Hillary Clinton has been a strong backer of the Iraq war from the outset, never expressed regret over her pro-war posturing, and now is only backing away from the war because it has failed.

Clinton a leftist? When is the last time you saw her on the front lines of a labor struggle?

John Edwards has done more for organized labor in the past year than Hillary Clinton has in her entire career, which began with her close relationship with those anti-worker, anti-union billionaires who own WALMART.

Obama’s legal career was as a civil rights attorney; Clinton represented some of the nation’s largest corporations.

I will not insult the intelligence of our readers by exhaustively detailing Hillary Clinton’s lack of progressive or “left” credentials. Democratic voters already know the truth about Hillary, which is why she will not be the Party’s nominee in 2008.   more »

The Bush surge comes at a critical time for his oil company pals, who are counting on the Iraqi government to deliver on a new oil law, expected to be voted on in the coming weeks and put in effect by March.

The law--“carefully scrutinized,” wrote Pepe Escobar in Asia Times, “by Washington, Big Oil and the International Monetary Fund, but not by Iraqi politicians”--would establish 30-year production-sharing agreements with Western oil companies and bar any future government from nationalizing the oil industry.

“In essence, it’s a game of ‘if you nationalize, we invade you--again.’” Escobar concludes. “So the law fulfills the early-2003 neo-con boast of ‘we are the new OPEC.’”

Beyond oil, Iraq is the centerpiece of U.S. plans to project its military power in the Middle East through the establishment of permanent bases:

"To maintain the legitimacy of U.S. imperialism, Bush needs the pretext of a global war on terror to justify further military intervention, expanded military budgets, concentration of executive power and restrictions on civil liberties,” wrote Anthony Arnove, author of Iraq: The Logic of Withdrawal, in the International Socialist Review.   more »

Down on Main Street, the Armageddon worshipping dispensationalists fielded the jingoistic mobs that subscribe to the notion that a little hellfire and damnation in the Middle East will bring on the end of times.

And, of course, there is that little detail about Iraqi oil reserves. Did I fail to mention Halliburton and the military industrial complex?

Yet for many Americans, launching this illegal war of aggression was just a primal act of vengeance in retribution for the atrocities of 9/11.

This particular constituency enthusiastically lined up to join the war party – without the slightest need for an elaborate WMD hoax.

They just wanted to kill as many Arabs as possible. Did it matter that the secular Baathist regime in Baghdad had nothing to do with Al Qaeda? Not a bit.   more »

They want us to be afraid.

I think we should be afraid - of what we are doing to our planet. But we should not fear our enemies in the world. They will return.

Our western occupation of so many Muslim lands have assured us of this fate. But if we can now end our injustice in the Middle East, Dr Death's 60 years could be over before he leaves his high office. Now there's a thought.

Meanwhile, watch the world and the weather and the turbulence at high altitude.   more »

The trouble with the lobby and the Christian zealots who act as its echo chamber is that they believe their own propaganda about Israel’s equitable social arrangements and immaculate political and legal record in its relations with the Palestinians.

Use the word apartheid and they howl with indignation.

The shock is about thirty years out of date. Israeli writers have used the word apartheid to describe arrangements in the occupied territories for years. Hundreds of prominent South African Jews issued a statement six years ago making the same link.

As in so many things, conventional elite opinion lives in a bubble, believing mere assertion and ranting about anti-Semitism will carry the day.   more »

It’s just a clash of cultures, say Channel 4’s bosses in response to complaints against the reality TV show Big Brother. It’s not really racism, they assure us, just a “culture clash”.

But all this talk of a “culture clash” raging in Channel 4’s twisted world evades the crucial point – that a gang of white contestants are using racist abuse precisely in order to assert the superiority of “their” culture over that of Shilpa Shetty, the Indian contestant.

How else should we understand the taunting of Shilpa Shetty with the phrase “Shilpa Poppadom”, or calls for her to “fuck off home”? A language problem? A misunderstanding?

This constant stream of low level racism emanating from the Big Brother house has taken many a commentator by surprise. “How unrepresentative of modern, multicultural and tolerant Britain those contestants are,” they say.   more »