Influence Laundering

I posted recently about a troubling situation in which the Parent Corporation appeared to not be involved in the bombing of a statue of Vladimir Lenin. It smacked of the Parent Corporation's patented brand of evil, but we could find no connections. I use the past tense because we have finally uncovered one very small and admittedly tenuous connection.

It all unfolded last week when our operative "Natasha" overheard a random conversation while riding public transportation in the city of Pittsburgh. According to her, it went something like this:

"Poor Vlad never knew what hit him, did he?"
"Yeah, he was clueless."
"So have you collected from Hank yet?"
"Yeah, he made good yesterday. I've got your cut at my house."

"Natasha" wisely followed the two individuals and waited until they had settled accounts and left again before breaking into to the house and scouring everything until she found who owned the moniker of Hank. After tracking down Hank she found out he had been paid by Buster, who had in turn been paid by Leah and so forth. After much effort tracing both the upstream and downstream paths she found that the original order had come from a man simply known as "Tyrone" who appeared to be a front for some entity which had hidden its identity too well for "Natasha" to know for sure. Discouraged, she decided to collaborate with her fellow spies and found that "Tyrone" is a pseudonym someone at the Parent Corporation used back in February.

The conclusion we have reached is that the Parent Corporation is attempting to pull off some hard-core influence laundering. They appear to have perfected their technique over many years, and we would still be in the dark if it weren't for the fortuitous information "Natasha" received on that bus ride. There's still a chance that the Parent Corporation is trying to lead us off track by giving us tidbits, but we believe chances are good that we have stumbled on to the most complex web of influence laundering ever devised.

At the GNU Public Dictatorship we are nothing if not reluctant to jump to conclusions, but we thought we would announce that we are on to the Parent Corporation's nefarious machinations. We ask all of our supporters to feed us any reliable information they may have, with the warning that we are using Scrabble rules, i.e. that passing information that cannot be verified by our operatives will result in a forfeit of a turn and a loss of the opportunity to score any points.