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July 10, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
European
Worries and
Bush's Terror War
July 9, 2002
St. Clair / Cockburn
The Atomic
Clock is Ticking:
All Roads Lead to Yucca Mtn.
Jack McCarthy
Florida:
a Terrorist Sanctuary for Bush's Bloody Pals?
Robert Fisk
How a Saudi
Billionaire
Does Beirut
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
July 8, 2002
Rick Mercier
Yucca
Mountain Bound
Lev Grinberg
The
BUSHARON Global War
Tariq Ali
How Bush
Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
July 6, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace Process
Todd May
Independence
and Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
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
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July
10, 2002
Record Cartel
Accounting Scams
The Return of CREEP
by Dave Marsh
This week, California State Senator Martha Escutia
called a hearing on record label accounting practices. Sen. Escutia
represents Whittier, which was Richard Nixon's hometown.
Perfect. Watergate unraveled as a White
House conspiracy of dirty tricks, showing Nixon and his henchmen
in CREEP (The Committee for the ReElection of the President)
as ruthless bullies, liars, thugs and cheats (not to mention
morons, since as the white supremacist candidate, Nixon would
have won on the square).
Many of those in CREEP physically resembled
the young white male MBAs who run today's record business. How
hard is it to  imagine Universal's Edgar Bronfman, Jr.
being grilled by a Congressional committee?
Like CREEP, the recording cartel deploys
juvenile tactics with no real purpose. Lately, RIAA's CREEPs
have resorted to "spoofing" file-sharing sites like
Morpheus and Kazaa. That means uploading files with popular song
titles that turn out to be loops of nothing but the chorus or
even greater garbage. If you wanted to force people to
have the cartel, you couldn't pick a better method.
The label CREEPs haven't uploaded viruses
only because that's illegal. Instead, the RIAA assigned its principal
Capitol Hill stooge, Howard Berman, a repulsively sanctimonious
Beverly Hills liberal, to introduce a law letting the cartel
CREEPs get away with computer murder. Berman's bill frees copyright
holders-that is, multibillion dollar multinational corporations-to
hack into any computer they suspect of "stealing"--
that is sharing copyrighted material even if they don't own
it. This lets the cartel sabotage, say, artists who offer
their own music for free on the Internet. Reasonably enough,
since that's also stealing by cartel standards, meaning it's
an exchange of music that does not involve slopping the RIAA's
hogs.
This probably sounds paranoid, just as
earlier columns claiming the RIAA cartel would criminalize file-sharers
seemed hysterical. Is it?
According to the July 3 Wall Street Journal,
the cartel plans to file lawsuits against "the highest volume
song providers within the [file-sharing] services." Granted,
that's not the same as filing felony charges against song-swappers.
But a criminal indictment requires convincing a Federal prosecutor
to ruin a kid's life (the RIAA's done that twice, though). On
the other hand, you can ruin a kid who loves music too much just
as easily with a lawsuit. With any luck, you can drag his parents
into it, too, and leave the family with the economic prospects
of a '60s soul singer living off record royalties. The price
is only hatred.
The RIAA wants to counter with a public
relations campaign featuring prominent artists committing career
suicide by justifying the labels' attempt to continue denying
Internet reality. But they'd better round up the artists before
Sen. Escutia holds her hearing, because what tumbles from under
that rock will surely alienate every record-maker with a one
point IQ advantage on James Hetfield. At the very least, it will
expose consistent patterns of undercounting, shortchanging, and
false charges for various "expenses." At some point,
someone might even note that these are multinational corporations
who earn their billions this way. That might even lead the public
to ask, "If they do that to recording artists, what do they
do to the rest of us?"
Hating the bastards is really too good
for 'em. Let's work on our own trick: Finding a way to decently
compensate our music-makers-which will mean doing it for everyone-so
we can get rid of the labels altogether.
DeskScan
(what's playing in my office)
1. "The
Rising," Bruce Springsteen (Sony)
2. The
Modern Recordings, 1950-1951, B.B. King (Ace UK)
3. Blazing
Arrow, Blackalicious (MCA)
4. Try
Again, Mike Ireland and Holler (Ashmont)
5. Party! At Home: Recorded in Memphis
in 1968, Furry Lewis, Bukka White and Friends (Arcola)
6. 1000
Kisses, Patty Griffin (ATO)
7. Watermelon,
Chicken and Gritz, Nappy Roots (Atlantic)
8. Masquerade,
Wyclef Jean (Columbia)
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. England,
Half-Half English, Billy Bragg and the Blokes (Elektra)
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. Fire
on Ice, Terry Callier (Elektra, UK reissue)
14. "Her Majesty," Chumbawumba
(free anti-royalist single from chumbawumba.com)
15. A Stagecoach Named Desire, The Cornell
Hurd Band (Behemoth)
Dave Marsh coedits
Rock and Rap Confidential.
Marsh is the author of The
Heart of Rock and Soul: the 1001 Greatest Singles.
He can be reached at: marsh6@optonline.net
Dave Marsh's
Previous DeskScan Top 10 Lists:
July 1, 2002
June 25, 2002
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
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
Europeans
and Bush's Terror War
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