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By Abdul Basit

8/29/07

As natural calamities like hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and droughts continue ceaselessly on one hand while endless and inconclusive debates about the reasons for Climate Change take place on the other, the time for firm action to counter Climate Change is getting shorter and the options for slowing the impact of Global Warming are getting fewer.

Expounding upon my article ‘Manifesto to counter global warming and climate change’, in which I stressed the importance of sustainable development, I would like to further address some of the challenges and hurdles that are slowing the implementation of policies and programs to counter Climate Change.

Sponsored Intellectuals

One of the main hindrances to Climate Change resolution is the frequent dissemination of specious reports by Climate Change deniers sponsored by certain oil corporations which are creating confusion among the general public. These sponsored intellectuals of the establishment and the corporatocracy are trying to find new reasons to prevent actions to counter Climate Change, seldom realizing that by their action they are endangering the very existence of mankind for meager monetary inducements. Some of the most common arguments of these sponsored intellectuals are that these natural disasters are part of the cyclical process and all measures to counter it are futile.

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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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By Adam Engel

8/28/07

The Possessed Man is not a bad man, nor a good one. He is terrified. Alone among friends and family, he “works” to support his family, but is not exactly sure of what he does. He “administrates creative product strategies,” according to the Job Description on file at Human Resources.

The Health Insurance covers his wife and two kids, both under seven years of age and subject to all manner of illness and disease. Then there were the pregnancies themselves, and the drugs he must take daily to function at his job without drinking, or veering into violence, or bursting into tears. He’s covered by the company plan, but loopholes open and money falls through. Deductibles. Co-payments.

He is no longer interested in his friends, the few that he still has, or in having friends at all. What good are they, except to drink with, and he’s not supposed to drink while on his pills — though he does anyway. And don’t think this is all confidential, that they don’t know, the ‘they’ at the company, whoever they might be, that he sees a head-drugger to stay on top of things.

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By Jason Miller

8/27/07

“It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, the capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.”

–Malcolm X

Striving with the unwavering dedication of true believers and slaves to the grind, those of us who exist within the geographic, social, cultural, economic, and political boundaries of the United States are collectively destroying the Earth.

With dutiful efforts, heavily sedated consciences, and sweet obliviousness to the depth of our depravity, we toil away at our chosen or assigned tasks. After all, predatory plutocrats like “Mitt” Romney would be impotent without his minions—the hundreds of millions of wage slaves exercising their “right to work” (for as small a wage as they desire) while obediently manning the bulwarks of a system so putrid that were it possible to feed it to a pig, our porcine friend would wretch his guts out.

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By Joe Bageant

8/24/07

On televisions you see police cars surround the car of a “terror suspect.” … When you learn he is a neurosurgeon whose wife and baby were in the car with him, you might think he probably just pulled over when the police seemed to want him to, but only if you were still capable of using your own brain. After all, his name is Mohammed and his wife wears a headscarf. … So maybe you’ll just ignore what your brain was trying to say, which is that neurosurgeons have a lot invested in their careers. … But the media are so hard to ignore. Even when you make a point of ignoring them, they are always there, flickering around the edges, burning impressions you can’t quite get rid of. … But it was all so tidy and comfortable in that TV/mainstream news site world. Meanwhile, though no evidence of guilt has been offered, the discussion zooms ahead. Why can’t everyone else see it?

—Jennifer, in Los Angeles

Needless to say, the Middle Eastern doctors accused of terrorism in Scotland may be guilty as hell. Mohammed Asha may be another one of your standard terror wogs who, as we all know by now, relish the idea of prison or perhaps blowing his wife and baby up for Allah.

But having been in the media business one way or another for almost 40 years, and having watched it increasingly take on a life of its own, I know that nothing of significance in the news is what it appears to be. This is not the result of some media conspiracy, mind you, but rather that the people working in the media have internalized the process so thoroughly they do not even know they are conditioned creatures in a larger corporate/state machine. Put simply, Katie Couric and the dumbshits grinding out your local paper actually believe they are in the news business. In today’s system, everybody is a patsy for the new corporate global order of things — the well-coiffed talking head, the brain dead audience, even the terrorists themselves. All play out their parts in our holographic image and information process.

All Americans, regardless of caste, live in a culture woven of self-referential illusions. Like a holographic simulation, each part refers exclusively back to the whole, and the whole refers exclusively back to the parts. All else is excluded by this simulated reality. Consequently, social realism in this country is a television commercial for America, a simulated republic of eagles and big box stores, a good place to live so long as we never stray outside the hologram. The corporate simulacrum of life has penetrated us so deeply it now dominates the mind’s interior landscape with its celebrities and commercial images. Within the hologram sparkles the culture-generating industry, spinning out our unreality like cotton candy.

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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 Vi Ransel

8/24/07

Sisyphus, a Corinthian king
of Greek mythology,
was condemned by Olympian gods
to pay a heavy price for his greed

by rolling an enormous stone
to the peak of a steep hill’s crown,
and every time he’d reach the top,
the stone quickly rolled back down.

* * * * * *

Throughout the Dark Ages of Europe
the mass of the medieval population
became the virtual slaves of the Rich
through the process of feudalization.

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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 Vi Ransel

8/23/07

While the game is rigged
in favor of the Rich,
they still depend
on us
to spend enough
to support them in the style
to which we’ve allowed them
to become accustomed.

When we turn around
and make a gift to them
of the wages
we slave so hard to make
by exchanging them
for mindless consumer fluff
we’re saying that it’s OK

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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

“Pageantry like some ridiculous game show churns along stronger than ever, where the likes of Mitt Romney spend $1000 per vote in straw polls.”

By Rand Clifford

8/22/07

“Never smarten up a chump, and never give a sucker an even break.”

—W.C. Fields

Government of, by and for corporations (CorpoGov) is closing the noose, while recourse for The People in post 9-11 America lie eviscerated to the point of simple dissent becoming a crime. So how might we temper CorpoGov’s assault on our Constitution, us, the world’s people—even the natural systems that support life on Earth? Have we any chance of nudging CorpoGov toward a revolution in clean alternative energies and away from obsession with controlling most of the world’s remaining fossil energy? Could any example of CorpoGov’s character shout louder than all the murder and destruction to dominate a resource that is destroying us?

“If our nation is ever taken over, it will be taken over from within.”

—President James Madison

Might we vote our way back to reason? Astonishingly, a majority of Americans still imagine their vote has influence on the federal level—an illusion vast resources are squandered to maintain. Pageantry like some ridiculous game show churns along stronger than ever, where the likes of Mitt Romney spend $1000 per vote in straw polls. But when the lying and posturing, spending and manipulation recede for some deep breaths of AIPAC before the next election show, those same elite responsible for handing occupation of the White House to another of the Bush Crime Family for two terms will have long before made our choice. Voters clearly rejected W, twice, but look at what has happened.

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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

Stephen Harper, the George Bush of the “Great White North”, fervently supports the SPP and its ostensible beneficence to “the people.”

By Si Contino

8/20/07

Free Trade was an idea that was born at the close of the Second World War. It continued to gain momentum within elite circles during the 1960’s; and by 1986 was codified into global law when the World Trade Organization was founded.

With the birth of the North American Free Trade Agreement under the Clinton Administration, global regulations began being deeply integrated, furtively, into every aspect of law within the United States, Canada and Mexico. This process was accelerated in 2005 under the auspices of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America; a plan to facilitate the free movement of goods, services and people throughout our continent.

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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

8/21/07

Dying in a dying Empire on a dying Planet the Terror! It started out like — I mean, I did well in
school, college and I didn’t I didn’t know it was either grad school or the Corporate cubicle so the
cubicle until almost mad returned to grad school.

Afterwards, the cubicle, only this time despite scholarships stipends I owed money so
HAD to be cubicle but didn’t if only I’d the courage to — I mean I was young, strong
could have lived anywhere done anything — the rat-hole — absentee landlord — but home
expensive studio-cube 600 dollars then $1850/month this on 10th and B, where Ginsberg
lived and Charlie Parker.

Then the Condition. Transfusion every year or so alright. Then every two months, then one
month, now two weeks.

Disability. But even with my wife’s job insurance and living with relatives not
enough so supplement free-lancing for Corporate PR selling (ha, ha) “Green”
products to clueless “environmentally conscious consumers.”

Work at home — careful: don’t make more than the $1200 Disability allows — my laptop
propped on pillows.

My cubicle my deathbed.

Adam Engel can be reached at

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