Originally posted on TPM -- July, 4, 2009
From the Nation:
Alexander Cockburn... columnist and one of America's best-known radical journalists, was born in Scotland and grew up in Ireland.
Wait, they are letting radicals into this country? Radical journalists no less? Dick Cheney is right... This current administration is failing to protect America from these radicals.
From NNDB:Alexander Cockburn (pronounced Coburn) is an expatriate Irishman living in Northern California as a radical leftist journalist.
Claud Cockburn (1904-1981) was a radical English journalist controversial for communist sympathies. Under the name Frank Pitcairn, Cockburn contributed to the British Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker.... Cockburn was attacked by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia (1938). Orwell accused Cockburn of being under the control of the Communist Party and was critical of the way Cockburn reported the Barcelona May Days.
Well, the ol' man was a full blown commie agitator.What else does the Nation say?
I knew it, an intellectual left wing commie radical.Wait Northern California? This intellectual left wing commie agitator is now a voting citizen in my Congressional district? He is going to cancel out my vote?He graduated from Oxford in 1963 with a degree in English literature and language.
Note: Thanks to California's legendary gerrymandering of Congressional districts, even though I live 6 hours and 300 miles from this pinko, our Congressional district looks like a chicken that has had its neck wrung about 5 times, with one wing sticking out with three dog legs when viewed on a map...
Who let this guy into the country anyway? The Nation:
A permanent resident of the United States since 1973, Cockburn wrote for many years...Wait, Nixon let this guy in? Law and Order, the silent majority, Nixon?
A permanent resident of the United States since 1973, Cockburn wrote for many years for The Village Voice about the press and politics. Since then he has contributed to many publications including The New York Review of Books, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and the Wall Street Journal (where he had a regular column from 1980 to 1990)...The Wall Street Journal hired commies and radicals during the Reagan years? Wouldn't Wall Street worm and CIA henchman William Casey have this guy removed? Let's read this thing from the Nation again:
Alexander Cockburn, The Nation's "Beat the Devil" columnist and one of America's best-known radical journalists, was born in Scotland and grew up in Ireland. He has written "Beat the Devil" since 1984.
Wait, I read Beat the Devil all the time... this guy does not seem radical. He seems pretty normal to me.
...with Jeffrey St. Clair he has written or coedited several books including: Whiteout, The CIA, Drugs and the Press; The Politics of Anti-Semitism; Imperial Crusades; Al Gore, A User's Manual; Five Days That Shook the World; and A Dime's Worth of Difference, about the two-party system in America.
Wait, I have read Whiteout, The CIA, Drugs and the Press. It is quite well written and documented.
He is co-editor, with Jeffrey St Clair, of the newsletter and radical website CounterPunch (http://www.counterpunch.org) which have a substantial world audience. In 1987 he published a best-selling collection of essays, Corruptions of Empire...
Oh, that is where I heard the name... I read CounterPunch all the time. This guy is not radical or a commie. He edits one of the best political and economic websites I have read. He has some of the best contributors on a variety of important topics on a daily basis. How do you pull that one off from the lost coast?
Okay Cockburn, you are in for now. But keep that little flag handy at all times and watch your step.
The well written recent essays of Mr. Alexander Cockburn:
I Become an American
Though the U.S. Constitution seemingly blocks my path at this time, I have taken the first necessary step in my own quest for the White House by becoming a citizen of the United States at approximately 10 am, Pacific time, last Wednesday, June 17, in the Paramount Theater in Oakland, California.
To my immediate left in the vast and splendid deco theater was a Moroccan, to my right a Salvadoran and around us 956 other candidates for citizenship from 98 countries, each holding a small specimen of the flag that was about to become our standard. All of us had sworn early that day that since our final, successful interview with immigration officials we had not become prostitutes or members of the Communist Party.
Well, Mr. Cockburn, you are a member of the press and have been associated with individuals at the Washington Post. Seeing the latest Post scandal of fees for service in arranging lobbyists meeting politicians, pure prostitution, I would worry about that one. And the communist thing, dad and all. Better bring your lawyer to the swearing in.
Inductees to U.S. nation-hood were downstairs; relatives and friends were up in the balcony, including CounterPuncher and friend Scott Handleman, attorney at law. I was determined to start out on the right path. What is more American than to have a lawyer nearby?
My own path to citizenship began with a green card in 1973, allowing me to work for the Village Voice in New York and to be a legal resident...
The man who helped me get that card was Ed Koch, at that time a supposedly liberal US congressman living, then as now, in Greenwich Village. A few years later, in 1977, he ran for mayor of New York City and I wrote about him harshly. Koch was heavily backed by Rupert Murdoch and the New York Post, running on a law and order platform.
Murdoch's pal Ed Koch got him in? You want to talk about some one who should be deported as an undesirable alien... Murdoch.
Ed was always a petty man, and this trait was well displayed the night he won. A PBS interviewer asked him what his "worst moment" on the race had been and he promptly said in his trade-mark squeaky whine, "the attack by Alexander Cockburn in the Voice... To think I got him his green card!" In that race there had been slurs a lot nastier than any I made. If you walked around Queens in that campaign you'd see "Vote for Cuomo, not the homo", scrawled on plenty of walls.
In my Voice column I made fun of a New Yorker writer, a woman dispensing lethal does of tedium on an almost weekly basis. I didn't know that her lover was a New Jersey congressman powerful on the Immigration and Naturalization subcommittee. Within days I was the object of a probe by the INS. A resident alien perches on a frail branch. That New Jersey congressman could have pressured the INS to put me on the watch list, meaning the next time I returned to the US I could have found the door slammed in my face.
In the mid 1980s a nutball colonel called Oliver North, working in the White House for Ronald Reagan, began to re-activate a national system of prison camps for lefties from a blueprint that had sat in government filing cabinets ever since the Palmer raids in the Red Scare following World War One. Dick Cheney most certainly dusted it off after 2001. On North's plan it was safe to assume, as with Cheney's, that potentially troublesome legal residents would have been locked up, then kicked out...
How long does it take a mild-mannered, antiwar, black professor of constitutional law, trained as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, to become an enthusiastic sponsor of targeted assassinations, "decapitation" strategies and remote-control bombing of mud houses the far end of the globe?
There's nothing surprising here. As far back as President Woodrow Wilson in the early twentieth century, American liberalism has been swift to flex imperial muscle, to whistle up the Marines. High explosive has always been in the hormone shot...
Woodrow Wilson, Virginian, lover of the DW Griffith film "The Clansman," documented racist (his own writings), US Corporate stooge and banking shill... banking shill is back in vogue these days. Read Wilson's 14 point speech for a lesson on US Rockefeller corporate agenda disguised as high ideals... a hallmark of Wilson speeches.
Thin Ice From Here to the Horizon
On any rational assessment the popular new president is skating on thin ice. Pollyanna bulletins about the economy puff up from the White House and Federal Reserve, like auguries of a new Pope through the Vatican chimney. "Habemus spem." We have hope.
We've just heard it from President Obama: "We are starting to see glimmers of hope across the economy." From Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, who's so far unleashed $12 trillion in booster money, we get the always sinister reassurance, like Death giving the Appointee in Samarra a friendly tap on the shoulder, "the foundations of our economy are strong".
Harlots High and Low: a Foul Saga in the History of Network TV
And then... a miracle! A very American kind of miracle to be sure, being the sort of miracle achieved by the usual megatonnage of campaign contributions from the drug industry dropped into the pockets of the relevant FDA overseers in Congress in Clinton's slush-sodden second term, plus direct lobbying of the FDA by media companies such as Time-Warner. The miracle went by the name of DTC: Direct to the Consumer Advertising.
Broadcast advertising of prescription drugs in the U.S. had actually been legal for years, but in 1997 the FDA "clarified" the rules about alerting consumers to any risks in a number of deft ways that suddenly made the game a whole lot easier for the drug companies. Thirty-five years after Congress moved to curb pharmaceutical company advertising of amphetamine antidepressants and barbiturates, the floodgates were opened once again. Through them poured the drug companies and their advertising dollars...
Back at the start of the 1990s the drug companies were spending $55 million on DTC ads. By 2003 the outlay had soared to $3 billion, and by 2005 to $7.5 billion. DTC sales-pitching of prescription drugs has been a huge boon to the networks, whose revenues from this source have surged since 1997. 2005 saw NBC, ABC and CBS pull in $1.4 billion in prescription drug advertising...
For the drug lords in the big pharmaceutical companies - America's most profitable industry - the FDA's 1997 decision has indeed been a license to print money, bales of it.
Back to our "Media as Whores" theme.
On any given day, CounterPunch can have a dozen or more articles and essays from gifted writers in many fields. Mr. Cockburn leads the Friday edition with one of his pieces. You will find some extremely interesting and thought provoking analysis.
This is why we like Mr. Cockburn. I guess Nixon was just too busy with other problems in 1973 to keep this subversive radical out of the country.
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