{"id":343570,"date":"2018-01-13T05:17:48","date_gmt":"2018-01-13T04:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/this-is-not-a-time-for-false-equivalence\/"},"modified":"2018-01-13T05:17:48","modified_gmt":"2018-01-13T04:17:48","slug":"this-is-not-a-time-for-false-equivalence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/this-is-not-a-time-for-false-equivalence\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018This Is Not a Time for False Equivalence\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>This is a lightly edited transcript of the December 29, 2017, year-end <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/best-of-counterspin-2017\/\">Best of <strong>CounterSpin<\/strong> episode<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>*****<\/p>\n<div id=\"wrapperMI_0\" class=\"wrap-mjp  \" style=\"padding:5px 0px 40px 0px;margin:0px;width:100%\">\n<div class=\"Eabove-mjp\" id=\"Eabove-mjp_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"subwrap-MI\">\n<div class=\"jp-innerwrap\">\n<div class=\"innerx\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerleft\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerright\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innertab\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"interface-mjp verdana-mjp\" style=\"height:71px\" id=\"interfaceMI_0\">\n<div class=\"MI-image Himg right-mjp\" id=\"MI_image_0\" style=\"width:auto;height:71px;overflow:hidden\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"T_mp3j_0\" class=\"player-track-title left-mjp norm-mjp plain-mjp childNorm-mjp childPlain-mjp\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"bars_holder\">\n<div class=\"loadMI_mp3j\" id=\"load_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"poscolMI_mp3j\" id=\"poscol_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"posbarMI_mp3j\" id=\"posbar_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"P-Time-MI_0\" class=\"jp-play-time\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"T-Time-MI_0\" class=\"jp-total-time\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"statusMI_0\" class=\"statusMI\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"transport-MI\">\n<div class=\"play-mjp\" id=\"playpause_mp3j_0\">Play<\/div>\n<div class=\"stop-mjp\" id=\"stop_mp3j_0\">Stop<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"buttons-wrap-mjp\" id=\"buttons-wrap-mjp_0\">\n<div class=\"mp3j-popout-MI\" id=\"lpp_mp3j_0\">pop out<\/div>\n<div id=\"download_mp3j_0\" class=\"dloadmp3-MI\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"mjp-volwrap\">\n<div class=\"MIsliderVolume\" id=\"vol_mp3j_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerExt1\" id=\"innerExt1_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"innerExt2\" id=\"innerExt2_0\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"Ebetween-mjp\" id=\"Ebetween-mjp_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"listwrap_mp3j\" id=\"L_mp3j_0\">\n<div class=\"wrapper-mjp\">\n<div class=\"playlist-colour\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"wrapper-mjp\">\n<ul class=\"ul-mjp darken1-mjp verdana-mjp med-mjp childNorm-mjp childPlain-mjp left-mjp\" id=\"UL_mp3j_0\">\n<li><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<div id=\"mp3j_finfo_0\" class=\"mp3j-finfo\">\n<div class=\"mp3j-finfo-sleeve\">\n<div id=\"mp3j_finfo_gif_0\" class=\"mp3j-finfo-gif\"><\/div>\n<div id=\"mp3j_finfo_txt_0\" class=\"mp3j-finfo-txt\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"mp3j-finfo-close\" id=\"mp3j_finfo_close_0\">X<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div id=\"mp3j_dlf_0\" class=\"mp3j-dlframe\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"mp3j-nosolution\" id=\"mp3j_nosolution_0\"><\/div>\n<div class=\"Ebelow-mjp\" id=\"Ebelow-mjp_0\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p>MP3jPLAYLISTS.MI_0 = [<br \/>\n\t{ name: &#8220;1. CounterSpin Best of CounterSpin 2017 Full Show &#8220;, formats: [&#8220;mp3&#8221;], mp3: &#8220;aHR0cDovL3d3dy5mYWlyLm9yZy9hdWRpby9jb3VudGVyc3Bpbi9Db3VudGVyU3BpbjE3MTIyOS5tcDM=&#8221;, counterpart:&#8221;&#8221;, artist: &#8220;&#8221;, image: &#8220;true&#8221;, imgurl: &#8220;&#8221; }<br \/>\n];<\/p>\n<p>MP3jPLAYERS[0] = { list:MP3jPLAYLISTS.MI_0, tr:0, type:&#8217;MI&#8217;, lstate:true, loop:false, play_txt:&#8217;Play&#8217;, pause_txt:&#8217;Pause&#8217;, pp_title:&#8217;FAIR&#8217;, autoplay:false, download:true, vol:80, height:71, cssclass:&#8217; &#8216;, popout_css:{ enabled:true, \t\t\tcolours: [&#8220;#fff&#8221;, &#8220;rgba(201,207,232,0.35)&#8221;, &#8220;rgb(241,241,241)&#8221;, &#8220;rgba(245,5,5,0.7)&#8221;, &#8220;rgba(92,201,255,0.8)&#8221;, &#8220;transparent&#8221;, &#8220;transparent&#8221;, &#8220;#525252&#8221;, &#8220;#525252&#8221;, &#8220;#768D99&#8221;, &#8220;#47ACDE&#8221;, &#8220;&#8221;, 600, 200 ],<br \/>\n\t\t\tcssInterface: { &#8220;color&#8221;: &#8220;#525252&#8221; },<br \/>\n\t\t\tcssTitle: { &#8220;left&#8221;: &#8220;16px&#8221;, &#8220;right&#8221;:&#8221;16px&#8221;, &#8220;top&#8221;:&#8221;8px&#8221; },<br \/>\n\t\t\tcssImage: { &#8220;overflow&#8221;: &#8220;hidden&#8221;, &#8220;width&#8221;:&#8221;auto&#8221;, &#8220;height&#8221;:&#8221;71px&#8221;  },<br \/>\n\t\t\tcssFontSize: { &#8220;title&#8221;: &#8220;16px&#8221;, &#8220;caption&#8221;: &#8220;11.2px&#8221;, &#8220;list&#8221;: &#8220;12px&#8221; },<br \/>\n\t\t\tclasses: { interface:&#8217; verdana-mjp&#8217;, title:&#8217; left-mjp norm-mjp plain-mjp childNorm-mjp childPlain-mjp&#8217;, image:&#8217; Himg right-mjp&#8217;, poscol:&#8221;, ul:&#8217; darken1-mjp verdana-mjp med-mjp childNorm-mjp childPlain-mjp left-mjp&#8217; }} };<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.fair.org\/audio\/counterspin\/CounterSpin171229.mp3\"><strong>MP3 Link<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson:<\/b> Welcome to the Best of <b>CounterSpin<\/b> for 2017. I\u2019m Janine Jackson. Each week, <b>CounterSpin<\/b> looks behind the headlines, asking what and who might be left out of the stories corporate media are telling, what questions are unasked, what alternatives unconsidered, and, at the end of the year, we revisit just a few of the conversations it\u2019s been our pleasure to bring you. There were many, many important stories this year, events bewildering and significant in themselves, media coverage that shaped public understanding, activists and journalists and researchers who brought those stories home. We of course can only revisit a few now, but you can find all of them on <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/\"><b>FAIR.org<\/b><\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>You\u2019re listening to the Best of <b>CounterSpin<\/b> 2017. <b>CounterSpin<\/b> is brought to you each week by the media watch group FAIR.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">***<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_7518602\" style=\"max-width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-7518602\" src=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/EllenSchrecker-1024x576.jpg\" alt=\"Ellen Schrecker\" width=\"350\" height=\"197\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Ellen Schrecker: &#8220;What is happening today is the fruit of 40 years of a concerted right-wing conservative effort.&#8221;<br \/><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Back in January, major media were roiling with tales about Russian hacking of the presidential election, and maybe Vermont\u2019s electrical grid. Outlets like the <b>Washington Post<\/b> were promoting a <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/rather-than-exposing-propaganda-wapo-shows-how-its-done\/\">report<\/a> from an anonymous group on websites accused of purveying fake news in service of a Russian campaign to undermine US interests and a new website purported to serve as a watchlist on professors deemed guilty of advancing leftist propaganda in the classroom.<\/p>\n<p>As many felt chilly echoes of the McCarthy era, <b>CounterSpin<\/b> <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/were-seeing-the-result-of-a-40-year-assault-on-the-liberal-mainstream\/\">spoke with Ellen Schrecker<\/a>, retired professor of American history at Yeshiva University, and author of <i>Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p><b>Ellen Schrecker:<\/b> I think the main thing that we have to be careful about is not to confuse McCarthy with McCarthyism, because McCarthyism was a much broader movement, and, similarly, not to think that Trump is everything that is happening today. Because I think what is happening today is the fruit of 40 years of a concerted right-wing conservative effort to delegitimize a lot of what we would consider liberal\/moderate orthodoxy, to delegitimize things like climate change, for example, which is pretty scary.<\/p>\n<p>McCarthyism was the same way. What we saw in the 1950s was a very broad-based movement, designed ostensibly to eliminate all the influence of American Communism, and all the people involved with it, and the ideas and the organizations connected to it, to eliminate that from American life. These people were certainly innocent of crimes, they hadn\u2019t done anything wrong. But politically, these were people on the left. These were people, many of them, probably the vast majority of them, the people who were called up by committees or blacklisted, had had some connection to the American Communist Party. And who were still willing to defy the status quo, the sort of standard Cold War consensus, enough to refuse to name names, to refuse to collaborate with this witch-hunting machine. And it was a machine.<\/p>\n<p>And so what we saw was a drive against the left, and one that was incredibly successful. That\u2019s the thing that we\u2014we can\u2019t just look at the 1950s and say, \u201cOh, McCarthy, you know, he was censured by the Senate, everything turned out fine.\u201d Well, everything didn\u2019t turn out fine. We ended up with a war in Vietnam, among other things. But also what had happened was that the American political spectrum narrowed, that a whole bunch of ideas and causes disappeared from American political discourse and American political life.<\/p>\n<p>And I can give you examples, from the labor movement that stopped trying to organize white-collar workers, for example. Or from the civil rights movement, which in the late 1940s had a very strong economic justice component, and that was completely wiped out, largely because many of the people who were pushing this broader notion of what civil rights was did have some Communist connections, were concerned about issues of economic class, and were simply booted out of the civil rights movement, the mainstream civil rights movement, which was trying to protect itself against some very ferocious red-baiting.<\/p>\n<p>So what we see as a result of McCarthyism is a much narrower range of political ideas that impoverished the American political scene and put a stop to creating a much stronger safety net, for example.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, the damage from McCarthyism is not just people losing their jobs or going to jail, but all of the movements, all of the projects, all of the books and ideas that weren\u2019t out there in American life. And that\u2019s the kind of thing that\u2019s very scary, because we\u2019ll never know.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">***<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_5585351\" style=\"max-width: 361px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5585351\" src=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/AmitNarang.jpg\" alt=\"Amit Narang (image: RT)\" width=\"351\" height=\"176\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Amit Narang: &#8220;President Trump has made claims that he wants to get rid of 75 percent of existing regulations\u2014without specifying, of course, which ones those are.&#8221; (image: <strong>RT<\/strong>)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson:<\/b> The Trump administration recently revised the rules for public school lunches, freeing schools from the scourge of Obama Era regulation requiring they make plans to reduce salt, offer whole grains and serve plain instead of flavored milk. It\u2019s sick, but it\u2019s no surprise. Early in the year, the White House issued an executive order that for every one new regulation, two had to be repealed. We talked about such cartoonish ideas <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/trump-wants-to-take-an-axe-to-the-regulatory-state\/\">with Amit Narang<\/a>, regulatory policy advocate at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.citizen.org\/congress-watch-0\">Public Citizen\u2019s Congress Watch<\/a>. I asked about a claim from then\u2013press secretary Sean Spicer that the negative response to the executive order was based on \u201cwildly inaccurate\u201d presumptions about its impact.<\/p>\n<p><b>Amit Narang:<\/b> That claim by Mr. Spicer is laughable. Essentially what he\u2019s saying is that, oh no, this executive order is not going to operate the way we intend it to operate, which is to make it almost impossible to regulate in areas that are key to protecting the public\u2019s health, safety; making sure Wall Street is accountable to the public and not acting recklessly; environmental protections.<\/p>\n<p>And let\u2019s be clear, President Trump has made claims that he wants to get rid of 75 percent of existing regulations\u2014without specifying, of course, which ones those are\u2014but he can\u2019t do that without touching bedrock, fundamental protections that the public takes for granted, frankly, and that Congress has produced legislation to protect, that is some of the most popular legislation that Congress has ever produced, stuff like the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Dodd-Frank Act.<\/p>\n<p>The general idea is false that regulations somehow cost the economy; in fact, if anything is true, it\u2019s the opposite. And we saw that with the Wall Street crash. Massive deregulation of Wall Street led to $14 to $22 trillion in lost wealth to this country. That was average Americans, mostly, bearing those losses\u2014and losing their homes, OK? To be clear, regulation protects jobs, it protects our economy.<\/p>\n<p>Now, of course, big businesses and corporate America and conservatives that are ideologically opposed to regulation want to paint this picture, which is completely a false picture, with respect to the presumption underlying this executive order, that there are tons of old regulations that serve no purpose, that are all dusty and laying around and can be easily repealed, and of course, since they serve no purpose, they must be costing corporate America a lot of money\u2014that\u2019s a little bit of sarcasm; I don\u2019t know how they reconcile that\u2014but even that presumption is false.<\/p>\n<p>Why? Because President Obama initiated in 2011 what\u2019s called regulatory Retrospective Review process, where he asked agencies to look at the rules that they had on their books and see if, in fact, there were any of these old regulations that really weren\u2019t serving any purpose, that would be able to be repealed without harming the public. And they did find some. They didn\u2019t find that many, and frankly, they didn\u2019t come anywhere close to pleasing corporate America with this initiative. But in any case, they did find some, and they did repeal them.<\/p>\n<p>And this is a real problem for the Trump administration\u2019s implementation of this executive order. Because under the executive order, in order for agencies to put out new regulations\u2014let\u2019s say, updated lead standards in drinking water, which is not a hypothetical; the EPA\u2019s supposed to do that in 2017\u2014in order for the EPA to do that, they have to find a regulation that doesn\u2019t serve any purpose, that\u2019s just sitting on the books, that\u2019s costing the energy industry money, to get rid of. Well, if those regulations have already been identified by the Obama administration and have already been repealed, what are they going to turn to?<\/p>\n<p>Then we start talking about regulations that absolutely still serve a purpose, that still protect the public\u2014say, getting mercury out of the water, essentially, by requiring power plants to not spew mercury out when they spew out emissions that eventually fall into the water that then make its way into the food that we eat. Are we going to sacrifice a mercury regulation in order to then regulate lead in drinking water?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">***<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_5585528\" style=\"max-width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5585528\" src=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/MizueAizeki.jpg\" alt=\"Mizue Aizeki\" width=\"350\" height=\"197\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Mizue Aizeki: &#8220;The exclusion and expulsion of particular groups of people who have been deemed a threat, or un-American, has very much been part of the whole project of nation-building since the very beginning.&#8221;<br \/><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson:<\/b> The human harms of the Trump White House accrue by the day but one of the first impacts was felt by immigrant communities, already targeted by the previous administration. As policies were pushed expanding the category of people prioritized for deportation, some media got caught up in efforts to distinguish \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad\u201d immigrants. The powerful, poorly understood frame of criminality so shaped the conversation that the statement from our guest that \u201chuman beings that happen to be noncitizens have fundamental rights, too,\u201d sounds radical. <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/the-basis-of-a-humane-immigration-policy-is-to-respect-people-as-human-beings\/\">Mizue Aizeki<\/a> is deputy director of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.immigrantdefenseproject.org\/\">Immigrant Defense Project<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><b> <\/b><b>Mizue Aizeki:<\/b> Just to put it a little bit into context, I think the broader problem is, especially over the past 20 years, that we have experienced the rapid development of the world\u2019s largest system to imprison and exile immigrants. And the heart of the system has been this government-constructed state of emergency that really relies on racialized fear, and has conscripted the entire criminal legal system, from the police to the courts to the prisons to probation, and eternally brands people as so-called criminals. So in many ways, that\u2019s the heart of criminalization, right, where a system of criminalization basically expands and legitimizes surveillance and regulation and punishment of these certain peoples and communities, while at the same time determining that they don\u2019t deserve any protection.<\/p>\n<p>I think in terms of the particular context of immigration, the exclusion and expulsion of particular groups of people who have been deemed a threat, or un-American, has very much been part of the whole project of nation-building since the very beginning, right, where certain bodies represented an imminent or inherent threat, from Native Americans to formerly enslaved people, and fast forward to the current day, where the target is people from Muslim countries, or criminalized immigrants.<\/p>\n<p>I think where we really saw convergence of this is in the 1990s, where a very highly punitive frame was applied to so many aspects of US policy, whether in welfare or the crime bill, and in the case of immigrants, these particularly harsh immigration policies, which rapidly expanded the number of criminal offenses that would subject someone to deportation, but also made deportation a mandatory minimum in the vast majority of cases. It\u2019s at this particular moment that we\u2019re living in, the convergence of the war on the poor and then on immigrants, and overall on criminalized people of color, converged with these themes of personal responsibility, law and order, and the rule of law, that we\u2019ve been fighting against since the 1990s.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">***<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_5586708\" style=\"max-width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5586708\" src=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/DanGoldberg.jpg\" alt=\"Dan Goldberg\" width=\"350\" height=\"175\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Dan Goldberg: &#8220;What\u2019s particularly troubling in that is not just that he held that for-profit corporations are people with legal rights, but that those rights trump the rights of everyday Americans.&#8221;<br \/><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson:<\/b> Corporate media didn\u2019t seem to have a lot of hard questions for Supreme Court candidate, now Justice, Neil Gorsuch. Even as he danced around questions in his hearing, the <b>New York Times<\/b> announced he\u2019d probably be confirmed. The <b>Chicago Tribune<\/b> said he earned it. <b>USA Today<\/b> reported he \u201csailed through.\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/hes-going-to-find-a-way-to-rule-with-the-corporations\/\">Dan Goldberg<\/a>, legal director at the group <a href=\"https:\/\/www.afj.org\/\">Alliance for Justice<\/a>, didn\u2019t share the sanguinity. We talked about Gorsuch\u2019s record of, for one thing, holding that corporations are people.<\/p>\n<p><b>Dan Goldberg:<\/b> He was on the original <i>Hobby Lobby<\/i> case. This is the case regarding whether for-profit corporations have a right, under healthcare law, to deny critical reproductive healthcare and access to contraceptives to their women employees. And what\u2019s particularly troubling in that is not just that he held that for-profit corporations are people with legal rights, but that those rights trump the rights of everyday Americans. Nowhere in his decision in <i>Hobby Lobby<\/i> does he talk about even the need to balance the interests of the women who rely on employer-sponsored healthcare. It was a callous decision, it was not legally right, and it just demonstrates how results-oriented he is.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">***<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_5587334\" style=\"max-width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5587334\" src=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/RaedJarrar.jpg\" alt=\"Raed Jarrar\" width=\"350\" height=\"175\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Raed Jarrar: &#8220;Iraq is not getting to a point where we\u2019re opening a new page. What\u2019s going on now is&#8230;a continuation of the destruction of the country.&#8221;<br \/><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson:<\/b> When more than 200 men, women and children were killed in a US airstrike in Mosul in northern Iraq last spring, the <b>Los Angeles Times<\/b> offered counsel to US readers, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/opinion\/op-ed\/la-oe-mcmanus-syria-isis-trump-20170329-story.html\">explaining<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The death toll is a tragedy, but it\u2019s also a grim sign that the long offensive against Islamic State begun by President Obama in 2014 is moving rapidly towards success. And for that President Trump deserves some credit.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><strong>CounterSpin<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/there-are-no-signs-that-iraq-can-be-bombed-into-stability\/\">spoke with Raed Jarrar<\/a>, government relations manager at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.afsc.org\/\">American Friends Service Committee<\/a>. I asked him how we disrupt the narrative that says that the mass slaughter of Iraqi civilians is not just unavoidable, but somehow a sign that we\u2019re getting closer to peace.<\/p>\n<p><b>Raed Jarrar:<\/b> I would intercede with two points. The first one is that the level of civilian casualties due to US airstrikes, and to those forces supported and aided by the US, might actually reach to the point of war crimes. So we\u2019re not just talking about a tactical difference\u2014you know, we\u2019re offending some groups; the US apparently has changed its rules of engagement in the last few months, and this came after promises by President Trump to take the gloves off against ISIS. And he said that we have been \u201crestrained,\u201d we have to take it all the way. So there is an intention there to start bombing more, and to disregard civilian lives. And under international law, these principles of proportionality and distinction are not optional; it\u2019s not an issue that a president can decide to tweak for political reasons.<\/p>\n<p>So that\u2019s my first point, is that the US might have been engaged in war crimes in the last few weeks because of the unprecedented level of civilian casualties in Syria and in Iraq, where hundreds of civilians are being killed by airstrikes by the US, in what seems to be a new pattern of US engagement.<\/p>\n<p>My second point is that I completely disagree with the premise of what\u2019s going on in Mosul. If you were to listen to mainstream media in the US, or to the US government, what\u2019s going on is supposedly a liberation of Mosul. That\u2019s why any price should be given for this liberation of Mosul from this pure evil group, because at the end of the day, supposedly, we\u2019re getting all of these Iraqi civilians liberated.<\/p>\n<p>And I disagree with this premise, because what\u2019s going on in Mosul is nothing more than a handover between one sectarian and violent militia, called ISIS, to another sectarian and violent militia, called the Iraqi government. Civilians in Mosul are not being liberated; in some cases there is worse treatment by the Iraqi government and militias affiliated with the Iraqi government. Human Rights Watch issued a few reports in the last few years. One of them is called \u201cAfter Liberation Came Destruction,\u201d and in that report, Human Rights Watch documents how Iraqi forces, aided and funded and trained by the US, committed systemic war crimes in areas that they took back from ISIS, including ethnic cleansing and rape and torture and extrajudicial killing. We\u2019re talking about the same level of violations committed by ISIS.<\/p>\n<p>So there is no liberation going on there. Iraq is not getting to a point where we\u2019re opening a new page. What\u2019s going on now is exactly another step, a continuation of the destruction of the country.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s very similar to what happened a decade ago around Fallujah, when the US told us that we have to go bomb Fallujah, because it was controlled by Al Qaeda, by pure evil there, and everything will be OK after that. Nothing became OK after that. There is more death and more destruction and more extremism.<\/p>\n<p>So that is my second point. My second point is that I challenge this narrative of liberation, and I doubt that what\u2019s going on in Mosul is a change in course. It\u2019s actually another example of how the US and its allies have been operating in Iraq for the last 15 years or so.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">***<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_5587590\" style=\"max-width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-5587590\" src=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/04\/jennifer-reisch.jpg\" alt=\"Jennifer Reisch\" width=\"350\" height=\"175\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Jennifer Reisch: &#8220;The more women enter a profession or field, the lower the pay of that field becomes.&#8221;<br \/><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson:<\/b> Before the so-called \u201cWeinstein moment\u201d and the reviving of the #MeToo campaign, started by Philadelphia social activist Tarana Burke, <b>CounterSpin<\/b> talked about grounding our understanding of harassment in an economic context <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/regardless-of-what-the-president-says-the-laws-are-still-there\/\">with Jennifer Reisch<\/a>, legal director at the group <a href=\"https:\/\/www.equalrights.org\/\">Equal Rights Advocates<\/a>. She underscored that real equal opportunity and employment go beyond the paycheck.<\/p>\n<p><b>Jennifer Reisch:<\/b> I think there\u2019s just a widespread misperception and misunderstanding of what the gender pay gap is really about, and a failure to recognize that it is the result, not only of continuing discrimination and the results of implicit and explicit bias against women in the workplace, but also the result of a lot of mechanisms and things going on in the labor market that result in women being underpaid. And they are pernicious, and they are often part of the way we see things as just being the way they are.<\/p>\n<p>So occupational gender segregation, for example, is a big contributor to the gender wage gap, and that\u2019s not the result of any specific employer necessarily making a discriminatory decision. It\u2019s really about the result of many, many years, and for many different reasons, women, first of all, ending up in jobs that pay less and, on the flip side, the jobs where women work being the lowest-paid jobs in our economy.<\/p>\n<p>And so we both undervalue the work that women do, and in fact we can see that when women enter a profession, the more women enter a profession or field, the lower the pay of that field becomes. So there is clearly still a long way we have to go to get to a place where women and men are truly experiencing equal opportunity in employment, and where they\u2019re being paid equally for doing substantially equal work.<\/p>\n<p>The other thing is that, just because something is illegal doesn\u2019t mean it doesn\u2019t happen. That\u2019s sort of the most obvious thing as well, is that we see with sexual harassment, which has been considered an unlawful form of sex discrimination since the early \u201980s, and was outlawed really by Title VII, which was passed in 1964, it is still the No. 1 reason why people call Equal Rights Advocates for help on our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.equalrights.org\/legal-help\/know-your-rights\/sex-discrimination-at-work\/\">toll-free help line<\/a>, and it is one of the most common reasons why people file discrimination charges, is based on sexual harassment-related issues. Just because something has been declared unlawful certainly doesn\u2019t mean that it\u2019s been eliminated. In fact, we\u2019ve seen, I think, a real upswing in a lot of these issues coming to the fore over the last few months.<\/p>\n<p><b>JJ:<\/b> Let\u2019s move on to that. In his defense of <b>Fox<\/b> head Roger Ailes, with his more than 20 allegations of sexual harassment, Donald Trump said that his daughter Ivanka \u201cwould find another career or find another company\u201d if she faced any harassment. And his son Eric Trump said Ivanka \u201cwouldn\u2019t allow herself to be subjected\u201d to harassment.<\/p>\n<p>Now, besides ignorant, that\u2019s revelatory in the implied assumption that a woman should and can just quit a job where she\u2019s harassed. And it points to harassment as an economic concern, but that\u2019s rarely how it\u2019s presented.<\/p>\n<p><b>JR:<\/b> You\u2019re absolutely right, Janine, and it is an economic concern. The thing that really appalls me about those comments, too, is that of course it places the blame for harassing conduct on the women who are subjected to it, and puts the onus of change on individual women, as opposed to on the institutions and employers and individuals that are perpetrating the harassment, and creating cultures inside those environments where men are given a free pass to harass women, and where women are taught that tolerating that harassment is the price of a paycheck.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center\">***<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_5590722\" style=\"max-width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-5590722\" src=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/Ari-Berman-Headshot-1024x682.jpg\" alt=\"Ari Berman (cc photo: Shawn)\" width=\"350\" height=\"233\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>Ari Berman: &#8220;Media are just totally unable to grasp the idea that some people are turned away from the polls by voter suppression efforts.&#8221; (cc photo: Shawn)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson:<\/b> Americans will be reckoning with the fact that Donald Trump got to the White House for a long time, and a key part of that is interrogating the white supremacy, misogyny and nativism he drew and draws on. There are also critical questions about to what extent the electoral process, marred by exclusions, barriers and unfairness, really reflect the public will. We talked about that with <b>Mother Jones<\/b> reporter <a href=\"\/\/fair.org\/home\/it-had-everything-to-do-with-trying-to-decrease-black-voter-turnout\/\">Ari Berman<\/a>, author of <i>Give Us the Balance: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America<\/i>. He\u2019d had enough of corporate media\u2019s continued credulity on Republican claims of \u201cvoter fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><b>Ari Berman:<\/b> This is a completely manufactured crisis. And what I find frustrating is that when President Trump says 3 to 5 million people voted illegally, the media says, \u201cOh yeah, that\u2019s crazy, there\u2019s no evidence for that.\u201d But in Texas and North Carolina and other places where Republicans say, over and over and over, that voter fraud is widespread and occurring rampantly, there\u2019s a lot of deference.<\/p>\n<p>And the other thing is that the media are just totally unable to grasp the idea that some people are turned away from the polls by voter suppression efforts. They\u2019re constantly pouring cold water on the idea that people could be turned away. They spent so much time interviewing Trump voters and trying to figure out, why did people vote for Donald Trump, what was their motivation\u2014as opposed to spending even any time trying to interview people who were turned away from the polls, or who weren\u2019t registered to vote, and asking them, what happened to you, why were you disenfranchised, why did you decide not to participate, why did you try to participate and you couldn\u2019t?<\/p>\n<p>Now, I understand that turnout is difficult to measure, because there\u2019s lots of different reasons why people don\u2019t turn out. But I also think it makes objective sense that if you pass a law, and hundreds of thousands of voters don\u2019t have the documents to comply with it, that\u2019s at least going to have some suppressive effect. I mean, this is not exactly rocket science here.<\/p>\n<p>I think it\u2019s much bigger than voting at this point. Because I think Donald Trump is an existential threat to democracy in this country. His attacks on the judiciary, his attacks on the free press, his foreign entanglements, the cronyism of his family, all of these things\u2014the firing of the FBI director; the multiple interferences with normal agencies, with the FBI, with intelligence agencies; the hacking of our elections. I mean, this all to me is a related issue, which is that we have both the president and a party that has complete contempt for the democratic process.<\/p>\n<p>And I think the media need to start to calling this out for what it is, because they are one of the chief people that are under threat by these attacks on democracy. That it\u2019s no coincidence, at the same time that you\u2019re attacking the right to vote, you\u2019re attacking independent judiciary, you\u2019re trying to shut down criminal investigations, that you would also then be going after the people that are going to report on all of this, which is us, the media.<\/p>\n<p>This is not, to me, a time for false equivalence, it\u2019s not a time for he said\/she said. I think that the undermining of democracy should really be one of those issues that crosses party lines. And you really think there could be some consensus in this country that at the very least, protecting and preserving American democracy would be something that we can all agree on.<\/p>\n<p><b>Janine Jackson:<\/b> That was Ari Berman. Before him you heard Jennifer Reisch, Raed Jarrar, Dan Goldberg, Mizue Aizeki, Amit Narang and Ellen Schrecker. And that\u2019s it for this year-end Best of <b>CounterSpin<\/b> for 2017.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>*****<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"et_bloom_bottom_trigger\"><\/span><br \/>\nThis piece was reprinted by <a href=\"http:\/\/rinf.com\">RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission from <a href=\"https:\/\/fair.org\/home\/this-is-not-a-time-for-false-equivalence\/\">FAIR<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is a lightly edited transcript of the December 29, 2017, year-end Best of CounterSpin episode. ***** Play Stop pop out X MP3jPLAYLISTS.MI_0 = [ { name: &#8220;1. CounterSpin Best of CounterSpin 2017 Full Show &#8220;, formats: [&#8220;mp3&#8221;], mp3: &#8220;aHR0cDovL3d3dy5mYWlyLm9yZy9hdWRpby9jb3VudGVyc3Bpbi9Db3VudGVyU3BpbjE3MTIyOS5tcDM=&#8221;, counterpart:&#8221;&#8221;, artist: &#8220;&#8221;, image: &#8220;true&#8221;, imgurl: &#8220;&#8221; } ]; MP3jPLAYERS[0] = { list:MP3jPLAYLISTS.MI_0, tr:0, type:&#8217;MI&#8217;, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2521,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-343570","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2521"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343570"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343570\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}