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Thomas Paine's Corner Has Moved!
2007-07-07 21:56:00
Thomas Paine's Corner , a persistent voice for the oppressed sentient beings of our Earth since March 10, 2005, has completed its integration into Cyrano's Journal Online, one of the finest radical publications in existence. Founded in print in 1982 by its highly regarded editor and publisher, David Patrice Greanville, Cyrano's has consistently provided a wealth of information, quality analysis, inspiration, commentary, and proposed solutions to the laundry list of problems caused by our depraved system.Visit us and bookmark the new links at:http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/ ANDhttp://www.bestcyrano.org/We will no longer publish new material at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/. However, this URL will remain enabled as an archive for the 2500 plus articles we have published since 2005.Thank you for your ongoing readership and support!Thomas Paine's Corner is a site dedicated to advancing universal human rights, fostering social and economic justice, and supporting the cau...
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The Militarization of American Youth
2007-07-04 06:46:00
NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you.by Bryn Lloyd-Bollard RECRUITMENT LIES Across the country, the U.S. military is failing to meet its recruitment goals. To address this problem, the Pentagon has been rapidly expanding its programs designed to entice young people to enlist. It is now spending $3.4 billion dollars annually, an average of $14,000 per new recruit. Using flashy marketing campaigns, television spots, and even developing its own videogames, the Army is bombarding young people with images that glorify guns and violence. Recruiters use elaborate PR strategies: they set up shop at malls, movie theaters, sporting events, and concerts, and they cruise around town in decked-out Humvees that blast music popular among teenagers. The military presence in our nation's public schools is growing at an alarming rate. Educational institutions in working-class areas are prime targets of military recruit...
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Reinventing a War Criminal
2007-07-03 22:09:00
NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you. By Stephen Lendman7/3/07Britain's most despised and discredited man ended his 10 year reign June 27 when he stepped down from office transferring his ruling Labor Party's leadership to successor Gordon Brown. He had no choice because of seething public displeasure over his allying with George Bush's illegal wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Most Brits oppose them, yet the vast majority of Labor and Conservative MPs, including new prime minister Gordon Brown, supported them early on, now may have second thoughts, but are constrained by close relations with Washington making them reluctant to back down from what they once disingenuously trumpeted as a noble cause.That's an open question; however, the London Guardian's Jonathan Steele posed and answered June 29 if Mr. Brown was listening. Steele's message to "The new man in No 10" is "seize the day....break with Bush now...
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A Night to Remember
2007-07-03 21:32:00
By Vi Ransel7/3/07Undaunted,the captain steers our economytoward Third World statuswhere growth runs up againstthe iceberg of interest paymentson the Titanic national debt.Like Ahabhe feverishly pursuesthe Great White Whale of deficit,slashing taxes for rich constituenciesand extorting increased military spendingwith the threat of international terrorism,which leads Congress to make cutsby jettisoning the lifeboats of social programs.Citizensplaint an S.O.S.while the King of the Worldmortgages their future to the Communist Chineseand the haves, and have-mores, his base,pull campaign contribution stringsas Congress plays "Nearer My God to Thee"and the Ship of State begins her descentbeneath the Social Darwinist, neoconservative sea.His laissez-faire majestytorpedoes the Social Safety Netand the American People jump,or are pushed overboardin individual, privatized lifejacketsas the United States sailsback to The Gilded Agewith a fleet of golden yachtsbearing Wall St. and Inherited Wea...
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Stop Buying Stuff?a reminder
2007-07-03 01:14:00
NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you.BY FRAN FORSTADT7/2/07Over the years I have become more and more discouraged and angry at this nation?s refusal to acknowledge, at a national level and in a consistent way, the harm we do our planet and its life forms. Our Environmental Protection Agency is so lame that I have to ask whose interests it serves. Profit, not health, is the prime motivator in all business. Industrial processes which poison the air, water, and soil have been developed and left in place for decades because to change them will reduce profits. Of course, NOT changing them continues to poison the planet and sicken its organic populations, but for so long now that consideration has been pushed aside.The ?sickness industry,? interconnected through pharmaceuticals, insurance, and the grossly expensive medical establishment, then makes money ?curing? the conditions that industry has caused. This whol...
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The attacks on SICKO make me sick
2007-07-02 13:51:00
NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you.BY PATRICE GREANVILLECOMMENT AND OPINION BY THE EDITOR OF CYRANO'S JOURNAL 7/2/07 Well, judging from what we are beginning to see, it didn't take too long for the mainstream media to regain its footing, atone for its earlier honest hoorays for Moore's film, and figure an angle from which it might preserve the remnants of its tattered honor while still fulfilling the dirty job its corporate masters demanded it to do, which was to badmouth Michael Moore's brave documentary, SICKO, into complete ineffectiveness. The spectacle makes me sick. Just a few days ago CNN's Anderson Cooper offered on his program 360 a glimpse of the subtle and not so subtle maneuvers being frantically worked out by the elites as they scramble to repair the huge breach on their disinformation wall created by Moore's near irrefutable expose of the American healthcare system, an industry wh...
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What is heroism?
2007-07-01 18:12:00
NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you.Photo: Bobby Mueller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (and a true hero), left, argues with a protester as he disrupts a ?John Kerry Lied? rally put on by Vietnam Vets for the Truth, at Upper Senate Park, Sunday, Sept. 12, 2004, in Washington. By Gene W. DeVaux ????????????????????Activist and columnist???????????????????? 7/1/07 A Google alert came in this morning. It was related to my KC Indymedia submission from December of 2004 (which follows): People routinely refer to our troops in Iraq as heroes. What is heroism in an unjust war? Charley Gibson of Good Morning America, as so many news people do, referred to our troops in Iraq as heroes. I flinch when I hear that. Can we give blanket praise to all who are fighting in this unjust war? Some have probably performed heroic deeds. Others have committed crimes against the Iraqi people, and h...
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Big Oil and Big Media V. Hugo Chavez
2007-07-01 17:47:00
NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you. By Stephen Lendman 7/1/07 On June 27, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal vied for attention with feature stories on oil giants ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips "walking away from their multi-billion-dollar investments in Venezuela" as the Journal put it or standing "Defiant in Venezuela" as the Times headlined. Both papers can barely contain their displeasure over Hugo Chavez wanting Venezuela to have majority ownership of its own assets and no longer let Big (foreign) Oil investors plunder them. Those days are over. State oil company PDVSA is now majority shareholder with a 78% interest in four Orinoco joint ventures. That's up from previous stakes of from 30 to 49.9%. That's how it should be, but it can't stop the Journal and Times from whining about it. What ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips reject, oil giants Chevron, BP PLC, Total SA and ...
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Race(ing) Backwards With Boost From SCOTUS
2007-07-01 01:44:00
NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you. ?Are the images of who was left to drown or starve during Hurricane Katrina so easily forgotten? At that time racial disparity stood clearly in front of the eyes of every person who turned on a television.? By Rowan Wolf CJO?s Avenger 6/30/07 Well, SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) has dealt yet another ?conservative? blow to the nation. This time by essentially overturning Brown vs the Board of Education. Schools are still expected to achieve racial ?diversity.? However, accomplishing racial integration is very difficult if it is unconstitutional to use race as a criteria. Justice Roberts argument was: ?The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.? (NY Times, 6/28/07) Roberts? statement is a tautological argument that is based on a false premise - that race would not be an issue if we did not att...
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Finding Lessons in Gaza's Bloodshed
2007-07-01 01:30:00
NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you. By Ramzy Baroud 6/30/07 The Hamas-Fatah clash that has culminated into a mini-civil war in recent weeks is both old and new, and while some of its elements are uniquely Palestinian, much of it was manufactured at the behest of US-Israeli intelligence and governments. The tensions between Fatah and Hamas are decades old. Fatah has - since the late 1960s until today - claimed a superior, if not exclusive, position at the helm of Palestinian politics. At times there seemed little margin for any other organization - be it secular, socialist or religious - to share a platform with Yasser Arafat's movement. Throughout the years, Fatah ensured the relevance of Palestinians to their own struggle. It's important, therefore, that Fatah is not seen as one monolithic body. Fatah security chief Mohammed Dahlan and the likes have tainted the reputation of Fatah ...
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Sexual Orientation: When it matters and when it doesn't
2007-06-29 20:52:00
NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you. By Carolyn Baker6/29/07Speaking Truth to PowerIn early 2005 in anticipation of my sixtieth birthday, I began working on an autobiography. Certainly, I reasoned, now entering my sixth decade, I should be putting in ink my reflections on life as I officially become a senior citizen. Following the publication of three books and countless articles, it seemed that my ?memoirs? was the very next step.Little did I realize that in the fall of 2006, just a few weeks after the release of my third book U.S. HISTORY UNCENSORED, a bombshell breaking news story that would hit a pivotal nerve in my own personal history would compel me to integrate the almost-finished memoirs with commentary on the story, not merely from my intellect but from my personal life experience. That news item was the revelation that fundamentalist Christian icon, Pastor Ted Haggard of the New Life Church of C...
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GUANTANAMO
2007-06-29 20:41:00
By Gary Corseri6/29/07Scratching their poems on styrofoam cups,The orange jumpsuits pass them along,Under the scorched-out Cuban sun, through bars,Telling themselves?and reminding the world?They are men, and this InquisitionAlso must pass, this auto da fe,Flushed down history?s manhole,Must bring shame in the Later YearsWhen men and women re-tell the past?La Conquista, the Crusades, the SlaughterOf the Innocents?all the lost causes.There in the cups, drops of Christ?s bloodAppear out of nowhere, mingle with the tearsOf God, of Mohammed?the shepherd boysTending their flocks, dreaming under white-hot stars.What distant fires illuminate their livesOn what worlds reaching beyond this hothouse?Here is grief and love and hatred mixedIn bitter cups to be drunk at onceTossing the head back carelessly; here isThe taste of this world?what we have become.Does it go down easy, cause revulsion,Trip-wire the memory? Does anythingEver come to anything more than a dreamOf home, struggle, certaintie...
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Mcmansions, SUVs, Mega-Churches and the Baghdad Embassy: Life Among Dim and
2007-06-28 18:05:00
NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you. ?In folk stories, when giants are about, drought and famine withers the land and starvation stalks its people. Accordingly, the ruthless giantism inherent to the Corporate/Military/Mass Media state has withered our inner lives, blighted our landscape, and left us powerless before a huge, demeaning system that devours our time, health and humanity.?by Phil Rockstroh6/28/07In microcosmic mimicry of the plight of the besieged middle and laboring classes, my parent's Atlanta neighborhood, as is the case with many others in the vicinity, is being destroyed, in reality --disappeared -- by a blight of upper-class arrogance. The modest, post-war homes of the area are being "scraped" from the landscape as an infestation ofbloated mcmansions rises from the tortured soil. These particleboard and Tyvek-choked monstrosities loom over the remaining smaller houses of the area, as ov...
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Reviewing Linda McQuaig's "Holding the Bully's Coat"
2007-06-28 03:23:00
NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you. ?That underscores Canada's moral depravity under Stephen Harper's leadership umbilically linked to the roguish Bush regime in Washington.? by Stephen Lendman 6/27/07 Linda McQuaig is a prominent, award-winning Canadian journalist, sadly less well known in the US because she writes about her own country. 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 and passion. 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 ...
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Soylent Greed
2007-06-27 02:35:00
NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you.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....(Continue...)Thomas Paine's Corner is a site dedicated to advancing universal human rights, fostering social and economic justice, and supporting the cause of all oppressed, exploited, and impoverished human beings on our Earth.
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"Demonstration" Government in Palestine
2007-06-27 01:43:00
NOTICE TO OUR READERS: The editors will be most grateful for your attention at the end of this feature. Thank you.?Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, has no intention of stepping down and responded at length live on Al-Jazeera rejecting Abbas' "hasty" moves saying 96% of Palestinians support a unity government as the best chance for peace and security. He affirmed his democratically elected government would continue functioning and maintain law and order.? By Stephen Lendman 6/26/07 In 1984 (a year of Orwellian significance), activist and media and social critic Edward Herman wrote one of his many important books titled "Demons tration Elections." In it, he analyzed the US-staged elections in the 1960s in the Dominican Republic and Vietnam and the 1982 one in El Salvador. In the book's Orwellian glossary of terms, he defined the process as "A circus held in a client state to assure the population of the home country that their intrusion is well received. The re...
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Overgrown Kids, Unshackled Ids, and the Death of the Superego
2007-06-25 05:51:00
Sculpture: ?The Id? by TJ Dixon and James Nelson By Jason Miller 6/24/07 Children are completely egoistic; they feel their needs intensely and strive ruthlessly to satisfy them. --Sigmund Freud Frightening as it may be, the Earth?s fate rests in the hands of children. With incredibly formidable military firepower at its disposal, the United States could catalyze Armageddon at any time. And while they may be adults chronologically, our sociopolitical structure is dominated by emotional infants. Nietzsche once pronounced God dead. In the United States, we have a more readily demonstrable (and perhaps related) problem. Our collective id has rendered its governing superego impotent, and perhaps dead. Our prevailing moral standards, as inconsequential as they have become, are of the Jerry Falwell variety. They are mean-spirited, self-serving, judgmental, narrow-minded, selfish, and belligerent. As far as US Americans are concerned, Christ may as well have preach...
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Liberty, Politics, and the Self
2007-06-24 20:41:00
?Spirituality used to be ontology (philosophy of reality) thousands of years ago, but those days are long gone. Now spirituality is mostly entertainment, self-deception, and self-mystification, which is to say a dedication to unrealities.? By Sankara Saranam Meta Arts MagazineIt's hard to dispassionately and philosophically discuss liberty with a straight face these days without becoming a journalist and describing the many ways in which our liberties have deteriorated in our declining society. I'll try, but I don't know how long I'll last or the point of lasting, anyway. Am I to write something for a 'spiritual' column that practically serves as distracting entertainment while our liberties are being suffocated? I could stop now and advise you to go to buzzflash.com to read the news; but whether you stick around or not, one thing to say about liberty is that the quickest and most pain-free way to lose it is by failing to keep abreast of current events, failing to know...
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ICE-CAPS MELTING ADAPTATION
2007-06-23 20:20:00
by Mankh (Walter E. Harris III) 6/23/07 sometimes i go angel and lean in where you are'cause maybe a picture of marigoldsor the thought of ocean could shift your moodsometimes staying brings such impatienceuntil the sun goes down and night sailslike a ship of stars through the Northern lights and thenthere is nowhere else to be only the cord to threadbetween these hands that make the sail go airily buoyantthe crux of this conundrum cannot be reducedto day or night, black or white-- rather,grasping with polar bear claws how the worldis changingearth stays earth yet mingles mud and dryvolcanic and ashen, water stays water yet minglesmud and wet river rambling and depression dustbowldue to forced relocation of indigenous peoples,wind stays wind yet mingles tree, leaf,bonnet off a southern belle, chapeau off a frenchman,roof off the house which was setting next to the eye of the hurricanewind can blow your mind if you don't anchor to some inner rockfire is restless and tameabl...

Reviewing Michel Chossudovsky's America's War on Terrorism
2007-06-23 19:50:00
By Stephen Lendman 6/23/07 Michel Chossudovsky is a noted academic, author, activist and relentless researcher concentrating on America's imperial crusade to control planet earth for its markets, resources and cheap exploitable labor. He's a Canadian economist by profession having taught at the University of Ottawa as well as at academic institutions in Western Europe, Latin America and Southeast Asia. In addition, he's been an economic adviser to developing countries' governments and a consultant for many international organizations, including the UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, International Labour Organization (ILO), and World Health Organization (WHO). He's also the editor of the Centre for Research on Globalization and its web site, Global Research.ca. "America's War on Terrorism " - An Overview Chossudovsky's book is a greatly expanded version of his 2002 book titled, "War and Globalization: The Truth behin...
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Democracy Defeated
2007-06-23 18:45:00
By Ramzy Baroud 6/23/07 All my forewarnings have suddenly been actualised, all at once: Gaza has descended into total and utter chaos; Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has capitulated to Israel and to the United States without a shred of reservation; and the Palestinian democratic experiment, which was until recently an astounding success, has been smashed to pieces. For years I have been warning of a civil war starting in Gaza. I wrote about it in my last book, The Second Palestinian Intifada. I warned via every media platform available that there are too many hands working to ensure the demise of the Palestinian national project, both from within and without. I urged Palestinians not to fall into rhetoric. I saw very clearly that the fragmentation of Palestinian national identity -- an outcome of two combined realities: one stemming from the post-Oslo political culture, the other from Israel's Bantustan ghettos imposed in the West Bank and the total isolation of G...
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Within the Architecture of Denial and Duplicity: The Democratic Party and t
2007-06-21 20:44:00
by Phil Rockstroh6/21/07Why did the Democratic Congress betray the voting public? Betrayal is often a consequence of wishful thinking. It's the world's way of delivering the life lesson that it's time to shed the vanity of one's innocence and grow-the-hell-up. Apropos, here's lesson number one for political innocents: Power serves the perpetuation of power. In an era of runaway corporate capitalism, the political elite exist to serve thecorporate elite. It's that simple.Why do the elites lie so brazenly? Ironically, because they believe they're entitled to, by virtue of their superior sense of morality. How did they come to this arrogant conclusion? Because they think they're better than us. If they believe in anything at all, it is this: They view us as a reeking collection of wretched, baseborn rabble, who are, on an individuallevel, a few billion neurons short of being governable by honest means.Yes, you read that correctly: They believe they're better than you. When the...
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U.S. Agricultural Policy Linked to the Surge in Illegals.
2007-06-21 19:03:00
By Ivor Hughes6/21/07"The flow of immigrants north from Mexico since NAFTA is inextricably linked to the flow of American corn in the opposite direction, a flood of subsidized grain that the Mexican government estimates has thrown two million Mexican farmers and other agricultural workers off the land since the mid-90s. (More recently, the ethanol boom has led to a spike in corn prices that has left that country reeling from soaring tortilla prices; linking its corn economy to ours has been an unalloyed disaster for Mexico's eaters as well as its farmers.) You can't fully comprehend the pressures driving immigration without comprehending what U.S. agricultural policy is doing to rural agriculture in Mexico. "The Way We Live Now ... You Are What You GrowBy MICHAEL POLLANThe New York Times, April 22 2007http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/mag azine/22wwlnlede.t.htmlProtectionist food politics and starvation are the seeds of war. In 1984 and under American pressure... New Zealand adopte...
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Northern Light
2007-06-21 01:41:00
Tony Sutton of ColdType interviewed by Jason Miller 6/20/07 Nearly asphyxiated by the fetid stench wafting from the mendacious corporate media pundits I?ve been profiling, I decided to ascend from the intellectual sewer into which I had crawled in order to observe them in their natural habitat. At last some detoxified air! It was an incredible boost to my faltering faith in humanity when I recently had the privilege to conduct a cyber-interview with Tony Sutton, the editor and publisher of ColdType, an online journal which presents ?Writing Worth Reading from around the World.? As you will discover, Tony and his marvelous publication are two of the best kept secrets we political educators and agitators for social justice have in our arsenal. Domiciled in the Great White North, Tony publishes one of the finest radical journals in existence. In terms of content, contributing writers, and presentation, ColdType?s quality is unparalleled. Judge for yourself: http...
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The Record of the Newspaper of Record
2007-06-21 01:24:00
by Stephen Lendman 6/20/07 Dictionaries define "yellow journalism" variously as irresponsible and sensationalist reporting that distorts, exaggerates or misstates the truth. It's misinformation or agitprop disinformation masquerading as fact to boost circulation and readership or serve a larger purpose like lying for state and corporate interests. The dominant US media excel in it, producing a daily diet of fiction portrayed as real news and information in their role as our national thought-control police gatekeepers. In the lead among the print and electronic corporate-controlled media is the New York Times publishing "All the News That?s Fit to Print" by its standards. Others wanting real journalism won't find it on their pages allowing only the fake kind. It's because this paper's primary mission is to be the lead instrument of state propaganda making it the closest thing we have in the country to an official ministry of information and propaganda. Single-hand...
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Alex Cockburn--Climate Denier
2007-06-19 20:05:00
By Alex Smith6/19/07When some right wing pseudo fascist nut is convicted, or discovered in the bedroom of a little boy, something inside me accepts. I want to cheer, but I don't, because it shows we are all kind of crazy, in some way. But at least all their hurtful rants become sidelined, in the great debates of the day. Thank God, if there is one, we don't have to listen to Jerry Falwell anymore.When an icon of the Left falls - someone who has warned and enlightened us, it is much harder. That's what makes it so painful to announce the virtual death of one Alexander Cock burn - or at least the passing of his credibility.This transplanted Irish/Scottish writer has blasted malfeasance, and authoritarian violence, from the pages of CounterPunch, the Nation, and many mainstream publications. He has been chums with Noam Chomsky, and pals with many of the gonzo journalists who keep us all honest.But now Cockburn has joined the Exxon-funded cranks, who deny that humans are heating up th...
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When is Democracy Not Democracy ?
2007-06-19 17:30:00
By Ivor Hughes6/19/07That question is soon answered ... Democracy is not Democracy if one votes for the wrong party... for the one... that the manipulating parties refused to deal with.A case in point was the political victory of Hamas... that told the story... that rang the Palestinian bell. But it is sure that the sound it made was not to Israeli taste... Since that time Britain... America and Israel have funded Fatah with money and arms via the Egyptian back door... this under American duress... Look at the murderous assault on Lebanon backed by Britain and the U.S. .. It is this double dealing and its historical injustices that are rooted in the foundation of Israel as a Nation with their apartheid and megalomaniac attitude that counts a non Jewish life as...(for the complete essay, click here)Thomas Paine's Corner is a site dedicated to advancing universal human rights, fostering social and economic justice, and supporting the cause of all oppressed, exploited, and impoverishe...

America The Dutiful
2007-06-18 23:14:00
By Vi Ransel6/18/07After the Great Depressionthe Rich had the impressionwe were ripe for revolution.Their solution? A New Deal.But this "gift" they gave uswas merely to enslave ustemporarily amaze us'til they could tear that mother down.After World War Twothey gave us credit.Did it work on us?You bet. It'sworked so well we'reall in debt up to our ass.We got little Levittmockups of their mansions,sprawling highway expansionof veins ready for the oily needlein the nation's arm.And they let us go tocollege, but they'reafraid of knowledge'cause it's POWER(to The People). Can'thave that! You have adream? You just dream on.Basic education is outdatedon the corporate plantation.All the world's remediationcan't undo the devastation doneby whole word reading and new math.And this theft of skillsmakes a mockeryof participatory democracy,sending us down the corporateManifest Destiny path.Advertising's their predationfor our seduction and sedationso without evaluationwe'll submitwhi...
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Uncivil Liberties and the Empire's War on Its Citizens
2007-06-18 21:07:00
By Carolyn Baker 6/18/07 Speaking Truth to PowerIn the seventh year of the current presidential administration which has eviscerated more aspects of the Bill of Rights and U.S. Constitution than any previous administration in American history, I recently had the opportunity of viewing a new documentary ?Uncivil Liberties: What Lies Between Liberty & Security?, written and directed by Thomas Mercer. I am pleased to offer my review of the film; however, it is not possible for me to authentically review this work of art or any other pertaining to civil liberties without attaching to it my own addendum of the history of attacks on the well being of its citizens by the United States government.Unlike Robert Greenwald?s ?Unconstitutional? or Aaron Russo?s ?America: From Freedom To Fascism?, Mercer?s film is not a documentary but fiction, closer in purpose to the genre of ?Star Wars?, ?Farenheit 451?, or ?Brazil.? It is intentionally murky in its message, filled with purposeful ambiguity, ...
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What is Money? Outing the L-Word Part 3
2007-06-17 18:57:00
By Andrew S. Taylor 6/17/07 "This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." -Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.We wish to live in a world where our wages have some objective meaning, and are not simply reflections of unthinking market relativism. But we live in an age of post-modern money, in which our currency - be it paper, plastic, or figures recorded in computer memory - serves as a re-writable "open text" for those to whom the world's treasuries are entrusted. Its value can be altered by decree, trimmed and nudged with exacting precision in studied correlation to events throughout the world marketplace. As international banking is now completel...
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