It’s hard not to suspect the horny hand of the CIA being involved in the latest wave of destabilizations against governments unfriendly to the U.S. in places like Venezuela and Ukraine, and who knows where else.

Nothing seems to be tempering the zeal of the elements managing the growing global octopus of U.S. covert intelligence operations, notwithstanding the revelations of astonishing excesses that have come to light in the last year.

The contempt that these operatives have demonstrated for the transparency that is required in a democracy has been met by lukewarm, at best, bleats of protest in the official corridors of power, going further to prove the impotence of our Congress than any gridlock on other issues could show.

For example, the Republican Party is now seriously flirting with permanent minority standing on the U.S. political landscape. Its refusal to act on meaningful immigration reform makes it clear it’s the GOP alone, and not the Democrats, are stonewalling on the issue, flying in the face of rapid demographic shifts in the U.S. populace. It means that, just as California, the most populous state in the union, is now forevermore a Democratic state because of the clout of its growing Hispanic population, so will the same soon become true for America’s second most populous state, Texas.

Yes, that one state most essential as the reliable cornerstone of Republican national ambitions, will soon become hopelessly controlled by its fast-growing Hispanic demographic. The failure of the GOP to compete for the loyalties of that demographic has now turned into a refusal to do so, and that confronts it with permanent minority standing henceforth. Florida is also going the same way.

Three states – California, Texas and Florida – once bastions of Republican electoral power in the U.S., either are already or soon to be solidly and permanently moved to the Democratic column.

But perhaps this means that the uber-rich “military industrial complex” behind the GOP agenda is abandoning the ballot box as the way they intend to rule going forward. If they can force the choices on the representatives of a nominal democracy in the U.S., then they will have their way through that means, instead.

Indeed, forcing the choices, or lack of them, on the White House and Congress through a secret web of intelligence gathering and executing capabilities is evidently the way things are headed.

Who’s been elected with the realization that dismantling this secret government constituted their job description? It is clear that no one at this point feels capable of taking this on in any kind of comprehensive way.

So who knows the extent of covert U.S. “military and industrial complex” involvement in meddling with global hot spots and destabilizations, using extraordinary intelligence methods, means and surrogates?

Now that China is becoming a military threat to its neighbors around the South China Sea, who is to know whether this is being done with the tacit, covert approval of U.S. intelligence capabilities? These elements centered in the U.S. and Britain have no concern for democratic values in their machinations, only interrelated notions of perpetual conflict and resource control.

Chinese disregard for human rights at any level does not cause these cynical elements to flinch, whether taking the form of China’s own genocidal “cultural revolution” of the 1960s, its genocidal Pol Pot surrogate in Cambodia in the 1970s, or its heinous North Korean surrogate today. The United Nations report on the atrocities of the current North Korean regime issued this week is only the latest example of the kind of totalitarian, national cult mode of iron-handed rule over a starving subject population that generally go unnoticed and unchecked.

The American intelligence origins of the Taliban and al Queda, from the days of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, are more examples of this.

America’s “military industrial complex,” with its British counterparts, lest we forget, was pro-fascist in the 1920s and 1930s, approving and even buoying Mussolini’s Italian fascist and Hitler’s German Nazi regimes, until it became geopolitically untenable to continue.

Democracy and covert machinations on the scale we see today are incompatible. You decide: Which do you want?