KPFA - CounterSpin

This week on CounterSpin:

Corporate economic news can be so abstract that it’s disinforming even when it’s true. The big idea is that there’s something called “the U.S. economy” that can be doing well or poorly, which obscures the reality that we are differently situated, and good news for the stock market, say, may mean nothing, or worse, for me. A people-centered press corps would spell out the meaning of economic “indicators,” not just in terms of their impact on different communities, but in relation to where we want to go as a society that has yet to address deep historical and structural harms.

A new report on the current state of the Black economy takes up these questions. We hear from its co-authors:

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Algernon Austin is director of the Race and Economic Justice program at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The post Dedrick Asante-Muhammad & Algernon Austin on the Black Economy appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

The country’s largest and second-largest grocery store chains want to merge and, surprising no one, they claim that giving them that tremendous market power will lead to lower prices, better quality food, and better conditions for workers. The FTC says, hold on a second, how does that square with on-the-record statements that Kroger is currently raising the prices of things like eggs and milk above inflation rates, simply because they can get away with it — a practice known as price-gouging? The response, dutifully reported in corporate news media is: We won’t do that anymore! And if you try to stop us, that’s illegal!

It could hardly be clearer that the public — consumers and workers — needs advocates willing to go behind talking points to enforceable law. Freddy Brewster is a writer and journalist; his report on the possible Kroger/Albertsons megamerger, its implications, and the behind the scenes shenanigans attendant to it, appears on LeverNews.com.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Golan Heights bombing.

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This week on CounterSpin:

One of many things wrong with corporate news media is the way they hammer home the idea that the current system is the only system. If you don’t see yourself and your interests reflected in either of the two dominant parties, the problem is you. On the other hand, independent media gives us new questions to ask. For example, How do we acknowledge the fact that many people’s opinions are shaped by messages that are created and paid for by folks who work hard to hide their identity and their interests? If we’re in an open debate about what’s best for all of us, why can’t we see who pays you?

We’ll talk about “dark money” with Steve Macek. He’s professor and chair of communication and media studies at North Central College in Illinois. His recent piece “Dark Money Uncovered” appeared on TheProgressive.org.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Phil Donahue.

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This week on CounterSpin:

Climate disruption is outpacing many scientists’ understanding of it, and it’s undeniably driving many harms we are facing: extreme heat, extreme cold, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes. News media are giving up pretending that these extreme weather events are just weird and not provably driven by the continued use of fossil fuels. But fossil fuel companies are among the most powerful players in terms of telling lawmakers how to make the laws they want to see — public interest be damned. We’ll hear about what you are very definitely not supposed to hear from reporter Emily Sanders from ExxonKnews.

Not everyone is lying down and accepting that we’re going to die from a climate crisis that is avoidable, but since companies don’t want to talk about it, let’s not. A county in Oregon is saying, deaths from high heat are in fact directly connected to conscious corporate decision-making. We’ll hear about that potentially emblematic story from Victoria St. Martin, longtime journalist and journalism educator, now reporting on health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News.

The post Emily Sanders on Criminalizing Pipeline Protest / Victoria St. Martin on Suing Fossil Fuel Companies appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

You don’t hear the phrase “free market capitalism” so much anymore, but the idea still tacitly undergirds much of what you do hear about why products and services are the way they are. We all know about corruption and cronyism, but we still accept that the company that “wins” — “cornering the market” — does so because people simply prefer what they sell. The anti-monopoly ruling against Google challenges that idea of how things work. We hear about it from Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project.

A recent news report offered the familiar construction that the attacks of September 11, 2001 “plunged the U.S.” into decades of war. Of course that’s not right: choices were made, unpopular choices, about how to respond to the attacks. Choices were made to not bring assailants to trial for the crime, but instead to detain people without charge and hold them indefinitely in a prison designed to be outside U.S. law. Now the Defense secretary has stepped in to overturn plea agreements that, while they wouldn’t have closed Guantánamo, would’ve brought some measure of closure to the cases against the alleged directors of the September 11 attacks. We get an update from Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Plus, Janine Jackson takes a look at recent press coverage of Sinclair Broadcasting.

The post Lee Hepner on Google Monopoly / Shayana Kadidal on Guantanamo Plea Deal appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Dog whistles are supposed to be silent except for those they’re intended to reach. But as listeners know, the right wing has gotten much more overt and loud about their intention to defeat the prospect of multiracial democracy. We unpack the latest weaponized trope — the “DEI hire” — with anti-racism educator and author Tim Wise.

Trying to help unhoused people and trying to make them invisible are different things. Keith McHenry, cofounder of Food Not Bombs, joins us to talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling that gave state authorities more power to dismantle the encampments in which many people live, with no guarantee they will land anywhere more safe.

The post Tim Wise on ‘DEI Hires’ / Keith McHenry on Criminalizing the Unhoused appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Donald Trump said, on Fox & Friends in 2020, that if voting access were expanded, meaning easing of barriers to voting for disabled people, poor people, rural people, working people … if voting were made easier, Trump said, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Why wouldn’t news media label that stance anti-democratic and shelve any so-called good-faith partisan debate? Call for the multiracial democracy we need? Illuminate the history that shows why we aren’t there yet?

Ari Berman has been tracking voter rights — and why “one person, one vote” is not the thing to memorize as a definition of U.S. democracy — for many years now. He’s the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones. His new book, which we discuss, is called Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People — and the Fight to Resist It.

The post Ari Berman on Minority Rule appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

In March, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”

But as Greg Shupak writes, even as evidence accumulates, denial is becoming socially and journalistically acceptable. Soon after the UN special rapporteur on the right to food asserted that Israel’s forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza was genocidal, Jonah Goldberg took to the LA Times to assure readers that Israel’s actions do not “amount to genocide,” and such claims are based on “Soviet propaganda” and Holocaust denial.

Years from now, we’ll hear about how everyone saw the nightmare and everyone opposed it. But history is now, and the world is watching. We’ll talk about real-time efforts to address the war on Palestinians with Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Plus, Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the shooting of Donald Trump.

The post Phyllis Bennis on Israel’s War on Palestinians appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

At some point, we will get tired of hearing news reports on “record heat” — because the “records” will continue to be broken, and “heat” will have stopped meaning what it once may have meant. Media play a role in moving us from questions about where to buy a good air conditioner to what stands in the way of addressing a public health catastrophe. One obstacle is utility companies. In February of last year, we spoke with Shelby Green at Energy and Policy Institute and Selah Goodson Bell at the Center for Biological Diversity, about their research on the topic.

Some listeners will know that veteran labor organizer and author Jane McAlevey died recently. The tributes are coming in, but I have little doubt in saying that McAlevey would care less for attention to her life in particular than to those of people she worked for, inside and outside of unions. CounterSpin spoke with her in 2018, when the #metoo campaign was coming to fore. We’ll hear some of that conversation.

The post Shelby Green and Selah Goodson Bell on Utility Profiteering / Jane McAlevey on #MeToo and Labor appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

The power of the algorithm is ever clearer in our lives, even if we don’t understand it. Algorithms don’t just guess at what you might like to buy: sometimes they’re determining whether you get a job, or keep it. Some 40 million people in the U.S. use online platforms to find work. The algorithms these platforms use create an environment where organizations enact rules for workers’ behavior, reward and sanction them based on that, but never allow workers to see these accountancies that make their lives unpredictable, much less work with them to develop measurements that would be meaningful.

Hatim Rahman has been working on this question. He’s assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and he’s author of a new book about it: Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers, forthcoming in August from University of California Press.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of climate disruption.

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