Politics

With Illinois, which on Saturday morning entered its third fiscal year without a budget, facing a catastrophic downgrade, late on Sunday evening the Illinois House approved the most controversial element of a budget package, a tax hike which will increase the income tax rate by 32% from 3.75% to 4.95%, and the corporate income tax rate from 5.25% to 7%, to try and end a historic budget impasse. The bill passed 72-45. The House also approved a $36 billion spending plan minutes later on a 81-34 vote.

Once Only Blacks Were Enslaved, Now We All Are

Paul Craig Roberts

The 4th of July is upon us. We will hear all sorts of patriotic BS about how wonderful we are and how thankful we are to our brave military who defends our liberty.

Not a word will be said about the destruction by the Bush and Obama regimes of the US Constitution, which once protected our liberty far better than any military action.

As the oppressive regime of leftist autocrat Nicolas Maduro intensifies its crackdown on anti-government protesters who have been gathering daily in the streets of Caracas and other Venezuelan cities to demand regime change, the government’s body count continues to climb. Last week, one such government-sanctioned killing was caught on video. The chilling footage shows Venezuelan soldiers shooting a 22-year-old rioter in the chest after he hurled rocks at them.

Just days before Trump's meeting with the Chinese president in Hamburg later this week for the G-20 summit, the Trump administration sent a guided-missile destroyer near Triton Island in the South China Sea, Bloomberg reported, a move "which may cause concern ahead of President Donald Trump’s meeting with his Chinese counterpart."

According to an anonymous official cited by Bloomberg, the U.S. Navy sent the destroyer USS Stethem within 12 nautical miles (22 kilometers) of Triton Island on Sunday, passing through the contested waters on the basis of "innocent passage." 

On Sunday Japanese PM Shinzo Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party suffered what Reuters called a "historic defeat" in the Tokyo assembly election, and "plunged into a crisis" after losing to an upstart outfit in an vote that is seen as a harbinger for Japan's national elections, and signaling trouble ahead for the premier who has suffered from slumping support after a series of political scandals.