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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

But the blood is wasted, splattered on clothes, on walls, on streets, or seeping into sand. There’s so much sand there, all of it rich with iron. “To see hematocrit in a grain of sand, hold hemoglobin in the palm of your hand…”

By Adam Engel

9/23/07

I died for your sins—almost. I never quite died complete. But still. You didn’t notice either way. It’s been a year, more or less. You didn’t call my wife. You didn’t send a card.

I don’t know why I stay on. Something in me clings to this wretched place. I refuse to leave. Perhaps I feel I deserve something. I broke my back carrying the burden of America. They gave me painkillers (pills, not Marines). Oxycontin, oxycodone. Now I’m addicted and must pay and pay and pay for more. Lucky my wife works.

I can’t sleep, but I’m clear, clear in the head. I need blood. I read the articles on the Web. So many writing, nobody doing. I look at clips of children stained with blood, or jetting blood from severed limbs, and think: waste, waste, waste.

All that blood and none for me. Do you think it’s a coincidence, me being a vampire and all, with all this blood around, everywhere I turn, and not drop for me, unless I pay and pay and pay?

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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

9/23/07

We are constantly urged to buy things we don’t need, which we use once, if at all, and then dispose of to buy another thing we don’t need, and often don’t really want. Who does it benefit if we, in essence, buy the same thing over and over and over and over and over? Why pay every day for something you should be able to buy once a week, once a month, or … once? Who does that benefit? You? You’re being ripped off and gotten over on and deep down you know it, but you feel like you can’t “not buy stuff.” So you just keep doing it and not thinking about it because it feels good - at the moment you’re doing it. But soon you feel the urge to do it again. Can you say “addict”?

You buy shoddy, inferior goods purposefully made to fall apart as fast as possible. And you’re urged to throw away things that are still perfectly serviceable just so someone can make a profit off you. Why do you have fifty pairs of shoes? Are you a centipede? Why have you become almost totally dependent on “electronics” to the point where you can’t brush your own teeth without a battery-operated brush? To the point where you can’t sit still without the distraction of a cell phone, an I-pod, a CD or DVD player, a TV, a radio, a laptop, videogames and video cameras, etc., etc., etc. to keep reality from staring you in the face?

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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

9/23/07

They gave us democracy,
But took our freedom.
We had the right to vote,
But it didn’t matter.
We had the right to refuse to sing
“The Star-Spangled Banner”—
But not if we valued our lives.

We could chant, “Not in my name,”
But they took our names away.
We could work hard,
But they taxed us into the ground.
We could march against War,
But they sent us to War
And taught our children to kill
Someone else’s children.

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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 Adam Engel

9/23/07

Bright lights.
Screechy scratchy
space gossip:
alien tongues
like insects in debate.
Cold instruments, hard tables.
Paralyzed, mute, helpless.
Steely gadgets telescoped up my –
but back in bed by six.
Clock radio Muzak
alarm, alarm. Alarm. Alarm.

That dream again?
No, look, proof:
tiny scoop-marks on my thigh
and oh my burning bum!
Regardless:
to the shower
the espresso pot
the car my pod my womb
two hours traffic
may I not collapse
on the packed pavement
of my destination or
drop dead
in the cubicle unremarked
till pay day or
stink of personal decay or
impromptu staff meeting.

May I survive this day’s
abduction,
return
home again, home again
to night’s
white light blindness
catatonic lifetimes past
probes unspeakable
alien chit-chat
unidentified fleeting objects
of deliverance.

Adam Engel is a senior contributing editor for Cyrano’s Journal Online and can be reached at:

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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

Martin Luther King Jr. refused “to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality”.

By Ramzy Baroud

9/22/07

Racism is, among many things, convenient. It provides simplified, definite and ready-to-serve answers to complex and compounded questions. Racists, in turn, come from all walks of life; their motivation and the root causes behind their contemptible views of others may differ, but the outcome of these views is predictably the same - racial discrimination, social and political oppression, religious persecution and war.

The textual definition of racism pertains only to race, but in practice racism is a consequence of groupthink, whereby a group of people decides to designate itself as a collective and starts delineating its relationship with other collectives - or other people in general - with a sense of supremacy. When coupled with economic and/or political dominance, supremacy translates into various forms of subjugation and cruelty.

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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 Steven Jonas

9/22/07

Originally published at BuzzFlash

Karl Rove originally set out to establish the Permanent Republican Majority (PRM), his version of The Thousand Year Reich. The disastrous results of Bush’s foreign military and domestic economic policies combined have likely put an end to any hope for the Georgites to achieve that goal in the foreseeable future. However, for a variety of reasons, a Permanent Republican Presidency (PRP) is very much achievable. Working for whomever the Republican nominee is (and I still think it will be Giuliani), Rove will remain heavily invested in achieving this goal.

There will be a variety of factors working in his favor. However, the Democrats are likely to have a (relatively) permanent majority in the Congress and a majority of the country’s voters now are either Democrats or self-styled independents. Thus to achieve the PRP, Rove is going to need some help. Here are some thoughts on what the Democratic Presidential candidates and eventual nominee can do to assist the establishment of the PRP. I am sure Rove is counting on them to do their part, as he has so often been able to do in the past.

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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

Is greed good? Gordon Gekko and Ragnar Redbeard III think so!

[To highlight the deep malevolence of our rotten-to-the-core system, we bring you this repulsive apologia for capitalism. Since many have deluded themselves with the far-fetched notion that decency and humanity can coexist with the inherent depravity of profits and property over people, we are providing you with a celebration of capitalism, the way it was meant to be written!]

December 6, 2006

by Ragnar Redbeard III

“What kind of a society isn’t structured on greed? The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm; capitalism is that system.”

—Milton Friedman

What kind indeed? Certainly not a prodigious society such as ours. Thanks to Capitalism, the United States is replete with opulence, might, and benevolence.

Guided by the brilliant foresight of Hamilton, manacled by men like Keynes, Galbraith, and FDR, and ultimately granted a refreshing degree of freedom by the heroic intellectual efforts of Rand and Friedman, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” has wrought a citadel for those wishing to pursue healthy greed, self-interest, and enlightened oppression. While Capitalism in the United States is still afflicted with the diseases of a mixed economy, government regulation and socialistic tendencies, America’s socioeconomic system is far superior to any rival, past or present.

Yet despite having propelled the human family to the zenith of prosperity, technology, and freedom, American Capitalism has been, and remains, under constant siege. Vile Communists have waged multiple wars (hot and Cold) against us. Islamofascist terrorists struck at the very heart of our economic freedom when they felled the Twin Towers. Crazed Latino Leftist leaders espousing frightening notions of nationalization, protectionism, and wealth redistribution are springing up like noxious weeds in our backyard. And despite their diminished prevalence, domestic entitlement programs and organized labor continue to pose significant threats to the evolution, perpetuation, and proliferation of the American Way.

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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 Republican candidates for president and their fantasy-prone constituents wish to set the Way Back Machine to the golden days of the 1980s when Ronald Reagan was impersonating a man just arrived via the 1940s. This phenomenon is known as the Law of Republican Special Relativity, which states: When events begin to accelerate forward, the conservative mind will be cast, at an equal rate of speed, backwards in time.]

by Phil Rockstroh

9/20/07

One would think that from the cries of (feigned) indignation and calls for repentance arising from conservatives regarding Move-On.org’s ad in the N.Y. Times that the liberal-leaning group had not simply questioned the insights and intentions of a public servant, promoting, in a public forum, the policy of an illegal and immoral occupation of a sovereign nation; rather, the folks of Move-On.org had committed blasphemy against the holy name of some revered saint — General Mary Petraeus, Mother of God.

The false outrage of perpetually offended conservatives serves as cover for the true outrages of our era, including: truncated civil liberties, rising levels of social and economic inequality and injustice, and foreign wars of aggression waged by an insular and secretive executive branch and fought by a permanent underclass. The outrages keep arriving, because the collective imagination of the citizen/consumers of the US, arbitrated by a careerist media elite, has been, for decades, in the thrall of false narratives that serve the interests of the elite of the corporate/militarist classes.

Concurrently, a sense of unease and despair, due to a sense of personal and collective powerlessness before exploitive power, has created the tone and tenor of the times, and begot the phenomenon of supine liberalism and Viagra conservatism. (In this way, liberals stand fecklessly by, as the public is, time and time again, screwed by the decrepit schemes of the right.)

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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

9/20/07

Except for a select group of corrupt politicians, powerful businessmen, media barons and pundits of the law, the rest of the world was fooled into the Iraq war. Granted not everybody believed its declared motives and a few tried to stop it, but in the end we are all paying the price, notwithstanding the Iraqi people. Donald Rumsfeld said at the beginning of the war, “I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today will last five days, five weeks or five months, but it won’t last any longer than that.” We are now in the fifth year of what I dare term ‘genocide’.

The same group of people who lied to the world about the war in Iraq are doing the same about the state of the global economy, and again the public is sleepwalking as it listens to their lullabies. We could be witnessing the collapse of the capitalist model of society as we know it. According to President Bush, however, we are seeing a “thriving” U.S. economy.

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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

[Reaganomics adherents are today’s neoconservatives with the “full force of the US military machine (serving their unfettered) corporate agenda” of greed writ large. Its holy policy trinity is: “elimination of the public sphere, total liberation for corporations and skeletal social spending (if any at all).” But instead of lifting all boats as promised, it’s the mirror opposite. It creates a powerful ruling corporatist class partnered with corrupted political elites - “with hazy and ever-shifting lines between the two groups.”]

Review of Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”

by Stephen Lendman

9/20/07

Naomi Klein is an award-winning Canadian journalist, author, documentary filmmaker and activist. She writes a regular column for The Nation magazine and London Guardian that’s syndicated internationally by the New York Times Syndicate that gives people worldwide access to her work but not its own readers at home.

In 2004, she and her husband and co-producer Avi Lewis released their first feature documentary - “The Take.” It covered the explosion of activism in the wake of Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis. People responded with neighborhood assemblies, barter clubs, mass movements of the unemployed and workers taking over bankrupt companies and reopening them under their own management.

Klein is also the author of three books. Her first was “No Logo - Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies” (2000) that analyzes the destructive forces of globalization. Next came “Fences and Windows - Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate” (2002) covering the global revolt against corporate power.

Her newest book just out is “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” that explodes the myth of “free market” democracy. It shows how neoliberal Washington Consensus fundamentalism dominates the world with America its lead exponent exploiting security threats, terror attacks, economic meltdowns, competing ideologies, tectonic political or economic shifts, and natural disasters to impose its will everywhere. Wars are waged, social services cut, and freedom sacrificed when people are too distracted, cowed or bludgeoned to object. Klein describes a worldwide process of social and economic engineering she calls “disaster capitalism” with torture along for the ride to reinforce the message - no “New World Order” alternatives are tolerated.

“Free market” triumphalism is everywhere - from Canada to Brazil, China to Bulgaria, Russia to South Africa, Vietnam to Iraq. In all cases, the results are the same. People are sacrificed for profits and Margaret Thatcher’s dictum applies - “there is no alternative.”

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