USA File: DJIA takes record 777-point hit as Congress rejects financial bailout bill, 3rd Infantry Division's Brigade Combat Team to patrol cities

The White House's US$700 billion socialist bailout plan for America's privately owned financial institutions was (rightly) rejected by Congress today, prompting stock markets to react violently. The following news blurb comes from CNN:

The fate of the government's $700 billion financial bailout plan - a far-reaching attempt to stem a growing economic crisis - was thrown into doubt Monday as the House rejected the controversial measure.

The next steps were unclear. The abrupt defeat left the Bush administration and congressional leaders scrambling to figure out whether to renegotiate the bill and introduce it again as soon as Thursday or to try other options.

And stock markets reacted violently. Investors who had been counting on the rescue plan's passage sent the Dow Jones industrial average down as much as 700 points while watching the measure come up short. The stock gauge closed 777 points lower - nearly 7%.

The measure, which is designed to get battered U.S. credit markets working normally again, needed 218 votes for passage. But it came up 13 votes short of that target, as the final vote was 228 to 205 against. Two thirds of Democrats and one third of Republicans voted for the measure.

President Bush, who earlier in the day said he was confident the bill would pass, is "very disappointed" by the House vote. He said the administration would continue to attack the nation's economic problems "head on."

The ripples of financial crisis are spreading throughout the world. On September 26, in a scenario reminiscent of the 1929 stock market crash, New Zealand-born, London-based banker Kirk Stephenson threw himself in front of the oncoming Plymouth-to-Paddington train. According to The Canberra Times, he was "haunted by the pressures of dealing with the credit crunch."

Just in time for (planned?) economic collapse and martial law, the Pentagon will deploy the US Army's Third Infantry Division’s First Brigade Combat Team where needed to deal with civil unrest and crowd control, widespread poisoning, and chaos resulting from a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-yield explosive, or CBRNE attack. "Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months," reported the Army Times on September 8, "the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks." Northern Command is based at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, but the soldiers with 1st BCT, who have 15 months of battlefield experience in Iraq, will reside at their home post in Fort Stewart, Georgia.

First BCT commander Colonel Roger Cloutier explains that US soldiers have been trained in the use of crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons to "subdue unruly or dangerous" individuals. "It’s a new modular package of nonlethal capabilities that they’re fielding. They’ve been using pieces of it in Iraq, but this is the first time that these modules were consolidated and this package fielded, and because of this mission we’re undertaking we were the first to get it," Colonel Cloutier relates. The BCT crowd-suppression package includes spike strips for disabling vehicles, shields and batons, and beanbag bullets.

That's nice. Say good bye to posse comitatus. The precedent for domestic military intervention, limited by law after the US Civil War, was set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when US soldiers were deployed to suppress crime in post-flood New Orleans and Mexican soldiers were invited to deliver aid to San Antonio, Texas.

Meanwhile, the Communist Bloc and Moscow-Beijing Axis are insulating themselves from the implosion of the US economy. Specifically, reports state-run Novosti, the Kremlin is using its massive forex reserves, the third largest in the world after China and Japan's, to prop up Russia's banking system: "The Russian Central Bank will grant state-controlled Vnesheconombank $50 billion from the country's international reserves to support the financial system, a deputy economic development minister said Monday. [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin said Russian companies had encountered problems in getting loan extensions or obtaining new loans as global financial woes caused by the U.S. mortgage crisis and banking defaults persisted."

The ruling Communist Party of China has already ordered the country's banks to halt all transactions with their US counterparts to prevent possible losses. Earlier this month the People's Daily gloated: "The eruption of the U.S. sub-prime crisis has exposed massive loopholes in the United States' financial oversight and supervision. The world urgently needs to create a diversified currency and financial system and fair and just financial order that is not dependent on the United States." Read Red World Order.

For its part, Al Qaeda, a terrorist proxy operated on behalf of the Kremlin by Ayman al-Zawahiri, is promising to disrupt the US presidential election campaigns--thereby giving both the US economy and political system a little nudge into the dustbin of history--via a suspected plot called the "October surprise." In a related story, 19 people died in the Al Qaeda-sponsored attack on the US embassy in Yemen on September 17. Heavily armed militants wearing police uniforms detonated a car bomb and opened fire at the compound's perimeter security with rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons. There were no casualties among US diplomatic staff. Osama bin Laden's ancestral home is Yemen.