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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

For Labor had won nothing but a royal reaming from a scheming cabal of Vultures who were succeeding in picking the corpse of the American Working Class clean…..

By Vi Ransel

9/30/07

That craven caricature of freedom, the weekend,
along with the minumum wage
and their insidious partner, the 8-hour day,
which Labor pretends to believe it ripped
from the Vultures of Great Wealth’s
rigor mortis-like grip
and touts as a hard-won victory,
are simply Pyrrhic palliatives of symptoms,
not the cure of the underlying disease.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

BY GARY CORSERI

9/23/07

They gave us democracy,
But took our freedom.
We had the right to vote,
But it didn’t matter.
We had the right to refuse to sing
“The Star-Spangled Banner”—
But not if we valued our lives.

We could chant, “Not in my name,”
But they took our names away.
We could work hard,
But they taxed us into the ground.
We could march against War,
But they sent us to War
And taught our children to kill
Someone else’s children.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Emily Spence

9/13/07

What an enjoyable summer many Americans experienced! Living in their own small air conditioned bubbles, they confirmed that whatever happened in the outside environment could be of little concern. Detached from the natural world, they passed between various cool zones with relative ease and no discomfort.

So for many, did it matter, for instance, that it was the hottest July on record for Wyoming, Montana and Idaho according to the NOAA National Weather Service? Who cared that Boise, Idaho’s average high temperature, a blistering 98.6 degrees F (37 degrees C), was more than nine degrees F (five degrees C) above average so that July 2007 was Boise’s hottest month ever documented? What difference did it make that drought conditions worsened in parts of the northern Rockies, northern Plains, Midwest, and mid-Atlantic while more than 5 million parched acres burned in the contiguous U.S. by early August according to the National Interagency Fire Center? So what that August was even worse [1]? Likewise, so it goes relative to the floods, hurricanes, droughts and other weather related extremes being faced in Europe, Australia, Africa, and all other land masses. So what if countless species are slowly being destroyed in the process while a rapidly increasing amount of terrain is rendered unusable for any life [2]?

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Jason Miller

9/11/07

“The other kids were all into black power,” Oprah told the Tribune in the mid-1980s. But “I wasn’t a dashiki kind of woman … Excellence was the best deterrent to racism and that became my philosophy.”

Excellence indeed. Few would deny that Oprah Winfrey has achieved an extraordinary degree of THAT, at least by our society’s warped standards. Witty, articulate, attractive, beloved by tens of millions, and fabulously wealthy, she is the “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps” queen of a vast media empire. Oprah is a living embodiment of the American Dream. What is perhaps most inspiring to her genuflecting disciples is that Oprah rose to her stratospheric position of wealth and influence from an impoverished start in a socioeconomic hierarchy still largely dominated by white males.

Oprah Winfrey ostensibly possesses the mythical Midas Touch, a generous spirit, deep spiritual wisdom, and, in the eyes of those blinded by their adoration, the credentials of a saint. Yet despite appearing destined for canonization, Oprah injects heavy doses of infectious pus into the already deeply abscessed wound of the American psyche.

How could anyone who’s noted for having said, “Let your light shine. Shine within you so that it can shine on someone else. Let your light shine,” have such a pernicious effect on our culture?

Let’s “count the ways…with a passion put to use.”

To truly understand the depth of the damage Oprah inflicts on our society, we need to step outside of our bourgeois indoctrination and see her for what she truly represents. Manifesting the Horatio Alger Myth on steroids, Oprah is a wet dream come true for our criminal class of ruling elites sometimes referred to as the plutocracy. She provides them with “irrefutable” and ubiquitous anecdotal evidence which “proves” the idiotic delusion that America is a meritocracy where everyone has a realistic chance of getting rich, if they just work hard enough. The reality is that the richest 20% of US Americans own over 80% of the wealth and the long-term trend has been toward an ever increasing concentration of treasure into a smaller number of strong-boxes(1).

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

George W. Bush loves photo ops with black people, especially kids. Here he is in St. Louis promoting the discredited No Child Left Behind act. The slogan was stolen from the Children’s Defense Fund and to add insult to injury, the act is leaving every child behind.
(Photo and caption credited to Freedom Writer)

By Emily Spence

9/3/04

Part Two: Down in the Trenches, Anecdotal Evidence from the Classroom:

The first day that I substitute taught for the “T” * school district, it was in a special education school during the winter. I was elated to have been selected for a position on the day after I completed my paperwork!

All considered, I could barely wait to meet my class of eight and nine year olds who had severe dyslexia compounded by other problems, such as legal blindness, ADD and other afflictions.

Indeed, all was going fairly well with them except during rest hour before which I had placed the children on the floor around my chair. Suddenly, after settling them down, one of the boys abruptly arose from his blanket and stomped on the head of a smaller boy whose glasses then shattered while his face got all bloodied from the glass and the blows.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Carolyn Baker

9/3/07

Originally published at Speaking Truth to Power

“We have only begun to see the reverberations of the mortgage meltdown. They will be as sweeping and mindboggling as global warming or an earthquake measuring 10 on the Richter scale.”

I’m an historian, not an economist, so anything about economics-macro, micro-whatever, has been as foreign to me for most of my adult life as soil samples from Mars. But several years ago I had an epiphany that shattered my then-left-liberal/progressive world. I awakened from decades of delusion that I could adequately grasp world and national events without understanding the essential nature of how money works in the capitalist economy in which I live. I realized that until I acquired that understanding, all of the other subjects I preferred to talk about-war, social justice, race, gender, environment, energy depletion, civil liberties, globalization, and many more were inextricably connected with the financial machinations of the imperial beast within whose belly I reside. Today, I do not claim for one moment to be an authority on economic issues, but I have studied the works of some folks who are, such as Catherine Austin Fitts, Michael Panzner, Michael Hudson, John Crudele, Paul Grignon, and Hazel Henderson.

From them I have learned to more skillfully read the tea leaves of the current economic upheaval that is brewing within the United States and is now rippling into the global financial markets. Furthermore, I have realized that my government and the economy of the United States is being run as a criminal syndicate, and that the most useful way to understand the subprime mortgage meltdown and its implications was to familiarize myself with the economics of Tony Soprano, that infamous main character of the HBO TV series “The Sopranos”, Mr. King of New Jersey “waste management” and proprietor of the Bada Bing.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Jonathan Lenglain

8/29/07

Power and property is concentrating in ever fewer hands, and things are beginning to hurt us in a way that we seek to wrest that power from the bloodlines of the privileged few. Poor Americans are numb and discouraged. Everywhere they hear that they live in a free country where they call the shots, yet their political agenda never comes close to the president’s desk. Every day, Congress deals directly with the concerns of big business lobbyists camping on the floors of Congress, while the White House brokers deals with contractors in Iraq or Afghanistan. Never mind sweeping reforms improving the health care, housing, and tax systems, which are on the agenda of America’s poor. And now that we’ve witnessed the most flamboyant series of illegal activities committed by our government at home and abroad in the name of anti-terrorism, are we finally ready for action?

It seems that things are in such a state that even Alexander Hamilton, the great conservative antagonist to the men we love to quote so much (like Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Patrick Henry,) would be on our side. He would be at the forefront of movements to tear things down, and rebuild something new.

Of course, this is the Hamilton credited with building the current economic system almost single-handedly. The man who wanted big government under the patronage of the wealthy, who thought a Bill of Rights was stupid, and whose last words were “Our real disease is DEMOCRACY.”

But Hamilton was a real Genius in a Mozartian sense, and so his flamboyant failings are colorful reminders that this master nation-builder was just human after all. Hamilton was also a slave-abolitionist, a prolific writer devoted to a free-press, and an honorable gentleman who hated corruption, greed, and especially incompetent government.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

“While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”

–Eugene Debs, American Socialist

By Paul A. Donovan

8/23/07

“The only thing most American know about socialism is they don’t like it. They have been led to believe that socialism is something to be either ridiculed as impractical, or feared as an instrument of the devil.”

–Leo Huberman

It is in fact difficult to shed light on what a socialist United States will look like, mostly because many think socialism, or other forms of publicly owned, and democratically controlled economies is an impossible goal to achieve in our country, mostly due to the hyper capitalist mentality of our nation, the strength of our ruling classes, and the overwhelmingly successful propaganda apparatus of the corporate system, which comprises the media, educational system, and many other venues, including the religious and political pulpit, and is reflected in the apathy, alarming confusion, and at times, indifference of our nation’s citizens, many of whom simply don’t know, don’t want to know, or don’t care where this country is headed (for a terrific insight into this puzzling and exasperating mindset I strongly recommend Deer Hunting with Jesus, by Joe Bageant, who also happens to be one of Cyrano’s senior contributing editors).

However, the capitalist systems own irrepressible dynamics and “make up”—which easily translate into a bill of indictment—are bringing about yet another wave of global repulsion and re-awakenings. In this framework, when I speak of this dynamic I am referring not so much to the more technical aspects of this phenomenon, but to its mass-perceived aspects, such as the following (in no particular order):

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

By Emily Spence

8/15/07

In Massachusetts of late, there’s been a recurrent radio commercial. It goes something like this: There are some great deals on foreclosed homes — really GRRREAAT! Someone had a loss and that is sad, but YOU can greatly benefit by the wonderful opportunity. So, please call [telephone number]. You will be happy you did. Imagine how well YOU can make out and win BIG! Boy, do we have a bargain for you!

When I hear this, I’m repulsed and don’t think about how well I could gain off of other people’s tragedies. Instead, I think of the plot of “The House of Sand and Fog,” an account in which an incredible amount of pain and deaths result from, amongst other causes, decent people trying to take advantage of a system gone terribly wrong.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online and its semi-autonomous subsections (Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop) would be delighted to periodically email you links to the most recent material and timeless classics available on our diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to  

by Adam Engel

8/9/07

Maybe we’ve never been lied to at all. It’s in the constitution’s
deceptively democratic language and supporting literature such as the
Federalist papers and “oppositional” writings by Madison and Jefferson
and the gang. They all wanted to keep their property, they just couldn’t
agree on the most subtle, persuasive, game plan.

The country IS and has always been a democracy for Our Masters — rich,
propertied, white men. It is a democracy for THEM to this day,
regardless of what BuschCo, hired out by the real owners of America,
does to the rest of us. Our Masters will vote democratically on
corporate boards. Our Masters’ “public” servants will vote
democratically in Congress, each representative voting in accordance
with his/her affiliated corporate interest whose board democratically
selected him or her for office.

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