edit: spelling
this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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I think it's fair to point out the donation patterns of various superpacs, but we should probably also acknowledge that even independent of campaign finance the US stands to gain substantial benefit of maintaining military superiority in the ME.
Couching your understanding entirely inside finance rhetoric falls dangerously close to a conspiracy theory and should be cautioned.
Yeah, but your line of thinking relies on politicians caring more about the country overall than themselves...
They care about defense spending, because they also get "donations" from weapons manufactures.
By no means did I mean they're only taking money from Israel, just that Israel's money comes with a single string:
Obviously they get money from more people
Like, did you see the name at number 2 between the Dem candidate for 2016 and the Dem candidate for 2020/2024?
It's the guy (also a dem) that had gold bars lining the suits in his closest.
They're taking the money, because they'll take money for almost anything.
That's not a conspiracy, corrupt politicians tend to care about money over everything else
I'm just saying the alignment of the lobby funding and the broader american imperial interests is an important reason why this particular issue hasn't moved much in 80 years.
No disagreement that politicians are far too eager to take campaign contributions.
What would you say are the broad american imperial interests? Maintaining regional military control for the sake of oil -- thats the obvious one -- but anything else?
Genuine question here, I haven't thought or read much about it, whereas I have thought/read more about the incentives for politicians to continue pushing the ever bloating "defense" budget.
Edit: Here's not a bad article about it that I just read. Basically: the new cold war with china.
Most of the geopolitics of the region revolves around oil, that much is certainly true.
A lot of the rest of it flows downstream from that; oil pipelines and supply from various places and through the red sea, the relative military strength of adversaries in the region (derived from the wealth of their oil supplies), ect. Most of the modern geopolitical relations in the area can be tied to the struggle over oil in some way.
In my experience as an American, "fuck you pay me" is our only practiced and sacred value, and all our other supposed values are just empty feel good platitudes that allow us to play pretend our culture doesn't revolve around greed and greed worship.
Most Congresspeople got into politics explicitly to be bought, and working your way up in local/state elections is a process both major parties use to measure your ability to both be amenable to and effective at funneling that sweet, sweet bribe money into the party.
That's why the few that don't take Superpac money are usually spoiler candidates with economic policy positions both parties loathe, as yes, the economics of political bribery, especially since Reagan converted his former opposition that used to get bribed by unions to rake the bigger corporate bribe checks as Republicans always did creating today's neoliberals, greatly exceed any other force in American politics.
There's nothing ideological about petrochemical subsidies, for example, that industry can and does just write "donation" checks to our elected leaders, and their bribes trump our ballots every time.
I've no hope of this changing, and have accepted this greed rot is going to be our end sooner rather than later, and that greed is creating a swath of vectors, Climate change induced famines/droughts, AI, fascism rising to defend the mass ignorance required to support such thoughtless corporate greed in the face of all evidence, etc to do just that.