KPFA - CounterSpin

This week on CounterSpin:

The long-fought effort to get legal acknowledgement of the abuses of Iraqi detainees during the Iraq War is coming to a federal court in Virginia, with Al-Shimari v. CACI. Since the case was first filed in 2008, military contractor CACI has pushed some 20 times to have it dismissed. We got a reading on the case last year from Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Historians tell us that the Cold War is over, but the framing persists in news media that love a simple good guy versus bad guy story. Telling history through actual human beings makes it harder to come up with slam-dunk answers but can raise questions that are ultimately more useful for those seeking a peaceful planet. A new book provides a case study; it tells the story of Ted Hall who, as a young man, shared nuclear secrets from Los Alamos with the then–Soviet Union. Veteran investigative journalist Dave Lindorff has reported for numerous outlets and is author of Marketplace Medicine and This Can’t Be Happening, among other titles. We talk with him about his latest, Spy for No Country: The Story of Ted Hall, the Teenage Atomic Spy Who May Have Saved the World.

The post Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Lawsuit / Dave Lindorff on Spy for No Country appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

U.S. corporate media’s story about Haiti is familiar. Haiti, according to various recent reports, has “whipped from one calamity to another.” The country is a “cataclysm of hunger and terror,” “teetering on the brink of collapse,” “spiraling deeper into chaos” or else “descending into gang-fueled anarchistic chaos.” It’s “become a dangerously rudderless country.” According to one Florida paper’s editorial, “Haiti’s unrest” is now “becoming our problem,” as Floridians and the U.S. “struggle to help people in Haiti, although history suggests there are no answers.”

According to The Washington Post, there is one answer. They made space for a former ambassador to explain that 20 years ago in Haiti, “the worst outcomes were avoided through decisive American intervention. Today’s crisis might require it as well.”

We talk about what has to change — including Western media presentations that ignore or erase even recent history — with Chris Bernadel, from the Black Alliance for Peace‘s Haiti/Americas Team and Haitian grassroots group Moleghaf.

The post Chris Bernadel on Haiti appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

In the final quarter of 2023, after-tax corporate profits reached an all-time high of $2.8 trillion. As reported by Popular Information, corporate profit margins were at a level not seen since the 1950s, as increases in prices have outpaced increases in costs. Capitalism 101 says this shouldn’t happen, because competing companies will step in with lower prices and grab some market share, right? What’s different now? Abject greed, abetted by policy, and whistled past by the press corps. As one economist put it, “If people are paying $3 for a dozen eggs last week, they’ll pay $3 this week. And firms take advantage of that.” One reason we have details on “greedflation” is the work of the Groundwork Collaborative. We spoke with their economist and managing director of policy and research, Rakeen Mabud, a few months back.

Advocates warned that overturning Roe v. Wade would not be the end, and it wasn’t. The court is now entertaining challenge to the legality of the abortion medication mifepristone, used safely and effectively for decades, including invoking the 1873 Comstock Act, about sending “obscene materials” through the mail. The Washington Post has described it as a “confusing legal battle,” but CounterSpin got clarity from the Guttmacher Institute’s Rachel K. Jones last year.

The post Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation / Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

A senior UN human rights official told the BBC that there is a “plausible” case that Israel is using starvation in Gaza as a weapon of war, which is a war crime. Meanwhile, US citizens struggle to make sense of White House policy that seems to call for getting aid to Palestinians while pursuing a course of action that makes that aid necessary, if insufficient.

Phyllis Bennis is senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, an international advisor with Jewish Voice for Peace and a longtime UN-watcher. She joins us with thoughts on the evolving situation.

As reporter Alex Sammon outlined five years ago in the American Prospect, the Boeing scandal is an exemplar of the corporate crisis of our age. Putting resources that should’ve been put into safety into shareholder dividends and stock buybacks, selling warning indicators that alert pilots to problems with flight-control software as optional extras, and outsourcing engineering to coders in India making $9 an hour — these weren’t accidents; they were choices, made consciously, over time. So why are media so excited about Boeing’s CEO stepping down, as though his “taking one for the team” means changing the playbook? We hear from Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen.

The post Phyllis Bennis on Gaza Ceasefire Resolution / Robert Weissman on Boeing Scandal appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Climate disruption is the prime mover of a cascade of interrelated crises. We’re told that, when it comes to problems people need solved, rule number 1 is “follow the money.” Yet even as elite media talk about the climate crisis, they still … can’t … quite …connect images of floods or fires to the triumphant shareholder meetings of the fossil fuel companies.

Narrating the nightmare is not enough. We’ll talk about the latest research on climate coverage with Evlondo Cooper, senior writer at Media Matters.

Part of what FAIR’s been saying since our start in 1986 — when it was a fringe idea, that meant you were either alarmist or benighted or both — is that there is an inescapable conflict between media as a business and journalism as a public service. For a while, it was mainly about “fear and favor” — the ways corporate owners and sponsors influence the content of coverage. It’s more bare-knuckled now: Mass layoffs and takeovers force us to see how your local newspaper is really just an “asset” in a megacorporation’s portfolio, and will be treated that way — with zero evidence that a source of vital news and information is any different from a soap factory.

Rick Goldsmith’s new film is called Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink. We’ll hear from him about the film and the change it hopes to part of.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent coverage of Israel’s flour massacre.

The post Evlondo Cooper on Climate Coverage / Rick Goldsmith on Stripped for Parts appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

About this time seven years ago, John Deere was arguing, with a straight face, that farmers shouldn’t really “own” their tractors, because if they had access to the software involved, they might pirate Taylor Swift music. Things have changed since then, though industry still gets up and goes to court to say that even though you bought a tractor or a washing machine or a cellphone, it’s not really “yours,” so you can’t fix it if it breaks. Even if you know how, even if you can’t afford to buy a new one. More and more people, including lawmakers, are thinking that’s some anti-consumer, and anti-environment, nonsense. We get an update from Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association.

“Former President of Honduras Convicted in US of Aiding Drug Traffickers” is the current headline. You’d never guess from the reporting that Juan Orlando Hernández was a US ally, that the US supported the 2009 coup that went a long way toward creating Honduras’s current political landscape. We discuss that and more with Suyapa Portillo Villeda, advocate, organizer, and associate professor of Chicana/o–Latina/o transnational studies at Pitzer College, as well as author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras.

The post Gay Gordon-Byrne on Right to Repair / Suyapa Portillo Villeda on Honduran Ex-President Conviction appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Donald Trump, if he should become president again, could order the Department of Justice to drop any charges against him stemming from his fomenting of an insurrection aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 election. That’s just been enabled by the Supreme Court, which put off until April the legal case wherein Trump declares himself immune to criminal prosecution. We speak with Vox Court-watcher Ian Millhiser, who says he tries to reserve his “this is an exceptionally alarming decision” voice, but this occasion calls for it.

Then, we look at the anti-elder narrative promulgated by corporate news which says, “Keep up or you’re in the way,” and, “if you aren’t working 40 to 60 hours a week, you’re a societal drain.” Alfredo Lopez is a longtime organizer and activist, and a founder of the new group Radical Elders. We talk with him about the space the group seeks to fill.

The post Ian Millhiser on Supreme Court Trump Protection / Alfredo Lopez on Radical Elders appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Years ago, when media critics called attention to ways corporate media’s profit-driven nature negatively impacts the news, many would respond, “But what about the internet?” Nowadays, more people understand that constraints on a news outlet’s content have little to do with whether it’s on paper or online but on who owns it, who resources it, to whom is it accountable. The phrase “crisis of journalism” is often heard, but one thing hasn’t changed: If we ask the same questions about what we need from journalism, we will arrive at the same old, unsatisfactory responses.

Victor Pickard is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, and author, most recently, of Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society, from Oxford University Press. We talk to him about the crisis of journalism and its future.

Plus, Janine Jackson takes a quick look at coverage of criminalizing journalism, gag rules, and diversity data.

The post Victor Pickard on the Crisis of Journalism appeared first on KPFA.

Every day the US falls more out of step with the world in its support for Israel’s violent assault on Gaza. As International human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber said, US vetoes of ceasefires in the UN Security Council, after which thousands more were killed, mean the US is directly responsible for those deaths: “Complicity is a crime.” Many in the US press seem divorced from the idea of US responsibility, and somehow we’re seeing more of the opinions of random TV actors than of groups on the ground in Palestine, and international human rights and legal bodies.

We get some update on this unfolding nightmare from author and activist Gregory Shupak, from the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto, and from Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

The post Greg Shupak and Trita Parsi on the Assault on Gaza appeared first on KPFA.

People with disabilities are meant to be grateful, excited even, for whatever access or accommodation is made available for them to participate in daily life. Often, it’s implied that any violation of the rights of disabled people is an individual matter, to be fought over in the courts, instead of something to be acknowledged and addressed societally.

The Supreme Court recently dismissed, but did not do away with, a case that gets at the heart of enforcement of civil rights laws for people with disabilities — though not them alone. Acheson v. Laufer is an under-the-radar case that, our guest says, is “part of a pattern of far-right reactionaries weaponizing the courts to dismantle labor protections, housing rights and health guidelines.”

Ariel Adelman is a disability rights advocate and policy analyst. Her piece, with Hayley Brown, appeared recently on CEPR.net, the website of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. She’ll tell us what’s going on and what’s at stake.

Plus, Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of the racist Charles Stuart murder hoax.

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