By Katharine Trendacosta

The Senate Judiciary Committee voted on the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act, aka the CASE Act. This was without any hearings for experts to explain the huge flaws in the bill as it’s currently written. And flaws there are.

During the vote in the Senate Judiciary Committee, it was once again stressed that the CASE Act—which would turn the Copyright Office into a copyright traffic court—created a “voluntary” system. “Voluntary” does not accurately describe the regime of the CASE Act...

Boeing is taking a $4.9bn hit to cover the costs of the grounding of its 737 Max aircraft after two deadly crashes.

The charge is set to wipe out profits when the world's biggest planemaker posts quarterly results next week.

In a statement, Boeing also said its "best estimate at this time" is that 737 Max will return to service in the last three months of this year.

By Mac Slavo

Railroad CEO James Foote says that the behavior of this economy is the “most puzzling” he’s seen in his 40-year career in the railroad industry. “The present economic backdrop is one of the most puzzling I have experienced in my career,” Foote told Wall Street analysts on a conference call Tuesday evening.

“Both global and U.S. economic conditions had been unusual this year, to say the least, and have impacted our volumes. You see it every week in our reported carloads...

Three weeks after a meeting between the countries who singed the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was ditched by US, French, British and German officials said the trade mechanism which was proposed last summer - designed to circumvent both SWIFT as well as US sanctions banning trade with Iran - called Instex, is now operational.

And while we await for the White House to threaten Europe with even greater tariffs unless it ends this special purpose vehicle - it already did once back in May when it warned that anyone associated with the SPV could be barred from the U.S. financial system if it goes into effect - a response from the US is now assured, because in the biggest attack on the dollar as a reserve currency to date, on Thursday, Russia signaled its willingness to join the controversial payments channel, and has called on Brussels to expand the new mechanism to cover oil exports, the FT reported.

By Lubomir Tassev

The recent seizure of a cargo ship owned by JP Morgan, a vessel loaded with 20 tons of cocaine according to latest accounts, highlighted the risks of banks’ involvement in illicit activities, inadvertent or otherwise. And although U.S. authorities released the MSC Gayane after the owner, JP Morgan’s asset management arm, and the operator, Mediterranean Shipping Company, paid a $50M in cash and surety bond, the stain remains and this is not the only stain. Money laundering for drug cartels and moving funds for terrorists, arms dealers and dictatorial regimes are among the sins banks have accumulated through the years. However, court settlements and billions of dollars in fines often help major financial institutions avoid prosecution, conviction, and labels like ‘Drugbanks.’...

By Matt Agorist

Orange County, CA — The war on homelessness has reached unprecedented heights this week as officials in California announced that they will begin arresting people in certain ares for the sole factor of being homeless. The announcement comes after a series of lawsuits were settled to get a handle on Orange County’s homeless problem.

For the mere act of being homeless in the wrong part of town, cops can now arrest people...

By John Phelan

Most of you will be familiar with a supply and demand graph. This shows a demand curve, which graphs the relationship between the price of something and the quantity demanded of that something, as well as a supply curve, which graphs the relationship between the price of something and the quantity supplied of that something. It is probably the most basic—and useful—model in economics.

Whether the something in question is a good or a service, shoes or labor, the basic supply and demand model predicts that, ceteris paribus, an increase/fall in the price of something will lead to a fall/increase in the quantity demanded of that something—this is Econ 101...

By Jean Vilbert

Is State activity the only or best way to provide services to the poor? Do we have alternatives? How about charity? Couldn’t charity replace taxation? It could—and with solid advantages.

There are four main reasons why this is the case: moral, political, financial, and psychological...

Imagine printing electronic devices using a simple inkjet printer — or even painting a solar panel onto the wall of a building.

Such technology would slash the cost of manufacturing electronic devices and enable new ways to integrate them into our everyday lives. Over the last two decades, a type of material called organic semiconductors, made out of molecules or polymers, has been developed for such purposes. But some properties of these materials pose a major hurdle that limits their widespread use...

By Sara Tipton

Whether we are climate change activists or skeptics, we can all agree that we should all be doing our part to leave our Earth in the best condition possible. Sustainability isn’t always the easiest thing to accomplish considering our consumerist lifestyle in the U.S., but we’ve come up with four things that can really have an impressive impact and make big changes...

Op-Ed by Brandon Smith

There is a very bizarre narrative being circulated in the mainstream economic media and it goes a little something like this:

“The Federal Reserve has capitulated on liquidity tightening yet the US economy is ‘stronger than ever’, isn’t that weird?”

There are a couple things wrong with this statement. First, the Fed has not yet capitulated on its tightening policy. In fact, we have been hearing since last November from the mainstream media and some alternative media that the Fed was going to lower its Fed Funds Rate and end monthly balance sheet cuts at “any moment”, yet several months later it still has not happened...

By Emma Fiala

A report published on Tuesday by the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, revealed that 13,400 of the city’s homeless population had jobs in 2017 while another 18,000 had a college education. The report challenges long held stereotypes concerning the homeless that include the false idea that anyone with a steady job or college education is immune from one of life’s most difficult experiences...

By Peter C. Earle

Everything that Mnuchin attributed to Bitcoin — for one thing, that it has been used in concert with such “illicit activity [as] cyber crime, tax evasion, extortion … illicit drugs, and human trafficking” — can be said, and to degrees an order of magnitude or more larger, about the U.S. dollar. It’s an argument suitable for children...

By Mac Slavo

The manufacturing industry in the United States has officially sunk into a recession. The once-booming industry is struggling to stay alive amid the trade war as production slumped in the second quarter...

Venezuela is considering using the Russian alternative to the traditional SWIFT international payment system, as the country braces for new US sanctions that could further weaken its financial sector, according to Bloomberg.

Venezuela’s central bank has sent a request on the matter to the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) as the regulator’s approval is necessary if Caracas wants to use the payment platform, the report said, citing sources. However, neither of the sides involved, nor the world’s largest payment system, SWIFT, has commented on the report.

Once a top investor with over $170 billion in US Treasury bills, Russia continued reducing its holdings of US debt in May to almost $12 billion, according to recent data published by the US Treasury Department.

Russia’s stockpile of Treasury bills fell by more than $100 million in one month to $12.024 billion, $5.25 bn of which is in long-term securities.

Moscow accelerated dumping US debt last year, when it reduced its holdings by more than 85 percent, from $96.9 billion in January to $13.2 billion in December. The biggest reduction came it April and May, when the country reduced its stockpile by around $81 billion.

The selloff is even more dramatic since 2010, when Russia held US Treasury bonds worth over $170 billion.

The federal government will soon run up against its self-imposed borrowing cap once again. Current estimates are for the government to max out its credit limit at a little over $22 trillion in early September. Congress goes on recess in August, so there is some pressure to address the cap right now.

By Chris Edwards

The federal government spends $14 billion a year on subsidies for local rail and bus transit. This spending should be zeroed out in the next federal transportation bill because it induces cities to own and run monopoly transit systems that are unionized and mismanaged.

Federal transit aid has mainly covered capital costs, not operations and maintenance. That has encouraged cities to purchase rail systems with big up-front costs, rather than cheaper, safer, and more flexible bus systems...

Op-Ed by Rosanne Lindsay, Naturopath

If you connected all the dots to the various United Nations (U.N.) Agendas, would you create a map of mass regionalization and an eventual Totalitarian State?

Let us count the ways…