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He raises the rifle to his shoulder and takes aim. BAM! There’s a thud, and a few excited squeals from the remaining pigs behind the bars. Carefully, the man sets down the gun and steps into the trailer. He emerges dragging a small, dead—but still twitching—reddish pig with a bullet hole the diameter of a pencil eraser just about perfectly centered in its forehead.

Meet John Taylor, or “One Shot Johnny,” as his customers call him. His business card offers just “JT’s Custom Slaughtering” and his cell phone number, along with clip art of a cow, pig, sheep, and lamb. But then, he doesn’t really need a card. Just about everyone in California north of San Francisco who raises animals for meat knows the tall “ranch butcher” with the bristly mustache and straight-arrow demeanor of a frontier sheriff. Now 43, he began sweeping floors in his family’s butcher shop (since sold) in third grade, and started helping his uncle in the pasture not long after. “I was doomed—I knew this was what I was meant to do,” he says.

Taylor ties on a black rubber apron that hangs past the tops of his rubber boots and chains a knife holder around his waist. He sticks a hook through the animal’s lower jaw and attaches it to a winch mounted on his truck. Twenty minutes of expert scraping, shaving, and eviscerating later, the pig has become pork.

The trailer belongs to Brock Fulmer, of Black Sheep Farm near Potter Valley, California, who’s hauled three swine 90 minutes south from his farm and paid $50 per head to have them slaughtered on this dead-end road outside a friend’s property. Fulmer could have paid just $20 per head at a usda-inspected facility two hours’ drive east of his farm, but that would have required booking a slot at least a month ago. And the customer who bought these pigs for a barbecue didn’t think that far ahead.

“Besides, J.T.’s the best there is,” says Fulmer. “He’s like a ninja.”

Marksmanship is important, but so is legal savvy, since a single misstep could land Taylor in hot water. By California law, he can slaughter livestock only for a farmer’s personal use or for a farmer’s customer who buys the animal alive and whole; in the latter case, he has to do so off farm premises. And under federal law, every carcass Taylor delivers to a butcher shop for cutting—and every piece from it—must be stamped “Not for Sale.” Only meat from usda-inspected slaughterhouses can be sold across state lines or on a retail basis (including at farmers markets and restaurants) in the 25 states without their own inspection systems, like California and New York. Taylor has something of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with his farmers—if Taylor knew his clients were going to sell the meat he shot and officials found out, he could be liable for any food-borne illnesses, for example.

Such rules are partly why federally inspected slaughterhouses kill 98 percent of all cattle and 99 percent of hogs in this country. But as giants like Tyson and Smithfield Foods—which have their own abattoirs—have increasingly dominated the meat industry, the number of usda-approved slaughterhouses nationwide has fallen, from 1,405 in 1992 to just 808 in 2008. (Wyoming doesn’t have a single one.) In 2007, just 14 plants killed 18.5 million cattle, more than half the country’s total; that’s a per-slaughterhouse average of 2.5 head per minute, 24-7. These big operations “are not talking to the little guy, the farmer who says, ‘I have 500 head of beef'”—let alone 50 or 5, says Bruce Dunlop, who raises lamb and pork on Lopez Island in Washington state. “They laugh at him.” Nor is the little guy excited to take his animals to the plant, considering the very real possibility that they will be mistreated (see the 2007 scandal involving workers at a Chino, California, facility who sprayed water up the noses of lame cattle to get them to walk to slaughter, as required by law, and moved those that couldn’t walk by forklift), or that their meat will be caught in the net of a massive E. coli-driven recall.

In desperation, farmers are going into the abattoir business themselves. In 2002, Dunlop, who worked as an engineer before raising sheep, headed a group of farmers who funded, designed, and built a usda-approved mobile slaughterhouse unit that now serves Washington state’s four northwest counties. A 34-foot trailer with a cooler and a water system, it dispatches up to 10 cattle a day, four days a week. Dunlop has sold six similar units for about $175,000 each to ranchers around the country. Joel Salatin, whose Polyface farm starred in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is thinking bigger: In July, with a partner, he bought a small usda-inspected slaughterhouse in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

But smaller slaughterhouses are struggling mightily to stay in business. The initial investment is steep and the payoff slow if you’re not processing thousands of head each day. It takes a minimum of $2 million to build a new plant or even overhaul an old one, says Mike Lorentz, who built a 30-head-a-day facility in 1999 in Cannon Falls, Minnesota. “We lost a million dollars in the first three years. I am like a cancer survivor—exhilarated that I survived, but I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

“The Democrats have replaced the Republicans as the big benefactors to the financial community,” said Kevin Phillips, author of “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism.”

“The financial community is donating more to Democrats than ever before and you’ve got more Democrats in the financial community, creating a very powerful pattern there. I don’t think you’re going to see the Obama administration and Congress willing to be tough enough in dealing with these things,” he told Reuters.

Phillips, a former strategist in the Nixon White House who has turned highly critical of the Republicans and voted for Obama in 2008, published “Bad Money,” his 13th book, a year ago.

The paperback edition came out March 31 with a revised preface and afterward, interpreting the events of the past year, but the prescient body of “Bad Money” remains unchanged.

A year ago, he warned of a the pending explosion of a 25-year “multibubble” that started in the 1980s, when the financial sector accounted for 10 percent to 12 percent of the U.S. economy had started metastasizing into an “arguably crippling” 20 percent to 21 percent by the middle of this decade.

Overleveraging and easy credit was bound to create disaster, he warned.

Phillips assigns much of the blame to former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, but perhaps even more on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who he calls a “disaster,” and his predecessor, Alan Greenspan.

Phillips calls Paulson a Wall Street insider who was looking out for his own, and Bernanke an academic misguidedly trying to refight the 1930s Great Depression. Together they formed the wrong team at the wrong time whose ad hoc approach threw away hundreds of billions of dollars and more than doubled the Fed’s balance sheet, he says.

“What you’re seeing Bernanke do is he’s trying to create a bailout reflationary bubble, which he can’t describe as a bubble, just as Greenspan couldn’t describe the housing mortgage bubble as a bubble. What we’re seeing by Bernanke is a covert attempt to rebubble,” Phillips told Reuters.

Moreover, a commodities cycle probably started early in this decade and is only being masked now by recession, Phillips says, presaging a repeat 1970s style inflation, he said.

“The danger is that the great unwind — the unraveling of the mammoth buildup of debt — is under way. If that predominates, Bernanke’s theory is you’re going to have deflation,” Phillips said.

“My theory is that if we are in a commodities cycle, what you will get will be more like 1973-74-75 … where as soon as the recovery begins you get rising inflation because you’re going to play havoc with all money supply and liquidity that’s been unleashed ” he added.

Meanwhile, the taxpayer and small investor have little defense.

One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.

“It’s got to be looked at,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.”

Holdren outlined several “tipping points” involving global warming that could be fast approaching. Once such milestones are reached, such as complete loss of summer sea ice in the Arctic, it increases chances of “really intolerable consequences,” he said.

Twice in a half-hour interview, Holdren compared global warming to being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”

At first, Holdren characterized the potential need to technologically tinker with the climate as just his personal view. However, he went on to say he has raised it in administration discussions.

Holdren, a 65-year-old physicist, is far from alone in taking geoengineering more seriously. The National Academy of Science is making climate tinkering the subject of its first workshop in its new multidiscipline climate challenges program. The British parliament has also discussed the idea.

The American Meteorological Society is crafting a policy statement on geoengineering that says “it is prudent to consider geoengineering’s potential, to understand its limits and to avoid rash deployment.”

Last week, Princeton scientist Robert Socolow told the National Academy that geoengineering should be an available option in case climate worsens dramatically.

But Holdren noted that shooting particles into the air — making an artificial volcano as one Nobel laureate has suggested — could have grave side effects and would not completely solve all the problems from soaring greenhouse gas emissions. So such actions could not be taken lightly, he said.

Still, “we might get desperate enough to want to use it,” he added.

The Treasury is still talking about how results of the regulatory stress tests on the 19 largest U.S. banks will be released, and may disclose them as summary results that are not institution-specific, the source said.

The government is testing how the largest banks would fare under more adverse economic conditions than are expected in an attempt to assess the firms’ capital needs. The tests are due to be completed by the end of April, but Treasury has said they may be finished before then.

The source, speaking anonymously because the Treasury has not made a final decision on what to disclose, said officials do not want any test results released before the earnings season wraps up for most U.S. banks on April 24.

Treasury did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

U.S. regulators have reached the closing phase of the stress tests, with many of the top banks having already turned in their internal versions of the test to officials. Bank of America Corp (BAC.N) Chief Executive Kenneth Lewis said last Thursday that his bank has already completed its test.

Bank regulators are at the stage of reconciling their own versions of the results with the banks’ internal assessments.

Officials realize it may be hard to keep the results under wraps, and they are looking for ways the banks could disclose some details without unduly disturbing the markets. They are also looking at providing some summary information about how the banks fared.

“There will be definitely be some information that will be provided at the end of it, but exactly what that will be, and when it will be provided, will come forth later,” Comptroller of the Currency John Dugan, who supervises some of the nation’s largest banks, said last week.

The stress tests at the biggest banks are part of a wide-ranging effort to restore stability to a sector hit by huge mortgage-related losses.

The tests are designed to determine the depth of banks’ capital holes if conditions deteriorate further. After the tests are completed, the banks will have six months to either raise private capital to compensate, or accept government funds.

But officials are worried about how the market will react to the stress test results if there is not a clear recovery path for a bank that is deemed to have a large capital need.

The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven’t sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

“The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid,” said a senior intelligence official. “So have the Russians.”

The espionage appeared pervasive across the U.S. and doesn’t target a particular company or region, said a former Department of Homeland Security official. “There are intrusions, and they are growing,” the former official said, referring to electrical systems. “There were a lot last year.”

Many of the intrusions were detected not by the companies in charge of the infrastructure but by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said. Intelligence officials worry about cyber attackers taking control of electrical facilities, a nuclear power plant or financial networks via the Internet.

Authorities investigating the intrusions have found software tools left behind that could be used to destroy infrastructure components, the senior intelligence official said. He added, “If we go to war with them, they will try to turn them on.”

Andrew Mwangura, coordinator of the Mombasa-based East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, said the 17,000 tonne Maersk Alabama was carrying 21 U.S. sailors when it was hijacked in the Indian Ocean off Mogadishu.

He told Reuters all the crew were believed to be safe.

Denmark’s A.P. Moller-Maersk (MAERSKb.CO) confirmed that the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama had been attacked by pirates about 500 km (300 miles) off Somalia and had probably been hijacked. It said it had 20 crew on board.

A U.S. naval spokeswoman in Bahrain, Lt. Stephanie Murdock, said a U.S.-flagged, Danish-owned ship with 21 crew reported being attacked by pirates at 7:30 a.m. local time on Wednesday about 280 miles (440 km) southeast of Eyl, Somalia.

The lead defendant, Darnell Bell, a documented member of the Lincoln Park street gang in Los Angeles, received at least $9 million in proceeds from the enterprise, prosecutors said.

Bell’s status as an active member of the Lincoln Park street gang helped him recruit straw buyers for 220 properties with a total sales price of $100 million, and later maintain discipline among them, according the indictment.

“It was relevant not so much to running the (real estate) scheme but to managing (the people),” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicole Acton Jones said.

Another defendant, Stanley Gentry, let the conspirators use his real estate license in exchange for a $10,000 monthly payment and a percentage of the commission and broker’s fees from each purchase, prosecutors said.

Defendant Billie Bishop was an escrow officer who helped with the enterprise’s fraudulent purchases of more than 100 properties, prosecutors said.

The defendants allegedly used straw buyers and inflated appraisals to purchase homes that had sat on the market for extended periods and had been reduced in price.

They submitted offers that exceeded the homes’ asking prices, and had the overage paid to a shell construction company that they claimed would make upgrades or handicap modifications to the properties, prosecutors said.

The defendants instead disbursed the “kickback amount” to members and associates of the enterprise as payments for their participation, the indictment said.

Lenders later foreclosed on the properties, taking “severe financial losses,” after the straw buyers failed to make payments, the indictment said.

Bell, who was in federal custody on narcotics charges, made his first court appearance on Tuesday. The remaining defendants were arrested on Tuesday and were expected to make their initial appearances on Wednesday, Acton Jones said.

Attorneys for the defendants could not be immediately reached for comment.

In rambling messages to family, friends, police and the owners of Shoot Straight, the Casselberry gun range she chose for Sunday’s fatal shooting, Marie Moore said the murder-suicide was the only way to save her son Mitchell Moore, her family and the world from violence and eternal damnation.

God decreed it, she wrote in documents released Tuesday.

“I’m so sorry,” Marie Moore, 44, wrote in one note. “I had to send my son to heaven and myself to Hell.”

The shooting was captured by security video at the gun range. Marie Moore walked behind her son, put a revolver to the back of his head and fired a single shot. Then she put the pistol in her mouth and fired.

Mitchell Moore, 20, died at the scene. His mother died a short time later at Florida Hospital Altamonte.

“The act appeared to be deliberate,” Casselberry police Officer Jeffrey Shumway wrote in his report.

The revolver was rented from the shooting range, Casselberry police Deputy Chief Bill McNeil said.

There are restrictions about gun ownership in some cases of mental incompetence, but they do not bar a person from renting a gun at a shooting range, McNeil said.

Late Monday, family members found three notes and two audio tapes and turned them over to police, McNeil said. Each note was addressed to “King,” a nickname for her boyfriend. Two were signed “Failed Queen.”

In these documents, Marie Moore described long struggles over whether to kill herself, stays at mental hospitals and attempts to make sense of the messages she said she received from God.

During a 2003 suicide attempt, her son stopped her from killing herself, she said in one recording. She thought God punished her for her failure by making her the “antichrist,” and that she must die to save the world from violence.

“You have a gun, you can do it,” she said God told her.

A prior suicide attempt at a gun range ended with her being thrown out.

This time, Marie Moore concealed her plans so she wouldn’t be hospitalized, she said in the recordings.

Why God chose Marie Moore for this fate made little sense to her.

“I don’t know how all this happened. It’s not in the Bible,” she said.

She wrote that she signed over the title to her truck, and left behind $7,900 cash and a check.

“I’m sorry King thats all thats left,” she wrote in one note.

Her jewelry would go to her boyfriend and others, she said in the recordings. She also left 65 journals explaining her ordeal.

And the figures are forecast to get even worse as more apartment buildings are expected to open this year, increasing supply, and as the U.S. employment picture gets uglier, Reis said.

Job creation is the No. 1 driver of demand for apartments.

“Given that things are weakening right now, any new buildings that come on will add additional pressure to landlords,” Victor Calanog, Reis director of research, said.

The national apartment vacancy rate rose to 7.2 percent in the first quarter, up 0.60 percentage points from the prior quarter and 1.1 percentage points from a year earlier, according to the report, released on Tuesday.

Since reaching a cyclical low of 5.5 percent in the third quarter of 2008, the U.S. apartment vacancy rate has surged 1.7 percentage points, Reis said.

It was the highest vacancy rate since the first quarter of 2002. That was right before the last downturn bottomed out, but Reis expects the picture to get a lot darker as “we are arguably only at the beginning of the current downturn.”

Behind the rising vacancy rate is a build-up of available apartments. The number of vacant apartments added was 31,878 units in the first quarter. This was the largest amount of excess apartments the sector has seen since the first quarter of 2002 and does not include empty condos for rent.