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The New Print Edition of CounterPunch, Only for Our Newsletter Subscribers! How Cops Extort Confessions;
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The New Print Edition of CounterPunch, Only for Our Newsletter Subscribers!
How Cops Extort Confessions;
How the U.S. “Justice System” Really WorksNinety-two per cent of felony convictions in the U.S. are obtained by plea bargains or confessions. Without them the “justice system” would grind to a halt. In an important piece in our latest newsletter, available only to subscribers, Emily Horowitz shows how totally innocent people will “confess” under police pressure, even without physical torture. Horowitz outlines the powerful case for banning confessions altogether. Also in this new edition Marcus Rediker, co-author of the legendary The Many Headed Hydra, writes of popular heroism and resistance in the favelas of Medellin, Colombia. Alexander Cockburn reports on how America’s oldest bank, patronized by the global elites, washed billions smuggled out of Russia, and how the Russians might win their money back, shaking the world’s banking system if they do so. Serge Halimi describes the real battle for the soul of Europe. Get your copy 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 gear make great presents.
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Today's Stories August 9 / 10, 2008 Robert Fantina August 8, 2008 Patrick Cockburn Manuel Garcia, Jr. M. Shahid Alam Andy Worthington Lawrence J. Korb David Model Alan Farago Diop Olugbala Firmin DeBrabander Website of the Day August 7, 2008 Dr. Trudy Bond William Blum Paul Craig Roberts Ralph Nader Robert Weitzel Jacob G. Hornberger Binoy Kampmark David Macaray Howard Lisnoff Website of the Day August 6, 2008 Marc Herold Greg Moses Sheldon Rampton Kevin Young Michael Estrada Robert Weissman Dr. Susan Block Cindy Sheehan Ronald Hoffman Website of the Day August 5, 2008 Paul Craig Roberts Jeff Halper Patrick Cockburn Nancy Welch Peter Morici Sousan Hammad Eamon Martin Shepherd Bliss Tim Matson Website of the Day August 4, 2008 Uri Avnery Saul Landau David W. Remington Rev. Jesse Jackson Dave Lindorff Peter Morici Joanne Mariner Ramzy Baroud Christian Wright Website of the Day August 2 / 3, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Patrick Cockburn Winslow T. Wheeler James Abourezk Andy Worthington Brian Cloughley Robert Fantina Benjamin Dangl Marlene Martin David Yearsley Fatemeh Keshavarz David Michael Green Obama as Dukakis Harvey Wasserman Jason Hribal Phyllis Pollack Laray Polk Ron Jacobs David Macaray David Rosen Dan Bacher Joe Allen Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend August 1, 2008 Jonathan Cook Nikolas Kozloff Rannie Amiri Peter Morici Christopher Brauchli M. K. Bhadrakumar Patrick Cockburn James J. Brittain Dan Bacher Website of the Day
July 31, 2008 Michael Hudson Carl Finamore Mike Whitney Joshua Frank Andy Worthington Ralph Nader Bill Moyers / Robert Weissman Dave Lindorff Website of the Day July 30, 2008 Brian M. Downing Chuck Spinney William S. Lind David Ker Thomson Karl Grossman Mike Whitney Martha Rosenberg James Murren Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Website of the Day July 29, 2008 Jeffrey St. Clair John Ross Peter Morici Alison Weir Gary Leupp David Macaray Brenda Norrell Marjorie Cohn Eric Ruder Website of the Day July 28, 2008 Dr. Bryant Welch Kathy Kelly Mike Whitney Peter Morici Christopher Brauchli Clifton Ross Stephen Lendman Website of the Day July 26 / 27, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair James G. Abourezk Joseph Nevins Uri Avnery Linn Washington, Jr. David Yearsley Binoy Kampmark Saul Landau Joshua Frank Brendan Cooney Jonathan Cook Robert Fantina Lee Sustar Michael Winship David Macaray Missy Beattie Robert Weissman Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend July 25, 2008 Harvey Wasserman Paul Craig Roberts Alan Farago Paul D'Amato Gary Leupp Niranjan Ramakrishnan Mike Whitney Paul Krassner Mike Roselle Website of the Day July 24, 2008 Greg Moses Andy Worthington James Bovard Joe Bageant George Wuerthner DC Larson William Willers David Macaray Website of the Day July 23, 2008 Winslow T. Wheeler Paul Craig Roberts Ralph Nader Mike Whitney Susie Day Website of the Day July 22, 2008 Nikolas Kozloff Patrick Cockburn Soldz, Olson, Reisner Arrigo and Welch Moshe Adler Martha Rosenberg Dan Bacher Harvey Wasserman Anthony Papa Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day July 21, 2008 Ishmael Reed Mike Whitney Andy Worthington Scott Pellegrino John Ross Robert Weitzel Mike Stark Website of the Day July 19 / 20, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Dave Lindorff Saul Landau Ron Jacobs Uri Avnery Neve Gordon Roane Carey Robert Fantina Christopher Brauchli Fred Gardner David Macaray Richard L. Hutto Bill Moyers / Ronnie Cummins David Yearsley Alison McKenna Wajahat Ali Poets' Basement Website of the Day July 18, 2008 Corey D. B. Walker Mike Whitney Robert Bryce Mike Roselle Bouthaina Shaaban Eve Spangler Website of the Day
July 17, 2008 Paul Craig Roberts James G. Abourezk Ralph Nader Allan J. Lichtman Andy Worthington"Screwed Up" and"Abused": Omar Khadr's Interrogations at Gitmo Ronnie Cummins
July 16, 2008 Jeffrey St. Clair Paul Craig Roberts Conn Hallinan Dave Lindorff William S. Lind Christopher Brauchli Website of the Day
July 15, 2008 Michael Hudson Brian Cloughley Patrick Cockburn John Ross Howard Lisnoff Website of the Day July 14, 2008 Uri Avnery Paul Craig Roberts Trish Schuh Patrick Cockburn Mike Whitney Alan Farago Seth Sandronsky Phyllis Pollack Website of the Day July 12 / 13, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair James Abourezk Nicole Colson Stan Cox Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Wajahat Ali / John Stauber Alan Farago Missy Beattie Robert Fantina Rannie Amiri Gregory Kafoury Fran Shor Martha Rosenberg David Macaray Andrew Wimmer Ron Jacobs Farzana Versey Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend July 11, 2008 Kevin Alexander Gray Sasan Fayazmanesh Peter Morici Mike Whitney Manuel Garcia, Jr. Robert Weissman Ramzy Baroud Kelly Overton Adrian Burgos Website of the Day July 10, 2008 Brian McKenna Paul Craig Roberts Saul Landau Ron Jacobs Joshua Frank Peter Morici Alan Maass Robert Weissman William Blum Alan Farago Website of the Day July 9, 2008 Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Luis Rodriguez Sheldon Richman Fatemeh Keshavarz Chad Hanson Sen. Russ Feingold Niranjan Ramakrishnan Dave Lindorff Stanley Heller Philip Rizk Website of the Day July 8, 2008 Nikolas Kozloff Laura Carlsen Mike Whitney Andy Worthington Patrick Irelan Chellis Glendinning David Macaray Dave Lindorff John Chuckman Phillip Doe Website of the Day July 7, 2008 Patrick Bond Kathy Kelly Andy Worthington Clifton Ross Elizabeth Schulte Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff Binoy Kampmark Stephen Fleischman Website of the Day July 5 / 6, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair / Patrick Cockburn Mike Whitney Robert Fantina Binoy Kampmark Rannie Amiri Eric Ruder Brian Cloughley William Blum Frank Barat Christopher Brauchli David Yearsley Ron Jacobs Karim Makdisi Wendy Thompson / N. D. Jayaprakash Ramzy Baroud Kelly Overton Richard Neville Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
July 4, 2008 Kathy Kelly Dave Lindorff Paul Krassner Jackie Corr Laray Polk Dan Bacher Walter Brasch Charles Modiano Website of the Day July 3, 2008 Sharon Smith Andy Worthington Laura Carlsen Peter Morici Ramzi Kysia Martha Rosenberg Anne Landman Dave Zirin Kristin Bricker Website of the Day
July 2, 2008 Patrick Irelan Vijay Prashad Brian Cloughley Ralph Nader Robert Fantina Dave Lindorff Parvez Ahmed Robert Bryce Website of the Day July 1, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Mike Whitney Douglas Macgregor Steven Higgs Andy Worthington Binoy Kampmark Dave Lindorff Roger Burbach Richard W. Behan Gary Leupp Website of the Day |
Weekend Edition The Musical PatriotOnce More Unto the Albert Hall, Dear FriendsBy DAVID YEARSLEY To listen to the BBC’s Proms concerts in the Royal Albert Hall I wake up early before the upstate New York summer days become too tropical, and enjoy the delayed broadcasts over the computer on BBC 3. There’s no standing in line with the Prommers (i.e., Promenaders) for the amazingly cheap five pound tickets, and then jostling with a thousand others in the standing room section below the Albert Hall stage. Instead of the Albert Hall mosh pit, there’s coffee and a view out over the wooded hills of New York to a soundtrack of the world’s greatest musicians heard in high-fidelity and half a day late. In place of the drama of the Proms’ ebullient concert-going culture comes leisurely enjoyment. Excitement, annoyance, anticipation, ecstasy, and the thousand other thrills of unfolding musical performance give way to contemplation, abstraction, solitude, and the occasional touch of wistfulness. Well into their second century of existence, the Proms call themselves “The World’s Greatest Classical Music Festival” and at more than seventy concerts stretched across the summer the claim seems more than justified. The Proms have long been committed to the democratization of classical music, not just through the cheap standing room tickets, but through the dissemination of the concerts on television, over the radio, and most recently the internet. Music by Debussy, Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Ralph Vaughan Williams, (who died fifty years ago this year and is therefore featured on many concerts this season), and many others was performed at the Proms when it is was new. The festival has always given much play to music of the twentieth century, as well as to the new works it commissions. Earlier in the Spring, before the Proms schedule for the 2008 summer was announced, the Labour Party’s Culture Minister Margaret Hodge criticized the institution for not reflecting the “diversity” of the New Britain. Conservative commentators immediately decried this transparent political grandstanding. Even Prime Minister Gordon Brown quickly distanced himself from this hackneyed attack on the alleged elitism and growing irrelevance of classical music. Hodge’s target was poorly chosen. There is no more accessible and successful classical musical festival in the world. But adjustments, not to say concessions, have been made over the last decade in the form of A Blue Peter Prom done in conjunction with long-running BBC children’s program, a Folk Music Prom, and a World Music Prom, held for the first time this year. In the end, I doubt such offerings will do much to erode the Proms’ long-standing commitment to classical music. Like so much else in the so-called New Britain, the Proms are famous, some would say infamous, for playing to national sentiment. The most extravagant expression of this strain of Proms culture comes at the Last Night, the conclusion of the series, when Prommers wave Union Jacks—though regional flags are also to be seen—as the orchestra makes its way through hymns to to the defunct British Empire: Pomp and Circumstance, Rule Britannia, Jerusalem, and finally God Save the Queen. Here too, though, slight renovations have been made to the imperial facade. While principal conductor of the BBC Symphony from 2000 to 2004, the American maestro Leonard Slatkin tried to tone down the excessive nationalism of the Last Night. The first non-commonwealth conductor to take the podium for the Last Night, Slatkin defrocked Rule Britannia of its independent status, letting it be heard only as part of the Fantasia on British Sea Songs by Henry Wood. Wood, first conductor at the Proms who continued leading these concerts for more than half a century and whose bust is put on stage in front of the Albert Hall organ for all Proms concerts. A bead of sweat is mopped from the bust’s brow on the Last Night, as if Wood’s effigy breathes a sigh of relief that the whole series has come off over a this exhausting cycle of events. Another interpretation would be that Wood is sweating bullets of embarrassment at the tenacity of this flag-waving foolishness. In spite of Slatkin’s neglible reform, the Last Night is still an orgy of British nationalism. The revels spill out into Hyde Park where the concert is to be seen live on the big-screen. It is the closest any supposedly classical concert will ever get to a World Cup soccer match. Indeed, rather than directing her criticism at the cowering scapegoat of “high” culture, Hodge should have gone after the unabashed, if paradoxically inclusive, jingoism of the Last Night. I’m not sure of the demographic makeup of the Last Night crowd, but the assumption seems to be that if a sufficient quota of dark-skinned people of the former Empire can be seen waving British flags, then the hymns of Empire will be themselves naturalized as the soundtrack of the New Britain. It is only as propaganda that classical music attains the appeal of pop. While nationalism in music takes its most flamboyant form on the Last Night it is deployed throughout the series for the purposes of marketing: music (classical, world, whatever) may masquerade as a universalize language, but it retains its media appeal when spoken with the exotic accent of a Russian, like Valery Gergiev, or a Venezuelan phenom like Gustavo Dudamel -- heard in respectively Proms 46 and 47 next week—and other musical ambassadors from Japan, China and, to be sure, the former British Colonies. A classic bit of Proms programming came over my computer this morning: last night’s concert by the Ulster Orchestra led by Kenneth Montgomery, a Belfast native. Here was group still residing within the massively shrunken borders of the British Empire. Pursuing the nationalist line, Alexandra Wilson introduced the concert for BBC 3 as an exploration of “contrasting national identities” in a program of Irish and Czech music—never mind that this “identity” was complicated by the fact that there are two Irelands. Things began with Belfast-born Howard Ferguson’s Overture for an Occasion, the occasion being the 1953 Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Rather half-heartedly praised in the next morning’s reviews in the London papers, the richly orchestrated and melodically diverse piece expertly conjoins stormy string writing, imperial brass strains, militaristic drum rolls, and the naive of woodwind themes. This melange unwittingly presaged the subsequent Windsor decades of scandal, military adventurism, insularity, and questionable taste. Indeed, the piece is as flimsy a construct as the British Monarchy itself. The true “identity” and political implications of this unabashedly royalist, unionist work are conveniently sidestepped. Mediocre music of dubious optimism is stamped quickly in the concert-goer’s passport before boarding EasyJet to the next destination. The Irish half of the program then moved on to a far more substantial, I want to say major and moving, work by the Anglo-Irish composer, Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924), best known nowadays for his stalwart Anglican choral music often heard in English cathedrals and Oxbridge chapels. The young Dubliner Finghin Collins chose Stanford’s darkly romantic Piano Concerto for his Proms debut, an unlikely work for such an important career juncture simply because it is not in the stable of concerto warhorses. But as Collins and company made abundantly clear to this remote listener, it as rewarding, challenging, and tempestuous a concerto as those of Rachmaninoff, who counted as Stanford’s main influence in the work. So much for “Irish” identity. Collins has a commanding technique but also, more impressively still, a feeling for pianistic melancholy against a backdrop of brooding orchestral colors. Whether these traits are typically Irish, Anglican, Catholic, Russian, Orthodox, or Patagonian, I’ll leave to the BBC. Collins is big-time player, now recording Schumann’s complete works on the Claves label. At his hands and those of the Harrington and the Ulster Orchestra, I’ve discovered an epic piano concerto beamed my way from the former seat of Empire. I’ll want to hear Stanford’s mighty concerto again in the Ithacan fall and winter. In the end, none of the Proms nonsense stops me from listening, only because the performances are of such diversity and quality, even if served up with unappetizing nationalist seasonings. Maybe I’m as naive as Ferguson’s Overture, but my musical patriots recognize no political boundaries. 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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