CounterSpin

    (CC photo: Chad Davis) This week on CounterSpin: If there are ideas, tools or tactics that are part of both this country’s horror-filled past, and some people’s vision for its dystopic future, they are at work in Cop City. Over-policing, racist policing, paramilitarization, the usurping of public resources, environmental racism, community voicelessness, and efforts to criminalize protest (that’s some kinds of protest)—it’s all here. Add to that a corporate press corps that, for one thing, disaggregates issues that are intertwined—Black people, for instance, are impacted not only by police brutality, but also by the environment, breathing air and drinking water as we do—and seems intent on forcing a vital, important situation into old, tired and harmful frames. Kamau Franklin is founder of Community Movement Builders, the national grassroots organization, and co-host of the podcast Renegade Culture. We’ll hear from him about Cop City and the fight against it. Transcript: ‘People Have Been Protesting Against Cop City Since We Found Out About It’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230317Franklin.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of DC’s crime bill. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230317Banter.mp3  

  Judy Heumann This week on CounterSpin:  “I wanna see feisty disabled people change the world.” So declared disability rights activist Judy Heumann, who died last weekend at age 75. As a child with polio, Heumann was denied entry to kindergarten on grounds that her wheelchair was a fire hazard. Later, she was denied a teachers license for reasons no more elevated. She sued, won and became the first teacher in New York to use a wheelchair. Media love those kinds of breakthroughs, and they matter. Here’s hoping they’ll extend their interest into the barriers disabled people face in 2023, and how policy changes could address them. We’ll talk with Kim Knackstedt, senior fellow at the Century Foundation and director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. Transcript: ‘The Whole System Is Stacked Against a Person With a Disability’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230310Knackstedt.mp3   March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963 And speaking of problems that aren’t actually behind us: You will have heard that the US is experiencing “blowout job growth,” and unemployment is at a “historic low,” with gains extending even to historically marginalized Black people. Algernon Austin from the Center for Economic Policy and Research will help us understand how employment data can obscure even as it reveals, and how—if our problem is joblessness—there are, in fact, time-tested responses. Transcript: ‘Let’s Target Job Creation to These Forgotten Places and People’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230310Austin.mp3  

  (Image: Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition) This week on CounterSpin: Media are certainly following the story of the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio—giving us a chance to see how floods of reporters can get out there and print a lot of words about a thing…and still not ask the deepest questions and demand the meaningful answers that might move us past outrage and sorrow to actual change. Are there not forces meant to protect people from this sort of harm? Is it awkward for reporters to interrogate the powerful on these questions? Yes! But if they aren’t doing it, why do they have a constitutional amendment dedicated to protecting their right to do it? There’s a test underway right now in Jackson, Mississippi, where residents who have been harmed many times over are now being told that the appropriate response is to take away their voice. Here’s where a free press would speak up loudly, doggedly—and transparently, about what’s going on. Makani Themba is a Jackson resident and volunteer with the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition. She’s also chief strategist at Higher Ground Change Strategies. She’ll bring us up to speed on Jackson. Transcript: ‘The Water Crisis Is a Manifestation of Jim Crow Politics’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230303Themba.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Social Security. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230303Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230224.mp3   Tucker Carlson on Fox News (7/6/21) This week on CounterSpin: If you care about free expression, and freedom generally, there is much to talk about right now. It is good to anchor ourselves in that conversation when we talk about books being banned and efforts to erase entire concepts, and then folks trying to inoculate themselves by saying they weren’t even talking about those concepts, until they learn that actually running away from those ideas doesn’t make you safe. These are not entirely new conversations or struggles. But our past has not been fully grappled with or understood, and that has everything to do with what’s happening now and how we can address it. History is alive and active, and you are a part of it. So this week we’re going to re-air a conversation that we had in January of 2017 with historian Ellen Shrecker, an expert on McCarthyism and its impacts. We don’t doubt that you will understand the relevance and the meaning in 2023. Transcript: ‘We’re Seeing the Result of a 40-Year Assault on the Liberal Mainstream’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230224Schrecker.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the price of eggs. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230224Banter.mp3  

  (image: Drug Enforcement Agency) This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media tend to take the State of the Union address as an opportunity to talk about messaging, and whether the president’s message is landing well with, first of all, other legislators, and then, somewhere in there, the US public. A better mediaverse would start with the impact of official actions, not just on the people who donate or even the people who vote, but on everyone whose lives are shaped by government policy. So, on just a couple of points: To the extent that most of us are hearing about fentanyl, it’s likely to be news stories saying that just touching the drug is enough to lay you out or, more recently, stories about Mexico and China, and why “they” want to “poison” “us.” What elite media and politicians aren’t having yet is a conversation about drug use and harm, and whether saying really loudly how far under the prison you want to put “dealers” is really an admission of a failure to address a public health issue as a public health issue, to put human beings over table-thumping rhetoric that goes nowhere. We’ll hear from Maritza Perez Medina, director of the Office of Federal Affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance. Transcript: ‘Punitive Enforcement Does Not Save Lives, or Reduce Drug Supply’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230217PerezMedina.mp3   Washington Post (2/5/23) Also on the show: The Washington Post editorial board says a “discussion” on Social Security “needs to happen sometime, and sooner rather than later.” Because these “entitlements,” they say, “already account for about a third of federal spending,” and are on “unsustainable trajectories”! When’s the last time you heard the Defense Department’s unending trillions described as “unsustainable”? Why is it just about whether your grandfather, who paid in his entire life, should maybe get ready to get nothing at all? Elite media seem ever stumped why they can’t sell their and Republicans’ image of Social Security as a weird communist mistake to a public that just doesn’t see it like that. So once more with feeling, we’ll revisit the reality vs. the fantasy of Social Security, with parts of an ever-relevant 2018 conversation with Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works. Transcript: ‘The American People Overwhelmingly Oppose Cuts to Social Security’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230217Altman.mp3 Transcript: “‘The American People Overwhelmingly Oppose Cuts to Social Security'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of the Japanese-American incarceration. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230217Banter.mp3    

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230210.mp3   (image: Fight for the Future) This week on CounterSpin: Why does it matter to me, a media consumer, internet user, a person concerned with social justice—why does a 2–2 deadlock at the FCC matter to me? What could be happening if Biden’s long-languishing nomination of public interest advocate Gigi Sohn were put through? Net neutrality, an anti-discrimination law around broadband access that isn’t written by corporations? Maybe US citizens could stop paying more for slower broadband than just about every other industrialized country? We won’t know unless Democrats stand up to the series of increasingly absurd and offensive smears on Sohn. And that remains to be seen. Evan Greer tracks technology and its meaning for justice activism as director of Fight for the Future. She’ll help us place the fight around Gigi Sohn’s FCC nomination in that keystone public conversation. Transcript: ‘Gigi Sohn Has Faced Relentless Smear Campaigns, Some Funded by the Telecom Industry’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230210Greer.mp3 Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the Covid death toll. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230210Banter.mp3  

    Bailout Watch et al. (1/30/23) This week on CounterSpin: Powerless in the United States: How Utilities Drive Shutoffs and Energy Injustice is an ongoing project from the Center for Biological Diversity, the Energy and Policy Institute and Bailout Watch. It tracks utility service disconnections and corporate profiteering—because, it turns out, they’re flip sides of a coin. You and I may think that in disastrous weather conditions (with no signs of stopping), and a pandemic and low wages and a hike in prices, it’s a time to acknowledge workers’ sacrifices and support them. Silly us. Actually, it’s a moment for powerful companies to raise prices on consumers—not to recoup losses, but just to raise profits, as their shareholder speeches will proudly reveal—and why would that gouging stop at life-saving vaccines or medicines? Why not also shut off the power to the homes of struggling families? Seriously, why not? If Wall Street will reward you for it, and corporate media won’t call you out or even seriously, humanistically report on what you’re doing? Or even easier, one might think, argue for the basic transparency that would allow that reporting? Electric utilities have disconnected US households more than 4 million times since the beginning of Covid, preceding the Russian war on Ukraine. At the same time, shareholder payouts went up by $1.9 billion, increases that could have paid those households’ bills five times over.  Our guests’ work illustrates how energy bills take up more and more of families’ earnings, and how the actions of corporations take a tough, in some cases life-threatening situation, make it worse, and then hand it off to their allies in the press corps, who they know will present it as “business as usual if regrettable,” but, above all, nothing worth looking in to or talking about seriously. Our guests aren’t just complaining; they have ideas about what’s needed to address the situation. Shelby Green is research fellow at the Energy and Policy Institute. Selah Goodson Bell is energy justice campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. We’ll hear from both of them this week on the show. Transcript: ‘Everyone Has a Right to Electricity and Heat’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230203Green_Bell.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the police killing of Tyre Nichols. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230203Banter.mp3  

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230127Mechanic.mp3   This week on CounterSpin: If repeated messaging about how we “can’t afford” public goods but we should always be “cutting taxes” isn’t discordant enough, corporate media’s guiding yet unspoken theory has some corollaries—one of which is that because wealthy people pay large (if not proportionate) amounts of money in taxes, they should get policies that reward them, including those allowing them to keep, and grow, their extreme wealth and its concomitant power. That’s how we wind up with congressional Republicans’ efforts to claw back the attempts the administration made to actually help the IRS start to audit the notoriously tax-avoiding wealthy. The message from many politicians and their media amplifiers: Cheating on taxes is a luxury only the rich can, or should be able to, afford. We know come April there will be a swell of “news you can use” stories about how to save a dime or two on your taxes. We get a bigger picture story this week from Mother Jones senior editor Michael Mechanic, author of Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230127Mechanic.mp3 Transcript: “‘We Can Pay for What We Decide to Pay For'”

    Patrice Lumumba, 1960 (photo: Harry Pot) This week on CounterSpin: US media elites have gotten comfy with what writer Adam Johnson calls their “wall calendar version” of Martin Luther King, in which he represents the “good” left, unmoved by racial nationalism and Marxist ideology. With Patrice Lumumba, assassinated by the CIA on January 17, 1961, as newly elected leader of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the story is different. Look up Lumumba on the anniversary of his murder and you’ll find—nothing, really, except maybe a story about how street vendors in Kinshasa are being pushed off of Lumumba Boulevard to prepare for a visit by the Pope. Martin Luther King, corporate media would have it, offers a lesson about hopes and dreams and the slow but steady push toward progress. Lumumba’s assassination, judging by attention, has zero lessons for US citizens or the press corps to learn about the past, the present or the future. That’s how you know you should pay attention. Maurice Carney, co-founder and executive director of the group Friends of the Congo, has another story. And we hear about it this week on CounterSpin. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230120Carney.mp3 Transcript: “‘The Cry is “Lumumba Lives”—His Ideas, His Principles'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of the Signal app. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230120Banter.mp3  

  Lever (1/8/23) This week on CounterSpin: US reporters used to talk, even brag, about telling the truth and letting the chips fall where they may, and more acutely, about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable—in other words about using their special, constitutional power to look behind curtains most of us can’t, and bring us meaningful information we could gain no other way. Not stories that might amuse us, which are fine, but more centrally, the sort of stories that might help us actually change a society that few would describe as perfect. How did that morph into elite reporters cutting their evident conscience to fit, not just this year’s fashion, but the particular fashion of the particular power source they institutionally favor? And what’s the cost of that approach to the public, who, still today, look to news media, not to pre-chew their food for them, but to give them accurate, independently sourced and documented information to help them make their own decisions about the world and their place in it. Journalist David Sirota has thoughts on that, as well as a new outlet, the Lever, focused on what one would hope would be the fundaments of media institutions: power and accountability. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230113Sirota.mp3 Transcript: “‘We Live in a New World Where Accountability Barely Exists'” Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of forced arbitration. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230113Banter.mp3