitate the Iranian regime and install a friendlier government. What he got instead was a global energy crisis and no exit ramp. When leaders go to war without a plan, it’s not just a miscalculation. It’s ordinary people who pay the price.
Did Trump’s 2019 DOJ Cover Up What Happened to Epstein’s Victims in New Mexico?
New Mexico authorities are searching Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch for the second time, and now we know why the first investigation went nowhere. Rep. James Comer, the Republican chair of the House Oversight Committee, went on Fox News and revealed that Trump’s Department of Justice asked New Mexico officials to stand down on their probe back in 2019. Victims of Epstein say they were trafficked at that ranch. Emails released in the Epstein files allege that girls were killed and buried under the building on Epstein’s orders. The property was never properly investigated. Then it gets worse. NPR found that the DOJ withheld at least 50 pages of Epstein files directly tied to abuse allegations against Trump himself. The FBI interviewed that accuser four times. Only one of those interviews was made public, and it doesn’t mention Trump. Attorney General Pam Bondi has dodged questions about the missing files, insulted lawmakers who pressed her, and the DOJ claims everything withheld is either privileged or duplicate. Epstein’s victims deserve the full truth, not a carefully managed release designed to protect the powerful. When a government buries investigations and hides documents, justice doesn’t get delayed. It gets killed.
California Voters to Billionaires: Your Free Ride Is Over
A new UC Berkeley poll shows California voters support a one-time wealth tax on billionaires by nearly two to one. Fifty percent are in favor. Just 28 percent opposed. The 2026 Billionaire Tax Act would impose a 5 percent tax on the net worth of roughly 200 California billionaires, raising an estimated 100 billion dollars earmarked for healthcare, education, and food assistance. Bernie Sanders has rallied thousands in Los Angeles and San Francisco in support. Governor Gavin Newsom, already positioning himself for a 2028 presidential run, is fighting it, claiming it will drive innovation out of the state. Google co-founder Sergey Brin already fled California before the January 1st residency cutoff, and has dumped 20 million dollars into defeating the measure. Stripe’s CEO, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and other tech elites are pouring tens of millions more into the opposition. But here’s the reality. California’s billionaire wealth has exploded from 300 billion dollars in 2011 to over 2 trillion dollars today. Working families pay taxes on every dollar they earn while billionaires watch their fortunes compound, tax-free, year after year. That’s not innovation. That’s a rigged system. And California voters are done playing along.
Did a DOGE Insider Just Walk Off With Every American’s Social Security Data?
A whistleblower is alleging that a former DOGE software engineer walked out of the Social Security Administration with two of the most sensitive government databases ever assembled, loaded them onto a thumb drive, and carried them straight to his new private sector job. The databases, called Numident and the Master Death File, contain Social Security numbers, birthdates, citizenship status, race, ethnicity, and parents’ names for more than 500 million living and dead Americans. According to the whistleblower complaint, the engineer boasted to co-workers that he had “God-level” access to SSA systems that no outside contractor had ever been granted. He told one colleague he planned to scrub the personal details before uploading the data to his new company’s systems. He told another that if caught, he expected a presidential pardon from Trump. The SSA inspector general is now investigating. Congress has been notified. The Government Accountability Office is involved. This isn’t just a data breach. It’s an alleged theft of the most intimate personal records of every American who has ever lived, carried out by someone installed by Elon Musk’s operation, who apparently believed he was untouchable. If this is what DOGE was doing inside our government agencies, the American people deserve a full criminal investigation, not a pardon.
Can Multi-Vitamins Actually Slow Down How Fast You Age?
Let’s end with some genuinely good news. A landmark study published in Nature Medicine found that taking a daily multivitamin for two years measurably slowed biological aging in older adults. Harvard and Mass General Brigham researchers tracked 958 adults with an average age of 70 in a rigorous randomized clinical trial. Those who took a daily multivitamin aged roughly four months slower at the cellular level than those on a placebo over that same two-year period. Researchers measured aging using five epigenetic clocks, which track chemical changes in your DNA that reflect how fast your body is actually wearing down at the cellular level. Two of those clocks, the ones most predictive of mortality risk, showed statistically significant slowing in the multivitamin group. The benefit was strongest in people who were already aging faster than their chronological age at the start of the study. Researchers say more work is needed to confirm whether this translates into longer, healthier lives. But here’s the bottom line. These vitamins are cheap, widely available, and have decades of safety data behind them. In a country where Big Pharma charges thousands for experimental treatments, sometimes the most powerful health tool is already sitting on your bathroom shelf.
And that’s the way it is, Today is Wednesday, March 11, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
