LEJ - I think you are really being a sorry-ass and mentally lazy dude to drag out the old "conspiracy theory" chesnut as a dismissal. You must not have read what I said about the Vidal book with enough care. I said:

"Are they a conspiracy? Yes. And no. Yes, because they share in a common purpose, which is to control government policy and thereby enrich themselves. No, because they are just doing what comes naturally to them anyway, which is to do whatever will most enrich themselves...so why would they even have to conspire? ;-D"

Now read that with some comprehension, okay? I was basically paraphrasing what Gore Vidal says in one of his essays in response to the usual media dismissal which is to laughingly joke...."conspiracy theory". And which you are now doing.

Look, man, you don't need an overall conspiracy for this sort of thing to happen. You simply need an entrenched elite at the top of a society who have basically common objectives.

1. they want to get even richer and more powerful
2. they want governments not to interfere much in the process of their getting richer, and that means: deregulation and other such manuovers

This elite are in vicious competition with each other too. Don't forget that. So of course they conspire. Duh! ANY private meeting of individuals which formulates a plan and doesn't tell the general public about that plan IS a conspiracy. So a couple of corporations, for example, will have a board meeting and conspire as to how they can join forces and buy out some other businesses and split the proceeds.

Conspiracies do not need to be single or monolithic to be conspiracies. There are probably several million conspiracies being hatched in the USA every day by private persons, criminals, aunties who are spying on the neighbours, CEOs, the CIA, businessmen, salesmen, teenage kids, you name it.

Conspiracies are normal in business. You don't tell all the other business people what moves you are about to make! Conspiracies are also normal in government. You don't tell the other governments about your strategic plans, military or otherwise. That's why we have spies, for gosh sakes!

So conspiracies are as common as grass and weeds.

But when you dismiss what I'm talking about as a "conspiracy theory", you are suggesting that I'm saying it's a single monolithic conspiracy, a la the Illuminati, the Templars, the Masons, etc... You do that so you can just laugh it off.

It does not have to be that at all. It just has to be a large number of enormous multi-national businesses who all wish to maximize their profits...naturally! That's what they're in it for. And they have, in general, very common interests when it comes to how to do that, because they are concerned about how the government taxes corporations, how the government regulates the banks and lending institutions, how the goverment handles trade and tariffs, how the government spends its money, how the government borrows its money, and where the government will fight its wars.

All this concerns them in common, because it affects their profits. They don't need to all get together and form a monolithic conspiracy. They just need to bribe the politicians through campaign funding and lobbying so as to control the political process and influence all those things I mentioned in the above paragraph.

And that is what they do. It's inevitable that they would do it.

Like all organized criminals, they are also quite willing to stab each other in the back when a lucrative opportuntiy arises, and of course they do that too. They are not a single monolithic conspiracy, LEJ, they are a bunch of separate businessmen with a very similar set of profit-making objectives, that's all.

In medieval times it was the Church of Rome, the Royals, and the Nobility who ran the show. They were the controlling elite. That wasn't a single monolithic conspiracy either...but it might as well have been from the point of view of the millions of peasants who suffered miserably under it, and the Muslims whose lands were invaded in the Crusades!

Get what I mean now?