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Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter! Drug Companies and Psychiatrists
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Inside the New Print Edition of Our Subscriber-Only Newsletter!
Drug Companies and Psychiatrists
Partners in CrimeEugenia Tsao reports on the upcoming revision of one of the most important books in America, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Here’s where the drug lords, the shrinks and the insurance companies collude in establishing hundreds of bogus psychic conditions requiring the psychotropic drugs from which they reap billions every year. There are about 250,000 migrant laborers in Israel, mostly from the Philippines and Thailand. Meanwhile tens of thousands of Palestinians can’t find work. From Tel Aviv, Yonatan Preminger reports on Israel’s vicious employment strategy. Also in this latest newsletter Andrew Cockburn updates his CounterPunch world exclusive on how the U.S. has secretly helped build Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Get your new edition today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and t-shirts make great presents.
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Today's Stories July 10-12, 2009 Alexander Cockburn José Pertierra John Ross Conn Hallinan Nikolas Kozloff Clifton Ross / Carl Ginsburg Michael Neumann Gilad Atzmon Ellen Hodgson Brown Jim Goodman Christopher Bickerton Wendell Potter Raymond Lawrence Walid El Houri Stephanie Westbrook July 9, 2009 Ronnie Cummings Jonathan Cook Nikolas Kozloff James Bovard Norman Solomon Afghanistan: the Escalation Scam Allan Nairn Andy Worthington Tomas Borge Nadia Hijab Paul Krassner Website of the Day July 8, 2009 Saul Landau Dean Baker Winslow T. Wheeler Eric Walberg Ray McGovern David Rosen Dr. Mona El Farra Ron Jacobs Benjamin Dangl Alan Farago Website of the Day July 7, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Uri Avnery Brian M. Downing Gary Leupp Gregory A. Burris David Macaray Laura Flanders Alan Farago Greg Moses Dan Bacher Website of the Day July 6, 2009 Patrick Cockburn Diana Johnstone Nikolas Kozloff Gary Leupp Jonathan Cook Tim Wise Franklin Lamb Charles R. Larson Carlos Benemann Shepherd Bliss Jerry Kroth Karyn Strickler Website of the Day July 3-5, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Eamonn Fingleton Jeffrey St. Clair Mike Whitney Pam Martens George Ciccariello-Maher Paul Craig Roberts Patrick Cockburn Anthony DiMaggio Roger Burbach John Ross Nikolas Kozloff Gareth Porter Andy Worthington Saul Landau David Macaray Adam Federman Jane Slaughter Labor's Vague Rally for Health Care Russell Mokhiber Black Caucus Muzzled on Israeli Kidnapping of McKinney Robert Jensen Robert Bryce Belén Fernandez Missy Comley Beattie C. G. Estabrook Stephen Martin Charles R. Larson Lorenzo Wolff Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend July 2, 2009 Andrew Cockburn Nikolas Kozloff Wendell Potter Ellen Hodgson Brown Christian Christensen Iran: Networked Dissent? Patrick Irelan Binoy Kampmark Returning Iraq Nicola Nasser Brian Tokar Dan Bacher Website of the Day July 1, 2009 Vijay Prashad Alberto Vallente Thorensen Paul Craig Roberts Robert Weissman Manuel García, Jr. Victor Figueroa-Clark / Pablo Navarrete Norman Solomon Franklin Lamb Martha Rosenberg Diane Rejman Website of the Day June 30, 2009 Michael Hudson Esam Al-Amin Benjamin Dangl Jonathan Cook Franklin Lamb George Wuerthner Todd Gordon Ron Jacobs Kenneth Libby Julian Vigo Website of the Day
June 29, 2009 Ishmael Reed Nikolas Kozloff Clifton Ross Patrick Cockburn Uri Avnery Conn Hallinan James G. Abourezk Ralph Nader Carol Miller Greg Moses Website of the Day June 26-28, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Doug Peacock Daniel Wolff Mike Whitney John Ross David Rosen Emily Ratner Gareth Porter Farid Marjai Nadia Hijab Paul Craig Roberts Fred Gardner Carl Ginsburg Paul Watson David Ker Thomson Farzana Versey Geoff Berne Todd Alan Price Ramzy Baroud Jeff Sher Dr. Carol Paris Despite My Arrest by Max Baucus, I Will Continue to Advocate for Quality Health Care for All Walter Brasch Adultery as Family Value? Glen Johnson Charlotte Laws Charles R. Larson Kim Nicolini David Yearsley Lorenzo Wolff Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend June 25, 2009 Kathy Kelly Jack Bratich Wendell Potter Charles R. Larson Alan Farago Jonathan Cook Gareth Porter Bitta Mostofi / David Macaray Mark Schuller Website of the Day June 24, 2009 Andrew Cockburn Dean Baker Andy Worthington James Bovard Diana Gibson / P. Sainath Gareth Porter Robert Alvarez Dave Lindorff Steven Colatrella Remembering Giovanni Arrighi Website of the Day
June 23, 2009 David Price Patrick Cockburn James Ridgeway / Dave Lindorff Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero Gary Leupp Brian M. Downing Robert Bryce Nicholas Dearden Yousef Munayyer Website of the Day June 22, 2009 Michael Hudson Esam Al-Amin Chris Floyd Jack Z. Bratich Atash Yaghmaian Laura Carlsen Paul Craig Roberts Vijay Prashad Fred Gardner Andy Thayer David Macaray Website of the Day
June 19 - 21, 2009 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Patrick Cockburn Al Giordano Henry A. Giroux Anthony DiMaggio Paul Craig Roberts John Ross Gareth Porter Carl Ginsburg Tommi Avicolli Mecca Joe Bageant Serge Halimi P. Sainath Jim Goodman Dave Lindorff Rannie Amiri Robert Fantina Harvey Wasserman Walter Brasch David Ker Thomson Charles R. Larson David Yearsley Kim Nicolini Ben Sonnenberg Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
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Weekend Edition The Musical PatriotTara, America's Dream HouseBy DAVID YEARSLEY Among the fifty-plus films on offer on the back of the seat in front of me was Gone with the Wind, its longwinded running-time offering to eat up a good half of the seven hour Atlantic crossing. I gladly accepted its splendors over the dozens of other contenders for my limited attentions. What better way to exact posthumous revenge on the big-screen megalomania of producer David O. Selznick than to confine him to a paperback-sized format framed by the blue and gray Prince William-plaid of the Continental Airline upholstery? In this 70th anniversary year of the mightiest classic of Hollywood’s Golden Age, airborne Sherman sweeps through Georgia, and the Confederate wounded are laid out in their rows in a back lot version Atlanta as the bombs burst around them and above the inflight mag and the airsick bag. There is something refreshing about reducing Hollywood’s grandest ambitions to the dimensions a mini Etch-a-Sketch. Equally as pleasing is the way a pair of low-fidelity, super-cheap ear-buds deflates the grandeur of Max Steiner’s soundtrack. Steiner always had pretensions to be taken seriously as a composer of symphonic stature on par with his European forbears. This is the perfect music, then, to accompany a flight that follows the arc of his ambition back towards the Old Countries. Each time the classic shot of Tara comes into view and the strings stride magisterially across their octave expanse and then exhale proudly as they relax into the home pitch, the tonic, I feel the pride swelling in my own breast. “The land is what lasts,” Mr. O’Hara tells his feisty daughter Scarlett, and she eventually becomes the most resourceful defender of the principle. Steiner’s sweeping melody, and its Romantic underpinnings, lets us know exactly what that pride feels like: how big and benign the plantation is, how it embraces all who live and work on it, even those who plow its fields. Could it be that no one did more than Steiner to instill a renewed sense of the value of home ownership after the hard years of the Depression and on the eve of World War II than Steiner? To look at your own house, be it a double wide or neo-Burgundy McMansion even with its underwater mortgage, is to hear the grandiose strains of Steiner’s Tara theme. Seventy years on, the score appears to me as a mighty weapon aimed at bolstering confidence in the American Dream. To hear Steiner’s most famous theme is realize that nothing could be better than to own your own piece, to invest in the only thing that lasts. Thus my plan to solve the credit crisis would be to play Steiner’s soundtrack in all banks, in the halls and meeting rooms of the Capitol, and at all meetings of the Federal Reserve.
Against the glowing sunset, we hear the bell sound for quitting time. One of the field hands rejoices that he can at last stop his work. But the black field boss tells him that only he can say when the gang can stop. The boss waits a beat and then duly gives the word. Way down at the bottom of the Dixie regime, one slave exerts his power over another. But that’s about the sum total of the friction either within or between the races. Old Slaves remain true, even after the defeat of the slave owners in the Civil War. Scarlett gives the family’s black butler Mr. O‘Hara’s pocket watch after the Irishman dies falling from his horse, and we’re expected to believe that this parting gift can make up for an entire lifetime of servitude and for entire centuries of cruelty. It’s hardly news to claim that the campy film is really a ridiculous white-washing of the brutality of slavery. Eloquent criticism of the film was voiced even in the face of the rapture which greeted the movie on its initial release, as Peter Franklin points out in a excellent essay on Gone with the Wind in a collection on film music entitled Beyond the Soundtrack and edited by Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and Richard Leppert (University of California Press, 2007). Franklin has also written the definitive essay on Steiner’s score for King Kong. In an ”Open Letter to Mr Selznick” printed in New York Daily Worker soon after the release of the Gone with the Wind, the black writer Carlton Moss argued that: “Whereas The Birth of a Nation was a frontal attack on American history and the Negro people, Gone with the Wind, arriving twenty years later, is a rear attack on the same. Sugar-smeared and blurred by a boresome Hollywood love-story and under the guise of presenting the South as it is “in the eyes of the Southerners,” the message of Gone with the Wind emerges in its final entity as a nostalgic plea for sympathy for a still living cause of Southern reaction. The Civil War is by no means ended in the South, Mr Selznick. It lives on and will live on until the Negro people are completely free.” But I suspect this far-fetched Gone with the Wind message is one that both Americans and Europeans still want to hear and to believe in, especially in this age of Obama. To many the future of race relations seems as rosy as Selznick’s Technicolor sunset. In the food courts of Newark’s “Liberty” Airport all the workers behind the many counters serving up blueberry muffins and lattes and blending fruit drinks have dark skin. Some were born in the United States, but most are immigrants. Almost all of those consuming the products served by these people as they make their way to their international flights are white. The legacy of colonialism is as obvious in the concourse as the taste of a JambaJuice smoothie. On the train from Heathrow after the long day flight was finally over the Jamaican conductor came to punch our tickets and informed us that Michael Jackson had just died. He turned to my two blonde daughters, ages eleven and nine, neither of whom had ever heard of Jacko, and said to them in comforting tones: “Don’t be sad kids. You’ll always have his music.” As I contemplate the fate of this black man who died white, and in massive debt, I screen in my mind the familiar shots of Neverland, that source of so many of his debts, and hear again resounding gestures of Steiner’s orchestral pomp. Here’s betting that Jackson loved Gone with the Wind. If you believe in this music, you’ll believe in anything. David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. A long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, he is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu
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Now Available from CounterPunch Books! Yellowstone Drift:
Spell Albuquerque:
Waiting for
Lightning
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