alexander cockburn

"It's the ruling class talking amongst itself," notes Alexander Cockburn of the information that WikiLeaks exposes and governments want to suppress. Meanwhile, Julian Assange is being held without bail, and online it's 4chan versus Mastercard, Xipwire versus PayPal in the fight to keep WikiLeaks open and funded as quickly as the government and corporate entities can shut it down.So what's the real story? Vince Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights and Alexander Cockburn of The Nation and CounterPunch join Laura to talk WikiLeaks: the charges, real and trumped-up, the free speech issues, and the real news uncovered underneath all the hype.The sixteenth UN Climate Change Conference will wrap up this Friday. While many were frustrated at exclusions of civil society and indigenous groups from official negotiations, others used the occasion to marshal an international grassroots movement that is stronger than ever. ; Here are a few voices from Cancun this week, courtesy of Reuters and independent journalist Tamar Sharabi for Free Speech TV.Everybody's talking about WikiLeaks and the government's right to its private conversations, but what about you and I?

We've had a lot of talk this week about the Left: where is it? Why does the media ignore it? What can we do to rebuild it? And whose fault is any of this? The mainstream media might ignore voices from the Left, but here on GRITtv those are just the voices that matter--and today, for a special feature, we welcome two you may have heard of: Tariq Ali and Alexander Cockburn.From Tony Blair to Tea Partiers to Thatcherism, Iraq to Pakistan, banks and bankers and campaign donations to the time Obama might have had to make significant change, Tariq and Alexander dissect the conventional wisdom of today on just about every political issue, domestic and global. The announcement that came this week, that Elizabeth Warren would sort of maybe possibly be appointed to do something like help institute the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She will be named an assistant to the president and special adviser to Treasury Secretary Geithner, and will oversee creation of the Bureau. Though this doesn't preclude her being named to head the agency, it's still not enough. Mary Bottari, director of the Center for Media and Democracy's new Real Economy Project, makes the case for Elizabeth Warren's appointment--sooner, rather than later.

What are the alternatives to the neo-liberal economic order? And why aren't people screaming from the rooftops? Laura Flanders sat down with David Harvey and Alexander Cockburn to discuss real alternatives to the current economic order. Restructuring America's cities and debt repudiation are a start.

The city of Pittsburgh has called up 4,000 highly-trained federal police officers to support local security forces in the days leading up to the G20 summit that begins on Wednesday. The delegates will be protected by a National Guard combat unit recently back from Iraq. On the eve of the G20 summit and during a major financial crisis, what is the future of capitalism? Nation columnist and Counterpunch co-editor Alexander Cockburn, William Tabb, associate editor of the Monthly Review, and Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements, talk alternatives.