> Much of our foreign policy is driven by unsatiable corporate
>pressures to sell military hardware to both the Defense Department
>and directly to foreign dictators. This happens even if it goes
>against the interests of our country, taxpayers and the principle of
>prudently allocated public budgets. Weapons manufactures foist
>weapons systems onto the Pentagon, working through a PAC-greased,
>supine Congress. Lower level Pentagon analysts are left to fume in
>private, powerless to stop the waste and distortions of our policies.
To claim that weapons sales drive U.S. foreign policy is pretty weird, but then Ralph wouldn't let Tim write about the CIA in Multinational Monitor. Ralph seems able only to understand malfeasance, not the normal operations of capitalism and/or imperialism (words I'm sure he'd frown at, just like he does at the word "patriarchy," which is just "sociological gobbledygook.") And sure there's a lot of legal corruption in the arms-buying process, but they don't buy the stuff only for that reason - if you want to rule the world, you've got to have the army to enforce it. A phrase like "distortions of our policies" assumes that there's some inner core of goodness being corrupted by a bad process.
Doug