Bloomberg - Oil prices headed for
a substantial weekly advance as the US push
to isolate Iran raised the specter
of further
disruptions. Crude has rallied more than 50% this year as the US-Iran
war rages, with the two sides battling
over the Strait of Hormuz.
August 21, 2026
Oil prices
Polls
The
Hill - Only 9 percent of Americans younger than 30 have a “very
positive” view of capitalism, according to a new CBS/YouGov poll.
That shows a stark generation
between Generation Z and older generations.
Thirty-three percent of people
older than 65, or those in the baby boomer generation, said they have a very
positive view of capitalism, while 23 percent of people aged 45-64, a group
that includes Generation Xers and older millennials, view capitalism very
positively.
Millennials in the 30-44 age
range were closer to Gen Z, with just 15 percent saying they had a very
positive view of capitalism.
Forty-one percent of respondents
younger than 30 had a very negative or somewhat negative view of capitalism.
That compares with 27 percent of those 65 and older, 32 percent of those aged
45-64 and 37 percent of those aged 30-44.
Added bills for tenants
The Guardian - An investigation co-published by the Guardian and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism non-profit that supports stories about inequality and poverty in the US, has revealed a problem emerging nationwide: fees that are known as “ratio utility billing system” fees – or Rubs – which are charged on top of rent.
Rubs, unlike standard utility
bills, where tenants owe money to the utility company, are owed to the landlord
and often paid through a third-party billing company. Many leases that include
Rubs are written so tenants can be evicted for not paying utilities, even if
they have paid their rent.
For working-class and low-income
tenants like Constance Soule, an 81-year-old disabled Alzheimer’s patient,
falling behind on these utility charges can lead to eviction notices, Tracie
McMillan reports. “It just kept adding up,” Margot Jones, Soule’s sister, said.
Tenants in Los Angeles and
Seattle have launched “Rubs strikes”, refusing to pay utilities until landlords
agree to reduce charges that can approach $300 a month per apartment.
At least 13 lawsuits have challenged Rubs since the start of 2025 across five states – including a case in California that led to a nearly $500,000 settlement last fall with a national property manager. “Some California landlords have tried to get away with illegal rent increases by shifting utilities and other fees to tenants and pretending those new charges are not ‘rent’” under state law, Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, said when announcing the settlement. Efforts to limit or ban add-on utility fees are also gaining momentum across several cities.
Climate
Miami
Herald - Despite afternoon rain, South Florida will have to deal with
the heat again…. The heat advisory is in effect for Miami-Dade and Broward
counties from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday. “We’ll be cranking that air
conditioning,” Lissette Gonzalez, a meteorologist with Miami Herald news
partner CBS News Miami, said Friday morning. “And take your umbrella.” The
feels-like temperatures, which take into account humidity, will reach as high
as 107 degrees, according to the weather service. At 5 a.m., parts of South
Florida already felt like more than 90 degrees, when humidity is considered.
The afternoon high temperature will rise to 91, a few degrees cooler than the
past few days in South Florida. Wednesday’s high reached the mid-90s and
Tuesday hit 100 in Miami, which hadn’t happened since 1942.
Islamophobia’s Rise in Texas
NY Times - The promise to combat “radical Islam” has long been a part of Republican politics. The rhetoric has only intensified nationally, as Muslims like Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist mayor of New York City, and Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, won major races.
But politicians in Texas have
gone beyond words, turning the power of the state against some Muslim groups.
A major turning point arrived in
early 2025, after members of the East Plano Islamic Center unveiled plans for a
real estate development centered on a new mosque in farmland east of Dallas.
The opposition was immediate and intense.
State leaders, including Gov.
Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have since opened investigations
into Muslim institutions across Texas. They’ve sought to block the real estate
development and investigate religious divorce counseling. Mr. Abbott threatened
to take state funding from Texas airports that provide ritual washing stations
for Muslim travelers, ordered the cancellation of a private water park party
celebrating a Muslim holiday and labeled the Council on American-Islamic
Relations, a national civil rights group, as a terrorist group — a step that
even the Trump administration has so far not taken.
Efforts by Republican state
leaders to restrict Islamic practice have coincided with a push to expand
Christianity’s place in public life. In June, Texas became the first state to
mandate Bible readings in public schools, where lawmakers had already required
prayer time and the posting of the Ten Commandments.
Supply of cattle hits 75 year low
The
Guardian - Tyson Foods, the largest meatpacking company in the US,
announced last week that it is closing two of its facilities in Iowa and Utah
and selling a beef facility in Washington state, and will lay off hundreds of
workers as the supply of cattle hits a 75-year low.
The historic cattle shortage has
been driven by a multi-year drought, rising costs and severe economic
pressures, including consolidation among cattle ranchers. Beef prices have
soared over the last year due to the shortage, though economists said the Tyson
plant closures likely won’t hit consumer prices so hard.
Earlier this month, Tyson
reported in its third-quarter earnings that beef volume is down 15.9% and beef
operating loss is at $138m.
Glynn Tonsor, an agricultural
economist at Kansas State University, said the US has had excess capacity for
processing and packaging beef for several years now, and beef that would have
been processed in Tyson’s Iowa and Utah plants
will just be rerouted.
“For the majority of the last 40
years, nationally, the US has had more capacity to harvest cattle than we’ve
had cattle,” he said. “Anytime you have too much capacity, or ‘too much’ supply
relative to what is needed in the market, that puts downward pressure on the
margins in that sector. That’s not new.”
With not enough cattle to
harvest, meatpacking plants have been taking measures to slow down operations,
including reducing shifts or cutting Saturday workdays. If operations don’t
pick up, plants eventually close.
August 20, 2026
Donald Trump
Richard - That moment when Donald Trump was warning about the dangers of the US reaching $24 trillion in debt: "That's the point of no return. That's when we become a country that's unsalvageable"
Today, US national debt has reached $40 trillion.
Climate change
Inside
Climate News - Wildfires in Europe could burn across about 39 percent
more land by the end of the century, even if greenhouse gas emissions decline
rapidly over the next few decades, new research shows. With continued high
emissions, the burned area could increase as much as 192 percent.
Emissions reductions are the key
to reducing wildfire impacts, the study, published Thursday in Global Change
Biology, concluded. Improvements in fire prevention, early detection and
firefighting could help limit the damage, but ultimately, Europe can’t fight
its way out of a worsening climate, the authors warned.
“Our results indicate there could
be widespread increases in burned area even under comparatively low warming of
around 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.24 degrees Fahrenheit),” said lead author Maik
Billing, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
With more warming, wildfires become more prevalent around the Mediterranean and
across much of Western and Central Europe, “including areas that to date have
not experienced many fires,” he said.
Polls
Interactive Polls
PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARIES
Jon Ossoff: 49%
JD Vance: 44%
—
Pete Buttigieg: 49%
JD Vance: 44%
—
Kamala Harris: 49%
JD Vance: 45%
Public Schools
Shortlysts
- Detroit Public Schools is expanding a taxpayer-funded attendance
program that pays students for completing full weeks of class. High school
students can receive $100 per week and collect up to $1,000 in Visa gift cards
during the school year. The district is now extending the program to students
in grades six through eight, who can earn $50 for each week of perfect
attendance.
….District officials contend that regular attendance is closely tied to academic success, with the belief that students who miss 18 or fewer days per year are three to five times more likely to perform at grade level or be prepared for college. The payments, however, are based only on attendance. Students do not have to meet any GPA, test score, or academic improvement requirement.
Middle East
Notus - If
there’s an Iran plan, it’s a secret. Two House Republicans told NOTUS that
they weren’t given talking points on the current status of the war by the White
House before they left Washington for their August recess. A MAGA influencer
who had been invited to private briefings with Vice President JD Vance and
other top officials said the outreach has ceased and information is scarce. And
it’s been more than 100 days since the Department of Defense held a press
briefing.
Left in the dark are Donald Trump’s political allies,
who not only want to help the president sell the Iran war but desperately need
something substantive to say ahead of the fast-approaching midterms. NOTUS’
Jasmine Wright and colleagues tell the story of how the White House’s messaging — or
lack thereof — on the war is affecting Trump’s most high-profile foreign policy
move.
“How do we finish the job? It has not been answered yet,”
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota) told us.
Meanwhile. . .
NPR - Elbridge Gerry, an early figure in the American Revolution, created a redistricting plan to protect his allies, leading to the term "gerrymander.
Inside Climate News - A new Inside Climate News analysis shows at least a dozen proposed data center developments across [Alabama], from Bessemer to the Black Belt. If built to full capacity, these data center campuses would consume more energy than all of the homes in Alabama combined.
NPR - The Trump administration on Tuesday moved to repeal an environmental regulation that prohibits road construction and most logging and mining activities on tens of millions of acres of public forest.
CBS - Miami officially hit 100 degrees on Tuesday afternoon, which tied the hottest temperature ever recorded in Miami.
Health
Jeffrey Kluger, Time - Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere do a lot of damage—heat waves, droughts, wildfires, superstorms. Now it appears there’s another knock-on effect that had never before been measured. According to a new study in the journal Air Quality, Atmosphere & Health, the changing chemistry of the atmosphere could be leading to changing chemistry in our blood—with potentially dangerous effects…. That’s very bad news for the health of the planet—and equally bad for the health of our bodies. Every breath we take—indoors or out—draws in more carbon dioxide than our bodies were originally adapted to cope with.
Word
Thom
Hartmann - The problem corporate
neoliberal Democrats, the heirs to Clintonism and Obamaism, face is that a
majority of Americans are now clear that it simply doesn’t work. We’re sick of
partial, corporate- and billionaire-aligned solutions to large problems that should
best be handed by our government as part of the commons.
— Trying to get affordable
healthcare to all Americans via Obamacare, for example, is increasingly failing
because the massive for-profit insurance industry it depended on is
increasingly committed to squeezing every last penny out of us, regardless of how
many of us die.
— Trying to lift a majority of
Americans back up into their parents’ middle class lifestyle is also failing,
largely because the corporate wing of the Democrats dependent on campaign
contributions from giant union-hating corporations have “mysteriously” failed
in their proclaimed effort to increase unionization and the minimum wage.
— Trying to give all Americans
access to a college education without debt has failed because a large handful
of big-bank-funded Democrats supported Bush’s bankruptcy “reform” in 2005 that
outlawed using bankruptcy to discharge student debt. When Reagan came into
office, roughly 80 percent of the cost of college was covered by state and
federal money and college endowments; today that’s only around 20 percent;
returning to 80% (and, thus, affordable college) is now a big legislative lift
when our tax code is so skewed toward billionaires and massive corporations
that the money for college is largely gone.
Forty-five years of the Reagan
Revolution being maintained by both parties have pretty much proven that
neoliberal Democratic policies won’t be enough to either stop Trump’s full-on
push to convert America into a fascist state, nor will they address the very
real problems most Americans are experiencing today when it comes to being able
to afford everything from rent to groceries to healthcare.
Today’s generation of progressive
Democrats, therefore, are taking a page from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s
New Deal and proposing genuinely big solutions to the massive problems that
Democratic neoliberalism and Republican neofascism have produced.
The effect of rising fuel costs on farmers
Axios
-Diesel prices are soaring just as the energy-thirsty peak of harvest
season looms for many of the country's largest crops. It's a double whammy for
farmers, with the Iran war also causing much higher fertilizer costs that hit
months ago.
…. The diesel market is tight and
expensive for two main reasons: the throttled Strait of Hormuz, and the
Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries that have prompted Moscow to reduce
exports.
Fuel is a major input cost for
farmers, who use diesel for combines, preparing fields, transporting crops to
storage, irrigation and more. And farmers typically can't pass those costs
along to crop buyers.
"[For] farmers, there's an
old saying in agriculture: they buy retail and sell wholesale," said John
Newton, VP of public policy and economic analysis at the American Farm Bureau
Federation.
Peak harvesting starts next month
for corn and soybeans — the country's two largest farm commodities — and
several other crops, though specifics vary by location and product.
"Harvest is the single
operation that uses the most fuel and runs from now through November for most
of the country," said Drew Kientzy, a University of Missouri agricultural
analyst.
….Diesel is the bulk of farms'
total fuel costs.
It's an important and now rising
expense, though typically smaller than costs like labor and other services,
seeds, and fertilizer, per Newton and Agriculture Department data.
[Jed] Bower, who holds the
rotating presidency of the National Corn Growers Association, farms around
1,100 acres. He expects to pay an extra $20,000 to $25,000 in diesel costs this
year compared to where prices were in January.
…."The way our input prices
have been, there's no way I can make a profit this year, and all this is going
to do is bury me further," he said.
August 19, 2026
Housing decline
Newsweek
- U.S. homebuilders are pulling back just when America remains in desperate
need of new, affordable homes to lower the rising cost of housing, as the
latest data shows that new construction projects fell for the fourth straight
month in July. Single-family housing starts, which account for the biggest
share of homebuilding in the nation, plunged 9.9 percent last month to a
seasonally adjusted annual rate of 808,000 units, according to the Census
Bureau’s latest report. That was the lowest rate in more than three and a half
years, since November 2022
Trump plans to cut protections for 44 million acres of forest
The Hill - The U.S. Forest Service has proposed to rescind the 2001 “Roadless Rule,” which prohibits road construction and logging in pristine parts of national forests that don’t currently have roads. By blocking roads, the rule targeted by the administration also inhibits activity like mining and oil and gas drilling in these areas. Officials said Tuesday that 44 million acres of the 193-million-acre National Forest System are subject to these protections. In a press release, the administration argued the rule also impedes forest management and could exacerbate wildfires
Word
Kim Sikoryak - For billions of years I did not exist on earth until I was born, yet I suffered not the slightest discomfort. And for billions of years after my death I will be just as unaware and oblivious of the world. So the only thing that matters to me is the life I have in the here and now, which is why we should all make the best of it while we still can.
Money
Shotlysts - This week, the U.S. national debt will surpass forty trillion dollars. The federal government is borrowing enormous amounts even outside a recession, while higher interest rates are making that accumulated debt increasingly expensive to maintain. The debt is the accumulated result of decades in which federal spending exceeded federal revenue.
Top contributors to the soaring national debt include Social Security, Medicare, and national defense spending. Costs associated with an aging population and other government programs, tax cuts, economic downturns, pandemic relief, and, increasingly, interest on previously accumulated debt are also driving up the total. In just the first ten months of fiscal 2026, the federal government ran an estimated $1.8 trillion deficit, $169 billion larger than during the comparable period a year earlier.
Student visas
Harvard
Magazine - The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has issued new
nationwide rules limiting the length of visas issued to foreign students and
visiting scholars from abroad. Prior rules stated that such visas would be
valid for the “duration of study,” while the new rules require an application
for an “extension of study” after four years. Most Ph.D. degrees entail at
least five to six years of study. The new rules, subject to congressional
review, are slated to take effect in September. President Alan M. Garber noted
that the visa restrictions make it “less and less attractive for international
students to come to the United States,” which is already competing for top
candidates with nations including China.
Elections
Blue Book - Major upset in the Florida Democratic
Senate primary, where self-described democratic socialist Angie Nixon thumped
the more mainstream favored candidate Alexander Vindman. We mean
thumped—12 points. He outspent her massively, as much as 20 to 1. And she
didn’t just win the cities and college towns. Look at this map of results; her biggest percentages came from the
small rural counties bordering Georgia.
Another right wing health appointee
NY
Times - President Trump plans
to nominate Dr. Heidi Overton, a White House domestic policy official and a
proponent of the administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, to serve
as the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, an agency that has
had significant staff turnover and political interference in recent months,
according to two senior administration officials.
Last week, she stood alongside
President Trump as he signed a third executive order calling for fewer
childhood vaccinations, which has no legal power and has been broadly
criticized by public health experts.
During the event, Dr. Overton
said the order could help states recognize “gold standard” recommendations and
take steps to limit vaccines required for school entry.
“We are going to be working
directly with states so that we’re not reliant on the court case to resolve,”
Dr. Overton said, referring to ongoing litigation over pared-down vaccine
recommendations. “We are doing it right away so that parents get the benefit
from state laws changing.”
Dr. Overton, a physician, is
currently deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy. A former chief
policy officer at the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think
tank, she has also written articles that denounced abortion as “corrosive” to
women and called for more controls over the prescribing of abortion pills. She
has called the pills “far more dangerous to women,” aligning with conservatives
who have urged the F.D.A. to take steps to restrict access to abortion
medication.
30-40 inches of rain in Hawaii
Newswothy News - Hawaii’s Big Island absorbed up to 30 to 40 inches of rain as Lala drenched communities and triggered flash flooding, landslides, and power problems. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported extreme rain totals up to 30–40 inches on windward Big Island. Heavy rain and strong gusts kept flash flooding and mudslide risks high even as Lala weakened. Officials urged caution after the storm because flooded areas and downed power lines remained dangerous. State alerts and local reports detailed flooded roads, debris, and closures across the island.
Pentagon threatens cut in funding if universities don't cut foreign partnerships
The Guardian - Thirty US
universities could lose federal funding unless they review and
cut foreign academic partnerships the Pentagon considers a national security
risk within the next two weeks, under a Pentagon directive aimed largely at
ties to Chinese institutions.
Harvard, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown and Cornell are among the
institutions ordered to conduct and report the reviews – and end partnerships
deemed problematic – by 31 August, according to a US official who provided the
full list to the Guardian.
“The ‘Department of War’ has zero
tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security,”
Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, said in a news release.
Canadian tariff paused by Trump
The Guardian - Donald
Trump has paused his threatened punitive tariff on Canada
just hours before it was due to come into effect. After Trump’s announcement,
the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, said “substantial progress” had been
made towards a trade deal, but more work was needed.
Tuesday’s 11th-hour backdown
comes after a contentious year for the two countries, with the longstanding
alliance strained by tit-for-tat tariffs and online broadsides in which Trump
has mused about wanting to turn Canada into a US state.
In February 2025, the White House
hit Canada with a 25% tariff, citing what it regarded as inadequate progress in
curbing cross-border illegal immigration and drug trafficking. In retaliation,
Canada announced a reciprocal levy, calling the US’s actions “unwarranted and
unreasonable”.
ICE
Congressional
Insider - Airport ID checks are now fueling immigration arrests that
have led to more than 800 apprehensions, turning routine travel into a
high-stakes status screen for millions of flyers. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement is making more airport arrests using Transportation Security
Administration screening tips. Homeland Security says it aims to stop
undocumented travelers from flying domestically….Reports show many detainees
include people with expired visas or pending immigration cases, not just
criminal defendants.
Religion in public school classrooms
Congressional
Insider- The Supreme Court is being asked to decide whether Texas can
force every public-school classroom to post the Ten Commandments, reviving a
church-state fight with national stakes.
Texas law orders a Ten Commandments display in every public-school
classroom, with fixed size and text rules. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton
told districts the mandate is lawful and must be followed. Families sued, and a
federal judge later said classroom postings under the law violate the
Establishment Clause. A divided appeals court ruling in Texas set up a likely
Supreme Court review that could reset school-religion rules.
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