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News for the public, not the powerful.
Trump Drains Emergency Oil Reserve to 43 Year Low as Experts Warn the Caverns Could Crack
America’s emergency oil supply just fell below 300 million barrels for the first time since it was filled in the early 1980s. Ronald Reagan was in his first term the last time that number looked like this. The oil sits in 60 salt caverns thousands of feet underground along the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas, and Trump has ordered 172 million barrels released to cover the supply shock from his war with Iran. When that drawdown finishes, the reserve will sit around 243 million barrels. Energy experts say pulling oil out this fast can physically damage the caverns themselves. The Government Accountability Office warned in May that repeated draining and refilling can leach the salt walls into shapes nobody designed. Amos Hochstein, who advised President Biden on energy, says the government’s claim that we can safely drop to 70 million barrels is nonsense. “Don’t believe the people out of the government,” he told CNBC. The Energy Department insists the caverns are always full, just with more water and less oil. Refilling maxes out around 785,000 barrels a day, so crawling back could take until 2030. One hurricane on the Gulf Coast and we find out the hard way what a war of choice really costs.
Bond Market Issues Warning to Washington as Borrowing Costs Hit a 19 Year High
Last week investors demanded the highest yields in roughly two decades to buy about $67 billion of long-term government bonds. The 30-year Treasury closed at 5.26%, the highest since June of 2007. That happened even though inflation reports came in mild, which is backwards from how this usually works. Why should you care about a bond auction? Because almost every loan you’ll ever take is priced off those yields. Your mortgage. Your car payment. The loan that keeps a small business breathing. When Washington pays more to borrow, the floor rises under everybody else. Three things are driving it. The Congressional Budget Office just raised its deficit estimate to $2.1 trillion, which is $200 billion more than it figured in February. Tech giants are flooding the market with corporate bonds to build AI data centers, and some of them now carry better credit ratings than the United States government. And investors have no idea what Fed chairman Kevin Warsh will do, because he’s stopped telling them. Mark Cabana at Bank of America said it plainly. “There is literally a price to be paid for the lack of guidance.” Working people pay that price, and yet they never get a say about it.
War Planners Break Silence on the Nightmare Scenario Nobody Has a Plan For
The Atlantic reported this week that Western military planners share a nightmare they don’t like saying out loud. Russia hits a NATO member in Eastern Europe while China moves on Taiwan at nearly the same hour. Two crises on opposite sides of the planet, timed to split American attention in half. Reporter Simon Shuster writes that our military would have to react on two fronts at once, “three if it remains at war in the Middle East.” Not long ago this sat at the outlandish end of the threat list, somewhere between a loose nuke and an alien invasion. The thinking was that coordination that big couldn’t stay hidden from our satellites. That comfort is gone. Moscow and Beijing have pulled closer together while we’ve burned through our weapons stockpiles and our emergency oil fighting a war of choice in the Middle East. And neither Washington nor Europe has a joint plan for handling both fronts at the same time. Here’s what nobody in power wants to say out loud. Empires rarely die from one big punch. They die overextended, fighting in too many places, borrowing at high rates to pay for all of it.
ICE Arms Officers With Shock Gloves Built to Leave No Marks and No Lawsuits
Homeland Security plans to spend up to $20 million on gloves that deliver electric shocks to anyone an ICE officer decides to grab. They’re called the G.L.O.V.E., made by Compliant Technologies out of Kentucky. Press a button at the wrist and the glove electrifies the moment it touches skin. The company’s own promotional videos show trained police officers screaming and collapsing to the ground. Now here’s what Mother Jones dug up. In 2024 Adam Glueck, then assistant police chief in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, went on a podcast and explained the real appeal. Everybody’s filming everything now, he said. A punch on camera goes viral. A taser leaves puncture wounds. But “with a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.” A Georgia chief deputy recommended the gloves on video to anyone wanting a tool that doesn’t lead to lawsuits. Amnesty International has said devices like these are readily misused for torture. Sit with that for a second. The selling point isn’t safety and it isn’t calming anyone down. The selling point is that the pain leaves no evidence behind. A tool designed so victims can’t prove what happened to them isn’t police equipment. That’s what secret police carry, and your tax dollars are buying it.
FDA Finally Shows Up in Mexico a Month After Thousands of Americans Got Sick
More than a month after the FDA publicly linked Taylor Farms to a nationwide cyclospora outbreak, the agency is only now sending investigators to the company’s facilities in Mexico. Four officials confirmed the trip to the Washington Post. The CDC has logged nearly 13,900 lab confirmed cases since May, with more than 10,000 additional cases still under review. Two people are dead in Michigan. The lettuce outbreak alone spans 17 states with hundreds hospitalized. Taylor Farms recalled its central Mexico iceberg lettuce back on July 17, and that product had already reached at least 31 states. Barbara Kowalcyk of George Washington University says investigators should have been on the ground the moment they traced it back. Finding the root cause is “what’s going to drive prevention going forward,” she told the Post. Now look at who we’re talking about. Taylor Farms is the largest fresh produce supplier in the country, selling to Walmart, Kroger, Target, Sam’s Club and Taco Bell, and the company has been a friendly donor to Trump. And before any of this started, Robert Kennedy Junior had already cut back federal parasite monitoring. Deregulation sounds like an abstraction until it’s your kid in the emergency room.
Crazy Alert. Trump Blames Vandals for Dead Grass His Own July 4 Stage Killed
On Sunday night the President of the United States posted a photo of a big brown patch of the National Mall beside the World War Two Memorial and declared it the work of criminals. “Look what VANDALS did to the grass,” he wrote on Truth Social. There’s just one problem. That’s the exact spot where he built a giant bandstand and packed in crowds for his July 4 celebration. A webcam on the Washington Monument caught the structures covering nearly the whole lawn. AP photographers shot the crews tearing it all down, and there was the brown, flattened grass underneath. This is the same president who blew up at his own U.S. Attorney, Jeanine Pirro, when her office found the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was wrecked by bad construction and not by vandals. It’s funny right up until you name what it actually is. A leader who invents enemies to explain his own damage, and then demands prosecutions. Today it’s grass but we all know it won’t stay grass...
And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, August 17, 2026. I’m Thom Hartmann.
