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This week on CounterSpin:

The rate of inflation is down. Prices, though, are still high, and Americans are struggling to afford food, cars and housing. Speaking of people having trouble affording basic necessities, “cut up the credit cards” is  the sort of advice that politicians and pundits dole out and that corporate news media presents as a respectable worldview, worthy of our attention.

Another view acknowledges that the same people who earn wages also buy groceries. Pretending that we’re pitted against one another is not just misinformation but disinformation.

Rakeen Mabud is chief economist and managing director of policy and research at Groundwork Collaborative. They have new work on what’s driving grocery prices, and it doesn’t involve getting mad at people using food stamps. We’ll hear from her today on the show.

The post Rakeen Mabud on Greedflation appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

The Supreme Court ruled that federal agents can remove the razor wire that Texas state officials have set up along parts of the US/Mexico border. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said that ruling “allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America.” Elite news media, for their part, suggest we seek a hallowed middle ground between those two worldviews.

Corporate media are filled with debate about the best way to handle the “border crisis.” But what if there isn’t a border crisis so much as an absence of historical understanding, of empathy, of community resourcing, and of critical challenge to media and political narratives — including that reflected in President Joe Biden’s call to allow access for “those who deserve to be here”?

We hear from Aron Thorn, senior staff attorney at the Beyond Borders program of the Texas Civil Rights Project.

The post Aron Thorn on Texas Border Standoff appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

Elite media can give the impression that problems wax and wane along with their attention to them. So it is with police brutality. The news media has moved on, yet 2023 saw killings by law enforcement up from the previous year, which was up from the year before that. More than 1,200 people were killed, roughly three people every day, including not just those shot dead but also those fatally shocked by a stun gun, beaten, or restrained to death. Thirty-six percent of those killed were fleeing, and they were disproportionately Black.

Unheard in the news is the hard work of communities to reimagine public safety without punitive policing. We hear about it from Monifa Bandele from the Movement for Black Lives.

Also on the show:

Little research is more important or less acknowledged than Princeton’s (now UCLA’s) Martin Gilens and Northwestern’s Benjamin Page 2014 work on the translation of public opinion into public policy. Looking at more than 1,700 policies over 20 years, they concluded that where economic elite views diverged from those of the public — as they would — the public had “zero estimated impact upon policy change, while economic elites are still estimated to have a very large, positive, independent impact.”

Awareness of that fundamental disconnect is always relevant — but maybe especially when it comes to election season, where corporate coverage suggests we have an array of choices. How do we acknowledge flaws in the system while still encouraging people to participate and to fight the roadblocks to voting that we’re seeing right now?

We get at that with Svante Myrick, president of People For the American Way and former mayor of Ithaca, New York.

The post Monifa Bandele on Reimagining Public Safety / Svante Myrick on Roadblocks to Voting appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

US corporate news media’s initial response to Israel’s terror campaign against Palestinians, unleashed in the wake of the October 7 attack by Hamas, was characterized largely by legitimization, a rhetorical blank check for whatever Israel might do. Israel, the New York Times editorial board said, “is determined to break the power of Hamas, and in that effort it deserves the support of the United States and the rest of the world.”

We’re more than three months into that “effort.” The death toll for Palestinians is, conservatively, as we record on January 18, over 24,000 people. The UN secretary general calls Gaza a “graveyard for children.” So how does the Times’ assertion that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law” stand up now?

We talk this week with media critic, activist, and professor Gregory Shupak. He teaches English and media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto and is author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, from OR Books.

First, Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at some recent press coverage of immigration.

The post Gregory Shupak on Gaza and Genocide appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

The journalists at Yahoo Finance tell us that a Connecticut McDonald’s charging $18 for a combo meal has “sparked a nationwide debate” on escalating prices in the fast food industry. The outrage, readers are told, is “partly attributed” to a recent raise in the minimum wage — which has not yet gone into effect.

From there, we move on to how it isn’t just that poor working Joes will have to pay more for a Big Mac, but also there will be layoffs of fast-food employees. We meet Jose and Jim, who say they thought higher wages would be good, “considering the decline in tipping and increasing living costs.” Alas no, Yahoo explains: “The reality was harsher. The wage increase, while beneficial for some, has resulted in job losses for others, leading to a complex mix of gratitude and resentment among affected workers.”

Elite reporters seem so far removed from the daily reality of the bulk of the country that this doesn’t even ring weird to them. A raise in wages for fast food employees means fast food employees have to lose their jobs — that’s just, you know, “economics.”

We get a different view on raising the minimum wage from Sebastian Martinez Hickey, researcher for the EARN (Economic Analysis and Research Network) team at the Economic Policy Institute.

Also on the show:

A largely unspoken part of media’s wage conversation is the whole sector of workers whose pay rates are based in enslavement. In 2015, CounterSpin learned about tipped wages from Saru Jayaraman, co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. We hear part of that conversation.

The post Sebastian Martinez Hickey on Minimum Wage; Saru Jayaraman on History of Tipping appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

It was a big deal when Jewish Americans who oppose US support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza filled New York’s Grand Central Terminal. But not big enough to make the front page of the local paper, the New York Times. US journalists invoke the First Amendment a lot, but not so much when it extends to regular folks using their individual voices, sometimes at significant personal risk, to say NO to something the US government is doing in their name.

Some listeners may remember marching with thousands of others in advance of the US war on Iraq, only to come home and find the paper or TV station ignored them utterly, or distorted their effort and their message — as when NBC’s Tom Brokaw reported a Washington, DC, anti-war march of at least 100,000 people, met with a couple hundred pro-war counter-protesters, as: “Opponents and supporters of the war marched in cities across the nation on Saturday.”

“Protest is the voice of the people,” our guest’s organization states. We talk with Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, this week on CounterSpin. Defending Rights & Dissent aims to invigorate the Bill of Rights and, crucially, to protect our right to political expression.

The post Chip Gibbons on the Right to Protest appeared first on KPFA.

Every week, CounterSpin presents a look “behind the headlines” of the mainstream news. Not because headlines are false, necessarily, but because the full story is rarely reflected there. Many — most — conversations we need to have, must happen around corporate news media, while deconstructing and re-imagining the discourse they’re pumping out, day after day.

Guests featured in this special “best of” episode include:

Paul Hudson, president of FlyersRights, on air travel chaos;

CounterSpin is thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters, and advocates who appear on the show. They help us to see the world more clearly, while enlightening the role we can play in creating change. This is just a small selection of these valued guests.

The post Best of CounterSpin 2023 appeared first on KPFA.

People in the U.S., the story goes, value few things more than individual freedom and money. So you’d think the way an individual uses their money would be sacrosanct. A sign of where we’re at are currently congressional efforts to put people in prison, and fine them millions of dollars, for choosing not to buy products from countries that are not declared “official enemies” by, well, presumably whoever’s in the White House at the moment. The anti-boycott measure the House Foreign Affairs Committee is pushing may never see daylight, of course, but it indicates a willingness by some in elected office to use state power to silence and sanction anyone using their voice in dissent of official actions — in this one case, of people critical of Israel’s ongoing mass murder and displacement of Palestinians.

The work to shut down opposition to the siege of Gaza, and U.S. facilitation of it, reminds Americans of what it means when powerful institutions, including in the media, combine a decidedly selective understanding of free expression with a vehement desire to enforce it.

We talk about that with Wadie Said, professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School, and author of the book Crimes of Terror: The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions.

The post Wadie Said on the New McCarthyism appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

UN Climate talks have ended with an agreement that, as New York Times headlines would suggest, “Strikes a Deal to Transition Away From Fossil Fuels.” Headlines, which are all that many people read, are often misleading, and sometimes they aggressively deflect from the point of the story, which in this case is that everyone who wasn’t a polluting corporate entity came away from COP28 angry, worried, and frustrated at the way that fossil fuel companies have been able to not only endanger everyone with their actions but also hornswoggle their way into media debate, such that we’re all supposed to consider how to balance the life of humanity on the planet with the profit margins of a handful of billionaires.

Almost precisely a year ago, CounterSpin discussed fossil fuel corporations’ brazen lie factory with Richard Wiles, director of the Center for Climate Integrity. We hear some of that  conversation again today.

Also on today’s show:

When you talk about climate, a lot of folks go in their head to a picture of clouds, butterflies and wolves. Climate policy is about money and profit and the meaninglessness of all those beautiful vistas you might imagine — at least, that’s how many politicians think of it. We addressed that with Matthew Cunningham-Cook from the Lever in August of this year. And we hear some of that discussion this week as well.

The post Climate Disruption Filtered Through Corporate Media appeared first on KPFA.

This week on CounterSpin:

As we record on December 7, the news from Gaza continues to be horrific: The Washington Post reports, citing Gaza Health Ministry reports, that Israel’s continued assault throughout the region has killed at least 350 people in the past 24 hours, which brings the death toll of the Israeli military campaign, launched after the October 7 attack by Hamas that killed a reported 1,200 people, to more than 17,000.

In this country, Columbia University has suspended two student groups protesting in support of Palestinian human rights and human beings, though the official message couldn’t specify which policies, exactly, had been violated.

There are many important and terrible things happening in the world right now — from fossil fuel companies working to undo any democratic restraints on their ability to profit from planetary destruction; to drugmakers who’ve devastated the lives of millions using the legal system to say money, actually, can substitute for accountability; to an upcoming election that is almost too much to think about, and the Beltway press corps acting like it’s just another day.

But the devastation of Gaza and the vehement efforts to silence anyone who wants to challenge it — and the failure of those efforts, as people nevertheless keep speaking up, keep protesting — is the story for today.

We speak with Sonya Meyerson-Knox, communications director of Jewish Voice for Peace.

But first, Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of climate change.

The post Sonya Meyerson-Knox on Jewish Voice for Peace appeared first on KPFA.