CounterSpin

    (cc photo: Don Sniegowski) This week on CounterSpin:  We heard a cable TV commentator say recently that with the invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s Vladimir Putin is trying to “put an end to democracy as we know it.” We know we weren’t the only ones wondering, among other things, what “we” is being invoked here? And what’s the definition of the “democracy” we’re meant to be endorsing? Does it account for, say, the people who broke into the US Capitol last January trying to violently overturn a presidential election, and their supporters, explicit and implicit? Thing is: Corporate news media don’t define the “democracy” they invoke as shorthand justification for pretty much anything, including war. It’s a murky stand-in for “a good place, where people have a voice and…stuff.” Even when and where it demonstrably means anything but. With the ongoing horrific attack on Ukraine by Russia, you get the sense that war is a clarifier—proof that “Russia” as a country deserves pariah status, with all that entails (and media have a big box of what that entails). And as Americans, media suggest, we’re meant to see and celebrate and fight for our difference from an imperialist, racist nation. So it is, respectfully, a good time to recall that we had a war within this country, in which many people declared that they cared less about this country than about white supremacy. And that sentiment did not disappear. And those conversations have not finished. And ignoring them doesn’t erase them. Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African-American studies at Emory University, and the author of White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy and, most recently, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America We talked with her in November of last year about the historical and ongoing struggle between white supremacy and this country’s hopes for democracy. We revisit that conversation this week. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220325Anderson.mp3 Transcript: ‘White Supremacists Were Willing to Hold the United States Hostage’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the “no-fly zone” proposal. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220325Banter.mp3  

    Sanaa, Yemen (cc photo: Yahya Arhab/European Pressphoto Agency) This week on CounterSpin: It’s worth our while to think about why everyone we know is talking about Ukraine and Russia’s unlawful incursion—and equally worthwhile to ask why the same principles of concern don’t seem to apply in other cases. Those feelings don’t have to fight. But to hear Yemen put forward as just an example of an underconsidered concern is galling from the same people who underprioritized it in the first place. Yemen is not a rhetorical device. It’s a country of human beings in crisis. We talk about that with Yemeni activist and advocate Shireen Al-Adeimi, who is also assistant professor of education at Michigan State University. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220318Al-Adeimi.mp3 Transcript: ‘Just Pay Attention to What Our Own Government Is Doing in Yemen’ Sarah Bloom Raskin (cc photo: New America) Also on the show: Sarah Bloom Raskin was up for a job at the Federal Reserve. Everyone was for her nomination, including the bankers she would oversee. So why did she withdraw her nomination, and what does it tell us about the possibility of making any advances at all in facing the reality of climate change? Helping us see why issues media divide are completely related is David Arkush, managing director of the climate program at Public Citizen. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220318Arkush.mp3 Transcript: ‘She Intended Not to Ignore Things Related to Climate, as There Is Pressure to Do’

  Institute for Policy Studies (3/6/22) This week on CounterSpin: Russia’s horrendous invasion of Ukraine is providing yet another reminder that when elephants fight, it’s the grass that’s trampled. We see that not just in the front-page casualties; teenage soldiers dying fighting; civilian men, women and children killed by dropping bombs—but also in the measures we are told are meant to avert those harms: economic sanctions. Khury Petersen-Smith is Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He joins us to talk about the problem with seeing sanctions as an alternative to war. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220311PetersenSmith.mp3 Transcript: ‘The Most Vulnerable People Lose When the US Imposes Sanctions’ Good Jobs First (3/1/22) Also on the show: In March 2012, Amazon opened an office dedicated to ferreting out tax breaks and subsidies. In other words, the megacorporation making hundreds of billions of dollars in profit puts in time finding ways to avoid supporting the communities it operates in—and to push local governments to divest money from education, housing and healthcare—to give to a company that doesn’t need it. This March, the group Good Jobs First marked that anniversary with a call to #EndAmazonSubsidies. We talk with the group’s executive director, Greg LeRoy. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220311LeRoy.mp3 Transcript: ‘Communities Should Not Pay Amazon. It Should Be the Other Way Around.’

  This week on CounterSpin: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said recently: “Whenever I go to community meetings, it always comes up. Young and middle-aged and even some elderly. It tortures them.” What was he talking about? Student loan debt. So is what we call “higher” education an individual investment or a public good? The way news media talk about it could be decisive. We’ll hear from Braxton Brewington, press secretary and organizer at the group Debt Collective. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220304Brewington.mp3 Transcript: ‘Student Debt Hurts the Economy and Cancellation Will Improve Lives’ (cc photo: Ted Eytan) Also on the show: When media say there’s a debate about transgender peoples’ “right to exist,” remind yourself that trans people are going to exist; what’s on the table is whether they get to live free from persecution, oppression, exclusion and erasure. Texas state leadership is staking a position on that, but humans everywhere are pushing back, and we talk about that with Andy Marra, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220304Marra.mp3 Transcript: ‘These Attacks Are on Children and Their Families’

  Aftermath of Tulsa Massacre (photo via bswise) This week on CounterSpin: Black History Month has always been something of a double-edged sword: It implies that Black history is somehow not “history,” that it has to be shoehorned in, “artificially,” to garner any value, with the corollary implication that if you choose to ignore it, you aren’t missing anything crucial. The idea that Black Americans are somehow something other than (meaning “less than”) “real” Americans is stupid, toxic…and fully in play, as reflected in Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s response to a reporter’s question about efforts to suppress Black people’s voting rights with the statement that “the concern is misplaced because, if you look at the statistics, African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” So: There’s a reason Black people feel a need to lift up our particular history–our efforts and accomplishments, in and despite the context of violent, systemic harm we live in–that distinguishes that from the bland and euphemistic vision that usually passes as “US history.” What matters is how the history of Black people is approached, discussed and integrated into what’s happening today. Journalists, of course, have an opportunity to do that work every month, not just the shortest. Last year, we saw some open media acknowledgement of an event previously shrouded in silence and ignorance: the Tulsa, Oklahoma massacre of 1921. The layers of that story, the roles played by various actors, make it especially relevant for news media, who, to fully tell it, need to reflect on their own role, then…and now. We talked about the Tulsa massacre around its anniversary last June, with Joseph Torres, senior director of strategy and engagement at the group Free Press, and co-author with Juan González of the crucial book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. He works, as does CounterSpin‘s Janine Jackson, with Media 2070, a consortium of media-makers and activists that are detailing the history of US media participation in anti-Black racism, as well as collectively dreaming reparative policies, interventions and futures. We hear from Joseph Torres about Tulsa this week on the show. Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220225Torres.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a very quick look at media coverage of Ukraine. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220225Banter.mp3   Transcript: Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’

  FAIR.org (1/28/22) This week on CounterSpin: You might think you’re not smart enough to talk about Ukraine. And, especially on US foreign policy, corporate media seem to suggest that any questions you have that fall outside their framework are not just dumb but traitorous, not earnest but dangerously naive. Peace? Diplomacy? The idea that US might have broken promises, might have material and not moral interests? Oh, so you love Putin then! There is an interesting, relevant history to the state of tension between the US and Russia over Ukraine; but understanding it involves letting go of the storyline in which the US equals benevolent democracy and Russia equals craven imperialism. We got some of that history from Bryce Greene, who wrote about Ukraine recently for FAIR.org.  We’ll hear that conversation this week. Transcript: In Ukraine, ‘No One Hears That There Is a Diplomatic Solution’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220218Greene.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Afghanistan. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220218Banter.mp3

  American Prospect (1/31/22) This week on CounterSpin: You will have heard many things recently about the supply chain—as the reason you can’t find what you’re looking for on store shelves, or the reason it costs so much. But what’s behind it all? Why has the system broken down in this way? Here’s where thoughtful journalism could fill us in, could educate on a set of issues that affects us all, including discussing alternatives. But corporate news media aren’t good at covering economic issues from the ground up, or asking big questions about who is served by current structures. You could say media’s reluctance to critically break down systems is itself a system problem. Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. She’ll join us to talk about the ideas in the article she recently co-authored for American Prospect, “How We Broke the Supply Chain.” Transcript: ‘Mega-Retailers Are Using Inflation as a Cover to Raise Prices and Turn Record Profits’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220211Mabud.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of polling and Israeli apartheid. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220211Banter.mp3

    CNN (1/28/22) This week on CounterSpin: A New York Times opinion piece by editorial board member Jesse Wegman says that debunking Republicans’ baseless, self-serving claims of voter fraud “was always a fool’s game,” because “the professional vote-fraud crusaders are not in the fact business.” The suggestion seems to be that even addressing such claims is “giving them oxygen.” But there’s a difference between airing such claims and training a scrutinizing, disinfectant light on them—and it’s really journalists’ choice which of those they do. The  spate of new election-meddling laws proposed in Arizona suggests that looking away is not the answer. But Trumpers’ loss in Arizona could also map a way forward, if you’re interested. Our guest is interested. Steven Rosenfeld is editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Transcript: ‘Big Lies Are Built From Lots of Little Lies’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220204Rosenfeld.mp3   (image: Jacobin, 1/21/22) Also on the show: If you think the “little guy” is left out of Wall Street deals, you’re not wrong. But is Bitcoin the answer? Is “cryptocurrency” a leveling force—or just a different flavor of grift that plays on that not-unfounded little guy frustration? Our guest gets at what’s new and what’s old in his description of cryptocurrency as “the people’s Ponzi.” Sohale Mortazavi is a writer based in Chicago; his recent piece on cryptocurrency appears in Jacobin. Transcript: ‘The Entire Cryptocurrency Market Is Basically a Ponzi Scheme’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220204Mortazavi.mp3

    New York Times depiction (1/18/22) of a Puerto Rican debt protest. This week on CounterSpin: A judge has approved a debt restructuring deal for Puerto Rico, and the deal’s architects are saying it means a “new day” for the territory. Natalia Renta is senior policy strategist at the Center for Popular Democracy. We’ll hear from her about what those outside of the deal-making, but nevertheless impacted by it, have to say. Transcript: ‘Puerto Rico Hasn’t Had the Opportunity to Develop Its Own Economic Future’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220128Renta.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of Ukraine. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220128Banter.mp3

  Flint, Michigan This week on CounterSpin: Search corporate news media for recent stories on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan—in which some of the city’s overwhelmingly Black residents were paying upwards of $300 a month for water they couldn’t drink, based on an infrastructure decision on the water’s source that their elected officials had no say in—and you’ll find a few stories on how yes, lead-leaching pipes endangered people’s health…but there’s been a multi-million dollar settlement, and a presidential commitment to address lead in water, so maybe it’s all over but the shouting. CNN hosted a Republican Michigan congressmember who explained that Flint was under an unelected austerity-minded emergency manager because their “city had essentially collapsed. They had no strong functioning government and the state had to step in and there was an error in shifting water sources.” That sounds lamentable, but not really blameworthy. So how do you square that “sorry but let’s move forward” line with the information that investigators looking into the crisis found that the cell phones of key health officials and other players, like then-Gov. Rick Snyder’s press secretary, had been wiped of messages for the key period? While corporate media have largely let Flint go, the story isn’t over, nor has justice been served. We’ll hear from a reporter still on the case: Jordan Chariton, from independent news network Status Coup News. Transcript: ‘The People of Flint Are Still Suffering’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220121Chariton.mp3   Patrice Lumumba Also on the show: You don’t need to put your ear to the ground to hear US news media drumbeats for war of some sort with official enemies China and/or Russia. With China, part of what we’re being told to two-minute hate is their involvement on the African continent, where we’re to understand they are nefariously trapping countries in debt—unlike the US involvement in the region, which has been about bringing joy and love and hope. Just because a playbook is old doesn’t mean it won’t be used again and again. The vision relies on amnesia and ignorance of what the US has done and is doing in Sub-Saharan Africa—a topic that, if news media wanted to explore it, they had a great chance this past week, with the 60th anniversary of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Why was Lumumba killed? And what’s the living legacy of that undercovered murder? We’ll hear from Maurice Carney,  co-founder and executive director of the group Friends of the Congo. Transcript: ‘The Assassination of Patrice Lumumba Is One of the Most Important Assassinations of the 20th Century’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin220121Carney.mp3