The idea that "the CIA" killed President Kennedy is ludicrous. While the number of employees who are retained by the CIA is not disclosed, any casual observer may easily conclude that there are far too many people working for the CIA to involve all of them in a dark conspiracy to assassinate the President and keep a lid on it for 50 years. That a small cabal within the CIA might have conspired to assassinate the President is another idea and much more plausible. When I say small, I mean a dozen or so, fifteen or twenty at the most.
The easiest way to go out and assassinate a national leader is to just do it. Don't ask anybody for help; you would just run the risk of discovery. To this day, I have not heard a conspiracy theory about the Kennedy assassination that beats a theory that says the President was assassinated by a lone gunman and, moreover, that the identity of the gunman is Lee Harvey Oswald.
What is relevant to this discussion here is that we do see activities nowadays that can be ascribed to a conspiracy more credibly, and even a lifelong conspiracy skeptic (me, age 64) will say so. The phenomenon in the intervening time between the Kennedy assassination and now that makes criminal conspiracies more plausible is the concentration of power in fewer and more homogeneous hands.
Fifteen big banks could conspire to fix LIBOR. This is perfectly credible, and what is incredible is to think this could have been done outside of a conspiracy. There is nothing natural about the way this worked. The invisible hand was tied by the consprirators.
Six corporations own 90% of American media. It is not implausible that they have laid down a set of rules that govern what we Americans, living in a putative democracy, see, hear and read. It goes a long ways in explaining why Americans are more likely to know about Paris Hilton's driving record than the roots of income inequality.
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