Well, yes George

George Monbiot makes a very good point here:

Federal government is a vast corporate welfare programme, rewarding the industries that give millions of dollars in political donations with contracts worth billions. Missile defence is the biggest pork barrel of all, the magic pudding that won't run out, however much you eat. The funds channelled to defence, aerospace and other manufacturing and service companies will never run dry because the system will never work.

To keep the pudding flowing, the administration must exaggerate the threats from nations that have no means of nuking it - and ignore the likely responses of those that do. Russia is not without its own corrupting influences. You could see the grim delight of the Russian generals and defence officials last week, who have found in this new deployment an excuse to enhance their power and demand bigger budgets. Poor old Poland, like the Czech Republic and the UK, gets strongarmed into becoming America's groundbait.

If we seek to understand American foreign policy in terms of a rational engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. The government's interests have always been provincial. It seeks to appease lobbyists, shift public opinion at crucial stages of the political cycle, accommodate crazy Christian fantasies and pander to television companies run by eccentric billionaires. The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders. That they threaten the world with 57 varieties of destruction is of no concern to the current administration. The only question of interest is who gets paid and what the political kickbacks will be.

That might sound a little vicious about the colonial cousins but it's an excess only of degree rather than an  error of logic.

However, there's one thing that George does seem to have missed. This isn't something exclusive to either the US or Russia. It's common to all governments, everywhere. All of them stay in power by buying off the special interest groups with other peoples' money. This is the very essence of politics as the game is played.

No one seriously thinks that the CAP is as it is for any rational reason other than farmers are a powerful political power bloc in some EU countries. Ditto the idiocy which is the Common Fisheries Policy, there's political power in those demanding subsidies and access to certain waters (you'll never get far in Galicia without pandering to the fishermen).

George himself is a member, a leader even, of just one such political bloc: he wants the economy of the UK to be radically restructured so that it meets his desires. It might be dressed up in concern over the environment, or climate change, but no one seriously thinks that if, say, nuclear fusion were available tomorrow that he'd stop campaigning for an end to industrial capitalism.

The American military industial complex might be a particularly obvious example of such behaviour, but really, to think that it's the only one is naive. This is what politics is, the purchase of a politician who then rewards you with what you want. Whether the purchase is with money or votes it's still other peoples' property and liberty that gets taken so that you do indeed get your desire.

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