re: I assume the control of our government by CIA and Wall Street plutocrats is much more alarming than most of us think it is.

Indeed.

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)

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

'Green Shoots over Thin Ice' (excerpt)

Fundamentally, my view is that the U.S. economy is on very thin ice, and that by focusing on the bailout of corporate bondholders rather than the restructuring of debt, we are courting the risk of a far deeper downturn. Last year, I didn't think it was conceivable that policy-makers would attempt to address this problem by making lenders whole with public funds. This is an ethical abomination, putting the public in the position of absorbing the losses that should properly be borne by those who provided capital to these institutions. It is not sustainable. What it does is place the public in the position of losing first, but it will not, and cannot prevent the ultimate failure of the debt – for the simple reason that without restructuring, the debt can't be serviced.

As Harvard historian Niall Ferguson observed last week, “Only somebody who studies financial history could say, as I was trying to say, ‘Look, something as big as the liquidity crisis of 1914 or as big as the banking crisis of 1931 is imminent.' We don't really have a great many options here. If we stay the present course, you're going to see the tailspin continue. To be effective, a large-scale restructuring of household indebtedness would need to be mandatory. The Great Depression was initially a U.S. financial crisis. But what made it a depression was its global contagion, and then the breakdown of trade and the retreat into protectionism. All of that can happen. All of that is in fact happening with terrifying speed.”

http://www.hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc090413.htm

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

US a paper tiger, says doomsayer

August 13, 2007

"Everyone thinks the US is the No.1 economy in the world. We're not. All we've been doing is consuming stuff on borrowed money. There's no savings...The collapse of consumer spending, associated with higher mortgage payments and vanishing home equity, will plunge the economy into severe recession, further exacerbating the collapse in real estate prices, worsening the recession and continuing the vicious cycle...People call us the biggest economy in the world but it's false, we'll be lucky to be in the top 20 in two years' time."

--Peter Schiff

http://www.news.com.au/business/story/0,23636,22234638-462,00.html

You ain't seen nothin' yet.

--Scorpio69er,October 25, 2007

http://tinyurl.com/cwsjtt

We're not just in for a recession. Years of financial mismanagement and policies designed to enrich the already rich and crush the middle class are coming home to roost.

It's going to be very, very bad.

--Scorpio69er, January 7, 2008

http://tinyurl.com/bdjugp