Forced Vaccination: Will you lie down and take it? Not me.
From http://urbansurvival.com/week.htm
Friday July 3, 2009
Depression 2 Update: Seven More Banks Fail!
Oh, the joys of not having to get up with the first ring of the alarm clock! But then, as I laid in bed this morning wondering what to write about, it came to me in a flash: There have been numerous alarming signs and portents in the markets this week, if one knows where to look.
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The FDIC announced seven bank failures after the market closed Thursday, which brings the number of banks closed this year to 52. But, if you count the number of branch offices closed this week it's 30 branches.
Founders Bank |
Millennium State Bank of Texas |
First National Bank of Danville |
Elizabeth State Bank |
Rock River Bank |
First State Bank of Winchester |
John Warner Bank |
But what's even more alarming is that if you look back over the last year of "We're not in a Depression" bank numbers, you'll see that the number of banks closed is nominally up to 75, but if you count up branches, the banking system has shuffled ownership of 2,969 branches.
That FDIC seems to be doing a smooth job of it - making depositors whole in each case (so far), one can't help but wonder what's the cost of all this to be in the longer term, especially since the real guts of the second leg down in financial markets isn't expected till this fall.
When will FDIC have to go looking to recharge its coffers?
Meantime, at least the bad news was released after the markets were closed and has an extra day to contemplate what this all means. Answer to that should be apparent to anyone with half a brain (Depression 2.0 may be real and George may not be so crazy after all...).
If you divide the total offices closed (2,969) by 51 weeks (since July 11, 2008 is the IndyMac failure - 51 weeks back) closings have been averaging 58.21 offices per week, although admitted the data is skewed a bit by the WAMU and Downey Savings failures. Still, the count is the count.
If you want to be informed on the Fed and economics in general, read 'The Creature from Jekyll Island' by G. Edward Griffin. He goes into great detail about central banking and fiat money(he condemns both). Its on Ron Paul's list of recommended reading, and it is probably the most enlightening piece of literature that you will ever read.
The first internet hit film, actually the most downloaded film on the internet.
Here is the fantastic film Shadowplay, the first Australian 9/11 truth film!
Its a realy good film
PART I
�9/11 PUPPETMASTERS
Featuring:�
CHARLIE SHEEN - with InfoWars.com
General LEONID IVASHOV - Commander of Russian Armed Forces, September 11, 2001
ANDREAS VON BUELOW - Former State Secretary of Defense,�Germany�
CONNIE FOGAL - Leader Canadian Action Party, Canada
WEBSTER GRIFFIN TARPLEY - Historian, USA
G.EDWARD GRIFFIN - Founder Freedom Force International, USA
WILL THOMAS - Investigative Journalist
BARRIE ZWICKER - Media Critic, Canada
Prof KEVIN BARRETT - Islamologist, Univ Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Prof MICHEL CHOSSUDOVSKY - Economist, Univ Ottawa, Canada
Prof JOHN McMURTRY - Moral Philosopher, Univ Guelph, Canada
Please come and see the full length film on the 12th of September at the Tom Mann Theartre, Surry Hills, Sydney.
How Congress and the Media Duck Impeachment
By DAVE LINDORFF
On Monday last week, something important happened in Washington. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the Democratic representative from Cleveland, OH, who early in the primary season won some of the biggest applause lines in the Democratic presidential candidate debates, introduced 35 articles calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors.
You'd be excused if you didn't know this happened. There was almost no reporting on the event that day or the next, which took several hours to accomplish, along with several hours Tuesday for to be read into the Congressional Record. Kucinich's address to the House was broadcast live on C-Span. But it was not announced in advance or highlighted on the C-Span website, and there were not many news reports on the historically significant fact that articles of impeachment had been filed against the president during subsequent days.
A week later, it has still not been reported in the New York Times, the nation’s self-described “newspaper of record,” even though the Times had just days before Rep. Kucinich’s action, editorialized about the enormity of the president’s lies in tricking the country into invading Iraq—one of the crimes leading Rep. Kucinich’s long list.
A number of papers did editorialize against impeachment, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Florida Sun Sentinel—but it says something that these publications thought it more important to attack Rep. Kucinich’s action than to actually report on it as a news item.
Even the Washington Post’s news report was an example more of the sclerotic state of American journalism than of genuine reporting. It began:
“Having failed in efforts to impeach Vice President Cheney, Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) escalated his battle against the administration this week by introducing 35 articles of impeachment against President Bush, using a parliamentary maneuver that will probably force a vote today.”
Any journalism student who wrote a lede like Post staff writer Ben Pershing’s in a classroom exercise would have gotten a “D” or an “F” for it. Talk about backing into a story! First of all, Kucinich hasn’t “failed” in his effort to impeach Cheney. Congress has failed to impeach our criminal vice president and regent. Technically, Kucinich’s Cheney impeachment bill is still lodged in the House Judiciary Committee, where it is now joined in political limbo by the Ohio congressman’s new Bush impeachment measure.
The unwillingness of the nation’s news media to seriously consider the need for Congress to respond to and challenge the president’s clear abuses of power—even as they themselves condemn of those abuses of power—is a blot on the journalistic profession perhaps worse, and of more lasting consequence, than their failure to act as watchdogs and critics during the run-up to the Iraq War, when they acted more as patriotic cheerleaders than as news organizations.
As impeachment advocates, including Rep. Kucinich, have pointed out, unless this president and vice president are impeached by the current Congress, any—and probably every—future president will feel empowered by unchallenged precedent to ignore laws passed by the Congress, to go to war without Congressional approval, to spy on Americans in violation of the law, to ignore court orders, to abrogate international treaties, and to lie to Congress and the American people. Unless Congress asserts its rights under Article I, it will no longer even be a co-equal branch of government, but instead will have been reduced to nothing more than a debating society.
Editorialists, while refusing to honestly report on this Constitutional crisis, have been parroting the claim of gutless and calculating Democratic Party leaders like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in saying that with the nation at war and with a critical election approaching, there are “more pressing” matters to consider than impeachment, and that impeachment would be a “diversion.”
This is nonsense. As hundreds of American troops continue to die each quarter in a war that never should have happened, and that was launched five years ago and continued for half a decade thanks to administration lies and deception, there is nothing more important facing this nation than restoring Constitutional government and Constitutional checks and balances—something that can only be done through the Constitutional process of impeachment.
The American people instinctively know this. In polls, fully half or more of the public consistently continue to say, even at this late date, that they want the president impeached. Considering the media blackout on the issue, this is truly astonishing and even heartening. But it will take more than polls to get impeachment rolling. The public needs to start demanding that its representatives take action, on pain of being voted out of office.
I was at an anti-war forum in New Jersey last Friday evening sponsored by a group of peace activists calling themselves the Iraq Forum Organizing Team. When forum panelist Rep. Rob Andrews was asked by an audience member whether he favored impeachment and supported Rep. Kucinich’s articles of impeachment, Andrews fudged. He claimed, ingenuously, that the articles had been sent to the House Judiciary Committee for hearings, and said that he personally thought that Bush had committed an impeachable “high crime” by outing the identity of a covert agent of the CIA, Valerie Plame, and added that if the Judiciary Committee “develops a bunch of evidence” to support that charge, he would vote to impeach.
As I pointed out to the congressman, he certainly knows that that is a cheap dodge. I said that he was well aware that the way legislation moves forward in Congress is that members like himself sign on as co-sponsors of legislation they favor, and that then, and only then, those measures get hearings. Without co-sponsors, bills go to committee to be killed by inaction, which is the intention of sending Kucinich’s articles of impeachment to the committee. I said if Rep. Andrews were honestly to believe that the president might have committed any high crimes, he should either file articles of impeachment himself, or co-sign the excellent set of articles already filed by Rep. Kucinich. Instead, Andrews, like the rest of the Democrats and Republicans in the House, with the notable exception of Rep. Wexler and California Reps. Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey, have avoided Kucinich’s articles like the plague.
The audience loudly applauded this condemnation of Rep. Andrews.
We are at a critical point on impeachment. The elected leadership is afraid to challenge even this unprecedentedly unpopular president, who continues to defy Senate and House subpoenas, continues to promote war and to violate laws and treaties, and who is now conspiring with his vice president to launch yet another, bigger, war against the nation of Iran.
At the end of the day, if we get to January 19 without any impeachment hearings, we may see Bush and Cheney depart Washington, we may even see a Democratic president and a Congress with a significant Democratic majority in both houses, but it will be a hollow victory.
The nation’s democracy will at that point have been left a smoking ruin.
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net
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The 'Free Bees' are looking for help in spreading their '9/11's a lie' music video and song far and wide. Reluctantly they have decided that even though they're extremely proud of the work, they are releasing it anonymously.
They believe that this music video has the potential to reach a large audience and as a work of infotainment is amusing, informative and thought provoking.
Regardless of your personal music taste please help spread this music video and song around.
KEVIN Rudd wants to spearhead the creation of an Asia-Pacific Union similar to the European Union by 2020 and has appointed veteran diplomat Richard Woolcott - one of his mentors - as a special envoy to lobby regional leaders over the body.
The Prime Minister said last night that the union, adding India to the 21-member APEC grouping, would encompass a regional free-trade agreement and provide a crucial venue for co-operation on issues such as terrorism and long-term energy and resource security.
And he outlined his plans for his visits to Japan and Indonesia next week, saying he would explore greater defence co-operation between Australia, Japan and the US - an approach that had been championed by John Howard.
Speaking in Sydney last night to the Asia Society Australasia Centre, the Mandarin-speaking Mr Rudd said global power and influence was shifting towards the Asia-Pacific region and that Australia must drive the creation of a new global architecture for the Asia-Pacific century.
"We need to have a vision for an Asia-Pacific community, a vision that embraces a regional institution, which spans the entire Asia-Pacific region - including the United States, Japan, China, India, Indonesia and the other states of the region," said the Prime Minister.
The body would be "able to engage in the full spectrum of dialogue, co-operation and action in economic and political matters and future challenges related to security".
"The purpose is to encourage the development of a genuine and comprehensive sense of community whose habitual operating principle is co-operation," Mr Rudd said.
"The danger of not acting is that we run the risk of succumbing to the perception that future conflict within our region may somehow be inevitable."
Government sources said last night that Mr Rudd was attempting to revive the reformist spirit of former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke, who successfully pressed for the creation of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation group 20 years ago.
Mr Woolcott, 80, was Mr Hawke's right-hand man in establishing APEC and was a frequent critic of the Howard government's foreign policy.
Mr Woolcott told The Australian last night that Mr Rudd had made it clear there was great scope to co-ordinate existing regional organisations.
"This fits neatly into the concept of greater middle-power diplomacy," Mr Woolcott said.
"If the US or China or Japan or some other big power were to suggest it, other nations might be apprehensive and back away. It's better for a middle power like Australia to take the initiative.
"I've always thought that this was the part of the world where Australia lives, and if an Asia-Pacific community does develop, it's essential that Australia be part of it."
The proposed new pan-Asian body would come in addition to a range of existing forums through the region, including ASEAN, ASEAN Plus Three and the East Asian Summit.
But Mr Rudd said now was the appropriate time to re-examine the regional diplomatic and economic architecture because foreign policy based only on bilateral agreements had "a brittleness".
"To remove some of that brittleness, we need strong and effective regional structures," Mr Rudd said.
"Strong institutions will underpin an open, peaceful, stable, prosperous and sustainable region."
Mr Rudd said the existing forums were not configured to promote co-operation across the entire region.
And he said his proposal was consistent with US President George W.Bush's call for the development of an Asia-Pacific free trade area.
While the EU should not provide "an identikit model", the Asia-Pacific region could learn much from the union, which in the 1950s had been seen by sceptics as unrealistic.
"Our special challenge is that we face a region with greater diversity in political systems and economic structures, levels of development, religious beliefs, languages and cultures, than did our counterparts in Europe," Mr Rudd said. "But that should not stop us from thinking big."
Mr Rudd said he would send Mr Woolcott to complete the "unfinished business" he had begun with Mr Hawke. "Subject to that further dialogue, we would envisage the possibility of a further high-level conference of government and non-government representatives to advance this proposal," he said.
"I fully recognise this will not be an easy process ... but the speed and the scope of changes in our region means we need to act now. Ours must be an open region - we need to link into the world, not shut ourselves off from it.
"And Australia has to be at the forefront of the challenge, helping to provide the ideas and drive to build new regional architecture."
Mr Rudd said his Government's foreign policy was based on three pillars: its relationship with the US; its links with the UN; and "comprehensive engagement with Asia".
Discussing his visits to Japan and Indonesia next week, Mr Rudd said he would continue talks with Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda toward the creation of a free-trade agreement as well as advancing talks on security co-operation between Australia, Japan and the US. In Indonesia, he would pursue talks about a free-trade agreement and anti-terrorism co-operation with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, as well as seeking a template for greater co-operation on dealing with natural disasters.
Additional reporting: Greg Sheridan