Through it all Americans seem to be happy, or at least, oblivious. We strive to be happy, or at least, oblivious.

The media, the advertisers, the sports-casters, the ministers and politicians and pundits all promote happiness, or oblivion.

It is a national past-time, being happy, or oblivious, even when, objectively, our make-believe world of rights and liberties and prosperity and moral piety is crashing all around us.

It's almost Super Bowl time. A time of communal myth, making merry and make-believe.

A supercilious nation watches the Super Bowl. It is the cathedral of our values. It is the metaphor for everything 21st Century America has come to stand for. How ironic.   more »

A genocide is engulfing the people of Gaza while a silence engulfs its bystanders.

"Some 1.4 million people, mostly children, are piled up in one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with no freedom of movement, no place to run and no space to hide," wrote the former senior UN relief official Jan Egeland and Jan Eliasson, then foreign minister of Sweden, in Le Figaro.

They described a people "living in a cage", cut off by land, sea and air, with no reliable power and little water, and tortured by hunger and disease and incessant attacks by Israeli troops and planes.

Egeland and Eliasson wrote this four months ago in an attempt to break the silence in Europe, whose obedient alliance with the United States and Israel has sought to reverse the democratic result that brought Hamas to power in last year's Palestinian elections.   more »

All of the Big Three Democratic presidential hopefuls (Edwards, Obama, and Hilary Clinton) mouth the standard childish imperial nonsense about democracy promotion as the motive behind the invasion of Iraq and U.S foreign policy in general.

Hilary Clinton, the “candidate of the foreign policy elite,” told The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Goldberg that “we want to continue to export democracy, but we want to deliver it in digestible steps”.

Yes, we’ve and our friendly allied freedom-exporters the United Kingdom and Israel have just been giving the Iraqis, the Palestinians, the Lebanese and others an overly large serving of “democracy,” delivered through excessively generous helpings of cluster bombs, Blackhawk Helicopter fire and depleted uranium.   more »

An Iranian offer to help the United States stabilize Iraq and end its military support for Hezbollah and Hamas was rejected by Vice-President Dick Cheney in 2003, a former top State Department official told the British Broadcasting Corp.

The State Department was open to the offer, which came in an unsigned letter sent shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Lawrence Wilkerson, former secretary of state Colin Powell's chief of staff, told BBC's Newsnight in a program broadcast Wednesday night. But, Mr. Wilkerson said, Mr. Cheney vetoed the deal.

"We thought it was a very propitious moment" to strike a deal, Mr. Wilkerson said. "But as soon as it got to the White House, and as soon as it got to the Vice-President's office, the old mantra of 'We don't talk to evil' . . . reasserted itself."The AP report above is truly shocking.

Wilkerson says that when the issue was broached with VP Richard Bruce Cheney, Cheney shot down any notion of "talking to evil."   more »

So, thank God, Jade has been evicted. Imagine if she hadn't, that Shilpa had walked the plank? It would have represented a popular endorsement of flagrant racism. The extraordinary fact, of course, is that no one, or virtually no one, ever owns up to racism.

Ron Atkinson described Marcel Desailly as a "fucking lazy, thick nigger" on air and then had the temerity to claim that he was not a racist.

Jade Goody called Shilpa Shetty "Shilpa Fuckawallah" and "Shilpa Poppadom", and then similarly claimed that she is not a racist.

Andy Duncan, Channel 4's chief executive, in a performance which should see him sacked forthwith, claimed on Thursday that "we cannot with certainty say that the comments directed at Shilpa have been racially motivated".   more »

In the early 1990s, when the present era of globalization began, it was asserted that its course was irreversible. The New Economy, given birth by revolutionary changes in the sphere of information technology was immune to business cycles.

There was no challenge to capitalism because the Soviet Union had collapsed and China had begun adapting itself to the new era.

All the national economies were sooner or later going to be integrated into one global entity, and the world was sure to become borderless as nation-state was on its way out.

This process could neither be held back nor reversed. The people opposed to this march of history were dubbed as lunatics or modern day Luddites.   more »