Donald Trump says that recent hysteria whipped up by the “Fake News Media” about his summit with Vladimir Putin shows that the US press is eager for a “major confrontation” with Russia, one that could even lead to war.
“The Fake News Media wants so badly to see a major confrontation with Russia, even a confrontation that could lead to war. They are pushing so recklessly hard and hate the fact that I’ll probably have a good relationship with Putin. We are doing MUCH better than any other country!” the US president tweeted on Thursday.

Socialist fools are giving high fives and singing hallelujah as a Chicago alderman seeks a "free money" trial.

The Intercept reports Chicago May be the Largest US City to Try Universal Basic Income.

Chicago Alderman Ameya Pawar is worried about the future.

He is concerned that a coming wave of automation could put millions of people out of work and result in more extreme politics.

Pointing to investments in autonomous vehicles by companies like Tesla, Amazon, and Uber, Pawar observed that long-haul trucking jobs, historically a source of middle-class employment, may become obsolete. More people out of work means more political polarization, says Pawar.”We have to start talking about race and class and geography, but also start talking about the future of work as it relates to automation. All of this stuff is intertwined.”

While ever-hope-filled expectations among the left are for a 'blue wave' in the Mid-term elections, we suspect things may not turn out quite as planned given the last week's "crisis". Even before President Trump had set foot in Helsinki, the left and the media were banging the drums of war against "the thug" Putin and how he would trump Trump, and once the press conference furore was over, all hell broke loose as the left-leaning world attempted to out-signal one another's virtue as to the "treasonous", "surrender" that had occurred.

So much so - in fact - that the internet became 'full' of "Trump" and "Treason" chatter - more so even than when he joked in July 2016 about Russia having Hillary's missing 30,000 emails.

Once again - the "Russia, Russia, Russia" cries drowned out any sane discussion of the end of cold war 2.0.

Those who think "trade wars are good and easy to win" need to stop and reflect on currency wars.

Trump's "logic" rests on the notion that China has a huge trade surplus and the US can hurt China more than China can hurt the US.

Such logic is seriously misguided.

Trade is not a zero sum game. One does not gain by losing less. Losing is losing.
Yes, Trump is correct that the US can place more tariffs on Chinese goods than China can place on US goods. However, Trump cannot ignore US farmers, but the unelected leaders in China can suppress all dissent.
The US dollar floats, the Renmimbi (Yuan) doesn't. Thus, China can manipulate it currency, albeit with risks of capital flight, to mitigate some or all of US tariffs.
Currency charts can be confusing. Sometimes up is down and sometimes down is up, It depends on which currency is fist. The lead chart shows a 7.4% decline in the yuan vs the US dollar since April 16.

Meanwhile the dollar index itself has advanced.

Without any public scrutiny, insurers and data brokers are predicting your health costs based on data about things like race, marital status, how much TV you watch, whether you pay your bills on time or even buy plus-size clothing.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will attend the BRICS Summit in South Africa next week. The emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China & South Africa will address challenges posed by escalating trade disputes with US.

The annual summit of the bloc will be held from July 25-27 in Johannesburg and will be attended by heads of the world’s leading developing nations. Home to 43 percent of the world’s population, four of the top BRICS economies are ranked in the world’s top 15 by GDP size, namely China (second), India (sixth), Brazil (eighth) and Russia (11th).

The BRICS meeting comes at a time when the US is trying to withdraw from global trade agreements that were first signed to serve its interests. Washington has also been accused of paralysing the work of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) by refusing to agree to the appointment of new judges at the WTO Appellate Body.

The European Commission ruled on Tuesday that "selective treatment" by Ireland allowed Apple to pay a tax rate of one percent on EU profits in 2003 down to 0.005 percent in 2014. The US company has been ordered to pay up to €13 billion to cover the unpaid tax.

“Member States cannot give tax benefits to selected companies – this is illegal under EU state aid rules. The Commission’s investigation concluded that Ireland granted illegal tax benefits to Apple, which enabled it to pay substantially less tax than other businesses over many years. In fact, this selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of one percent on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 percent in 2014,” said EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager EU in a press release before her speech.

While President Trump's latest round of tariffs has only just taken effect, and his earlier tariffs on steel and aluminum weren't widely imposed on American allies until May, American companies, or foreign firms' US-based subsidiaries, are already complaining about the negative impact that tariffs are expected to have. And as the White House mulls over whether to slap 10% tariffs on another $200 billion of Chinese imports, the situation is finally "getting real." Companies have warned for months that the tariffs would hurt economic growth, but to try and get a handle on the "real-world impact"of these policies, Bloomberg is compiling a list of companies that have either mentioned the tariffs during their earnings calls, or have released some other tariff-based announcement.

China is investing nine times more into Europe than it is into North America as policies force divergence, a report released this week reveals.

Chinese outbound foreign direct investment (FDI) has dramatically swung toward Europe in the first half of 2018 and its FDI into North America has dropped by a whopping 92 percent in the last year, from $24 billion to $2 billion, according to multinational law firm Baker Mackenzie.

In the first six months of the year, newly-announced Chinese mergers and acquisitions (M&A) into Europe were $20 billion compared to $2.5 billion in North America, while completed Chinese investments in Europe exceeded those in North America six-fold, at $12 billion compared to $2 billion.

Puerto Rico's hedge fund creditors can sue the federal government over the losses they sustained as the government reorganized the island's finances, a federal judge has determined.

United States Court of Federal Claims chief judge Susan Braden wrote in a document filed Friday that a group of hedge funds invested in Puerto Rico debt could proceed with a lawsuit against the federal government for stiffing them by creating the 2016 Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act, or PROMESA, which set up an oversight board to restructure the island's debt and budget.

The final declaration of the recent NATO summit in Brussels says that the allies are committed to “working to address, as appropriate, existing dependencies on Russian-sourced legacy military equipment through national efforts and multinational cooperation” (paragraph 31). From now on they will “foster innovation to maintain our technological edge.” Actually, the very need to include such a clause into the text of the document speaks highly of “Made in Russia” weapons. The pledge to get rid of them is an attempt to please the US chomping at the bid to fill the void with American systems. At the same time, it hardly expresses the sincere desire of the nations that have Russian arms in the armed forces’ inventory to dispose of them. This is a very interesting issue worth having a closer look at.

Google has been slapped with a record-breaking $5 billion (£3.8bn / €4.3bn) fine from the European Union.

The latest anti-trust penalty for the US search firm is equal to the amount of money the Netherlands contributes to the EU budget each year.

The fine was announced during a press conference held by EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager in Brussels today.

Google faces more penalties if it doesn't pay-up in the next 90 days.

The crux of the issue is the monopoly Google has garnered within the Android app marketplace and the advertising advantage this provides the company.

Readers may recall that last month we first reported that for all the confusion about sharply higher yields in April, the explanation was simple: it was Vladimir Putin who liquidated a whopping half of Russia's Treasury holdings, which declined by $47.4BN to just $48.7BN - the lowest since 2008 - from $96BN in March.

But wait, it gets better, because as Trump continued to jawbone about more sanctions targeting Russia, Putin did not stop and in May he continued what was an outright liquidation of Russia's TSY holdings, which plunged by another 70%, down from $48.7BN to just $14.8BN in May. Keep in mind this was over $100BN at the start of the year.

Washington's "comprehensive" package of sanctions against Tehran are expected to kick in this November, but officials say the main target, Iranian crude oil exports, will likely simply be diverted from one group of buyers to another.

A senior US energy official has told The Wall Street Journal that Washington expects China to buy up much of the oil others won't due to the threat of US sanctions. Beijing, according to the official, will likely make the purchases through the same bank it used during the previous rounds of sanctions to get around US penalties.

This includes the Bank of Kunlun Co, Ltd, a bank affiliated with the China National Petroleum Corp with limited exposure to the global financial system. The US has threatened to sanction "everybody, including China" if they purchase Iranian oil once sanctions step into effect.

Worker repairs a part of a unit of the Tehran oil refinery, in Tehran, Iran. (File)
© AP PHOTO / VAHID SALEMI

Yeah, just keep ’em coming, right, so that when the last one falls flat on its face people will have already forgotten about it and instead focus on the new one. It’s been the modus operandi of the US MSM ever since Donald Trump emerged as an actual presidential candidate, and they haven’t let go.

That Vladimir Putin is an existential threat to the US and indeed the entire western world is a narrative taken straight out of Edward Bernays’ playbook. And it works like a charm. The problem is, it is also the biggest threat to peace anywhere on the globe that we have ever seen since WWII.

Putin is a patriot who came to the fore in mostly unexplained ways, named by American puppet Boris Yeltsin as his successor, only to save his country from US-induced plundering and restore Russia as a functioning country. Far from perfect, but functioning.

The US withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018 and promised to impose sanctions against Tehran and any company that does business with it, potentially threatening to leave the world without 2.5 million barrels of Iranian oil.

Iran's representative to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Hossein Kazempour Ardebili, has warned that Trump's hopes that other countries will fill the gap in oil supply after the US imposes sanctions on Iranian oil will not come to pass and are based on a "miscalculation," Iran's PressTV has reported. He also noted that the US president was falsely led into the belief as a result of a "miscalculation by other oil producers."

"Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Russia pretended to be able to deliver 2.5 million barrels a day of Iranian exports […] That was a miscalculation, Mr. President: you have fallen in their trap, and prices will go up," Hossein Kazempour Ardebili said.

The Vlad and Donald show in Helsinki Monday was simply brilliant and breathtaking – we’d say even a beautiful thing to behold.

Between them, they left CNN’s nattering nabobs of neocon nonsense sounding like the shrieking monkeys they actually are. And that’s to say nothing of the fools they made out of the newly minted liberal and progressive warmongers on the Dem side of the aisle in Washington or the so-called journalists who fill 90% of the space in the so-called mainstream media with endless pro-war propaganda.

But most of all it was the single greatest blow to the War Party since it turned Imperial Washington into a colossal menace bent on global hegemony when the Soviet Union slithered off the pages of history in 1991.

While Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin says that exemptions from US sanctions against Iran will be considered in certain cases, the European Union is apparently not going to be one of them. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed that he has rejected EU appeals for Iran exemptions.

Senior officials from Britain, France, and Germany have all urged the US not to apply the sanctions to EU nations’ companies when they start going into effect next month. The EU has passed laws rejecting US sanctions, and forbidding their companies from complying with them.

Pompeo and Mnuchin told the EU, however, that they want “unprecedented financial pressure” on Iran, and that they will not ease any sanctions until they see a tangible change in Iranian policy.

As discussed previously, the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, or TRADOC, drafted a new strategy for how soldiers will operate, fight, and campaign successfully across multiple domains—space, cyberspace, air, land, maritime—against all enemies (Russia and China) in the 2025-2040 timeframe.

Warrior Maven has confirmed that the Army is literally "gearing up" for decades of hybrid conflict, and in doing so, testing and prototyping self-generating “Ironman-like” soldier exoskeletons. These “breakthrough” suits are designed to transform the combat mission by supporting soldier movements, generating electricity, powering weapons systems and substantially lowering the weight burden of what soldiers carry on the modern battlefield.

The technologies [exoskeleton suits] we are developing can produce electricity, which can be stored and used to power batteries. This increases the longevity of a mission, decreases the need for resupply and reduces the logistics trail,” Sharps explained.

"Far from leading to fusion, Europe's migration crisis is leading to fission", Stanford's historian Niall Ferguson recently wrote. "Increasingly, I believe that the issue of migration will be seen by future historians as the fatal solvent of the EU". Week after week, Mr. Ferguson's prediction seems to be turning into a reality.

Not only does Europe continue to fragment as anti-immigration sentiment gathers political strength, but, as a result of the migrant crisis, the EU's border-free internal zone, Europe's most cherished prize after the Second World War, is now defined as "at risk" by the Italian government, among other governments, such and Austria.

Immigration is also redefining the intra-EU contract.

The Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, the so called "Visegrad Group", recently called for EU border defense. "We have to have a Europe capable of defending us", Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said as well, after he was invited to join the Visegrad meeting.

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org.

Beginning his joint press conference with Vladimir Putin, President Trump declared that U.S. relations with Russia have “never been worse.”

He then added pointedly, that just changed “about four hours ago.”

It certainly did. With his remarks in Helsinki and at the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump has signaled a historic shift in U.S. foreign policy that may determine the future of this nation and the fate of his presidency.

He has rejected the fundamental premises of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War and blamed our wretched relations with Russia, not on Vladimir Putin, but squarely on the U.S. establishment.

In a tweet prior to the meeting, Trump indicted the elites of both parties: “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!”