Weekday NEWS to Comfort the Disturbed and Disturb the Comfortable.
Monday 04.02.2012
FDIC shutters bank in Michigan,
tallies 16 US bank failures so far this year
AP - WashingtonPost.com
WASHINGTON — Federal regulators have closed a bank in Michigan, bringing to 16 the number of banks that have failed in 2012.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said Friday that it shuttered Fidelity Bank based in Dearborn, Mich.
The bank, with 15 branches, had about $818.2 million in assets and $747.6 million in deposits as of Dec. 31.
Everything Is Going To Be Alright?
By Michael Snyder - TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com
Is the U.S. economy going to be okay? Well, if the only source you listened to was the mainstream media, you would be left with the distinct impression that the U.S. economy is heading toward a full recovery and that everything is going to be alright. Unfortunately, that is not the case at all. The United States is rapidly becoming poorer as a nation and less competitive in the global marketplace. At the same time, consumer debt levels are rising, corporate debt levels are rising, state and local government debt levels are rising and the U.S. government is indulging in a debt binge unlike anything the world has ever seen. Considering the insane amount of money the U.S. government has been pumping into the economy, we should have seen a much more robust recovery by now. Instead, the employment statistics have barely moved and government dependence is at an all-time high. That is really sad, because this is as good as "the recovery" is going to get. The next major economic downturn is just around the bend, and in future years millions of us will desperately yearn for the "good old days" of 2012.
Whose Recovery?
By Robert Reich
Luxury retailers are smiling. So are the owners of high-end restaurants, sellers of upscale cars, vacation planners, financial advisors, and personal coaches. For them and their customers and clients the recession is over. The recovery is now full speed.
But the rest of America isn't enjoying an economic recovery. It's still sick. Many Americans remain in critical condition.
The Commerce Department reported Thursday that the economy grew at a 3 percent annual rate last quarter (far better than the measly 1.8 percent third quarter growth). Personal income also jumped. Americans raked in over $13 trillion, $3.3 billion more than previously thought.
Recovering America: Earning Less,
Spending More, $6.7 Trillion Poorer
Tim Cavanaugh - Reason.com
Since Ben Bernanke the hero saved the global economy, things have been coming up roses for, well, nobody.
The Department of Commerce reports that Americans are spending far more than they are making. That's good news, according to CNN:
[PNC economist Stuart] Hoffman said he was encouraged by the fact that Friday's report showed a 1.6% increase in spending on durable goods, which are typically big-ticket items. That was driven by strong auto sales during the month, as automakers reported the best new-car sales in four years.
Brave New Bank? BRICS moot dropping dollar, IMF
The BRICS summit has wrapped up in India. Creating an alternative global lender and stepping away from the dollar as a reserve currency were among their main objectives. RT also spoke to Dr Sreeram Chaulia, who is a Vice Dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs. He believes institutions like the IMF and the World Bank have outlived their uselfulness.
Gold and Silver Outperform Major Currencies -
Fiat Devaluation Continues
BY GOLDCORE - FinancialSense.com
....Gold has been stuck in range of roughly $1,630 to $1,700 in recent weeks, as risk appetite has returned after the latest European debt "solution" which saw the battered can kicked down the shortening road once again.
Nothing has been solved with regard to the European debt crisis and debt crises in Japan, the UK and the US now loom.
The misguided panacea of heaping debt upon debt and shifting debt onto government balance sheets, debt monetisation and currency debasement is leading to continuing currency devaluations internationally.
Gold Is Manipulated (But That's Okay) Price suppression equals buying opportunity
BY CHRIS MARTENSON PHD - FinancialSense.com
The price of gold is being actively managed by central planners and their proxies. The main culprit here appears to be the US authorities, as the manipulation is most apparent in the US open gold market. For the most part, this 'management' has resulted in letting the price of gold rise, but not too much, or too quickly.
The price of gold has always been an object of interest for governments and central bankers. The reason is simple enough to understand: Gold is an objective measure of the degree to which fiat money is being managed well or managed poorly.
Warren Buffett Scorns Gold. Bad Move!
By Addison Wiggin - DailyReckoning.com
03/30/12 Baltimore, Maryland – Warren Buffett doesn't like gold. In this year's annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Warren Buffett scorned gold as an asset that is "forever unproductive."
And he's right about that…
But investors don't buy gold because they hope it will produce something. They buy gold because they know that no one can produce it. Therefore, the more that folks distrust their national currency, the more they put their trust in the ultimate currency: gold.
European bailout plan funding could support Gold
LONDON (Commodity Online): A boost in the eurozone bailout funds to EUR700 billion from EUR500 billion could support gold.
According to news reports, EUR500 billion will come from the European Stability Mechanism, the permanent bailout fun, with EUR200 billion from the European Financial Stability Facility which is the existing bailout programs for Greece, Ireland and Portugal.
Both Commerzbank and HSBC said that, gold could find support on this news because of its safe character.
Fed's Bernanke disparages the Pseudo-Gold-Standard
By Dr Jeffrey Lewis - CommodityOnline.com
Just about all of the world's national currencies in circulation today consist of paper or fiat currencies that have been assigned value by official decree or fiat, rather than due to any real intrinsic value they may possess, other than perhaps the ability to generate a significant amount of heat when burned. Furthermore, these currencies represent the debt of a country, rather than any real store of value.
Many people have become concerned about the ability of such debt based paper currencies to retain their value over time in comparison to hard currencies with well-established intrinsic value like silver and gold.
Cashless: The Coming War on Tax-Evasion
and Decentralized Money
BY CRIS SHERIDAN - FinancialSense.com
There are two major trends taking place that are shaping up as a recipe for disaster. On the one hand, we have massively indebted governments around the world desperate for tax revenues and, on the other, steadily growing multi-trillion underground economies whose main goal is to avoid paying them.
According to a recent study, the amount of uncollected tax revenues in the U.S. is estimated around a whopping 500 billion dollars per year1—enough money to bailout most of Europe.
Will a cashless society lift all boats,
or will it sink the '99 percent'?
By Dominic Basulto - WashingtonPost.com
Sweden's push to become the first nation to phase out physical bills and coins marks the next major evolution in the creation of the cashless society. In some areas of Sweden, people no longer need to carry bills or plastic cards, and payments for everyday items such as bus tickets and groceries are made by mobile devices. The ultimate point of arrival, of course, is the creation of the truly cashless society in which all payments are digital and mobile devices contain all the information we once entrusted to our wallets.
So will this new era of digital money lead to a rising tide that lifts the boats of America's "99 percent" — or will it lead to a further chasm in the digital divide?
Brave New Bank? BRICS moot dropping dollar, IMF
The BRICS summit has wrapped up in India. Creating an alternative global lender and stepping away from the dollar as a reserve currency were among their main objectives. RT also spoke to Dr Sreeram Chaulia, who is a Vice Dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs. He believes institutions like the IMF and the World Bank have outlived their uselfulness.
Goldman Sachs: Rewarded for Greek Debt Scheme
Written by ECB Watch - EconIntersect.com
In an earlier article, EU's selective Lessons from Greece, we saw that EU Parliament's investigation of the financial crisis (CRIS), and the hearing Lessons from Greece (ECON/7/02578), lacked the resolve to address the Greece/Goldman secret loan that was allegedly improper and exacerbated Greece's ills.
Goldman Sachs' explanations contained gaping holes, and that was left unchallenged. Perhaps the most striking example of it is the the claim by its spokesman at a 2010 hearing before the EU parliament that he didn't know of the single most important restructuring of the deal in 2005:
Germany's reluctant hegemony and misguided Calvinism If the purpose of monetary union is to tie down a "European Germany" with silken cords, the Kohl-Mitterrand legacy has gone horribly wrong.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in Berlin - Telegraph.co.uk
Germany's glistening new capital on the Spree - capped by Sir Norman Foster's Reichstag dome - is the throbbing heart of a reborn First Reich, a secular and democratic variant of the Imperium Romanum Sacrum or Hohenstaufen Empire. Brussels has become a backwater again.
Half of Europe lives in trepidation of the mercurial Wolfgang Schäuble, the crippled idealist and mastermind of reunification whose own tortured emotions have become a Continental curse, and who entirely conformed to his reputation for irascible outbursts when I met him last week in the forbidding board room of Hermann Göring's Luftwaffe headquarters. The euro has delivered a "German Europe" after all.
EU hearing, Lessons from Greece
Public hearing - Lessons from Greece (ECON/7/02578) - Goldman Sachs spokesman Gerald Corrigan tells Eurostat head he knows nothing of the 2005 restructuring (the single most significant) of the secret loan granted by bank to Greece's debt agency in 2001.
Argentina threatens to sue banks
helping Falklands oil explorers
as trade war with Britain escalates A group of British and American banks have been threatened with legal action by the Argentine government for advising and writing research reports about companies involved in the Falkland Islands' £1.6bn oil industry.
By James Quinn - Telegraph.co.uk
In what amounts to the start of a new trade war between the UK and Argentina, the banks - understood to include the Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays Capital and Goldman Sachs - have been warned they face criminal and civil action in the Argentine courts.
The threats were made in a series of letters sent to as many as 15 banks by the Argentine embassy in London over the last ten days.
The letter, a copy of which has been seen by The Sunday Telegraph, warns the institutions that even merely writing research notes on exploration companies involved in the Falklands constitutes "a violation of the applicable domestic and international rules".
Market rigging gets too obvious
even for Bill Buckler and Jim Grant
By: Chris Powell, Secretary/Treasurer, GATA - GoldSeek.com
Nothing has been more disappointing and frustrating to GATA in its nearly 13 years of fighting gold and silver market manipulation than the refusal to acknowledge the issue by many of those who have affected to be devoted friends of the monetary metals and free markets.
GATA Chairman Bill Murphy long has called this the Not Invented Here Syndrome, a matter of the intellectual vanity of prima donnas who can't bring themselves to admit that mere upstarts might discover anything profound in the prima donnas' field. From 45 years in journalism the experience of your secretary/treasurer is that most endeavors are full of people whose success has made them so arrogant that they think that nothing could be happening if they don't know about it already. (While journalism inclines its practitioners to the exactly opposite position -- to realize every day how much more they don't know -- it doesn't necessarily give them the courage to report what they learn.)
Charles Biderman: The Problem with Rigged Markets
by Adam - ChrisMartenson.com
"Even Wile E. Coyote had to come back down to earth sooner or later", says Charles Biderman, founder of TrimTabs Investment Research. In his opinion, the prices of stocks and bonds - enabled by excessive financialization of our economy and central bank money printing - have been defying gravity for a dangerously long time.
If we continue to do all we can to preserve the status quo -- to maintain "phony" asset price levels as Charles calls them -- at best we will restrict overall growth and handicap the economy.
Ignore GDP: This Is the Obscure Stat
That Explains the Hot Recovery The recovery is real, even if it's not spectacular, and Gross Domestic Income explains why.
By Matthew O'Brien - TheAtlantic.com
Something odd has happened the past few months. The job numbers tell us the recovery is accelerating. The GDP numbers say it's not. This discrepancy has confounded expectations because there's usually a fairly stable relationship between the GDP and employment -- economists call it Okun's Law. The growth-and-jobs gap has since launched a thousand blog posts.
But it turns out there might not be a gap, after all. Today we received news that GDI grew at a gangbusters rate in the fourth quarter of 2011. Bye-bye, growth-and-jobs gap.
"Human history seems logical in afterthought but a mystery in forethought. Writers of history have a way of describing interwar societies as coursing from postwar to prewar as though people alive at the time knew when that transition occurred." – Strauss & Howe - The Fourth Turning
Watching pompous politicians, egotistical economists, arrogant investment geniuses, clueless media pundits, and self- proclaimed experts on the Great Depression predict an economic recovery and a return to normalcy would be amusing if it wasn't so pathetic. Their lack of historical perspective does a huge disservice to the American people, as their failure to grasp the cyclical nature of history results in a broad misunderstanding of the Crisis the country is facing. The ruling class and opinion leaders are dominated by linear thinkers that believe the world progresses in a straight line. Despite all evidence of history clearly moving through cycles that repeat every eighty to one hundred years (a long human life), the present generations are always surprised by these turnings in history. I can guarantee you this country will not truly experience an economic recovery or progress for another fifteen to twenty years. If you think the last four years have been bad, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Foreclosures give rise to new industry
By Edward Robinson - WashingtonPost.com
Ken Major climbs the steps of a county courthouse in a San Francisco suburb with $500,000 in cashier's checks in one hand and a list of addresses in the other. Major is a buyer for Waypoint Real Estate, an Oakland-based investment firm that is scooping up foreclosed homes in California.
On this afternoon, he joins a dozen house flippers as an auctioneer starts hawking the latest batch of defaulted properties to hit the market. Major bids on a three-bedroom house in Antioch, and after other buyers counter, he wins at $147,600.
The Foreclosure Landscape in 2012:
Recent Court Ruling to Have Dramatic Impact
Throughout the Year
By Christopher G. Brown - NationalMortgageProfessional.com
What trends will shape the mortgage foreclosure landscape in 2012? As I look towards the next 12 months, I'm expecting that the most influential trend will be a recent Connecticut Supreme Court ruling that could have a significant impact on who can sue to foreclose. As the foreclosure defense attorney who represented the borrower in this case, I had a front row seat on Connecticut's recent Supreme Court decision, and I'm expecting it to be something that will give lenders pause. Only a few months into 2012, I'm already seeing how it's been rocking business as usual when it comes to who has the right to foreclose. Before this decision, lenders claimed that being a holder (the legal term for possessing the note) meant that they had the right to foreclose. The court's decision confirms that only the owner of the debt has a right to foreclose. Holder status is not enough. I would expect lenders to be slow to change their procedures to account for this decision, which could very likely mean more dismissed foreclosures in 2012.
Affordable Housing and Social Engineering in New Jersey
By Timothy B. Lee - Ars Technica - TheAtlantic.com
A few weeks ago I wrote a post questioning conservative antipathy toward the New Jersey Supreme Court's famous Mount Laurel decision. That's a decision that held that exclusionary zoning schemes that make it effectively impossible to build low-income housing in a particular municipality violate the New Jersey constitution. Mike Proto, a spokesman for the conservative activist group Americans for Prosperity, emailed me the following response:
Forcing high density, low income housing into every town in New Jersey is hardly the epitome of a free market. Quite to the contrary, it is social engineering and central planning run amok and everything conservatives rightly oppose. This isn't about property rights, per se. It's about a renegade, activist court imposing its policy preferences against the plain language in the state constitution. Citizens are free to live where they please so long as they are successful enough to do so. And New Jersey communities, through a democratic process, ought to have the right to determine the destiny and character of those communities. Mt. Laurel has stripped this away.
Why Do So Many Americans Drop Out of College? Unprepared students sign up for school because they think a degree is their passport to the middle class. They should have other options.
By Jordan Weissmann - TheAtlantic.com
The phrase "dropout factory" is ordinarily applied to America's failing high schools -- the ones where students are expected to fall through the cracks, where those who make it past graduation and on to college are considered the exceptions, the lucky survivors. But by that definition, another level of U.S. education counts as a "dropout factory": our entire higher education system.
That's the basic message of a recent article by Reuters' Lou Carlozo, which digs into the reasons why so many American college students fail to finish their educations. Just 56 percent of students who embark on a bachelor's degree program finish within six years, according to a 2011 Harvard study titled Pathways to Prosperity. Just 29 percent of those who seek an associates degree obtain it within three years. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, just 46 percent of Americans complete college once they start, worst among the 18 countries it tracks.
More BS from the BLS
By Greg Kadajski - DailyReckoning.com
03/30/12 Baltimore, Maryland – In an early morning press release, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced today that it would no longer include "people" in any of its estimates of US unemployment. According to the press release, the move is part of a new initiative to "more accurately report US employment figures through a measured omission of irrelevant data, stemming primarily from the coincidental fact that people exist."
The new calculating practice — being dubbed the "What Unemployment?" model — is meant to replace the controversial "Birth/Death" model, which the BLS has long-used as a way to make up for the lag in reporting associated with the creation of new businesses. But according to a BLS spokesperson, the B/D model exhibited some serious design flaws, namely that it "factored actual people into its data set."
Nothing to See Here:
ABC Totally Skips Any Mention
of Obamacare's Bad Day in Court
By SCOTT WHITLOCK - WSJ.com
From the Media Research Center
The Obama administration suffered another bad day in the Supreme Court, Wednesday, leading many to wonder if all of the President's health care law will be entirely scrapped. ABC's Good Morning America on Thursday responded to this with silence, totally ignoring the story.
GMA co-host George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday referred to the case as "historic," but apparently lost interest a day later.
Healthcare reform:
looking for hints in aggressive supreme court questions White House says it's unwise to predict anything, but that isn't stopping analysts who think days are numbered for 'Obamacare'
By Chris McGreal in Washington - Guardian.co.uk
President Barack Obama has been counting on Americans overcoming their scepticism and growing to love his landmark health reforms. He has even embraced the tag "Obamacare", which opponents intended as a slur, in the belief that one day it will be shorthand for the greatest achievement of his presidency.
But after this week's supreme court showdown over one of the most divisive pieces of legislation in years, few are predicting the law will survive long enough for people to appreciate what the White House says are the life changing benefits of the Affordable Care Act.
Shall We Be Citizens or Subjects?
By Ken Blackwell PatriotPost.us
In Washington this week, a rare drama is unfolding in the U.S. Supreme Court. The momentous question that is before the court is this: Shall we be Citizens or Subjects?
The high court is considering a historic challenge by twenty-six states to the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare. Hundreds of people have stood in line, some of them overnight in the chill March air, to get inside. Our colleague, Ken Klukowski, was one of those fortunate few. We are relying on Ken's reporting and also on the impressions of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.
OBAMACARE FIGHT 'SOON TO BE OVER'? LOL! 'We are already … preparing for years of new court battles'
By Bob Unruh - WND.com
Pretty soon the Supreme Court will rule on the validity of Barack Obama's plan to have the government tell consumers what products to buy – in the Obamacare case – and then all those arguments will be done. After all, that is the highest court in the land, right?
LOL! As the new text-language expresses for "laugh out loud."
"We are already looking beyond June and preparing for years of new court battles over health care mandates," explained Brad Dacus, president of Pacific Justice Institute.
"Without question, we expect the Supreme Court's decision to have both immediate and long-term impact on the authority of the federal government on our lives," he said.
Liberty and Health Care for All
By Bill Boyarsky - Truthdig.com
In a bare basement law school classroom last week, four students argued the merits and weaknesses of the health care act. It was an exercise no doubt replicated around the country as legal scholars warmed up for the U.S. Supreme Court's three-day hearing on the law this week—the most searching examination of federal power in decades.
Several miles away at a community health clinic, restaurant workers, gardeners, housekeepers, car washers, nannies, day laborers and others of the low paid who keep Los Angeles running were being given medical care, as were their families. The long-term future of their care awaited the Supreme Court's decision.
ANOTHER $17 TRILLION SURPRISE FOUND IN OBAMACARE 'The bill has to be removed from the books
because we don't have the money'
By Neil Munro - The Daily Caller
Senate Republican staffers continue to look though the 2010 health care reform law to see what's in it, and their latest discovery is a massive $17 trillion funding gap.
"The more we learn about the bill, the more we learn it is even more unaffordable than was suspected," said Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Republicans' budget chief in the Senate.
"The bill has to be removed from the books because we don't have the money," he said.
Keystone Pipeline Debacle
May Cost Obama 2012 Election:
Lindsey Williams Reports
Alex also continues his discussion with pastor and author Lindsey Williams. In his Sunday, March 25 interview with Alex, Williams talked about the impending financial crash, what currency is a safe bet, and why Obama may not be re-elected due to his involvement in Keystone Pipeline.
CIVIL WAR HAS BEGUN: AMERICA IS FATALLY DECEIVED
By Greg Evensen - NewsWithViews.com
The war of northern aggression began forming in the 1840's as the government even then, moved further and further away from a constitutional republic. Vitriolic debate about growing, indifferent central taxation coursed through the halls of Congress in the 1850's. Dire threats were taking shape by 1858, and there was no turning back by 1860. For those who understand our Republic and the efforts to sustain freedom, in spite of all out war waged upon it then and since the end of the last internal struggle, the federal economic/banking/political/internationalist/police state has had but one goal. That is, the internal destruction of the sovereign states and the imposition of a socialist government tyranny under the ongoing protection of the federal court system and the threat of military intervention to achieve the final dark victory against the American people.
No Country for Con Men:
Sheriff Joe and the Cold Case Posse
Put Obama To Shame Arizona's Cold Case Posse
Rides To The Rescue of America And The Constitution.
By Saman Mohammadi - Prisonplanet.com
Sheriff Joe Arpaio has guts. He is taking on the alien in the White House by saying he is a liar and that his birth certificate is a forgery.
This is real life cowboys versus aliens.
The criminal Obama administration and rotten establishment media can try to vilify the Sheriff, and point out his flaws, but they can't hide the reality that they have been put to shame by him and his cold case posse.
Highlights Of Sheriff Joe's March 31 Press Conference
BY DANIEL NOE - WesternJournalism.com
Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the lead investigator of the MCSO Cold Case Posse, Mike Zullo, presented their preliminary findings today (March 31, 2012) regarding their investigation into the "probable" forgery of Barack Obama's online birth certificate and selective service forms. Most of the event was comprised of information that has already been released in earlier press conferences, but not widely reported on by the mainstream media, out of fear of ridicule, or perhaps fear of sanctions by the federal government. Despite this, here were several updates to this case that were disclosed today. The conference took place at the Church on the Green in Sun City, Arizona.
HIGH COURT JUSTICE: OBAMA BIRTH CERTIFICATE FISHY Says evidence raises 'serious questions about authenticity'
By Drew Zahn - WND.com
An Alabama State Supreme Court justice earlier this week agreed that findings suggesting Barack Obama presented a forged birth certificate to the nation "would raise serious questions about the [document's] authenticity" if presented as evidence in court.
Though the Alabama court denied a a petition filed by Hugh McInnish seeking to require an original copy of Obama's birth certificate before the sitting president would be allowed on the state's ballot in November, Justice Tom Parker filed a special, unpublished concurrence in the case arguing that McInnish's charges of "forgery" were legitimate cause for concern.
Biden Hints at More Gun Laws
in Wake of Trayvon Martin Case
By Kurt Nimmo - PrisonPlanet.com
Vice president Joe Biden told CBS News Florida's "Stand Your Ground" self-defense law will become a subject of debate following the Trayvon Martin shooting.
"It's important that people be put in a position where their Second Amendment rights are protected, but that they also don't, as a consequence of the laws, unintendedly put themselves in harm's way," Biden told Bob Schieffer in an interview that will air on "Face the Nation" on Sunday.
Biden told CBS it is questionable if firearms allow people to protect themselves. "The idea that there's this overwhelming additional security in the ownership and carrying concealed and deadly weapons… I think it's the premise, not the constitutional right, but the premise that it makes people safer is one that I'm not so sure of," Biden said.
FEDS REFUSE TO RELEASE OBAMA DRAFT DOCS TO SHERIFF JOE Arizona lawman's team believes registration fraudulent
By Jerome R. Corsi - WND.com
The Selective Service System has declined Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's request to see the original copy of Barack Obama's Selective Service registration form.
Arpaio's Cold Case Posse investigating Obama's eligibility announced at a March 1 press conference that it believes there is probable cause that the registration is fraudulent.
A three-sentence March 22 letter written on behalf of Selective Service Director Lawrence G. Romo, however, dismissed the request.
NSA vs USA: Total surveillance zooms-in on Americans
Ever evolving high-tech gadgets and the Internet have given Big Brother a peep hole into the lives of everyday Americans. Now, without the hassle of planting bugs or breaking and entering, the government can monitor virtually anything it wants.
Clinton: World must unite
to stop Assad's war on Syrian people Speaking to the 60-nation "Friends of the Syrian People" conference in Turkey, U.S. Secretary of State says she doubted whether Assad would ever adhere to a UN-sponsored peace plan.
Haaretz.com
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed doubt Sunday about whether President Bashar Assad would ever adhere to a UN-sponsored peace plan to end Syria's year of bloodshed, and urged world solidarity against a regime that she said was waging war on its own people.
Clinton told the 60 nations attending the "Friends of the Syrian People" conference in Turkey that no one could "sit back and wait any longer," even as the United States refuses to entertain military options to intervene in the crisis. Instead, she urged unity behind a plan that includes more sanctions, humanitarian aid, support for the opposition and the promise of justice one day for the Assad regime's willing accomplices in human rights atrocities.
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