Now
Available from
CounterPunch for Only $11.50 (S/H Included)
Today's
Stories
January 3 / 4, 2004
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
January 3 / 4, 2004
Weapon of Meat Destruction
Mad
Cow and Main Street USA
By SETH SANDRONSKY
Mad cow disease in America discovered during the
recent holiday season may well sway "consumer confidence"
near and far. Yet this disaster-in-progress is about far more
than confident consumers.
Take folks in America. I will refer to
these people as Main Street USA.
For them, MCD could be a lens through
which to better their view of and activism against the system.
That system is market production of, by and for a privileged
few, the affluent and corporations.
I mean the "they" that, thanks
largely to the public relations industry and its institutional
next of kin, corporate media, are nearly invisible in public.
This is a stunt, as author Gore Vidal has noted, without historical
parallels.
But that social invisibility can, and
in fact, is changing. Americans protesting last spring against
the U.S. attack on Iraq is a case in point.
Is it such a leap from Saddam's unfound
WMD to the emergence of MCD? Consider the potential impact of
Main Street USA turning its gaze on feedlot owners implicated
in the MCD story.
After all, the same government that has
facilitated MCD is also backing the U.S. corporate looting of
Iraq. Concerning MCD, free-trade protesters, maligned as "anarchists"
and the like by mouthpieces for the establishment, have led the
way with a critique of corporate food production.
For example, since the WTO protests in
Seattle four years ago, these dissidents have educated the public
about agribusiness' hunger for constant growth and profit by
any means necessary. Essentially, they foretold the emergence
of MCD from the beef and dairy industries.
In a nutshell, MCD shows the normal workings
of the modern business enterprise under capitalist production.
Its toxicity to human health and welfare also requires workers
to create wealth beyond the wages they earn, also know as profits.
In that vein, MCD goes hand-in-hand with
the increase of hungry Americans (34.9 million of them in 2002,
up from 31 million in 1999, reports the USDA). Both crises are
the rational outcomes of an irrational system based on production
for profit, not human need.
Enter Main Street USA as it confronts
domestic hunger and the slaughtering of unhealthy cattle fed
to other creatures, and ultimately consumed by humans. Contradictions?
You bet. Basically with the MCD story,
the people of America are looking at human productivity.
Who rules this productivity, and who
is ruled by it? And why?
It is perhaps instructive to think of
America's working people being herded like so many cattle between
school and work. During this herding, their brains are scrubbed
with the ideology of free enterprise, level playing fields and
fair competition.
Meanwhile across America from classrooms
to feedlots and offices, people's energy sustains the market
system that churns out commodities such as beef and dairy products.
So goes the process of commodity production for profit in which
the alienated spirits of working people are just costs of doing
business.
MCD is one outcome of such a system,
and, I think, a critical point in American history. This should
be no mystery, just a logical continuation of the transition
from agriculture to industry.
That process in America, from roughly
the Civil War to 2004, has featured millions of peasant farmers
becoming industrial workers. I thought about that painful social
change while watching the film "Cold Mountain" at my
local corporate cineplex the other day.
In the U.S., the transition from a society
of small agricultural producers to one of hourly wage workers,
from family farms to corporate feedlots, is mainly over. However,
in countries such as Indonesia and Mexico, the liquidation of
the peasantry by the capitalist forces of production is very
much an ongoing process.
South of America, the Zapatista uprising
10 years ago was a response to the NAFTA. It opened the gates
to industrial agriculture from the U.S., dooming a people's way
of life.
The Zapatista resistance to U.S. agribusiness
imports is a current example of people fighting to keep their
ties to the land. They wish to be free of the modern economy
that encloses folks in the global market of commodity exchange.
MCD casts some light on another example
of this exchange, which U.S. trading partners want no part of,
period. Investigating this development is quite necessary for
many reasons, beginning with public health.
Kudos to investigative journalists John
Stauber and Sheldon Rampton for doing that so well. We are in
their debt.
Investigation of MCD is a first step.
Increased regulation may, I say may, follow.
But only if more of Main Street USA awakens
politically and demands it. Without that, I fear, the system
that has created MCD will continue to create new and more lethal
commodities, a hint of which may be found in the unclear contamination
of nature by genetically modified organisms.
Though not readily apparent in America,
a social change of consciousness was underway before the outbreak
of MCD. The basis for that was the changing nature of the economy
driven by capitalist technology.
I am thinking of free-trade protesters
and organic food consumers. Together, they help to make up Main
Street USA.
Its growing involvement in the issues
of the day such as MCD is urgently needed, for its sake and the
rest of the world's.
Seth Sandronsky,
a member of Sacramento Area Peace Action and co-editor of Because
People Matter, Sacramento's progressive paper. He can be reached
at: ssandron@hotmail.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|