Category: CounterSpin

December 29, 2023

Best of CounterSpin 2023
CounterSpin231229.mp3

Janine Jackson

Every week, CounterSpin tries to bring you a look “behind the headlines” of the mainstream news. Not because headlines are false, necessarily, but because the full story is rarely reflected there—the voices, the communities and ideas that are not front and center in the discourse of the powerful, but could help us move toward a more equitable, peaceful, healthy communal life. Many—most—conversations we need to have, have to happen around corporate news media, while deconstructing and re-imagining the discourse that they’re pumping out day after day.

Guests featured in this special “best of” episode include:
- Paul Hudson, president of FlyersRights, on air travel chaos;
- Kamau Franklin, founder of Community Movement Builders, on Atlanta’s Cop City;
- Eric Thurm, campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, on artificial intelligence;
- Emily Sanders, editorial lead at the Center for Climate Integrity, on oil company lies;
- Kehsi Iman Wilson, chief operating officer of New Disabled South, on the Americans With Disabilities Act;
- Rodrigo Camarena, director of Justicia Lab, on wage theft;
- Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines group, on Covid-19 price-gouging.
CounterSpin is thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. They help us see the world more clearly, as well as the role we can play in changing it. This is just a small selection of some of them.

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December 22, 2023

Wadie Said on the New McCarthyism

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Middle East Eye (12/14/23)

This week on CounterSpin: People in the US, the story goes, value few things more than individual freedom and money. So you’d think the way an individual uses their money would be sacrosanct. It’s a sign of where we’re at that there are currently congressional efforts to put people in prison, fine them millions of dollars, for choosing not to buy products from countries that are not declared “official enemies” by, well, presumably whoever’s in the White House at the moment. The anti-boycott measure the House Foreign Affairs Committee is pushing may never see daylight, of course, but it indicates a willingness by some in elected office to use state power to silence and sanction anyone using their voice in dissent of official actions—in this one case, lest it be confused, of people critical of Israel’s ongoing mass murder and displacement of Palestinians.

The work to shut down opposition to the siege of Gaza, and US facilitation of it, is reminding Americans of what it means when powerful institutions, including in the media, combine a decidedly selective understanding of free expression with a vehement desire to enforce it.

We talked about that with Wadie Said, professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, and author of the book Crimes of Terror: The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions, from Oxford University Press.

CounterSpin231222Said.mp3

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December 15, 2023

Richard Wiles & Matthew Cunningham-Cook on Climate Disruption Filtered Through Corporate Media

      CounterSpin231215.mp3

New York Times (12/13/23)

This week on CounterSpin: UN Climate talks have ended with an agreement that, most importantly—New York Times headlines would suggest—”Strikes Deal to Transition Away From Fossil Fuels.” Headlines, all that many people read, are often misleading, and sometimes they aggressively deflect from the point of the story, which in this case is that everyone who wasn’t a polluting corporate entity came away from COP28 angry, worried and frustrated at the way that fossil fuel companies have been able to endanger everyone with their actions, but also hornswoggle their way into media debate such that we’re all supposed to consider how to balance the life of humanity on the planet with the profit margins of a handful of billionaires.

Corporate news media have a lot to answer for here, in terms of public understanding of climate disruption, what needs to happen, why isn’t it happening? Few things call more for an open public conversation about how to best protect all of us. Why can’t we have it? Well, mystery solved: The entities that are to blame for the problem have their hands in the means we would use to debate and conceivably address it.

Put simply: We cannot have a public conversation about how fossil fuels cause climate disruption within a corporate media moneyed by fossil fuel companies. We know that, and they know that, which is why one of the biggest outputs of polluting corporations is PR—is management of our understanding of what’s going on.

CounterSpin discussed fossil fuel corporations’ brazen lie factory almost precisely a year ago with Richard Wiles, director of the Center for Climate Integrity. We hear some of that conversation again this week.

      CounterSpin231215Wiles.mp3

Also: When you talk about climate, a lot of folks go in their head to a picture of clouds, butterflies and wolves. Climate policy is about money and profit and the meaninglessness of all those beautiful vistas you might imagine—at least, that’s how many politicians think of it. We addressed that with Matthew Cunningham-Cook from the Lever in August of this year. And we hear some of that this week as well.

      CounterSpin231215Cunningham-Cook.mp3

Climate disruption reality as filtrated through corporate media, this week on CounterSpin.

Featured image: Extinction Rebellion climate protest. Photo: VladimirMorozov/AKXmedia

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December 8, 2023

Sonya Meyerson-Knox on Jewish Voice for Peace

      CounterSpin231208.mp3

(CC image: Jewish Voice for Peace)

This week on CounterSpin: As we record on December 7, the news from Gaza continues horrific: The Washington Post is reporting, citing Gaza Health Ministry reports, that Israel’s continued assault throughout the region has killed at least 350 people in the past 24 hours, which brings the death toll of the Israeli military campaign, launched after the October 7 attack by Hamas that killed a reported 1,200 people, to more than 17,000.

In this country, Columbia University has suspended two student groups protesting in support of Palestinian human rights and human beings, though the official message couldn’t specify which policies, exactly, had been violated.

There are many important and terrible things happening in the world right now—from fossil fuel companies working to undo any democratic restraints on their ability to profit from planetary destruction; to drugmakers who’ve devastated the lives of millions using the legal system to say money, actually, can substitute for accountability; to an upcoming election that is almost too much to think about, and the Beltway press corps acting like it’s just another day.

But the devastation of Gaza and the vehement efforts to silence anyone who wants to challenge it—and the failure of those efforts, as people nevertheless keep speaking up, keep protesting—is the story for today.

Sonya Meyerson-Knox is communications director of Jewish Voice for Peace. We talk with her this week on CounterSpin.

      CounterSpin231208Meyerson-Knox.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of climate change.

      CounterSpin231208Banter.mp3

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December 1, 2023

Melissa Gira Grant on Abortion Rights & Politics

      CounterSpin231201.mp3

AP (11/19/23)

This week on CounterSpin: “Abortion Politics Reveal Concerns” was the headline one paper gave a recent Associated Press story, language so bland it almost discourages reading the piece, which reports how right-wing politicians and anti-abortion activists are seeking to undermine or undo democratic processes when those processes accurately reflect the public desire to protect reproductive rights. Methods include “challenging election results, refusing to bring state laws into line with voter-backed changes, moving to strip state courts of their power to consider abortion-related laws, and challenging the citizen-led ballot initiative process itself.”

So there is a way to cover abortion access as a political issue without reducing it to one. But too many outlets seem to have trouble shaking the framing of abortion as a “controversy,” or as posing problems for this or that politician, rather than presenting it as a matter of basic human rights that majorities in this country have long supported, and centering in their coverage the people who are being affected by its creeping criminalization.

Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at the New Republic, and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work and of the forthcoming A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race and the Limits of Justice in America. She’s been reporting on abortion for years, and joins us this week to talk about it.

      CounterSpin231201Grant.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of marriage and ideology.

      CounterSpin231201banter.mp3

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November 24, 2023

Mark Weisbrot on Argentina’s Javier Milei

      CounterSpin231124.mp3

Washington Post (11/19/23)

This week on CounterSpin: The new president of Argentina opposes abortion rights, casts doubt on the death toll of the country’s military dictatorship, would like it to be easier to access handguns and calls climate change a “lie of socialism.” Many were worried about what Javier Milei would bring, but, the Washington Post explained: “Anger won over fear. For many Argentines, the bigger risk was more of the same.”

But if you want to dig down into the roots of that “same,” the economic and historic conditions that drove that deep dissatisfaction, US news media will be less helpful to you there. Milei is not a landslide popular president, and thoughtful, critical information and conversation could help clarify peoples’ problems and their sources, such that voters—in Argentina and elsewhere—might not be left to believe that the only way forward is a man wielding a literal chainsaw.

We’ll learn about Javier Milei and what led to his election from Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the book Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy.

      CounterSpin231124Weisbrot.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at FAIR’s recent study on the Sunday shows’ Gaza guests.

      CounterSpin231124Banter.mp3

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November 17, 2023

‘You Cannot Preach on Human Rights When You Are Not Doing Enough at Home’ – CounterSpin interview with Jamil Dakwar on the US and human rights

Janine Jackson interviewed the ACLU’s Jamil Dakwar about human rights and the United States for the November 10, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin231110Dakwar.mp3

Janine Jackson: As US officials and pundits appear to consider which babies are really civilians and which interpretation of law allows for their murder, you can almost imagine them thinking that the world is watching, waiting to learn: What do these smart people think about geopolitics? What will they decide?”

When certainly, what a huge number of people are thinking, around the world and in this country, is: Where do they get off? What allows so many US professional talking–type people, in 2023, to imagine that they are the city on the hill?

The belief in US exceptionalism—the idea that this country alone can and should serve as international arbiter, not because of a massive military and a readiness to use it, but because of the impenetrable moral high ground earned by a commitment to democratic principles—well, that belief is price of admission to the “serious people” foreign policy conversations in the US press.

ACLU

So something like the recent report from the UN Human Rights Committee, that assesses the US the same way it would assess any other country on human rights issues, lands in corporate US news media like a message from Mars.

Joining us now with a differing context is Jamil Dakwar, director of the Human Rights Program at the ACLU. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jamil Dakwar.

Jamil Dakwar: Thank you for having me on.

JJ: This assessment from the UN Human Rights Committee can be read as particularly meaningful at the moment, as the United States asserts, both openly and covertly, its power in the Middle East. But the report is about

many things, both international and here in the United States. I know that people are not going to see a lot—if any—of media coverage on this report. So what is the report, and then what’s in it that we should acknowledge?

JD: The report that was released last Friday, November 3, is the result or outcome of a review that happened last month, on the 17 and 18 of October, by the UN Human Rights Committee. This is a committee of independent experts, of about 18 members, that come from different parts of the world, and they are in charge of monitoring the implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

This treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights—or the ICCPR, as it’s commonly referred to—was one of the first international human rights treaties that the United States ratified in the early 1990s, right after the end of the Cold War, when the United States was showing that, look, we are, as you said, we are the city on the hill. We are the beacon of freedom of democracy and human rights for all other countries, and we are going to be committed to these things by signing on and ratifying this treaty.

The ratification of the ICCPR, 12/11/1978. UN Audiovisual Library of International Law.

However, that was 30 years ago, and we have this report, which was issued by the independent experts of the UN Human Rights Committee, based on reviewing the United States Periodic Report that was submitted in 2021, that essentially concluded that the US has so much more work to do. It has fallen behind, and it’s actually an outlier in many areas when it comes to civil and political rights, and particularly with regard to marginalized communities.

This is a really damning report. This is a report that—a review happens every eight or nine years. The last time this happened was in 2014, during the Obama administration. The United States’ report itself, to the committee, was submitted in the last five days of the Trump administration, and the Biden administration showed up before the committee.

Although they attempted to show some of the work and some of the important steps that they took in order to address some of the backsliding on human rights that happened in the last eight years, the committee was not convinced. And in specific terms, it went one by one, and in the report, which I hope you can post it also on your website, is a very long document that covers a massive amount of issues, from Indigenous rights to reproductive rights, to voting rights, to issues related to free speech and assembly rights, use of force. The criminal legal system was also analyzed in the report, looking at specific extreme sentences and punishment, like death by incarceration, for example, and many, many other issues that, really, it’s hard to enumerate in just a short interview.

But the bottom line is, this was another wake-up call for the United States, that you really cannot claim the moral high ground. You cannot preach to other countries on human rights when you are not doing enough here at home in your own backyard.

And I think civil society organizations that participated in the review—and we had over 140 of them from the United States, all the way from the colonial territories of Guam to Puerto Rico, to Alaska, Hawaii, to different parts of the United States—and the civil society organizations have made it clear that they are not going to accept the same talking points or the same formulations that government officials from the State Department, from the White House, from the Justice Department have put forward to the committee.

They are inadequate. More needs to be done. And that’s something that I think was echoed by the recommendations that were made in the report of the Human Rights Committee.

JJ: I do think that a lot of folks will actually find it jarring to hear the term “human rights” applied in a US domestic context. Human rights is something that other countries have violations of, and the idea of looking at missing and murdered Indigenous girls, at the death penalty, at asylum policy, at solitary confinement, looking at those as human rights issues, I think is just difficult for many people.

And I don’t want it to get lost; there is a call to action. There are calls to action suggested by the report. So what are they saying should actually happen right now?

JD: First, the committee said, we are not happy and we’re not satisfied with the way that the United States has been implementing—or rather, failing to implement—the treaty at the state, local and federal level. So they first expressed that concern, and they also said that we don’t accept the reservations that the United States has entered when the US ratified it.

But more importantly, they said the United States doesn’t have a human rights infrastructure to implement international human rights obligations. And they called, as a matter of a priority, to establish a national human rights institution—which many countries around the world, including the closest US Western allies, have—where this body would be in charge of implementing and monitoring and helping the United States uphold its international human rights obligations and commitments at the federal, state and local level.

We don’t have such a body. In fact, we don’t have any monitoring body which relates to human rights, and therefore this was one of the first and, I think, a prominent recommendation that is in the report.

The committee also made significant detailed recommendations, going through the list from, as you said, Indigenous rights issues related to sacred sites and tribal lands, or land where there was not adequate consultations with Indigenous communities—and asked them to uphold the principle of free prior and informed consent, which is a universal principle accepted by many countries around the world when it comes to intrusion and violating the rights of Indigenous peoples, particularly in the extraction and development industry.

The other area that was very prominent was in the area of gender equality and reproductive rights, where the committee also noted and called for significant changes in the way that the United States government is upholding its international human rights obligations with relation to protecting women’s right to choose and women’s right to their own body, to domestic violence, and the fact that this is an endemic that has really reached the highest proportion.

ACLU (Photo by Bryan Olin Dozier/NurPhoto via AP)

It also addressed the issue of migration and rights of immigrants, including in immigration detention facilities, the fact that many people are losing their right to seek asylum, something that we’ve seen deteriorating even under the Biden administration.

It called on the United States to look at the impact of the climate crisis on human rights in the United States, something that usually is not looked at as a matter of human rights, rather as a matter of environmental rights, or only as a matter of a climate crisis separate from human rights.

It also called on the US to address voting rights as a really urgent issue, where we know, and the committee noted, the gerrymandering and redistricting that was happening around the country, the suppression of voter rights, particularly of minority and marginalized communities.

So all of those are in the report. They are calling on the United States within three years to submit a progress report on what [steps] will be taken in order to address issues of immigration, reproductive rights and voting rights. And then, in eight years, the US will be up for another review.

Of course, the US shouldn’t be waiting for eight years to start working on its own record. I think that’s where our role as civil society organizations, to hold our government accountable, to make sure that they are doing what they should do, what they should have done yesterday or years ago and in an urgent manner.

Jamil Dakwar: “There is an organized, orchestrated attack to delegitimize the human rights movement in different ways… The lack of concerted effort to do human rights education in the United States is clear.” (image: Witness to Guantanamo)

Because it’s really impacted not only people in the United States. Some of the policies impact millions of people who reside outside the United States, particularly with regard to US massive surveillance policies. The impact of the United States’ policies of foreign assistance, as we know, impacts the rights of people who live outside the United States, including people who are still held at places like Guantánamo Bay, where the committee expressed deep concern that the Guantánamo Bay detention facility is still open and the kangaroo courts of military commissions are still hearing accusations and capital charges against some of the individuals held there.

So the call for action is clear. I think now it’s up to the US government at all levels to take that seriously, and I think for us as civil society organizations and the media to hold the government accountable as to the progress that should be made in the next few years, in terms of where the US will find itself. Is it going to really live up to this self-defined title of a global leader on human rights and champion of universal human rights? Or it’s going to continue to be only talk, and no action that will follow.

JJ: I just did want to add, finally, that just because corporate news media deal in crudeness doesn’t mean that people aren’t capable of holding ambiguity, of both seeing that their government has undeserved power and also caring about the way that that power is deployed.

And I guess one of the things I’m maddest about is the way that corporate media conflate what they call “US interests” with those of the American people. And I know that people are deeper than that, are smarter than that. And so media are not just underserving us, but erasing many of us, and the complexity and the depth of understanding that we’re capable of having when it comes to the US role in the world.

JD: Absolutely. I think that is an important distinction to be made. And I think that based on polling, most people in the United States understand the importance of human rights, actually understand also the importance of the role of international human rights bodies, including the bodies like the UN Human Rights Committee and the role of the United Nations.

And yet there is an organized, orchestrated attack to delegitimize the human rights movement in different ways. The lack of any concerted effort to do human rights education in the United States is clear, and there’s the whole movement to do censorship in the classroom, to block the ability of students to learn about history such as slavery or genocide of Indigenous peoples, or about the rights of the LGBTQ community, and so on.

Human Rights Watch

So there’s a serious organized, ideologically driven movement against any progress that this country has made over the years, and I think that there is a responsibility for all people in this country to take that seriously, meaning to push back against those efforts.

And I think the UN human rights bodies really can do much in order to really flag the concerns and the urgency and the disparities and the gaps between international human rights norms and standards and US policies and practices. And it’s really up to the people to organize and to do what they need to do in order to hold their government officials accountable.

And there is some work happening at the state and local level. When we were in Geneva last month, we had the head of the Missouri Human Rights Commission, Alisa Warren, who is also the president of IAOHRA, the International Association of Official Human Rights Agencies, that is coordinating the work of state and local human rights commissions. These agencies told the US government, “You should support us, you should provide incentives and guide us and help us do this work on the state and local level.”

And so there’s so much energy, there’s so much out there that needs to be done, and I think there’s only a hope that there should be the right political capital spent on this, rather than spent on other issues, or distorting the ideals of human rights and the notion that these really start at the very local community level.

And if we don’t do that now, it will be too late, because this is going to impact the way our future generation of people living in this country will be having a much worse situation, in terms of their ability to enjoy all of their human rights, not just civil and political rights, as this particular treaty was on, but also social, economic, cultural rights, which are the other part where the United States is falling behind in recognizing and respecting as a matter of constitutional framework, as a matter of law, as a matter of decent treatment of all human beings.

JJ: Thank you very much. We’ve been speaking with Jamil Dakwar. He’s director of the Human Rights Program at the ACLU. Thank you again, Jamil Dakwar, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JD: Thank you for this opportunity.

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November 17, 2023

Scott Burris on US v. Rahimi

      CounterSpin231117.mp3

Time (11/6/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Coverage of what is quite possibly not the most recent mass shooting, as we record the show, but the recent one in Lewiston, Maine, leaned heavily on a narrative of the assailant as a “textbook case” of a shooter, because he had some history of mental illness. FAIR’s Olivia Riggio wrote about how that storyline not only gets the relationship wrong—mental illness is not a predictor of gun violence, except in terms of suicide, but also underserves and even endangers those with mental illness, with at least one presidential candidate calling for a return to involuntary commitment. What isn’t served is the public conversation around reducing gun violence.

The Supreme Court has just heard the case US v. Rahimi, which is specifically about whether those under domestic violence restraining orders should have access to guns. Most media did better than Time magazine’s thumbnail of Rahimi as pitting “the safety of domestic violence victims against the nation’s broad Second Amendment rights”—because, as our guest explains, Rahimi is much more about whether this Court’s conservative majority will be able to use their special brand of backwards-looking to determine this country’s future.

Scott Burris is a professor at Temple Law School and the School of Public Health, and he directs Temple’s Center for Public Health Law Research. We hear from him this week on the case.

      CounterSpin231117Burris.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Gaza crisis, and at McCarthyism.

      CounterSpin231117Banter.mp3

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November 10, 2023

Jamil Dakwar on US & Human Rights, Matt Gertz on Mike Johnson

      CounterSpin231110.mp3

Truthout (11/9/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media use at least a couple of largely unexplored lenses through which to present US human rights violations. One is: The US does not commit human rights violations, except by accident, or as unavoidable collateral for an ultimately net-gain mission, be that international or domestic.

The other is: They aren’t violations if the US does them, because we’re in a civilization war, a fight of good over evil, so all battles are holy, and you can’t commit human rights violations against non-humans, after all, so where’s the problem? Again, the narrative covers global and at-home violations.

Elite media have trouble navigating the place of the US in a global context, and the media-consuming public suffers as a result. There’s a new report from the UN about this country and human rights. We’ll hear about it from Jamil Dakwar, director of the Human Rights Program at the ACLU.

      CounterSpin231110Dakwar.mp3

House Speaker Mike Johnson (CC photo: Gage Skidmore)

Also on the show: Headlines tell us that the US public don’t know a lot about Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House of Representatives. That’s true as far as it goes, but isn’t it also a kind of admission of failure for a press corps that really should be actively involved in informing us about the person third in line for the presidency—like maybe his idea that some of the people he’s nominally representing should just burn in Hell?

Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, will give us some things to consider as we see coverage of Mike Johnson unfold.

      CounterSpin231110Gertz.mp3

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October 27, 2023

Peter Maybarduk on Paxlovid, Maya Schenwar on Grassroots Journalism

      CounterSpin231027.mp3

Paxlovid tablets

This week on CounterSpin: Advertising critics have long noted that a company’s PR tells you, inadvertently but reliably, exactly what their problems are. The ad features salmon splashing in crystalline waters? That company is for sure a massive polluter.

That’s the lump of salt with which to take the recent announcement from the US Department of Health and Human Services that their new deal with Pfizer “extends patient access” to Covid treatment drug Paxlovid and “maximizes taxpayer investment”—as the HHS works with the drug company to “transition” Paxlovid “to the commercial market.” The announcement doesn’t note that this “transition” entails hiking the cost of the treatment to more than $1,300 for a five-day course, or 100 times the cost of production.

We discuss this outrage, and what allows it, with Peter Maybarduk, director of the Access to Medicines group at Public Citizen.

      CounterSpin231027Maybarduk.mp3

(image: Truthout)

Also on the show: CounterSpin listeners, more than many, recognize news media as a keystone issue—important not simply in their own right but to all of the other issues we care about. The media lens—the points of view that they show us day after day, those they obscure or ridicule—affects the way we understand the world, our neighbors and what’s politically possible. That’s why we see the fight for a thriving media ecosystem as bound up completely with the fights for social, racial, economic and environmental justice. We talked about that nexus with Maya Schenwar, author and editor at large of Truthout, and director of a new project, the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism.

      CounterSpin231027Schenwar.mp3

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October 20, 2023

Christopher Bosso on Food Assistance, Barbara Briggs on Workplace Disasters

      CounterSpin231020.mp3

(USDA, 1939)

This week on CounterSpin: Government-supplied food assistance has been around in various forms since at least the Great Depression, but never with the straightforward goal of easing hunger. 1930s posters about food stamps declare, “We are helping the farmers of America move surplus foods”; that link between agriculture industry support and nutrition assistance continues to this day—which partly explains why the primary food aid program, SNAP, while the constant target of the anti-poor, racist, drown-government-in-the-bathtub crowd, keeps on keeping on. We talk with Christopher Bosso, professor of public policy and politics at Northeastern University, the author of a new book on that history, called Why SNAP Works: A Political History—and Defense—of the Food Stamp Program.

      CounterSpin231020Bosso.mp3

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 1911

Also on the show: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, in which 146 mainly immigrant women and girls died, many leaping from windows to escape the flames, horrified New Yorkers and galvanized the workers’ rights movement. The October 11 unveiling of a monument to those who didn’t just die, but were killed that day, put many in mind of how much still needs to change before we can think of things like Triangle Shirtwaist as relics of a crueler past.

In 2015, CounterSpin spoke with Barbara Briggs of the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights about Rana Plaza, the 2013 catastrophe that killed more than a thousand workers in Bangladesh, in circumstances that in some ways echoed those of 102 years earlier. We’ll hear that interview again today.

Transcript: ‘Workers Are the Best Guarantors of Their Own Safety When They’re Organized’

      CounterSpin231020Briggs.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Net Neutrality.

      CounterSpin231020Banter.mp3

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October 13, 2023

Phyllis Bennis on Gaza

      CounterSpin231013.mp3

BBC (10/11/23)

This week on CounterSpin: In the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas and the ensuing bombing campaign from Israel on the Gaza Strip, many people were surprised that CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria aired an interview with a Palestinian activist who frankly described the daily human rights violations in Gaza, the right of Palestinians to resist occupation and apartheid, and how any tools of resistance they choose are deemed violent and punishable. Such statements aren’t controversial from an international law or human rights perspective, but they stand out a mile in elite US media suffused with assumptions listeners will know: Palestinians attack, Israel responds; periods of “calm” are when only Palestinians are dying; stone-throwing is terrorism, but cutting off water is not.

“War is not the time for context” still seems to be the mantra for many in the US press. But there is, around the edges, growing acknowledgement of the dead end this represents: showing hour after hour of shocking and heart-wrenching imagery, in a way that suggests violence is the only response to violence—when so many people are looking for another way forward.

We’ll talk with Phyllis Bennis from the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

      CounterSpin231013.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Saudi Arabia, Nicaragua, US political division and the Federal Reserve.

      CounterSpin231013.mp3

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October 6, 2023

Rodrigo Camarena on Wage Theft

      CounterSpin231006.mp3

This week on CounterSpin: The LA Times’ Michael Hiltzik is one of vanishingly few national reporters to suggest that if media care about crime, if they care about people having things stolen from them—maybe they could care less about toasters and more about lives? As in, the billions of dollars that are snatched from working people’s pockets every payday by companies, in the form of wage theft—paying less than legal wages, not paying for overtime, stealing tips, denying breaks, demanding people work off the clock before and after shifts, and defining workers as “independent contractors” to deny them benefits. Home Depot just settled a class action lawsuit for $72.5 million, while their CEO went on Fox Business to talk about how shoplifting means we’re becoming a “lawless society.”

There is legislative pushback; New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has added wage theft to the legal definition of larceny, allowing for stronger prosecutions. But such efforts face headwind from corporate media telling us to be mad about the rando taking toilet paper from the Walgreens, but not the executive who’s skimming your paycheck every two weeks. Not to be too poetic, but corporate thieves don’t need masks as long as corporate media provide them.

We talk about wage theft with Rodrigo Camarena. He’s the director of the immigrant justice group Justicia Lab, and co-author, with Cristobal Gutierrez of Make the Road New York, of the article “How to End Wage Theft—and Advance Immigrant Justice” that appeared earlier this month on NonProfitQuarterly.org. He is co-creator of Reclamo!, a tech-enabled initiative to combat wage theft.

      CounterSpin231006Camarena.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of climate protests.

      CounterSpin231006Banter.mp3

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September 29, 2023

Stephen Zunes on Menendez Indictment

      CounterSpin230929.mp3

New York Times (9/27/23)

This week on CounterSpin: You can’t say elite US news media aren’t on the story of the federal indictment of Robert Menendez, Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But articles like the New York Times’ “As Menendez’s Star Rose, Fears of Corruption Cast a Persistent Shadow” represent media embrace of the “great man of history” theme: The story is mostly about the political fortunes of an individual; the huge numbers of less powerful people impacted by those compromised decisions are, at best, backdrop.

When they try to tighten it into a “takeaway,” it can get weirder still: That Times piece’s headline included the idea that “the New Jersey Democrat broke barriers for Latinos. But prosecutors circled for decades before charging him with an explosive new bribery plot.”

Come again?

If elite media’s takeaway from the Menendez indictment is that some people over-favor their friends and like gold bars—that’s a storyline that leads nowhere, calls nothing into question beyond the individual actors themselves. Is that the coverage we need? What does it even have to do with foreign policy?

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco. His most recent book, co-authored with Jacob Mundy, is Western Sahara: War, Nationalism and Conflict Irresolution, out now in a revised, updated edition from Syracuse University Press.

We talk with him about what’s at stake in the Menendez indictment beyond Menendez’s “political fortunes.”

      CounterSpin230929Zunes.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the FCC and the 1973 Chilean coup.

      CounterSpin230929Banter.mp3

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This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
September 8, 2023

Amanda Yee on Korean Travel Ban, Hyun Lee on Korea History

      CounterSpin230908.mp3

Liberation (9/3/23)

This week on CounterSpin: The White House has announced it’s extending the ban on people using US passports to go to North Korea. Corporate media seem to find it of little interest; who wants to go to North Korea? Which fairly reflects media’s disinterest in the tens of thousands of Korean Americans who might want to visit family in North Korea, along with their overarching, active disinterest in telling the story of the Korean peninsula in anything other than static, cartoonish terms—North Korea is a murderous dictatorship; South Korea is a client state, lucky for our support—terms that conveniently sidestep the US’s historic and ongoing role in the crisis.

Amanda Yee is a writer and organizer, and an editor of Liberation News. We’ll talk with her about the role the travel ban plays in a bigger picture.

      CounterSpin230908Yee.mp3

We reference hidden history in that conversation. CounterSpin got some deeper understanding on that a couple years back from Hyun Lee, US national organizer for Women Cross DMZ, part of the coalition Korea Peace Now!. We’ll hear a little from that today as well.

      CounterSpin230908Lee.mp3

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This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
September 1, 2023

Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro on Education

      CounterSpin230901.mp3

(CC photo: Paul Hart)

This week on CounterSpin: It is back to school week in the US. Schools—pre-K to college—have been on the front burner for at least a year now, but education has always been a contested field in this country: Who has access? What does it teach? What is its purpose? Do my kids have to go to school with those kids? So while what’s happening right now is new, it has roots. And it does no disservice to the battles of the current day to connect them to previous battles and conversations, and that’s what we’re going to do this week on the show.

We hear from three of the many education experts that have been our pleasure to speak with: Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro.

      CounterSpin230901Kohn.mp3

      CounterSpin230901Ravitch.mp3

      CounterSpin230901Kumashiro.mp3

The post Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro on Education appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
August 25, 2023

Kehsi Iman Wilson on Americans with Disability Act

      CounterSpin230825.mp3

(image: New Disabled South)

This week on CounterSpin: “We’ve come a long way but there’s a long way to go” is a familiar, facile framing that robs urgency from fights for justice. It’s the frame that tends to dominate annual journalistic acknowledgement of the Americans with Disabilities Act, passed 33 years ago in late July.

Like Black history month, the ADA anniversary is a peg—an opportunity for journalists to offer information and insight on issues they might not have felt there was space for throughout the year. As depressing as that is, media coverage of the date often doesn’t even rise to the occasion. You wouldn’t guess from elite media’s afterthought approach that some 1 in 4 people in this country have some type of disability, or that it’s one group that any of us could join at any moment.

Likewise, you might not understand that the ADA didn’t call for curb cuts at every corner, but for an end to “persistent discrimination in such critical areas as: employment, housing, public accommodations, education, transportation, communication, recreation, institutionalization, health services, voting and access to public services.” Nothing less than the maximal integration of disabled people into community and political life—you know, like people.

And if that’s the story, it’s clear that it demands all kinds of attention, every day—not a once a year pat on the back about “how far we’ve come.”

We talk about some of all of that with Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder and chief operating officer of New Disabled South.

      CounterSpin230825Wilson.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Maui fires and the climate crisis.

      CounterSpin230825Banter.mp3

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This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
August 18, 2023

Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Torture Lawsuit, Thomas Germain on Online History Destruction

      CounterSpin230818.mp3

Victim of US torture at Abu Ghraib, 2003

This week on CounterSpin: For corporate news media, every mention of the Iraq War is a chance to fuzz up or rewrite history a little more. This year, the New York Times honored the war’s anniversary with a friendly piece about how George W. Bush “doesn’t second guess himself on Iraq,” despite pesky people mentioning things like the torture of innocent prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.

Federal Judge Leonie Brinkema has just refused to dismiss a long standing case brought against Abu Ghraib torturers for hire, the company known as CACI. Unlike elite media’s misty memories, the case is a real-world, stubborn indication that what happened happened and those responsible have yet to be called to account. We can call the case, abstractly, “anti-torture” or “anti-war machine,” as though it were a litmus test on those things; but we can’t forget that it’s pro–Suhail al-Shimari, pro–Salah al-Ejaili,   pro– all the other human beings horrifically abused in that prison in our name. We get an update on the still-ongoing case—despite some 18 attempts to dismiss it—from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

      CounterSpin230818Azmy.mp3

Gizmodo (8/9/23)

Also on the show: The internet? Am i right? Thomas Germain is senior reporter at Gizmodo; he fills us in on some new developments in the online world most of us, like it or not, live in and rely on. Developments to do with ads, ads and still more ads, and also with the disappearing and potential disappearing of decades of archived information and reporting.

      CounterSpin230818Germain.mp3

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August 11, 2023

Shankar Narayan on Facial Misrecognition, Braxton Brewington on Student Debt Abolition

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New York Times (8/6/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Why was Detroit mother Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, arrested and held 11 hours by police accusing her of robbery and carjacking? Because Woodruff was identified as a suspect based on facial recognition technology. The Wayne County prosecutor still contends that Woodruff’s charges—dismissed a month later—were “appropriate based upon the facts.” Those “facts” increasingly involve the use of technology that has been proven wrong; the New York Times report on Woodruff helpfully links to articles like “Another Arrest and Jail Time, Due to a Bad Facial Recognition Match,” and “Wrongfully Accused by an Algorithm.” And it’s especially wrong when it comes to—get ready to be surprised—Black people.

Facial recognition has been deemed harmful, in principle and in practice, for years now. We talked in February 2019 with Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU of Washington state. We hear that conversation this week.

Transcript: ‘Face Surveillance Is a Uniquely Dangerous Technology’

      CounterSpin230811Narayan.mp3

Newsweek (8/7/23)

Also on the show: Listeners may know a federal court has at least for now blocked Biden administration efforts to forgive the debt of student borrowers whose colleges lied to them or suddenly disappeared. The White House seems to be looking for ways to ease student loan debt more broadly, but not really presenting an unapologetic, coherent picture of why, and what the impacts would be. We talked about that with Braxton Brewington of the Debt Collective in March 2022. We’ll revisit that conversation today as well.

Transcript: ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’

      CounterSpin230811Brewington.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trumpism.

The post Shankar Narayan on Facial Misrecognition, Braxton Brewington on Student Debt Abolition appeared first on FAIR.
August 4, 2023

Teddy Ostrow on UPS/Teamsters Agreement, Matthew Cunningham-Cook on GOP Climate Sabotage

      CounterSpin230804.mp3

Washington Post (7/25/23)

This week on CounterSpin: As contract negotiations went on between UPS and the Teamsters, against a backdrop of a country ever more reliant on package deliveries and the people who deliver them, the New York Times offered readers a lesson in almost-but-not-quite subtext, with a piece that included the priceless line: “By earning solid profits with a largely unionized workforce, UPS has proved that opposing unions isn’t the only path to financial success.” The tentative agreement that both the union and the company are calling a “win win win” presents a bit of a block for elite media, so deeply accustomed to calling any union action a harm, and any company acknowledgment of workers’ value a concession.

Teddy Ostrow will bring us up to speed on Teamsters and UPS. He reports on labor and economic issues, and is host and lead producer of the podcast the Upsurge.

      CounterSpin230804Ostrow.mp3

Lever (7/25/23)

Also on the show: Despite how it may feel, there’s no need for competition: You can be terribly worried about the devastating, galloping effects of climate disruption, and also be terribly confused and disturbed by the stubborn unwillingness of elected officials to react appropriately in the face of it. What are the obstacles between the global public’s dire needs, articulated wants, desperate demands—and the actual actions of so-called leaders supposedly positioned to represent and enforce those needs, wants and demands? Wouldn’t a free press in a democratic society be the place where we would see that conflict explained?

Independent media have always tried to step into the space abandoned by corporate media; the job only gets more critical. Matthew Cunningham-Cook covers a range of issues for the Lever, which has the piece we’ll be talking about: “The GOP Is Quietly Adding Climate Denial to Government Spending Bills.”

      CounterSpin230804Cunningham-Cook.mp3

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This post was originally published on FAIR.
July 28, 2023

Melissa Crow on Asylum Restrictions, Dave Zirin on NYT’s Vanishing Sports Section

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Houston Chronicle (7/11/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Listeners may have heard that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott installed barrels wrapped in razor wire in some parts of the Rio Grande to block migrants from crossing and harm those that try. As revealed by the Houston Chronicle, Texas troopers have been ordered to push people back into the river, and to deny them water. The cruelty is obvious; the Department of Justice is talking about suing.

But there are other ways for immigration policy to be inhumane. Advocates have long declared that Biden’s asylum restrictions (which look a lot like Trump’s asylum restrictions) are not just harmful but unlawful. And a federal judge has just agreed. We learn about that from a participant in the case, Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies.

      CounterSpin230728Crow.mp3

New York Times (10/23/17)

Also on the show: In October 2017, the New York Times ran a story headlined “Why the Athletic Wants to Pillage Newspapers,” that began, “By the time you finish reading this article, the upstart sports news outlet called the Athletic probably will have hired another well-known sportswriter from your local newspaper.” In January 2022, the Times bought the Athletic for $550 million, saying that “as a stand-alone product…the Athletic is a great complement to the Times.”

It’s now July 2023, and the New York Times has announced it’s shutting down its sports desk, outsourcing that reporting to…the Athletic. Dave Zirin joins us to talk about that; he’s sports editor at The Nation, host of the Edge of Sports podcast, and author of many books, including A People’s History of Sports in the United States.

      CounterSpin230728Zirin.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Europe’s economy.

      CounterSpin230728Banter.mp3

The post Melissa Crow on Asylum Restrictions, Dave Zirin on NYT’s Vanishing Sports Section appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
July 21, 2023

Kevin Minofu on Say Her Name

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(Haymarket Books, 2023)

This week on CounterSpin: If corporate news media didn’t matter, we wouldn’t talk about them. But elite, moneyed outlets do, of course, direct public attention to some issues and not to others, and suggest the possibility of some social responses, but not others. It’s that context that the African American Policy Forum hopes folks will bring to their new book, based on years of research, called Say Her Name: Black Women’s Stories of Police Violence and Public Silence. It’s not, of course, about excluding Black men and boys from public conversation about police violence, but about the value of adding Black women to our understanding of the phenomenon—as a way to help make our response more meaningful and impactful. If, along the way, we highlight that ignoring the specific, intersectional meaning that policies and practices have for women who are also Black—well, that would improve journalism too. We’ll talk about Say Her Name with one of the key workers on that ongoing project, Kevin Minofu, senior research and writing fellow at African American Policy Forum.

      CounterSpin230721Minofu.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of campaign town halls.

      CounterSpin230721Banter.mp3

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This post was originally published on FAIR.
July 14, 2023

Arlene Martínez on Corporate Subsidies, Florín Nájera-Uresti on Journalism Preservation

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Good Jobs First (7/6/23)

This week on CounterSpin: Media talk about “the economy” as though it were an abstraction, somehow clinically removed from daily life, instead of being ingrained & entwined in every minute of it. So white supremacy and economic policy are completely different stories for the press, but not for the people. Our guest’s recent work names a simple, obvious way development incentives exacerbate racialized inequality: by transferring wealth from the public to companies led by white male executives. Arlene Martínez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First, which has issued a trenchant new report.

      CounterSpin230714Martinez.mp3

Free Press

Also on the show: CounterSpin listeners are well aware of the gutting of state and local journalism, connected to the corporate takeover of newspapers and their sell-off to venture—or, as some would say it, vulture—capitalists. Florín Nájera-Uresti is California campaign organizer for the advocacy group Free Press Action. We talk to her about better and worse ways to meet local news media needs.

      CounterSpin230714Najera-Uresti.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Israel/Palestine and cluster bombs.

The post Arlene Martínez on Corporate Subsidies, Florín Nájera-Uresti on Journalism Preservation appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
July 7, 2023

Emily Sanders on How Not to Interview an Oil CEO, Kaufman & Bozuwa on Fighting Climate Disrupters

      CounterSpin230707.mp3

Common Dreams (7/5/23)

This week on CounterSpin: The Earth recorded its hottest day ever July 3, with an average global temperature of 17.01°C. The record was broken the next day, with 17.18°C. Common Dreams‘ Jake Johnson (7/5/23) collected international responses, including a British scientist calling it a “death sentence for people and ecosystems”; and reported (7/5/23) IMF estimates that world governments dished out nearly $6 trillion in fossil fuel subsidies in 2020, and those giveaways are expected to grow. At Truthout (7/3/23), Victoria Law wrote about extreme heat’s impact on the incarcerated, including people in their 30s dropping dead in prisons with inadequate cooling systems. One source described his cell: “No air gets in and no air escapes.”

Public Citizen (6/16/23) points to House Appropriations Republicans, larding spending bills with “poison pill” riders that fuel the crisis and block alternatives. And a database from the new climate group F Minus reveals how many state lobbyists hired by environmental groups also lobby for fossil fuel companies, entrenching those influence peddlers in state capitols with a veneer of respectability, even as public opinion of fossil fuels plummets.

Orange skies burning over many parts of the US may not be the rockets’ red glare, but they’re signs of war nonetheless. The battle is less well understood as a fight between humans and climate change, as one between those who want to forcefully mitigate disastrous impacts and those who want them to continue, for the simple reason that it’s making them rich. There is no way to fight climate disruption without fighting climate disrupters—this week on the show.

Emily Sanders watched appalled as CNN‘s Andrew Ross Sorkin (6/26/23) “interviewed” Chevron’s Mike Wirth recently, leading her to write “How (Not) to Interview an Oil CEO” for ExxonKnews (6/29/23). She’s editorial lead at the Center for Climate Integrity; we’ll ask her about that.

      CounterSpin230707Sanders.mp3

And: When media illustrate pushback against the fossil fuel industry, it generally looks like activists with signs; but there are myriad points of resistance, at different levels of community, offering multiple ways forward—but all of them in the same direction. In 2021, HuffPost reporter Alexander Kaufman discussed attempts of local representatives to have a say in building codes, and industry’s reaction. Democracy Collaborative‘s Johanna Bozuwa joined us during 2019’s California wildfires and power outages, to explain the potential role of public utilities in the climate crisis.

      CounterSpin230707Kaufman&Bozuwa.mp3

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This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
June 30, 2023

Taryn Abbassian and Others on Dobbs One Year Later

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(CC photo: Ted Eytan )

This week on CounterSpin: The US public’s belief in and support for the Supreme Court has plummeted with the appointment of hyper-partisan justices whose unwillingness to answer basic questions, or answer them respectfully, would make them unqualified to work at many a Wendy’s, and the obviously outcome-determinative nature of their jurisprudence. Key to that drop in public support was last year’s Dobbs ruling, overturning something Americans overwhelmingly support and had come to see as a fundamental right—that of people to make their own decisions about when or whether to carry a pregnancy or to have a child. The impacts of that ruling are still reverberating, as is the organized pushback that we can learn about and support. We hear from Taryn Abbassian, associate research director at NARAL.

CounterSpin230630Abbassian.mp3

Also on the show: Meaningful, lasting response to Dobbs requires more than “vote blue no matter who,” but actually understanding and addressing the differences and disparities of abortion rights and access before Dobbs, which requires an expansive understanding of reproductive justice. CounterSpin has listened many times over the years to advocates and authors working on this issue. We hear a little this week from FAIR’s Julie Hollar; from Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of the group URGE: Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equity; and from URGE’s policy director, Preston Mitchum.

The post Taryn Abbassian and Others on Dobbs One Year Later appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
June 29, 2023

‘The One Part of Our Retirement Income System That Works Is Social Security’ – CounterSpin interview with Nancy Altman on GOP’s Social Security assault

Janine Jackson interviewed Social Security Works’ Nancy Altman about the latest Republican attack on Social Security, for the June 23, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230623Altman.mp3

New York Times (1/27/88)

Janine Jackson: A piece for FAIR cited a New York Times article describing the federal budget deficit as

overwhelmingly a consequence of American military outlay and entitlement programs such as Social Security, together with the nation’s unwillingness to pay the taxes needed to finance the expenditures.

Here’s the thing: That scaremongering about the runaway cost and unmanageability of Social Security, the like of which you may have heard very recently, is how I introduced our next guest in 2018.

And here’s the other thing: The New York Times article cited in that piece, which was written for FAIR by veteran Times reporter John Hess, came out in 1988.

It isn’t just that corporate news media get things wrong about Social Security, it’s that they stubbornly get the same things wrong–maybe most importantly, presenting it as a contentious issue in this year’s budget battles, when in fact the fight over Social Security is an ideological one, with many on one side and few on the other, that’s been going on since the program began.

The budget blueprint released by the House Republican Study Committee last week provides a new opportunity to trot out misinformation, and a new chance to combat it.

Strong Arm Press (2018)

We’re joined now by Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works and author of, among other titles, The Truth About Social Security: The Founder’s Words Refute Revisionist History, Zombie Lies, and Common Misunderstandings. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Nancy Altman.

Nancy Altman: Thank you so much, and what you just said, in your intro, is a zombie lie, is that Social Security is adding even a penny to the deficit. So I’m so glad we’re going to have this conversation.

JJ: Let’s start right there. I keep reading, “set to be insolvent in 2033,” right? As though Social Security is a building on fire.

So let’s leap right into those myths, because I know that some folks are going to say: “Oh, so you’re saying there’s no problem. You’re saying that Social Security doesn’t require any support.”

There’s so much misunderstanding about what the questions actually are, and then how we might respond to them. So have at it.

NA: I think you’re exactly right to talk about it: Is this a building on fire, or is it, down the road, you have to put your children through college, so you got to think about putting aside some money for their college education?

I think it’s much closer to the latter than the former. It’s not that nothing should be done. In fact, I think the program should be expanded. I think we’re facing a retirement income crisis, and the solution is expanding Social Security.

But just to put a few of the myths to rest–and you’re exactly right, the problem is that the media keeps misreporting this over and over again.

I smiled when you talked about the 1980s, because I started working on this program in the mid-1970s. I was involved with the so-called Greenspan Commission in 1982. At that time, I was told, oh, there’s a crisis, we can’t afford this program, and all these greedy old people. And you– I was young at the time–you’re not going to get your benefits.

Well, all that happened was I aged, and now my children and grandchildren are being told they’re not going to get their benefits because I’m greedy. And all that is is the passage of time.

So here are the facts. Social Security is a defined-benefit pension plan that provides life insurance, disability insurance and retirement annuities. And it does so extremely efficiently. It spends less than a penny of every dollar it spends on administration. More than 99 cents is returned in benefits. It’s extremely efficient.

It also is extremely responsibly managed. Every year, there are about 40 actuaries of the Social Security Administration. And just like any private insurance company, they are looking at longevity and birth rates and wage growth and all kinds of factors to make sure that Social Security can always pay its benefits.

Nancy Altman: “The opponents of Social Security have latched onto this unsurprising, manageable shortfall, and talked about the building’s on fire.”

It doesn’t just project out 10 years or 20 years, but for three quarters of a century, 75 years. And whenever you project out so far, sometimes you’re going to show unintended surpluses. Sometimes you’re going to have unintended shortfalls.

And what the actuaries have been telling us is that there is a shortfall, quite manageable. It’s now about a decade away. So we’ve got plenty of time to bring in additional revenue.

If Congress were to do nothing, Social Security could still pay 75% of promised benefits, 75 cents on the dollar.

But of course, we want it to pay 100%, because these are earned benefits. And there are many proposals, including many in Congress, that restore Social Security to long-range balance.

But the opponents of Social Security have latched onto this unsurprising, manageable shortfall, and talked about the building’s on fire. And they’ve been talking this way since the program began, really.

JJ: And that’s what I want to get at, because it’s so funny the way that the proffered solution always turns out to be cuts, and yet that’s being presented as saving the program. There’s a perversity there that says, we need to burn the village to save it.

NA: Exactly. If Congress doesn’t act, there may be some cuts in the future. So let’s make the cuts now. It’s really like, wait, what? I thought we were trying to prevent the cuts.

I call it a solution in search of a problem. The solution is, we’ve got to cut benefits. But, people will say, everybody’s living longer. We’ve got to cut benefits by raising the retirement age.

And I’ll point out, well, certain people are in physically demanding jobs, certain minorities, they’re not living longer. In fact, their life expectancies are going down.

Oh well, then, we’ve got to cut benefits cause it’s unfair to them. It’s like, wait, what?

And really, what is behind this is that, from the beginning, there’s been people who have opposed Social Security. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, in a private letter to his brother, which you can find online, said that they are a tiny splinter group, their numbers are negligible, but they are stupid, he says.

They tend to be the very wealthy, who think they can just self-insure and don’t want to pay any money towards the common good. Now, they used to be quite honest, and they’d call Social Security “socialism.” The problem is that the American people appreciate what Social Security provides. And so they always lost.

Then, starting somewhere in the ’70s, their tactics changed, unless they all disappeared, and it’s hard to believe that happened; they say, “No, we love Social Security, but we can’t afford it.” And they make it a point about affordability.

Let me put the affordability question in context. Social Security currently costs about 5% of gross domestic product. At the end of this century, year 2100, it’s going to cost about 6% of gross domestic product. That’s what we’re fighting about, this 1% increase in gross domestic product.

Now, when the Covid epidemic hit, we spent more than 1% on all the ways to combat that. After the 9/11 attacks, we spent more than 1% on increasing military spending.

And, in fact, if you even just look at the Baby Boom, and these costs are because the Baby Boom is moving into its retirement years, and there was a baby bust following up and so forth, that when the Baby Boomers hit kindergarten, we spent more than 1% of GDP on increased classrooms and hiring teachers and so forth.

And those three, the Covid, the 9/11 and even Baby Boomers entering kindergarten, were surprises to policy makers. This was not a surprise.

JJ: We’re hearing how we can’t afford this and we can’t afford that. And you have to ask, cui bono, because certainly even in this Republican Study Committee plan, not everyone is tightening their belt. Not everyone is rallying around and suffering together. There are some folks who are spared from what we’re being told is meant to be a shared social cost.

Common Dreams (6/15/23)

NA: And in fact, not even are they spared, they’re benefiting. The same Republican Study Committee budget, which calls for increasing the retirement age, slashing middle-class benefits, privatizing Medicare, transforming it into a premium support, which is just giving people a coupon and telling them to go out on the market–at the same time that they’re really hitting the middle class and working class, they’re giving tax cuts to billionaires. That makes no sense.

If you look at how people did during the worst part of the Covid pandemic, so many people lost income, lost jobs, lost their lives, but the billionaires increased their wealth substantially.

So there’s no question that there are ways and there are proposals out there that are not undue burdens to anyone. They require the very wealthiest, those earning millions and billions of dollars, to pay what I would consider their fair share, and at the same time expand benefits.

But what the Republican Study Committee, which makes up about 70% of the House Republicans, and what Republicans in the Senate also are calling for, is exactly what you’re saying: belt tightening for those who are middle class and working class, and big gifts to those who are the wealthiest.

And that makes absolutely no sense, and is not what the American people want. So there’s a real debate going on, but one side, 80% of the American people favor, which is no cuts and let’s expand and make the wealthy pay more.

And the other side, which is, let’s go behind closed doors and cut benefits, but not have our fingerprints on them. That’s what makes the debate so hard, because it’s got to be transparent for everyone to see.

JJ: I want to point out one thing, that you have also indicated, because media and many people often shorthand Social Security with “benefits for seniors” or “programs for the elderly.” And I just want us to tip the fact that Social Security deeply impacts the lives of many disabled people as well, and they’re often erased in media debates. But certainly if this budget were to go forward, disabled people would really feel the brunt.

NA: First of all, I’m so glad you raised that, because Social Security is also the nation’s largest children’s program; because of the survivor benefits and the family benefits, more children benefit from Social Security. The benefits are by no means generous, but they are extremely important when a breadwinner dies or becomes so disabled that they can no longer work.

And you’re exactly right that disability insurance is an extremely important part of the program. And the Republican Study Committee really goes after the disability insurance part, makes it harder to get benefits, makes it harder to keep getting those benefits. It is really hostile to that group. So I’m so glad you raised that.

And the point is that Social Security, one of the many reasons I think it’s so popular, it really embodies basic American values. And it is this idea of, we’re united, we all contribute. The idea is that it’s insurance against the loss of wages. You don’t get benefits unless there’s a work record. But if you’re 30 years old and you walk out in the street and get hit by a truck, God forbid, and can no longer work again, you get benefits for the remainder of your life.

If you have young children and instead of just becoming disabled, you are killed, your children will get benefits until age 18. Now they used to get them until 22, and many of us think that should be restored, or even higher. Normally parents will help their children finance their college educations, but if the parent is gone, though, then the rest of us step in.

So you’re exactly right that this is a program that benefits all of us, and even indirectly–many children receive benefits directly, but they also often live in families where they’re living with their grandparent, their grandparents, getting Social Security. It really is a family program, and I think that’s part of the reason it’s so well-supported.

New Press (2021)

JJ: Just finally, and briefly, “Social Security Works” is the name of the group. It’s the title of the book you co-authored with Eric Kingson. And I really like that verb there: It works. It works to do, as you’re just saying, real things for real people.

And it’s countering this idea that you get every time you pick up the paper, which is that it’s broken, that Social Security is broken or failing or struggling.

And I know it’s just words, but it seems so crucial, because in news media, Social Security is a problem, but actually Social Security is a program that works that we just need to keep working.

NA: Exactly. And in fact, I consider it even more than that. I consider it a solution. Private pensions have largely, in the private sector, disappeared. 401Ks have proven inadequate for most people, other than the very wealthy.

The one part of our retirement income system that does work is Social Security. It’s the most universal. It’s portable from job to job. It’s very fair in its distribution. It’s extremely efficient. Its one shortcoming is that its benefits are too low, which is why we need to expand it.

But you’re exactly right. There’s an elite media view that is very hard to shake. As you say, you could go back decades, and you’ll see the same articles. Somehow, it’s a problem, it’s a drain, it’s unaffordable, it’s this, it’s that. When, actually, it’s extremely efficient. It works extremely well. Indeed, it’s a solution. We should build on it, because it works so well.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Nancy Altman from Social Security Works. They’re online at SocialSecurityWorks.org. Nancy Altman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

NA: Thank you so much for having me.

The post ‘The One Part of Our Retirement Income System That Works Is Social Security’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.
June 23, 2023

Nancy Altman on GOP Social Security Attack, Daniel Ellsberg Revisited

      CounterSpin230623.mp3

New Republic (6/14/23)

This week on CounterSpin: 70% of House Republicans belong to the Republican Study Committee, which just released a budget that calls for curtailing programs supporting racial equity and LGBTQ rights, natch—and also for increased cuts and access hurdles for Social Security and Medicare. It’s a tale as old as time, how some people want to take resources explicitly designated for seniors and disabled people and funnel them to rich people, in supposed service of “saving” those popular social programs. We’ve been asking for debunking of that storyline for years now from Nancy Altman, president of the group Social Security Works, and author of books, including The Battle for Social Security: From FDR’s Vision to Bush’s Gamble. We’ll get some more debunking this week, because when it comes to Social Security, it seems everything old will always be new again.

      CounterSpin230623Altman.mp3

Daniel Ellsberg (CC photo: Christopher Michel)

Also on the show: Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg died last week at the age of 92, and elite media did that thing they do, where they sort of honor someone they discredited in life, burnishing their own reputation as truth-tellers while still somehow dishonoring the practice of truth-telling—of the sort that afflicts the comfortable. CounterSpin spoke with Ellsberg many times over the years. We hear just some of those conversations this week on the show.

      CounterSpin230623Ellsberg.mp3

The post Nancy Altman on GOP Social Security Attack, Daniel Ellsberg Revisited appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
June 16, 2023

Sonali Kolhatkar on the Power of Narrative

      CounterSpin230616.mp3

(City Lights, 2023)

This week on CounterSpin: The stories news media tell are something different than the facts they report. The facts may say what happened where; the stories tell us who’s the hero and who’s the villain, how important the fight is, and whether we should care about the ending. It’s not always easy to discern, but it’s critical—which is why narrative has been taken up as an important tool by folks looking to change the world for the better, in part by changing the stories we tell ourselves and one another.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the host and executive producer of the daily radio and TV program Rising Up With Sonali, and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. Her new book, Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice, will be published this month by City Lights. She joins us this week on the show.

      CounterSpin230616Kolhatkar.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of work requirements.

      CounterSpin230616Banter.mp3

The post Sonali Kolhatkar on the Power of Narrative appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
June 13, 2023

‘These Bills Will Make Children Less Safe, Not More Safe’ – CounterSpin interview with Evan Greer on Kids Online Safety Act

Janine Jackson interviewed Fight for the Future’s Evan Greer about the Kids Online Safety Act for the June 9, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

CounterSpin230609Greer.mp3

Janine Jackson: Louisiana just banned abortion at six weeks, before many people even know they’re pregnant, while also saying 16-year-old girls are mature enough to marry.

PBS NewsHour (5/25/23)

Arkansas says there’s no need for employers to check the age of workers they hire. As one state legislator put it, “There’s no reason why anyone should get the government’s permission to get a job.”

And Wisconsin says 14-year-olds, sure, can serve alcohol. Iowa says they can shift loads in freezers and meat coolers.

Simultaneously and in the same country, we have a raft of legislation saying that young people should not be in charge of what they look at online. Bone saws: cool. TikTok: bad.

The way this country thinks about young people is odd, you could say. “Incoherent” would be another word.

When it comes to the online stuff, there seem to be some good intentions at work. Anyone who’s been on the internet can see how it can be manipulative and creepy. But are laws like the Kids Online Safety Act the appropriate way to address those concerns?

We’ll talk about that now with Evan Greer, director of the group Fight for the Future. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Evan Greer.

Evan Greer: Thanks so much for having me. Always happy to chat.

Cyberscoop (5/2/23)

JJ: Let’s start specifically with KOSA, with the Kids Online Safety Act, because it’s a real piece of legislation, and there are things that you and other folks are not disputing, that big tech companies do have practices that are bad for kids, and especially bad for some vulnerable kids.

But the method of addressing those concerns is the question. What would KOSA do that people may not understand, in terms of the impact on, ostensibly, those young people we’re told that they care about?

EG: Yeah, and I think it’s so important that we do start from the acknowledgement that big tech companies are doing harm to our kids, because it’s just not acceptable to pretend otherwise.

There is significant evidence to suggest that these very large corporations are engaging in business practices that are fundamentally incompatible with human rights, with democracy, but also with what we know young people, and really everyone, needs, which is access to online information and community, rather than having their data harvested and information shoved down their throat in a way that enriches companies rather than empowering young people and adults.

And so when we look at this problem, I think it is important that we start there, because there is a real problem, and the folks pushing this legislation often like to characterize those of us that oppose it as big tech shills or whatever.

It’s hard for me not to laugh at that, given that I’ve dedicated the better part of my adult life to confronting these big tech companies and their surveillance-capitalist business model, and working to dismantle it.

But I think it’s important that we say very clearly that we oppose these bills, not because we think that they are an inappropriate trade off between human rights and children’s safety. We oppose these bills because they will make children less safe, not more safe.

And it’s so important that we make that clear, because we know from history that politicians love to put in the wrapping paper of protecting children any type of legislation or regulation that they would like to advance and avoid political opposition to.

It is, of course, very difficult for any elected official to speak out against or vote against a bill called the Kids Online Safety Act, regardless of whether that bill actually makes kids safer online or not. And so what I’m here to explain a bit is why this legislation will actually make kids less safe.

It’s important to understand a few things. So one is that KOSA is not just a bill that focuses on privacy or ending the collection of children’s data. It’s a bill that gives the government control over what content platforms can recommend to which users.

Conversation (6/24/19)

And this is, again, kind of well-intentioned, trying to address a real problem, which is that because platforms like Instagram and YouTube employ this surveillance-advertising and surveillance-capitalist business model, they have a huge incentive to algorithmically recommend content in a way that’s maximized for engagement, rather than in a way that is curated or attempting to promote helpful content.

Their algorithms are designed to make them money. And so because of that, we know that platforms often algorithmically recommend all kinds of content, including content that can be incredibly harmful.

That’s the legitimate problem that this bill is trying to solve, but, unfortunately, it would actually make that problem worse.

And the way it would do that is it creates what’s called a broad duty of care that requires platforms to design their algorithmic recommendation systems in a way that has the best interest of children in mind.

And it specifies what they mean by that, in terms of tying it to specific mental health outcomes, like eating disorders or substance abuse or anxiety or depression, and basically says that platforms should not be recommending content that causes those types of disorders.

Vanity Fair (7/28/22)

Now, if you’re sticking with me, all of that sounds perfectly reasonable. Why wouldn’t we want to do that? The problem is that the bill gives the authority to determine and enforce that to state attorneys general.

And if you’ve been paying attention at all to what’s happening in the states right now, you would know that state attorneys general across the country, in red states particularly, are actively arguing, right now today, that simply encountering LGBTQ people makes kids depressed, causes them to be suicidal, gives them mental health disorders.

They are arguing that providing young people with gender-affirming care that’s medically recommended, and where there is medical consensus, is a form of child abuse.

And so while this bill sounds perfectly reasonable on its face, it utterly fails to recognize the political moment that we’re in, and rather than making kids safer, what it would do is empower the most bigoted attorneys general law enforcement officers in the country to dictate what content young people can see in their feed.

And that would lead to widespread suppression, not just of LGBTQ content, or content related to perhaps abortion and reproductive health, but really suppression of important but controversial topics across the board.

So, for example, the bill’s backers envision a world where this bill leads to less promotion of content that promotes eating disorders.

In reality, the way that this bill would work, it would just suppress all discussion of eating disorders among young people, because at scale, a platform like YouTube or Instagram is not going to be able to make a meaningful determination between, for example, a video that’s harmful in promoting eating disorders, or a video where a young person is just speaking about their experience with an eating disorder, and how they sought out help and support, and how other young people can do it too.

In practice, these platforms are simply going to use AI, as they’ve already been doing, more aggressively to filter content. That’s the only way that they could meaningfully comply with a bill like KOSA.

And what we’ll see is exactly what we saw with SESTA/FOSTA, which was the last major change to Section 230, a very similar bill that was intended to address a real problem, online sex trafficking, that actually made it harder for law enforcement to prosecute actual cases of sex trafficking while having a detrimental effect for consensual sex workers, who effectively had online spaces that they used to keep themselves safe, to screen clients, to find work in ways that were safer for them, shut down almost overnight, because of this misguided legislation that was supposed to make them safer.

Evan Greer: “This is cutting young people off from life-saving information and online community, rather than giving them what they need, which is resources, support, housing, healthcare.”

And so we’re now in a moment where we could actually see the same happen, not just for content related to sex and sexuality, but for an enormous range of incredibly important content that our young people actually need access to.

This is cutting young people off from life-saving information and online community, rather than giving them what they need, which is resources, support, housing, healthcare. Those are the types of things that we know prevent things like child exploitation.

But unfortunately, lawmakers seem more interested in trampling the First Amendment, and putting the government in charge of what content can be recommended, than in addressing those material conditions that we actually have evidence to suggest, if we could address them, would reduce the types of harms that lawmakers say they’re trying to reduce.

JJ: Thank you. And I just wanted to say, I’m getting Reefer Madness vibes, and a conflation of correlation and causality; and I see in a lot of the talk around this, people pointing to research: social media use drives mental illness.

So I just wanted ask you, briefly, there is research, but what does the research actually say or not say on these questions?

EG: It’s a great question, and there’s been some news on this fairly recently. There was a report out from the surgeon general of the United States a couple weeks ago, and it is interesting because, as you said, there is research, and what the research says is basically: It’s complicated. But unfortunately, our mainstream news outlets and politicians giving speeches don’t do very well with complicated.

CNN (5/24/23)

And so what you saw is a lot of headlines that basically said, social media is bad for kids, and the research certainly backs that up to a certain extent. There is significant and growing evidence to suggest that, again, these types of predatory design practices that companies put into place, things like autoplay, where you just play a video and then the next one plays, or infinite scroll, where you can just keep scrolling through TikToks forever and ever, and suddenly an hour has passed, and you’re like, “What am I doing with my life?”

There is significant evidence that those types of design choices do have negative mental health effects, for young people and adults, in that they can lead to addictive behaviors, to anxiety, etc.

There’s also evidence in that report, that was largely ignored by a lot of the coverage of it, that showed that for some groups of young people, including LGBTQ young people, there’s actually significant evidence to suggest that access to social media improves their mental health.

And it’s not that hard to understand why. Anyone who knows a queer or trans young person knows online spaces can provide a safe haven, can provide a place to access community or resources or information, especially for young people who perhaps have unsupportive family members, or live in an area where they don’t have access to in-person community in a safe way. This can be a lifeline.

And so, again, there is research out there, and it is important that we build our regulatory and legislative responses on top of actual evidence, rather than conjecture and hyperbole.

But, again, I think what’s important here is that we embrace the both/and, and recognize that this is not about saying social media is totally fine as it is, and leave these companies alone, and we can all live in a cyber-libertarian paradise.

That’s not the world we’re living in. These companies are big, they are greedy, they are engaging in business practices that are doing harm, and they should be regulated.

But what we need to focus on is regulating the surveillance-capitalist business model that’s at the root of their harm, rather than attempting to regulate the speech of young people, suppress their ability to express themselves, and take away life-saving resources that they need in order to thrive and succeed in this deeply unjust and messed-up world that we are handing to them.

JJ: All right then. We’ve been speaking with Evan Greer. She’s director of Fight for the Future. They’re online at FightForTheFuture.org. Evan Greer, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

EG: Anytime. Thanks for having me.

The post ‘These Bills Will Make Children Less Safe, Not More Safe’ appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
June 9, 2023

Tauhid Chappell on Cannabis Justice, Evan Greer on Kids Online Safety Act

      CounterSpin230609.mp3

(image: PCBA)

This week on CounterSpin: This country has a long history of weaponizing drug laws against Black and brown communities. Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, ran an anti-marijuana crusade in the 1930s, saying, “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” Concerns are justified about what the legalization, and profitizing, of marijuana means for the people and communities most harmed by its criminalization. We hear about that from Tauhid Chappell, founder of the Philadelphia CannaBusiness Association and project manager for Free Press’s News Voices project.

      CounterSpin230609Chappell.mp3

(CC photo: Janine Jackson)

Also on the show: Lots of people are concerned about what’s called the “digital well-being” of children—their safety and privacy online. So why did more than 90 human rights and LGBTQ groups sign a letter opposing the “Kids Online Safety Act”? Evan Greer is director of the group Fight for the Future. She tells us what’s going on there.

      CounterSpin230609Greer.mp3

The post Tauhid Chappell on Cannabis Justice, Evan Greer on Kids Online Safety Act appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.