CounterSpin

Fat cat pays a pittance in taxes to Uncle Sam in vintage cartoon. This week on CounterSpin: It is tax season in the US,  when some of us wonder why the government, which knows how much we earn, requires us to guess, with the threat of prison if we guess wrong. And leads some of us to ponder what we get in return for our resources—streets and stop signs, to be sure, but also wars and wheelbarrows of money doled out those who already have plenty. We’ve talked about taxes and tax policy a lot on CounterSpin, enough to put together a walk-through of some of the issues, and the way news media explain them. You’ll hear from Steve Wamhoff, Dean Baker, Jeremie Greer and Michael Mechanic. Steve Wamhoff Transcript: ‘There Is a Different Set of Rules for Someone Like Donald Trump’ Dean Baker Transcript: ‘The Distribution of Income Depends on How We Structure the Economy’ Jeremie Greer Transcript: ‘1 Percent of Taxpayers Receive More Than the Bottom 80 Percent’ Michael Mechanic Transcript: ‘We Can Pay for What We Decide to Pay For’ Taxes, and how they’re not just an April 15 thing, this week on CounterSpin!

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230407.mp3   (CC photo: Elliot Stoller) This week on CounterSpin: Former President Donald Trump was arrested this week, but we’re going to talk about another kind of crime: the slow, steady drip drip of crime that doesn’t leap out to reporters—the day-to-day crushing of workers’ attempts to organize themselves to have a voice in the workplace, not just about their pay, but their well-being and their dignity. Crushing those attempts to work together is against the law—but it’s not the sort of crime that elite media seem able to identify. And it’s much harder to fight  when the law-breaking megacorporation is as media-savvy and faux progressive as Starbucks. Saurav Sarkar has been reporting Starbucks workers’ efforts—not to quit their workplaces, but to transform them into places where they can make a living and have some say in their lives, while, yes, also giving you your cappuccino. Sarkar writes for Jacobin, In These Times, The Progressive and FAIR.org, among other outlets. We hear from them this week on CounterSpin. Transcript: Starbucks ‘Workers and Consumers Have the Same Foe’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230407Sarkar.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of the Chicago mayoral election and the projected Antarctic current collapse. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230407Banter.mp3   Corrected audio file.

  Ciudad Juárez detention center fire This week on CounterSpin: There are a number of issues or realities where good-hearted people are overwhelmed and frankly misled about how isolated they are in their view, and what levers of power they may have to pull on. We can live in a better world! And we should interrogate those who say, “Oh no, you don’t get it; we’re smarter and we say you just can’t.” One such story is migration, or immigration—or, to be real, do Black and brown people have a right to move freely in the world? If not, why not? We’ll get some ideas of where to start this week with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network, about the Ciudad Juárez fire and what it tells us about immigration policy. Transcript: ‘The US Incarcerates More Immigrants Than Anywhere Else in the World’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230331Shah.mp3   Image: Health & Human Services And on healthcare: Do we really need to be making choices between seniors getting needed healthcare and other folks getting needed healthcare? Do we have to run our healthcare system on for-profit incentivizing? Is there truly no other way? We talk with Eagan Kemp, healthcare policy advocate at Public Citizen, about the fight around Medicare and Medicare Advantage, and what it says about concerns about seniors and about health, in the US. Transcript: ‘Medicare Advantage Has Never Delivered on the Promise’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230331Kemp.mp3  

  New York Times (3/18/23) This week on CounterSpin: In the immediate wake of the September 1, 2001, attacks, a military official told the Washington Post of the newly minted “war on terror”: “This is the most information-intensive war you can imagine. . . . We’re going to lie about things.” If reporters don’t evidence skepticism after a declaration like that, it says more about them than anyone or anything else. But US elite news media did the opposite of what you would hope for from an independent press corps in a country launching an illegal and baseless invasion, whose leaders had announced in advance they would lie to support it. You can dig out the reality if you read, but if you rely on the same media you were looking at 2003, you will be equally misled, and in the same, frankly, boring ways you were before: The US is great and only wants democracy; other countries are bad, and if our reasons for invading them and replacing their leadership with folks we like better, and killing anyone who doesn’t agree with that, don’t add up, well, we’ll come up with others later, and you’ll swallow those too. What passes for debate about why we must remain at some kind of war—cold, hot, corporate, stealth, acknowledged, denied—with Russia or China or whomever else is designated tomorrow, has roots worth studying in 2003. We’ll talk about it with author, critic and longtime friend of FAIR Norman Solomon. Transcript: ‘Media and Government Excuses Are Basically Intertwined’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230324Solomon.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at media coverage of ex-FCC nominee Gigi Sohn. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin230324Banter.mp3  

    (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