Once upon a time humans lived in small nomadic groups that supported themselves by hunting and gathering roots and fruits that nature supplied. Cooperation was essential for their survival. This type of existence last for the first 98% of nearly 200,000 years of humans as we know them today. In the last 2%, roughly around 10,000 years, many of these groups started to learn how to grow crops which enabled them to remain in one location.
This was revolutionary in that it marked the beginning what we now know as civilization: written language that could pass knowledge within and between human societies and to the next generations. Humans soon learned how to efficiently provide for their needs and to secure their safety from the hazards of nature.
Because they were poorly socialized or mutants (I don't really know), some humans soon realized that they could acquire all their material needs by the use of violence (or the threat of violence) and later deception. They soon took control of societies and evolved into ruling classes that dominated the rest of the cooperative humans. By evolving into nations with governments and all the trappings of laws, agents of enforcement, courts, these ruling classes transformed the more personal form of violence (or the threat of violence) into new and improved impersonal forms, often referred to as political power, and gave them a veneer of legitimacy. And, as they say, the rest is history.
Cartalucci in this essay describes how contemporary ruling classes called capitalists have perfected a third way to acquire power and wealth: induce with their wealth, or bribe, others to serve their interests. He focuses on one of the prime organizations, the National Endowment for Democracy, and illustrates how the capitalist ruling class has used this deceptive front organization to serve their interests of wealth and power in Thailand where he has lived for a number of years.
Supposedly liberal-progress NGOs around the world taking money from corporate-financiers, warmongers, and right-wing ideologues embodies perfectly the notion of a fraudulent front used to conceal criminal intentions under the guise of a noble cause.
