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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 Jason Miller

8/27/07

“It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, the capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.”

–Malcolm X

Striving with the unwavering dedication of true believers and slaves to the grind, those of us who exist within the geographic, social, cultural, economic, and political boundaries of the United States are collectively destroying the Earth.

With dutiful efforts, heavily sedated consciences, and sweet obliviousness to the depth of our depravity, we toil away at our chosen or assigned tasks. After all, predatory plutocrats like “Mitt” Romney would be impotent without his minions—the hundreds of millions of wage slaves exercising their “right to work” (for as small a wage as they desire) while obediently manning the bulwarks of a system so putrid that were it possible to feed it to a pig, our porcine friend would wretch his guts out.

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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 Carolyn Baker

8/24/07

Originally published at Speaking Truth to Power

“The U.S. government is on a ‘burning platform’ of unsustainable policies and practices.”

–David Walker, U.S. Comptroller General

Anyone who hasn’t watched “Money As Debt,” an animated DVD by Paul Grignon, should consider purchasing this extraordinary explanation of money’s origin in an economy totally dependent on debt. Almost everyone has seen footage of federal printing presses cranking out paper money, and some of us have even visited a government mint or two and have observed the process firsthand. But like so many other illusions with which the U.S. economy is replete, money is not created by government printing presses.

During the first few minutes of “Money As Debt” I began feeling my eyes glazing over in anticipation that I would soon begin viewing photo footage instead of animation. I then realized that I, like the masses of Americans who demand that every video experience provide them with entertainment, was unconsciously holding the same expectation. I then promptly hit the rewind button and started over, this time listening and watching attentively.

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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

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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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

8/18/07

Meat & potatoes.
Potatoes & meat.
This, we’re told,
is what REAL men
eat.

And since faggots, feminazis
and minorities got the upper hand,
it’s one of the last legal ways left
to show you’re a HE, not a girly, 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

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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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 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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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 Bal Patil

8/12/07

I think it would be most appropriate to recall the great Ahmedabad trial at this juncture when the centennial of the Gandhian Satyagraha in South Africa is commemorated worldwide. When Mahatma Gandhi entered the Central Hall of the Government Circuit House at Ahmedabad on the 18th of March, 1922 to face a trial on a charge of sedition under section 124A of the Indian Penal Code about two hundred spectators inside the improvised courtroom stood up as a mark of respect to the frail figure in loincloth.

The spectators included Kasturaba, Sarojini Naidu, Pandit Malaviya, N.C. Kelkar, Smt. J.B. Petit and Ansuyaben Sarabhai.. Sarojini Naidu has described how the entire court rose in an act of spontaneous homage to a “frail, serene, indomitable figure in a coarse and scanty loin cloth.” who joked in a characteristic manner looking at them saying: “This is like family gathering and not a law court.”

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BY CHALMERS JOHNSON

In politics, as in medicine, a cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. The United States, today, suffers from a plethora of public ills. Most of them can be traced to the militarism and imperialism that have led to the near-collapse of our Constitutional system of checks and balances. Unfortunately, none of the remedies proposed so far by American politicians or analysts addresses the root causes of the problem.

According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, released on April 26, 2007, some 78% of Americans believe their country to be headed in the wrong direction. Only 22% think the Bush administration’s policies make sense, the lowest number on this question since October 1992, when George H. W. Bush was running for a second term — and lost. What people don’t agree on are the reasons for their doubts and, above all, what the remedy — or remedies — ought to be.

The range of opinions on this is immense. Even though large numbers of voters vaguely suspect that the failings of the political system itself led the country into its current crisis, most evidently expect the system to perform a course correction more or less automatically. As Adam Nagourney of the New York Times reported, by the end of March 2007, at least 280,000 American citizens had already contributed some $113.6 million to the presidential campaigns of Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani, or John McCain.

If these people actually believe a presidential election a year-and-a-half from now will significantly alter how the country is run, they have almost surely wasted their money. As Andrew Bacevich, author of The New American Militarism, puts it: “None of the Democrats vying to replace President Bush is doing so with the promise of reviving the system of check and balances…. The aim of the party out of power is not to cut the presidency down to size but to seize it, not to reduce the prerogatives of the executive branch but to regain them.”

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By Vi Ransel

6/26/07

I stand

with the “Little Man”

upon whose back

the balance

of America stands,

whose blood, sweat, tears

and humiliation

are the raw materials used

to create the Wealth of Nations.

Money cannot

plant or reap,

drive steel, make cars,

sew clothes, kill meat.

Products

do not assemble

themselves at the whim

of those with the means

to invest in them.

Vast fortunes

cannot be amassed

by any single man.

Workers are the engine

that generate the profit,

that one, alone, never can.

But the engine of industry

operates by consuming

human “resources” -

people -

the collateral damage

of unregulated capitalism

and is considered a necessary evil

by those who feed on their fellow man

via gluttonous economic cannibalism

yet have the nerve to proclaim themselves

shining examples of American entrepreneurism.

“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital.

Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never

have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor

is superior to capital, and deserves much the

higher consideration.” - Abraham Lincoln

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“NAFTA alone is estimated to have displaced 40% of the small farmers in Mexico. “Displaced” to where, and to what? For many, it is to abject poverty and they head to where jobs are - regardless of how exploitative - the United States.”

By Rowan Wolf

6/15/07

They stand in icy water; in crowded conditions; wet to the skin for 18 hour shifts. They work for one of the largest food processors in the world. They are paid below legal wage, and not paid overtime. Now, 167 of them sit in ICE custody after a raid on the North Portland (Oregon) plant at which they were employed. Some had ICE agents show up at their homes and take them into custody.

The workers (including legal immigrants) were employed at $7.00 an hour (below Oregon’s minimum wage of $7.80). They worked up to 18 hour shifts with no overtime in appalling conditions. Why did the workers stay?

Rodriguez, the former worker, said most employees did not report poor conditions and long shifts to authorities for fear of losing their jobs.

“Most of them didn’t have papers to work, so they had no choice; this is where they could find work,” Rodriguez said. “It made me sad, because these people came here to work. The women had little kids at home to feed.” [Work complaints hang over plant]

Now those children, like the children of the workers arrested at Michael Bianco, Inc - a military contractor being paid with our tax dollars - sit waiting for parents who will never come home.

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