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By Charles Sullivan

11/4/07

It is clear that the US media moguls would have us believe that the catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq was a sincere effort to promote freedom and democracy in the Middle East, gone awry. But we must remember that everything associated with capitalism is about marketing: making the people believe that things and events are the opposite of what they really are, and creating artificial wants that neither benefit the individual nor society, while simultaneously embellishing corporate profits.

This understanding would have been equally evident in the mainstream media’s buildup to the war had we a less propagandized, better read, and more informed citizenry. Even the politically naïve should have known that Saddam Hussein’s threat to the US, so vividly hyped in the media, was pure marketing propaganda.

But the majority of the people bought it, and now we have no choice but to live with our purchase. Short of a major social upheaval, we are going to be in Iraq for a very long time, and the death toll will continue to rise, especially for the Iraqis—the unwilling recipients of our corporate benevolence delivered through carpet bombs, terror, and torture. For these are the undeniable legacy of our foreign policies, and the illegal, amoral, acquisition of property by blunt force trauma.

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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

“Saddest of all is the fact that Arab masses lack the ability to even vent their frustrations, having lived under a tight grip for decades and crushed mercilessly whenever they dared to march for their rights.”

By Ramzy Baroud

11/4/07

The ongoing socio-economic and political ills that mar potential progress in Middle Eastern countries can largely be attributed to the ill-defined foreign policy of the United States. Utterly desperate situations have arisen whereby US clients rule with an iron fist, making prospects for a meaningful democracy sit at an all-time low. However it would be nothing less than self-deception to elucidate Arab social, economic and political ailments exclusively on US-Israeli military and political belligerency; there needs to be an element of self-reflection and responsibility to make viable any pragmatic steps towards improvement and justice.

The Arab Human Development Reports list political and economic regressions, rampant corruption, utter inequality, oppression of women, and indeed men, lack of cohesion, planning, and forward thinking as significant problems in Arab countries. The 2005 report laboured to put a positive spin on negative situations, choosing to focus on the empowerment of Arab women, who, in some Arab societies are denied access to schools, economic independence and political representation.

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By Steven Jonas

11/4/07

Over the past couple of weeks, Rush Limbaugh has been holding forth on the San Diego fires. He has been particularly forthright on the difference between how they have been responded to compared to that of the Katrina Disaster. Rush Limbaugh is not, as Keith Olbermann likes to characterize him, a comedian. Rush Limbaugh is a serious political figure in the United States who just sometimes sounds like a comedian in that he seems to be doing self-parody, even when in his own mind, he is deadly serious.

For example, no joke, Limbaugh was one of the key outside figures brought into Washington by Newt Gingrich in December 1994 to run serious seminars (seriously, folks) for the incoming “Gingrich Class” of then newly elected Congressmen. He is, after all, an expert, one of the paramount practitioners in the use of the paramount Lee Atwater political tactic of “Always Attack, Never Defend.” He is a supreme slayer of messengers, another prize Atwater technique. The other most prominent current practitioners are the other two-thirds of O’RHannibaugh, BushCheney themselves, and Hannity’s candidate for President, Rudy Giuliani, perhaps the best practitioner of all. Giuliani is so good at it, so natural with it that one might think that it is embedded in his genes. So if your two most prominent political tactics are, as they were for Gingrich, always attacking and never defending and killing the messenger(s), who better to instruct his acolytes than Limbaugh.

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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

“She photographed friends and strangers on the “Hip Scene” for art; models and advertisements for money. Still did jobs for the Ad Agency. Occasionally.”

By Adam Engel

11/4/07

The Photographer exhibited downtown. Galleries, museums. Big hit in the “art community”, but not in the infallible system that measures the worth of all things, from “culture” to fruit salad: The Market. Did it, is it, or will it make/be making money? If so, Artist + Sales = Success, anywhere from up-and-coming novice to assiduous crafts-man to Genius, depending on The Market’s sober assessment.

Thus far, The Photographer had merited barely a “fresh new face,” but her first book of photographs, DOWN IN THE CITY, published several years ago to great praise, many awards and dismal sales, was “discovered” by the wife of a Big Media Executive who convinced his more conservative colleagues that the theme of young, gritty Beautiful people should be tested, on television, as a pilot for a potential series. She’d be paid for the pilot, and if the show became a series, a share in the residuals would be hers — the industry standard for “story idea.” So the Photographer might become a very talented artist indeed once the pilot was shown across The Nation. And she was working on a second book.

We’d met at the Ad Agency, when I wrote copy and she photographed, free-lance, for Graphics and Design. It was she who took the photograph for my EARN advertisement and added the necessary effects.

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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 Pablo Ouziel

11/1/07

As European officials express concern about the fact that the Bush administration’s designation of Iranian agencies and firms as supporters of terrorism could block relations with Tehran for years to come, President Vladimir Putin’s description of these new U.S. sanctions, as America “running around like a madman with a razor blade in his hand,” seems appropriate and worrisome.

The problem is that Europe has been enchanted by America’s spread of dollar-democracy and through it has become America’s closest ‘ally’. Europe’s formal political figures no longer represent the voice of the people but the interests of the ruling elites, all of whom are currently courteous to the American Empire. Without being aware, people on the streets in Europe are not really discussing their role in the international arena, but are merely reacting to America’s global expectations.

Meanwhile in America, the US Air Force has just asked Congress for $88m to equip B2 stealth bombers with racks strong enough carry Big Blu bombs referred to as ‘the Mother of All Bombs’, and the US military is building a forward base in Iraq called Combat Outpost Shocker, just five miles from the Iranian border. About this, Robert Byrd, a Democrat member of the Senate Armed Services Committee is saying that action taken by the Bush administration, “raises the spectre of an intensified effort to make the case for an invasion of Iran”.

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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

11/01/07

Monthly visit to The City Haven for Adults. See Uncle Joe. Former salesman, private detective, writer of detective novels, movies. Money stashed. Or so I’d been told. Also told he’d gambled it away. Then again, who was paying for The Haven? Senescence ain’t cheap, unless you live it on the streets, potential guest cadaver of “The Death Squad.”

He’d been a newspaper columnist, numismatist, a player of horses. He never married, though, allegedly, women craved him, even in The Haven for Adults.

Old folks made me young. But still. I feared them. Impatient me perturbed. Portraits of infirmity to come. Incontinent inadvertent experts: Time’s flash passage.

Haven no heaven. Stink of piss. Lemon cleanser. Mothballs. Time a damp fart in slow air. Reality small real-estate. The Body domicile of ghosts, spun-out spiders, rusty pipes. A ticking bomb. Wind through pores of crinkly skin. Small pleasures of walking. The Elders don’t produce. Neither work, nor children. Sure, The Past — “but what have you done for me lately?”

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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 Paul A. Moore

11/1/07

One of the corporate wrecking balls brought down recently on America’s public schools is “data driven” education. The charade is a creation of the Business Roundtable and other forces that dream of a privatized school system that serves only their global profit making schemes.

Because their sinister intentions must be kept on the down low, data driven education is packaged and sold as economical but revolutionary pedagogy come to the classroom. Absurdity is the inevitable result. And so it is that our system of universal public education is now trapped in a scene from Woody Allen’s farce Bananas. The new leader has decreed that, “From this day on the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16-years-old are now…16-years-old!”

Promoting insanity in the classroom has proven to be quite an effective weapon of public school destruction. Teachers are being broken down and driven away at an unprecedented rate. One in five new teachers will not make it through their first year. Half of them will be gone inside of five years.

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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

11/01/07

“free” markets “free” trade shit 9/11 aberrant anecdote afghanistan
africa agitprop aipac american delusion american dream american empire american
exceptionalism american illusion american infantilization american
nightmare animal cruelty anomie aol apartheid asymmetrical war atomic
bombs banality of evil barbarism betrayal big brother big oil big pharma blackwater
bloated bankers bolivarian revolution bourgeoisie brutality bullying burma calvinism
capitalism censorship cheney china christian fundamentalism cia clarence thomas
climate change clinton collapse of civilization collapsing infrastructure confused
establishmentarians conservatism consumerism corporate media lies corporate
perfidy corporatism credit crime and punishment crony capitalism cultural genocide
cultural inanity dalits darfur dea debt slavery democratic duplicity depraved aristocracy
disposable human beings divide and conquer duopoly earth economic collapse
education gap edward bernays empathy deficient equality myths eulogy
exploitation factory farming false assurance false consciousness fascism
fashionable social causes faux christians faux democracy fcat fear mongering
finance capital fire the bastards forced prostitution fundamental christians
gaza genocide george w. bush gilded age gop guns hatred healthcare piracy
hologram homeless human trafficking humanitarian imperialism
hyper-individualism hypocrisy illegal occupation imf immigration impending
doom imperialism impotent centrism inhumanity injustice insularity
intellectual chains intellectual elitism interdependence iraq islamophobia israel
aggression israel israel lobby israeli ethnic cleansing israeli war
crimes kafkaesque killing fields klan latin america law of the jungle
lebanon liberalism liberals libertarian lies loyal opposition macho
bullshit madison avenue scum mainstream media propagandists
malevolence manipulation martial law meat industrial complex media
whoredom media whores memorial mendacious punditry mercenaries
microsoft militarism military brothels military industrial complex
shit money and the word money worship moral cowardice moral injury
moral rot narcissism national debt native american genocide nato
neocolonialism neocons neoliberalism no child left behind nobel lies
nsa nuclear proliferation nuclear weapons obesity obfuscation oil
oil market opportunists oppression oprah osama bin laden pakistan
palliative measures patriarchy patriot act peak oil perverse justice
plutocracy pol pot police state ponerology poverty prison industrial
complex propaganda prositution quagmires quiet desperation r-complex
rabid centrism racism rape raping the earth reactionaries reaganites red scare
religious right republican filth resistance fighters resource wars
right wing degenerates rugged stupidity savage capitalism secession
sectarian violence separate and unequal sex slaves sexual slavery
shattered moral compass shredding the constitution simulacrum
snatching defeat from the jaws of victory social darwinism social
unrest souless capitalists species extinction speciesism spiritual
bondage starvation state terrorism superiority complex supreme court
sustainability television think tank whores torture totalitarianism
united nations us imperialism us war crimes us/israeli war crimes
vietnam violence wage slavery war war crimes war on drugs war on
terror war on the poor war profiteering war victims wealth divide
weltschmerz white man’s burden wholesale terror wholesale terrorism
whores of academia working class world bank wto xenophobia zionism

adam engel, etc.