This week on CounterSpin:

They say ignorance is bliss, but I know that, for myself and others, our lack of knowledge of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency will only hurt us in our response to the effects that the dealings around that stuff are having on our lives. Bartlett Naylor breaks it down for us; he works at Public Citizen, as a financial policy advocate at their project Congress Watch.

Billionaires don’t need tax cuts; they already have a system designed to appease them. But it’s not enough! Part of the budget bill to give more to those who have everything is an effort to sell off public land for exploitation for fossil fuel companies, who are determined to die taking the last penny from our fingers. Pulling up the covers and waiting for better times isn’t the way; if we stay focused, we can save critical elements of, in this case, unspoiled wild places in this country. We hear from Ashley Nunes, public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Plus Janine Jackson looks back on an interview with the late Robert McChesney.

The post Bartlett Naylor on Meme Coin Grift / Ashley Nunes on Public Land Selloff appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

The website of the Kairos Democracy Project has a quote from John Lewis, reminding us, “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.” Our guest Tanya Clay House is board chair at Kairos and a longtime advocate for the multiracial democracy that the Trump White House seeks to denounce and derail — in part by erasing the history of Black people in this country. As part of that, she’s part of an ongoing project called Freedom to Learn and its present campaign, called #HandsOffOurHistory.

Corporate news media evince lofty principles about the First Amendment, but when people actually use it, the response is more telling. When USA Today covered activism in Seattle around the WTO, it reported that, “Little noticed by the public, the upcoming World Trade Organization summit has energized protesters around the world.” You see how that works: If you’re the little-noticing “public,” you’re cool; but if you band together with other people and speak out, well, now you’re a “protester,” and that’s different — and marginal. Whatever they say in their Martin Luther King Day editorials, elite media’s day-to-day message is, “Normal people don’t protest.” In 2025, there’s an ominous addendum: “Or else.”

We hear from Danaka Katovich, co-director of the feminist grassroots anti-war organization CODEPINK, currently, but not for the first time, at the sharp end of state efforts to silence activists and activism.

The post Tanya Clay House on Freedom to Learn / Danaka Katovich on Attacks on Activists appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Elon Musk reportedly told Tesla investors that he’ll be amping down his role with the Department of Government Efficiency to, one guesses, bring his big brain back into their service. Like the “War on Terror,” “DOGE” is a thing that was in part spoken into normalcy by the corporate press.

Media seem ready to, if not embrace, to make respectful space for whatever hot nonsense is proffered — if it fits within their political template. In this case, it’s a thing — not officially a new Cabinet-level department, but acting like one — wildly powerful, yet utterly opaque and run by an unelected billionaire. DOGE sparked lawsuits about its legality from day one, but today’s news is about, legal or not, what it’s doing and how we can respond. The Revolving Door Project is tracking all of that; we hear from executive director Jeff Hauser.

There’s no reason you need to know that Selena Chandler-Scott is a 24-year-old woman from Georgia who had a miscarriage last month; pregnant people lose those pregnancies routinely. You should know that Chandler-Scott was sent to jail for her miscarriage, and though later released, she won’t be the last. “Fetal personhood” may sound abstract or legalistic; but this case brings home vividly how granting legal rights to embryos and fetuses doesn’t “potentially” “open the door to,” but concretely means undermining the rights of people who carry pregnancies, leaving them open to surveillance, suspicion, and prosecution.

U.S. media seem uninterested in Chandler-Scott’s story and its implications, but we hear from Karen Thompson, legal director at Pregnancy Justice.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Pope Francis.

The post Jeff Hauser on DOGE / Karen Thompson on “Fetal Personhood” appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

CBS News on April 14 said:

We’re following new violence in the Middle East. Israeli strikes hit a major hospital in northern Gaza. At least 21 people were reportedly killed. The emergency room is badly damaged. Israel accused Hamas of using the hospital to hide its fighters.

Meanwhile, Houthi militants in Yemen said they fired two ballistic missiles at Israel. The Israeli military initially said two missiles were launched and one was intercepted, but later said only one missile had been fired.

There’s information in there, if you can parse it; but the takeaway for most will be that framing: “violence in the Middle East,” which suggests that whatever happened today is just the latest round in a perennial battle between warring parties, where you and I have no role except that of sad bystander.

When it comes to Yemen, elite media’s repeated reference to “Iran-backed Houthi rebels” not only obscures the current fighting’s political origins and recent timeline, it erases the Yemeni people, who are paying the price both for the fighting and for the distortions around it, from political elites and their media amplifiers.

We get some grounding from Khury Petersen-Smith; he’s the Michael Ratner Middle East fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a look back at some recent press coverage of fossil fuel companies and climate change.

The post Khury Petersen-Smith on Yemen Distortions appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

We’re learning from Jonah Valdez at the Intercept that the Trump administration is now revoking visas and the immigration status of hundreds of international students under the Student Exchange and Visitor Program — not just those active in pro-Palestinian advocacy or those with criminal records of any sort. It is, says one immigration attorney, “a concerted effort to go after people who are from countries and religions that the Trump administration wants to get out of the country.”

Dara Lind is senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. She joins us this week on the show.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of the Hands Off! protests.

The post Dara Lind on Criminalizing Immigrants appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

When Robert Kennedy Jr. was just a famously named man about town, we heard about how he dumped a bear carcass in Central Park for fun, believes that children’s gender is shaped by chemicals in the water, and asserts that Covid-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” while leaving “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” immune.

But once you become RFK Jr., secretary of health and human services in a White House whose anger must not be drawn, those previously unacceptable ideas become, as a recent New York Times piece has it, “unorthodox.”

Kennedy’s unorthodox ideas may get us all killed while media whistle. We hear from Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, about that.

For many years, social justice advocates rather discounted the Federal Communications Commission. Unlike the Federal Trade Commission or the Food and Drug Administration, whose actions had visible impacts on your life, the FCC didn’t seem like a player.

That changed over recent years, as we’ve seen the role the federal government plays in regulating the power of media corporations to control the flow of information. As the late, great media scholar Bob McChesney explained, “When the government grants free monopoly rights to TV spectrum … it is not setting the terms of competition; it is picking the winner.”

We’ll talk about the FCC under Trump with Jessica González, co-CEO of the group McChesney co-founded, Free Press.

The post Paul Offit on RFK Jr. and Measles / Jessica González on Trump’s FCC appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Israel has abandoned the ceasefire agreement and restarted its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza — a war that has destroyed the region and killed tens of thousands of human beings. The ceasefire, as Gaza-based writer Hassan Abo Qamar, among others, reminds us, still allowed Israel to deprive Palestinians in Gaza of “food, water, medical care, education and freedom of movement.” But it wasn’t enough and, as Belén Fernández writes for FAIR.org, Israel’s U.S.-endorsed resumption of all-out genocide killed at least 404 Palestinians right off the bat but was reported in, for instance, the New York Times as “Israel Tries to Pressure Hamas to Free More Hostages.”

We know that elite media will tell us someday that the whole world was horrified by the genocide of Palestinians, and that journalists decried it. But someday is not today. We need reporters who aren’t not afraid they will be targeted but who may be afraid and are nevertheless bearing witness. Reporters like Hossam Shabat, 23-year-old Palestinian correspondent for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, targeted and killed March 24, and not even the first Israeli journalist assassination for the day: hours earlier, Palestine Today reporter Mohammad Mansour was killed in an Israeli strike on his home in southern Gaza.

We talk about this with reporter Michael Arria, U.S. correspondent for Mondoweiss and the force behind their new feature called “Power & Pushback.”

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of transphobia and remembers FAIR board member Robert McChesney.

The post Michael Arria on Gaza Pushback appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

News site Popular Information alerted us to new Social Security Administration policy effectively requiring tens of thousands of recipients, by the agency’s own estimation, to travel to a field office to verify their ID. An internal memo predicts the shift will create “service disruption,” “operational strain,” and “budget shortfalls” — unsurprising, given concurrent staffing cuts and field office closures. The inevitable harms will no doubt be declared part of a necessary attempt to purge “fraud” from the system that has disbursed earned benefits to elderly and disabled people for generations.

Journalists have choices. They can, as did the Record-Journal of Meriden, Connecticut, report that the cuts derive from repeated claims of fraud from Elon Musk that are “without evidence,” that Trump echoes Musk’s “unfounded statements,” and then quote a retiree advocate noting that accusations of loads of dead folks collecting benefits are “baseless,” and put the words “fact sheet” in appropriate irony quotes when describing a missive from the White House.

Or you can go the route of the Arizona Republic, and lead with the notion that the interference in Social Security is most importantly part of Musk’s “implementing … measures to trim costs throughout the government.” Mention that the actions have “stirred a range of emotions, from cautious hope that the federal government might finally bring its deficit spending under control, to frantic fears that benefit cuts could undermine the financial or health security of millions of Americans” go on to ask, earnestly, “Where does Trump stand on Social Security and other benefits?” and begin with a White House statement “reiterating that the president supports these programs.” In paragraph 19, you might throw in that public polling shows that “most Americans would favor revenue increases rather than benefit cuts to Social Security,” which would include “requiring high-income individuals to pay taxes on more of their earnings.”

In short, easily verified facts, along with “most Americans,” can be centered or tangential in your reporting on the drastic, opaque changes aimed at the program that keeps the wolf from the door for millions of people but for Musk/Trump represents yet another pile of money they feel belongs to them and theirs. All that’s in the balance are human lives and health, and the ability of working people to plan for our futures.

We’ll talk about the new, yet also old, attacks on Social Security with Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of Mahmoud Khalil, deportations and the FTC.

The post Nancy Altman on Social Security Attacks appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

In early February, when Representative Maxwell Frost tweeted that he and Representative Maxine Waters were denied access to the Department of Education, Elon Musk responded on the platform he owns: “What is this ‘Department of Education’ you keep talking about? I just checked and it doesn’t exist.” That, we understand, was the shadow president skating where the puck’s gonna be, as they say; a month later, we learned that indeed newly appointed Education Secretary Linda McMahon is tasked not with running but with erasing the department.

Elite media have talked about the political machinations, how this was expected, how it fits with Trump/Musk’s grand schemes. When it comes to what will happen to the under-resourced schools, and the students with disabilities for whom the DoE supported access and recourse for discrimination? Media seem happy with McMahon’s handwaving about how that stuff might be better off in a different agency.

The impacts of policy on people with disabilities are overwhelmingly an afterthought for corporate media, even though it’s a large community, and one anyone can join at any moment. We talked, on March 5, with journalist and historian David Perry about the threats McMahon and MAGA pose to people — including students — with disabilities.

You wouldn’t know it from what comes out of the mouths of today’s “leaders,” but there has long been a widely shared view in this country that people with disabilities deserve full human rights, but don’t have them. July 2023 marked the 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And, as happens every year, a dismaying amount of the anniversary coverage was about buildings or spaces coming into compliance with the ADA — as though complying with a decades-old law was a feel-good story and despite the relative absence of feel-bad stories about decades of noncompliance.

CounterSpin spoke at the time with Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder of New Disabled South, about what’s lost when the public conversation around disability justice revolves around abiding by a baseline law, rather than a bigger vision of a world we can all live in. We revisit that conversation this week on CounterSpin.

The post David Perry on MAGA and Disability / Kehsi Iman Wilson on ADA (2023) appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

A NASA official warned workers to maybe think about not wearing their badges in public, to protect themselves from harassment against people identifiable as federal workers by MAGA randos who feel deputized by Trump and Musk to do whatever it is Trump and Musk suggest.

It’s early days of the Trump/Musk federal smash and grab, and the harms are already piling up. But so too is the resistance. And federal workers, presumed to be easy targets — based in part on years of corporate media coverage telling us government is fat and lazy and the private sector does everything better — are also on the front lines of the fightback.

We talk about the power of workers — with or without a union — with labor activist and organizer Eric Blanc. He’s assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University and author of the new book We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Trump’s congressional speech, “DOGE” and town hall repression.

The post Eric Blanc on Worker-to-Worker Organizing appeared first on KPFA.