Alexander Cockburn Puns

"With hardly a backward–or forward–look, the bulk of the surviving American left has blithely joined the Democratic Party center, without the will to inflect debate, the influence to inform policy or the leverage to share power. The capitulation of the left–a necessarily catchall word, here covering the spectrum of progressive politics from old socialism to recent radical activism–is almost without precedent.

This time out there is no McCarthy of 1968, no McGovern of 1972, no Kennedy of 1980; not even a John Anderson or a Barry Commoner to raise a standard of dissent or develop an alternative vision against a Democratic Party whose project is overwhelmingly conservative in attitude and action. The excuse for submission is easy to discern: Anybody But Reagan. But the consequences are likely to be dire, and they are already taking shape. By accepting the premises and practices of party unity, the left has negated the reasons for its own existence.

..

Where does the left–the white left, that is, which refuses to concede Jackson’s validity and hardly acknowledges his existence–stand now? It has given up on class struggle, black liberation, the Third World, even détente. It can hardly remember the nuclear freeze. Its only live demand, settled last week, was the promotion of a woman as the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee: the transubstantiation of politics into symbolism."

This is one of the better articles I have found on the Opium Wars:

-Hong Kong remained under British control until 1997 because of the opium wars and the Opium trade.

-2,000 tonnes of Opium per year imported into China by 1840, 6,500 tonnes imported by 1880 +20,000 tonnes of domestic production

-Hundreds of thousands killed by British soldiers to protect the opium trade

-Starvation in India caused by opium production taking all of the farm land.

(Excerpt) For the full article click the link

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/01/the-us-opium-wars-china-burma-and-the-cia/

(....)

The opium poppy was not native to Southeast Asia but was introduced by Arab traders in the seventh century AD. The habit of opium smoking didn’t take hold till the seventeenth century, when it was spread by the Spanish and Dutch, who used opium as a treatment for malaria. The Portuguese became the first to profit from the importing of opium into China from the poppy fields in its colonies in India. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the British East India Company took over the opium monopoly and soon found it to be an irresistible source of profit. By 1772 the new British governor, Warren Hastings, was auctioning off opium-trading concessions and encouraging opium exports to China. Such exports were already generating £500,000 a year despite the strenuous objections of the Chinese imperial government. As early as 1729 the Chinese emperor Yung Cheng had issued an edict outlawing opium smoking. The sanctions for repeat offenders were stern: many had their lips slit. In 1789 the Chinese outlawed both the import and domestic cultivation of opium, and invoked the death penalty for violators. It did little good.

Inside China these prohibitions merely drove the opium trade underground, making it a target of opportunity for Chinese secret societies such as the powerful Green Circles Gang, from whose ranks Chiang Kai-shek was later to emerge. These bans did not deter the British, who continued shipping opium by the ton into the ports of Canton and Shanghai, using what was to become a well-worn rationale: “It is evident that the Chinese could not exist without the use of opium, and if we do not supply their necessary wants, foreigners will.”

Between 1800 and 1840 British opium exports to China increased from 350 tons to more than 2,000 tons a year. In 1839 the Chinese Emperor Tao Kwang se

When you hear that Biden couldn't have done what Tara alleges he did because he has otherwise been a boy scout, bear in mind that 12 years ago Alexander Cockburn reported hearing of Biden "accosting" the staffer of another Senator, not long after his wife had died in a car crash.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2008/08/23/quot-change-quot-quot-hope-quot-why-they-must-be-talking-about-joe-biden/

>Biden is a notorious flapjaw. His vanity deludes him into believing that every word that drops from his mouth is minted in the golden currency of Pericles. Vanity is the most conspicuous characteristic of US Senators en bloc , nourished by deferential acolytes and often expressed in loutish sexual advances to staffers, interns and the like. On more than one occasion CounterPunch’s editors have listened to vivid accounts by the recipient of just such advances, this staffer of another senator being accosted by Biden in the well of the senate in the weeks immediately following his first wife’s fatal car accident.

• Christopher Hitchens, 𝑇𝑕𝑒 𝐶𝑕𝑜𝑟𝑢𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝐶𝑎𝑠𝑠𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑟𝑎 (article).

Among the most cutting and eloquent sentences Hitchens ever penned.

Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press 1998 part 1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdX6HBkTYho

Part 2- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df6z6Dh0b7g

Part 3- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqULCCX-xWw

Part 4- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVI-uFWG1jk

". . .when you step out of line, of what the line of mainstream discourse for want of a better word, in the Amercian press mainstream, if you cross a certain line you get done."