KPFA - CounterSpin

This week on CounterSpin:

Headlined “The Cash Monster Was Insatiable,” a 2022 New York Times piece reported insurance companies gaming Medicare Advantage, originally presented as a “low-cost” alternative to traditional Medicare. One company pressed doctors to add additional illnesses to the records of patients they hadn’t seen for weeks: Dig up enough new diagnoses, and you could win a bottle of champagne. Some companies cherry-picked healthier seniors for enrollment.

Such maneuvers don’t lead to good health outcomes but serve the real goal: netting private insurers more money. Here to discuss new research on the problem and the response is David Himmelstein, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program and co-author of this new analysis of Medicare Advantage.

You may get the impression from media that marijuana is legal everywhere now, that it’s moved from blight to business, if you will. It’s not as simple as that, and many people harmed by decades of criminalization have yet to see any benefit from decriminalization. Our guest Tauhid Chappell has tracked the issue for years now; he teaches the country’s first graduate-level course on equity movements in the cannabis industry, at Thomas Jefferson University.

But first, Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Julian Assange.

The post David Himmelstein on Medicare Dis-Advantage / Tauhid Chappell on Cannabis Equity appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote dozens of pages justifying his decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, stating the Constitution does not confer the right to determine whether or when to give birth. None of those pages mention his intention to make the United States “a place of godliness,” or his belief that there can be no compromise on such concerns, because “one side or the other is going to win.” Yet those are thoughts Alito freely expressed with a woman he thought was just a stranger at a public event. Will elite news media now suggest we just go back to considering the Supreme Court a neutral body, deserving of life terms because they’re above the fray of politics? Jim Naureckas is editor of FAIR.org and the newsletter Extra!. We talk to him about this.

The news that “the economy” is doing great on paper doesn’t square with the tone-deaf messaging from food companies about mysteriously stubborn high prices. Nothing suggests a media universe that takes seriously the widespread struggle to meet basic needs. This may explain the failure to find the story in the upsurge in dollar stores, supposedly filling a void for low-income people, but actually just another avenue for ripping them off. We talk about that with Kennedy Smith from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

The post Jim Naureckas on Secret Alito Tape / Kennedy Smith on Dollar Store Invasion appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Donald Trump told a Las Vegas crowd earlier this month that, if elected, the “first thing” he would do would be to end the IRS practice of taxing tips as part of workers’ regular income. Unfortunately, Trump can count on a general haziness in the public mind on the impact of “tipped wages,” more helpfully labeled subminimum wages. That’s partly due to a corporate press corps who, through the decades-long fight on the issue, always give pride of place to the industry narrative that, as a Chicago Sun-Times headline said, “Getting Rid of Tipped Wages in Illinois Would Be the Final Blow to Many Restaurants.”

As president of the group One Fair Wage, Saru Jayaraman is a leading mythbuster on the history, practice, and impact of tipping. CounterSpin talked with her in November 2015. We’ll hear that conversation again today, when much of what she shares is still widely unexplored and misunderstood.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of child labor.

The post Saru Jayaraman on Taxing Tipped Wages appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Surprising no one, Donald Trump and his sycophants responded to his 34-count conviction on charges of lying in business records by claiming that the trial was “rigged,” the judge and jury corrupt, and that it was somehow Joe Biden’s doing. We’ll talk with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, about press response to the trial and the verdict.

For some people the violent police crackdown on peaceful college students protesting their schools’ investments in Israel’s war on Palestinians has been eye-opening. For others, it’s one more example of the employment of law enforcement to brutally enforce corporate power. The fight led by Indigenous women against the Dakota Access pipeline is not long enough ago to have been forgotten. We’ll hear a bit from an August 2017 interview with North Dakota organizer Kandi Mossett.

The post Matt Gertz on Trump Trial Verdict / Kandi Mossett on Dakota Access Struggle appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

In 2023, the California legislature passed legislation that said that big corporations doing business in the state have to tell the public how much pollution they’re emitting throughout their supply chain. But this past January, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other industry groups challenged those laws, claiming that making companies disclose the impact of their actions — in this case, their emissions — would force them to publicly express a “speculative, noncommercial, controversial and politically charged message.” That supposedly would make the laws a “pressure campaign” aimed at shaping company behavior.

Unfortunately, some courts are indulging this notion that regulation should be illegal because it forces companies to say stuff they’d rather not say. Fortunately, other courts are calling this self-serving nonsense self-serving nonsense. Public information, our right to know, is on the line here.

Katherine Li addresses this issue in a recent piece for the Lever, where she is an editorial fellow.

The post Katherine Li on Corporations’ First Amendment Dodge appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

As an historic catastrophe, the deep and myriad impacts of Israel’s assault on Palestinians will not be fully understood until years from now, if then. That only adds urgency to present-day resistance to the collateral assault — on the ability to witness, to record, and to remember.

When we spoke with historian Ellen Schrecker in 2017, she noted that the power of the movement associated with Joseph McCarthy was not the man himself but the “collaboration of the employers, of the mainstream media, of the legal system, you name it, to go along with this anti-Communist purge.” And while many people feel comforted that McCarthy the man was eventually censured by the Senate, the truth is, “the American political spectrum narrowed [and] a whole bunch of ideas and causes kind of disappeared from American political discourse and American political life.”

We hear again today from historian and author Ellen Schrecker, co-editor of the new book The Right to Learn: Resisting the Ring-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, from Beacon Press.

The post Ellen Schrecker on the Attack on Academic Freedom appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Steven Rosenfeld reports on election transparency, among other electoral issues, for Voting Booth. We hear from him about kinds of election interference we ignore at our peril.

Some elite media-designated “smart people” have determined, “Citizens United, what? It’s folks who give ten bucks to a candidate that are really messing up the system.” We explore that notion with Ian Vandewalker, senior counsel for the Elections & Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

The post Steven Rosenfeld on Election Transparency / Ian Vandewalker on Small Donors appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

CNN’s Jake Tapper is mad about college students protesting their institutions’ and their government’s support for Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza — because they’re preventing him, by his account, from covering Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. Tapper and CNN, we’re to understand, are powerless to decide what they cover, and incapable of understanding that the clear, core demand of students protesting is that government (and media) not just chat about but act to change U.S. enabling of Israel’s genocidal assault.

People, in media and elsewhere, who are used to unequivocal U.S. support for Israel’s actions, are seeing the ground shift, and they’re shook. What happens now is critical — first for Palestinians and Israelis, of course, but also for the U.S. press and their handlers.

We talk about latest developments in Gaza with Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at protester/press relations, “outside agitators” and TikTok censorship.

The post Ahmad Abuznaid on Rafah Invasion appeared first on KPFA.

We’re now seeing the impacts of the reality that corporate media, as well as corporate-funded universities, will always side with official power — as they present students sitting quietly in tents in protest of genocide as violent terrorists. But in fact, we’ve been seeing it for decades, as corporate media spin narratives about people of color as both violent and lazy, and the socio-economic status quo as the best possible option, even as millions of people increasingly recognize that it means a terrible life for them.

Many people, at the same time, are deeply interested in how different media, telling different stories, can change our understanding of our past, our present, and our future. Joseph Torres is currently senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press and co-author with Juan Gonzalez of News for All the People. Writer, musician and communications strategist Collette Watson is with Black River Life. They both are part of the project Media 2070, which aims to highlight how media can serve as a lever for racial justice, and how that includes changing entrenched media narratives about Black people.

Their co-authored article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm,” appears in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (5/23).

The post Joseph Torres & Collette Watson on Media for Social Justice appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Many college students appear to believe that learning about the world means not just gaining knowledge but acting on it. Campuses across the country — Rutgers, MIT, Ohio State, Boston University, Emerson, Tufts, and on and on — are erupting in protest over their institutions’ material support for Israel’s war on Palestinians and for the companies making the weapons. And the colleges’ official responses are gutting the notion that elite higher education entails respect for the free expression of ideas. Students for Justice in Palestine is working with many of these students. We talk with Sam from National SJP about unfolding events.

Then, app-based companies, including Uber and DoorDash, are adding new service fees and telling customers they have to, because of new rules calling on them to improve wages and conditions for workers. The rather transparent hope is that, with a lift from lazy media reporting on worry about more expensive coffee, folks will get mad and blame those greedy bicycle deliverers. We ask Sally Dworak-Fisher, senior staff attorney at National Employment Law Project, to break that story down.

Plus, host Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the TikTok ban.

The post Sam on Students for Justice in Palestine / Sally Dworak-Fisher on Delivery Workers appeared first on KPFA.