re: While the Banksters have highjacked our government they could care less how the economy goes, as long as they can use their insiders to save themselves.

There is no longer, on the one hand, an economy, and, on the other hand, a political order containing a military establishment unimportant to politics and to money-making. There is a political economy linked, in a thousand ways, with military institutions and decisions... there is an ever-increasing interlocking of economic, military, and political structures. If there is government intervention in the corporate economy, so is there corporate intervention in the governmental process. In the structural sense, this triangle of power is the source of the interlocking directorate that is most important for the historical structure of the present. The fact of the interlocking is clearly revealed at each of the points of crisis of modern capitalist society: slump, war, and boom... given the scope of their consequences, decisions-and indecisions-in any one of these ramify into the others, and hence top decisions tend either to become coordinated or to lead to a commanding indecision. It has not always been like this. When numerous small entrepreneurs made up the economy, for example, many of them could fail and the consequences still remain local; political and military authorities did not intervene. But now, given political expectations and military commitments, can they afford to allow key units of the private corporate economy to break down in slump? Increasingly, they do intervene in economic affairs, and as they do so, the controlling decisions in each order are inspected by agents of the other two, and economic, military, and political structures are interlocked. At the pinnacle of each of the three enlarged and centralized domains, there have arisen those higher circles which make up the economic, the political, and the military elites. At the top of the economy, among the corporate rich, there are the chief executives; at the top of the political order, the members of the political directorate; at the top of the military establishment, the elite of soldier-statesmen clustered in and around the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the upper echelon. As each of these domains has coincided with the others, as decisions tend to become total in their consequence, the leading men in each of the three domains of power-the warlords, the corporation chieftains, the political directorate-tend to come together, to form the power elite of America.

--Charles Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956)

re: A declining middle class, a feeble working class, and finally the so-called "death of the consumer".

SEE:

http://tinyurl.com/cf2vom

re: The President of the United States is not going side with the United Nations against the CIA...

Well, I certainly understand this country's past actions and how they do not square with our rhetoric or the wishes of the UN. However, the U.S. is a signatory to the UN Convention against Torture. The U.S. Senate voted in favor of ratification, legally binding the United States Government to uphold the treaty. It thus carries the weight of law.

Article 4:

Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.

Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.

http://www.hrweb.org/legal/cat.html

Obama has already effectively sided with the United Nations against the CIA, by acknowledging that it tortured and providing damning evidence of it. Him saying that those who were "only following orders" should not be prosecuted is not an amnesty, merely an opinion, albeit a weighty one. But they can and should be prosecuted.

As Glenn Greenwald notes:

"...it is up to citizens to demand that the rule of law be applied"

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/radio/2009/04/16/aclu/index.html

re: Why is letting the same idiots stay in charge thought to be a good thing?

It's only thought to be a good thing by the same idiots.

Watch Nassim Taleb rip them a new one, here:

http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2009/03/nassim_taleb_an.html

re: The President was not elected to start hassling the CIA about the past.

He is sworn to uphold the Constitution and the law.

CIA torture exemption 'illegal'

US President Barack Obama's decision not to prosecute CIA agents who used torture tactics is a violation of international law, a UN expert says.

The UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, says the US is bound under the UN Convention against Torture to prosecute those who engage in it.

"The United States, like all other states that are part of the UN convention against torture, is committed to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bringing all persons against whom there is sound evidence to court," Mr Nowak told the Austrian daily Der Standard.

"The fact that you carried out an order doesn't relieve you of your responsibility," he was quoted as saying by AP news agency.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8006597.stm

SEE ALSO:

Under Nuremberg Principle IV, "defense of superior orders" is not a defense for war crimes, although it might influence a sentencing authority to lessen the penalty.

Nuremberg Principle IV states:

"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Defense

re: international corporate consortia - Big Oil, the military-industrial complex, and particularly the global banking imperium - have an inordinate control over most governments and most of the global economy.

SEE:

http://tinyurl.com/dxym27

:)