Gold Morning, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Who’s Afraid Of Reporters Doing Their Jobs?
The Justice Department just sent federal agents to the homes of four New York Times reporters. Their crime? They wrote that the new Air Force One, a Boeing 747 gifted by Qatar, lacked the antimissile defenses of the old plane, and that the Secret Service urged Trump to fly the older jet home from the NATO summit. Now those four journalists are ordered before a grand jury in Manhattan this week. The Times calls it a “brazen act” meant to intimidate. The subpoenas came from Jay Clayton, the very prosecutor Trump just tapped to run national intelligence. This follows cash settlements squeezed out of ABC and CBS, and legal threats against the Post and the Journal. The Justice Department insists the reporters aren’t the target, only the people who leaked to them. When the government starts knocking on reporters’ doors at night, the free press itself is on trial.
Why Is Trump Fencing Off The People’s Park?
Trump wants a permanent fence around Lafayette Square, the park right across from the White House where Americans have gathered to protest since the early nineteen hundreds. His plan lets officials slam the park shut whenever they decide there’s a security risk. He also wants the brick walkways torn up, because he’s worried protesters might pick up the bricks and throw them. Suffragettes marched there. War veterans demanded their bonuses there. It’s federal land, and Trump is skipping the historical reviews the law requires, just like he did when he demolished the East Wing. One preservation leader calls the square “the national symbolic heart” of the public’s right to speak. Wall off that square, and you wall off the First Amendment itself.
Is Marco Rubio Now The Viceroy Of Venezuela?
The New York Times reports that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been quietly running Venezuela for months. Ever since the American military seized President Nicolás Maduro back in January and hauled him to the United States, Rubio has controlled Venezuela’s finances, its oil revenue, and its day-to-day government. The Treasury collects the money from Venezuela’s exports, then doles it back out under strict conditions Rubio sets himself. Diplomats have started calling him the “viceroy,” the old title for colonial governors. A former Human Rights Watch director says Trump has turned Venezuela into an effective American colony. One historian says we’re back in the Dollar Diplomacy days of the nineteen tens, when Washington ran whole countries as banana republics. Rubio told the Senate there’s no war and no occupation. We did this to Hawaii once. Now we’re doing it again.
The Rich Got A Handout, Working Families Got The Bill
One year ago, Trump signed his One Big Beautiful Bill. Now the receipts are in. A new report finds the richest one percent will pocket one hundred seventeen billion dollars in tax cuts this year, an average windfall of about sixty-six thousand dollars each, more than the entire bottom sixty percent gets combined. To pay for it, Republicans cut over one trillion dollars from Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, the biggest healthcare cuts in American history. Nearly four million people have already lost food assistance after a one hundred eighty-seven billion dollar cut to food stamps. Hospitals are closing. A Pennsylvania lawmaker and emergency doctor says he’s “never seen a more dangerous and purposeful attempt to make people sick and hungry.” That’s not a budget. That’s a robbery.
Machine Guns Detained Congressman Ro Khanna In The West Bank
Congressman Ro Khanna went to the occupied West Bank last week to see a Palestinian village that Israeli settlers had destroyed, the school and the homes flattened, its families driven out by settler raids two years ago. While he stood there, armed settlers rolled up carrying American-made M4 rifles, blocked the road, kicked his van, and detained him and other Americans. When Israeli soldiers arrived, Khanna says they sided with the settlers and kept the group held for over an hour, until the American embassy stepped in. The Israeli military claims its soldiers dispersed the settlers and reopened the road. On national television Sunday, Khanna said flatly, “The IDF is lying.” And he asked the obvious question. If they’ll do this to a United States congressman on camera, what are they doing to Palestinian families every single day?
Why Can’t Anyone Track The Explosive Diarrhea?
And finally, a strange alert. A nasty parasite called cyclospora is sweeping the country right now, and it causes what doctors politely call explosive diarrhea. One Denver man said he “wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy” after five days of running to the bathroom over forty times a day. More than a thousand people are sick in Michigan alone, with cases in dozens of states. So why can’t the government find the source? Because last year, Elon Musk’s efficiency crusade and Robert Kennedy Junior gutted the CDC program that tracked it. For thirty years that program watched eight foodborne germs. Now it watches only two. The same cuts brought back a flesh-eating cattle parasite and fired the scientists watching bird flu. They called it saving money. The country’s paying for it now, one bathroom trip at a time.
And that’s the way it is, Today Monday, July thirteenth, twenty twenty-six. I’m Thom Hartmann.
