Why do we pretend like it’s necessary to have a CIA as part of the U.S. government? Between the nepotism and complete lack of public accountability they justify by claiming it’s necessary to “protect America,” they might as well just be a private corporation.

It really seems like the entire purpose of the agency is just to help rich people in the U.S. do fucked up shit at home and around the globe to destroy democracy in the name of “spreading democracy.”

There’s a book I love called The Very Best Men by Evan Thomas that shares this thesis. The author is a well-regarded Washington journalist and insider who was given access to the CIA’s archives.

He starts off by playing the title straight, humanizing his main subjects, explaining their ideological motives and justifications, and playing up their esteemed credentials and education. Then he goes into the practical effects of their actions and shows that in practice, they were terrible people who pumped out a steady stream of incompetent gaffes, own-goals, and international crimes.

There’s a very similar vibe to the Epstein files: The shadowy kabbalic figures were, in the cold light of day, grade A morons and it’s a miracle they had any success covering their tracks at all.

Robert maxwell apparently was trying to bring together criminals globally, and that mean underground and intelligence.

If you watch the world's geopolitics it almost seems like the 5 eyes are running the world and manipulating what life is.

I never really thought too much about CIA mainly being just a secretive way for the 1% to conduct fucked up business transactions, but that's also because it just never really gets pointed out by most media.

This independent journalist/early blogger Steve Kangas wrote a lot about it, and it may not seem that ground breaking today, but when you consider he wrote it circa 1996 it's pretty amazing what all he was putting together: http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-overclass.html

He was found dead under very odd circumstances while investigating the heir to the Mellon family fortune.

This proud veteran of years of political argument in Internet discussion forums, and creator of an award-winning Web site devoted to liberal issues, is dead. On Feb. 8, his body was discovered in a men’s room on the 39th floor of a building in Pittsburgh — just outside the offices of conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.

Although Joseph Coors is usually credited with providing Heritage with the funding that lifted the think tank off the ground, only 4 months after Kangas was found dead in Scaife's office building, Washington Post revealed Scaife had provided significantly more funding to the Heritage Foundation compare to Coors.

The Heritage Foundation became an important part of the right’s community-building efforts. Scaife first contributed to Heritage in 1974. Soon afterward, using money from Scaife, Heritage established its resource bank, a compilation of conservative organizations, which from 1982 was published in the Directory of Public Policy Organizations, a guide to the new right-wing establishment. The current edition lists 300 groups; 111 have received grants from Scaife, 76 of them in 1998.

Heritage, organized by former staff assistants to Republican lawmakers whose goal was to influence both Congress and the news media with a stream of brief, meaty position papers on issues of the day, became Scaife’s favorite beneficiary. When it began to make a mark in the mid-1970s, Joseph Coors, the beer magnate, was commonly credited as its chief financial patron. Coors did put up the first $250,000. But within two years, according to Heritage officials, Scaife had given more than twice as much, and he has kept on giving ever since – more than $23 million in all, or about $34 million in inflation-adjusted, current dollars. At Heritage the joke was, “Coors gives six-packs; Scaife gives cases.”