by Eric Zuesse, The Duran:

The way that the U.S. empire expands its control into targeted countries so as to perpetrate coups that formerly the CIA had been doing (such as, most famously, in Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, and Chile 1973 — all of which replaced a democratically elected progressive leader by a fascist dictator and longstanding police-state), are now being done by “Non-Governmental Organizations” (NGOs) that are commonly also referred to by such terms as “think tanks” and ‘charities’ and ‘nonprofits’ (though hardly being charitable, and are actually tax-write-off propaganda-mills, scams for billionaires whose regular corporations reap profits from the consequences of these coups — of which the most successful recent one was the U.S. coup in February 2014 in Ukraine, which started the war there, which has been a gold mine for firms such as Lockheed Martin).