CounterSpin

  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. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/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. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210507Love.mp3 Transcript: ‘What We’ve Seen in Sheikh Jarrah Is a Microcosm of What We’ve Experienced for the Last 70+ Years’ and ‘Government Money That’s Gone Into Vaccine Development Is Being Privatized by a Handful of Companies’

    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. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210430Karr.mp3 Transcript: ‘We Need to Mobilize People Who Don’t Want to Pay Tucker Carlson’s Salary’ (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. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210430Parramore.mp3 Transcript: ‘Hedge Fund Managers Bleed Companies of Their Capabilities’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Mumia Abu-Jamal. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210430Banter.mp3

  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. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210423Page.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. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210423Mallory.mp3 Transcript: ‘It’s Important Americans Don’t Take for Granted They Can Exercise Their First Amendment Rights’ and ‘Laws Targeted at Trans Youth Are Stigmatizing, Are Harmful’

    (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. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210416Brown.mp3 Transcript: ‘The System for Building Wealth Is Designed for White Wealth’ 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. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210416Hanauer.mp3 Transcript: ‘Some of Our Most Profitable Companies Are Not Contributing to Our Basic Needs’ Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at rewriting the history of the January 6 coup attempt. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210416Banter.mp3

  Daniel Hale This week on CounterSpin: The idea that you don’t “shoot the messenger” dates back, evidently, to Sophocles. It echoes today as a man named Daniel Hale stands convicted nominally of breaking a law aimed at spies sneaking intel to foreign enemies, but actually with revealing things the US government didn’t want known about its drone warfare programs—the ones elite media have often presented as precise in separating “bad guys” from “innocents,” and so superior to other methods of (what we are to understand is) “counterterrorism.” Big media have shown little interest in the case. We’ll get a backgrounder from researcher and journalist Chip Gibbons, policy director of the group Defending Rights & Dissent. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210409Gibbons.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at press coverage of Georgia’s voter suppression law. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin210409Banter.mp3 Transcript: ‘Hale’s Crime Is Not Leaking Information, but Exposing Government Lies About the Drone Program’