One should always be circumspect with criticism of those who "know" America as well as our putative friends at the Guardian, or who take their economic advice from strong-government Keynesian types who feel that the market needs regulation from those whose field of expertise is in coercion and not trade. When one views such commonplaces as "cutting public spending, deregulating, privatising and even cutting capital gains tax" with horror and alarm, it may be suspected that one's name isn't Friedman or Hayek.
The signal failure of the left dating from Marx is the insistence on regarding economic man as political man; this attempt to cast the current geopolitical ambitions of the Bush administration in economic terms is an unusually embarrassing result. It turns out not to be all of one easily digestible and theorizable piece, actually, and the ostensible relations of the Republicans with Eeevil Corporate America (good grief, does the Democratic party have no corporate donors?) turn out not to be particularly related to the attempt to cut off support and funding for Islamist ambitions by invading Afghanistan and Iraq, after all. Such issues are never entirely unrelated given the complexities of the real world, but those complexities are precisely what forcing this into the intellectual model of economic theory attempts to resolve by ignoring. It just won't wash.