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Category: CounterSpin

  • Dorothy A. Brown and Amy Hanauer on Tax Unfairness

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    (cc photo: John Morgan)

    This week on CounterSpin: Taxes, the concept of taxation, does a lot of work in US public discourse, though the role is not consistent: When reporting on a wished-for social good, like universal healthcare or improved infrastructure, the “cost to taxpayers” is presented as central; “raising taxes” is a synonym for increasing hardship on working people, and unironically offered as the reason those same people can’t have nice things, like healthcare and infrastructure. At the same time, but on a different page, we read that corporations like Zoom, Amazon and Netflix are super-successful, exemplary—what magic do they have to earn themselves such fortune?—and, oh yeah, they pay zero or near zero federal tax on their profits, but that’s complicated, and sort of clever? And anyway legal, so whaddya gonna do? Except, remember that you can’t have nice things because: taxes.

    We’ll talk today with two people who, while recognizing that it’s not the sole source of inequality, have thoughts about what we can do about blatant, enduring and powerful unfairness in US tax policy.

    Dorothy A. Brown teaches tax policy as Asa Griggs Candler professor of law at Emory University School of Law. She’s author of the new book, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans—and How We Can Fix It.

          CounterSpin210416Brown.mp3

    Amy Hanauer is executive director at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and Citizens for Tax Justice. They’ve been tracking corporate tax avoidance and its societal impact for decades.

          CounterSpin210416Hanauer.mp3

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at rewriting the history of the January 6 coup attempt.

          CounterSpin210416Banter.mp3

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    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Peter Maybarduk on Global Vaccination, Jane Chung on Big Tech Lobbying

     

    Vaccination (image: NIAID)

    (image: NIAID)

    This week on CounterSpin: Between two and a half and three million people have died from Covid-19. That’s just what is reported. And we know the toll is so much greater, beyond even the more than 128 million people who have been infected by the virus, many with long-lasting and poorly understood repercussions.

    That’s why a year after the WHO declared coronavirus a pandemic, protests demanding global access to vaccines were held around the world. At this point, media could ask how the global economy can recover if only parts of the globe are vaccinated…. But what if they went deeper and wondered: If we don’t learn from this pandemic that none of us can be healthy unless all of us are healthy, how many chances will we get? We’ll talk about global vaccination and what’s in the way of it with Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program.

          CounterSpin210402Maybarduk.mp3

     

    Blocks representing tech companiesAlso on the show: There are more congressional hearings for Big Tech companies coming up—about their role in spreading misinformation about Covid along with, you know, racism and violent insurrection and stuff. We’ll see the congressional debate, assuming there is one, play out in the press. What we won’t necessarily see is how Big Tech companies are furiously working—by which I mean spending—behind the scenes to tilt things in their favor. We’ll talk about that part with Jane Chung, Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen and author of a new report on the subject.

          CounterSpin210402Chung.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at past coverage of police murder trials.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Peter Maybarduk on Global Vaccination, Jane Chung on Big Tech Lobbying

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    (image: NIAID)

    This week on CounterSpin: Between two and a half and three million people have died from Covid-19. That’s just what is reported. And we know the toll is so much greater, beyond even the more than 128 million people who have been infected by the virus, many with long-lasting and poorly understood repercussions.

    That’s why a year after the WHO declared coronavirus a pandemic, protests demanding global access to vaccines were held around the world. At this point, media could ask how the global economy can recover if only parts of the globe are vaccinated…. But what if they went deeper and wondered: If we don’t learn from this pandemic that none of us can be healthy unless all of us are healthy, how many chances will we get? We’ll talk about global vaccination and what’s in the way of it with Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program.

          CounterSpin210402Maybarduk.mp3

    Blocks representing tech companiesAlso on the show: There are more congressional hearings for Big Tech companies coming up—about their role in spreading misinformation about Covid along with, you know, racism and violent insurrection and stuff. We’ll see the congressional debate, assuming there is one, play out in the press. What we won’t necessarily see is how Big Tech companies are furiously working—by which I mean spending—behind the scenes to tilt things in their favor. We’ll talk about that part with Jane Chung, Big Tech accountability advocate at Public Citizen and author of a new report on the subject.

          CounterSpin210402Chung.mp3

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at past coverage of police murder trials.

    Related Posts

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Igor Volsky on Ending Gun Violence, Robert Dreyfuss on Iraq War

     

          CounterSpin210326Guestname.mp3
    WaPo: How the NRA hijacked history

    Washington Post (9/9/19)

     

    This week on CounterSpin: If you look, you can find reminders that the Second Amendment was forged, distressingly, with the aim of preserving “slave patrol” militias in the South. And that courts consistently interpreted it as meaning a “collective” right of the states; only after a concerted, well-heeled effort was it read as ensuring an “individual” right to ownership of all kinds of guns—which means that when media lazily point to “Second Amendment rights,” they’re tacitly endorsing a particular interpretation. That the history around gun policy is a living history is important, because when US news media move from reporting terrible incidents to hosting debate on policy responses, they can slide into an enervating picture of this country’s unparalleled gun violence as lamentable, but legal, so what are you gonna do? They may as well reprint the Onion headline from years ago: “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

    On this as on a number of issues, many are simply fed up with the idea that change is too hard. Will media conversation shift to keep up with them? We’ll talk with Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America, and author of Guns Down: How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer Future With Fewer Guns.

          CounterSpin210326Volsky.mp3

     

    (CNN/Media Education Foundation)

    Also on the show: We’ve just marked the 18th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, and US corporate media could not care less. Iraqis still suffer from decades of war, sanctions, displacement and disease, but so far out of US of media’s range has the country fallen that, when Biden bombed Syria on February 25, it was reported as “Biden’s First Military Action,” even though the US carried out an airstrike in Iraq just days into office. Part of the reason media are comfortable putting the Iraq War in the rear view is that they’re comfortable in the story they’ve settled on, that it was all a tragic mistake. But lies don’t become truth on repetition. We’ll hear a bit of an early 2004 conversation with journalist Robert Dreyfuss just to remind us of that.

          CounterSpin210326Dreyfuss.mp3

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Ernesto Falcon on Internet for All, Alexander Kaufman on Future-Proofed Housing Codes

    Girl using laptopThis week on CounterSpin: Reporters covering the pandemic can’t help but note the impact of the digital divide: How do you work from home, or do remote learning, or even register for a vaccine, without not just available, but affordable high-speed internet? Yet a major congressional effort to end that divide is, so far, generating little interest from big media. It’s almost as if the corporate press accepted the existence of information haves and have-nots, because that’s how goods get divided in this country—even if it doesn’t make technological, economic or humanitarian sense. We’ll hear about the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act (AAIA) from Ernesto Falcon, senior legislative counsel at Electronic Frontier Foundation.

          CounterSpin210319Falcon.mp3

    House threatened by extreme weatherAlso on the show: As with the country’s communication networks, there’s an obvious social win, and cost efficiency, in adapting buildings to climate realities—making them not just energy efficient (right now, they generate about 40% of greenhouse gases), but “future-proofed” against predictable and predicted weather events. Many cities think so, and they were working on building codes to reflect that—until industry groups, including home builders and the American Gas Association, said not so fast. We’ll get this very important but still under the radar story from Alexander Kaufman, who’s been on it. He covers climate change, energy and environmental policy as a senior reporter at HuffPost.

          CounterSpin210319Kaufman.mp3

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the Atlanta hate-crime shootings.

          CounterSpin210319Banter.mp3

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Ari Berman on the Attack on Voting Rights

     

    USA Today: Fight voter suppression laws in the states. Let's not let America regress to Jim Crow.

    USA Today (3/9/21)

    This week on CounterSpin: A March 3 New York Times story, while informative, suggests a problem: “How Georgia’s GOP Voting Laws Could Impact Black Voters” carried a subheadline that explained, “Two bills moving through the Republican-controlled Legislature would place new restrictions on voting access, in ways Democrats say would have an outsize impact on Black voters.” Except that that impact is not a partisan claim, but a demonstrable fact.

    The Washington Post had a piece by Greg Sargent using the word “alarming” to describe the GOP’s voter suppression campaign, and USA Today had one saying the country risks regression to the Jim Crow era—both were labeled “opinion.”

    Do elite media think that whether or not the US, in 2021, under pressure from racists, goes back on the whole “one person one vote” thing is a legitimate topic for debate? We need more and better—and fast—in order to push back on Republicans’ current anti-democratic campaign.

    Ari Berman has covered voting rights for many years, now as a senior reporter at Mother Jones. He’s the author of Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America. We’ll talk with him about the overt, multi-level, deeply dangerous attack on the right and the ability to vote.

          CounterSpin210312Berman.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of climate justice, Venezuelan sanctions and healthcare debt.

          CounterSpin210312Banter.mp3

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Michelle Holder on Black Women & Minimum Wage, Alice O’Connor on the War on Poverty

     

    Florida minimum wage protest

    (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

    This week on CounterSpin: It’s not clear where the fight to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour stands in Congress right now, but while politicians do what they need to do, no one’s forcing news media to drown out discussion of the economic and historical sense, the simple rightness of lifting the wage, in smaller-bore talk about current political “feasibility.” Polls show wide public support, across party lines, so it’s only elite media forcing the idea that those opposing this overdue move are “moderate.” While a federal minimum wage increase would affect millions of workers and the social fabric, it would have particular impact on one “essential” yet somehow expendable group: Black women. We’ll talk about that with economist Michelle Holder, associate professor of economics at John Jay College/City University of New York, and author of the report The Double Gap and the Bottom Line: African-American Women’s Wage Gap and Corporate Profits.

          CounterSpin210305Holder.mp3

     

    The Watts Labor Community Action Committee

    Watts Labor Community Action Committee, 1965

    Also on the show: The fact that news media can even host a debate around just how poor it’s OK to let a person be who works a full-time job in a wealthy country is a sign of the perverse nature of media’s storytelling on poverty. But media also distort the history of responses to poverty in this country, which has always included recognition that it’s about power, and not just money. We talked about some of this crucial but scarcely discussed history a few years back with Alice O’Connor, professor of History at University of California/Santa Barbara, director of UCSB’s Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality and Democracy, and author of, among other titles, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy and the Poor in 20th Century US History.  We’ll hear some of that conversation today.

          CounterSpin210305OConnor.mp3

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Mitch Jones on Texas Freeze-Outs, Joe Torres on News for All the People

     

    Texas: How Texas’ Drive for Energy Independence Set It Up for Disaster

    New York Times (2/21/21)

    This week on CounterSpin: As Texans continue to deal with impacts of a deadly combination of frigid weather and power outages, the New York Times report on the crisis allows as how “part of the responsibility for the near-collapse of the state’s electrical grid can be traced to the decision in 1999 to embark on the nation’s most extensive experiment in electrical deregulation.” There have been multiple warnings of potential problems, the Times says, “But there has not been widespread public dissatisfaction with the system, although many are now wondering if they are being well served.” It sounds a little like blaming people for not realizing they’d been sold a broken umbrella while the sun was out. If media really expect people to actively challenge the promises pushed—aggressively and constantly—by the energy industry, maybe they could do a little more challenging themselves? We’ll talk about lessons from Texas with Mitch Jones, policy director at Food & Water Watch and Food & Water Action.

          CounterSpin210226Jones.mp3
    News for All the People

    Verso Books

    Also on the show: Part of the scandal of Black History Month is that it’s a “month” at all, of course, with the implication that the contributions and experiences of Black people in this country are ancillary to the “real” history—that’s it a class you can skip and still pass the course. The further scandal is that so much of the history we learn in February is not just little-known, but hidden—entire stories of events and movements and lives that, if they were stitched routinely into our understanding of this country, would utterly reshape it. That’s true not least of media’s own history—a  problem named and responded to with the 2011 publication of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, co-authored by Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres. We spoke with Joe Torres, now senior director of strategy and engagement at the group Free Press, when the book came out. We’ll hear that conversation today.

          CounterSpin210226Torres.mp3

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at (non-)coverage of White House press conferences.

          CounterSpin2102026Banter.mp3

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Ending the Forever Wars: Phyllis Bennis on Afghanistan, Hyun Lee on Korea

    WSJL Leaving Afghanistan the Right Way

    Wall Street Journal (2/10/21)

    This week on CounterSpin: Media are soberly reporting a congressional panel’s warning against an “abrupt” or “precipitous” withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, because that might lead to “civil war” in the country. If “spinning in the grave” imagery were real, George Orwell will have screwed himself to the Earth’s core by now. The rest of us can try and puzzle out what’s behind the “more war will lead to peace” argument with Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and co-author of Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer.

          CounterSpin210212Bennis.mp3
    AP: UN experts: North Korea using cyber attacks to update nukes

    AP (2/9/21)

     

    Also on the show: “North Korea Using Cyber Attacks to Update Nukes” is the latest scary buzzword-packed headline from the region, representative of US media coverage that centers the entire story of Korea on Kim Jong Un’s potential threat to Americans—pushing aside all of the people in North and South Korea who seek an end to the militarized tension they’ve lived under for more than 70 years. We hear from Hyun Lee, US national organizer for Women Cross DMZ; they’re part of the coalition Korea Peace Now! that’s behind a new report called Path to Peace.

          CounterSpin210212Lee.mp3

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of George Shultz’s death.

          CounterSpin210212Banter.mp3

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Basav Sen on Biden Climate Policy, Hannah Sassaman on Prometheus v. FCC

     

    Illustration of fossil fuel pollution

    (image: Institute for Policy Studies)

    This week on CounterSpin: We know Biden will be better than Trump on climate policy, because a poke in the eye with a stick would be better. That media are celebrating the “inclusion of scientists throughout the government” shows how very low the bar has been set. The disasters of climate disruption have next to no relationship to what corporate media say is “feasible” to address them. That’s the starting point of a conversation we had on how to move forward with Basav Sen, director of the Climate Justice project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

          CounterSpin210205Sen.mp3
    Prometheus Radio Project

    (image: Prometheus Radio Project)

    Also on the show: You could find the news in business papers like the Wall Street Journal, industry organs like Broadband Breakfast and courtwatchers like SCOTUSblog, but a quick survey suggests that the Supreme Court case on whether media concentration means women and people of color will be forever shut out of media ownership is of no interest to major news media.  Some of the same media who find a “racial reckoning” around every corner can’t seem to connect the dots to Prometheus Radio Project vs. FCC, in which the “public interest” agency defends its efforts to undermine diversity goals. We get an update from Hannah Sassaman, former organizer with Prometheus, now policy director at Movement Alliance Project.

     

          CounterSpin210205Sassaman.mp3

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.

          CounterSpin210205Banter.mp3

     

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Basav Sen on Biden Climate Policy, Hannah Sassaman on Prometheus v. FCC

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    (image: Institute for Policy Studies)

    This week on CounterSpin: We know Biden will be better than Trump on climate policy, because a poke in the eye with a stick would be better. That media are celebrating the “inclusion of scientists throughout the government” shows how very low the bar has been set. The disasters of climate disruption have next to no relationship to what corporate media say is “feasible” to address them. That’s the starting point of a conversation we had on how to move forward with Basav Sen, director of the Climate Justice project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

          CounterSpin210205Sen.mp3
    Prometheus Radio Project

    (image: Prometheus Radio Project)

    Also on the show: You could find the news in business papers like the Wall Street Journal, industry organs like Broadband Breakfast and courtwatchers like SCOTUSblog, but a quick survey suggests that the Supreme Court case on whether media concentration means women and people of color will be forever shut out of media ownership is of no interest to major news media.  Some of the same media who find a “racial reckoning” around every corner can’t seem to connect the dots to Prometheus Radio Project vs. FCC, in which the “public interest” agency defends its efforts to undermine diversity goals. We get an update from Hannah Sassaman, former organizer with Prometheus, now policy director at Movement Alliance Project.

          CounterSpin210205Sassaman.mp3

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of Jeff Bezos and Amazon.

          CounterSpin210205Banter.mp3

    Related Posts

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Kimberly Inez McGuire on Abortion Realities, Bama Athreya on Defending Gig Workers

     

    #4EachOfUs: Pro-choice activists, 2015This week on CounterSpin: The same day’s news can include a story noting anti-abortion anger as an element in the “domestic extremism” the FBI is tracking. And one in which Joe Biden’s press secretary answers a question about the policy that denies US funding for foreign groups that perform abortions (or “counsel, refer or advocate” for abortion) by reminding reporters that Biden “attends church regularly.” And an obituary of anti-choice agitator Joseph Shiedler—a “funny,” “self-deprecating” guy, whose harassment of women at clinics the New York Times describes as “finding women who were considering abortions and persuading them not to follow through.”  Amid all that, a book review tosses off a reference to the post–World War II period as a time when ”surprise pregnancies were an obstacle to a better life,” and abortion was “taboo.” We’ll talk about actual realities of present-day abortion with Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of the group URGE: Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity.

          CounterSpin210129McGuire.mp3

    Albertsons classifying grocery workers as first respondersAlso on the show: After California’s Proposition 22 allowed app-based companies like his to skirt basic labor laws, the head of DoorDash declared the company was “looking ahead and across the country, ready to champion new benefits structures,” and they “look forward to partnering with workers, policymakers, community groups…to make this a reality.”

    A glimpse of what that partnering looks like: Albertsons grocery, after months of calling its workers “first responders,” made what execs called a “strategic decision” to fire their unionized deliverers and contract their work out to apps including, well huh, DoorDash. We’ll talk about defending workers in the digital economy with Open Society economic inequality fellow Bama Athreya, who also hosts the podcast The Gig.

          CounterSpin210129Athreya.mp3

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    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Chris Savage, Talia Buford & Peggy Case on Flint Water Crisis

     

    Water in a Flint, Michigan, hospital

    Water in a Flint, Michigan, hospital, 2015.

    This week on CounterSpin: Michigan’s attorney general has indicted nine state officials, including former Gov. Rick Snyder, the state’s former health director and two of the emergency managers of the city of Flint, for exposing at least 100,000 people to dangerous levels of lead in their drinking water, and for an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease killed at least 12 people and sickened many more.

    In an op-ed for The Hill (1/19/21), Michigan Rep. Dan Kildee called the 2014 decision to switch the source of Flint’s drinking water “one of the greatest environmental injustices in our lifetimes.” Which is true, but “the environment” didn’t do it: It’s often forgotten that Flint was a crisis of democracy—as decision-making had been taken out of the hands of Flint’s elected officials, and given to an “emergency manager” tasked with reining in costs—a  system that seems to be used disproportionately in communities of color, taking decisions out of community hands but leaving them to deal with their fallout.

    There’s been a $640 million settlement of class action lawsuits, but Michigan Radio (1/11/21) reports that some civic leaders say the deal presents inappropriate hurdles—young children might not get their settlement if they don’t undergo a specific bone lead test—and some question how money could ever compensate Flint residents for months and months of washing and bathing and cooking with bottled water, to avoid exposing themselves and their families to a neurotoxin, all while officials deflected and denied and belittled concerns.

    We talked about Flint on CounterSpin, in its particulars and in terms of how it fits into bigger questions around environmental racism, resource control and local governance. In light of the renewed attention around the story—which has not ended, even as media looked away—we revisit some of those conversations this week.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Keri Leigh Merritt on the New Lost Cause, Elisabeth Rosenthal on Troubled Vaccine Rollout

     

    CNN depiction of rioter carrying Confederate flag in the Capitol

    CNN (1/7/21)

    This week on CounterSpin: As media sift through the fallout of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, it’s important to see that the insurrectionists were not simply victims of a modern disinformation campaign, hoodwinked via social media into believing that Donald Trump got more votes in the election; they were also participating in a tradition “deeply rooted in the American experience,” as historian Eric Foner put it, that says that only some people’s votes should count—that Black political power, as exercised in Georgia, represents a threat to the “natural” societal dominance of white people, and that violence is appropriate to neutralize that threat and maintain that status quo. That resonance is why historians are shaking their heads as media talk about January 6 as “unprecedented”; while shocking and dispiriting, it has layers and layers of precedent that need to be learned and engaged, if we are ever to actually have the racial reckoning that corporate media are forever insisting we’ve already had.

    Keri Leigh Merritt is an independent historian and filmmaker, author of the book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South. Her essay, co-authored with Rhae Lynn Barnes, “A Confederate Flag at the Capitol Summons America’s Demons,” appeared on CNN.com. We talk with her about this country’s past that is never dead, or indeed even past.

          CounterSpin210115Merritt.mp3
    Bottle containing Covid-19 vaccine by Pfizer

    Kaiser Health News (12/24/20)

    Also on the show: You don’t have to choose between the assault on the electoral process by violent, disinformed white nationalists, and a disease that has killed more than 380,000 people in this country and left many it didn’t kill with lasting health problems—both are major crises. And just as many people could and did predict something like the attack on the Capitol, many could and did predict that the distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine would be marred by the Trump administration being the Trump administration, and the hollowing out of public health infrastructure. We talk about the troubled vaccine rollout with Elisabeth Rosenthal, longtime journalist, now editor in chief of Kaiser Health News.

          CounterSpin210115Rosenthal.mp3

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Dorothee Benz on January 6 Insurrection, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard on Police Responsibility

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    Military Times‘ photo of a gallows erected on Capitol Hill by pro-Trump militants. (photo: Sarah Sicard)

    This week on CounterSpin: As we recorded on January 7, the Washington Post was calling for Donald Trump’s removal from office. To which one might respond: Ya think? Media who egged on Trump’s candidacy, trivialized his venality and normalized as extreme-but-within-range his and his party’s every anti-democratic outrage, are poorly placed to take principled umbrage when that juggernaut takes the course that everyone and their mother said it would. Headlines suggesting the insurrection at the Capitol was the Trump era’s “last gasp” suggest a continued refusal to acknowledge the multiple factors that drove and abetted it, that go well beyond Trump and are going nowhere with Trump’s deposal, today or in two weeks’ time.

    Some say the deferential police treatment of rampaging white nationalists who brought their own gallows, as opposed to the abuse that routinely meets nonviolent Black and brown protestors, betrays a double standard; our guest says no, it reflects the single standard of white supremacy. We talk about coverage of the January 6 attack on the Capitol with political scientist Dorothee Benz.

          CounterSpin210108Benz.mp3”
    Washington Post image of far-right militants assaulting the Capitol

    Washington Post image of police barricades at the Capitol. assaulting the Capitol.

    And speaking of law enforcement: We’ll also hear briefly from activist/attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. They’re demanding an investigation of federal and local police planning and response to yesterday’s events.

          CounterSpin210108Verheyden-Hilliard.mp3”

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of Julian Assange’s extradition denial and Trump’s Blackwater pardons.

          CounterSpin210108Banter.mp3”

    Related Posts

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Dorothee Benz on January 6 Insurrection, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard on Police Responsibility

    Gallows erected on Capitol Hill by pro-Trump militants

    Military Times‘ photo of a gallows erected on Capitol Hill by pro-Trump militants. (photo: Sarah Sicard)

    This week on CounterSpin: As we recorded on January 7, the Washington Post was calling for Donald Trump’s removal from office. To which one might respond: Ya think? Media who egged on Trump’s candidacy, trivialized his venality and normalized as extreme-but-within-range his and his party’s every anti-democratic outrage, are poorly placed to take principled umbrage when that juggernaut takes the course that everyone and their mother said it would. Headlines suggesting the insurrection at the Capitol was the Trump era’s “last gasp” suggest a continued refusal to acknowledge the multiple factors that drove and abetted it, that go well beyond Trump and are going nowhere with Trump’s deposal, today or in two weeks’ time.

    Some say the deferential police treatment of rampaging white nationalists who brought their own gallows, as opposed to the abuse that routinely meets nonviolent Black and brown protestors, betrays a double standard; our guest says no, it reflects the single standard of white supremacy. We talk about coverage of the January 6 attack on the Capitol with political scientist Dorothee Benz.

          CounterSpin210108Benz.mp3
    Washington Post image of far-right militants assaulting the Capitol

    Washington Post image of police barricades at the Capitol. assaulting the Capitol.

    And speaking of law enforcement: We’ll also hear briefly from activist/attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. They’re demanding an investigation of federal and local police planning and response to yesterday’s events.

          CounterSpin210108Verheyden-Hilliard.mp3

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at media coverage of Julian Assange’s extradition denial and Trump’s Blackwater pardons.

          CounterSpin210108Banter.mp3

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Best of CounterSpin 2020

    PlayPlay

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    (photo: Daniel Arauz/Wikimedia)

    As we start a new year, longtime CounterSpin listeners will know, we revisit a few of our weekly looks behind the headlines. We call it “the best of,” but it’s just a reflection of the sorts of conversations we hope have offered some voice or context or information that you might not have heard elsewhere, or that might help you assess the news you are hearing. We’re thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show to help us understand the world and how we can change it.

    Related Posts

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Best of CounterSpin 2020

    Black Lives Matter protest, Marin City, California (photo: Daniel Arauz)

    (photo: Daniel Arauz/Wikimedia)

    As we start a new year, longtime CounterSpin listeners will know, we revisit a few of our weekly looks behind the headlines. We call it “the best of,” but it’s just a reflection of the sorts of conversations we hope have offered some voice or context or information that you might not have heard elsewhere, or that might help you assess the news you are hearing. We’re thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show to help us understand the world and how we can change it.

    The Best of CounterSpin 2020 includes excerpts from Janine Jackson’s conversations with Alex Lawson on Social Security, Chip Gibbons on protest, Greg Shupak on Qasem Soelimani’s assassination, Carol Anderson on voter suppression, Jim Naureckas on the pandemic, Alicia Bell on covering community, Maritiza Perez on drugs and police violence, and Ray Fuentes on the gig economy.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Lisa Gilbert on Lame Duck Trump, Dean Baker on Trickle-Down Economics

     

     

    (image: Public Citizen)

    This week on CounterSpin: Media critic Margaret Sullivan made a plea to journalists to turn off their fascination with Donald Trump when he leaves office. Acknowledging (as few do) that elite media profited off a monster they helped create, Sullivan asked outlets to just say no to setting up a Mar-a-Lago bureau, or entire beats dedicated to what Trump and his family members are up to. “And for God’s sake, stop writing about his unhinged tweets.” While we await the day that particular face and voice are no longer at the top of every newscast, it ain’t over til it’s over. And harms Trump does as a lame duck are harms nonetheless. Public Citizen is keeping an eye on these last minute maneuvers. We’ll hear from the group’s executive vice president, Lisa Gilbert.

    David Stockman

    David Stockman (photo: Atlantic)

    Also on the show: Hang on to your hats: Research says cutting super rich people’s taxes doesn’t really help middle or lower-income people, but does make rich people richer! If your hat’s unmoved, it might be because you remember the architect of so-called “trickle-down” theory, Reagan budget director David Stockman, admitting as much to journalist Bill Grieder, rather famously one would’ve thought, 40 years ago. Dean Baker from the Center for Economic and Policy Research joins us to explain why some ghosts of economic theories past don’t seem to go away.

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at false balance, stimulus advice and Time‘s person of the year.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Lisa Gilbert on Lame Duck Trump, Dean Baker on Trickle-Down Economics

     

     

    Donald Trump

    (image: Public Citizen)

    This week on CounterSpin: Media critic Margaret Sullivan made a plea to journalists to turn off their fascination with Donald Trump when he leaves office. Acknowledging (as few do) that elite media profited off a monster they helped create, Sullivan asked outlets to just say no to setting up a Mar-a-Lago bureau, or entire beats dedicated to what Trump and his family members are up to. “And for God’s sake, stop writing about his unhinged tweets.” While we await the day that particular face and voice are no longer at the top of every newscast, it ain’t over til it’s over. And harms Trump does as a lame duck are harms nonetheless. Public Citizen is keeping an eye on these last minute maneuvers. We’ll hear from the group’s executive vice president, Lisa Gilbert.

          CounterSpin201225Gilbert.mp3
    David Stockman

    David Stockman (photo: Atlantic)

    Also on the show: Hang on to your hats: Research says cutting super rich people’s taxes doesn’t really help middle or lower-income people, but does make rich people richer! If your hat’s unmoved, it might be because you remember the architect of so-called “trickle-down” theory, Reagan budget director David Stockman, admitting as much to journalist Bill Grieder, rather famously one would’ve thought, 40 years ago. Dean Baker from the Center for Economic and Policy Research joins us to explain why some ghosts of economic theories past don’t seem to go away.

          CounterSpin201225Baker.mp3

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at false balance, stimulus advice and Time‘s person of the year.

          CounterSpin201225Banter.mp3

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Jessica Martinez on Gutting Worker Protections, Mitch Stoltz on Breaking Up Big Tech

    (photo: Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images)

    This week on CounterSpin: More than 308,000 US women, men and children have died of Covid-19. That devastating toll has been borne disproportionately by Black and brown people in dangerous occupations and at the short end of an unequal healthcare system. Workers in fields, factories and hospitals, endangered by the pandemic, are now held up as pawns, as some lawmakers look to make workers’ health and safety a “tradeoff” for Covid relief. We talk about efforts to gut worker protections under the guise of economic support with Jessica Martinez, co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.

    Blocks representing tech companiesAlso on the show: Congressional hearings supposedly aimed at addressing concerns around the power of Big Tech have not been the best venue for those concerns (the fact that many congresspeople couldn’t be bothered to learn how to say Google CEO’s Sundar Pichai’s name being the merest indication). The wheels of accountability are slowly turning in tech companies’ direction: An antitrust lawsuit against Google, our guest says, won’t address every important concern, but could usher in some scrutiny on companies that have been given a pass for too long. We’ll talk with Mitch Stoltz, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Jessica Martinez on Gutting Worker Protections, Mitch Stoltz on Breaking Up Big Tech

    Amazon worker protesting lack of protection

    (photo: Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images)

    This week on CounterSpin: More than 308,000 US women, men and children have died of Covid-19. That devastating toll has been borne disproportionately by Black and brown people in dangerous occupations and at the short end of an unequal healthcare system. Workers in fields, factories and hospitals, endangered by the pandemic, are now held up as pawns, as some lawmakers look to make workers’ health and safety a “tradeoff” for Covid relief. We talk about efforts to gut worker protections under the guise of economic support with Jessica Martinez, co-executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health.

    Blocks representing tech companiesAlso on the show: Congressional hearings supposedly aimed at addressing concerns around the power of Big Tech have not been the best venue for those concerns (the fact that many congresspeople couldn’t be bothered to learn how to say Google CEO’s Sundar Pichai’s name being the merest indication). The wheels of accountability are slowly turning in tech companies’ direction: An antitrust lawsuit against Google, our guest says, won’t address every important concern, but could usher in some scrutiny on companies that have been given a pass for too long. We’ll talk with Mitch Stoltz, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

    This post was originally published on CounterSpin.

  • Kimberle Crenshaw on the Equity Gag Order

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    (image: Breitbart, 9/4/20)

    This week on CounterSpin: “This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!” Donald Trump’s disturbing September 5 tweet paired with his claim that “teaching this horrible doctrine to our children is a form of child abuse in the truest sense of those words.”

    What is the sickness, the doctrine that Trump says is “being deployed to rip apart friends, neighbors and families”? It’s Critical Race Theory, or really any of a whole group of interrelated social justice ideas, like structural racism, implicit bias or privilege—tools for talking about and addressing persistent inequities in US society.

    Trump’s September executive order on “combating race and sex stereotyping” banned any training addressing racial or gender diversity for federal employees, government contractors and the US military. The effects were immediate and chilling—not just the end of workplace diversity trainings, but academics forced to cancel lectures, research projects suspended, curricula scrubbed for fear of running afoul of what’s being called the Equity Gag Order. And yet this obviously suppressive effort has been largely shrugged off by media that ought to be sounding the alarm. Oh, McCarthyism—how can we miss you if you won’t go away?

    Resisting the effort to silence necessary conversations about racism is Kimberle Crenshaw. A pioneer in critical race theory, she’s a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law Schools, and executive director of the African American Policy Forum and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies. We talk with her about Trump’s order and the Truth Be Told campaign that’s pushing back on it, and the ideas behind it.

    MP3 Link

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of President-elect Joe Biden’s cabinet picks.

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    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Liliana Segura on Trump’s Execution Spree, Gaurav Laroia on Ajit Pai’s FCC

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    Straps for restraining death penalty target.

    (BBC/Getty Images)

    This week on CounterSpin: The lame duck White House is engaged in a virtually unprecedented spree of federal executions, eight so far this year with more scheduled. As with many aspects of his presidency, it’s both Trump being especially gruesome, and his simply making use of a gruesome machinery he certainly didn’t create. And federal executions are, of course, just a part of the picture. We’ll talk about the death penalty with  Liliana Segura, investigative journalist at the Intercept.

    MP3 Link

    Ajit Pai and friends.

    Also on the show: Between the time he made a video in which he danced with a Pizzagate propagator to celebrate the repeal of net neutrality, and the time he misled Congress about how the agency’s public comment system was cyber-attacked just at the moment that John Oliver urged viewers to leave comments supporting net neutrality, there are things about exiting FCC chair Ajit Pai, the human, to make one glad to see the back of him. We’ll talk less personally about the Pai FCC—and how they’re holding water for Trump til the end—with Gaurav Laroia, senior policy counsel at the group Free Press.

    MP3 Link

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    This post was originally published on Radio Free.