Author Archives: circleof13

SWEET SABOTAGE: CIA’s secret war on Soviet sugar revealed in JFK files

Posted on by

A covert economic strike
“…In August 1962, the CIA learned that a Cuban cargo ship carrying 80,000 bags of brown sugar — each weighing 200 pounds — was en route to the USSR. The vessel was scheduled to make a brief stop in Puerto Rico for minor repairs, requiring part of its cargo to be offloaded. Seizing the opportunity, the CIA launched a clandestine operation to taint the shipment.
“Through a clandestine operation, which was not detected and is not traceable, we were able to contaminate 800 of these bags of sugar,” a declassified memo to General Edward Lansdale, then the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary for special operations, revealed. The chemical used was reportedly a denaturing agent, strong enough to render the entire shipment “unfit for human or animal consumption in any form.”…”

https://www.newstarget.com/2025-03-25-cias-secret-war-on-soviet-sugar-revealeddeep.html

Catherine Austin Fitts: Dillon Read & Co. Inc. & The Aristocracy of Stock Profits — I. Brady, Bush, Bechtel & “the Boys”

Posted on by

“…Bush climbed through Republican politics to become Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Ford Administration. After spending four years displaced by the Carter Administration, Bush was now Reagan’s Vice President with Executive Order authority for the National Security Council (NSC) and U.S. intelligence and enforcement agencies. Bush’s new authority was married with expanded powers to outsource sensitive work to private contractors. Such work could be funded through the non-transparent financial mechanisms available through the National Security Act of 1947, and the CIA Act of 1949.

This was a secret source of money for funding powerful new weaponry and surveillance technology and operations owned, operated or controlled by private corporations.3 Carter’s massive layoffs at the CIA had created plenty of private contractor capacity looking for work.4 An assassination attempt on President Reagan’s life two months after the inauguration meant that Vice President Bush and his team were called on to play an expanded role. Meantime, Nicholas Brady continued as an intimate friend and collaborator from his position as Chairman of Dillon Read.5

In April of 1981, Bechtel, working through the Bechtel private venture arm Sequoia, bought the controlling interest in Dillon Read from the Dillon family, led by C. Douglas Dillon, former U.S. Treasury Secretary6 and son of the firm’s namesake, Clarence Dillon. This was a time when Bechtel was facing increased competition globally while experiencing a decline in the nuclear power business that they had pioneered.7

We found ourselves with new owners whose operations were an integral part of the military and intelligence communities and who had demonstrated a rapacious thirst for drinking from the federal money spigot.[8] George Schultz, former Secretary of the Treasury during the Nixon Administration, and now Bechtel executive, joined our board…”

https://dillonreadandco.com/brady-bush-bechtel-the-boys/

Founder of Company that Produced Software Later Stolen by CIA Believes Software Was Used to Develop Digital Surveillance in Afghanistan

Posted on by

PROMIS stands for Prosecutors Management Information System. It was originally created by the Hamiltons’ company, called the Institute for Law and Social Research (INSLAW), to help law enforcement agencies track court cases and criminal offenders and was adopted by state and local prosecutors’ offices, including in cities like New York and Los Angeles.

In the mid-1970s, INSLAW was awarded a $10 million contract to install the PROMIS software in 94 Department of Justice offices before it was forced into bankruptcy and taken over by officials in the Justice Department working under Edwin Meese, Ronald Reagan’s Attorney General.

Hamilton believes that INSLAW was used by banks to enable NSA and the CIA to track wire transfers of money and letters of credit, and by the CIA to track dissidents and alleged troublemakers in an emergency preparedness program commissioned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Then-CIA Director William Casey was the driving force for most of the unauthorized, copyright-infringing uses of INSLAW’s PROMIS, which was carried out by the CIA’s Division-D.

The PROMIS software was so valuable because it enabled collection of a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, CIA and other agencies.

Lockheed Martin engineers also got a hold of PROMIS and developed sophisticated software for the cockpits of some of its planes, like the F-117 stealth fighter which is invisible to radar.

Throughout the mid to late 1980s, the PROMIS software was sold to intelligence services worldwide by Dr. Earl W. Brian, a veteran of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam and former director of California’s Department of Health Care Services, with close connections to Meese.

Dr. Brian’s holding company, Biotech Capital Corporation, had 40 computer system contracts with U.S. intelligence agencies, and tried to pressure Hamilton into selling INSLAW.

According to various sources, Brian was involved in the “October Surprise” where the Reagan campaign paid the Iranians to delay the release of American hostages during the 1980 election to make incumbent Jimmy Carter look bad and help Reagan win the White House.

CIA whistleblower Michael Riconosciuto claimed that PROMIS software was Brian’s payment for participation in the “October Surprise” and other covert operations.

Riconosciuto told Unsolved Mysteries that Dr. Brian and other men involved in the PROMIS theft participated in the Iran-Contra affair and covert operations in Central America and the Middle East that involved illegal drugs and arms smuggling.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/07/31/founder-of-company-that-produced-software-later-stolen-by-cia-believes-software-was-used-to-develop-digital-surveillance-in-afghanistan/

The Star Within the Circle — How an Oligarchy that is Thousands of Years Old Maintains Control Through Secret Round Table Groups

Posted on by

This is the Star-in-Circle Model — the true power structure that operates behind and above the visible Org Chart of global institutions.

The Circle represents external control mechanisms — secrecy, coercion, blackmail, and loyalty enforcement.

The Star represents internal networking and deal flow — hidden agreements, conflict resolution, and policy formation among members.

However, the true complexity of this model emerges when we consider that many members of these Round Table groups also hold seats in multiple organizations. This creates an interwoven network of power, where different groups form reciprocal alliances.

In other words, the hidden Org Chart of the world isn’t structured like a corporate pyramid but like a constellation of interlocking stars — a dynamic power matrix that resembles the Sefirot, where each node of power connects to multiple others, forming a self-reinforcing elite governance system.

https://thedukereport.substack.com/p/the-star-within-the-circle

The AI Race to Reboot Feudalism

Posted on by

It’s the robber barons, rails, rents and defaults of the next twenty years I worry about, not skynet, the singularity or misaligned paperclip optimizers.

Infrastructure ownership: it’s the rails, not the robots

Infrastructure capture refers to the consolidation of essential systems, such as transport, energy, communications, or now AI tech stacks, under the control of a small number of private actors. Historically, this pattern has produced enduring power asymmetries. When a resource becomes indispensable for competition in the market and cannot be reasonably duplicated, its owner wields structural power. When public infrastructure gets privatized or commodified into a corporate chokepoint, those who own it do not merely extract rent; they set the terms of participation in economic and civic life.

A classic example is the Gilded Age railroad monopolies in the United States. By the late 19th century, a handful of companies controlled the rail network, enabling discriminatory pricing and political leverage while producing the largest wealth inequality between a small elite and masses in poverty.

We have seen the same more recently with the big social media platforms, that for too long were treated as consumer products, when in reality they aimed to become the roads and bridges of digital life for most of us while extracting a heavy rent on our attention. That rent did not only make them filthy rich but also extremely powerful and politically influential, enshrining continued exploitation of their users data as their business model.

AI infrastructure magnifies these stakes, as AI tech stacks are becoming the interface to information creation, dissemination and consumption. If a few companies own the chips, data centers, cloud compute, foundational models, model weights, and distribution channels, they effectively control any future useful AI application build on top of it; and with it, the epistemic and economic arteries of the 21st century.

The gamble to become the next Vanderbilt, Rockefeller or Carnegie’s of the info age are long underway. Current tech giants have already captured chips and cloud computing, that is why Nvidia’s data‑center revenue hit $18.4 billion in a single quarter—up 409% YoY as AI hyperscalers started hoarding H100 chips like potable water before a drought. Amazon plowed $8 billion into Anthropic so Claude will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud and training partner, and will utilize Amazon’s custom AI chips. OpenAI will purchase an additional $250 billion of Microsoft Azure cloud compute and locked its model distribution to Azure’s cloud for the next decade.
[…]
This brings us to the next point:
Strong-arming society into technological lock‑in

Infrastructure capture is not just about finding one bottleneck to own, because bottlenecks can be remedied with just building more capacity over time through market competition or government investment. Real infrastructure capture today is much more about owning the full value-chain, tech stack or ecosystem. That is why the current AI players aim to cement vertical control—chips → cloud → model → API—where each layer enforces the others and makes competition almost impossible. The current AI web of partnerships and strategic investments have only one goal: to entrench big tech incumbents across multiple layers of the value chain.
[…]
If the tech moguls win their gambit, if they succeed at infrastructure capture, technological lock-in and public dispossession of our shared information ecosystem, we will have ceded more than we have bargained for. Once control over knowledge creation, distribution and consumption (and with it increasingly cognitive agency) is lost for most of us, what awaits is a new dark age of monarchs, myths, manipulation and magical thinking.

A handful will own, a tiny minority will benefit, and the rest of us will fall into exploitation, exclusion or serfdom.

https://www.protagonist-science.com/p/the-ai-race-to-reboot-feudalism

MASS BLACKOUT: WE’RE PULLING THE PLUG ON CORPORATE CONTROL – THIS HOLIDAY SEASON, WE SHUT DOWN THE SYSTEM

Posted on by

// SYSTEM ERROR: CONNECTION TO CAPITALISM LOST

This is a coordinated economic shutdown—a collective refusal to participate in a system that profits off our pain, exploits our labor, and buys our politicians.

NO SPENDING. NO WORK. NO SURRENDER.

The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed—for the wealthy.

The Mass Blackout is a nationwide economic action, coordinated across aligned organizations, calling Americans to:

Stop online or in-store shopping (except for small businesses)

Stop work

Stop streaming, cancel subscriptions, no digital purchases

Remove the regime

If you must spend: support small, local businesses only. Pay in cash.

We’re not targeting small businesses or communities—we’re targeting the corporate systems that profit from injustice, fuel authoritarianism, and crush worker power.

https://www.themassblackout.com/

Visualizing the $19 Trillion Global Cost of Conflict

Posted on by

Last year, the economic impact of violence reached $19.1 trillion, or $717 billion higher than the previous year.

This came as conflict deaths hit 25-year highs, and wars continued in the Ukraine and Gaza. In response to heightened geopolitical tensions, European nations have injected billions into defense spending. Even Japan plans to double its defense spending to 2% of GDP.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/19-trillion-global-cost-of-conflict/

The rich marry the rich: How love perpetuates inequality

Posted on by

Homogamy — marriage between people from similar sociological or educational backgrounds — helps perpetuate economic inequalities in Spain. According to De Poli’s data, couples in the wealthiest 10% of the population have, on average, almost double the income and wealth of those in the next income bracket. And they hold 12 times the income and 42 times the net worth of those in the lowest decile.

whttps://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2025-11-22/the-rich-marry-the-rich-how-love-perpetuates-inequality.html

$1.2 Billion Suspicious Epstein Transactions? Wyden Demands Investigation After JP Morgan Failed To Report For Years

Posted on by

You really just need to look at Exhibit A in Wyden’s memo (dated Wednesday) based on unsealed court records: the number of transactions flagged as suspicious between 2002 – 2016, vs. a flurry of almost $1.3 billion in suspicious transactions that the bank scrambled to file right after Epstein died in jail awaiting trial.
[…]
According to internal bank emails, JPMorgan may have held off on filing the SARs (suspicious activity reports) because it wanted “to continue working with Epstein,” who was a great source of referrals despite firing him as a client in 2013, the report found.

The bank said in late October that “it was flagging about 4,700 transactions, totaling more than $1 billion, because they were potentially related to reports of human trafficking involving Mr. Epstein. It also mentioned Mr. Epstein’s wire transfers to Russian banks and sensitivities around “his relationships with two U.S. presidents.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/12-billion-suspicious-epstein-transactions-all-eyes-jpmorgan-bank-scrambled-report-after

Interior Department to Open 1.3 Billion Acres of U.S. Waters to Oil and Gas Drilling

Posted on by

In a statement, Earthjustice blasted Thursday’s announcement by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, writing, “Trump’s plan would risk the health and well-being of millions of people who live along our coasts. It would also devastate countless ocean ecosystems. This administration continues to put the oil industry above people, our shared environment, and the law.”

https://www.democracynow.org/2025/11/21/headlines