Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Trump Trapped In His Own Iran Quagmire?
Three American service members are dead this morning. Two soldiers killed when Iran struck a U.S. base in Jordan over the weekend, and a third killed in northern Iraq while handling the wreckage of a downed Iranian drone. One of the dead was a private just nineteen years old. And now the president who promised a fast, clean win is stuck with no good way out. Trump vows Iran will pay many times over, and Central Command has already launched a fresh round of strikes. But the war is unpopular, it’s brutally expensive, and gas is back up to four dollars a gallon. One person close to the White House said it plain. “This is what a quagmire looks like.” A ceasefire signed just last month is now in tatters, and Democratic leaders are demanding an end to what they call a reckless and costly war of choice. Republicans are terrified too, because a souring war drags down the party in power right as the midterms arrive. Working families didn’t ask for this war. They never do. But they’re always the ones who pay for it, in blood on foreign soil and in dollars at the pump.
Can We Share What’s Left Before The Rich Say No?
Now here’s a big idea worth chewing on. Thomas Piketty and forty-five researchers at the World Inequality Lab just dropped a one hundred thirty-five page blueprint for saving the planet and ending poverty at the very same time. They call it the Global Justice Report, and it aims for equality and prosperity within planetary boundaries. The plan would lift the poorest half of humanity from owning just two percent of the world’s wealth up to thirty percent, while the billionaire class falls from six percent all the way down to almost nothing. Every country converging toward the same decent standard of living by the year twenty one hundred. Piketty calls making the global rich pay for climate and welfare the most obvious form of reparations we need. It’s bold, it’s peaceful, and it’s built on hard math, not wishful thinking. There’s just one catch. The richest one percent will fight it with everything they’ve got. So the real question isn’t whether we can afford to share what’s left. It’s whether we’ll let a handful of billionaires tell us no.
Did RFK Junior Just Weaponize Your Health Care?
Robert Kennedy Junior just froze more than one billion dollars in Medicaid money, and take a look at where it landed. Eight hundred sixty-seven million dollars yanked from California. Two hundred million dollars pulled from Minnesota. Both states run by Democrats. Both states with governors Trump loves to attack. Kennedy says his department used artificial intelligence to sniff out fraud, and until Governors Newsom and Walz hand over paperwork, the money stays locked up. Medicaid chief Mehmet Oz put it bluntly. “If it smells like fraud, we’re not paying for it anymore.” But here’s what ought to worry you. Medicaid is health coverage for low-income and disabled people. In California alone it covers roughly fifteen million residents. And this is the second time these same two Democratic governors have been targeted. Back in the spring, Vice President Vance openly threatened to withhold funding from any state that didn’t fall in line with his new fraud task force. When Washington freezes a billion dollars and somehow only Democratic states get hit, that’s not fraud fighting. That’s using sick and disabled people as political hostages.
Was Jeffrey Epstein A Foreign Agent In Trump’s Ear?
Congressman Jamie Raskin just opened an investigation into whether Jeffrey Epstein was secretly working for foreign governments. Raskin says recently released documents show Epstein acted on behalf of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Russia, and then cashed in on his long friendship with Trump to sell that access. Raskin wrote that the evidence already reveals “damning indications of Epstein’s activities on behalf of foreign states.” In private emails, Epstein even bragged about speaking with a country’s leader and laying out a strategy plan. He also privately alleged Trump was tangled up in a money laundering scheme with a Russian oligarch centered on Florida real estate. He never once registered as a foreign agent, which happens to be a federal crime. And the Justice Department is still sitting on two and a half million Epstein documents it refuses to release. In a Republican-run House, Raskin’s demands will probably go nowhere fast. But if Democrats win back the majority this fall, those files, and the subpoenas, are coming.
Trump Slaps Canada With Fifty Percent And A Smirk
Trump just hit Canada with a brand new fifty percent tariff on a whole range of goods, set to land in one month, and some of it covers products protected under the free trade deal he signed himself. Prime Minister Mark Carney says it flat out violates that agreement. And Trump’s excuse? Canadian bans on American booze, dairy rules, and quotas on cars. Then he stood in the Oval Office and sneered at an entire nation. “Without us there’s no way they can survive.” Well, Canadians aren’t buying it. Only thirty-five percent of them now call the U.S. a reliable partner, and that’s crashed down from eighty-three percent just a few years back. One Canadian premier shot back that his country could dismantle the U.S. economy if it wanted to. But here’s the thing about a trade war. That tariff is a tax, and it’s American families who pay it, every single time they check out at the register.
Are Right-Wing Honeypots Hunting Federal Workers?
And finally this morning, a story that sounds like a bad spy movie but isn’t. Writer Ossiana Tepfenhart reports that right-wing operatives are now running honeypot dating schemes to get federal workers fired. Here’s how the trap works. A charming stranger matches with you on a dating app, keeps steering the talk toward politics, secretly records you trashing Trump, then hands the tape to a so-called citizen journalist who smears your name and torches your career. Federal workers have already banded together to sue conservative provocateur James O’Keefe over exactly this scheme. NPR investigated it too, and the goal, they found, is simple, to purge the people slowing down Trump’s agenda. And they don’t care whose life gets wrecked doing it. So now dating apps come with a warning label. Watch for hidden cameras, and maybe skip politics on the first date. In Trump’s America, even romance has become a loyalty test.
And that’s the way it is, Today Tuesday, July twenty-first, two thousand twenty-six. I’m Thom Hartmann.
