Today's Stories

May 8-10, 2009

Paul Wolf
Obama's Axis of Obedience

Neve Gordon
Jailed for Caring

May 7, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Criminalizing Criticism of Israel

Chris Floyd
A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

Andy Worthington
Mixed Messages on Torture

Alan Farago
No Place Like Home: a Stress Test for Land Use, Not Just Banks

Ray McGovern
Deux ex Machina on Torture?

Dave Lindorff
Stain Removal: Impeaching the Torture Judge

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Why is There Rampant Famine in the 21st Century?

Ana M. Malinow, MD
Why We Need a Single-Payer Health Care System

Jeff Armstrong
Freeing Leonard Peltier: What Would Warren Harding Do?

Norman Solomon
A Green New Deal

Website of the Day
The End of Lake Mead?

May 6, 2009

Doug Peacock
The Fate of the Yellowstone Grizzly

Patrick Cockburn
Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

Richard Neville
The Torturer's Apprentice

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs or Sunshine?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Of Pork and Baloney: Obama's Defense Budget

Deepak Tripathi
Pakistan in Crisis

Stephen Soldz
A "Natural Reaction": APA Ethics Policy-Maker Endorses Torture

Reuven Kaminer
Nice is Not Enough: Obama vs. Netanyahu and Lieberman

David Macaray
The Chrysler-UAW Deal

Kevin Zeese
Why We Were Arrested at the Senate Finance Committee Hearings

Marjorie Cohn
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Investigate Psychologist and Health Provider Complicity in Torture

Website of the Day
Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown?

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu's Plan

Steven Higgs
Autism and Toxic Pollution

Dean Baker
Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic

Daniel Wolff
The Education of Rachel Carson

Sibel Edmonds
The Broken Congress

Carole King Klein
A New Chance to Save the Northern Rockies

Fidel Castro
Giving One's All

Belén Fernández
Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Big Lie About Fish vs. Jobs

Website of the Day
"I Married Isis on the Fifth Day of May"

May 4, 2009

James G. Abourezk
The AIPAC Spy Case

Jeff Leys
Obama's War Budget

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollahs Press Marital Rape Law

Andy Worthington
A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Jaime Avilés
Mexico's Plague-Bringers

David Swanson
An Even Worse Bybee Memo

Paul Craig Roberts
Working with Jack Kemp

P. Sainath
Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics

Eugenia Tsao
Canada's Obama and the Cult of the Prof

Benjamin Dangl
Protest and Rubber Bullets in Paraquay

Sami Al-Arian
Mourning William Moffitt

Website of the Day
"Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down": Kent State, May 4, 1970

May 1 - 3, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Game-Changers: Specter Jumps, Souter Quits

Gary Leupp
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Peter Linebaugh
The Key to the Bastille

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank:
Half Life of a Toxic War: Iraq's Wrecked Environment

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

Patrick Cockburn
Kabul's New Elite

Mike Whitney
Economy on the Ropes

Pierre Sprey /
Winslow Wheeler
What "Sweeping Overhaul" of the Pentagon?

Andy Worthington
Al-Marri's Plea Deal: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged

Mairead Maguire
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid: a Letter to Obama From a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Nadia Hijab
The Israel Boycott is Biting

Diane Farsetta
Life, Death and Water Policy

Michael Calderón-Zaks
The Déjà Vu Flu: Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

Richard Rhames
When Piggies Come Home to Roost: Swine Flu and the Industrial Meat Gulags

Russell Mokhiber
Inside the Beltway Baucus

Ramzy Baroud
Clinton's Unpromising Start

Rannie Amiri
Understanding Lebanon's June Elections

Deb Reich
No Talking, Dammit!

Steven Higgs
Indiana Criminalizes Dissent: Roadblocks on the NAFTA Highway

Brian Cloughley
Malice in Blunderland

David Michael Green
The Party's Over

Farzana Versey
Sex, Swat and Susan Boyle

Jim Goodman
Think Before You Eat: Agriculture and the Environment

Carl Finamore
New Prescription for a Healthy Union Movement

Christopher Brauchli
The Sounds of Silence: the Texas Option

Susie Day
The Real Cause of Unemployment: Employees!

David Yearsley
Nuts Over Beethoven

Lorenzo Wolff
Three Minutes of Perfection

Peter Stone Brown
Dancing with Dylan

Poets' Basement Dominguez, Orloski and Springate

Website of the Weekend
May Day Europe

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

Weekend Edition
May 8-10, 2009

The Musical Patriot

Jean Ferrard, Organist Extraordinary (And He Saved Ms. Yearsley's Tooth)

By DAVID YEARSLEY

After a glorious birth in the 18th-century, the concept of the amateur became tarnished by connotations of dilettantism: if the market didn’t recognize and reward one’s artistic inclinations then they literally weren’t worth anything.

The entry on “amateur” in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encylopédie evokes the golden youth of the term. Here it is defined as someone with a “decided taste” for art (usually painting), and concludes with the observation that “we [the French] have our amateurs, the Italians their virtuosos.” In this final phrase we in turn get a sense how the word virtuoso—now implying astonishing technical skill at a musical instrument, and one that usually brings with it substantial remuneration—projects the sense of moral probity with which aesthetic feeling should be imbued, unattached to rewards.  Appreciation is not only an essential talent to be cultivated, but also an ethical posture to be nurtured.
 
The parallel Encyclopédie article on “connoisseur” raises the stakes, arguing that only those who themselves practice the art can offer truly accurate judgments about it. To claim connoisseurly credentials, the excitement of the amateur must be refined by study. But the flood of 18th-century music publications directed at both Amateurs and Connoisseurs (Kenner und Liebhaber in German) document that the two categories could share a love for the same body of art.

The title of J. C. Bach and C. F. Abel’s Professional Concerts begun in 1769 in London confirm the move away from the mixed events involving paid musicians and amateurs that had dominated the city’s musical salons. With this rather pompous title the German émigré organizers — themselves both products of the guild-like family system that trained so many great 18th-before being largely supplanted by professional-staffed and professionally minded conservatories in the 19th — meant to guarantee their customers that the admission price ensured high standards of execution. But Professionalism is a chilling word, one which puts a price on the moral impulse of the amateur. Salary and tips become the carrots and sticks for aesthetic motivation; professional advancements and industry merely distract from true artistic advance.

One of the most energetic, expert, and wide-ranging musicians of our time, Jean Ferrard is both amateur and connoisseur. A lover of the arts and of life — as Horace reminded us, the first is long, the second short — Ferrard retires next month at the age of 65 from his post as Professor of Organ at the Royal Conservatory of Music.  Meeting him you would have a hard time learning that he has occupied this position, one of the most prestigious in the organ world, since 1992, or that he counts figures like Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens, founder of the school of modern organ playing in francophone Europe, among his predecessors. Though ascended to the top of his profession, Ferrard is too much of an amateur in the best sense word — too interested in music and others — to be bothered much with self-promotion.

An indefatigable teacher and performer, who, before he shed the encumbrances of his car last year for the pleasures of train-travel, would cover vast expanses of Europe behind the wheel, GPS mounted on his dash,  to play ingeniously conceived and compellingly executed concerts from Trieste to Copenhagen, from the low lands of Flanders to the Swiss Alps, on monuments to the instrument’s history both great and small, from the late Gothic to the just-completed.

His own encyclopedic knowledge of the organ’s long history and its current, sometimes flagging, health in withstanding the centrifugal forces of modern culture derives not just from endless hours of youthful practice and countless concerts at dozens of instruments built over the last half-millennium, but from his training in and subsequent dedication to musical scholarship. Holder of a degree in musicology from the Free University of Brussels, he has editing important editions of organ music, several of them devoted to composers active in what is now modern-day Belgium, a transitional zone, often a battleground,  between Protestant and Catholic Europe. The Low Countries forged musical gold in the crucible of the Reformation, and used it to produce gleaming alloys that combine erudite counterpoint worthy of the Sistine chapel and austere Calvinist psalm settings animated by the virtuosic style imported by recusant English organists.

Ferrard’s edition of the music of Peeter Cornet, the early 17th-century organist at the sumptuous Hapsburg archducal court in Brussels, is a testament to the rigors of modern scholarship animated by the desire to have the best music of the past available for the best purposes of the present. To hear Ferrard play Cornet, his long-distant predecessor in Brussels, on one of the more recent of his many recordings—Four Centuries of Belgian Organ Music —on the splendid modern organ in the city’s Gothic Cathedral is to encounter a rare performer who has the ability to make the learned style as astonishing as the flamboyant passagework. Ferrard turns what many players are deceived into thinking is reserved polyphony into a provocation, a challenge to a game of wits.

Ferrard’s edition of Cornet’s music levels the playing field: the editor of the first modern print of Cornet’s great fantasies, masterpieces of the 17th-century and indeed of the entire corpus of keyboard music, failed to see that in one of these magisterial works the original manuscript had switched two of the scribe’s pages in the binding process, so that the contrapuntal argument of the piece was hopelessly jumbled at critical junctures. As he puzzled over the piece, rehearsing it in his head, Ferrard suddenly heard and saw Cornet’s discourse unfold before him.

There’s little or no money in such musical forensic work, and not much, for that matter, in organ concerts: amateur’s zeal and expert eyes and ears make it all happen.

As if all this performing, teaching, and scholarship isn’t enough, Ferrard is one of our times great music journalists, and it is here that the real force of his amateur spirit can be felt. From 1965 until 1985 he worked for the French-speaking wing of Belgian National Radio (RTBF), rising to become the head of music and continuing through his tenure to offer daily commentary on current musical events. Beginning in 1975 he produced the program “Magazine de l’Orgue” with a new installment every week even after he had left his job at RTBF to dedicate himself more fully to teaching and playing. In 1996 he ended his radio days, and turned to print journalism, publishing the Magazine de l’Orgue (http://www.lemagazinedel.org/) three times a year for the past decade.

Now closing in on its 90th number, this journal is always 64 pages and always full of free-wheeling, often humorous. and always trenchant commentary on the organ and related topics in music and culture. As with the best music criticism, one learns as much about the editor—his tastes and passions, his variable moods and the shadings of his observational wit, and his perennial dislikes and favorite targets — as about the vibrant musical cultural he chronicles. Ferrard’s unbuttoned, always engaging, style retains the spontaneity of radio. Given his many duties and interests, Ferrard doesn’t have time to ponder.  He tells you what he thinks, but always with a real flair never weighed down by his profound knowledge of music.

As a practicing musician who also has talent and dynamism (and never enough time!) to serve as an indefatigable commentator on contemporary musical life, at the organ and elsewhere, Ferrard follows in the tradition of François-Joseph Fétis, himself an organist, journalist, and historian and the 19th-century founding director of the conservatory from which Ferrard is set to retire. From that other predecessor at the conservatory, Lemmens, and no doubt from other more immediate sources as well, Ferrard inherited his love and fascination for the organ music of J. S. Bach.  Trained by a student of a student of Bach, Lemmens brought Bach’s organ music to francophone Europe, where it is nurtured by his successor, Ferrard, both as a teacher and performer. Even Bach’s supposed penchant for number symbolism informs Ferrard’s journalism:  because the letters of Bach’s name add up to fourteen, the famous Magazine de l’Orgue interview is always composed of fourteen questions. But the amateur in Ferrard cannot stop there: his elegant 19th-century terraced house in the center of Brussels boasts a fascinating and hilarious collection of busts of the composer, which ranging in style from austere Teutonicism to goofy experimentalism and span the spectrum of emotional registers from religious veneration to crass exploitation.

Ferrard’s recent CDs, like the one mentioned above, are published under the auspices of Ferrard’s non-profit organization, [Sic], whose ingenious name reflects the man’s irreverent and irrepressible humor. [Sic] also appears on other Ferrard projects like his gorgeous little book of observations on and grainy black-and-white photos of the organ, entitled Le plus impressionannt dans l’orgue est son silence …  This collector’s item comes with an even smaller English version without the photos, which translates the title as Most Impressive in the Organ is its Silence … The observations are in prose and poetry; presented in various formats, these pieces range in tone from the arch to the elegiac, and consider topics as diverse as the organist’s shoes and instrument’s soul. The opening number is a poem:

From the forest it took the strongest trees,
Earth gave tin and lead,
Sheep offered their fleece,
And man, the wind …

Perhaps my most lasting impression of Jean is from  Bruges in the summer of 2005, when we served together on the jury for the organ competition in the famous early musical festival that takes place each year in that perfectly preserved late Gothic city. After dinner my family and I were hopped up on moules and pommes frites and otherwise giddy after watching a Euro-trash street performer escape from a straitjacket in front of throngs of tourists in the town square.  As we headed back to our hotel, one of my daughters tripped on the cobblestones and broke-off a recently grown adult front tooth right in the shadow of magnificent 13th-century Belfry.  Never was a more postcard-perfect backdrop found for a vacation mishap that terrifies the parents and shocks the kids.

It was a Friday night in August when the vast majority of European dentists are at the beach. I picked up the fragment of the tooth, and we made it back to the hotel.  A taxi trip to the hospital on the other side of the canal that encircles the city—amazingly, the Gothic hospital on the island of Bruges with its Memling paintings had been in use until the middle of the 1970s—provided no help, though the kind staff admitted us and had a doctor take a look. But no dentist was available or on call—but neither were we charged a cent for the visit.

Back at the hotel and desperate, I knocked on Ferrard’s room around 10pm.  I told him what had happened. “Bummer!” came his idiomatic response.  Fluent in four languages, his linguistic gifts were sparked by the bilingual educational reforms that taught French-speaking school children Flemish in the more optimistic post-wars years of the bi-ethnic (tri-ethnic if you count the small German-speaking minority) years of the Belgian state.  (Since abandoning these reforms in francophone Belgian it is very difficult to find a Belgian who knows even rudimentary Flemish.)

Ferrard had headphones around his neck and a glass of cognac in his hand. He beckoned me into the room.  His computer was open on the desk next to a wooden box containing a few dozen CDs. After a numbing eight-hour day of listening to organists in the competition, he was busy reviewing the latest influx of recordings for Magazine d l’Orgue. This amateurism is not to be confused the workaholism: the joy in the task was written all over Ferrard’s face.

Ferrard got the Director of the Festival on the phone and by Saturday morning the tooth was back together, the one remaining dentist in town agreeing to see my daughter in his office and charging his normal rate of forty Euros for a procedure that would have been two or three hundred dollars in the USA.

And also by the following morning Ferrard was back at the jury table, the next issue of the Magazine de l’Orgue sent off and ready to be printed.

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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