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June 25, 2002
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F--Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti--Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker--Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9--11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli--Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
June 25,
2002
They Got What They Wanted,
Will They Lose What They Had?
by Dave Marsh
Last week, the record company cartel for the first
time gained a fee from American radio stations. That, not the
specific rate, marks the real breakthrough of last week's ruling
by the Library of Congress that established fees for webcasting
recorded music. RIAA mouthpiece Cary Sherman shrieked that "artists
and record companies will subsidize the webcasting businesses
of multibillion-dollar companies like Yahoo!, RealNetwroks and
Viacom."
The LoC actually played into the hands
of both the RIAA's five member label cartel and the big
webcast powers. It did this by using as its royalty model the
agreement struck between Yahoo! and the RIAA. This meant rejecting
a rate based on percentage of webcasts, like that which songwriters
and music publishers get from both broadcasters and webcasters.
The per-song standard ensured an amount of money owed far beyond
what any small webcaster can pay. Since the rates are retroactive
to 1998, some web stations owe several hundred thousand dollars
each, payable in October. Smaller webcasters like SomaFM, French
ambient station BlueMars, and Tag's Trance Trip folded before
the ink dried on the decision.
Some say the RIAA's committed suicide,
since little webcasters expose so many kinds of records and targeted
core audiences. But this misses the real point which, as Andrew
Orlowski of theregister.co.uk
points out, is that the RIAA "want complete control."
The only way that the RIAA cartel can achieve such control is
through alliances with large webcasters--the kind who can
afford the new rates. None of the big webcasting entities screamed
loudly. The typical comment, from Alex Alben, of RealNetworks,
was "It's a step in the right direction." Live365,
the largest Internet broadcaster with 8.4 million Arbitron-certified
broadcast hours a month, has had a plan, based on the projected
rate, since February to pay $1.5 million in fees plus a monthly
charge of $200,000. The new plan, which cuts the rate per song
from 0.14 cents a song to .007 cents, cuts those sums in half.
In contrast, Live365 points out that
many of the 40,000 webasters who use its service, some paying
as little as $6.95 a month to do their shows, would now face
at least a $500 license fee and will have to subsidize Live365's
record royalties.
Just as broadcast "deregulation"
virtually wiped out small radio stations, the LoC's new rates
ensure that webcast survivors will belong to very wealthy companies
who can afford them. Clearly, that's now government policy, summed
up by the LoC's rationalization: "...many Webcasters are
currently generating very little revenue, [so] a percentage-of-revenue
rate would require copyright owners to allow extensive use of
their property with little or no compensation." As I've
pointed out many times, protecting "copyright owners"
means protecting big business, not artists. That the Librarian
of Congress views songs solely as property, discarding their
status as culture, is even more appalling.
As the stranglehold of big broadcasters
became too much to endure in the '80s and '90s, one result was
the rise of a pirate (so-called micropower) radio movement. Pirate
radio became so pervasive that the FCC tried to create micropower
licenses; big broadcasting stopped that in its tracks by corralling
a batch of its pet legislators to object.
Some pirates became Webcasters. They
(and many others) will likely become "pirates" again
rather than pay rates set to destroy them. If the FCC couldn't
police such stations when they needed relatively large transmitters,
how is the government going to catch Web "pirates"?
All Web pirates will be aware that it
was the cartel labels who drove them out of legitimacy. This
means an opportunity to expose more of the RIAA's music will
be turned into one more salad of snarling hatred. You don't even
have to hope the RIAA chokes on it. Plummeting sales figures
show it already is.
(Shout out to Little Richard for the
title.)
DeskScan
(what's playing in my office)
1. Try
Again, Mike Ireland and Holler (Ashmont)
2. Human
Being Lawnmower: The Baddest & Maddest of the MC5
(Total Energy)
3. 1000
Kisses, Patty Griffin (ATO)
4. The
Eminem Show, Eminem (Interscope)
5. Watermelon,
Chicken and Gritz, Nappy Roots (Atlantic)
6. Sweet
Talk and Good Lies, Heather Myles (Rounder)
7. Masquerade,
Wyclef Jean (Columbia)
8. Times
Ain't Like They Used to Be, Vol. 5 & 6: Early American
Rural Music, Classic Recordings of the 1920s and 30s (Yazoo)--Each
has one of the newly discovered Blind Joe Reynolds tracks. Not
putting them together's a gouge but at least the rest of each
set lives up to the standard. Each disc features Skip James and
Charley Patton. Five has the Weems String Band's original "Greenback
Dollar" and Frank Blevins' "I've Got No Honey Baby
Now." Six contains Uncle Dave Macon and "God Didn't
Make Me No Monkey Man" by Eli Framer.
9. Living
in a New World, Willie King and the Liberators (Rooster
Blues)
10. Revolucion:
The Chicano's Spirit, a selection of Chicano grooves
from the early 70s (Follow Me, Fr.)
11. By
the Hand of the Father, Alejandro Escovedo (Texas Music
Group)
12. The Shed Session, Bhundu Boys (Sadza,
Ger.) Two discs of early '80s Zimbabwean guitar band music that
rocks harder and easier than any of the "world music"
that became of it.
13. Tonight
at Johnny's Speakeasy, Jo Serrapere & the Willie
Dunns (Detroit Radio Co.)
14. Happy
Town, Tim Krekel
15. Brendan Behan Sings Irish Folksongs
and Ballads: Songs, Anecdotes, Jokes, Diversions, Contradictions,
Seamlessly Strung Together (Outlet, UK)
Dave Marsh coedits
Rock and Rap Confidential.
He can be reached at: marsh6@optonline.net
Dave Marsh's
Previous DeskScan Top 10 Lists:
June 17, 2002
June 12, 2002
June 4, 2002
May 27, 2002
May 20, 2002
May 14, 2002
May 6, 2002
April 30, 2002
April 22, 2002
April 15, 2002
April 9, 2002
April 2, 2002
March 25, 2002
March 18,
2002
March 11,
2002
Today's
Features
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
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