•TPC•

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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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By Usman Khalid

8/3/07

The entire world was shocked beyond belief when the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon building were struck on 9/11 by US planes hijacked by Arab young men. There was sympathy for the victims and justifiable anger in America. But the US response in invading the already devastated country of Afghanistan was excessive. More important, the USA did not obtain the endorsement of the UN Security Council and the invasion violated International Law. A military attack is permissible only in response to an invasion or imminent aggression. The Afghans did not invade the US nor were capable of doing so. That the 9/11 attacks had been planned and executed by Arab mujahideen in Afghanistan, did call for action, perhaps even punishment, but not the wanton bombing that resulted in the death of over 40,000 mostly innocent non-combatants.

The invasion of Afghanistan set the stage for the “US war on terror” that is still going on. There is little point in quarrelling about this name which many consider misleading. What is important is that it is a new type of war, with new rules. When President Bush said, “You are either with us (the USA) or with the terrorist”, he propounded a new doctrine of war the chief features of which are: 1) strategic ‘pre-emption’ and 2) ‘unilateralism’. Both of these features constitute a violation of international law. America has assumed the right to invade or bomb any country which it accuses of providing refuge or assistance to terrorists. America makes demands to hand over to them persons it accuses of being terrorists. A country that refuses on the plea that it does not have an extradition treaty with America, or that legal procedures should be followed before extradition, or that they cannot hand over a person to be sent to a dubious jurisdiction like Guantanamo Bay, or that the accusation made by America does not constitute a crime in their country, earns the wrath of the USA. Most countries take the threats from America seriously and comply. Those countries that resist are demonised, isolated and sometimes even invaded. Three countries have been invaded since 9/11 - Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon – and thousands have been incarcerated in many countries without trial or handed over to America by their own governments because of dire American threats.

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by Stephen Lendman

8/1/07

Linda McQuaig is a prominent, admired, and award-winning Canadian journalist writing about vital issues of concern to everyone. She was a national reporter for the Toronto Globe and Mail before joining the Toronto Star where she now covers Canadian politics with her trademark combination of solid research, keen analysis, irreverence, passion and wit. She’s easy to read, never boring, and fearless. The National Post called her “Canada’s Michael Moore.”

McQuaig is also a prolific author with a well-deserved reputation for taking on the establishment. In her previous seven books, she challenged Canada’s deficit reduction scheme to gut essential social services. She explained how the rich used the country’s tax system to get richer the way it’s worked in the US since Ronald Reagan and then exploded under George Bush. She exposed the fraud of “free trade” (never called fair because it isn’t) empowering giant corporations over sovereign states while exploiting working people everywhere.

She also showed how successive Canadian governments waged war on equality since the 1980s, and in her latest book, “Holding the Bully’s Coat - Canada and the US Empire,” she takes aim at the conservative Stephen Harper administration’s allying with George Bush’s belligerent lawlessness and phony “war on terrorism.” Canada chose not to be part of Washington’s concocted “coalition of the willing” in Iraq but partnered in its war of aggression and illegal occupation of Afghanistan.

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By Jason Miller

7/25/07

A few days ago, one of my closest friends hit me with a heavily loaded question.

“Are you a Communist?” she queried.

To which I replied:

I do not belong nor militate in any formal communist party in the U.S. Nor do I belong to any other political entity or party. Furthermore, I do not subscribe to a specific doctrine, ideology, or dogma. My allegiance is to my core principles and values, which are premised on honesty, justice, humanity, responsibility, critical thinking, open-mindedness, egalitarianism, compassion, a belief in a Higher Power of my understanding, and many of the teachings of Christ.

My personal beliefs aside, communism is an incredibly loaded word. Our infinitely mendacious educational, social, and media infrastructures begin inculcating reflexive rejection of “all things communist or socialist” into US Americans from the moment they draw their initial breath.

Why is the establishment so desperate to vaccinate us against the “disease” of communism?

Because at its hopelessly rotten core, capitalism, which is manifested most strongly in the United States, is about exploitation, hyper-competitiveness, “rugged individualism”, survival of the fittest, concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, profits above all, property over people, greed, and selfishness. Perhaps worst of all, this pyramid scheme masquerading as a “moral” economic system inevitably leads to wars fueled by its insatiable demands for new markets, more resources, and cheaper labor. Why else would 350 million out of 6.5 billion people spend a trillion dollars a year on a military that has the capacity to destroy our planet thousands of times over, dwarfs the combined firepower of the rest of the world, and plagues over 130 countries with its “benign” occupations? We in the United States maintain a carefully crafted façade as the “benevolent champions of democracy”, but will quickly install ruthless tyrants and commit mass murder (euphemistically labeling our victims as “collateral damage”) if sovereign nations dare to resist our economic rape and plunder.

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“I was doing a very good job. I was meticulous,” Eichmann conceded.

By Phil Rockstroh

7/25/07

“All we can do is what folks (a minority) have always done … exile or resistance. In my opinion, both are honorable. The other options are varying degrees of “little Eichmann[ism]” – Ward Churchill’s much scorned, career purge-inducing – but never-the-less accurate phrase…”

In this summer of angst and grim foreboding about what further assaults against common sense and common decency the Bush Administration might inflict upon the people of the world, how many times during the day do those of us — still possessed of mind, heart and conscience — take pause, hoping we’ve seen the worst of it, then, fearing we haven’t yet, attempt to push down the dread rising within us, so that we might simply make it through the day and be able to rest at night? Accordingly, those who have been paying attention are aware that the outward mechanisms of martial law are in place. We shudder knowing that Bush has issued an executive decree that grants him dictatorial power in the event of some nebulously defined national emergency. In addition, the knowledge nettles us that a vast network of internment camps bristle across the length of the U.S., standing at wait for those who might raise objections to the fascistic fury unloosed by the American empire’s version of the Reichstag fire.

Moreover, a closer look would reveal that the inner processes by which an individual begins the act of acceptance of authoritarian excess — the mixture of chronic passivity, boredom, low grade anxiety and unfocused rage inherent in the citizens/consumers of the corporate state that primes an individual for fascism — have been in place for quite some time within the psyches of the American populace, both elites and hoi polloi alike. Although, don’t look for torch-lit processions thronging the nation’s streets and boulevards; rather, look for a Nuremberg Rally of couch-bound brownshirts. Instead of ogling the serried ranks of jut-jawed, SS soldiers, a contemporary Leni Riefenstahl would be forced to film chubby clusters of double-chinned consumers, saluting the new order with their TV remotes. In the contemporary United States, the elation induced by the immersion of one’s individual will to the mindless intoxication of the mob might only be possible, if Bush seized dictatorial control of the state while simultaneously sending out to all citizens gift certificates to Ikea.

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Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to the latest high quality content available on our very 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

7/25/07

Medical studies
funded by drug companies
have only lately “discovered”
the onset of
cancer, diabetes and autism
is “not caused”
by agents outside the body,
but brought on
by your own susceptible,
read “defective”
DNA.

They’re a passive creation
with no visible perpetration
rather like saying
93,000 women were raped
in 2005 in the USA.
Of course without mentioning
the 93,000 men
and their evil intentions
who actually
did the raping.

No way
could mercury-preserved vaccines,
cost-cutting food additives
or petroleum pollutants
pumped into the environment
be a factor in the development
of debilitating
devastating
deadly
dis-ease.

WAKE UP!!!
Someone made these decisons.
These are just as much injuries
as the results of
drunk driving collisions,
assault with a deadly weapon,
poisoning a parent to inherit money
or the collateral damage
of shock and awe bombing
with depleted uranium WMD.

But
Big Drugs, Big Pharma and Big Energy,
much like the Tobacco Industry,
have the
means
profit motive
and FDA-approved opportunity
and since tort “reform”
they can do it with impunity.

As long as the effect
doesn’t happen
immediately
after the cause,
they can wrap themselves up
in plausible deniability.
Their products are innocent
’til you’re dead
and proven guilty.
You made the choice to use them.
Accept your personal responsibility.

It’s supremely important
that you accept
that you’re the cause
of their effect.

A SPECIAL MESSAGE TO OUR READERS.

For over two years now, Thomas Paine’s Corner has been a powerful and unwavering voice for a courageous and badly needed agenda for change. We have consistently delivered hard-hitting and insightful commentary, polemics, and analysis in our persistent efforts to persuade, educate, and inspire, and serve as a discriminating but generous platform for voices from many points of view with one thing in common: their spiritual honesty and quality of thinking.
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As a semi-autonomous section of the multi-faceted, thoroughly comprehensive, and highly prestigious Cyrano’s Journal Online, we share Cyrano’s passion for winning the battle of communications against systemic lies, an act which is essential to attaining social and environmental justice. To help us achieve that goal, Cyrano’s Journal, besides its regular editorial pages, intends to begin producing editorial videos to expose the lack of proper context, ahistoricalism, excessive over-emphasis on inane events, and outright lies the corporate media, and in particular television, present to you and your family as a steady diet of pernicious intellectual junk food. This will be an expensive under-taking and there will be no grants forthcoming from the likes of the American Enterprise Institute, the Coors or Heritage Foundation. You can be sure of that!
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As Greek mythology has it, the powerful are frequently defeated by their own hubris, and that’s precisely what we are witnessing today. Our rotten-to-the-core, usurping plutocracy has become so overtly and arrogantly corrupt that our patience has now reached its generous limit, and the membrane of America’s collective consciousness is about to burst. This will result in a significant restructuring of our socioeconomic and political environments, we hope (and must make sure) for the better. Considering what is at stake in the world today, Cyrano’s Journal and Thomas Paine’s Corner want to accelerate the arrival of that new day, and its promise of a new, truly well organized, kind, and honest civilization.
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Associate Editor, Cyrano’s Journal Online, and Editorial Director, Thomas Paine’s Corner.
Patrice Greanville, Editor in Chief, Cyrano’s Journal Online

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

7/21/07

Do you really believe your answers
to multiple choice questions
play any part in who you are,
that your identity,
your individuality,
comes from choosing
what’s already been chosen
for you to choose by those
chosen to get you to choose
to use what their masters produce?

Ford. Or Chevy.
Coke. Or Pepsi.
Scott. Or Charmin.

What’s the harm in your daughter
pining to be a pig like Paris,
or wearing jeans sell-out movie stars
and musicians push at us,
or your son idoling a vulgar,
greedy glutton like The Donald,
or your husband worshipping a drug-using,
woman-beating sports icon,
or your wife reading the rag mags
from cover to cover
to see which star’s just impregnated
and jilted his lover,
or your boss admiring the wisdom
of executives from Enron
for the clever theft
of their employees’ retirement funds,
or our children watching us try
to imitate celebrities
which gives our stamp of approval
to role models like these
latest idols
of American material excess
whose very lack of character
is seen as success,
whose identities we try to buy
since we see these leeches as our “betters”
and whose conduct we endorse by buying
the junk they shill in an effort
to define who we are -
very few of us could deny it -
but how unique could it be
when somebody else can buy it?

Victims of an offer
we can’t seem to refuse
buying goods planned for obsolescence
and perpetual renewal
while worshipping in front of
big-screen color TVs
eating our way to diabetes
and heart disease.
And the eating, the drinking,
the buying, the legal drugs,
the electronic diversions
allow us to accept with a shrug
the lop-sided economy,
the devastation of education,
the broken down, red-and-blue
state of our nation.

We do the frenzied, directionless,
lemming-like dance
of the meaningless minimal motion
of a mouse click
or the swipe of a credit card
and drown enthusiastically
in the plastic consumer credit ocean.
And in this act of conspiciuous consumption
we explode -
bankrupt
in spontaneous human consumer combustion.
Not to worry. There are always
plenty more where we come from
who’ve got holes in their souls
where their selves ought to be
that can never be filled by the engineered
greed, lust and gluttony
which is how we express freedom
in the Land of the Free,
choosing goods rather than the direction
of our representative Democracy.

Though we’re sold the “fact”
that the market is consumer driven
and each of us, alone, is responsible
for our purchasing decisions,
corporations spend billions each year
to manufacture our consent,
to turn citizens into consumers
instead of the drivers of government.
If it didn’t work they wouldn’t pay
to arouse shame, desire and envy.
They do it because they need
a rabid consumer feeding frenzy

and our seeing our future strictly
as the next thing that we buy.
The irresponsibility they sponsor
keeps the profit well from running dry.
They want our focus on the wealth-
creating surface of our outside,
not the road less traveled to the value
we each have on the inside.
They fear we might step off the material path
because it threatens their very survival
if we get over our lust for the vehicle
and learn to love The Driver.

Cyrano’s Journal Online, Thomas Paine’s Corner, The Greanville Journal, CJO Avenger, and VoxPop are initiating a weekly email which will include links to the latest high quality content available on our very diverse and comprehensive site. If you would like to subscribe, type “CJO subscription” in the subject line and send your email to

“Figuring some of the odds”

by Paul A. Donovan

7/17/07

From July 6th to July 9th of 2007, Strategic Vision conducted a gallop poll out of 1,200 likely voters in the state of Pennsylvania that provided interesting yet predictable results. In overwhelming numbers, Republican and Democratic voters alike were dissatisfied with Bush’s handling of everything from the war in Iraq (20% approval rating), the economy (21% satisfied), and his overall performance (23% gave him the thumbs up). Hardly desirable statistics for George Bush or Republican presidential hopefuls.

However, when one examines such a poll, one can readily conclude that the level of Republican dissatisfaction with Bush’s performance provides the Democrats with an incredible opportunity to capitalize on the ominous shadow Bush is casting over the Republican Party. Increasingly, many Republicans have distanced themselves in rhetoric and practice from President Bush for this very reason. Recently, presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani tried to seek some shelter from Hurricane Bush by stating that America lacks the “strong, aggressive, bold leadership” of Republican legend Ronald Reagan. (It would be nice if the Democrats would finally stiffen their spines and take a tougher stance against Bush as well, considering they have voted for the war in Iraq, voted for mostly all war spending bills, and have not impeached a target as vulnerable as a beached whale. So let’s not go and pat our boys and girls in blue on the back for being much better than their pro-corporate brethren.)

Over the last seven years, President Bush has become a caricature of himself. The beady-eyed multimillionaire Texan, famous for dismembering his own businesses, the English language, the Constitution, Hurricane Katrina prevention and relief efforts, the Middle East, and everything else he has ever touched has appeared to the public as not only incompetent and corrupt but also profoundly stupid, but incorrectly viewed much of the time as solely responsible. Unfortunately, our preoccupation with Bush’s ridiculous idiosyncrasies has distracted us from the fact that Bush is hardly alone in calling the shots—no American president ever is. Right now he is merely the public face for the interests of the unelected government, the plutocratic and corporate elite, and in that sense the lightning rod for massive disenchantment with the more diffuse political quarters that actually control the nation.

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By Jason Miller

7/15/07

[Warning: Satire Ahead]

“Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone.”

–John Maynard Keynes

If you’re nodding your head in agreement with Keynes and expecting validation of your opinion as you read this piece, you’re in for a rude awakening.

Forget the humanitarian, bleeding heart nonsense. Let’s reflect on the words of Thomas Sowell instead:

“Despite a voluminous and often fervent literature on ‘income distribution,’ the cold fact is that most income is not distributed: It is earned.”

We live in reality ladies and gentlemen. Not some utopian fantasy dreamt up by the likes of idealistic dreamers like Marx and Engels.

Ours is indeed a cold, cruel world. The sooner each of us accepts our lot, makes the most of it, and moves on, the better off we will all be. The ingenious and industrious Bill Gates deserves every penny he has. By the same token, the dregs of society inhabiting places like Skid Row and eating from dumpsters are reaping their just rewards for their depraved, lazy, and ignorant ways.

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By Adam Engel

7-14-07

What to you do if you’re a minority and “everyone” hates you? What if you realize that lots of people like or even love you, actually, but none of them are ever on TV? And the TV was the one that told you that you were a minority and everyone hated you in the first place?

What if your country were not the land of opportunity, merely of opportunists?

What if you had not an enemy in the world capable of harming you, and a trillion dollars to spend on housing, schools, hospitals, transportation, and most important of all, preventing as best as possible the dire consequences of a compromised environment?

What if “The Environment” were just the green fields and mountains and stuff you know from postcards, ads, and TV, but have never actually experienced with your other four senses?

What if someone lied to you in order to prevent you from spending the trillion dollars on the aforementioned public necessities so they could spend it on a war against a foreign country which had neither ability nor intention of ever attacking you, but who did harbor a great supply of the oil that is destroying your planet?

What if someone told you that the war was of immediate necessity because the Enemy harbored weapons of mass destruction (just like your country and its “allies.”)?

What if thousands of your “countrymen” were wounded, dying, or dead?

What if hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of The Enemy’s children had been killed by bullet or embargo, thousands killed daily or dying in barren hospitals since your daughter, now in college, was born?

How come the number of offenses by Corporate/Military/Political elites against the people outside the Nation and the Nation’s own people cannot be counted by mere men in time, but like the fractal, must undergo millions of iterations by computer, to reach completion?

Why are people dying of cancer in the street, or if not on the street in hospitals or homes and why is everyone always dying of cancer?

Why won’t the Nation treat its cancerized citizens who don’t have health insurance?

Why is the “National Institute of Health” (NIH) taking government money to do research to create drugs that will be sold back to the taxpayer at exorbitant prices? Is there a “National Free Clinic?” Is there a “National Free Aspirin?”

Why is my friend dying because he doesn’t have health insurance? Why am I dying because I don’t have health insurance?

Is that why the Indians died, because they didn’t have health insurance? Is that how Lincoln died?

If we’re the “good guys,” why does everyone want to kill us? Are we lone cowboys like Gary Cooper and John Wayne?

What if all these questions were asked of a ten-year-old, the age at which, it seems, the Modern American Mind closes, shutting down all alternatives to racism, corporatism, imperialism, and savage, restless violence?

How many questions about America are there? Enough to fill every database on the Internet?

Adam Engel can be reached at

A SPECIAL MESSAGE TO OUR READERS.

For over two years now, Thomas Paine’s Corner has been a powerful and unwavering voice for a courageous and badly needed agenda for change. We have consistently delivered hard-hitting and insightful commentary, polemics, and analysis in our persistent efforts to persuade, educate, and inspire, and serve as a discriminating but generous platform for voices from many points of view with one thing in common: their spiritual honesty and quality of thinking.
•
Aside from the caliber of its content, Thomas Paine’s Corner’s strength is that there are no advertisers or corporations to exercise de facto censorship or orchestrate our agenda. We aim to keep it that way and we need your help!
•
As a semi-autonomous section of the multi-faceted, thoroughly comprehensive, and highly prestigious Cyrano’s Journal Online, we share Cyrano’s passion for winning the battle of communications against systemic lies, an act which is essential to attaining social and environmental justice. To help us achieve that goal, Cyrano’s Journal, besides its regular editorial pages, intends to begin producing editorial videos to expose the lack of proper context, ahistoricalism, excessive over-emphasis on inane events, and outright lies the corporate media, and in particular television, present to you and your family as a steady diet of pernicious intellectual junk food. This will be an expensive under-taking and there will be no grants forthcoming from the likes of the American Enterprise Institute, the Coors or Heritage Foundation. You can be sure of that!
•
As Greek mythology has it, the powerful are frequently defeated by their own hubris, and that’s precisely what we are witnessing today. Our rotten-to-the-core, usurping plutocracy has become so overtly and arrogantly corrupt that our patience has now reached its generous limit, and the membrane of America’s collective consciousness is about to burst. This will result in a significant restructuring of our socioeconomic and political environments, we hope (and must make sure) for the better. Considering what is at stake in the world today, Cyrano’s Journal and Thomas Paine’s Corner want to accelerate the arrival of that new day, and its promise of a new, truly well organized, kind, and honest civilization.
•
Assisting us in our cause is as simple as clicking on the PayPal button below and exercising the power of your wallet. No matter how large or how small, we thank you in advance for your donation! If you are serious about our struggle for a new society, please don’t put it off. Let us hear from you today.
•

Jason Miller
Associate Editor, Cyrano’s Journal Online, and Editorial Director, Thomas Paine’s Corner.
Patrice Greanville, Editor in Chief, Cyrano’s Journal Online