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Three men with the intestinal fortitude to defy a malevolent empire, despite its overwhelming economic and military power….Viva La Revolución!

By Fidel Castro

Originally published at Cuba News Agency

08/20/07

The history of Cuba during the last 140 years is one of struggle to preserve national identity and independence, and the history of the evolution of the American empire, its constant craving to appropriate Cuba and of the horrendous methods that it uses today to hold on to world domination.

Prominent Cuban historians have dealt in depth with these subjects in different periods and in various excellent books which deserve to be readily available to our compatriots. These reflections are addressed especially to the new generations with the aim of helping them learn about very important and decisive events in the destiny of our homeland.

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“Their main goal, in fact, may be no different than other resistance groups - to drive out a repressive occupier (the British in the South in their case) and reclaim their sovereignty. Afterwards they can sort out how to run their country.”

By Stephen Lendman

8/21/07

The Bush administration is required to submit three progress reports on Iraq to Congress in September after it returns from its August recess. The US Comptroller General will issue one around September 1 on how well so-called congressional benchmarks have been met. Near the end of the month, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) conservative think tank will report on “The readiness of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) to assume responsibility for maintaining the territorial integrity of Iraq, denying international terrorists a safe haven, bringing greater security to Iraq’s 18 provinces in the next 12 to 18 months, and bringing an end to sectarian violence to achieve national reconciliation.”

Then, on or about September 15, General David Petraeus, US “Multi-National Force” - Iraq (MNF-I) commander will submit his assessment of progress before multi-billions more funding are released for a war the Pentagon and most others in Washington know is unwinnable and lost. No matter, his report (and the others) will state progress has been made and the “surge” is working even though details will be sketchy in what’s expected to be a vaguely worded deceptive snapshot of contrived positive trends. It’ll fool no one, but Congress will be asked to accept it (and the others) on faith that more time, money, sustained troop levels and patience are needed.

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By Dean Baker
t r u t h o u t | Columnist

Monday 20 August 2007

There is a simple and direct way in which the federal government can help out millions of moderate-income families struggling to keep their homes: They can simply change the rules on foreclosure to allow moderate-income homeowners the option to remain in their homes indefinitely as renters, paying the fair market rent.

This proposal would immediately give moderate-income homeowners a guarantee they would not be thrown out of the street because they cannot meet the terms of a predatory mortgage. It accomplishes this goal without requiring any elaborate new bureaucracy and without requiring a single dollar from the taxpayers. And this plan does not bail out the bankers, hedge funds, and other financial industry types who were speculating in mortgage debt.

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“If that is our choice, just like humanity paid once the price for the ‘will’ of the Almighty Creator through the actions of Hitler, we are once again bound to pay the price for the ‘will’ of God through the actions of Bush.”

By Pablo Ouziel

8/20/07

Many decades ago in Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler stated the following; “I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator.” By now we have all had a chance to evaluate the consequences of that “will”. In 2003 an article by the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, quoted a Palestinian leader claiming Bush said to him; “God told me to strike at Al-Qaeda. And I struck them. And then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did. And now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.”

Studies conducted over the last few decades in regards to the impact of National Socialism on ordinary life in Germany during and after that period have catalogued a serious of civilian attitudes such as keeping silent, looking over one’s shoulder and feeling frightened, and have moved on to evaluate the aftermath of such attitudes and the results of accepting such extreme violence perpetrated on others. A lot of these studies have shown collective signs of guilt, depression and even collective post-traumatic stress disorder.

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Jim Miles reviews William Easterly’s book

8/18/07

This is one of those books that comes so close to getting it right all the way along, and in truth actually does get it right, but not always for the expressed reasons. The reader has to consider the author and the probable intended audience. The author, William Easterly, is a former World Bank research economist; his target should be people similar to himself and those currently in academia. Why else write a book criticizing the global top-down foreign aid/anti-poverty groups (governmental, corporate, or otherwise) if not to target that audience?

Two author comparisons come to mind: Joseph Stiglitz and Thomas Friedman.

Stiglitz is also an ex-World Bank functionary, in a higher position but not there for the same duration. His writing Globalization and its Discontents (W.W. Norton, 2003) is a much more aggressive and hard –hitting work calling for a full reform of the World Bank and the IMF as they are root causes of many of the world’s economic, social, and political problem (they are obviously all inter-related). He arrives at the same conclusion as Easterly, saying “The result [of globalization of the Washington Consensus] for many people has been poverty and for many countries social and political chaos. The IMF has made mistakes in all the areas it has been involved in.”  

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BY CHIP BERLET

Originally at The Public Eye - Vol. 18, No. 3

John Calvin (Jean Cauvin), the main architect of one of protestantism’s most severe sects, and moral inspiration for New England’s Puritans. The curious thing is that while Calvinism, in general, provided a big legitimacy boost to capitalism, the Puritans hewed to a doctrine that had much more in common with old Catholic doctrine in regard to commerce.

Why are increased sentences and the severe punishment of those convicted of crimes so popular and prevalent in U.S. culture? Since the late 1970s our society has accepted increasingly rigid and vengeful ways of punishing those convicted of crimes. Behind this trend is the momentum of 250 years of a strain of religious philosophies brought to our shores by Pilgrims, Puritans, and other colonial settlers influenced by a Protestant theology called Calvinism. Today, many ideas, concepts, and frames of reference in modern American society are legacies of the history of Protestantism as it divided and morphed through Calvinism, revivalist evangelicalism, and fundamentalism. Even people who see themselves as secular and not religious often unconsciously adopt many of these historic cultural legacies while thinking of their ideas as simply common sense.

What is “common sense” for one group, however, is foolish belief for another. According to author George Lakoff, a linguist who studies the linkage between rhetoric and ideas, there is a tremendous gulf between what conservatives and liberals think of as common sense, especially when it comes to issues of moral values. In his recent book Moral Politics, which has gained attention in both media and public debates, Lakoff argues that conservatives base their moral views of social policy on a “Strict Father” model, while liberals base their views on a “Nurturant Parent” model.1

Other scholars have looked at these issues and found similar patterns. According to Axel R. Schaefer, there are three main ideological tendencies in U.S. social reform:

Liberal/Progressive: based on changing systems and institutions to change individual behavior on a collective basis over time.

Calvinist/Free Market: based on changing individual social behavior through punishment.

Evangelical/Revivalist: based on born again conversion to change individual behavior, but still linked to some Calvinist ideas of punishment.2

Coalition Politics

Republicans have forged a broad coalition of two of the three tendencies that involves moderately conservative Protestants who nonetheless hold some traditional Calvinist ideas; Free Market advocates ranging from multinational executives to economic conservatives to libertarian ideologues; and conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists with a core mission of converting people to their particular brand of Christianity. This is a coalition with many fracture points and disagreements. The Calvinist/Free Market sector is already a coalition based on shared ideas about individual responsibility and successes in Free Market or Laissez Faire capitalism- sometimes called neoliberalism to trace it back to an earlier use of the term “liberal” by philosophers who opposed stringent government regulation of the economy.

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By Jason Miller

8/15/07

“The moral duty of man consists of imitating the moral goodness and benificence of God manifested in the creation towards all his creatures. Everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and everything of cruelty to animals is a violation of moral duty.”

–Thomas Paine from The Age of Reason

Despite the trappings of a civilized culture and the incredibly persistent myth of our moral exceptionalism, we in the United States are collectively a group of mean-spirited, depraved barbarians. Sparing our psyches the pangs of conscience by ferociously devouring the corporate media’s seemingly endless supply of rationalizations, euphemisms, historical revisions, distractions, denials, distortions, and affirmations of our pathological self-absorption, we each carry a degree of responsibility in the infliction of immeasurable unnecessary pain and suffering upon the rest of the Earth’s sentient beings.

Deeply integrated into a cultural and economic system in which compassion is considered to be a weakness and in which greed, exploitation, profits, property, winning, bellicosity and selfishness are sacrosanct, we cannot escape the reality that each of us participates in the American version of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” to some extent. Unless we isolate ourselves in a mountain cabin or expatriate, as US citizens we are each damned to be one of the 300 million “Little Eichmanns” who enable our cynical plutocratic masters to dominate the world both economically and militarily.

Struggling to make itself heard above the cacophonous din of sound bites, advertising jingles, clichés, tropes, memes, mythos, and various other manifestations of the false consciousness that afflicts so many of us, the voice of conscience occasionally grabs our attention and violently reminds us how badly we are fucking the rest of the world.

And when it does, the question we each need to ask ourselves is, “How much like “Eich” do I want to be?”

While there are myriad ways we can each minimize our culpability in the egregious crimes of savage capitalism and its most banal representation, consumerism, the struggle to end speciesism is at the vanguard of our much needed moral evolution. Yet is often minimized and ridiculed by sociopolitical thinkers of nearly all stripes.

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By Carolyn Baker

8/10/07

Originally published at Speaking Truth to Power

Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.

–Robert Louis Stevenson–

A few days ago a friend called me just after hearing Michael Panzner on the Thom Hartmann show on Air America. My friend wanted me to read Panzer’s book, Financial Armageddon and see what I thought. Apparently, Panzer’s radio interview remarks were filled with passion and a sense of urgency, and upon reading the book, I experienced the same intensity in the author’s writing which pleasantly surprised me. Here was a financial guru with 25 years’ experience in the stock, bond, and currency markets and a faculty member of the New York Institute of Finance, who unlike Ben Bernanke and the silver-lining pundits of the financial pages, was not telling us that everything is going to be fine or that things will “bounce back in 2010″.

Anyone familiar with my writings knows that I have never claimed to be a fiduciary wizard, but in recent years I have written more on topics related to economics than at any time in my life. I do not believe that all social issues can be resolved if only we change how money works in the United States or the world, but I am profoundly aware of the role of economic issues-perhaps more than militarism, healthcare, education, politics, or any other institution, in the dead-ahead demise of empire. I also notice that few in the left-liberal end of the political spectrum have a firm grasp on economic issues which I suspect comes from a fundamental polarization between activism and financial intelligence-a reality which motivated me a few years ago to write an article entitled “Activists And Accountants: Absolute Allies.”

Michael Panzner is definitely not from the left end of the political spectrum, which makes the contents of Financial Armageddon all the more fascinating and momentous. I came away from the book with both remarkable reinforcement of my position that the United States has entered economic collapse, but also perplexed regarding the myriad blind spots that the author seemed to have regarding the causes of the current economic meltdown. I am not aware of how Panzner may have altered his views since the publication of his book earlier this year, but at the time of writing, Panzner did not mention or was not aware of a number of glaring realities regarding the gluttonous greed-fest that has characterized the United States since the end of World War II. I will address those inconsistencies first, then highlight the places where I think Financial Armageddon is absolutely on-target.

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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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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  

Commentary written by Vi Ransel and edited by Jason Miller

Verse by Vi Ransel

8/7/07

It seems you’ve been able to unite liberals, progressives, conservatives, libertarians and even whacka-wacka Americans not in a righteous condemnation of the Iraq War, illegal dictatorial legislation, the wealth gap, lack of health care, vote fraud, dumbed down education, a bought-off/wholly-owned media and Congress, but simply by reminding them of where the meat they eat comes from. Would that we could inspire such passion over any of the aforementioned topics!

And while comments on well-reasoned pieces by eminent authors such as Chalmers Johnson are slim to none, DEAD ANIMALS got 29 comments - some VERY scary, many of them cartoons of hysteria and caricatures of sentient debate - on its first day up. (at 54 today)

While the author does drive himself right over that cliff of “going-so-far-you-have-a-hard-time-getting-anybody-to-go-along-with-you”, most of us probably agree that concentration camps and torture are wrong in any context, that mistreatment of the least of us leads inevitably to mistreatment of the rest of us and has nothing at all to do, ultimately, with meat, the food chain or population growth, but the ethics (or the lack of) on which we base our actions and the fully-aware acceptance, or denial, of what is being done in our name.

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