Category: CounterSpin

July 30, 2021

Luke Harris on Critical Race Theory, Cindy Cohn on Pegasus Spyware

Little Rock, 1957

This week on CounterSpin: You’ve almost certainly seen the documentary photographs; they’re emblematic: African Americans trying to walk to school or sit at a drugstore soda fountain, while white people yell and spit and scream at them. Should no one see those pictures or learn those stories—because some of them have skin the same color as those doing the screaming and the spitting? The most recent attack on anti-racist education is labeled as protective, as avoiding “division,” and as a specific assessment of critical race theory. To the extent that corporate media have bought into that labeling, they’ve misinformed the public—not just about critical race theory, but about a campaign whose own architects say is about disinforming, confusing and inflaming people into resisting any actual effort to understand or respond to persistent racial inequity. Luke Charles Harris is co-founder and deputy director of the African American Policy Forum. He joins us to talk about what’s at issue.

CounterSpin210730Harris.mp3

(image: EFF)

Also on the show: Democracy & technology and digital rights groups around the world signed on to a letter in support of encryption: the ability of journalists, human rights defenders and everyone else to have private communication—to talk to one another without being spied on by governments, including their own. You’d think it’d be a big deal, but judging by US corporate media, it’s evidently a yawn. We talk about what’s going on and why it matters with Cindy Cohn, executive director at Electronic Frontier Foundation.

CounterSpin210730Cohn.mp3

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July 23, 2021

Bianca Nozaki-Nasser on Anti-Asian Bias

New York Times (6/22/21)

This week on CounterSpin: A June New York Times article about female Asian-American and Pacific Islander golfers reacting to the recent spike in anti-Asian bias began inauspiciously: “Players of Asian descent have won eight of the past 10 Women’s PGA championships, but there is nothing cookie cutter about the winners.” It reads like a TikTok challenge: “Tell me you assume your readership is white without telling me you assume your readership is white.” In other words, it’s unclear who, exactly, the New York Times believes would, without their guidance, confuse a Chinese-American player with a South Korean player with a player from Taiwan.

The piece goes on to talk about the concerns and fears of Asian-American golfers “at a time when Asians have been scapegoated in American communities for the spread of the coronavirus.” Locating the source of racist bias and violence in “American communities,” with no mention of powerful politicians or powerful media, is a neat way to sidestep the role of systemic, structural racism, and imply that bias or “hate” is an individual, emotional issue, rather than one we can and should address together, across community, as a society.

Add in media’s frequent prescription of law enforcement as the primary response, and you have what a large number of Asian Americans are calling a problem presenting itself as a solution, and not a way forward that actually makes them safer.

We’ll talk about anti-Asian bias and underexplored responses to it with Bianca Nozaki-Nasser, from the group 18 Million Rising.

CounterSpin210723Nozaki-Nasser.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of theft—retail and wholesale.

CounterSpin210723Banter.mp3

The post Bianca Nozaki-Nasser on Anti-Asian Bias appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
July 16, 2021

Chris Bernadel on Haitian Assassination, Michael Carome on FDA Alzheimer’s Investigation

Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Adm. Mike Mullen (center) with US troops in Haiti, 2010 (photo: Chad J. McNeeley/DoD)

This week on CounterSpin: There are enough storylines in the July 7 assassination of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse to make you lose sight of the big picture. The thing is: US media consumers don’t have to puzzle out if the assassins were Colombian, or if a Florida doctor bankrolled the plan, or if Moïse’s own bodyguards had it in for him and his wife. The long history of the US using state force to kill Haitians and their aspirations is sufficient and appropriate context for current events. From George Washington to Woodrow Wilson to the Clintons, there’s enough for US citizens to know about not doing harm before we chinstroke over whether “the world’s policeman” should wade in again. We talk about Haiti with Chris Bernadel from the Black Alliance for Peace.

CounterSpin210716Bernadel.mp3

Also on the show: Cronyism between pharmaceutical companies and their ostensible government regulators is an infuriating fact of US life, along with the unsurprisingly obscene cost of drugs. Yet somehow the story of aducanumab takes it to a new level. We talk about what pharma and the FDA call a breakthrough Alzheimer’s drug, and what public advocates call an example of all that’s wrong with the FDA, with Michael Carome, M.D., director of the Health Research Group at Public Citizen.

CounterSpin210716Carome.mp3

The post Chris Bernadel on Haitian Assassination, Michael Carome on FDA Alzheimer’s Investigation appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
July 9, 2021

William Dodge on Nestle Slave Labor, Michael Ratner on Donald Rumsfeld

Child chocolate worker in the Ivory Coast (Fortune, 3/1/16) (photo: Benjamin Lowy)

This week on CounterSpin: Nestle CEO Mark Schneider told investors in February that “2020 was a year of hardship for so many,” yet he was “inspired by the way it has brought all of us closer together.” And also by an “improvement” in Nestle’s “profitability and return on invested capital.” “The global pandemic,” Schneider said, “did not slow us down.”

You know what else didn’t slow them down? Ample evidence that their profitability relies on a supply chain that includes literal slave labor in the Ivory Coast. The US Supreme Court recently heard Nestle USA v. Doe, a long-running case that seemed to get at how much responsibility corporations have for international human rights violations, but in the end may have taught us more about what legal tools are useful in getting to that accountability. We got some clarity on the case from William Dodge, professor at University of California/Davis School of Law.

      CounterSpin210709Dodge.mp3

AP (6/30/21)

Also on the show: Donald Rumsfeld launched wars of aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and approved torture at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. But to hear elite media tell it, the former Defense secretary should be remembered as “complex and paradoxical.” The New York Times described his arrival in Washington as “like an All-American who had stepped off the Wheaties box,” and AP suggested that all those dead Iraqis were mainly a thorn in Rumsfeld’s side, with the headline, “Donald Rumsfeld, a Cunning Leader Undermined by the Iraq War.” Obituaries noted that Rumsfeld expressed no regrets about his decisions; media appear to have none of their own.

CounterSpin talked about Rumsfeld’s media treatment back in 2008 with the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Michael Ratner, whose book The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld had just come out from the New Press. We’ll hear that conversation on today’s show.

      CounterSpin210709Ratner.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the New Cold War.

      CounterSpin210709Banter.mp3

The post William Dodge on Nestle Slave Labor, Michael Ratner on Donald Rumsfeld appeared first on FAIR.

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July 2, 2021

Vera Eidelman on Fourth of July Freedoms, Vivek Shandas on Addressing Climate Change

USA Today (7/1/20)

This week on CounterSpin: For many US citizens the Fourth of July is really just a chance to barbecue with friends and family. But for US media, it’s also a chance to say or imply that there really is something to celebrate about the unique place of the United States in the world, the special democratic project that this country is supposedly engaged in.

And that’s where the message gets complicated. Because while media give air time and column inches to where you can find the best holiday sales and celebrations, fewer will use the occasion to direct attention to the danger that the democratic project is facing, the energetic efforts to silence the voices of anyone who has something critical to say about this country, its practices and policies, or its history.

Celebrate, don’t interrogate—is the takeaway from a press corps that wants to tell you how to protect your dog from fireworks, but not how to protect yourself and your society from well-funded, well-entrenched campaigns to stop people from voting or speaking or going into the street to protest things that are wrong. We’ll talk about that with Vera Eidelman, staff attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

CounterSpin210702Eidelman.mp3

Washington Post depiction (6/28/21) of Pacific heat dome (from earth.nullschool.net)

Also on the show: As the West Coast deals with a historic heatwave and drought, some city officials are banning fireworks to help prevent wildfires. If that’s some folks’ first indication that climate disruption will actually disrupt their lives, well, media need to take some of the blame.

A recent Washington Post piece on the unprecedented, punishing heat in the Pacific Northwest stressed how readers would be wrong to be shocked: Everybody saw this coming; there have been “40 years of warnings.” It had a breaker reading “Chickens Coming Home to Roost,” it used the phrase “human-caused.”… It’s just that the words “fossil fuels” appear nowhere.

So climate disruption is a horrible thing that’s happening, and we’re all to blame for not acknowledging it…but who is to blame for doing it? Well, that’s unclear. Just know that you should be worried and upset.

A CBS News piece did say: “This is only the beginning of the heating expected if humanity continues burning fossil fuels.” And it ended with Michael Mann calling for “rapidly decarboniz[ing] our civilization.” And that stripe of coverage is fine as far as it goes. But how far does it go? Where is the reporting that frankly identifies fossil fuels as the problem (rather than how long a shower I take), and incorporates that knowledge into all of the coverage—of Enbridge 3 and other pipelines, of extreme weather events, of how, as CNBC had it recently, “It’s not too late to buy oil and gas stocks.” Why won’t media move past narrating the nightmare of climate disruption, to using their powerful platforms to actually address it?

We’ll talk about that with Vivek Shandas; he focuses on the particular implications of climate change on cities, and on different people within cities, as a professor at Portland State University.

CounterSpin210702Shandas.mp3

The post Vera Eidelman on Fourth of July Freedoms, Vivek Shandas on Addressing Climate Change appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
June 25, 2021

Laura Carlsen on Biden’s Central America Policy, Greg LeRoy on Texas Corporate Subsidies

Protest in Union Square, New York (cc photo: Jim Naureckas)

This week on CounterSpin: “Biden Administration Ousts Trump’s Border Patrol Chief,” announced the June 24 New York Times, explaining in the subhed that Rodney Scott “had become known for his support of President Donald J. Trump’s signature border wall, and had resisted a Biden initiative to stop using the phrase ‘illegal alien.”’ Ergo, we are to understand, his “forcing out” by the White House—suggesting a meaningful departure from the immigration policies of the previous administration. The message is undermined by the subsequent acknowledgement from the paper’s anonymous Homeland Security source that Scott “could remain in the department, reassigned to a new post.”

The notion of real change is undermined more severely by a close look at Biden’s actual immigration policy, particularly with regard to Central America, which includes familiar promises to promote “the rule of law, security and economic development” in the region, and to fight corruption. Familiar because they’ve been used for decades as cover for policies that pour money into regional governments that agree to use it to protect the profits of foreign investors, by violence if necessary (and it’s always necessary), and even when it means communal and environmental devastation, which are also par for the course.

So what’s new? We’ll talk about Central America policy and Honduras in particular with Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas Program at the Center for International Policy.

CounterSpin210625Carlsen.mp3

(cc photo: Paul Lowry)

Also on the show: Texas state Rep. Jim Murphy may wish he’d never called attention to Chapter 313—the state program that offers companies major tax breaks to locate in the state. The alarming price tag attached to Murphy’s proposal to expand the program led some to examine Chapter 313 carefully for the first time. The Houston Chronicle produced a groundbreaking investigative series on the program and its costs. A somewhat motley coalition of opposition was formed. And now—after being easily renewed three times since 2001—the program is set to expire. We’ll hear why that’s good news for Texas schools, taxpayers and the planet from Greg LeRoy, executive director of the group Good Jobs First.

CounterSpin210625LeRoy.mp3

The post Laura Carlsen on Biden’s Central America Policy, Greg LeRoy on Texas Corporate Subsidies appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
June 18, 2021

Andrew Perez on the Filibuster

James Stewart filibustering in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

This week on CounterSpin: NBC News recently reported that “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said…he is ‘100%’ focused ‘on stopping’ President Joe Biden’s administration.”

The statement is remarkable for the painful mockery it makes of Democrats’ and corporate media’s stubborn insistence that the most important value is “bipartisanship,” Democrats and Republicans getting along—over and against majorities of the US public getting the laws and policies they want and need, and have elected officials to enact.

But then, wait a minute, the Senate minority leader is vowing to “stop” the dominant party’s legislative agenda? How’s that work? Listeners know the problem stems from a Senate where, to start with, Wyoming, with 578,000 people, has the same representation as California, population 39.5 million—and then there is the filibuster, the rule that allows Senate minorities to block legislation indefinitely unless the majority can get 60 votes. It’s the crucial backdrop to any conversation about the Biden agenda, though media don’t always bring that point home. We’ll talk about the filibuster with Andrew Perez, senior editor and reporter at the Daily Poster.

CounterSpin210618Perez.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of racist facial recognition, Naomi Osaka and billionaire taxes.

CounterSpin210618Banter.mp3

The post Andrew Perez on the Filibuster appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
June 11, 2021

Jaisal Noor on Worker Co-Ops, Duncan Meisel on Fossil Fuel Greenwashing

ChiFresh Kitchen, a worker co-op

This week on CounterSpin: In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, employees of Whole Foods—owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos—were asked to give their own accrued paid sick days to co-workers who had either contracted the virus or been forced to take time out of work. Bezos could have given every single worker unlimited paid sick leave without his bank account even noticing. But the move shows, for those who miss the message, that corporate capitalists really mean it: This is the system they support all the time, even when it means wealthy companies saying that life-saving equipment just isn’t sufficiently profitable for them to distribute, or that, yes, they’ll take “paycheck protection” money from the state and then fire workers anyway, or that actually protecting workers’ health in a pandemic just doesn’t serve their “bottom line,” so, no, they won’t do it.

Then if you’re confused or upset, here come corporate media saying, nope, that’s a completely valid point of view—and underscoring the idea that our “economy” means everyone is always on the edge of disaster, so you better show up for work, or else you’ll lose your healthcare, you won’t make your mortgage or your rent payments, you’ll be sick and on the street, and you know what? That’s just how it is.

Such a deep, encompassing, anti-human narrative calls for not just debunking points nibbling at the ankles, but a full-frontal assault on a story about how workers are powerless and deserve to be. An important part of a counter-narrative is provided by worker co-operatives: the way they treat workers, and productivity, and the balance of worker health and company success, in a pandemic and every day. We’ll talk about the complications co-ops pose to corporate media’s economic storyline with Jaisal Noor, senior reporter at the Real News Network.

CounterSpin210611Noor.mp3

Source: Clean Creatives

Also on the show: The Keystone XL pipeline has evidently just been killed; Enbridge’s Line 3 is, as we speak, the center of a huge gathering in Minnesota—the Treaty People Gathering—to call attention to the myriad harms it likewise poses to people and to the environment. Fossil fuel companies’ onward march is under threat—maybe not as much as many of us would like, but obviously much more than they would like. As companies get increasingly desperate—and let’s not fool ourselves; no one’s headed to the poorhouse; it’s an industry that wants to make every last penny before they close shop—we can only expect their greenwashing to get smarter and more subtle. They’ve been working on that greenwashing for a long time, with a lot of smart people.

Part of their work right now is convincing you and me that fossil fuel companies are working hard to get to the net zero emissions standard that the Paris Accord calls for and, more broadly, to give us to understand that if we’re looking for a solution to climate disruption, we ought to honor and even privilege the participation of fossil fuel companies in that conversation. We’ll start to unpack that message, and shine a light on the messengers, with Duncan Meisel, campaign director at the climate-focused, behind-the-scenes ad group Clean Creatives.

CounterSpin210611Meisel.mp3

The post Jaisal Noor on Worker Co-Ops, Duncan Meisel on Fossil Fuel Greenwashing appeared first on FAIR.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
June 4, 2021

Joseph Torres on Media & Tulsa Massacre

June 1, 2021, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

This week on CounterSpin: The word is a number of proposed documentaries about the 1921 murderous assault on Tulsa, Oklahoma’s, prosperous Black community, and how the story was not just little-known but actively erased, were meeting general disinterest. Then the TV show Watchmen, adapted from Alan Moore’s graphic novel, proved that—not to put too fine a point on it—white people could handle hearing the history. A false accusation against a young Black man led to a lynch mob and the descent of hundreds of “deputized” white people on the part of town known as Black Wall Street. The assault left this area, which represented the success and the hopes of Tulsa’s Black community, a blasted ruin, with hundreds dead and hundreds more wounded and scattered.

It’s no criticism of the show, generally credited with handling the harrowing events respectfully, to acknowledge that “what white people are comfortable with” can’t be the criterion for what history is allowed to enter public discourse and to shape it. So while the present reflection on the Tulsa nightmare is welcome and overdue, we might still think about who decides what lessons we take away, given that journalism has been central to public reckoning with Tulsa ever since that late May night 100 years ago.

We’ll talk about journalism and the Tulsa massacre with Joseph Torres, co-author of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, and senior director of strategy and engagement at the group Free Press.

CounterSpin210604Torres.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at Amazon‘s “native” advertising and the US’s non-support for public media.

CounterSpin210604Banter.mp3

The post Joseph Torres on Media & Tulsa Massacre appeared first on FAIR.

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May 28, 2021

Vijay Prashad on India, Covid and Modi

New York Times (5/25/21)

This week on CounterSpin: A May 25 New York Times story reports that India’s leading Bharatiya Janata Party is pressuring Twitter to censor and sanction anyone posting critically about prime minister Narendra Modi. An after-dusk visit by “officers from India’s elite antiterrorism police unit” to Twitter‘s New Delhi offices wasn’t so much legally binding as symbolic, the Times explained, sending a “a clear message that India’s powerful ruling party is becoming increasingly upset with Twitter because of the perception that the company has sided with critics of the government.”

In that effort to cow those calling attention to its failings, the Times said, Modi’s government is “following the path of some other countries trying to control how and where messages can spread on social media.” For first example, “the Russian government said it would slow access to Twitter, one of the few places where Russians openly criticize the government.” Lest you miss it, the subtext of this kind of storytelling is that it is a mark of an undemocratic society that you can’t access all kinds of perspectives—not just on your own country, but on any country—and freely, make up your own mind.

It’s a misleading premise, and though India is just one example, it’s a powerful one: The country is the new epicenter of the Covid pandemic, a major vaccine exporter than can’t vaccinate its own people, a potential example of how and why austerity and disaster capitalist programs fail—yet US corporate media don’t seem to see a story worth telling, beyond how Modi might hold on to power despite some unfortunate “missteps.”

We’ll talk around corporate media about current events in India with historian, author and journalist Vijay Prashad, executive director at the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and author of, among other titles, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South.

CounterSpin210528Prashad.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Pride and police.

CounterSpin210528Banter.mp3

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
May 21, 2021

Preston Mitchum on Roe and Reproductive Justice, Steven Rosenfeld on Arizona Audit

(cc photo: Charles Edward Miller)

This week on CounterSpin: When Clyde Chambliss, Alabama senate sponsor of a 2019 law banning virtually all abortion—no exceptions for rape or incest—was asked whether the law would likewise criminalize in vitro fertilization clinics that discard embryos, his answer was: “The egg in the lab doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman.” Let that sit a minute.

The Guttmacher Institute’s Elizabeth Nash and Lauren Cross described right-wing ideologues who have pushed, since January, 536 abortion restrictions, including 146 abortion bans, introduced across 46 states, as “engaging in a shock and awe campaign against abortion rights as part of a large and deliberate attack on basic rights that also includes a wave of voter suppression laws and attacks on LGBTQ people.” Anti-reproductive rights folks have been shooting their shot for a while, and they now have a Supreme Court majority to help. So who’s speaking for the actual majority of US citizens who support a person’s right to determine whether and when to have a child? (You know most women who have abortions already have children, right?) Where are the news media that will not just acknowledge, but build reporting around the fact that abortion opponents are demonstrably unconcerned about actual women or their actual children? Who will connect the dots from anti-choice to anti-immigrant, anti–poor people, anti-healthcare, etc., lest “pro-life” be mistaken for pro-life?

We’ll talk about the Supreme Court’s potential overturning of Roe v. Wade with Preston Mitchum, director of policy at URGE: Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, and adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center.

CounterSpin210521Mitchum.mp3

(photo: NBC News/Getty)

Also on the show: Arizona Republicans are insisting on an audit of one county’s votes in the 2020 election—just the presidential line on the ballot, not any others, but we’re not supposed to ask about that. Given that, if you’re playing along, the notion is that the recount is about transparency and accountability, it should be noteworthy that, as the Arizona Republic‘s Jen Fifield and Andrew Oxford reported, Arizona senate Republicans got the ballots, voting machines and voter information from the county through a court order, and then handed it all over to private contractors to do the audit, who have since studiously declined to name or specify the people who have access to that information, or who is paying for the work.

As much as one might want to dismiss it as sour grapes, observers are calling the Arizona maneuver “a new, more dangerous front” in the voting wars that merits our attention. We’ll talk about the Arizona audit with Steven Rosenfeld, editor at Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

CounterSpin210521Rosenfeld.mp3

This post was originally published on FAIR.
May 14, 2021

Michael Hiltzik on ‘No One Wants to Work!’

      CounterSpin210514.mp3

(via Twitter)

This week on CounterSpin: A report showing that fewer jobs were added in April than expected has some business owners and media minions shaking heads and pointing fingers about how people “don’t want to work!” Listeners will have heard the trope, providing a scarcely needed opening for shopworn right-wing assertions about how government assistance to keep folks’ head above water robs people (some people, mind you, it’s always only some people) of their work ethic.

At this point, the fact that data don’t support a connection between unemployment benefits and difficulty in hiring is beside the point. That work “ethic” equals the willingness to work in whatever conditions at whatever wage is an unchallenged, mostly unspoken pillar of corporate reporting. Trouble for them is, millions of people are hearkening to the idea—expressed in a popular meme—that if as an employer you “offer” wages less than unemployment, you are less a job creator than a poverty exploiter. And they’re less and less willing to accept the line that an insistence on a livable life will wreck what we’re told is “the” economy.

Do elite media have space for people who don’t want to risk their lives for less money than they need to live? It’s a big conversation, but we’ll start by talking about breaking through false but hardy narratives with Michael Hiltzik, business columnist and blogger for the Los Angeles Times and author of, most recently, Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads and the Making of Modern America.

      CounterSpin210514Hiltzik.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Israel/Palestine, Venezuela and voter suppression.

      CounterSpin210514Banter.mp3

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

This post was originally published on Radio Free.
May 7, 2021

Ahmad Abuznaid on Israel/Palestine Apartheid, James Love on Bill Gates & Vaccine Politics

New York Times (4/27/21)

This week on CounterSpin: “Rights Group Hits Israel With Explosive Charge: Apartheid.” You don’t need to be a linguist to think there’s something leading about the New York Times choice of headline for a report from a human rights organization detailing how Israel’s daily, grinding suppression of Palestinian people’s rights actually constitutes a crime. But where elite media present a frozen he said/she said, never-the-twain-shall-meet debate, more and more people see a different way forward. We get an update from Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

CounterSpin210507Abuznaid.mp3

Bill Gates (cc photo: ILRI)

Also on the show: Corporate media will have you believing there’s just no reasonable answer to your simple questions about how we can have a world where people are dying from a pandemic, at the same time as vaccines exist. How we navigate that has to do with media’s elevation of “experts” like Bill Gates, who—divorce distractions aside—raise serious questions about why we allow billionaires to set policy on something as important as public health. We talk about that with James Love, who thinks a lot about this as director of Knowledge Ecology International.

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This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
April 30, 2021

Tim Karr on Paying for Fox News Racism, Lynn Parramore on Hedge Funds vs. Green New Deal

Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson

This week on CounterSpin: Fox News is a flagship of right-wing disinformation, racism and hatred, and Tucker Carlson is its figurehead. Carlson spews harmful nonsense like it’s his job, which it is, and he gets some $10 million a year from it—but did you know that, if you have cable, you’re paying into that income? We’ll talk about how that works with Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the group Free Press.

      CounterSpin210430Karr.mp3

(image: Institute for New Economic Thinking)

And speaking of pollution: Polluting companies tell us every day how they’re invested in the future; we’ve heard corporations en masse say, “Profits, what? We’re all about the people now!” There’s a certain amount of people-who-make-the-problem-pretending-they’re-the-solution that we can see through, but there’s still plenty going on behind the scenes. We’ll talk with Lynn Parramore, senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, about how hedge funds get in the way of the big changes all kinds of companies need to make to fight climate disruption.

      CounterSpin210430Parramore.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

      CounterSpin210430Karr.mp3

This post was originally published on FAIR.
April 30, 2021

Tim Karr on Paying for Fox News Racism, Lynn Parramore on Hedge Funds vs. Green New Deal

Subscribe: RSS

Fox News‘ Tucker Carlson

This week on CounterSpin: Fox News is a flagship of right-wing disinformation, racism and hatred, and Tucker Carlson is its figurehead. Carlson spews harmful nonsense like it’s his job, which it is, and he gets some $10 million a year from it—but did you know that, if you have cable, you’re paying into that income? We’ll talk about how that works with Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the group Free Press.

      CounterSpin210430Karr.mp3

(image: Institute for New Economic Thinking)

And speaking of pollution: Polluting companies tell us every day how they’re invested in the future; we’ve heard corporations en masse say, “Profits, what? We’re all about the people now!” There’s a certain amount of people-who-make-the-problem-pretending-they’re-the-solution that we can see through, but there’s still plenty going on behind the scenes. We’ll talk with Lynn Parramore, senior research analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, about how hedge funds get in the way of the big changes all kinds of companies need to make to fight climate disruption.

      CounterSpin210430Parramore.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

      CounterSpin210430Karr.mp3

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This post was originally published on Radio Free.
April 23, 2021

Elly Page on Anti-Protest Bills, Christy Mallory on Targeting Trans Youth

This week on CounterSpin: It’s not hard to see—indeed, it’s hard not to see—how the initial Minneapolis police department account of George Floyd’s death, “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction,” would have been the last word were it not for intervening factors: One was the witnessing of teenager Darnella Frazier—whose historical act deserves a serious responsive effort to protect and respect citizen reporters, and to fight racist policing—more so than pats on the head like that from the Washington Post‘s Margaret Sullivan about her “pure…motivations” and “moral core.”

And another being the unprecedented multi-racial protests Floyd’s murder kicked off. If the verdict is testament to the power of protest, so too are the vigorous efforts to squelch that power. We’ll talk about that with Elly Page, legal advisor at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law and founder of their US Protest Law Tracker.

CounterSpin210421Page.mp3

Also on the show: After the Supreme Court ruled last summer that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act protects workers from discrimination based on sexual orientation or transgender status, the Washington Post‘s Jennifer Rubin wrote, “While we might be slow in getting there and are diverted time and again, Americans can eventually be prevailed upon to come down on the side of fairness, equality, inclusion and simple human decency.” The notion that civil rights just expand naturally without struggle—and that justice delayed is, you know, fine—isn’t serving trans kids as right-wing legislators target them at the state level. We’ll hear from Christy Mallory, legal director at the Williams Institute, based at UCLA School of Law.

CounterSpin210421Mallory.mp3

This post was originally published on FAIR.
April 16, 2021

Dorothy A. Brown and Amy Hanauer on Tax Unfairness

(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

This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
April 16, 2021

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.
April 2, 2021

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

(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

Also 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.
April 2, 2021

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

Also 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.

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This post was originally published on Radio Free.
March 26, 2021

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

      CounterSpin210326Guestname.mp3

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.
March 19, 2021

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

This 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

Also 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.
March 12, 2021

Ari Berman on the Attack on Voting Rights

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.
March 5, 2021

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

(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

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.
February 26, 2021

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

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

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.
February 12, 2021

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

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 (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.
February 5, 2021

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

(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

(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.
February 5, 2021

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

Subscribe: RSS

(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

(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

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This post was originally published on Radio Free.
January 29, 2021

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

This 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

Also 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.
January 22, 2021

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

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.

Category: CounterSpin

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