It's easy for Americans to forget that the food they eat doesn't magically appear on a supermarket shelf.

Look Congress has allocated more money to finance the upcoming Iraqi elections than it has for the American elections. There's something wrong with that.

Sharia has become an increasingly significant force in American capitalism thanks to the embrace by Wall Street and the U.S. government of so-called Sharia-Compliant Finance. Indeed this country's taxpayers now own the largest purveyor of sharia-compliant insurance products in the world: AIG.

To finance this trade deficit the U.S. has to borrow from the rest of the world or sell American assets like stocks businesses and real estate to the rest of the world.

We all know that Americans love their statistics - in sport obviously. And in finance too.

Americans have an abiding belief in their ability to control reality by purely material means... airline insurance replaces the fear of death with the comforting prospect of cash.

Sides are being divided now. It's very obvious. So if you're on the other side of the fence you're suddenly anti-American. It's breeding fear of being on the wrong side.

Americans have discovered fear.

Americans need never fear their government because of the advantage of being armed which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.

Roosevelt's declaration that Americans had 'nothing to fear but fear itself' was a glorious piece of inspirational rhetoric and just as gloriously wrong.