•TPC•

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 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.

Continue Reading »

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 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?

Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »

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 Ramzy Baroud

8/4/7

The name of Alberto Gonzales is rapidly becoming synonymous with all that has gone wrong under the Bush administration. Repeated media discussions of the US Secretary of State in the most contentious tones have served to lay the blame for all the ailments that infected American democracy under Bush squarely on one man’s shoulders.

President Bush himself, Gonzales’ loyal boss, friend and the hand behind all the stunts and tricks that Gonzales so indefatigably performed to defend and justify the unjustifiable, remains immune to any meaningful criticism.

Bush is well known for his habit of awarding sensitive posts to old friends, as if the prime objective of the president of the United States is to protect the administration’s secrets and rubber stamp whatever compulsive policies he and his self-serving neoconservative associates concoct. Although appointed to the post in February 2005, Gonzales has been a member of Bush’s team for years; he served as Bush’s General Counsel from 1994 to 1997, when the president was governor of Texas. Then, he served as Secretary of State for Texas for two years, before going on to join the state’s Supreme Court. Finally he worked with Bush again for five consecutive years as White House Counsel. Considering the president’s reputation of favouritism and staunch loyalty to those faithful to him, Gonzales’ ascension to the 80th Attorney General of the United States, replacing John Ashcroft, only seemed a natural progression.

Continue Reading »

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

7/31/07

Hemp is about life, renewal and future, power to The People…most everything America’s embedded fascist regime is not about. Government of, by and for corporations (CorpoGov) has us hogtied.

Corporate profits rule the priorities in a globalizing plutocracy (CorpoWorld) where the bottom line is…power to the bottom line. Corporate grip just keeps increasing, squeezing the life out of the biosphere—CorpoWorld truly is making a killing!

CorpoWorld lives by fossil energy, death and decay sucked and scoured from Earth’s burial grounds. Fossil fuels have already so poisoned the biosphere that canned tuna, healthy old protein standby, needs health warnings on the label. Banks of many rivers and lakes are sprinkled with signs reading: DO NOT EAT THE FISH! Common at others are diagrams detailing parts of fish where mercury, PCBs, dioxins, furans, lead and arsenic collect; anatomical maps posted to warn of where CorpoWorld’s toxic fingerprints are concentrating…. Mercury is the premier toxin, pervasive and potent, now piling up around the top of virtually every ocean food chain. The primary mercury dispensers are coal-fired power plants—China is building new ones as fast as they can, expecting to continue bringing another new plant on-line every few days…. And so it goes in the world of hidden costs keeping cheap imports “cheap”. So goes the biocidal foundation of “cheapness”. Nothing synthetic is cheap when all the real costs are accounted for.

Continue Reading »

SPECIAL: From our classic archives

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of propaganda, would have admired the American system’s ability to tell big lies and keep telling them year in year out to fool most of the people.

The presentation of an illegal invasion of a foreign country as a “preventative” or pre-emptive war did not originate with Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld…It had ample precursors in Nazi Germany. The ongoing US aggression in the Middle East raises the most serious questions about the role of the mass media in modern society. In the period leading up to the invasion, the American [corporate] media uncritically advanced the Bush Administration’s arguments, rooted in lies, distortions and half-truths, for an attack on Iraq. It virtually excluded all critical viewpoints, to the point of blacking out news of mass anti-war demonstrations and any other facts that contradicted the propaganda from the White House and Pentagon.

The obvious aim was to misinform and manipulate public opinion, and convince the tens of millions within the US who were opposed to the Administration’s war policy that they constituted a small and helpless minority…[READ THE REST OF THIS IMPORTANT ESSAY]

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

7/23/07

America was just starting to crawl, and hemp was such an essential crop that farmers could be fined for not growing it—even jailed during periods of shortage in the mid 1760s. Hemp was legal tender in most of the country until the early 1800s. By 1850, over 8,000 farms of 2,000 acres or more were growing hemp, mostly where slave labor could satisfy the extreme labor-intensity of the hemp industry.

The slavery issue changed after 1865…but by the 1930s, hemp-harvesting machinery was coming out that drastically reduced labor demands. Popular Mechanics magazine ran a cover story, February, 1938, hailing hemp as “The New Billion-Dollar Crop”. Imagine the wealth a billion dollars meant in 1938. Imagine the wealth William Randolph Hearst had amassed by 1938. Twenty years earlier, Hearst had seen hemp looming on the horizon as a threat to his paper-making empire. As soon as new machinery made superior hemp paper competitive, Hearst, as well as Pierre Dupont, owner of patents for the sulfuric-acid process for making paper from wood pulp, both stood to loose vast profits to hemp. Through connections to the very core of American politics, their stealth campaign of sensational lies and propaganda, manipulation, racism and even terrorism, culminated with an illegal tax law essentially outlawing hemp in 1937—yes, the year before Popular Mechanics published their “New Billion-Dollar Crop” article lauding hemp. Talk about stealth! Imagine the chagrin of all the people involved in our domestic hemp industry in 1937 when they suddenly learned that hemp had been banned in America because of “The Killer Weed from Mexico”. Except for during the reprieve of several years in WWII, under the government’s “Hemp for Victory!” campaign, not a single acre of hemp has been legally grown in America since 1937.

Continue Reading »

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 Peter Chamberlin

7/23/07

On July 17, 2007, Bush quietly issued an executive order entitled “Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq.” By this order, he made it a crime to commit, or to pose a significant risk of committing…, acts of violence that threaten “the peace and stability of Iraq,” or undermine “efforts to promote economic reconstruction and political reform in Iraq and to provide humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people.”

It remains to be seen just how far Bush will stretch this law, in light of ongoing attempts by Neocon enemies of America, who charge Americans with “subversive activities” and “providing support to the enemy,” for protesting the war. No one is safe from their crusade to brand most of the American people as “treasonists,” for opposing Bush’s out-of-control “leadership” of the war effort. Even Sen. Hillary Clinton has been accused of these “crimes” by Neocon stooges like Eric Edelman, who attacked her for requesting a briefing for her committee from the Department of Defense on contingency plans for withdrawal from Iraq.

Continue Reading »

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 both the most recent offerings and to timeless classics 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 Steven Jonas

7/18/07

In the famous Humphrey Bogart/Ingrid Bergman movie Casablanca, the character Captain Renault of the French police is famously played by Claude Rains. Upon walking into Rick’s (the Humphrey Bogart character) bar near the beginning of the movie, he famously says: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!” And so, the reaction among many on all sides of the political spectrum to the Libby commutation has been: “shocked, shocked” to find that it has happened.

How could Bush do this? After all, he has always been so strict on the question of commutations, and pardons too. It is so obviously political, or a payback, or a payoff, or a cover-up, or a bone for his “conservative” base, or he is reaching out at least halfway to Sean Hannity (who is saying that well, it’s OK, but now Bush should really go and do the right [in both senses, I guess] thing and pardon the guy.”) Yes, it is obviously most of those things and probably all of them.

Continue Reading »

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.

Continue Reading »