Well, I for one at least appreciate how much you have rolled up your sleeves and reached into the muck.!

When I think about trying to slog past anyone's information fatigue to pass on the facts of the System of systems, I have a flashback to being 13 yrs old. A cow was expecting and it didn't show up to the barn. By some intuitive miracle, my father found her (about a mile away in a swamp) and the calf. When cows have a difficult birth, they can get weak and unable to get up, and after a while just give up and die. So, in the dark and mosquitos, we gave her an IV of dextrose. In about 20 minutes, she stood up and fed the calf. I keep trying to understand what magic solution is going to get American minds out of their marketing and religious competitive fog to see a ray of light outside this swamp, but just when we open a curtain, they turn around and go back into the consumer swamp to have another lie down.

Tuchmann writes history to the nth detail, so a lot of reading( or listening in my case). The Proud Tower is a deep look at the factors of power that perpetuate wars and aristocracies.

Ferdinand Lundberg's America's 60 Families is dated (1938-ish) but very informative about the oligarchal state. More contemporary is Foodopoly, by Hauter. In between, and very crucial is Empire of Oil by Harvey O'Connor (1958) that documents how oil families bought the government. I have an obscure book called "The Conspirators" (questionable provenance) that covers the complex deep criminal state of Iran Contra (both parties profited).

The Dulles brothers, indeed. Ray Cohn, Epstein,....it just goes on and on and that's without opening the Reynolds Heavy Duty roll.