Five More States Invoke the 10th

by A.W.R. Hawkins 03/04/2009

Last week, HUMAN EVENTS reported that eleven states, Washington, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas, had all “all introduced bills and resolutions” declaring their sovereignty over Obama’s actions in light of the 10th Amendment.

These actions are in response to the Obama administration’s faux-“stimulus” legislation which directly assaults the rights of states to reject the money coming from the federal government. So far, several Republican governors — among them South Carolina’s Mark Sanford and Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal — have said they would refuse all or part of the stimulus money because of the constitutional infringements and because of the additional unfunded liabilities they impose on the states.

This week, HUMAN EVENTS is happy to report that five more states have decided to invoke the 10th as well.

These five — Tennessee, Kentucky, Kansas, Indiana, and West Virginia — have all begun their action under the 10th Amendment in a bid to protect themselves from what they view as nothing less than an unconstitutional usurpation of power on the part of the Obama administration.

On February 23, HJR 108 was put forth in the Tennessee legislature, indicating that legislators in that state decided “it [was] time to affirm state sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and demand the federal government halt its practice of assuming powers and of imposing mandates upon the states for purposes not enumerated by the Constitution,” according to Truman Bean... More…

Earth is narrowly missed by an asteroid as big as a ten-story building

Why didn't they warn us in advance shouting about it from all msm? Think about it. Most likely is that T.H.E.Y. (The Hierarchy Enslaving You) will not warn you of any catastrophic event impending, both natural or artificial, since that may endanger their control of the situation (encompassing you):

"An asteroid which may be as big as a ten-storey building has passed close by the Earth, astronomers say.

The object, known as 2009 DD45, thought to be 21-47m (68-152ft) across, raced by our planet at 1344 GMT on Monday.

The gap was just 72,000 km (44,750 miles); a fifth of the distance between our planet and the Moon.

It is in the same size range as a rock which exploded over Siberia in 1908 with the force of 1,000 atomic bombs.

The object was first reported on Saturday by the Siding Spring Survey, a near-Earth object search programme in Australia. It was confirmed by the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Centre (MPC), which catalogues Solar System objects.

The closest recent flyby listed by the MPC is 2004 FU162, a small asteroid about 6m (20ft) across which came within about 6,500km (4,000 miles) of our planet in March 2004.

The latest object, 2009 DD45, passed by our planet at only twice the altitude of satellites in geosynchronous orbit.

Surprise miss

In 1908, an object with a similar size exploded over Siberia, flattening 80 million trees over an area of 2,000 square km (800 square miles) near the Tunguska river...

As had been shown with the Tunguska object, asteroids of this size could potentially unleash a destructive power equivalent to about 10 to 15 megatonnes of TNT, Dr Crowther explained. This is about 1,000 times more powerful than the blast from the bomb dropped on Hiroshima..." Read all here

How Cash Starved States can Create their Own Credit

S.t. important to know, by Ellen Brown on Global Research, March 3, 2009. Extract: "...“North Dakota is a sparsely populated state of less than 700,000, known for cold weather, isolated farmers and a hit movie – Fargo. Yet, for some reason it defies the real estate cliché of location, location, location. Since 2000, the state's GNP has grown 56%, personal income has grown 43%, and wages have grown 34%. This year the state has a budget surplus of $1.2 billion!”

What does the State of North Dakota have that other states don't? The answer seems to be: its own bank. In fact, North Dakota has the only state-owned bank in the nation. The state legislature established the Bank of North Dakota in 1919. Fleetham writes that the bank was set up to free farmers and small businessmen from the clutches of out-of-state bankers and railroad men. By law, the state must deposit all its funds in the bank, and the state guarantees its deposits. Three elected officials oversee the bank: the governor, the attorney general, and the commissioner of agriculture. The bank's stated mission is to deliver sound financial services that promote agriculture, commerce and industry in North Dakota. The bank operates as a bankers' bank, partnering with private banks to loan money to farmers, real estate developers, schools and small businesses. It loans money to students (over 184,000 outstanding loans), and it purchases municipal bonds from public institutions.

Still, you may ask, how does that solve the solvency problem? Isn't the state still limited to spending only the money it has? The answer is no. Certified, card-carrying bankers are allowed to do something nobody else can do: they can create “credit” with accounting entries on their books..." Read all here

USA has the highest incarceration rate and the biggest prison population of any country in the world

So much for the land of freedom. From eldib:

"A record high-number of 10 million Americans were behind bars or under a correction system in the US in 2007, according to a research.

The record-high number, one in every 31 adults, includes people in prison or jail, and on probation or parole.

The Results of the research conducted by Pew Center further indicated on Monday that America’s prison population has skyrocketed over the past quarter century.

In 1982, 1 in 77 adults were in the correctional system in one form or another, totaling 2.2 million people.

Some maintain that more emphasis should be put on community supervision, not jail or prison as the country is facing with a downturn in economy and declining resources.

“New community supervision strategies and technologies need to be strengthened and expanded, not scaled back,” he said. “Cutting them may appear to save a few dollars, but it doesn’t. It will fuel the cycle of more crime, more victims, more arrests, more prosecutions, and still more imprisonment,” said Adam Gelb, director of Pew’s Public Safety Performance Project.

Most of those in the US corrections system — one in 45 — are already on probation or parole, with one in 100 in prison or jail, the Pew study found.

Those numbers are higher in certain areas of the country, and Georgia tops all states with one in 13 adults in the justice system. The other leading states are Idaho, where one in 18 are in corrections and Texas, where the rate is one in 22. In the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., nearly 5 percent of adults are in the city’s penal system.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate and the biggest prison population of any country in the world, according to figures from the US Department of Justice.

The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world’s prison inmates, the center said." Source

No change in CIA snatchings, torture, secret detentions, Patriot Acts

From Steve Watson Infowars.net Tuesday, March 3, 2009:

"By releasing internal Justice Department memos showing how the Bush fronted Neocons systematically destroyed civil liberties in America after 9/11, the Obama administration has sought to distance itself from such practices. However, closer inspection of the actions of the new regime, reveal no deviation from such policies in the war on terror.

As we further illuminated in our previous report, Obama’s much lauded declaration to “ban” torture and his “commitment” to close down detention facilities is full of loopholes and hidden clauses designed to allow such practices and premises to be continued, albeit with renewed secrecy...

...If Obama were truly committed to ending the legacy of torture and secret detention, he would authorize the prosecution of those officials responsible, all the way up to the top. Instead, he , along with his CIA Director Leon Panetta, has said he will do no such thing.

Indeed, the latest sign of allowing such crimes to go unpunished comes in the form of federal prosecutor John Durham signaling that even though he has yet to complete his investigation, he is unlikely to indict any CIA employees for incinerating 92 secret interrogation tapes that purportedly show suspects being waterboarded.

Furthermore, we have not seen Obama repeal Patriot Acts I and II, nor have we seen a reversal of Bush’s signing statement that would effectively repeal the John Warner Defense Authorization Act.

We have not seen any evidence to suggest that the NSA will cease warrantless secret surveillance and phone-taps of American citizens.

We have not seen any deviation from the Bush-era war on terror policies.

We have not seen any CHANGE." Read all here

this couldn't have been an accident: Live Avian Flu Virus Placed in Baxter Vaccine Materials Sent to 18 Countries

This is the big news of the day: "...Deerfield, Illinois-based pharmaceutical company Baxter International Inc. has just been caught shipping live avian flu viruses mixed with vaccine material to medical distributors in 18 countries. The "mistake" (if you can call it that, see below...) was discovered by the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada. The World Health Organization was alerted and panic spread throughout the vaccine community as health experts asked the obvious question: How could this have happened?

As published on LifeGen.de (http://www.lifegen.de/newsip/shownews.php4?getnews=2009-02-26-5323&pc=s01), serious questions like this are being raised:

"Baxter International Inc. in Austria 'unintentionally contaminated samples with the bird flu virus that were used in laboratories in 3 neighbouring countries, raising concern about the potential spread of the deadly disease'. Austria, Germany, Slowenia and the Czech Republic - these are the countries in which labs were hit with dangerous viruses. Not by bioterrorist commandos, but by Baxter. In other words: One of the major global pharmaceutical players seems to have lost control over a virus which is considered by many virologists to be one of the components leading some day to a new pandemic."

Or, put another way, Baxter is acting a whole lot like a biological terrorism organization these days, sending deadly viral samples around the world. If you mail an envelope full of anthrax to your Senator, you get arrested as a terrorist. So why is Baxter -- which mailed samples of a far more deadly viral strain to labs around the world -- getting away with saying, essentially, "Oops?"

But there's a bigger question in all this: How could this company have accidentally mixed LIVE avian flu viruses (both H5N1 and H3N2, the human form) in this vaccine material?

Was the viral contamination intentional?

The shocking answer is that this couldn't have been an accident. Why? Because Baxter International adheres to something called BSL3 (Biosafety Level 3) - a set of laboratory safety protocols that prevent the cross-contamination of materials.

As explained on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosafety_level#Biosafety_level_3):... " Source

I first heard of this yesterday from Mike Ruppert's blog. Quote: "REALLY BAD FUCKING NEWS -- There is one story that really stuck out today. It seems that someone at Baxter Pharmaceuticals "accidentally" mixed H5N1 bird flu with a human virus into one vaccine and sent it off to Eastern Europe where it was injected into humans. For those who have been with me a long time you know what kind of investigative journalism we did on biowarfare and how it would be used to reduce population eventually. You know how well we documented the relentless quest for gene-specific bioweapons. Well, the only thing that was saving us from H5N1 bird flu was that it was generally considered not transmittable to humans. (Of course we known that it already has been on a small scale.) But here's a pharmaceutical company that we have written about at FTW (I think also in Rubicon) that's accomplished what nature couldn't. This story has zero credibility for how the screw up occurred because even the most basic lab protocols would prevent it. Combine DNA from H5N1 with a human viral DNA, inject into a human, and then watch the perfect mutation take place... The mother of all superbugs. I don't have time to rewrite what I have already written. In fact none of us have time to slow down for those who don't get it or who slow us down. (Combat veterans know this attitude very well.) Go to Rubicon and go to FTW and search for biowarfare or Baxter.

For about seven years now I have warned that an event like this would confirm that the die-off was planned... and underway. This sounds like a starting bell. Combine what we know about events in eastern Europe and this makes very sick sense. I don't think the elites will be able to control this anymore than they can fully control the collapse; or than Warren Buffet could control getting his clock cleaned... But then again, Buffet may be screaming louder than he's actually hurt.

OFFICIALS INVESTIGATE HOW BIRD FLU VIRUSES WERE SENT TO UNSUSPECTING LABS..." Read all here

Update here and here: Flu 'Oddities'

Another update here: U.S. Air Force Study Proposed 2009 Influenza Pandemic in 1996 - Kurt Nimmo - Infowars - March 5, 2009

meet the new boss

A great article by Dan Denning just published on Goldnews. Extracts [my emphasis]:

"The economy is turning into Barack Obama's Iraq... All the gains in equities since Alan Greenspan uttered his famous words about irrational exuberance have been wiped out. All that remains to know now is how irrational the downside would be. The good news is that you're seeing signs of capitulation. Investors are giving up on stocks for the long-term.

For example, we got a text message this morning from a long-time bull. He always finds reasons to disagree with our analysis. He texted early this morning after watching Wall Street's depressed closing.

"It's over."

That's not quite a buy signal. But it's not a bad sign either.

...we agree with John Robb that this is not just a stress test of financial firms. It's a stress test for national governments.

Banks and governments have co-evolved to get to this point where we are today in the modern world (where interconnectedness and complexity threaten to crash the system). The "Cash Nexus" as historian Niall Ferguson calls it, is the murky relationship between fractional reserve banking, perpetual government debt, and the fiscal warfare/welfare state. That is, governments would never have the money to build powerful military machines without modern bank financing and the bond market (where banks buy and sell government debt, bridging the gap between private capital and government borrowing).

Similarly, banks could never have gotten as large without the regulatory and legal framework set up to favor them. And of course it would favor them.

A few things have changed in the last ten years. The main one is that leaders have become looters, be they political or corporate. On the political side, instead of conventional armed conflict, which had diminishing marginal returns (in addition to being really unpopular in a culture addicted to leisure) governments have gotten into all sorts of other wars, mostly against their own people (War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on This, War on That, War on Everything, War on You.)

And for their part, the banks and even non-bank lenders figured out that if the government was going to encourage home ownership for political reasons by discouraging rigorous lending standards, then the best way to deal with the increased risk was to sell it!

Alan Greenspan called this "disaggregation" of risk. But obviously securitization did not lower systemic risk. It heightened it. But for a little while anyway, the banks and bankers made a mint off of the government's desire to gear the entire national economy towards the goal of home ownership. This happened in Ireland, the UK, the US, and Australia to name few English-speaking companies.

You'll forgive us if we don't quite have our head wrapped around the idea yet. It's a work in progress. But yes, we are suggesting that the co-evolution of the modern welfare/warfare state and the financial system has been impacted by a financial meteorite of sorts.

The co-dependency has always required a little inflation to keep it going. But lately, the last one hundred years or so, it's turned into a lot of inflation. The expansion of global money supply through fiat money (i.e. not backed by a tightly supplied physical commodity, such as – say – the Gold Bullion which underpinned the world's money for the previous 5,000-odd years) and widespread credit has created an inherently unstable scale of modern living. We have a living arrangement that uses resources too quickly and too inefficiently. And now we have bumped into that fact in a rather abrupt way.

A re-localization of the economy would be something to think about and even plan for. If the centralization of money and power has reached its useful limits, then you'd think we'd be moving away from it. Yet in Washington, Canberra, Paris, London, Tokyo, and Berlin everyone wants government to get bigger and spend more and take a larger role in the economy.

The response to the crisis has become activist and interventionist. This, ironically, echoes the ideological response of the Bush Administration in Iraq. So meet the new boss...making the exact same strategic mistake as the old boss, only in a different theatre." Dan Denning, 04 Mar '09 Source