Economy is in the toilet....no surprise there...no worries though as it will only get worse...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The U.S. economy continued to hemorrhage jobs in February, bringing total job losses over the last six months to more than 3.3 million, and taking the unemployment rate to its highest level in 25 years.

The government reported Friday that employers slashed 651,000 jobs in February, down from a revised loss of 655,000 jobs in January. December's loss was also revised higher to a loss of 681,000 jobs, a 59-year high for losses in one month.
http://money.cnn.com/2009/03/06/news/economy/jobs_february/index.htm

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A record 31.8 million Americans received food stamps at the latest count, an increase of 700,000 people in one month with the United States in recession, government figures showed Thursday.

Food stamps, which help poor people buy groceries, are the major U.S. anti-hunger program, forecast to cost at least $51 billion in this fiscal year ending Sept. 30, up $10 billion from fiscal 2008.
http://money.cnn.com/2009/03/05/news/economy/foodstamps.reut/index.htm?section=money_latest

See my post for future forecast...
http://yophat.blogspot.com/2009/02/impending-incident.html

WASHINGTON — Trying to draw a line in the sand, a Senate panel told the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve to identify all the parties made whole by the bailout of the American International Group or forget about coming back to ask Congress for more rescue money.

Since the insurance conglomerate’s near collapse in September, the federal government has committed $160 billion to keep it afloat. Tens of billions of those dollars have merely passed through A.I.G. to its derivatives trading partners, shielding them from losses. The Fed has refused to provide the names of those financial institutions, and senator after senator, Democrat and Republican, said that was an outrage.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/06/business/economy/06insure.html?_r=1&ref=business

WASHINGTON - Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd has moved to allow the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to temporarily borrow up to $500 billion from the Treasury Department, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

In return, Bair has agreed to halve a new emergency fee on U.S. banks. In a letter to Dodd on Thursday, Bair said raising the permanent credit line "would give the FDIC flexibility to reduce the size" of the emergency premium to be charged to banks.

Bair is agreeing to cut the new emergency premium, to be collected from all federally-insured institutions on Sept. 30, to 10 cents for every $100 of their insured deposits from the 20 cents the FDIC approved last Friday. That compares with an average premium of 6.3 cents paid by banks and thrifts last year.

The agency has never drawn on its long-term credit line, which is currently $30 billion, but Bair told lawmakers in letters Thursday that an increase in the FDIC's borrowing power "would leave no doubt that the FDIC will have the resources necessary to address future contingencies and seamlessly fulfill the government's commitment to protect insured depositors against loss."

The FDIC is "backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government," Gray said. "We can and always will be able to meet our obligations to depositors."

In addition to $18.9 billion now in the insurance fund, the FDIC also has a contingency reserve of $22.4 billion set aside for potential bank failures this year.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29543959/

Last newsprint I read said the FDIC had close to $34 billion in funds to cover $6.5 trillion in potential insurance obligations. They must be expecting significantly more then $40 billion in losses over the next couple of years if they are getting a line of credit for 1/2 a trillion over the same time period.

March 6 (Bloomberg) -- TCF Financial Corp., the Wayzata, Minnesota-based bank that never made a subprime loan and hasn’t lost money since 1995, is asking why it should help clean up the mess made by Wall Street.

“I’m kind of bitter,” said William Cooper, chief executive officer of the 448-branch bank, adding that over the years TCF has invested about $1 billion in the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s fund that guarantees bank deposits. “We pay for the excesses of our competitor over and over again.”

TCF is among more than 8,300 banks and lenders insured by the FDIC facing increased fees and a one-time “emergency” charge designed to raise $27 billion this year for the agency’s depleted coffers. Community banks may take a 10 percent to 20 percent hit to 2009 earnings even if the FDIC halves that charge, said Camden Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America.

The ICBA and its 5,000 mostly locally owned member banks are rebelling against the costs, as well as curbs on pay and business practices imposed on recipients of U.S. capital after public outrage over bonuses and perks. Community banks rely more on deposit funding, so they suffer a “much heavier burden” as a result of deposit insurance proportionate to size than peers such as New York-based Citigroup Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co., with its headquarters in San Francisco, Fine said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=anmrn4H8hXfw&refer=exclusive

Gordon Brown will claim today his visit to the US this week has put him on the verge of winning international agreement on principles for banking regulation to put to the G20 summit on 2 April.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/06/brown-banking-regulation

March 5 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve Board of Governors receives daily reports on bailout loans to financial institutions and won’t make the information public, the central bank said in a reply to a Bloomberg News lawsuit.

The Fed refused yesterday to disclose the names of the borrowers and the loans, alleging that it would cast “a stigma” on recipients of more than $1.9 trillion of emergency credit from U.S. taxpayers and the assets the central bank is accepting as collateral.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aG0_2ZIA96TI

General Motors today warned it would go bust within 30 days unless the US treasury gives it a further multi-billion dollar loan.

The dramatic warning from America's biggest car group came after its auditor, Deloitte, raised substantial doubts about its ability to continue operations as a going concern.

GM has so far received $13.4bn (£9.5bn) in treasury loans and a further $1.6bn in other government loans. Today , effectively holding a gun to the government's head, it said it could default on this $15bn if it did not receive a further cash injection.

It is seeking a total of $30bn from the Obama administration after racking up $82bn of losses in the last three years, including $31bn last year.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/06/generalmotors-automotive-industry

HONG KONG: South Korea lashed out Friday at a warning from North Korea that appeared to threaten civilian planes traveling though the region. While hectoring comments are routinely made by the North, often in vivid and inflammatory language, the threat caused enough uncertainty that three airlines announced they were rerouting some flights.

Singapore Airlines announced Friday that it would reroute flights passing over the east coast of the Korean Peninsula through the North's air space. The move followed announcements Thursday by South Korea's two principal airlines, Korean Air and Asiana Airlines, that they would reroute some flights approaching South Korea from the east.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/06/asia/06north-airspace.php

The top US diplomat in Kabul warned ­yesterday that Pakistan posed a bigger security challenge to America and the world than Afghanistan, as Islamabad grappled with the latest terrorist attack on its soil and the escalating Taliban ­insurgency on its north-western border.

Christopher Dell, who currently runs the US embassy in Kabul, was speaking in the aftermath of the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore and the news that Pakistani Taliban groups had formed a common front to attack Nato troops in Afghanistan, in what is widely expected to be a bloody and possibly ­decisive summer this year.

"From where I sit [Pakistan] sure looks like it's going to be a bigger problem," Dell said in an interview in the heavily fortified US embassy in Kabul. "It is certainly one of those nuclear armed countries the instability of which is a bigger problem for the globe.

"Pakistan is a bigger place, has a larger population, its nuclear-armed. It has certainly made radical Islam a part of its political life, and it now seems to be a deeply ingrained element of its political culture. It makes things there very hard."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/04/pakistan-global-security-threat

Mexico is an equal if not greater threat to the United States and gets very little press...see my post on Mexico...
http://yophat.blogspot.com/2009/01/destabilization-of-mexico-drug-war.html

MEXICO CITY (AFP) — Mexican President Felipe Calderon hit back at accusations his government is failing in the fight against violent drug cartels, saying that corruption in the United States is also to blame.

With murders among feuding Mexican drug cartels on the rise and continued ravenous demand for cocaine and other illegal drugs north of the border, Calderon said the United States should take a hard look at itself before pointing the finger at anyone else.

"The main cause of the problems associated with organized crime is having the world's biggest consumer next to us," Calderon said in an interview with AFP.

"Drug trafficking in the United States is fueled by the phenomenon of corruption on the part of the American authorities," he said, calling on US President Barack Obama to step up the fight against drugs in his own country.

"It is not an exclusively Mexican problem, it is a common problem between Mexico and the United States," he said.

Although cocaine is largely produced in South America, Mexican cartels control much of the multi-billion-dollar trade, transporting the drug to consumers in the United States.

Since taking office in late 2006, Calderon has launched a wide-ranging crackdown on drug cartels, often with bloody repercussions, as cartels hit back with ever-higher levels of violence and intimidation.

Mexican cities on the US border have suffered the brunt of the violence, prompting concerns in Washington that the killings and attacks could spill over the border.

Top US military official Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is due in Mexico later this week as Washington prepares to step up military and other assistance to tackle the heavily armed cartels.

"One of the things he expects to talk to his counterparts in Mexico and other officials about is the growing violence and growing threat with regard to narco-trafficking and the drug cartels," Captain John Kirby, spokesman for Mullen, also told AFP on Wednesday.

Mexico's ill-equipped police and security forces are often out-gunned by the well-armed gangs.

The administration of George W. Bush pledged 1.6 billion dollars over three years in security assistance to Mexico and Central America, primarily aimed at better equipping Mexico's security forces.

To even the playing field further, Calderon called on US officials to do more to stem the flow of weapons from the United States to Mexico, a route often used by traffickers to acquire arms.

"The biggest empowerment of organized crime are the weapons that arrive from the United States," the president said.

"Since 2006 we have decommissioned 27,000 arms, everything from missile launchers to 2,500 grenades. We have also found uniforms and arms belonging to the US Army."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gJy9Rww9q63tf7qFTrqhhaQmr2Fg

Of course that is cause to ban assault rifles in the US...since they are getting missile launchers and grenades...

(CNN) -- Nearly 7,000 Mexican soldiers and federal police arrived in the U.S.-Mexico border city of Ciudad Juarez this week to restore security to a city plagued by a long-standing, bloody drug war.

Another 1,500 soldiers are expected to join the 3,500 that rolled into Juarez earlier this week to support municipal police in street patrols and ultimately take control of their operations, Torres said.

In addition to the army troops, about 3,000 federal agents arrived to carry out investigations Torres likened to those of the FBI in the United States.

"They'll stay as long as necessary," Torres said, in the city across the border from El Paso, Texas.

Extreme violence among warring drug cartels and between them and the Mexican government has long plagued Juarez and the state of Chihuahua, but the situation has been getting worse.

Last month, the city's chief of police was obliged to quit after threats from organized crime to kill a policeman every day that he remained on the job.

And this week, the U.S. Consulate in Juarez specifically warned Americans to avoid an area southeast of the city.

"There has been a dramatic increase in drug related violence in the Guadalupe Bravo area and there is no indication that the situation will improve in the near future," the consulate said on its Web site.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/03/06/mexico.troops/

More information...
http://yophat.blogspot.com/2009/02/texas-national-guard-high-alert.html

March 6 (Bloomberg) -- A turf war between drug gangs is turning one of Europe’s safest cities into a shooting gallery.

Denmark’s worst-ever bout of violence between criminals intensified last week with three shootings that left two dead in Copenhagen, the capital. That prompted the government on March 4 to propose some of the most sweeping laws in the country’s legal history by lengthening jail terms and giving police more surveillance powers, including wiretaps.

“We’ll give police almost anything they ask for,” Justice Minister Brian Mikkelsen told reporters this week. “We need extraordinary steps. We won’t give the gangs a moment’s rest.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=afdpHpk7zovs&refer=exclusive

More Obama ostridge behavior...
Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., has referred constituents raising concerns over President Obama's eligibility to occupy the Oval Office to an online "fact" organization that relies for its answer partly on information from the Obama campaign.

The response from Kyl to a voter who asked about Obama's ability to meet the constitutional requirements for president said:

Thank you for your recent e-mail. Senator Obama meets the constitutional requirements for presidential office. Rumors pertaining to his citizenship status have been circulating on the Internet, and this information has been debunked by Snopes.com, which investigates the truth behind Internet rumors.

The Snopes explanation to which Kyl directed constituents refers back to another website, FactCheck, which in turn cites as documentation of Obama's Hawaiian birth a "Certification of Live Birth" that the Obama campaign posted online during 2008.

The Snopes explanation notes that there could have been citizenship issues for Obama, except for the confirmation from FactCheck via the Obama campaign that Obama actually was born in the United States.

Critics, however, have pointed out that the "Certification of Live Birth" posted online is not, in fact, the same as a "Birth Certificate," and COLBs have been issued by Hawaii to parents whose children are not even born in the state.

"Do you see the ridiculousness of this response? … Snopes.com (a left-wing website) is now the arbiter of who is and isn't qualified to be president," said the voter who received the response. The person's identity was withheld for this report.

"I thought it was our elected representatives in Congress that were responsible for that!"

However, lawyers and plaintiffs in a multitude of lawsuits have asked why, if a birth certificate actually reflects that Obama was born in Hawaii, has he spent sums estimated by observers of up to $1 million hiring various law firms to keep concealed his birth certificate, his college records and other documentation.

California lawyer Orly Taitz, whose work is on her Defend Our Freedoms Foundation website, has written to state lawmakers across the nation.

Her letter released today confronted the Snopes explanation directly:

"The State of Hawaii, statute 338, allows foreign born children of Hawaiian residents to get a Hawaiian birth certificate. Mr. Obama has never presented any corroborating evidence that he was actually born in Hawaii. His paternal grandmother in Kenya and the ambassador of Kenya made statements that he was born in Kenya," she said.

"The image that Mr. Obama has posted on the Internet was not a valid birth certificate, but rather a limited value document, called Short Version Certification of Live Birth. The Certification of Live Birth does not name a hospital, name a doctor, have any signatures or a seal of the Hawaiian Health Department on the front of the document. This document is usually given to parties that don't have a proper hospital birth certificate and it is given based on a statement of one relative only. Even the state of Hawaii doesn't give full credit to these documents," she continued.

"As elected state and U.S. officials, you have a right and an obligation to hold judicial hearings on issues of paramount importance and you have a right and an obligation to issue subpoenas for production of documents and subpoena witnesses for testimony on such important issues," Taitz wrote to state lawmakers in the 50 states.

She suggested the records from the "Annenberg FactCheck" be subpoenaed "as to how did they claim to have examined Obama's birth certificate and found it valid. Neither the state of Hawaii, nor Obama has ever released such birth certificate and there is no evidence of Obama being born in any hospital in Hawaii."
http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=90843

Jesse Jackson Jr. has proposed several Constitutional amendments which state that we have the right to full employment, a clean environment, high quality health care, high quality education and safe housing. These amendments are just meant to make all the brainwashed sheep out there feel good because the government cannot guarantee full employment, a clean environment, high quality health care, high quality education and safe housing for all. These proposed amendments sound like something that would be written by Karl Marx or a politician in the old Soviet Union. These are some of the dumbest proposed Constitutional amendments ever in the history of this country, and Jackson should be removed from office just based on the stupidity of these proposals. Government doesn’t grant rights, and certainly nobody has a right to any of these things that Jackson is proposing. People are given inalienable rights to be free when they are born and they cannot be granted or given by any politician or government institution.
http://www.roguegovernment.com/Jesse_Jackson_Jr._Seeks_To_Insert_Communism_In_The_U.S._Constitution/14631/0/13/13/Y/M.html

A new operation appears to have been launched in the mass media mind control complex to make people believe that FEMA camps do not exist. Talking head stooge and former drug addict Glenn Beck who gets paid millions of dollars to lie to people on his radio show and on Fox News, actually began talking about FEMA camps recently. Beck promised that his research team would get to the bottom of what’s really going on with these FEMA camps. This is funny, because news of detention facilities being preserved and built in this country for large groups of people is 100% documented and is really nothing new. Of course, it is doubtful that Beck will actually reveal the truth about government detention facilities when his research team finishes their work. It appears as if the only reason why he’s mentioning FEMA camps is so that he can setup phony arguments as to why they don’t exist. Strangely enough, Ron Paul made an appearance on his program and actually told him that the camps don’t exist. Dr. Paul is right on many issues, but he is wrong about the FEMA camps. In fact, it is amazing to see how Dr. Paul has now been turned into a media darling as the corporate media’s old paradigms are being traded for new paradigms to keep people watching their fake news broadcasts. The fact that Dr. Paul won’t expose the phony terror war fraud, the lies about 9/11 and is now claiming that FEMA camps don’t exist is ridiculous. It is time to call a spade a spade.

Let’s look at some of the evidence that there are detention facilities in place that could be used to hold large quantities of people for whatever reason the government deems to be necessary.

First in the 1980s, it was reported by the Miami Herald, the Akron Beacon Journal and other publications on and after July 5th 1987 that Oliver North had assisted FEMA in drafting plans for civil defense. These plans included the suspension of the U.S. Constitution, the imposition of martial law, internment camps and turning control of state and local governments to military commanders and providing FEMA dictator like powers during catastrophic events including times of widespread political dissent. North himself was even asked about these reports during the Iran-Contra scandal by Congressman Jack Brooks but was stopped by the committee Chairman because it touched upon classified information.

We have George W. Bush signing into law a bill that allocated money to preserve Japanese internment camps that were used during World War II.

We have KBR the engineering arm of Halliburton being awarded a $385 million contract to build detention facilities under the guise that they would be used to house illegal aliens.

There is a declassified U.S. Army document posted on the U.S. Army’s official web site outlining U.S. Army Regulation 210-35 which describes standard operating procedures on how to setup a Civilian Inmate Labor Program.

The Associated Press ran a report describing how FEMA is looking for ways to transport large quantities of people via trains during an emergency, much like the Nazis did with Jews back during World War II.

There is also ample anecdotal evidence of people who have reported facilities that appear to be built for the purpose of detaining large quantities of people around the country.

There is also a new bill entitled HR 645 the National Emergency Centers Establishment Act that was proposed by Congressman Alcee Hastings (D-FL) which would authorize and legalize FEMA camp facilities on open and closed military reservations.

It is impossible to dismiss all of this information and say that FEMA camps flat out don’t exist. There is too much anecdotal evidence and mainstream news to say that it is just a wild conspiracy theory. We know there are Japanese internment camps and we know that KBR was given a huge contract to build detention facilities that are not being used to house any illegal aliens at this point in time.

With that said, we have to face the facts that there are detention facilities in existence today and that they are pushing to expand and legalize this insane FEMA camp program. It is pretty sad when there is literally nobody in Washington DC including Dr. Paul that is providing the full truth on anything. Even though Dr. Paul’s campaign for President began as a positive resistance movement it was clearly infiltrated and steered in the wrong direction to ensure its eventual defeat. The globalists plan to get rid of the Federal Reserve, so they don’t really mind the fact that Dr. Paul is over TV speaking out against it. They are just going to replace the Fed with the phony solution of a new central bank and a new debt based currency when the Federal Reserve Note currency collapses.

The entire political process is a joke and there doesn’t appear to be any way to salvage it. The government is a criminal enterprise on every possible level and should be recognized as such. If Glenn Beck actually tells the truth about FEMA’s role in continuity of government operations coupled with what's really happening with these camps, it will be an enormous surprise. It appears as if Dr. Paul’s appearance was setup for Beck to later debunk this FEMA camp information with his bought and paid for research team cronies. Even though it is possible Dr. Paul might not have full access to all of the information about government run detention centers, his stance on other issues such as the phony threat of Al-Qaeda and the false flag terror attacks of 9/11 raises a number of questions. Who out there is providing the full truth about anything in Washington DC? The answer is simple, and that is nobody.
http://www.roguegovernment.com/Ron_Paul_Helps_Glenn_Beck_Debunk_FEMA_Camps/14611/0/13/13/Y/M.html

NEW ORLEANS: The Federal Emergency Management Agency may expand the use of passenger trains to evacuate the sick and elderly in advance of hurricanes across the Gulf Coast, a FEMA official said.

Glenn Cannon, a FEMA assistant administrator, told a congressional subcommittee meeting in New Orleans on Monday that his agency is looking at passenger trains as a method of getting people out of harm's way.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/02/12/america/Disasters-Trains.php



Police are targeting thousands of political campaigners in surveillance operations and storing their details on a database for at least seven years, an investigation by the Guardian can reveal.

Photographs, names and video ­footage of people attending protests are ­routinely obtained by surveillance units and stored on an "intelligence system". The ­Metropolitan police, which has ­pioneered surveillance at demonstrations and advises other forces on the tactic, stores details of protesters on Crimint, the general database used daily by all police staff to catalogue criminal intelligence. It lists campaigners by name, allowing police to search which demonstrations or political meetings individuals have attended.

Disclosures through the Freedom of Information Act, court testimony, an interview with a senior Met officer and police surveillance footage obtained by the Guardian have ­established that ­private information about activists ­gathered through surveillance is being stored without the knowledge of the people monitored.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/06/police-surveillance-protesters-journalists-climate-kingsnorth