A truly horrible example of how corporate interests own our politicians and control government policy. Private health providers have donated £16,285,437 trousered by the coalition parties who are privatising NHS services to them. Fantastic work by Eoin Clarke.

When I tell audiences that corporate interests control politicians, they want to agree but, having seen any establishment-critical analysis labeled “conspiracy theory”, some are often worried that I am going to start fantasising about the Illuminati, or at best am postulating an academic construct. I am not. I am talking about very real business deals and very real sums of money getting behind the politicians’ career-promotion, party funding and thus personal financial interest.

So as the NHS is ruined by “marketisation” and billions of taxpayers money go into private pockets as profit for NHS “providers”, you know that Cameron and Clegg have been bought, simple as that.

The same dynamic was true of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 2,000 US troops have now died in Afghanistan, but very real profits indeed have been made, amounting to hundreds of billions, by arms manufacturers, military contractors like Halliburton and companies owned by the Karimov family, and of course the private mercenary hired killers like Aegis. There are thousands of people who made millions out of the wars and some who made hundreds of millions. They are not the ones who did any of the dying. They give a lot of money to, and mingle a lot with, politicians.

This business report from the BBC was given toltally without irony:

Work to re-equip UK and US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has helped profits to soar at defence group BAE Systems. The UK’s largest defence firm, BAE made a pre-tax profit of ’657m ($1.4bn), compared with ’378m a year earlier. BAE said the “high tempo” of UK and US military operations was increasing demand for land systems to support armed forces overseas. BAE, which is facing an anti-corruption probe by US authorities, saw its half-year revenues rise by 10%. The firm said its sales had benefited from its US operations, which achieved organic sales growth of 12% during the period. Overall sales at BAE’s Land & Armaments business, which includes everything from tanks to munitions, rose 43%.

And that is before you get to the oil companies waiting to come in and hoover up the profit from “liberated” assets. I repeat, this is not an academic construct. While I was Ambassador in Uzbekistan, I learnt the hard way the industrial scale torture, repression and state compulsion of child labour were of no importance compared to the vested interests of the powerful.

The sad truth is, of course, that New Labour were no better. As they look well placed to come back to power, you are going to see some of those private donations heading their way shortly. They massively forwarded the “market driven” model of NHS privatisation, and of course presided over the Great Banking Pozni Scheme while Mandelson, Bliar and Brown hovered around the rich soliciting donations. They also received very large donations from BAE, who made billions from the Iraq War, while Blair intervened to prevent BAE executives facing criminal bribery charges as this was “against the national interest”.

The mainstream parties are bought and sold, merely a collection of alternative parcels of rogues. The politicians are, virtually without exception, sickening examples of self-seeking, profiteering and aggrandisement. What astonishes me is that many people apparently think bringing back the first lot of war criminals will make things better.

My suspicion is that the percentage splits between parties by pollsters are an illusion, and a large majority are sick of all of them. Society had not yet found a way to express that, but it will.