Good Day, this is the Commonwealth Report.
News for the public, not the powerful.
Why Should You Pay Five Thousand Dollars More For Bombs?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth marched up to Capitol Hill this week and demanded one and a half trillion dollars for the Pentagon. That’s the biggest military budget in American history, even adjusting for inflation, and it’s more than a fifty percent jump over what we spent last year. Economist Dean Baker did the math, and the extra spending works out to nearly five thousand dollars per household. Baker pointed out we did just fine on eight hundred and sixty billion dollars, more than China, Russia, Germany, India, and the United Kingdom spend combined. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand looked Hegseth in the eye and said, “You’re asking for unlimited money for bombs when people can’t feed their families.” Nearly sixty percent of Americans say the Pentagon budget’s already too big. Senator Ed Markey is pushing a bill to cap defense spending at seven hundred and fifty billion dollars. And tucked inside Hegseth’s request is a forty-six billion dollar fund for artificial intelligence that would pour your tax money straight into private companies. Which companies? He won’t say. So who is this really for? It’s not for you. It’s for the war profiteers who cash the checks.
Is Trump About To Bomb An Eighth Country?
The Trump administration is now weighing military strikes inside Mali, a country in West Africa, going after an al-Qaeda affiliate called JNIM. If the President signs off, Mali becomes the eighth nation he’s ordered strikes on since his second term began. Eight countries. Iran, Venezuela, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Nigeria, Ecuador, and now maybe Mali. This one’s reportedly being pushed by Sebastian Gorka, one of the administration’s hardliners. Remember when Trump ran as the anti-war candidate, the man who promised “no new wars”? Just this month, a drone strike hit near Mali’s border with Algeria. And this push into Africa isn’t only about chasing terrorists. It’s also about critical minerals and beating back Russian and Chinese influence across the continent. Now he’s bombing his way across the map, one country at a time, with no vote in Congress and no plan for what comes next. That’s not strength. That’s a President treating the whole world as target practice while working Americans foot the bill.
Why Are One Hundred And Five Million Americans Not Working?
Here’s a number that ought to stop you cold. One hundred and five point eight million Americans are now out of the labor force. That means they’re neither working nor looking for work, and it’s an all-time record. In June alone, eight hundred and thirty-two thousand people dropped out. We’re now two point two million above the worst of the COVID shutdown, and worse than the Great Recession. At the start of this century, only sixty-eight point seven million Americans sat on the sidelines. Now nearly thirty-nine percent of adults are outside the workforce, the most since the nineteen-seventies. Since January alone, two and a half million Americans have walked away from work entirely. Labor force participation has sunk to sixty-one and a half percent, the lowest in fifty years outside the pandemic. Economists point to what they call a “demographic cliff,” as the baby boomers retire in droves. But the four point two percent unemployment rate you hear on the news looks low only because so many folks have simply given up. When people stop believing there’s a job worth chasing, that’s not a healthy economy. That’s a warning.
AOC And A Republican Sound The Alarm On An Israel Merger
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is warning that a provision buried in this year’s defense bill would merge parts of the American military with the Israeli military. She’s calling it an existential threat to American sovereignty. And she’s not alone. Republican Thomas Massie is standing right beside her against it. The provision goes by a friendly name, the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, but foreign policy analyst Ben Freeman says it would tie our two militaries together tighter than we’re bound to any other nation on earth, and hand Israel enormous sway over American politics. Israel already runs weapons co-production plants in Mississippi and Arkansas. Analysts warn this deal could be permanent, locking America into a partnership no future Congress could easily undo, and handing a foreign government a bigger foothold in our defense industry than any ally has ever had. Ocasio-Cortez put it plainly. “Every member of Congress must vote NO,” she said. The House votes today. Ask yourself who benefits when American sovereignty gets quietly signed away inside a spending bill nobody reads.
Are We Ready For The Next Outbreak?
While measles, hantavirus, and a nasty parasite called cyclospora spread across the country, the people who fight those outbreaks are getting laid off. Former CDC officials are sounding the alarm. Thirteen hundred workers got termination notices, and while some were called back, hundreds stayed gone. Doctor Joel Barratt ran the federal lab that tracks parasites. He watched his eleven-person team shrink to three, then quit. Now the cyclospora outbreak has sickened thousands across more than thirty states, with twenty-six hundred cases in Michigan alone, and the response is crawling. Former CDC official Debra Houry warned bluntly, “The nation is in trouble.” Another former official, Demetre Daskalakis, says the downsizing leaves us unprepared for daily public health, let alone a real emergency. The administration blames the government shutdown and calls the old CDC a bloated bureaucracy. And to be fair, some experts caution that this particular outbreak can’t be pinned entirely on the cuts. But here’s the truth. Germs don’t care about politics. When you gut the people who keep watch, you find out the hard way, and so do your kids.
ICE Keeps Crying Vehicle Attack, And The Cases Keep Collapsing
Over and over, ICE and Homeland Security have justified arrests and even deadly shootings by claiming immigrants “weaponized” their cars against agents. A Guardian investigation looked at twenty-six cases the government promoted as proof of a vehicle attack surge. Guess what they found. Only one ended in an assault conviction. Fifteen people were never even charged. Of the eleven who were, eight saw their charges dismissed. And the government kept pushing these stories to the press long after they fell apart. This all comes right after ICE officers shot and killed two men, Lorenzo Salgado in Texas and Joan Duran in Maine, during traffic stops the agency defended the very same way. A federal judge who reviewed similar claims in Chicago called them “difficult, if not impossible, to believe,” noting agents appeared to brake-check drivers to manufacture crashes. A leaked Homeland Security memo even warned its own agents to stop stepping in front of moving cars. Yet the agency still insists assaults on its officers have jumped more than a thousand percent. But when nearly every case collapses, you have to wonder whether the danger is real, or manufactured to justify the crackdown.
And that’s the way it is, Today Wednesday, July twenty-second, twenty twenty-six. I’m Thom Hartmann.
