"Pakistan warned Washington against future attacks. However, US military officials, under pressure from Obama to show progress in the endless Afghan war, responded to Pakistan’s warning by calling for expanding the Afghan war into Pakistan. On October 5 the Canadian journalist Eric Margolis wrote that “the US edges closer to invading Pakistan.” In his book, Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward reports that America’s puppet president of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, believes that terrorist bombing attacks inside Pakistan for which the Taliban are blamed are in fact CIA operations designed to destabilize Pakistan and allow Washington to seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons."
Washington renews demand for cuts to Social Security, Medicare (tags)
The Bush administration, echoed by much of the mass media, seized upon reports released May 1 on the fiscal health of the Social Security and Medicare system to renew its demand for drastic cuts to these two major entitlement programs, thereby gutting retirement benefits and health care for older Americans. According to the reports, issued by the trustees of the programs’ trust funds, the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund is projected to become insolvent by 2018, due largely to rapidly rising costs of American health care outstripping the payroll taxes that fund the program. The report on Social Security indicates that this program will be able to pay out 100 percent of benefits until 2040, when the trustees predict the fund will be exhausted—a year earlier than previous projections. After that it would be able to cover 74 percent of promised benefits out of revenues until 2080, when it would decline to 70 percent.
Hillary Clinton outlines Democrats’ big business agenda (tags)
New York’s Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton delivered a speech last week to the Economic Club of Chicago that served as an introduction to the right-wing economic platform upon which she and her party intend to run in the 2006 US midterm elections, as well as her own agenda in an expected bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008.
Terror and Energy Security (tags)
The US will need 6 million more barrels of oil every day by 2020..Both the supply and the security of the US would be helped far more if energy savings and promotion of regenerative energy were vigorously emphasized. Translated from the German