The Pacific Northwest had been weathering the housing market collapse the best, but the newest released numbers showed that property values in the Seattle area dropped about 1.3% (?, maybe 1.4, i forget).

I think its time to batten down the hatches; a storm is a brewing.

Who has any money left to buy hatches to batten?

Where can we find something to batten for free?

Tax my rich white torturer - Schools? Health care? As if. Your taxes pay for brutality and Wall St. bailouts. Feel better?, By Mark Morford, SF Gate, March 26, 2008.

Just so we have this straight: You are not paying taxes merely to fund torture and bomb-dropping and the killing of countless innocents in Iraq in a futile and lost war that's not really a war and is far more of a massive fiscal, tactical and moral failure which will end up costing the nation an estimated $3 trillion, burn through any remaining sense of national dignity and leave repercussions that will last for generations.

Ha. You should be so lucky. Because your tax money is right now also funding the Fed's unprecedented and rather shocking multibillion-dollar bailout of rich bankers and fund managers who have, through their greed and excess and with the implied blessing of former Chairman Alan Greenspan (whom many consider the architect of the collapse in the first place), helped bring about what is shaping up to be the worst fiscal crisis since World War II.

There now. Don't you feel better? Isn't it a good time to be an American? And is it not, despite the notorious dishonesty of the players involved, still a bit hard to believe?

Yes, I know it's George W. Bush. I know its Dick "Satan Loves You" Cheney. I know it's Wall Street. Hence, I know expectations are at rock bottom. But as far as torture is concerned ...

Morford's got it right as far as he goes, back "since World War II." As in Engdahl's exemplary explanation of the economics, between the lines of which we see the CIA and Pentagon causing every bit of today's Mother of all Depressions, as the Federal Reserve deliberately directed, (making military-industry money). [See here: Crisis of the World Financial System: The Financial Predators had a Ball, by F. William Engdahl, and behind it at Engdahl's website: www.Engdahl.OilGeopolitics.NET ]

The clear and present danger now is bigger than in any circumstance before WWII, too, if one reviews the precursors. And, whaddaya know, there between the lines lies the precursors of CIA and Pentagon, such as the 1930s OSS's Allen Dulles and associates wheeling and dealing foreign policy in Europe, oh so Continental, shmoozing tight with Adolf and his nazis to get the military-industry interest rate paid back on Federal Reserve loans to them. Such as 1920s Hoover's FBI unlawfully abrogating workers' rights of assembly and free speech, (also 1925 loss of Scopes' freedom of (ir)religion vs. State posterity of wind to inherit), to unjustly opportune the bubble of the capitalists speculating on Federal Reserve moves -- the 'house' holding the odds.

Such as even in the root enactment of the Federal Reserve, (1907-13), where its Rothschild-Warburg-JPMorgan banker cabal, bribed and bought the votes to pass Woodrow Wilson his design, a League of Nations, in quid pro quo 'deregulation' (i.e., un-legislative un-interruption) of Federal Reserve currency involved exclusively in military industry establishment. There were no dollars loaned for buildings and the national-resource trade of sovereign new democracies constituted then, circa 1910-20, such as Cuba, Mexico and south, Turkey, Palestine, India, China, and places all around. As each post-colonial democracy established recognition of itself, the Federal Reserve procured a dictator to run it. into the ground.

Ironically, an Oregonian founded the industrial company that first did institute: 40-hour workweek, paid vacation, medical facilities and personnel on-site (not just 'health insurance'), (also cooks and cafeteria), workers' training classes and education expensing, employee life insurances, employee housing supplementals including company credit-union mortgage lending, and stock options for employee equity positions -- the Gilbert Toy Co. Recounted in (McMinnville-Salem native) A.C. Gilbert's 1954 autobiography, 'The Man Who Lives in Paradise.' The US War Department acted to shut his business down, 1918 et seq., but Gilbert bribed some Generals and Cabinet appointments, trimmed his workers' rights somewhat, diversified beyond the toy (and magician props) industry into military applications manufacturing, and sustained the company with half-a-loaf in commerce compromise.

There is industry aplenty besides the military. Toys is one example. Space vehicles, communications satellites, weather-watch and planetary resource inventory -- all in orbit, have no intrinsic military exclusivity and do have inherent humankindly cause and purposes. Petroleum and minerals mining is another nationalized interest of sovereign society.

Did 'we' mention public utilities and infrastructures? Schools and hospitals. Communications, and of course, the internet. Get the Federal Reserve monopoly money out of all of it, just take their military industry and beat it.

Into ploughshears.

That'd be something to batten.

Or, you could buy some silver bullion, and hide it away for you and your loved ones. I did, and will continue to do so.

From a recent post I saw on a financial and investment board; it's my understanding that over 70 U.S. Banks are on the FDIC "watch list" of banks with questionable finances.