Today's Stories

August 20, 2009

Eugenia Tsao
Inside the DSM:
The Drug Barons' Campaign to Make Us All Crazy

Dave Lindorff
The Worst and the Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

Yonatan Preminger
The Strategy Behind Israel's Migrant Labor Policies

Wajahat Ali
The Detention of Shah Rukh Kahn

Website of the Day
How to cope with flu pandemics

August 19, 2009

David Michael Green
Guess What? He's a Terrible President

Paul Craig Roberts
Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs

Marshall Auerback
Debt Revolt? Tax Strike? There are a Lot of Angry People Out There

Franklin Lamb
AIPAC Sends in the Clowns

John Ross
Three Amigos Summit

Marjorie Cohn
Legendary Lawyer Doris Brin Walker Dies; Represented Angela Davis, Smith Act Defendants

August 18, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Specter of Debt Revolt Is Haunting Europe?

Mary Lynn Cramer
Obama-Fraud: Don't Confuse Medicare with Single-Payer

Jonathan Cook
U.S. Turns Blind Eye to Israel's New Separation Policy

Uri Avnery
Whose Acre?

Ralph Nader
Block Obama's Abject Surrender to Insurance and Drug Companies

Bill Quigley & Davida Finger
Katrina Pain Index - 2009

August 17, 2009

Ray McGovern
Can the Washington Post Save Dick Cheney?

Andy Worthington
Bagram Isn't the New Guantánamo, It's the Old Guantánamo

Patrick Cockburn
Life and Death in Baghdad as Americans Leave

Don Fitz
The True Story of Fox's Hero, Kenneth Gladney

P. Sainath
Drought of Justice, Flood of Funds

Helena Cobban
Zionist Pioneer Renounces Zionism

August 14-16, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Health Plans and Death Plans

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Fall of the House of Stanford

Peter Linebaugh
The Commons, the Castle, the Witch and the Lynx

Esam Al-Amin
What Actually Happened in Fatah's Elections?

Marshall Auerback
Why a Debtor's Revolt Would Work

Mike Whitney
Bulletins From Clunkerville

Paul Krassner
Woodstock at Forty

Saul Landau
Health Care and the Seeds of Disunity

Nikolas Kozloff
Colombian Elites Fear Bolivaran Revolution

Henry A. Giroux
Politics After Hope

John Ross
Sleepwalking Through the Minefield

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Land Sale

Isabella Kenfield
Monsanto's Man in the Obama Administration

David Rosen
Sexual Torture, Yet Again

Ron Jacobs
Unconditional Negotiations, Now!

Wajahat Ali
Obama's Immigration Reforms: Neither Humane Nor Thoughtful

David Macaray
Prison Games

Greg Moses
Down in South Texas: the Geometries of Bob Dylan

Charles R. Larson
Egyptian Economics 101

David Yearsley
Stalked by Bill Evans' Ghost: Kind of Blue at Fifty

Lorenzo Wolff
There Ain't Much to Country Livin': the Drive-By Truckers and the Fine Print

Kim Nicolini
Class, Race and Clint

Poets' Basement
Reiss, Ford and Moser

Website of the Weekend
Timidity and Transparency

August 13, 2009

Eduardo Galeano
I Hate to Bother You

Joanne Mariner
Letting Cheney Off the Hook

Michael Donnelly
Burning Forests for Electricity

Norman Solomon
When the Dead Have No Say

Russell Mokhiber
Boycott Whole Foods

Tim Wise
Sick Heil! The Hitlerizing of Obama

Brian M. Downing
Succession and the Pakistani Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Single-Payer and Medicare

David Manning / Miriam Cotton:
Iran Versus Honduras: a Subtle Difference

Martha Rosenberg
John Hughes, Gone With Only 59 Candles

Website of the Day
Congress Can't Find Their As-teroids

August 12, 2009

Michael J. Watts
Nigeria on the Brink

Bouthaina Shaaban
Where are the Arabs to Stand Up for the Hanoun and Ghawi Families?

Ricardo Alarcón
The Cuban Five: Justice in Wonderland

Binoy Kampmark
Terror Australis

Paul Craig Roberts
Concocting the Appearance of Recovery

Alan Farago
Going Down Absurd: the Future of Florida Bay

James Ridgeway
Ghostwriting Your Meds

Dave Lindorff
10 Questions to Ask If You Find Yourself at an ObamaCare Town Hall Meeting

David Macaray
Labor and the Conventional Wisdom

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Assimilation of Niranjan Ramakrishnan

Website of the Day
A Petition in Support of Janice Harper

August 11, 2009

Ricardo Alarcón
Forbidden Heroes

Marshall Auerback
America's Biggest Economic Problem?

Reza Yavari
Inside Iran's Most Infamous Prison

Winslow T. Wheeler
How Congress Pays For Its Pork

Tim Wise
Red-Baiting and Racism

Uri Avnery
A Moral Person

Deepak Tripathi
Getting Away With Torture

Greg Moses
Time to Plan for the Worst

Benjamin Dangl
Boycotting Big Beer

Dave Lindorff
Hecklers Unite! Why Aren't Progressives Disrupting ObamaCare Town Halls?

Website of the Day
What Bush Told Chirac About the Iraq War

August 10, 2009

David Price
Trial by FBI Investigation

Mike Whitney
There is No Recession; It's a Planned Demolition

Alan Farago
Seeds of Destruction: How the National Economy was Wrecked by the Politics of Deregulation in Florida

Conn Hallinan
The Honduran Coup: a U.S. Connection

Russell Mokhiber
Health Care: In Defense of Disruption

Paul Krassner
The Mystery Behind the Manson Murders

Sousan Hammad
Orgy of the Dead: the 2009 Fatah Conference

Jonathan Cook
Israeli School Apartheid

Ira Glunts
Netanyahu's Sister-in-Law Detained by Israeli Police; Calls Evictions an Unjustified Folly

George Wuerthner
Dead Tree Hysteria

Website of the Day
Conyers: ObamaCare is Crap

August 7 - 9, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
It Pays to Have a Nuke

Mike Whitney
Economy on a Scaffold

Elaine C. Hagopian
Obama's Israel Albatross

Carl Ginsburg
RX For Healthcare

Miguel Tinker Salas
Honduras is Only Part of the Story: the Conservative Counter-Attack in Latin America

Saul Landau
The Kidney Broker and the Money Laundering Rabbis

John Ross
The Mexican Genome: Big Science in the Service of Indian Genocide?

Anthony DiMaggio Obama and the Israel Lobby: Origins of Power

John Stanton
Expanding Human Terrain Systems?

Christopher Brauchli Legal Absurdities: Outing Three Strikes

Wajahat Ali
A Muslim American Hero: an Interview with Dave Eggers on "Zeitoun"

Ron Jacobs
As Long as the Wars Continue, We Must Resist Them

Franklin Lamb
Sunday Morning on the Dunes: Cleaning "Free Gaza Beach"

Bruce E. Levine
Protect Us From Our Friends

Michael Winship
Neighborhood Watch for Planet Earth

David Macaray
Glimmers of Hope for Labor?

Stephen Fleischman
Suicide Squad

Robert Bryce
Unplugging the Next Big Thing: the Hype Over Electric Cars

Robert Dodge, MD: Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered

Mark Seth Lender
The Message of the Glossy Ibis

David Yearsley
Vaucanson's Faun and the Duck in the Attic

Ben Sonnenberg
Chris Fuller's Brilliant Debut

Lorenzo Wolff
When Music's the Character

Poets' Basement
Dominguez and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Warren Buffett's Betrayal

August 6, 2009

Ishmael Reed
Let's All Have a Beer

Paul Craig Roberts
The Expiring Economy

William Blum Assassinations and Coups: Keeping Track of the Empire's Crimes

Michael Donnelly
Rod Coronado: the Hardest Working Man in Animal Rights "Terrorism"

Jonathan Cook
Rabbis Ban Marriage for Israeli "Untouchables"

Dave Lindorff
The Health Care Reform Sell-Out

Ellen Brown
The Public Option in Banking

Website of the Day
Ellsberg on Hiroshima

August 5, 2009

Dedrick Muhammad /
Barbara Ehrenreich
The Destruction of the Black Middle Class

Norman Solomon
The Incredible, Shrinking Health Care Plan

William Blum
The Myths of Afghanistan: Past and Present

Gareth Porter
The ISI and the Taliban: US Officials Are Protecting Pakistani Aid to Taliban

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Myth of Medicare for All

Jim Goodman
Obama Needs to Take a Stand on Trade

Nadia Hijab
Playing From Strength in the Middle East

Gretchen Kroth
Guatemala's Garbage Dump Education System

Steve Macek /
Scott Sanders
Privatizing the Airwaves

Sarah Lazare
Inside G.I. Resistance

Website of the Day
The Locavore Myth

August 4, 2009

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Shell Game

Dave Lindorff
The Recession Isn't Over, By a Long Shot

Patrick Cockburn
Did British Bomb Attacks in Iran Provoke Hostage Crisis?

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Campaign to Silence Human Rights Groups

Jeff Sher
Making a Mess of Health Care Reform

Dean Baker
Why Don't We Globalize Health Care?

Andy Worthington
Gitmo as Hotel California

Uri Avnery
A Jeremiad

Mark Weisbrot
U.S.-Brokered Mediation in Honduras Has Failed

Alvaro Huerta
Hold That Dustbin! So Much for the "End of Racism"

Website of the Day
Pentagon to Ban Facebook and Twitter?

August 3, 2009

Pam Martens
Millions of Americans Pushed Into No-Law System by Colluding Banks

Anthony DiMaggio
Media Backlash: Obama and the Settlements

Udi Aloni
And Who Shall I Say is Calling? A Plea to Leonard Cohen

Mike Roselle
See the Mountains of WestVirginia ... Before They're Blown Up!

Dr. Susan Block
Beat It! Sex, Death and Michael Jackson

Roy Bourgeois / Margaret Knapke
School of Coups

Joe Bageant
A Yard Sale in Chernobyl

Dina Jadallah
Hiding the State

Dave Lindorff
Of Blue Dogs and Jellyfish

Martha Rosenberg
Grand Closings in Evanston: How the Recession is Hitting Illinois

Website of the Day
Why We Can't "Afford" Health Care

July 31 - August 2, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Biden and Clinton Mutinies

Gabriel Kolko
Searching For Enemies

John Prados
The Intelligence Oversight Mess

Joe Bageant
The Bastards Never Die

Tim Wise
Rationalizing Racial Oppression

Carl Ginsburg
Frist First: Follow the Money (and Find the Plump Heart of "Health Care")

Michael Fox
The Honduran Coup as Overture

John Lindsay-Poland
Revamping Plan Colombia

Michael Winship
Pay-to-Play: Washington's Sport of Kings

Rev. William Alberts
White Men Can Jump ... to Conclusions

Andy Worthington
Judge Orders Release of Tortured Gitmo Prisoner

Steve Breyman
Counting the Unemployed

Cyrus Bina
Racism, Class and Profiling

Missy Beattie
Promises Ignored

Ron Jacobs
Into the Vapid: Consuming the Cultural Product

Willie L. Pelote, Sr.
Party of Concessions: Democrats Never Learn

Lucia Alvarez
Fall of the House of Kirchner? Return of the Right in Argentina

Dave Lindorff
David Brooks' White Guy Nightmare

Lawrence R. Velvel
Madoff: What Should be Done Now?

Omar Barghouti /
Sid Shniad
United for Freedom and Universal Justice

James L. Secor
The Name of the Game is Wipe-Out

Belén Fernández
Zelaya in Nicaragua: Has Another Constitution Been Violated?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Frank Lloyd Wright in Hollywood: the Ennis House as Imperial Ruin

David Yearsley
Beauty in Dark Places: Berlin's Olympic Stadium

Brian J. Foley
Pre-Eating: a Threat to Restaurants Everywhere

Alan Cabal
Onward, Into the Fog: Thomas Pynchon's
"Inherent Vice"

Kim Nicolini
The Way War Feels

Lorenzo Wolff
The Way It Felt the First Time: the Jump Rope Magic of the Shangri-Las

Poets' Basement
Four Poems From the Chinese

Website of the Weekend
Obama's Ex-Doc Knocks ObamaCare

July 30, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Victims of a Covert Tit-for-Tat War

Gareth Porter
Afghanistan's US-Backed Child-Raping Police

Saul Landau
Summer of Denial

Greg Grandin
Honduran Coup Over?

Diane Farsetta
Pentagon Pundits Get a Pass

Stephen Soldz
The King Case, the APA and the Missing Ethics Investigation

Alan Farago
Learning How to Survive in a Depression From "Weeds"

David Macaray
Cops and Labor Unions

Mike Howells /
Jay Arena
Volunteerism Will Not Rebuild the Gulf Coast

Christopher Brauchli
Oatmeal Envy

Website of the Day
Changing the SOFA

July 29, 2009

Carl Ginsburg
Our Crisis, Their Gain

Clifton Ross
From Tegucigalpa to El Paraiso: a Voyage From Curfew to State of Siege

Paul Craig Roberts
How Fake is the "Recovery"?

Franklin C. Spinney
Winning Hearts and Minds, Pentagon Style

James Bovard Lackawanna Six: Bogus Charges and Martial Law

Anthony DiMaggio
Health Care, the Media and Public Opinion

Bouthaina Shaaban
How Will Arabs Wake Up?

Greg Moses
A Catch and Trade Policy for Labor Costs

Wajahat Ali
No Racism in Obama's Post-Race America?

Gary Leupp
Beer Will Not Solve This

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Musharraf, Imran Khan and Overseas Pakistanis

Website of the Day
Why Single-Payer Gets No Respect

July 28, 2009

Jean Bricmont
Bombing for a Juster World?

Uri Avnery
Obama, Netanyahu and the Settlements

Dean Baker
Right to Rent: a Remedy for the Foreclosure Crisis

Heather Gray
Stupid Cop Tricks: Driving Too Close to a White Female and Other Episodes in Racist Policing

Jonathan Cook
Can an "Arab Soul" Yearn for Israel's Anthem?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Beyond the F-22: the Future of Pentagon Reform

Belén Fernández
Thomas Friedman Does Afghanistan

Carl Finamore
The Hotel Workers' Kickass Local 2

Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Striking the World Cup

Harvey Wasserman
We All Stand Before Peltier's Parole Board

Website of the Day
Behind the Wheel

July 27, 2009

Ishmael Reed
Gates: Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism

Patrick Cockburn
Elections Shake Kurdistan

Roger Burbach
Hillary and Obama Nix Change in Honduras

Steve Breyman
Bomber Joe and Russia: Why is Biden Channeling Cheney?

Ramzy Kysia
Gaza: On the Right of Resistance

Stephen Soldz
Will the American Psychological Association Renounce the Nuremberg Defense?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Sexual Hocus Pocus in the Episcopal Church

Greg Moses
The Color Line is Black

Binoy Kampmark
Swine Flu Panic

Kim Ives
Lavalas and Haiti's Student Union Unite

Website of the Day
Meet the Paid Assassins of Health Care

July 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
"A Damned Murder, Inc."

Clifton Ross
Surreal Honduras

Patrick Cockburn
Party of "Change" Challenges Old Guard in Kurdistan

William Polk
Report Card on Obama From a New Frontiersman

David Sterritt
Screening the Politics Out of the Iraq War

Ray McGovern
Hooded in Bush's Hood

David Lindorff
Cops Gone Wild

Hannah Mermelstein
"The War is With the Arabs"

Carl Ginsburg
The Actually Existing Health Care System

Helen Redmond
The Selling of Single-Payer Features

John Ross
The Song of the Guerrilla

Bill Simpich
Fair Play for Cuba and the Cuban Revolution

Mark Weisbrot
Learning From China on How to Beat the Recession

Lee Sustar
U.S. Labor in Crisis

David Macaray
Union Workers Forced to Accept Massive Cuts

Felipe Matsunaga
Obama's Slow (and Familiar) Dance With Cuba

Sara Mann
Why Health Care Will Kill My TV

Martha Rosenberg
Which is Worse? Germs in Our Food or the Antibiotics That Kill Them?

Missy Beattie
Cha-ching Culture

David Ker Thomson
Empty Nest: a Natural History of Now

Ron Jacobs
United4Iran, a Footnote

Stephen Martin
The Crying of Lots 1 Thru 50

David Yearsley
Psst, I Show You a Feelthy Gluck

Gilad Atzmon
Bruno: a Glimpse Into Zionism?

Kim Nicolini
Guilty Laughter in the Dark: Seeing Brüno Twice

Poets' Basement
Kakak and McLellan

Website of the Weekend
Dead Prez: Summertime

July 23, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Masters of Perfidy: AIG and the System

Saul Landau /
Nelson Valdés
Hypocrisy and the Honduran Coup: Term Limits Only Apply When Governments Help People

Jonathan Cook
The Reality of Israel's "Open" Jerusalem

Nadia Hijab
Israeli Warships in the Red Sea

Dave Lindorff
Living in a Police State: the Gates Incident

Laura Carlsen
21st Century Coups d'Etat

Steve Breyman
Bankers Beware?

Ellen Brown
How California Could Turn Its IOUs Into Dollars

Norman Solomon
Spinning Health Care

Jorge Mariscal
Youth Activists Demand Military-Free Schools

Website of the Day
Copy-Editing Sarah Palin

July 22, 2009

Bernard Chazelle
How to Argue Against Torture

Nikolas Kozloff
The Coup and the U.S. Airbase in Honduras

Carl Ginsburg
The Recovery, Phase Two

Clifton Ross
Back to the Future? Return to El Salvador

Anthony DiMaggio
Health Care, Media and the Case for Socialized Medicine

Michael Donnelly
The Whoppers Behind WOPR

Nadia Hijab
Memoirs of a Lost Arab World

Dedrick Muhammad
Structural Inequality: News Not Fit to Print?

Charles Thomson
Cronyism at the Tate

Alan Farago
Ted Williams and the Florida Keys

Website of the Day
Himmelstein: Howard Dean is a Liar

July 21, 2009

Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Iranian Election and Its Aftermath

Uri Avnery
Breaking the Silence on Israeli War Crimes

Dean Baker
Séance on Wall Street

Jonathan Cook
Team Twitter: Israel's Internet War

Dave Lindorff
Saving Private Bergdahl

Andy Worthington
Interrogating the Uighurs

David Macaray
Heat, Dust and OSHA

Carl Finamore
The Deferential Party

Harvey Wasserman
Cronkite and Three Mile Island

Walter Brasch
The Marie Antoinettes of Health Care

Website of the Day
Linebaugh: Magna Carta and the Commons

July 20, 2009

Pam Martens
Judicial Apartheid

Nikolas Kozloff
Honduras and the Big Stick: Obama's Bullish Behavoir in Latin America

Paul Craig Roberts
Threatening Iran

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Policy on China and Iran

Ira Glunts
Netanyahu's Time Bomb: Building in the Vineyard of the Mufti

P. Sainath
Put Your Money Down, Boys

Binoy Kampmark
The Moon Landing and the Cold War

Stephen Fleischman
The First Anchorman

Norman Solomon
Cronkite and Vietnam: Beyond the Hype

Andy Worthington
Predictable Chaos as Gitmo Trials Resume

Ron Jacobs
Out of the Haze, Into the Darkness: Recalling 1979

Website of the Day
Why Publishing Can't be Saved (as it is)

July 17-19, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
"Watch What We Do, Not What We Say"

Nikolas Kozloff
Chiquita in Latin America: From Arbenz to Zelaya

Joanne Mariner
CIA Apples: Bad at the Top of the Tree

Joe Bageant
America's White Underclass

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Road Signs: Wiping Arabic Names Off the Map

Saul Landau
Why So Much Sympathy for Madoff's Dupes and So Little for the Poor?

John Ross
Jurassic Fallout in Mexico

Sue Sturgis
Senator Sessions, Race and Impartiality

Anita Sinha /
Daniel Farbman
The Ricci Case and the Myth of Special Treatment

Peter Morici
Obama's Donut Economics

Pervez Hoodbhoy
Whither Pakistan? A Five-Year Forecast

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the Language of Power

Greg Moses
The Real Demand Crisis

Kia Mistilis
The Niger Delta Crisis

Missy Beattie
The Placebo President

David Ker Thomson
How Not to See: Things to Tell Your Eyeballs

James G. Abourezk
Evil Spirits: the Booze Strip in Indian Country

Paul Richards
Why Does Jon Tester Want to Log Wild Montana?

Dave Lindorff
Dark Days for Working People (With Three Small Rays of Light)

Marc Levy
Just Like Hanoi Jane

Matt Siegfried
The Good War Goes Hot

Stephen Martin
Panopticon Blues

Ben Sonnenberg
Sembène's Faat Kiné

David Macaray
Casablanca: When Melodrama Trumped History

Charles R. Larson
A Pakistani, Victorian Novel Celebrating Women

David Yearsley
That's Women for You: Abbas Kiarostami's Così

Lorenzo Wolff
Death Rattle and Roll: the Sound From England's Gutters

Poets' Basement
Payne, Anderson and Williams

Website of the Weekend
Hitler Learns of Sarah Palin's Resignation

July 16, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
What Economy?

Afshin Rattansi Iranian Planes and the Hidden Toll of Economic Sanctions

Gregory V. Button
The Search for Environmental Justice in Perry County, Alabama

Evan Knappenberger
Profile of a Deserter

Michelle Bollinger
Why is Leonard Peltier Still in Prison?

Russell Mokhiber
White House to ABC News: No Obama Single-Payer Doc

Belén Fernández
Iranian Penetration, Oh My!

Alice Walker
What is Torture Like? A Letter to Obama

Nicholas Dearden
Paying the Climate Debt: the G-8's Troubling Model

Albert Osueke
Sotomayor and the Identity Mountain

Website of the Day
Sotomayor for the Prosecution

July 15, 2009

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Assassination Bureau

Vijay Prashad
A Political Recession

Dean Baker
Stimulus Arithmetic

Ray McGovern
Cheney Sweating Bullets

Jonathan Cook
Jenin's Model of "Economic Peace"

David Rosen
Shouts From the Gallery: the Sotomayor Hearings and the Culture Wars

Eric Walberg
Uighurs vs. Afghans: a Study in Contrast

Greg Moses
Three Dimensions of a Complete Stimulus Plan

Sousan Hammad
Decolonizing Israel

Binoy Kampmark
The Trial of Charles Taylor

Tracy McLellan
The Story of My Arrest

Website of the Day
11 Days in Saudi Gitmo

July 14, 2009

Eamonn McCann
The Emperors of Bombast: Bono, U2 and the Crisis of World Capitalism

Joanne Mariner
Obama's New Euphemism

Franklin Spinney
The Taliban Rope-a-Dope

Steve Heilig
Walking Mount Tam: an Interview with Gary Snyder

Ali Abunimah
Hamas' Choice

Dave Lindorff
The End of "Nice" Health Care Reform

Nikolas Kozloff
The Politics of Destabilization: McCain and Honduras

Ellen Brown
From Golden State to Subprime State

Alice Slater
How US Missile Defense Plans Sabotaged Nuclear Disarmament Talks With Russia

Ron Jacobs
Protest U.S. Aggression

Joe Allen
The Fight to Save James Hickman in Jim Crow-Style Chicago

Website of the Day
Mel Brooks Does the French Revolution

July 13, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Essence of the Regime

Mike Whitney
The Deflating Economy

P. Sainath
How the World Depression Hits Orissa

Gareth Porter
A US / Iraq Conflict on Iran

Paul Moore
Rap in the Streets, Rap in the Suites

Tim Wise
Off the Deep End: Private Clubs, Public Prejudice

Andy Worthington Former Insider Shatters Credibility of Military Commissions

David Macaray
Cartoon Voices: Serf's Up in Hollywood

Cal Winslow
The Healthcare Worker War

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Spring in the Time of Obama

Website of the Day
Washington's Deep Game with China

July 10-12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Biden Problem

José Pertierra
The Cuban Five: a Cold War Case in a Post-Cold War World

John Ross
After the Honduran Coup

Conn Hallinan
The Settlements and the Quartet

Nikolas Kozloff
C Street Band: Sex Scandals, Moral Hypocrisy and the Far Right Agenda in Latin America

Clifton Ross /
Marcy Rein
U.S. and Honduras: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Good Neighbor

Carl Ginsburg
Summers' Clouded Crystal Ball

Michael Neumann
Say It Loud, Say It Proud: There is No God!

Gilad Atzmon
The Left and Islam: Thinking Outside of the Secular Box

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Parable of the Golden Parachute

Ellen Hodgson Brown
California Dreamin': How the State Can Beat Its Budget Woes

Jim Goodman
Rural America Needs More Than Listening Sessions

Christopher Bickerton
Europe's New Politics of Hard Times

Wendell Potter
Health Care Industry Adopts Tobacco Lobby's Tactics

Dave Lindorff
CIA Lies: Why Isn't Congress in Open Revolt?

David Ker Thomson
Switchbacking Toward Bastille Day

Anthony DiMaggio
The Michael Jackson Feeding Frenzy

Raymond Lawrence
Michael Jackson as Sexual Pervert: the Calumnies of Peter King

Walid El Houri
Neda and Marwa: a Tale of Two Murdered Women

Stephanie Westbrook
Yes, We Camp

Roger Gaess
The Shades of Highgate Cemetery

David Yearsley
Tara, America's Dream House

Kim Nicolini
Caution: Men at Work, Robbing Banks

Poets' Basement
Five Poems From the Japanese

Website of the Weekend
Free Tiga and Hugh!

August 20, 2009

Inside the DSM
The Drug Barons' Campaign to Make Us All Crazy

By EUGENIA TSAO

Some years ago, a friend told me that he had been diagnosed with a major depressive disorder and that his psychiatrist had given him a prescription for Forest Laboratories’ popular SSRI antidepressant Celexa (chemical name, citalopram hydrobromide; $1.5 billion in sales in 2003). Knowing him to be a vociferous critic of the pharmaceutical companies, I asked whether he agreed that the origins of his unhappiness were biological in nature. He replied that he unequivocally did not. “But,” he confided, “now I might be able to get my grades back up.”

This guy was, at the time, a full-time undergraduate student who managed rent, groceries and tuition only by working two part-time jobs. He awoke before dawn each morning in order to transcribe interviews for a local graduate student, then embarked upon an hour-long commute to campus, attended classes until late afternoon, and then finally headed over to a nearby café to wash dishes until nine o’clock in the evening. By the time he arrived home each night, he was too exhausted to work on the sundry assignments, essays and lab reports that populated his course syllabi. As the school year dragged on, he had become increasingly disheartened about his slipping grades and mounting fatigue and decided, finally, that something had to be done. So he’d seen the psychiatrist and was now on Celexa.

It is worth reflecting on this anecdote, and others like it, as research proceeds on the upcoming revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), a draft of which is slated for release in late 2009. When perceived through the aseptic lens of statistics, diagnostic rates, and other seemingly objective metrics, the urgency with which companies like Pfizer exhort us to monitor ourselves for sadness or restlessness and to “ask your doctor if Zoloft is right for you” assumes a superficially unproblematic aspect. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, over 17 million American adults are afflicted with clinical depression each year, costing the national economy $30 billion in absenteeism, inefficiency and medical expenses. Eighty per cent of those afflicted will never seek psychiatric treatment, despite the American Psychiatric Association’s regular reassurances that 80-90 per cent of chronic depression cases can be successfully treated, and 15 per cent will attempt suicide. Suicide is, indeed, the third leading cause of death among American youth aged 10 to 24.

Implicit to the drug companies’ messianic promises of health, happiness and economic productivity is a spurious parable of linear scientific progress: in spite of consistently inconclusive clinical trials, new psychotropic drugs are regularly marketed as improvements on old ones, ever more specific in their targeting of neurotransmitters, ever less productive of pernicious side effects. While revelations that put the lie to the industry’s feigned beneficence have belatedly crept into the mainstream press in recent years, the extent to which our lives and livelihoods have been colonized by the reductive logic of pharmaceutical intervention remains breathtaking. As Laurence Kirmayer of McGill University has suggested, the millennial rise of a “cosmetic” psychopharmaceutical industry, wherein drugs are “applied like make-up to make us look and feel good, while our existential predicaments go unanswered,” raises disturbing questions about the consequences of our willingness to use chemicals to treat forms of distress that would seem to signal not biological but social maladies.

Is it adolescent rebellion or “Oppositional Defiant Disorder”?

What is revealed about a society, in which drugs are touted with increasing regularity as a treatment of choice for entirely natural responses to conditions of unnatural stress? How have we been persuaded to equate such things as recalcitrant despair (“Dysthymic Disorder,” DSM-IV-TR 300.4), adolescent rebellion (“Oppositional Defiant Disorder,” DSM-IV-TR 313.81) and social apathy (“Schizoid Personality Disorder,” DSM-IV-TR 301.20) with aberrant brain chemistry and innate genetic susceptibilities rather than with the societal circumstances in which they arise? What does it mean when increasing numbers of people feel as though they have no choice but to self-medicate with dubious chemical substances in order to stay in school, stay motivated, stay employed, and stay financially solvent?

In the summer of 2003, a small group of psychiatric survivors convened in Pasadena, California, to hold a hunger strike with the aim of forcing the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) to admit that they had no conclusive evidence to support their claim that mental illness is based in biological dysfunction. Though the APA was, at first, quite indignant, it did eventually issue a statement, three weeks into the strike, conceding that “brain science has not advanced to the point where scientists or clinicians can point to readily discernible pathologic lesions or genetic abnormalities that in and of themselves serve as reliable or predictive bio-markers of a given mental disorder or mental disorders as a group.”

This acknowledgement raises interesting questions. Although medical textbooks and even drug advertisements have, for years, admitted evidentiary uncertainties in psychiatric research (as a 2004 advertisement for a Pfizer antidepressant oddly proclaimed, “While the cause [of depression] is unknown, Zoloft can help”), the notion that mental disorders are ubiquitously and irrefutably founded in genetic, neurochemical and physiological anomalies is a mainstay of Western popular culture. The psychiatric fixation on brains and genes, vaunted in newspaper headlines on weekly basis, has quite deftly captured the public imagination, leading many people to view even mild forms of social maladjustment as pharmaceutically remediable. Today, we are everywhere urged to repackage ourselves into medicalized identity categories whenever we discover that we do not fit the productive, gregarious norm: the 8-year-old who cannot focus on her spelling exercises because of an energetic imagination has an attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, remediable with the aid of psychostimulants such as Ritalin or Adderall; the mother who cannot overcome her grief at losing her son in Iraq has clinical depression, readily dispatched with regular doses of Paxil, Prozac, or Lexapro.

Psychiatrist Joel Paris admits in his recent book Prescriptions for the Mind, that, “in reality, psychiatrists are treating conditions that they barely understand. Our diagnoses are, at best, rough and ready, and do not deserve the status of categories in other specialties. We have no laboratory tests that can reliably identify any mental disorder, and the measures we use are entirely based on clinical observations.” So, how is it that psychiatric diagnoses are now the driving force behind a multibillion-dollar international industry? “The force driving psychiatry today,” Paris readily grants, “is its wish to be accepted as a medical specialty.” Indeed, the history of this wish reveals much more about the inordinate preoccupations of psychiatrists than of their supposed beneficiaries.

Psychiatry did not always suffer from biology envy. The project of systematically categorizing and enumerating types of mental illness, in fact, began in the United States not as a medical venture but a criminological one. As philosopher of science Ian Hacking writes, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the increasing stratification of wealth and resources in Western societies prompted an exciting new pastime for the educated classes: the scientific documentation of social misery. Starting with “an avalanche of numbers that begins around 1820,” physicians developed a raft of new medical categories within which to group such behaviours as suicide, prostitution, drunkenness, vagrancy and petty crime. Informal attempts at condensing these data into diagnostic manuals were made in the ensuing decades: the 1840 national census documented occurrences of “idiocy/insanity,” while the 1880 census split these figures into seven discrete categories: mania, melancholia, monomania, paresis, dementia, dipsomania and epilepsy. Unsurprisingly, this precipitated a sharp increase in diagnoses of what became homogeneously known as “feeblemindedness,” and, by 1918, mental hospitals and asylums everywhere were bursting with inpatients. The earliest official medical nosologies of mental illnesses were then adopted in order to better manage the incarcerated populace.

When the DSM Began

The first editions of the DSM would have been unrecognizable to modern practitioners of psychiatry. The DSM-I, published in 1952, conceptualized mental disorders as dysfunctions of personality rather than of neurobiology, following a former president of the American Psychiatric Association’s advocacy of “mental hygiene,” and the DSM-II, published in 1968, consisted of 180 categories of illness framed in a flowery psychoanalytic cant that drew scorn from the medical community, which viewed it as something of an unscientific embarrassment. In their 1997 exposé, Making Us Crazy, Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk point out that the DSM-II was, in fact, a slim guidebook of dubious analytic value that clinicians could purchase for $3.50, designed to describe, rather than to prescribe, current psychiatric practices.

Things began to change in the next decade. Following the public outcry over thalidomide, a tranquilizer that was linked to thousands of birth defects despite originally being proclaimed safe by its manufacturers, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration initiated new regulations in 1962 covering the drug industry’s activities: companies were now required to establish a direct correlation between the physiological effects of newly designed compounds and particular medical diseases. This was a fateful moment for the psychiatric enterprise, which at the time lacked standardized disease entities to which specific compounds could be tailored. Increasingly attacked by its critics as unscientific, passé, inadequately somatic, and borderline illegitimate, psychiatry was in danger of slipping into medical irrelevance and was in dire need of reinvention. Enter Robert Spitzer, head of biometrics research at Columbia University’s Psychiatric Institute. Under Spitzer’s direction, an aggressive initiative to revise the DSM was launched, new diagnostic instruments were devised, and quantification became the disciplinary catchword. When completed in 1980, the DSM-III was, in every sense, an entirely new document. Whereas the DSM-II was 134 pages long, the DSM-III ran to nearly 500 pages and described 265 mental disorders in fastidious, grocery-list-like detail. Spitzer, in fact, vehemently pushed for the DSM to classify “diseases,” though the editorial board ultimately settled on the term “disorders” in order to placate the APA-member psychologists who found Spitzer’s overly clinical zeal disturbing.

Theodore Millon, one of the original members of the DSM-III revision task force, has acknowledged that the editors’ intentions were, in fact, to “embrace as many conditions as are commonly seen by practicing clinicians,” and, in so doing, expand psychiatrists’ access to fiscal coverage from third-party insurance providers. The rhetorical paraphernalia of the DSM-III, through which entirely normal forms of human behavior were transformed into somatic ailments, thus equipped psychiatrists with an unprecedented level of authority over problems of mental health throughout civil society, in fulfillment of a longstanding wish to attain the prestige of other medical specialties. By reconceptualizing everything from unhappiness to inefficiency to social anxiety as discrete illnesses, each indexed with formally objective criteria, fixed etiologies and clear-cut prognoses, the DSM-III’s authors – many of whom were recipients of major research grants from pharmaceutical companies – secured for themselves a substantial gift in the form of guaranteed insurance remittances, and furnished the drug barons with an equally lucrative gift: a slate of well-defined diagnostic entities at which to market their concoctions and, thus, an elegant solution to the challenges posed by the regulatory pressures of 1962.

In 1994, the DSM-IV was published to considerable acclaim, with a text revision released in 2000. A quick glance through its list of contributors is revealing. As was reported in a 2006 study, lead-authored by Lisa Cosgrove of the University of Massachusetts, 56 per cent (95 of 170) of the researchers who worked on the manual had at least one monetary relationship with a drug manufacturer between 1989 and 2004. Twenty-two per cent of these researchers received consulting income during that period, and 16 per cent were paid spokespersons for a drug company. The percentages are even higher – 100 per cent in some instances – for researchers who contributed to the manual’s subsections on psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. While Cosgrove and her coauthors were not able to determine the percentage of researchers who received funds from the drug industry during the actual production of the DSM-IV, the chorus of protest that arose following their paper’s publication was telling. “I can categorically say,” roared the DSM-IV’s text and criteria editor, Michael First, “that drug-company influence never entered into any of the discussions, whatsoever.”

First’s objection is probably accurate. The implementation of commercial agendas in medical research rarely takes the form of industry agents archly ordering doctors around. While it’s true that the annual conventions of the APA have become glitzy trade fairs, at which attendees spend much of their time absorbing product pitches, it is the subtler forms of influence that have the most impact. As Joel Paris points out, “Although nothing forces us to prescribe their products, marketing strategies work. And the industries know it.” By sponsoring the scholarly activities of researchers – such as conferences, whose keynote speakers are often booked by industry representatives – companies are able to clinch remarkable levels of good will from academic faculty and medical residents. The psychiatric literature is, additionally, infested with a voluminous amount of corporate ghostwriting, wherein drug companies invite doctors to add their names and, thus, their scientific imprimatur, to pre-written articles. (In return, naturally, these doctors get to pad their publication histories.) Many medical journals, moreover, manage their operating expenses by occasionally publishing corporate-sponsored “supplements,” which readers are not always able to distinguish from the journal’s regular issues. Finally, because of governmental agencies’ lack of interest in funding clinical trials, the companies have a virtual monopoly on pharmacological research, and have been free to regularly suppress negative results and finesse methodologies in order to generate favorable outcomes. The drug companies are now de facto members of the medical research community, and it has become virtually impossible to determine where the academy ends and the industry begins.

One Nation of Self Medicators (under Shrinks and Drug Companies)

As the history of the DSM makes clear, it is not possible to speak of modern psychiatric nosologies without speaking of the professional interests from which they have arisen. The serviceability of this branch of the medical-industrial complex to the neoliberal fetishization of state noninterference, finally, should not be underestimated. With the innovation of increasingly marketable psychotropic drugs over the past four decades, public health officials have been free to legitimize healthcare budget cuts, hospital closures, and the widespread dismantlement of social services, by devolving responsibility for mental health to the individual and by transforming happiness into a problem of consumer choice. Miserable people – the exhausted assembly-line worker, the desperate college student, the alcoholic veteran – no longer pose a threat to the status quo so long as they agree to self-medicate and to keep themselves, thereby, in a state of artificial equanimity. As sociologist Nikolas Rose says, “In the majority of cases, such treatment was not imposed coercively upon unwilling subjects, but sought out by those who had come to identify their own distress in psychiatric terms, believe that psychiatric expertise would help them, and were thankful for the attention they received.” And this is the crux of the matter.

A common objection to criticisms of our society’s growing infatuation with psychopharmaceuticals is that distressed people should be free to undertake whatever course of action they feel is necessary to dispel their misery. I cannot dispute this contention. No one who is familiar with the texture of crushing, existential despair can fail to sympathize with another person’s decision to resort to whatever is available to help them through the day, and it is not my intention to indict the personal logics that underpin these choices.

The rationality of consumer choice, however, is inevitably limited insofar as authentic data on the health risks of specific compounds are rarely available in the public domain, and insofar as the drug companies continue to inundate airwaves, newspapers, magazines and billboards with mollifying untruths about the efficacy of their products. As Alexander Cockburn has recently revealed in this newsletter, as much as a third of consumers who view an advertisement for a particular prescription drug go off and talk to their doctors about it, and nearly half of those who ask for a drug end up getting a prescription for it. How many of these consumers know of the plethora of peer-reviewed studies that have demonstrated that selective serotin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRI) compounds are closely linked with violence and suicide? What percentage of those who have come to conceptualize their pain in biological terms are aware that definitive links have yet to be established between neurotransmitter action and complex, culture-bound emotional states such as grief, anguish and loneliness?

Data manipulation and elision are rampant in psychopharmaceutical research. The list of revelations, both current and years-old, is extensive and can be elaborated only in brief. In the 1990s, the litigation-averse Los Angeles Times killed an investigative report coauthored by Alexander Cockburn and former Scientific American editor Fred Gardner, in which evidence was presented linking Prozac to, among other things, domestic violence and tumor growth. Journalist Evelyn Pringle has, more recently, reported on the CounterPunch website that Janssen-Cilag’s antipsychotic Risperdal (chemical name, risperidone; $3.5 billion in sales in 2005) induced severe side effects, including strokes and death, in 1,207 children between 1993 and 2008. Two recent studies, conducted independently in the United States and Great Britain, have additionally revealed that newly released antipsychotics differ from their predecessors only in price, not in efficacy or safety.

But a question remains. What if, in some hypothetical future, a new generation of unambiguously safe and effective psychotropics could be developed? Would it become ethically acceptable to urge the depressed and the despondent to take drugs?

When psychiatrists lament that over half of depressed people are “treatment-resistant,” what they do not consider is this. It is not the “stigma” of being labeled mentally ill that discourages many people from seeking medical help; it is a strenuous aversion to being told that one’s existential grievances are irrational, a mere result of a pathological neurochemical imbalance. It is the fear of being coerced into ingesting foreign substances, whether safe or dangerous. Since 1997, the National Alliance on Mental Illness has sought to expand a medication compliance program first developed in the 1970s, wherein mental health workers visit outpatients on a daily basis to confirm that they’ve taken their drugs, and to forcibly administer drugs if necessary.

We are at a strange point in history. It should come as no surprise that the exhausting and alienating conditions in which we live and labor are productive of myriad forms of psychological suffering. Yet, critics of biological psychiatry are commonly subjected to the fallacious accusation that, because we reject the equation of unhappiness with sickness, we must believe that it is a weakness. This is a false dichotomy. Is it so difficult to understand the pain engendered by life under neoliberal capitalism as something worthy of dignified reflection, irreducible to either sickness or weakness? Is it so hard to grasp that to detrivialize the social conditions that give rise to despair or the ideologies that equate difference with disease is not to trivialize despair or difference?

Let’s be candid. The drug barons’ ongoing campaign to pathologize entirely natural emotional responses to hunger, humiliation, financial insecurity, racism, sexism, overwork and isolation is a mercenary tactic, designed to create markets, maximize profits and minimize dissidence. Whether intended or unintended, the consequence is that we have come to reflexively view ourselves – our bodies, brains, and genes – rather than our societal environment as pathogenic, against all evidence to the contrary. As the DSM-V looms, we have to explore the dire implications of this trend and contintue to raise the alarm.

Eugenia Tsao is a Ph.D. candidate in medical anthropology at the University of Toronto and a CGS Doctoral Fellow of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She can be reached at tsao.eugenia@gmail.com. A full list of references, sources for the quotes and figures cited in this article can be obtained by emailing the author.

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Yellowstone Drift:
Floating the Past
in Real Time
by John Holt
Introduction by Doug Peacock

Click here to Buy!

Spell Albuquerque:
Memoir of a
"Difficult Student"
By Tennessee Reed

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont