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(image: UAW)
This week on CounterSpin: One of the ways corporate media coverage of the now more than three-week-old GM strike is like coverage of every strike is the use, so common as to be invisible, of constructions like “GM strike leaves thousands of outside workers without a job,” “The strike may begin to drag the economy in places like Michigan,” or “In Flint, at least 1,200 truckers and production workers from suppliers have lost their jobs because of the strike.” To describe the intervention—the strike—as the cause of all attendant harms suggests that the status quo (to which the strike is a response) is blameless. Management’s predations—in this case including cutting healthcare, and using tiered wage scales and temporary workers to undercut pay and security—are daily and grinding and deeply unfair. But it’s the strike that’s “disruptive” and damaging and somehow out of bounds. We’ll talk about the strike reality outside media’s frame with Mike Elk, senior labor reporter and founder of Payday Report.
Transcript: ‘People Taking Action Inspires Other People’
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin Mike Elk Interview @http://www.fair.org/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin191011Elk.mp3″]
(image: CPBA)
Also on the show: California’s corporate lobbyists did not want the state to pass the Public Banking Act, but a coalition of non-lobbyists—worker and climate justice and civil rights and community groups—made it happen, and now California’s the second state in the country, after North Dakota, to allow jurisdictions to build banks that are local, accountable, environmentally responsible, and invested in the commons rather than profit-making. We’ll hear about that from Trinity Tran, co-founder and lead organizer for Public Bank LA and a founding member of the California Public Banking Alliance.
Transcript: ‘Finance Can Be Something That Helps Rather Than Harms Our Communities’
[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin Trinity Tran Interview @http://www.fair.org/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin191011Tran.mp3″]
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of Pentagon greenhouse emissions and Bernie Sanders’ heart attack.
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M’s Janie Jackson. I have to tell you that I really enjoy your podcasts very much. What impressed me so much is your journalistic insights on every topic of current affairs and your choice of guest. Very informative. The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person who is doing it. –Chinese Proverb
Public banking! Yes!
Counterspin covers again what corporate media ignores and/or distorts. On my local NPR station they give Ms. Jackson and Fair.org the 6 am Sunday morning slot – keeping almost everybody in the dark.