America

Trump’s Choices

Paul Craig Roberts

Headline growth in US construction spending collapsed in July to just 1.6% YoY - the weakest since 2011.

As Reuters reports, U.S. construction spending unexpectedly fell in June as investment in public projects recorded its biggest drop since March 2002. The Commerce Department said on Tuesday that construction spending tumbled 1.3 percent to $1.21 trillion - the lowest level since September 2016 - drastically missing economists' estimates of a 0.4% increase.

Appearing on the Today Show earlier this morning, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said that President Trump has indicated to him that the administration is prepared to strike North Korea to prevent an attack against the U.S.  Pushed on by Matt Lauer on whether a viable military option exists in the region, Graham responded: "They're wrong.  There is a military option to destroy North Korea's program and North Korea itself."

By replacing low-wage cashiers and other retail workers with robots, the retail sector’s struggling companies can engineer a potentially life-saving boost in profits. But as advances in artificial intelligence continue to accelerate, according to the World Economic Forum, large swaths of laborers are going to lose their jobs, leading to unprecedented levels of unemployment.

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned.—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Things are falling apart.

How much longer we can sustain the fiction that we live in a constitutional republic, I cannot say, but anarchy is being loosed upon the nation.