"It's not to anyone's benefit to intimidate voters. It's not to anyone's benefit to have armed, non-publicly accountable individuals, private armies, on the streets."

Understanding how we got to this place requires looking behind the curtain of the "partisan tug of war" narrative corporate media present every day, to see how a powerful minority in this country manages to use public institutions to do unpopular things.

"Julian Assange is accused of publishing information about war crimes, about human rights abuses and about abuses of power, that have been tremendously important, not just for the public's right to know, but also have made a real difference in advocacy around those issues."

"You can't say that Donald Trump is just doing whatever the law allows; Donald Trump was part of why this is in the law."

Unlawful militias manage to be part of the political landscape while somehow escaping rigorous media scrutiny.

"The reality that we live in today is not immutable. It is the product of choices, of power dynamics, of motivations of certain sectors over others, a set of priorities that we can shift. And not just in some abstract, pie-in-the-sky, theoretical thinking, but actually right here, right now."

Steve Wamhoff, director of federal tax policy at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, discusses the takeaways from Trump's taxes.

Janine Jackson interviewed journalist Antonia Juhasz about the end of oil for the September 18, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. [mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin Antonia Juhasz Interview @http://www.fair.org/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin200918Juhasz.mp3″] MP3 Link Janine Jackson: Dow Jones dropped ExxonMobil from its blue chip stock market index, a spot it had occupied since 1928. Major banks […]

Laura Flanders, the original host of CounterSpin and the former director of the Women's Desk at FAIR, practices a kind of journalism that's meant to encourage engagement, not just in the stories it tells, but in the people who tell them.

While we welcome the demise of an oil industry that does such harm, we have to remember that a creature can do tremendous damage in its death throes, and that a better way forward isn't guaranteed, unless we fight for it.