Frankly, much as I usually disagree with Cockburn these days, I agree with Max that this column is mostly on the money. Outside Jewish money DID target two black incumbents and unseat them, something liberals normally concerned about money influence should be beating the outrage drum over. And as a lefty pissed off by stupid divisive Green attacks on Wellstone from the left, I'm equally pissed off at stupid divisive attacks on McKinney and Hilliard by the Jewish pro-Israel right. So Cockburn's equivalency argument is on the money (even if he doesn't practice it himself in reverse).
And frankly on the abortion issue, I spent too much time fundraising from Planned Parenthood members on the phone not to recognize that the euthanasia strain of pro-choice politics and funding is very real. I don't agree with the "seamless garment" leftwing Catholicism of David Bonior and Dennis Kusinich, but it serves more respect on its own terms than many folks on the left give it.
-- Nathan Newman
On Wed, 21 August 2002, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> [This Counterpunch version looks pretty much identical
> to AC's column
> in this week's Nation. This is looking like a record
> low for Ace,
> with the idiotic defense of McGaa, the use of the
> rather repulsive
> phrase "outside Jewish money," the equally
repulsive
> comments on
> abortion and Malthusianism, and the patronizing remark
> addressed to
> Katha Pollitt. To conclude a column this awful with a
> swipe at Paul
> Krugman is pretty rich, since Krugman is doing far
> better work than
> Cockburn is these days.]
>
> Counterpunch - August 20, 2002
>
> Splenetic Thoughts for Dog Days
> From Cynthia McKinney to Katha Pollitt, to the ILWU
to
> Paul Krugman
>
> by Alexander Cockburn
>
> Let's start with Cynthia McKinney, who at time of
> writing is fighting
> for political survival in a too-close-to-call
> Democratic primary in
> Georgia. Don't you think that if Arab-American groups
> or
> African-American groups targeted an incumbent white
> liberal, maybe
> Jewish, congressperson, and shipped in money by the
> truckload to oust
> the incumbent, the rafters would shake with bellows of
> outrage.
>
> Yet when a torrent of money from out of state American
> Jewish
> organizations smashed Earl Hilliard, first elected
> black
> congressperson in Alabama since Reconstruction, you
> could have heard
> a mouse cough. Hilliard had made the fatal error of
> calling for some
> measure of even-handedness in the Middle East. So he
> was targeted by
> AIPAC and the others. Down he went, defeated in the
> Democratic
> primary by Artur Davis, a black lawyer who obediently
> sang for his
> supper of the topic of Israel.
>
> At that particular moment the liberal watchdogs were
> barking
> furiously in an entirely different direction. Ed
McGaa,
> a Green
> candidate, has had the effrontery to run in Minnesota
> for Wellstone's
> senate seat. Such an uproar! Howls of fury from Mark
> Cooper and
> Harold Meyerson, lashing McGaa for his presumption.
> Even a pompous
> open letter from progressive organizer Steve Cobble
> hassling the
> Minnesota Greens for endangering St Paul. Any of these
> guys think of
> writing to Artur Davis, or to Majette, telling them to
> back off, or
> to denounce them as catspaws of groups backing
Sharon's
> terror
> against Palestinians? Only Cobble.
>
> Then it was McKinney's turn. A terrific liberal black
> congresswoman.
> Like Hilliard she wasn't cowed by the Israel
> right-or-wrong lobby and
> called for real debate on the Middle East. And she
> called for a real
> examination of the lead-up to 9/11. So the sky has
> fallen in on her.
> Torrents of American Jewish money shower her opponent,
> a black woman
> judge called Majette. Buckets of sewage are poured
over
> McKinney's
> head in the Washington Post and the Atlanta
> Constitution.
>
> Here's how it worked. McKinney sees what happened to
> Hilliard, and
> that American Jewish money is pumping up Majette's
> challenge. So she
> goes to Arab-American groups to try to raise money to
> fight back.
> This allows Tom Edsall to attack her in the Post as
> being in receipt
> of money from pro-terror Muslims. Lots of nasty
looking
> Arab/Muslim
> names suddenly fill Edsall's stories.
>
> Now just suppose someone started looking at names in
> the pro-Israel
> groups funding Majette who by mid-August had raised
> twice as much
> money as McKinney. Aren't they aren't supporting and
> helping fund
> terror that has US-made F-16s machine-gunning kids in
> Gaza? What's
> the game here? It's the reiteration of the same
message
> delivered to
> politicians down the years, as when Senator Charles
> Percy went down.
> Put your head over the parapet on the topic of Israel
> and the
> Palestinians and we'll blow it off. Oh, and when
> furious blacks start
> denouncing the role of outside Jewish money in the
> onslaughts on
> Hilliard and McKinney, what then? There'll be
intricate
> articles with
> intricate exit poll calculations promoting the
> conclusion that the
> money from the Jewish groups "wasn't a
factor". Then
> there'll be an
> avalanche of hysterical columns about the ever-present
> menace of
> black anti-Semitism. Just you wait. It's a closed
> system.
>
> Footnote: Organizer Steve Cobble, did the right thing,
> fundraising
> and writing pro-McKinney material for telephone
> campaigns to get out
> McKinney voters, and urging the Jacksons, father and
> son, to campaign
> for the beleaguered Congresswoman.
>
> Next splenetic thought
>
> Yes, Katha Pollitt, you did raise a little stink in
The
> Nation re
> McKinney, in overly decorous but still commendable
> terms, which
> reminds me, here's what I wrote to a fellow angered
> over a piece by
> Ellen Johnson we'd run in CounterPunch, criticizing
you
> for saying
> Dennis Kucinich's position against abortion rendered
> him ineligible
> as the progressives' 2002-champion.
>
> "Hi Matt, I'm forwarding your note to Ellen, and
she
> may drop you a
> line, but allow me to say that I think your reaction
is
> too hasty.
> Ellen raised some very serious points about the
> monoptic way NOW and
> leading feminists address the abortion issue. I think
> it is right to
> emphasize that we should battle for social conditions
> where abortion
> ceases to be regarded by many progressives as a prime
> indicator of
> freedom and liberation for women.
>
> "Surely you cannot regard the killing of fetuses
as
> somehow, an
> intrinsically "good thing". The real
friends of
> abortion are the
> Malthusians who want to rid the world as much as
> possible of the
> "over-breeding" and disruptive poor,
particularly
> minorities. Just
> the other day in New York I listened with some
> astonishment as two
> progressive lesbians who had just had an unsuccessful
> effort with a
> turkey baster to get one partner pregnant, cheering
the
> news that
> Mayor Blumberg has instructed that New York doctors (I
> guess somehow
> those attached to the city payroll, I'm not sure of
the
> details) b e
> trained in aborting fetuses. Would you see anything
> sinister or out
> of whack about that?
>
> "More generally, I think the liberal women's
groups
> gave Clinton the
> pass on savage assaults on the poor because the
> Clintons
> unrelentingly preached commitment to abortion. In sum,
> we ran the
> piece because we think it is high time to get beyond
> bunker
> liberalism, where progressives huddle in the foxhole,
> holding onto
> "choice" as their bottom-line issue, with a
sideline in
> telling black
> teen moms that they are socially irresponsible. Best
> Alex Cockburn"
>
> More spleen
>
> The ILWU? That's the West Coast Longshoremen. Their
> contract expired
> at the end of June. The contract is being renewed on a
> daily basis .
> The employers are playing very tough, well aware that
> the Bush high
> command has told the ILWU leaders that Bush would
> invoke Taft
> Hartley, bring in troops if necessary, destroy the
ILWU
> as a
> bargaining agent for the whole West Coat. Separately
> Tom Ridge,
> calling in his capacity as chief of Homeland Security
> has done some
> heavy breathing in the ear of ILWU leaders about the
> inadvisability
> of a strike at this time.
>
> The ILWU's coastwide contract was won in the 1934
> strike, along with
> the hiring hall, which replaced the old shape-up
system
> where the
> boss could keep out organizers and anyone liable to
> cause trouble.
> These are bedrock issues for which strikers fought and
> died in 1934,
> in San Francisco and in Seattle.
>
> The west coast Longshoremen stand as a beacon of what
> union
> organizing can do. Of course the Bush White House
> yearns to destroy
> it, maybe using the War on Terror as half a pretext.
If
> ever there
> was time for solidarity, this is it.
>
> Final splenetic thought on Paul Krugman
>
> Krugman? He has just conceded that maybe neo-liberal
> policies haven't
> worked too well in Latin America. Look it up. It's in
> his column for
> August 9, "The Lost Continent". He spent
184 words on
> the matter.
> "Why hasn't reform worked as promised? That's a
> difficult and
> disturbing question."
>
> Well, gee Paul, since you constitute the entirety of
> the Democratic
> Party's opposition to the Bush administration I know
> you're as busy
> as hell. But since you and your crowd supervised a
good
> deal of the
> economic destruction of Latin America, and your
> economic faction
> offered all the basic rationales for that devastation,
> I sure hope
> you return to the problem. Maybe you won't be so
snooty
> about the
> opponents of "free trade" and all that
jazz. Maybe even
> have a quiet
> word with Friedman.