Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Who’s Really Paying For Trump’s Iran War?
One hundred and ten days into Trump’s war on Iran, and the bill is landing on your kitchen table. A new analysis says American drivers have paid fifty three billion dollars in extra gas costs since the fighting started at the end of February. That’s on top of pricier diesel for the trucks that haul our food and higher airfares too. One study found the war wiped out the average household’s entire tax cut from Trump’s big bill, and then some. Trump himself admitted this week that if the fighting had dragged on, the country could’ve faced economic catastrophe as oil reserves ran dry. And here’s the kicker. Even with a ceasefire, an expert at 350.org warns “we should expect prices to remain above pre-crisis levels.” Now Iran says it’ll start charging ships to cross the Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint for one-fifth of the world’s oil, once a sixty day grace period ends. So the waterway Trump promised would reopen toll-free won’t be free at all. Tehran calls them service fees, not tolls, but the result is the same. Trump started this war with no real plan to protect that strait, and now everyday people are stuck with the tab while oil companies post record profits. Working families pay. Big Oil cashes in. Same old story.
Did Trump Just Raid The Secret Service To Build His Ballroom?
Follow the money. Last week Trump’s budget office quietly moved three hundred fifty two million dollars away from the Secret Service and into something vaguely called White House Security Measures. That cash came from Trump’s own tax law, and it was supposed to pay for agents, training, and protection. Instead, lawmakers in both parties think it’s bankrolling Trump’s giant new ballroom, the one he tore down the East Wing to build. He swore private donors would cover every dime. But the Washington Post says it’ll cost six hundred million dollars, with taxpayers footing more than half. Senator Brian Schatz put it plainly. “I don’t know whether it’s the ballroom, but it sounds like the ballroom.” And it’s not just the ballroom. Senators are demanding a halt to Trump’s Golden Dome missile shield, a project the budget office now pegs at one point two trillion dollars, up from the one hundred seventy five billion he promised. The Pentagon’s gutting the very office that tests whether these weapons even work, and contracts are lining up for billionaire pals like Elon Musk. Senator Ed Markey calls it a system that “won’t stop a nuclear attack but will balloon the deficit.” Two grand vanity projects, both sold with one big lie about who pays. Your tax dollars. Their trophies.
Who Actually Wants AI To Replace All Of Us?
This one should stop you cold. A new report in Vox by Sigal Samuel digs into a movement of Silicon Valley thinkers who don’t just expect artificial intelligence to outsmart us. They want it to replace us, on purpose. They call themselves successionists, and they argue that machines should be humanity’s rightful heirs, the next step in evolution. One of their leaders, a man named Daniel Faggella, talks about building what he calls a worthy successor to the human race. At a closed-door gathering in New York, one voice told the room they were in “probably the only room in the country where most people disagree with you.” These folks rub shoulders with tech billionaires, and their ideas trace straight back to old fantasies about engineering a superior species, the same poisoned well that gave us eugenics. So while regular people worry about AI taking their jobs, a handful of the powerful are quietly cheering for it to take everything. That’s not science fiction. That’s a worldview with money behind it.
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What’s Hiding In The Newest Epstein Files?
Buried in the Justice Department’s Epstein documents is an FBI interview that’s hard to read. A woman who worked at a luxury shoe shop inside Trump Tower told agents that back in the early nineteen nineties, two men worked the building’s public atrium like a hunting ground. She’d study there on her lunch break, and she says the pair approached young women, asked if they wanted to meet Donald Trump, and handed out party invitations printed with Jeffrey Epstein’s home address. She felt the men were, in her words, “playing the role of recruiters for Trump.” When she turned them down, she says the death threats started, and she watched them keep approaching other women for months. Now, this is one woman’s allegation from an FBI interview, and the files don’t say whether agents ever confirmed it. But Trump and Epstein ran in the same circles for years, and it’s one more thread tying the President to a man whose crimes still haunt this country.
Whatever Happened To Trump’s Big Blue Pool?
And finally, file this under you can’t make it up. Trump spent somewhere between thirteen and sixteen million dollars of your money, on a no-bid contract, to paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool a patriotic American flag blue for the country’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday. Within days it turned bright green with algae. So crews dumped jugs of hydrogen peroxide in to fix it. The Park Service swore there were “no harmful side effects to marine life or to the environment.” Well, now huge chunks of that blue paint are peeling right off the bottom. Sixteen million dollars, and the thing can’t even hold its color till the Fourth of July.
And that’s the way it is, Today Thursday, June eighteenth, twenty twenty six. I’m Thom Hartmann.
