counterpunch
GRITtv: Alexander Cockburn & Vince Warren: Prosecuting WikiLeaks
"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.
Email this pageGRITtv: Dec. 8, 2010
"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?
GRITtv: Tariq Ali & Alexander Cockburn: War and Taxes
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.
GRITtv: Sept. 16 2010
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.
GRITtv: The F Word: Credit Where Due, Geithner
We talked about the economy today, and whether Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner deserves more credit. What he should be getting credit for, it seems to me, is that Lehman Brothers report -- well, not the report, but the cover-up.
To give you the thumbnail sketch, a court-appointed bank examiner spent a year researching the fall of Lehman -- the trigger for the bailout crisis. As it turns out, surprise surprise, the accounting at Lehman was, to put it mildly, shifty... and our guests aren't the only ones asking what did Geithner know and when did he know it?
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism is noting, "The NY Fed, and thus Timothy Geithner, were at a minimum massively derelict..."
Mike Whitney over at CounterPunch is faking disbelief: "Is there really any doubt that Tim Geithner at the New York Fed, or Bernanke knew that Lehman was trading its junk assets to finance its on-going operations?"
If Geithner and Bernanke didn't know what was going on at Lehman, that's bad. If they knew, that's worse. One way, you've got to wonder why they're still in work. The alternative is that it was all part of some bigger, nastier scam, which transferred huge amounts of wealth from taxpayers back to the very banks that created the crisis.
They shouldn't just be out of work, quite possibly, Geithner or Bernanke (or both) should be in the clink. We learned long ago that this President can cut bait when he thinks it's called for. Candidate, then president Obama has broken with his preacher, his green jobs guru, his social secretary. The last, Desiree Rogers, apparently got the boot for letting gatecrashers into last fall's first State Dinner.
If she can get the boot for letting strangers into a feast, surely Bernanke and Geithner should get at least that for covering up for the banks who ate up our whole economy? Or does Obama only get tough with homies?
The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.
GRITtv: Mar. 15 2010
Welcome to GRITtv's new format! We're coming to you from our new studio in SoHo, shooting higher resolution video. We'll be bringing you 30 minutes of content 5 days a week from now on, featuring more of our friends from around the country, more field reporting, and some other new surprises as well. Hope you enjoy! Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah, joins Laura in studio to talk about recent news. A spate of profiles of Timothy Geithner hit the news recently, from Vogue to the Atlantic and several places in between. We ask a couple of experts what's really going on with the economy--and if Geithner deserves any of that praise. Robert Johnson is the director of economic policy at the Roosevelt Institute and the former chief economist for the Senate Banking Committee. Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America. They both have some words for the Democrats on what happens if don't wise up. Nahr al-Bared ("Cold River") refugee camp in Lebanon is home to 20,000 displaced Palestinians, struggling to rebuild their home after its destruction in 2007. The camp has been around for some 60 years, and in this excerpt from "Checkpoints and More" by A Films, residents of the camp tell their stories. Finally, Laura reminds us that while some profiles of Geithner may be cheering the former New York Fed chair, he's also implicated in the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
GRITtv: Bumbling Buggers or Intelligence Operatives?
Yesterday, Laura called our attention to the strange tale of the attempt at bugging Sen. Mary Landrieu's New Orleans office, noting the stories uncovered by indie reporters connecting the dots between the ACORN sting, the break-in, and funding flowing into universities from the nation's intelligence agencies -- as well as right-wing organizations. David Price wrote a piece in Counterpunch, "Silent Coup," about the intelligence operations on campus, and Lindsay Beyerstein uncovered the connection between one of the Landrieu arrestees and those same programs; her work was cited in Raw Story's "Landrieu Phone Plot: Men Arrested have Links to Intelligence Community." They joined us to talk about the disturbing layers to this story, and discuss where it goes next.
GRITtv: The F Word: Hijinks or Undercover Ops?
If four politically-motivated young men with left-wing (or Muslim), rather than right-wing ties, broke into the office of a senior Senate Homeland Security Committee member and gained access to her computer files -- do you think we'd be hearing less about hijinks and more about Guantanamo? The story of the break-in at Senator Landrieu's office gets weirder and weirder by the day. For those who were distracted by the State of the Union last week, federal officials arrested four young men and charged them with plotting to tamper with the telephone system, after they were caught impersonating telephone repairmen in the New Orleans office of Senator Mary Landrieu. The mainstream media account of the story has it that the four were neo-conservative pranksters gone overboard in an attempt to possibly uncover damaging information related to the Democrat and voter registration drive or the healthcare bill, or both. One of the men was a conservative activist who gained fame last year by secretly recording members of the community group ACORN giving him advice on how to set up a brothel. Read the alternative media however, and the story points away from pranks and towards undercover ops. The group not only had ties to conservative campus think tanks, but also to the US intelligence community. Lindsay Beyerstein is alleging that one of the arrestees, Stan Dai, is an Assistant Director at the Intelligence Community Center for Academic Excellence at Trinity University in DC. Curious about the ICCAE? David Price over at Counterpunch happens to be reporting right now that the ICCAE (perfectly pronounced "ICKY") is just one of a handful of programs started on US campuses after 9-11 to "sneak unidentified students with undisclosed links to intelligence agencies into university classrooms." The Trinity program, according to its website, "received a $250,000 renewable grant from the US intelligence Community" upon launching in 2004. "Hijinks to Handcuffs for Landrieu Provocateurs," so ran the New York Times story by Jim Rutenberg and Campbell Roberston January 31. "Silent Coup" is the headline of David Price's piece in Counterpunch. Connecting the two is Raw Story's "Landrieu Phone Plot: Men Arrested have Links to Intelligence Community." Whatever the truth, and however this story pans out, thank god for independent media. Thanks to inquisitive independent media, the dots are out there just crying to be linked up. The F Word is a regular commentary by Laura Flanders, the host of GRITtv which broadcasts weekdays on satellite TV (Dish Network Ch. 9415 Free Speech TV) on cable, and online at GRITtv.org and TheNation.com. Follow GRITtv or GRITlaura on Twitter.com.
GRITtv: Feb. 1, 2010
We've all seen the headlines about record bonuses on Wall Street just a year after record bailouts with taxpayer dollars. And we all know that the rest of the country is hardly feeling the recovery. But even right here in New York City, recovery hasn't yet trickled down, and inequality is just getting worse. To discuss real economic recovery for New York's working class (and the people in urban centers around the country) we invite Mark Winston Griffith, executive director at the Drum Major Institute and 2009 candidate for New York City Council, Matt Ryan, campaign director with Jobs With Justice New York, and Jonathan Hicks, former reporter with the New York Times and senior fellow at the DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy. Bill Clinton, explaining the U.S.'s hand in Haiti's crumbled infrastructure. Queen Elizabeth, apologizing for colonialism. Has the world turned upside down? No, it's the Yes Men, putting some words in the mouths of world leaders that we'd like to see. Rev. James Forbes took part in sit-ins at Woolworth's lunch counters in his youth, and in his new book, Whose Gospel?: A Concise Guide to Progressive Protestantism, he shares his prescription for a way to build progressive communities through spiritual support and understanding one another's worldview. The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission will allow unprecedented corporate money to influence United States elections -- essentially giving corporations free speech rights. Free Speech for People is calling for a movement to amend the constitution to keep corporate money out of our election process, and in this video they ask people whether corporations should be given the same rights as they have. Finally, as a result of policies around the tar sands in Alberta, the Royal Bank of Canada has been deemed the World's Most Environmentally Irresponsible company. This video from the Rainforest Action Network explains why.
GRITtv: Imagining Radical Change with David Harvey & Alexander Cockburn
The word "Change" has been used so much lately that it often seems almost meaningless. What's change really? Is it having Barack Obama in the White House, talking about withdrawing from Iraq, a stimulus bill that spends some federal dollars on infrastructure? David Harvey, author of "A Brief History of Neoliberalism," and Alexander Cockburn, author of "End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate," don't think small when it comes to change. They aren't afraid to think about significant, even radical changes to the social order we've grown so used to, whether it's requiring full employment, reimagining urban living or repudiating credit-card debt and abolishing Wall Street speculation. Cockburn and Harvey joined Laura for an event at CUNY's Center for Place, Culture & Politics, and we bring you part of that discussion today.
