Flint ‘Really Comes Down to People Not Being Listened To’
“Flint is a failure on a number of different levels, a failure from the city level to the state level to the federal level.”
Janine Jackson
‘The Basic Problem Is a Lack of Central Strategy’
“We have chosen the most profitable form of ending the pandemic, which is a vaccine…. This is the only solution, given how out of control we’ve let this become, as a result of not being good at public health.”
‘The Lost Cause in Some Ways Won the Civil War’
“I think we’ve underestimated how much you can whip up racism and xenophobia by just saying, ‘You were robbed of this, you’ve got something to be angry over, you’ve got something to be aggrieved about.’”
‘Being Neutral in the Face of a Fascist Threat Is Not an Acceptable Journalistic Value’
“It’s not that they were unprepared, it’s that they were prepared for white nationalists, which to them is not a crisis in the same way that Black people demanding rights is.”
‘What Happened at the Capitol Could Not Happen Unless Police Allowed It to Happen’
“There has to be exposure and accountability for every single officer, for every single command official, for everyone who was involved in allowing, facilitating, this white supremacist mob violence.”
‘To Tell Stories of Communities That Are Authentic, You Have to Have a Conversation’
The Best of CounterSpin is a reflection of the sorts of conversations we hope offer some voice or context or information that you might not have heard elsewhere, or that might help you assess the news you are hearing.
‘We Structure the Market to Create Inequality’
“Just as we know that trickle-down, giving money to the rich, doesn’t help—we know long-term unemployment hurts. A lot of the people that are unemployed six, eight, ten months, they may never work again.”
‘He Is the King of Dirty Deals’
“He’s rushing through controversial hirings, filling commissions, changing the structure of the federal government to make it easier to move political appointees to become long-term career appointees.”
‘That Loss of Privacy Is the Monopoly Price’
“They should be treated with skepticism; as much as we love their products, as much as we depend on them—and so many of us still do—it’s also healthy to cast a skeptical eye on them. And to recognize the problems that technology can’t solve.”
‘Our Government Needs to Protect Workers, Not Corporations’
“American workers are sick and dying and broke from this pandemic. So why on Earth would you suspend the very laws that are supposed to protect us?”
‘This Order Puts the Weight of the Federal Government Behind Anti-Antiracism’
“Critical Race Theory [is] basically the idea that we still have problems with structural racism, and we don’t get away from those problems by not talking about it, by having the ‘see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ approach.”
‘These Executions, Disturbing as They Are, Have Flown Largely Under the Radar’
“Family members of the condemned are often erased and have been, for the most part, throughout this process, and I try to really keep that at the center of my work.”
‘The Chairmanship of Ajit Pai Has Been a Disaster’
“He’s failed in his job to make sure that the people come first, and not these companies.”
‘Emancipation Never Really Came to Agriculture’
“We say, on the one hand, that they’re essential; we would like to compel them to go to work so that the rest of us could have the comfort of still ordering in our T-bone steaks and what have you. But we don’t pay these people in a way that reflects how essential they are.”
‘The Ones With the Most Risk Are the Ones We’re Most Ill-Prepared to Reach with the Vaccine’
‘We’ve had decades-long underfunding of state and local public health departments, and just myopic funding cuts for pandemic preparedness. And this hampers coordinated access, and leaves us ill-prepared to reach the very populations that are the most affected by this virus.”
‘Trump Has Let the Military Establishment Do Everything It Wants to Do’
“Historically, siege was considered an act of war; to undertake a siege against a foreign population was considered an act of war. And these sanctions are basically a form of siege against a civilian population, to extort some sort of political goal from their leadership.”
‘Media Sources in the Democratic Party Tend to Be More Right-Wing’
“It’s the false balance that is putting us into a dangerous position, because you don’t want to give any sort of balance to the autocratic side here.”
‘We Basically Made Recovery Much, Much Harder Than It Has to Be’
“Centering workers in a genuine recovery, and really trying to rebuild economic security, it’s going to take movement on a bunch of fronts.”
Absolving Trump Means Erasing the Harm Done to Millions
The call to coddle Trump—like the same outlets’ insistence that it would be mean to send bankers whose fraud derailed the economy to jail—is evidence of the total divorce between real people’s lives and experiences, and the puppets and caricatures in media’s narrative.
‘Proposition 22 Is a Backlash to Victories Workers Have Had’
“We’ve seen the most explosive and energetic worker organizing on the ground that has ever been present in the gig community.”
