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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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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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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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BY WILLIAM BLUM \ DATELINE: August 10, 2007

Read this or George W. Bush will be president the rest of your life

Simulpost at author’s site: www.killinghope.org

On several occasions I’ve been presented with the argument that contrary to widespread opinion in the anti-war movement and on the left, oil was not really a factor in the the United States invasion and occupation of Iraq. The argument’s key, perhaps sole, point is that the oil companies did not push for the war.

Responding to only this particular point: firstly, the executives of multinational corporations are not in the habit of making public statements concerning vital issues of American foreign policy, either for or against. And we don’t know what the oil company executives said in private to high Washington officials, although we do know that such executives have a lot more access to such officials than you or I, like at Cheney’s secret gatherings. More importantly, we have to distinguish between oil as a fuel and oil as a political weapon.

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“Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney avoided Vietnam with his Mormon missionary work, and high draft lottery number. Last week, after delivering a speech in Bettendorf, Iowa, calling for a “surge of support” for our forces in Iraq, Romney was asked why none of his 5 sons had joined the military. “They are showing support for their nation,” said Romney, “by helping me get elected because they think I’d be a great president.” Romney’s net worth exceeds two hundred million dollars.”

By Rand Clifford

8/11/07

A CorpoMedia masterpiece has recently been published by Michael Barone, senior writer for U.S. News and World Report. The title: New global study points to hope. [1] The study in reference is the Pew Global Attitudes Project’s poll of 47 nations. The Pew Resource Center, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, likes to call itself a Washington Fact Tank. [2]

Could it be that Barone is satisfied with his ad-hominem attacks on Al Gore having minimized the threat of global warming, so in this article at least, Barone felt compelled to feed Americans highly-pure CorpoMedia pap? “Most striking” is how he described the fact that only 1 out of 4 Americans are positive about the direction of the nation. An ensuing flourish of CorpoMedia bait-and-switch seasoned with indirection and omission assigns blame to the low job ratings of W, and congress. Partisanship is trotted out—Democrats are spoiling the party. Then The People get spanked with: “But when one considers that America has not suffered another Sept. 11 and that is has enjoyed a surging and prosperous economy, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that citizens of this most blessed country are registering a verdict that is in tension with reality.”

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“Do we have a sufficient supply of self-control and compassion toward our unknown descendants to curb our boundless desire for ever more merchandise, petrol, electricity and offspring? Can we find some modicum of happiness within deliberately self-proscribed limits?”

By Emily Spence

8/8/07

Until fairly recently, anthropologists and geologists were greatly puzzled by an unusual finding. Their perplexity concerned the almost total disappearance of humankind many years ago. Finally, they were able to put together the various factors related to this happening and came up with the following scenario.

Over much of the Earth, crude stone tools have been found at the geological layer roughly corresponding to 74,000 years ago. Based on the various rock types used, their rate of wear and the number of implements uncovered in each setting, the population could be estimated for many regions of the globe. In addition, migration patterns could be charted based on similarities in tool designs combined with their varying quantities in assorted locales. As the seasons changed and the animal location shifted — so did the hunter-gatherers. The related movement could be mapped for several clans.

Then suddenly, signs of all tools, abruptly and completely, vanished across nearly the entire globe. The disappearance was almost completely universal except, for the most part, in one small region of Eastern Africa. At the same time, there existed, instead of the tools elsewhere, layer upon layer of volcanic ash corresponding to a time period many years in duration.

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By Peter Chamberlin

8/7/7

It should be clear to America, by this point in the “war president’s” reign, that American foreign policy has always been to create its own enemies. Like all of Bush’s predecessors, his “mistakes” in foreign policy have usually strengthened those we are fighting, or those whom we are about to fight. The enormous arms packages that Bush has proposed for Israel and every Sunni state in the Middle East region (except for Shiite Iran) are meant to be used in a planned regional expansion of the war in Iraq. Congress has basically authorized a massive expansion of the war that the People want to be terminated, with the recent votes against Iran that read like the Iraq war resolution. The creation of covert forces to be used inside of Iran and the torrent of weaponry that is now flowing to the Sinoura government in Lebanon are leading elements of the strategy to make war against Iran and all of its allies, even those in Iraq.

The most sinister part of the new strategy to use proxy Sunni forces to fight Iran can be found in the much ballyhooed co-opting of Sunni insurgents as “security contractors” in Iraq. This is a blatant effort by our government to empower the people who are responsible for killing the most Americans and Iraqis. This effort is strengthening the Sunni hand, while it undermines the legitimate democratic Maliki government. The policy of buying off our enemies in Iraq, in order to buy Petraeus a little more time, is still a policy of aiding our own enemies to fight our other enemies. It is the sinister policy of our economic “overlords,” actually playing-out on the battlefield, using American troops as guinea pigs and shock troops to create a state of permanent war in the world – the ultimate marketplace for the “Lords of war.”

As Americans and the puppet Congress bicker over a great drama called, “ending the war,” the real governing powers are giving form to the “terrorist haven” in Anbar Province (that they have been warning us about), which will justify continuing the war there forever. Instead of dealing with both Iran and Saudi Arabia in a search for order inside of Iraq, the government has sided with Saudi Arabia (the birthplace of Al Qaida) in aiding the real enemy in Iraq, to wage an even bigger war against the friends of Iran there. They chose to make Iraq a central front in the ever-changing, politically useful, war on “terrorism,” without regard for the Iraqis who would be caught in the middle. Do we even care if any of them will survive the planned escalation that is coming to their neighborhoods very soon?

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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  

“His actions proved it and give pause to what may be afflicting George Bush, kept secret from the public. A disastrous six and a half year record conclusively shows this man is unfit to serve in the nation’s highest office or in any responsible capacity. Because he’s there taking full advantage, all humanity is held hostage to what’s coming next at the hands of a venal, incompetent and possibly mentally unbalanced or deranged US chief executive.”

By Stephen Lendman

8/6/07

Ferdinand Lundberg (1905 - 1995) was a 20th century economist, journalist, historian and author of such books as The Rich and the Super-Rich: A Study in the Power of Money Today; The Myth of Democracy; Politicians and Other Scoundrels; and the subject of this review - Cracks in the Constitution.

Lundberg’s book was published twenty-seven years ago, yet remains as powerfully important and relevant today as then. Simply put, the book is a blockbuster. It’s must reading to learn what schools to the highest levels never teach about the nation’s most important document that lays out the fundamental law of the land in its Preamble, Seven Articles, Bill of Rights, and 17 other Amendments. Lundberg deconstructs it in depth, separating myth from reality about what he called “the great totem pole of American society.”

He does it in 10 exquisitely written chapters with examples and detail galore to drive home his key message that our most sacred of all documents is flawed. It was crafted by 55 mostly ordinary but wealthy self-serving “wheeler dealers” (among whom only 39 signed), and the result we got and now live with falls far short of the “Rock of Ages” it’s cracked up to be. That notion is pure myth. This review covers in detail how Lundberg smashed it in each chapter.

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By Chip Ward

7/30/07

Resilience. You may not have heard much about it, but brace yourself. You’re going to hear that word a lot in the future. It is what we have too little of as our world slips into unpredictable climate chaos. “Resilience thinking,” the cutting edge of environmental science, may someday replace “efficiency” as the organizing principle of our economy.

Our current economic system is designed to maximize outputs and minimize costs. (That’s what we call efficiency.) Efficiency eliminates redundancy, which is abundant in nature, in favor of finding the one “best” way of doing something — usually “best” means most profitable over the short run — and then doing it that way and that way only. And we aim for control, too, because it is more efficient to command than just let things happen the way they will. Most of our knowledge about how natural systems work is focused on how to get what we want out of them as quickly and cheaply as possible — things like timber, minerals, water, grain, fish, and so on. We’re skilled at breaking systems apart and manipulating the pieces for short-term gain.

Think of resiliency, on the other hand, as the ability of a system to recover from a disturbance. Recovery requires options to that one “best” way of doing things in case that way is blocked or disturbed. A resilient system is adaptable and diverse. It has some redundancy built in. A resilient perspective acknowledges that change is constant and prediction difficult in a world that is complex and dynamic. It understands that when you manipulate the individual pieces of a system, you change that system in unintended ways. Resilience thinking is a new lens for looking at the natural world we are embedded in and the manmade world we have imposed upon it.

In the world today, efficiency rules. The history of our industrial civilization has essentially been the story of gaining control over nature. Water-spilling rivers were dammed and levied; timber-wasting forest fires were suppressed; cattle-eating predators were eliminated; and pesticides, herbicides, and antibiotics were liberally applied to deal with those pesky insects, weeds, and microbes that seemed so intent on wasting what we wanted to use efficiently. Today we are even engineering the genetic codes of plants and animals to make them more efficient.

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By Rand Clifford

8/2/07

Prohibition of cannabis hemp was a mugging, a twisted and diabolical assault on the rights, health and well-being of Americans unparalleled in our history for sheer scope of lasting impact. Never has brazen self interest cost so many people so much for so long. And the number of entrenched industries with profits threatened by hemp have greatly multiplied in number, and political influence.

You might say the assault was officially set in motion by BULLETIN No. 404, released by the United States Department of Agriculture on October 14, 1916, announcing the superiority of using hemp hurds for making paper of highest quality—and cheaply, once mechanization reduced the labor intensity of hemp harvesting. William Randolph Hearst knew the machinery might be at least 10 years away, knew that’s how much time he had to make sure hemp paper did not crush his paper-making empire. He got right to work.

Lies, propaganda and racism Hearst unleashed upon a gullible population with his chain of newspapers was phenomenally effective. The method was exquisitely simple: Because most people knew cannabis hemp as a wonderful resource, change the name of cannabis hemp to “marijuana” then terrorize relentlessly about this horrifying new threat, marijuana…and when the threat of hemp competition became imminent, kill the hemp industry by strangling marijuana. Phenomenally effective, 70 years and counting.

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