Well, for what it’s worth, I’ll just tack this on here too:
[i]But let me put my own cards on the table regarding the American government and “conspiracy”:
I believe that America is fully invested in preserving and sustaining its “ruling class”. And that, in so doing, it will in fact plot and plan to do things that unfold almost entirely behind the curtains. And that includes Barack Obama and most of the Democratic Party.
But not a “ruling class” in the simplistic Marxist sense of “the class struggle”. That was more a manifestation of the industrial revolution. Capitalism today is of the crony rendition—it has evolved light years beyond that.
Indeed, in today’s world, delineating something as “the ruling class” does not mean that once a month…literally…the folks from The Mainstrem Media [and their Wall Street advertisers] sit down with relevant committee chairmen in Congress, Obama’s economic team in the White House, the K Street lobbyists and Henry Kissinger’s “colleagues” from Bilderberg to meticulously plan the next month’s political and economic agenda. It doesn’t work that way. Why? Because it doesn’t have to. Besides, even within these corporate/political concoctions of wealth and power, there are considerable conflicts. For example, corporations based here in America may be strongly opposed to government policies that favor companies that shift all or part of their business overseas. And companies that oppose policies seen as favorable to the interests of oil industry do so because the higher the cost of oil the more costly it is in run their own businesses profitably. As with most things global, it’s very, very complex. And that, of course, is where “democracy” comes into play. Democracy for the rich. But some of these conflagrations are titantic because so much money is at stake.
No, America’s ruling class does not encompass a bunch of secret meetings where secret conspirators plot and plan nefariously to carve up the world in Dr Evil’s secret location at Goldman Sachs.
In that context, I just don’t buy into many of the “truther” narratives—whether regarding Roswell, 9/11, Newtown or [as silly as this is] Russia. Where is the hard evidence?
Instead, the ruling class “conspiracy” narrative [mine, anyway] unfolds more like this:
From the Bullfrog Films review of the film The American Ruling Class:
The American Ruling Class is one of the most unusual films to be made in America in recent years–both in terms of form and content. The form is a “dramatic-documentary-musical” and the content is our country’s most taboo topic: class, power and privilege in our nominally democratic republic.
At bottom the film is a morality tale, the story of two Yale students (played by Harvard men) who seek their opportunities upon graduation. As the renowned essayist, author and longtime Harper’s magazine editor Lewis Lapham conducts them through the corridors of power: Pentagon press briefings, the World Economic Forum, philanthropic foundations, Washington law firms, corporations, banks, the Council on Foreign Relations, and New York society dinners–our two representative graduates “one rich and the other not so rich” must struggle with their responsibilities in “a world collaterally damaged by the magic of money and the miracles of science.” The real-life luminaries they meet on their journey become characters in a story about power, its responsibilities and abuses.
All the while “the Mighty Wurlitzer” plays on, a reference to the massive propaganda apparatus invented by the CIA’s Frank Wisner, here used to signify the nocturnal philosophy of acquisition and imperial hubris which continually calls to the young men, the siren song of careerist myopia that was bred into their bones at school.
As we watch these two young men wend their way through what is only a slight fictionalization of their actual lives and choices, as we meet former Secretaries of State and Defense, directors of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, the publisher of The New York Times, Kurt Vonnegut, Howard Zinn, Barbara Ehrenreich, Robert Altman and a host of others, we have to ask along with Mr. Lapham: “To what end the genius of the Wall Street banks and the force of the Pentagon’s colossal weapons? Where does America discover the wisdom to play with its wonderful toys?” The possible answers move beyond the empty distinction of party affiliation and into the heart of American Oligarchy itself. By film’s end, the young men must decide: Should they seek to rule the world, or to save it?
In this context, crucial aspects of American foreign and domestic policy are in fact rooted in political economy, in crony capitalism, in stuff that really does unfold behind the curtains.
Obama Inc. fits quite comfortably into this carefully calibrated cache. His first administration was veritably bursting at the seams with men and women of this ilk. For example, Bilderberg, CFR, TC folks alone included Hillary Clinton [and Bill of course], Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Rahm Emanuel, George Mitchell, Robert Rubin, Paul Volcker, Robert Gates, James Jones, Tom Daschle, Eric Shinseki, Michael Froman, Susan Rice, Jack Reed, Eric Holder, Janet Napolitano, Mona Sutphen.
Hey, it is just commonsense to point out that those who own and operate the political and economic instruments that sustain the global economy, are going to want to connect the dots with others like them around the world. They have “shared interests” that evolve from and center around transactions that swell well up into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
So, no, they don’t need to schedule a secret rendevous where they can exchange secret handshakes and secret code words with the other secret participants.
If you grasp the manner in which these folks get together to sustain their own interests you begin to get a clearer sense of why a “progressive” agenda hardly ever comes up at all. Well, other than as rhetorical camouflage to dupe the unabashed liberal intellectuals who still believe that ObamaLand and BushWorld are the antithesis of each other.
And yet, with respect to many social issues, they really are, right?
And while it is true the neoconservatives in the ruling class disdain these “internationalists”, they are both attached at the hip to Wall Street and the military industrial complex.
This is where the CTs need to aim their narratives. Or so it seems to me.[/i]
This in my view is what makes the world go around. At least in “the West”. All that other stuff – Kennedy assassination, Watergate, operation cointelpro, operation chaos, iran-contra, the war on terror etc. – is all subsumed in that. More intriguing perhaps is how [or even if] China can be subsumed in it too.