What you are describing was actually a decades-long process of establishing hegemony within the industrial union movement, and was quite far along before the CIA was even created (for documentation, see my book, Producing Hegemony, Cambridge, 1995). You can't reduce large-scale social processes to conspiracies without missing the big picture and losing sight of the reasons why social change is desirable in the first place (i.e., changing structures of domination). That's one huge problem with conspiracist thinking; the other (which Chip has admirably and consistently highlighted) is that it lends itself to scapegoating (the core logic of any conspiracist story entails the need to identify and stop the conspirators). None of this means that conspiracies don't happen, or that they are trivial; only that they aren't the motor of history and you won't advance a progressive cause much by getting mired at that level of analysis.
Mark Rupert
Political Science
Syracuse University
merupert at maxwell.syr.edu <mailto:merupert at maxwell.syr.edu>
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