The United States steps into the new fiscal year without a budget approved by Congress. According to Government Accountability Office, the national debt has grown to record high $16, 7 trillion or 73% of GDP (it exceeded this level only in the days of WWII). The figure is much higher according to informal sources (independent researchers like, for instance, James Douglas «Jim» Hamilton, an American econometrician currently teaching at University of California, San Diego). If the debt ceiling is not raised urgently, then the US may step into a new financial crisis, as President Obama warned. US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew told the congressmen in a letter the country may go bankrupt on October 17, the default may take place by the end of October – the middle of November when the money flows get exhausted as Douglas W. Elmendorf, the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, points out.
Category: The 9/11 Questions
Today is the 12th Anniversary of the Invasion of Afghanistan drone_attack_victims_children Introduction Thank you. I’m very happy to be here this evening once again at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, which has always been…
I have carefully parsed UNSC Res 2118 and while I did not find any great surprises in its contents, I would qualify it as a half-full glass, meaning that while this resolution does not fix…
The administration has been amping up stats about foiled plots to bolster support for mass surveillance In so many words, NSA director Keith Alexander admitted Wednesday that the Obama administration had issued misleading information about terror plots and their foiling to bolster support for the government’s vast surveillance apparatus. During Wednesday’s hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy pushed Alexander to admit that plot numbers had been fudged in a revealing interchange: “There is no evidence that [bulk] phone records collection helped to thwart dozens or even several terrorist plots,” said Leahy.
While the General Assembly was discussing the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it is another matter altogether that concerned the diplomats: are the United States still the superpower they have claimed to be…
Perpetual mass-media deception and pervasive surveillance encompass a never ending train of abuse that won’t end any time soon. As long as armaments factories continue producing weapons of death for the fortune 500 Wall Street elite who reside in U.S. capitalist society, war and threats of war will continue to expand and take on an ever deadly character. Over 1000 military bases stationed, world-wide, nuclear weapons, a nuclear, first-strike posture by U.S. anti-ballistic missile systems and thousands of tanks, planes, bombers, armadas, special forces killer teams, hundreds of proxies and the Central Intelligence Agency that massacres civilians in Pakistan with drones on a routine basis, not because the missiles are missing their targets as claimed but because slaughtering civilians is a rapacious and depraved tool of the U.S. war mongers and their imperial war machine–that includes the civilian CIA, for resource control against Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia and any other nation the U.S. bombs to sustain its militarized war economy and claim to control the world’s most coveted petroleum resources in the Caspian Basin and Africa.
It may be that we have inched back from the precipice of war in Syria, if for no other reason than a hefty gust of sheer luck. Russia’s intervention and neutralisation of the escalating tension…
Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider. It doesn’t take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist”. He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.
Anti-ICC Kenyan President and his government appear to be the target of US-bolstered Al Qaeda attack. What are the chances that family members of Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta just so happened to be visiting Nairobi’s Westgate…
One nun puts entire US intel community to shame over ‘stage-managed’ Syria footage The US intelligence community has been put to shame by the dedication and determination of a lone Christian nun. Her modest study…