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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 Rand Clifford

10/11/07

Despite the muddy slurry streaming from mainstream corporate media (CorpoMedia), most Americans still seem to believe the indirection and untruth that washes out along with flecks of reality. Consider Iraq, a country we invaded to take control of their oil. Very simple, obviously true. But CorpoMedia gushed mud about weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds, shocking destructive powers of Saddam, freedom and democracy, liberators’ welcome, fighting terrorists over there so they won’t come and get us over here, Saddam’s role in 9-11?…on and on—and that’s all caked around the barest, simplest question of why did we invade? CorpoMedia even calls it a “war”, this invasion and occupation for booty. And the mud is often joined with befuddling banks of emotional fog that frequently condense into flags and yellow ribbons, “I Support The Troops” magnetics, more flags, and white and blue and red ribbons.

Why do we still occupy Iraq with so many troops? Because the New Iraqi Oil Law is yet to be chiseled into legal stone. Simple as that. The New Oil Law awards to primarily American Big Oil 75% of Iraqi oil revenue for 30 years, putting Big Oil in control of Iraq’s lifeblood and denying them any chance of recovering from our crimes. Whenever mentioning the New Oil Law, CorpoMedia likes to stick it low on lists of “benchmarks” we have set for the (independent?) Iraqi government. But ultimately, there is only one benchmark: The New Oil law. The other benchmarks are just so many rags thrown over the naked truth. The New Oil Law might have made it into legal stone while its details were hidden from even the Parliament set to vote on it; but now, leaks of truth leave Iraqis with no choice but to fight the occupier because the New Oil Law would remove their only hope of getting a fair share of their resources. So what does CorpoMedia call these people fighting for their own oil, fighting for their country? It calls them insurgents, terrorists, al-Qaida…. Is it even possible to kill enough Iraqis to get whatever survivors to sign over their oil? Well over a million has not been enough.

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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

10/11/07

Shortly after the occupation of Iraq in 2003, Coalition Provisional Authority administrator Paul Bremer issued an edict granting immunity to U.S. military and civilian personnel including employees of Blackwater USA, from criminal prosecution in Iraqi courts.

On October 7th 2007, Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said the investigation set up by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had found Blackwater “deliberately killed” the 17 people in the September 16th shooting in western Baghdad. For this incident according to senior government sources, the Iraqi government wants U.S. security firm Blackwater to pay $8 million in compensation to each of the families of the 17 people killed.

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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 GARY CORSERI

10/10/07

Christopher Columbus, crawl back in your hole!
Take you Nina, Pinta and Santa Magreedier.
We know what you did in Hispaniola!
We watched silver helmets glint in the sun.
We saw you claim our island for Spain!
Idiot!
Look what you’ve done!
How many millions of lives lost,
How many holocausts
Would burn up the centuries
So you could fill your coffers with gold?

Christopher Columbus—take George Bush with you!
Take them all—Lincoln and Washington
And Jefferson, too.
None of them gave a damn about us.
They said we were savages,
They killed us for sport.
Ever read about Lincoln and the Black Hawk War?
If Lincoln wanted to “free the slaves,”
How come he didn’t give a damn
About their red brothers?
Jefferson pimped for “democracy”
But signed the Removal Act to defraud the Cherokees.
And Washington—“Father” of his country?
Please! You’re killing me! Don’t make me laugh!

Christopher Columbus—Genoa scum!
Take Ferdinand and Isabel—bane of the Jews.
Bane of the Moors, too, who gave Spain a culture.
Not like those crap-bags with their “kill one for Christ!”
(You can leave Jesus behind,
But not him of the Popes, not him of their lackeys.
If you want to leave the sandaled carpenter behind,
We’ve got work for him, work with honor.
We’ve got to undo 500 years of your damned interfering:
We’ll re-plant forests and heal the sky.
We don’t know if we can do it.
You took the last kernel of our hopes and crushed it.
You took our hope away and gave us fear.
You took our hope—but not our courage.
Courage to resist you, even after 500 years.

We’re all under your boots now, your jackhammer boots.
You Nazi, you maniac—take your bloody history
Forward and backward and what have you got?
The Spaniards came and rode us like lamas—literally!
They climbed on our backs and whipped us till we dropped.
The French came looking for pelts.
They took more than they needed so they made
Beaver-fur hats—a Parisian fashion statement!
The Anglos came and never stopped coming.
They slaughtered each other over our land.
They never stopped slaughtering.
They made great speeches about freedom and liberty
While their vampirish mouths ran with our blood.

Christopher Columbus, crawl back in your hole!
Take your economy and your progress and
All the appurtenances of “civilization.”
Take your death culture and your sordid manias.
We’re sick of you and your hypocrisies.
And we’re gathering.

We’re singing the Ghost Song and dancing the Ghost Dance,
Gathering on the hills when you shut your eyes;
Whispering in your dreams
And crying in your nightmares.

And howling as your towers fall,
Your bridges buckle,
Your levees are breached,
Your schools implode,
And your children grasp you with their bloody claws.

Gary Corseri has been fighting the Good Fight since the Vietnam War. He has taught in prisons, public schools and universities. He has published books, had plays produced, and his stories, articles, poems and dramas have appeared at hundreds of venues. He can be contacted at .

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 Anwaar Hussain

10/8/07

There are main battle tanks, there are fish tanks and there are simple water tanks. Then there are ‘Think Tanks’.

Odd as it may seem, Think Tanks are tanks that think. And just as when a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news, their ‘thinking’, whenever they do that, makes it straight to the main stream media. Ours, on the other hand, remains confined to free Google Blogspots.

So when in a recent study, the Oxford Research Group Think Tank said the “war on terror” has been a disaster, it was a man biting the dog but when we poor bloggers cried ourselves hoarse to, “bring out the nails to hammer into the coffin of the Empire dream because the Empire seekers tried to defeat with brawn what should have been conquered with brain”, it was a dog biting the man.

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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 Rowan Wolf

10/4/07

The current protests in Burma are attributed to a 500% increase in fuel prices which crippled an already struggling population’s ability to survive (BBC). The people of Burma have been descending into deeper and deeper poverty over the last decade. According to Jonathan Head, author of the BBC article, the people of Burma spend an average of 70% of their income on food. The dramatic increase in fuel prices on August 15, 2007 was too much to bear.

It appears that the government of Burma (Myanmar) were reacting to a “suggestion” by the International Monetary Fund, that they needed to phase out the state subsidizing of oil prices. Myanmar is a member nation of the IMF. This makes one wonder at the seeming naivety of this statement by Head:

Like so many decisions made by the reclusive generals, the sudden hike in fuel prices is hard to fathom.

The IMF had advised weaning the population off subsidised fuel, because with rising world oil prices it was becoming an unsustainable burden for Burma, which although rich in natural gas, relies on imports for almost all of its refined petrol and diesel.

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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

The West and the Islamic world clash not because of religion, but because a Darwinian current has taken hold in the West that reduces life to mere production and consumption, writes Abdel-Wahab Elmessiri

By Abdel-Wahab Elmessiri

10/7/07

In the opening years of this century, the world was presented with a historic confrontation between the West and Islamic and Arab worlds. This confrontation has been used in the pursuit of imperial agendas. American failure in Iraq has left underlying reasons exposed. Can the damage done be repaired?

Our relationship with the West began with Alexander the Great, the founder of the colonialist Ptolemaic Dynasty that ruled Egypt and the Levant for several hundred years. In that distant past there existed a form of parity; a certain give and take, an alternation of victory and defeat between the two sides. Even to today, however, it is possible to point to factors that can as easily form the basis of mutual understanding and cooperation between Islam and the West as they can trigger conflict. For example, we share with some Western nations the border of the Mediterranean, whose importance for trade and maritime wealth should compel neighbours on either side towards closer cooperation, especially in this age of the global village.

Yet that very proximity has also been the source of intense friction because of the lure of land and resources on the other side. In its height, Islamic civilisation expanded geographically at the expense of the West as defined by the ambit of Christian civilisation, and the reverse was also true: the expansion of the West took place at the expense of the Islamic world, and tensions reached a zenith when Western powers moved to partition that world amongst themselves. Conversely, the further removed societies and civilisations are from one another geographically, the lower the potential for conflict between them. At least before the rise of Western colonialism, which staked out the entire world as its field of enterprise, there existed no tension between the West and Thailand, for example, simply because land and resources were so far out of reach.

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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

“Decades ago, in order to field test the economic theories that were formulated by the right wing think tanks at The Chicago School, Friedman and his disciples descended like locusts upon Latin America. The results were devastating: Democratically elected governments were systematically overthrown and brutal dictators friendly to US business interests were installed in their place—all of which were subsidized by US tax dollars with the complicity of the CIA.”

By Charles Sullivan

10/03/07

One can no longer understand US governmental policy on the basis of conventional language or traditional wisdom. Language itself and its long-established meanings were long ago twisted and distorted in order to deceive the people. Now war is peace and terror and occupation is liberation. In order to make sense of what is happening, it is important to understand everything within the context of a specific economic philosophy, and the distorted capitalist system that spawned it.

That ideology was crafted by a diminutive economist named Milton Friedman, at the University of Chicago some five decades ago. The holy trinity of Friedman’s version of capitalism—privatization of the public domain, corporate deregulation, and deep cuts in social spending—has resulted in enormous societal inequity and socio-economic classes. It has given us the haves and the have-nots, the haves and the have-mores.

Friedman and his disciples, collectively known as ‘The Chicago School’ do not believe in a minimum wage—much less a living wage, unions, worker rights, environmental protections, worker safety, or any other kind of restraint imposed upon corporations. In Friedman’s view, the market should rule and profitability should be the guiding principle, the end results always justifying the means.

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By Anwaar Hussain

9/29/07

If wishes were horses, most Americans would have known that Iraq and Afghanistan are just the latest victims of the colonial behemoth in a continued saga of American imperialism and not any thing else. That throughout its imperialistic expedition, Americans have firmly believed that the United States was God’s chosen nation and, therefore, on course to divine destinies. They would have known Senator Albert J. Beveridge’s speech to Congress that exemplifies this American attitude as nothing else does, “…and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world…” If wishes were horses.

If wishes were horses, most Americans would have known that, consequent to this belief of American leaders, the U.S. had, even before the deployment of troops for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, around 752 military installations located in more than 130 countries with actual American military contingents stationed in 65 different foreign countries. They would have known that like all occupying powers, Americans have around 70,000 U.S. troops in Germany, 40,000 in Japan and about 37,000 in South Korea, where they have been since 1951. Add to it now around 140,000 troops (not counting the 100,000 Blackwater type mercenaries) in Iraq and another 27,000 in Afghanistan and one gets a fair inkling of American’s idea of ‘regeneration of the world’ the American way. If wishes were horses.

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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

“One of those biases is Burman’s curious view that the US has only been empirically aggressive under Bush, even with maps of American interventions abroad showing interventions ‘to prevent the spread of communism.’”

Jim Miles Reviews “The State of the American Empire – How the USA Shapes the World” by Stephen Burman

9/28/07

On first perusal my perceptions told me this was my kind of book: lots of graphs, charts, and maps for my visual learning strengths, more akin to the National Geographic where I can glean most of the significant information from the photos and captions as much as I can from the text. But then as I delved into the text that introduces and accompanies the visuals, I realized that this was a bit more than just an atlas – it also made political statements through choice of words and topics.

Unfortunately, that position wavered in front of me, at one time apparently saying this, at another time apparently saying that. The State of the American Empire has a slippery and elusive perspective, but one that finally settles down into a relatively clear theme, perhaps the slippery metaphor being appropriate for American ‘idealism’ as it stands today. Ultimately, the underlying theme to the book, even though it brings forth some very strong criticisms of American actions, is that we, the royal ‘we’, the global ‘we’, need the empire for stability that will bring about the security we need for our energy demands, for our currency markets, for our trade relations.

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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

Leaders like Ahmedinejad and Chavez, who refuse to submit to US military and economic subjugation, are assaulted with vicious character assasination and hyperbolic vilification by the Empire’s well-funded media whores, reactionary academics, and Right Wing “think tanks,” often enabling CIA-sponsored “regime changes” or wars of aggression against their nations.

By Steven Jonas

9/28/07

Originally published at Buzz Flash

So Pres. Ahmedinejad of Iran comes to the U.S. And boy, is the U.S. Right hot and bothered about his visit and what he wants to do here (inside the 25-mile radius from the UN within which foreign dignitaries on the Administration’s s__t list must stay). First, he wants to visit the site of 9/11. Apparently forgetting that Iran delivered an outpouring of sympathy when the horror occurred, that Iran, a Shiite country, despises the Sunni bin Laden (and he doesn’t like them much either), that Iran provided material aid to the original U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and still doesn’t like the Taliban and certainly doesn’t like the fact that under yet another Georgite-mismanaged war they have made a strong comeback, the U.S. Right launched a general “how dare he?” That of course fits right in with the current campaign to drum up Islamophobia using any convenient Muslim target regardless of politics (except, of course, the Bush-partners Saudis).

So then he gets this invitation to speak at Columbia University and all hell breaks loose, on the Right. But given what actually happened there, one has to wonder why the Right is so upset. After all, this man is so much like Bush, they could almost be twins. So the Right shouldn’t be angered. They should be pleased that at least one other world leader, for the most part, is following the example of their man in particular or at least that of his core supporters in general. Hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, ain’t it? Let’s count the ways.

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