Your task is to extract the thesis of an opinionated news article by selecting some of its text segments. The thesis is a summarization of what the author wants to persuade the reader of. Your answer should consist of segments of the given text. Note that you are not allowed to combine different sentences.

Privatising Mexico's oil industry spells disaster. Considering Mexico's history and the present political context, it's no surprise that the majority of the Mexican population nowadays is either deeply suspicious of President Pena Nieto or just opposed to the current fast-track drive to privatise oil and pass it into the hands of foreign oligopolies . At present, Mexico suffers from an extremely weak state where the vast majority of crimes go unaddressed because of a judicial vacuum . More than 22,000 forced disappearances have occurred since 2007 and more than 70,000 people have been killed since 2006 . Almost every week we hear about more mass graves discovered . Most recently, a massacre of students in Iguala shook the nation . Mexico also suffers from the third largest illicit economy in the world, according to the Global Financial Integrity Report . Clearly, organised crime is openly challenging and fragmenting the state . In the face of these facts even President Nieto has admitted in public speeches that Mexico's legal system is in shambles . International experience and basic common sense indicate that a country must possess a minimum standard of the rule of law in order to be able to foster social benefits for most of its population when privatising state assets . Without functional regulatory and judicial controls, it is technically and politically not feasible for any oil-funded social development fund to effectively spread wealth to future generations through new public education programmes, a modernised public health, adequate environmental standards and a much-improved physical infrastructure . Absolutely nothing today indicates that Mexico can implement privatisation of the oil infrastructure at even the most basic standards of security, transparency, effectiveness and efficiency . Yet ,  a Mexican paradox occurs . While insecurity still runs at record highs , foreign money keeps pouring in . What's going on? Since the beginning of the still unfinished democratic transition and since the economic opening to international trade of the early 1990s, Mexico managed to attract billions of dollars per year in foreign direct investment . Yet ,  most of this money has been channelled into politically managed non-competitive sectors in the hands of Mexican "state courtesans" disguised as private entrepreneurs who over the last 25 years created vast oligopolies out of the privatisation of state assets . The privatisation process in Mexico has largely been conducted through dubious procedures orchestrated by corrupt federal governments . All this happened in the midst of a Mexican economy lacking technological innovation with low productivity and where more than half of what is produced and consumed is exchanged within informal/illicit markets . Nevertheless ,  these so-called private oligopolies within the mining, banking and telecommunications industries operate in a crony capitalistic fashion by attracting foreign investors to politically protected markets in which governments (through bribes and subsidies) ensure rates of return two to five times above the international average . How can, for example, German or US oligopolies presently investing in Mexico fail to fall in love with such a "generous" corrupt system? The forthcoming Mexican oil privatisation falls comfortably within this "legally corrupt" economic framework . Yet ,  harsh social realities have a way of trumping politics most of the time . Mexican writer and journalist Ana Lilia Perez published in 2012 a book titled"The Black Cartel" in which she provides a description of massive organised crime infiltration within the top managerial echelons of the state-run oil company, PEMEX . The nature of the organised crime infiltration covers technical and political appointees at PEMEX . Moreover ,  with thorough documentation, Ms Perez provides a detailed account of how and where a large portion of the oil extracted and distributed by PEMEX is currently stolen through illegal operations . These have been linked to Mexican politicians and US and Mexican private companies selling illegal Mexican oil to the markets in Canada, Mexico and the US, with the complicity of the Mexican armed forces supposedly responsible for protecting the PEMEX infrastructure . The current illegal oil trafficking comes with high-level political corruption, intense armed conflict causing thousands of deaths per month and frequent acts of terrorism against the PEMEX infrastructure . One cannot expect this armed conflict scenario to just go away after privatisation . In this kind of context, any honest foreign investor bidding within a Mexican oil privatisation process should have his or her head checked or otherwise possess enough political clout within Mexico or the financial capacity to bribe with millions of dollars the government ladder and pay for a vast praetorian guard of security personnel to manage the armed chaos ahead . In comparison , dealing with other oil producing countries with problematic states, such as Nigeria, would seem like a walk in the park . Shareholders of oil companies can only expect low economic returns and chaos from investing in the Mexican oil sector , unless , prior to any private investment drive, an international judicial cooperation effort starts dismantling the vast organised crime networks within the Mexican oil business and beyond . This international judicial cooperation must entail the actual implementation of a serious anti-corruption programme within the Mexican state with much broader conflict of interest and traffic of influence statutes, all monitored by reputable international civil society organisations . Furthermore ,  the failure of the Mexican state needs to be corrected with the installation of autonomous investigative units for economic crimes within each Mexican region and the creation of witness protection programmes for cases of political corruption linked to organised crime . These reforms will be good for Mexican society in general and also good for the pockets of Mexican and foreign oil investors .
Clearly, organised crime is openly challenging and fragmenting the state Almost every week we hear about more mass graves discovered

Is it not time to dismantle the CIA? It's not as if we weren't warned about the CIA . Some 50 years before the Senate Intelligence Committee issued its 500-page report on torture, former President Harry Truman published an opinion piece in the Washington Post asserting that the CIA was out of control and calling for it to be broken up . Truman's column appeared on December 22, 1963, a month to the day following US President John F Kennedy's assassination and 11 years after he himself moved out of the White House . Truman argued, as the president who authorised its establishment in 1947, that the CIA had strayed from the mission he had intended for it . He had favoured creation of the CIA so that a president would have one agency providing him with objective foreign intelligence, rather than having to rely upon the often conflicting information being served up by the Departments of State, Defense, and others who "slanted to conform to established positions of a given department" . Viewing intelligence gathering as its sole mission, Truman was disturbed "by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment . It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government." He said he had "never had any thought" that the CIA would involve itself in "cloak and dagger operations" . But it had which "has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas" . It is clearly of some significance that Truman published his piece just one month after Kennedy's assassination . Although there is no evidence that Truman was suggesting CIA involvement in the assassination , it is impossible to believe that the late president's difficulties with the CIA were far from Truman's mind . As a former president who the Kennedy White House regularly briefed on foreign policy issues and decisions, Truman knew how the CIA essentially steamrolled Kennedy into the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba (and other anti- Castro actions), leading Kennedy to tell a friend that he wanted"to splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds" . Kennedy never had the chance to follow up on that idea but it was essentially what Truman suggested a month after Kennedy's death . Obviously, Truman's recommendation had no effect . In fact ,  the Washington establishment apparently took action to see that Truman's piece disappeared almost without a trace (easier in those pre-internet days) . According to former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, the Washington Post only published the piece in its morning edition, pulling it from view after that (a peculiar way to treat an opinion piece by a former president, especially on such a weighty issue) . McGovern also reports that former CIA Director Allen Dulles, who Kennedy fired after the Bay of Pigs debacle, actually flew down to Truman's home in Independence, Missouri to get the former president to retract . Although Dulles reported back to his friends that Truman had indeed recanted , he clearly never did . In fact ,  six months after publishing the column in the Post, Truman wrote to the managing editor of Look Magazine that he intended the CIA as an intelligence gathering agency only and not a place where"strange activities" would be launched . No doubt, the Bay of Pigs and Cuba, in general, were not the only examples of CIA interventions that disturbed Truman . In the years between the end of Truman's administration and his Washington Post column, the CIA had orchestrated the overthrow of governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), Dominican Republic (1961), South Vietnam (1963), Brazil (1964) . Within a year following Truman's death, the CIA successfully brought down the Allende government in Chile (1973) . As for its activities since, its intelligence activities have clearly continued to be a low priority (it has gotten Iraq wrong from the start, culminating most recently in its failure to predict the rise of ISIL) while , what Truman called its "cloak and dagger" operations, have proliferated . According to historian William Blum, writing in Foreign Policy Journal, in the last 69 years, the CIA has (often in conjunction with the military) "(1) attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of which were democratically-elected, (2) attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries, (3) grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries, (4) dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries, (5) attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders." And now there are the horrific reports of torture and, equally appalling, the defense of CIA torture by former CIA driectors, other top CIA officials and, most enthusiastically, former Vice President Dick Cheney who famously told NBC five days after 9/11 that it was now time for US intelligence agencies to operate on the "dark side" . That is the context of the torture debate . As Truman understood, the CIA was dangerous and should be broken up or, in Kennedy's words, "splinter[ed] into a thousand pieces and scatter[ed] to the winds" . That was 50 years and nine presidents ago and since John F Kennedy, no president has challenged the CIA . Perhaps each of them have understood there are battles that not even a president could win .
Some 50 years before the Senate Intelligence Committee issued its 500-page report on torture, former President Harry Truman published an opinion piece in the Washington Post asserting that the CIA was out of control and calling for it to be broken up

Peace on Earth? There are a whole bunch of people who simply don't like Christmas and are fighting to get rid of it any way they can . And, there are a lot of people on the other side who are angry at those efforts . And so, this whole battle over whether to say Christmas or Happy Holidays misses the point . I suppose it may be hard to be a non-believer in the religious themes around Christmas and live in our culture . You are confronted daily with the religious symbolism of Christmas in the books you read, the friends you have and the movies you watch ; and , above all ,  you have to stay away from religious stuff...like Christmas celebrations . I'm a believer, but not without a modicum of compassion for those who don't share my religious beliefs . I can imagine how irritating Christmas must be for those whose whole worldview is built on the belief that Christmas doesn't matter because it points to what is spurious at best and dangerous at worst . I get that, too . I must admit, though, that I get irritated sometimes when a group of people bring a lawsuit to get rid of the town creche or when someone wishes me "Happy Holidays." It bothers me when universities remove Christmas trees or Christmas concerts are canceled because it offends those who aren't religious or Christian . Frankly, I listen to a lot of stuff from the other side all the time . Fair play suggests that it wouldn't hurt for the other side to abide some of mine . I decided that I'm just not going to fight the Christmas war . I'm an old guy and old people are already irritated about being old . As someone said, it takes very little to tick us off . Instead, I'm just going to sing as loudly and as publicly as I can a Christmas carol---a Christmas carol about love and a God who went to a lot of trouble to express his love for us . You see , in my belief system, Christmas doesn't mean that God came to destroy us or to kick posteriors . I believe that the reason he came was to tell us that he isn't angry . And when we make obscene gestures or get mean with those who disagree with us, it kind of misses the point . It becomes a disconnect between what I believe and what I do . And if I really believe(and I do) that the King came , it kind of changes my perspective . I have a friend whose family takes playing chess very seriously . It gets so "hot" sometimes that they end up throwing chess pieces at one another . As you can imagine , they lose a lot of pieces . One Christmas when they were playing chess, my friend took the baby Jesus from the small creche under the Christmas tree to replace one of his lost pieces . My friend then began to move all over the board, going after his brother's pieces . "You can't do that," his brother said,"that's illegal." "Oh, yes I can," my friend said."This is Jesus and he can do whatever he wants to do." Jesus does as he pleases and he does it right well . At Christmas he decided to love and, then, clean up the mess later . So I think I'll opt out of the war . The King was doing fine before I came along and will do fine long after I'm gone . He doesn't need my defense . So, Merry Christmas or...uh .... Happy Holidays . Whatever .

There are a whole bunch of people who simply don't like Christmas and are fighting to get rid of it any way they can And, there are a lot of people on the other side who are angry at those efforts