The Washington Post (4/8/26) asserts that “the Islamic Republic stands to lose more from the war resuming than Washington does”—though Trump’s plummeting approval ratings might suggest otherwise.

In the wake of the temporary US/Iran ceasefire, hawkish commentary in leading American newspapers advanced the premise that the US can dictate terms to Iran in negotiations, with a faith in the power of Washington’s military might that was hard to justify by the previous course of the war.

A Washington Post editorial (4/8/26) contended:

Despite the massive damage inflicted upon the country by the US in recent weeks, the regime acts like it holds the cards. Its leaders are demanding the US pull all troops out of the Middle East and accept Iran’s right to pursue nuclear weapons. The question is why Trump would bend over backward to keep obviously unserious talks on track.

Whether the Post likes it or not, Iran has a decent hand to play. For instance, Iranian drones cost just $20,000 to produce, and the US uses missiles that cost $4 million each to try and destroy them (Bloomberg, 3/2/26). Less than three weeks into the war, the US was already estimated to have spent more than $18 billion attacking Iran (Guardian, 3/19/26). The longer Iran can hold out, the more it financially bleeds the US.

The majority of Americans already consistently oppose the war (NBC News, 4/1/26) and, as costs spiral, domestic opposition to the US’s assault is likely to grow. In this context, the paper may need to revise its definition of seriousness to include accepting that Iran has the power to resist US bullying and bluster.

‘More work to degrade’

An intelligence source tells CNN (4/2/26) that Iran is “still very much poised to wreak absolute havoc throughout the entire region.”

The Washington Post editorial also said that there “is still more work to be done to degrade Iran’s offensive capabilities and its capacity to rebuild them.” “Offensive” here is a propaganda term, as Iran has not launched an aggressive war in nearly two centuries—unlike the United States and Israel, which have attacked Iran twice in the last year.

By reversing victim and offender, the Post was transparently calling for the US to resume bombing Iran; after all, it’s through war that one country “degrades” another’s military capacity. But it’s not that the US and Israel didn’t try to destroy Iranian capabilities; rather, they tried and have not succeeded.

Less than a week before the ceasefire, a CNN report (4/2/26) said US intelligence had assessed that

roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers are still intact and thousands of one-way attack drones remain in Iran’s arsenal, despite the daily pounding by US and Israeli strikes against military targets over the past five weeks….

The intelligence, compiled in recent days, also showed a large percentage of Iran’s coastal defense cruise missiles were intact, the sources said, consistent with the US not focusing its air campaign on coastal military assets, though they have been hitting ships. Those missiles serve as a key capability allowing Iran to threaten shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran retained that capacity despite the US hitting more than 12,300 targets in Iran, according to US Central Command. Israel, for its part, said it had dropped 15,000 bombs on Iran since February 28 (Jerusalem Post, 3/25/26).

The Post offered no insight into why it believes the US/Israeli assault will suddenly become more effective.

‘Finish the job’

“If the [Iranian] regime behaves as it always has, it will claim to want to reach a deal but never will,” the Wall Street Journal (4/8/26) writes—stuffing the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement down the memory hole.

The next test for Mr. Trump will be whether he takes his two-week ceasefire deadline seriously. If he does, and Iran plays its usual games, then he really will have to “finish the job.”

Such calls overlook the limits to US war-making capacity. Analysts at Colorado’s Payne Institute for Public Policy, cited by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (4/1/26), “assessed that the US had lost nearly 46% of its Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS),” one of the US’s main tactical ballistic weapons. Likewise, they estimated that

supplies of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile systems, used by the US and its partners in the region to defend against Iranian missiles, were also dropping significantly. Projections showed the THAAD interceptors could run out by mid-April.

The US also burned through 850 Tomahawk cruise missiles in the war’s first four weeks, “a rate that has alarmed some Pentagon officials” (Washington Post, 3/27/26). Meanwhile, the Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 interceptors that Israel used against Iran’s longer-range missiles “were also projected to be exhausted by the end of March” (Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 4/1/26). Unlike the Journal’s lust for violence, the US/Israeli arsenal is finite.

‘Circle of death’

Marc Thiessen (Washington Post, 4/8/26) asserts that Trump can “bring the war to a final and decisive conclusion…in a matter of weeks”—disregarding the fact that nearly six weeks of all-out war were far from decisive.

Nor did these constraints prevent the Washington Post‘s Marc A. Thiessen (4/8/26) from calling on Trump to create a “circle of death” around any former nuclear sites in Iran, and enforce it by “killing any Iranian who enters that circle.” He also suggested another round of assassinations, “eliminating the Iranian officials who had been spared for the purpose of negotiations,” so that the country’s leaders understand that if they fail to reach “a negotiated settlement to Trump’s liking…they will be killed.”

Murderous fantasies about the US imposing total domination over Iran are perhaps a symptom of the US being unable to do so in reality. As Thiessen’s own paper (4/3/26) reported, despite the US/Israeli assassinations of high-ranking Iranian officials,

Iran has continued to launch retaliatory attacks, often hitting high-value targets, demonstrating sustained command and control beyond the conflict’s initial days when units largely operated on autopilot under Iran’s “mosaic” defense strategy, which emphasizes decentralized autonomy. In recent weeks, Iranian attacks have struck critical energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf, industrial and energy sites in Israel, and key US military installations, including a direct strike on an advanced US spy plane.

In other words, decapitating the Iranian government hasn’t caused it to capitulate or prevented it from responding to US/Israeli attacks, but Thiessen—for reasons he did not explain—thinks that doing the same thing again will produce a different result.

Thiessen also said that the US should

develop and implement a covert action plan to support the Iranian opposition…. Such a plan could involve supplying the Iranian opposition with weapons, much as the US once provided arms to anti-Communist “freedom fighters” across the world.

The overriding goal should be to help the Iranian people, over time, bring down this murderous regime.

Set aside that this plan would violate the UN Charter’s principle of nonintervention and that the US has zero right to shape who governs Iran. In reality, multiple US intelligence reports conclude that Iran’s government “is not in danger” of falling (Reuters, 3/11/26). Israeli officials also think that Iran’s government “isn’t likely to fall soon” (Wall Street Journal, 3/12/26).

While there’s little reason to believe that Thiessen’s proposal would produce regime change in Iran, we can be fairly confident that flooding Iran with weapons will have the same outcome that flooding countries with arms generally has—namely, a devastating bloodbath for its inhabitants (Electronic Intifada, 3/16/17; Jacobin, 9/11/21).

‘The easiest method’

Bret Stephens (New York Times, 4/14/26) advises Trump to “keep turning the screws on the regime’s leaders”—a torture metaphor from an advocate of actual torture.

Bret Stephens of the New York Times (4/14/26) likewise wrote from an alternate reality where the war showed that the US can impose its will on Iran. Stephens opened by quoting his own piece (4/7/26) from the previous week :

“The easiest method for the United States to reopen Hormuz,” I wrote last Tuesday, “is to start seizing tankers carrying Iranian crude once they reach the Arabian Sea.”

It’s not clear why Stephens thought seizing Iranian ships would cause Iran to back down. After all, assassinating many of the country’s leaders, attacking Iranian health facilities (Al Jazeera, 4/3/26) and vital civilian infrastructure (BBC, 3/19/26), and mass-murdering Iranian school girls (Guardian, 3/3/26) did not compel the country to stop defending itself.

Stephens went on to contend:

Trump should put Iran’s regime to a fundamental choice: It can have an economy. Or the regime can attempt to have a nuclear program while trying to control the Strait of Hormuz. But it can’t have both.

This quote suggests Stephens was unwilling to seriously grapple with Iran’s retaliatory power. For example, Iran has consistently responded to US aggression by attacking the empire’s regional nodes, killing Israelis (BBC, 3/1/26; Reuters, 4/6/26) and badly damaging Israeli infrastructure (Al Jazeera, 3/21/26).

Iranian countermeasures have likewise hit energy infrastructure in the US’s client states in the Gulf, leading—for example—to fires at Kuwaiti oil and petrochemical facilities, at a petrochemical plant in the UAE and at a storage tank in Bahrain (AFP, 4/5/26). In other words, Iran has illustrated that it has a multitude of options for raising the costs of US violence, indicating it would likely continue exercising these in the scenario Stephens advocates.

‘Broke the petrodollar’

Aaron Brown (Bloomberg, 4/6/26) notes that while investment generally flows into the US Treasury in times of crisis, “the calculus changes when the US itself is the belligerent.”

None of these commentators acknowledge what is likely the strongest blow that Iran has landed against the US. The Islamic Republic has undermined what’s called the petrodollar regime, a system in which the US promises to militarily protect the Gulf monarchies in exchange for these states putting money they earn from oil sales into US assets—most notably Treasury bonds. The arrangement, which has been in place since 1974, subsidizes US borrowing costs and keeps the US dollar as the de facto global reserve currency.

Bloomberg (4/6/26) reports that the war on Iran “broke the petrodollar,” because the conflict is “categorically different” from other political, military and economic crises of the post-1974 period:

Gulf producers can’t get their oil out. The Strait of Hormuz closure has stranded their barrels along with everyone else’s.

Gulf states including Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the UAE collectively cut production by at least 10 million barrels per day in March. Saudi Arabia and the UAE can export reduced volumes through alternative pipelines. But those routes handle only about a quarter of normal Strait throughput at full capacity, and they are under active Iranian drone and missile threat. Qatar declared force majeure on exports of liquified natural gas after strikes on its Ras Laffan facility.

Thus, Iran has shown that it can hinder, and possibly destroy, a central plank in the architecture of the US empire. Stephens, Thiessen and the editorial boards of the Journal and the Post appear to be deluding themselves about the gravity of this development. Iran has successfully resisted subjugation, largely by jeopardizing a key instrument of US global hegemony, but these authors have gone on writing as if Washington were in a position to force Iran to surrender to its diktats.

These observers traffic in illusions about a virtually omnipotent US that can indefinitely control the world through force of arms, consequence-free. Op-ed writing is supposed to be persuasive. In that regard, these authors have failed spectacularly.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

NHLC (3/24/26)

This week on CounterSpin: From the federal level on down, many laws and policies that claim to be about “ending homelessness” seem to be clearly more about hurting homeless people than changing their circumstance. Even if you, or anyone you know, has never been unhoused: How hard is it to understand the difference between charging poor people monetary fines they obviously can’t pay, and then throwing them in jail when they don’t—and addressing homelessness with, oh I don’t know, housing?

That would be a commonsense conversation, about what resources we have and how we deploy them; but instead we see power actors, with the support of the White House and the Supreme Court, telling us that “ending homelessness” means tearing up people’s tents, throwing away their belongings; a new law in Kentucky says officials can use “stand your ground” laws to shoot homeless people that don’t “cooperate” with their eviction from private or public land.

So: Is this really about addressing homelessness? Because we know how to do that. And if it’s not: What is it about? And can we have an honest conversation about that?

Jesse Rabinowitz is the campaign and communications director at the National Homelessness Law Center. We hear from him this week.

Marijuana Moment (12/18/25)

Also on the show: You may think weed is “legal” because you see so many people smoking it on the street. Including your grandma and your next-door neighbor who just a few years back would’ve called the cops. But just as the criminalization of marijuana affected different communities very differently, the current supposed de-criminalization continues to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted. Though that is not at all the understanding you would get from a casual view, or for that matter from media coverage that makes it seem like the debate over weed is all over, and now we’re all just talking about which strain is the best.

Maritza Perez Medina is director of federal affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance. She joins us to talk about what the “rescheduling” of marijuana does and doesn’t do.

With both homelessness and drug policy, it’s useful to see how many current legislative measures, with a cultural backwind from corporate media, are fooling people that things have changed, while actually things are still harming the people who have always been harmed. So these moves are not something to “tweak”; we need conversation and action based on a different understanding of why things are as they are, and of how things can be.

This is a lightly edited excerpt from Robin Andersen’s The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, published by OR Books.

Intercept (4/15/24)

How is information made legitimate, and when is it appropriate for journalists to introduce skepticism? What happens when only one side of a conflict is given the legitimate voice, always repeated and rarely questioned, even when those sources have proven many times to have promulgated lies?

Military studies scholars and analysts understand that there is always a long genesis of historical, political and economic factors that can eventually erupt into conflict. In many ways, US establishment media seemed unwilling or unable (but likely both) to narrate a more complex, historically accurate account of the war on Gaza.

The Intercept (4/15/24) reported that editorial directives at the New York Times and CNN, two of the most important news sources in the US, advised reporters to avoid certain “taboo” words, such as “genocide” and “massacre.” Yet between October 7 and November 24, 2023, the Times used the word “massacre” 53 times—referring to Israelis killed by Palestinians, but only once to refer to a Palestinian killed by Israel (Intercept, 1/9/24).

From November onward, as deaths in Gaza piled up, the Times habitually avoided using emotionally fraught terms for Palestinians. Another term, “ethnic cleansing,” was also barred from use, along with “refugee camps” and “occupied territories.”

As the Times source who leaked the directives said, “You are basically taking the occupation out of the coverage, which is the actual core of the conflict.”

US news outlets were crippled by these verbal restrictions, incapable of offering an accurate explanation of what was happening in Gaza by imposing such constraints on humanitarian language, and international principles and laws.

Islamophobic tropes

FAIR.org (5/9/24)

Media frames are based on underlying assumptions, articulated through familiar tropes that appear unquestioned in language and representation. Some stories are recognizable as reflections of beliefs and myths, and others are accurate renderings when accompanied by on-the-ground documentation.

Seasoned journalists entrusted to cover such a monumental conflict seemed not to be schooled in the differences. They failed to identify the history and uses of atrocity stories as propaganda, and showed no awareness of the use of Islamophobic tropes such as the “brutish knife-wielding Arab terrorist,” or the West’s long history of Orientalism and the hypersexualized Arab male, as identified by Edward Said.

Establishment media applied a “lawlessness” trope, identified by Rebecca Solnit (A Paradise Built in Hell, 2009) as a dictate of convention to blame the victims of humanitarian disasters, when in fact in such crises, she argued, communities come together to help one another. The lawlessness frame was used to direct the causes of starvation away from Israel’s engineered famine, and point the finger of blame at starving Palestinians, who were being shot by IDF snipers as they looked for food.

By April 2024, when police were called to break up student encampments, media relied on another powerful framing device, complete with its attendant language, to condone police violence against students at colleges and universities, first at Columbia, then at other campuses around the country. Campuses, they said, had been infiltrated by “outside agitators” (FAIR.org, 5/9/24).

Yet the critical debate articulated by student protests was part of American public discourse at the time. Though they were violently attacked by pro-Israel protesters and US law enforcement, students helped move American sentiment about the genocide to the center of cultural and political debate. By the fall of 2024, students would be hit by a wave of repression and attacks on their civil liberties and rights to freedom of expression.

Were these stereotypes taken into consideration when deciding which stories would be told, which talking points would be followed, and which perspectives would be ignored? Many of the narratives we are left with, used to explain this so-called “Israel/Palestine conflict,” are familiar media constructs and simply cannot explain a genocide.

Language of confusion

OR Books (2026)

In so many ways, big media failed to provide accurate information about Israel’s bombing attacks and their consequences on the people in Gaza. They improvised a language of confusion, denial and justification.

A combination of media tropes and frames, together with verbal inventions, downplayed Israel’s increasingly brutal genocidal violence, along with the hollow echoes that explained away every military act of violence, as the media served as “stenographers to power.” These strategies facilitated the continuation of a genocide. The failure to accurately cover the destruction of Gaza was inimical to the basic professional canons of journalism.

Genocide does not happen without a language to incite it. From collective punishment to ethnic cleansing, and the destruction of infrastructure to the withholding of food, water and medical care, Israel continually committed war crimes on a much greater scale than the initial Hamas attacks. Such acts depended on the demonization of an entire people, and the undervaluing of Palestinian life was a major feature of US reporting.

In Gaza, in addition to dismantling civilian infrastructure such as hospitals, Israel also carried out the destruction of cultural heritage sites, universities, schools and mosques, acts of destruction understood to deliberately eliminate an entire group of people defined by their ethnicity, religion, culture and identity. These are the crimes of genocide. Yet the words associated with these crimes were rarely if ever used in establishment media reporting on Israel’s attacks on Gaza.

Janine Jackson interviewed Fight for the Future’s Lia Holland about the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine for the April 17, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Wired (4/13/26)

Janine Jackson: A recent report by Wired‘s Kate Knibbs leads with the contradiction: USA Today published a story recently on how ICE is misinforming about its detainment policies, a case that the paper built on data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, a nonprofit digital library that preserves webpages.

At the same time, USA Today bars the Wayback Machine from archiving its work. Along with outlets like the New York Times, the paper is trying to block the Internet Archive project from doing their job of preserving reporting.

So what’s going on here? Here to catch us up is Lia Holland, a social artist, writer and activist, and campaigns and communications director at the group Fight for the Future. They join us now by phone from Oregon. Welcome to CounterSpin, Lia Holland.

Lia Holland: Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.

JJ: Please fill out our understanding a little more of what the Wayback Machine is and does. It seems like, particularly in these times, a critical information resource.

LH: Absolutely. And that’s why my organization is so engaged with this issue. The Wayback Machine, for 30 years this year, has been the best and most reliable archive for preserving our digital lives, culture, recording and history. They archive nearly 5 million links on Wikipedia to news articles, and are a trusted resource for journalists all around the globe to investigate everything from corruption, to report on culture, to really do their jobs. And, unfortunately, that is under threat now.

JJ: Let’s talk about what’s happening now. What is the crisis, if you will, and why is it of particular concern? You’ve tipped it, but why is it of particular concern for what I have seen called “accountability journalism,” but I think is just journalism?

Pluralistic (2/9/23)

LH: Yeah. Most journalists do work to hold the powerful to account. And I think that that is a part of the factor in what’s happening in this moment.

So since February, the Wayback Machine has not been able to archive the New York Times. And there are other major publications like this that have told them to stop preserving all of their journalism. And this is happening for reasons that I can only speculate on, but it seems that many of these major media outlets are very interested in packaging up their content to sell for AI training, and they’re concerned that sharing it with the Internet Archive somehow weakens their product, or weakens their stance on whether or not AI training is a copyright violation in various lawsuits.

I’m not quite sure why they’re doing it, but the reality is that blocking the Wayback Machine, and saying, “No, there can be no independent, unimpeachable record of the news anymore,” is not going to stop AI from doing whatever it’s going to do. What that does is destroy a resource that every working journalist that I speak to has relied on in order to do their job.

JJ: Right. We can be forgiven for pausing, if you will, on the notion that the same outlets that are pushing AI in our face at every turn are also saying, “Oh, we’re concerned about the Wayback Machine because it might be training AI, and we really don’t want that. ” That just doesn’t pass a sniff test. It sounds more like they want to be in charge of the way that AI is used, in terms of their historical records.

LH: Yes, and also want to be in charge of what the public record is. Frequently, the Wayback Machine is used for accountability at publications like the New York Times. They will change the content of articles, or take things down, just like any corporation that is archived on the Wayback Machine. And I would say there are many powerful people who would rather there never be a record of what they said or did.

JJ: Absolutely. It’s the longitudinal aspect of it that is the value. And in this Wired piece, a labor organizer talks about how they used old job listings to check against what their company was offering at that time, and what they’re offering now. That’s not something that you can get if you don’t have access to archived or older material, right?

LH: Absolutely. And another thing that I think is important to point out is that the Internet Archive works directly with journalists and with news organizations. Their goal is to preserve respectfully, and to not negatively impact the bottom line at these companies.

People sometimes conflate the Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine with archive.is, or these other paywall-jumping tools that people use. And it’s unfortunate, because that’s not what the Internet Archive is doing, or what the Wayback Machine is known for, or what it’s regularly used for. And so I think that that misconception also is really harmful when it comes to the public, and also these decision-makers choosing whether or not they want the archives to continue to do what it’s been doing for 30 years.

JJ: Spell that out just a little bit more. What does it mean to work with journalists, rather than not do that? What does that look like?

LH: I got to peek behind the curtain a little bit as a part of this campaign. It was very cool.

So at any given time, there are employees at this nonprofit that are working directly with journalists who are investigating very important stories, people at every globally renowned media outlet digging through the archives of what is stored in the Wayback Machine, with assists from employees. And there are countless articles, over the course of a year, that reference what that journalist has found in the Wayback Machine. I think that there’s several to a dozen a day, at times, where the Wayback Machine was used as a source.

Lia Holland: “DOGE set a goal of eliminating 20% of government websites, whereas everything that’s been deleted now is living in the Wayback Machine.”

JJ: And this is government data, not just journalism, but all kinds of information, yeah?

LH: Yeah. The Trump administration, I believe, or DOGE, set a goal of eliminating 20% of government websites, whereas everything that’s been deleted now is living in the Wayback Machine. And I think that’s also really important for corporate accountability reporting, where what they said in a press release that’s been removed, and things like that union organizer you mentioned, what was promised and what was actually delivered.

JJ: It seems, I mean, it’s existential. Even beyond journalism, this is about collective memory. This is what we’re allowed to know that happened. I feel like we’re so many iterations beyond Orwell at this point, but clearly an entity that’s invested in erasing our memory, we should be fighting against that.

So I would just say, finally, is there a way for folks to plug into this, even if it’s just to say that they value the work that the Wayback Machine does?

LH: Yeah, absolutely. The biggest thing that I’m doing in this moment, in collaboration with the Internet Archive and journalists, is I’m collecting signatures from anyone who is a journalist or has worked as a journalist at SaveTheArchive.com/Journalists. Any journalist, student journalist, radio journalist, if you’re a podcaster, it doesn’t matter what medium you work in, this resource is important to you. Go sign that letter that’s been signed by well over a hundred journalists, including Rachel Maddow, Cory Doctorow, big names.

And if you are not a journalist, and you are a subscriber to any major news outlet, or even your local newspaper, send them a note, let them know how much you value the Wayback Machine, and that you really hope that their work continues to be preserved in it. I think that expressing our disagreement with the idea that we cannot be the keepers of our own history, and that we can’t have access to the record of our digital lives, is the crucial thing to do right now.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Lia Holland. You can find Fight for the Future at FightForTheFuture.org. Lia’s site is LiaHolland.com. Lia Holland, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

LH: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.

Janine Jackson interviewed Institute for Policy Studies’ Sarah Anderson about “successful” corporations paying poverty wages for the April 17, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Forbes (5/24/24)

Janine Jackson: In 2024, Forbes asked, “What Is the Secret to Walmart’s Success?” The answer:

Walmart’s strategy is boring but reliable. The foundation is provided by the scale of the business, creating the fuel necessary to maintain cost leadership.

In 2025, the Economist explained to readers “How Walmart Became a Tech Giant—and Took Over the World.” The answer, well, founder Sam Walton, a “trucker-capped, pickup-driving penny-pincher,” had a simple idea: “Keep costs low, pass savings on to customers, win market share, harness scale to further lower costs, and listen as the cash registers sing.”

Early this year, Inc. Magazine gave us “One Bold Decision Helped Make Walmart a Trillion-Dollar Company.” That story says:

Most experts see the company’s tremendous growth as a triumph of technology, including AI, and that’s certainly true. Walmart has used its heft, highly efficient warehouse network and the ubiquity of its stores as a competitive advantage.

But oho, the shocker, the big reveal, is that former CEO, Doug McMillon, “visited Walmart stores and asked the people working there what they needed. He listened to their answers and he started paying them more.”

Well, I hope you’re sitting down for this: “To begin with, every associate, as Walmart calls employees, would earn at least $9 an hour and soon move up to $10 an hour.” McMillon took home $27.4 million in 2024.

Inequality.org (3/4/26)

That the same media that herald companies like Walmart for supposedly building a better mousetrap, and getting their rightful riches, also complain about government spending on public assistance programs like SNAP encapsulates a certain media mythology that needs puncturing.

And that’s just what a new report does. “America’s 20 Largest Low-Wage Employers and the Affordability Crisis” is out from the Institute for Policy Studies, and we’re joined now by its author.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and co-edits the IPS website Inequality.org. She joins us now by phone; welcome back to CounterSpin, Sarah Anderson.

Sarah Anderson: Really great to be here. Thank you.

JJ: Media talk about companies as not just successful, but as evidence that profit-driven capitalism—and the deregulation that enables it—really is the best thing for everyone, because, look, they’re providing a product or a service; they’re creating jobs. So, really, any criticism is wrong, and maybe just jealousy.

Your new report is not about a small, ancillary thing that companies could improve on. It really drives a stake through the heart of this mythology. So tell us, what did you look at, and what did you find?

Sarah Anderson: “The rest of us are affected, because it’s our taxpayer money that is going into those public assistance programs that these companies are using to make this model workable.”

SA: Yeah, well, just continuing with the Walmart example, you mentioned that the CEO made $27.4 million in 2024. So, yeah, if we criticize that, then sometimes people will say, “Oh, you’re just envious. You want to make that amount of money, and it doesn’t have anything to do with you, so why should you complain?”

Well, it does have to do with all of the rest of us, because, for one thing, Walmart and many other large US corporations are really based on a business model that extracts wealth from low-wage workers and funnels it up to guys like Doug McMillon. And they are paying their low-level workers so little that many of them have no choice but to rely on public assistance.

And so that’s what our report looks at, is the 20 largest US corporations with the lowest median worker pay, and we found that the vast majority of them have median pay that’s so low that a worker at that level would qualify for Medicaid for a family of three. Most of them would qualify for SNAP food aid benefits.

And what that means is that not only are workers getting the shaft from this business model, that it’s all about keeping wages at poverty levels at the base to overpay their CEOs, but the rest of us are affected, because it’s our taxpayer money that is going into those public assistance programs that these companies are using to make this model workable.

And I think that this is a big part of the current affordability crisis that so many people are talking about, as they struggle with the rising costs for things like housing and groceries. And there’s a lot of focus on how can we bring these costs down, but we’ve also got to look at why do people have so little money in their pockets in the first place, and that’s because of wage suppression by companies like Walmart.

JJ: I just want to say, if we can say “poverty-wage business model,” like 10 times; I want that to enter the lexicon.

Washington Post (11/30/25)

But I feel like some media feel like they found a hack. The Washington Post had a thing a few months back, “Why You May Not Want Lower Prices as Much as You Think You Do.”

And I get it. They’re saying prices are one factor, and we have to look at other factors. But if you just report it that way, “Oh, you’re so dim, you want prices to go down. You don’t understand how the economy works.” It’s like giving the ball score, “Yankees four.”

There are other elements of course at work here, and this is in a context, as the report lays out. It’s in a context of cuts to benefits, union participation, stock buybacks. There’s a lot going on here that is part of the affordability crisis, yeah?

SA: Absolutely. And the companies are saying, “Oh, with rising costs for so many things, we have to pass those costs on to customers, or we have to cut jobs. There’s no other way to find money to cover these things”—when, if you look at what they really are spending money on, these 20 companies altogether have been on a massive stock buyback spending spree. Altogether, let’s see, I think it was over $200 billion over the past 20 years.

Some companies are just completely outrageous examples, like Home Depot spent $38 billion on stock buybacks over the past six years, and every dollar that’s spent on stock buybacks—first of all, I should explain what they are. This is when companies go out and repurchase their own stock on the open market, and when they do that, it artificially inflates the value of their shares, because they’re reducing the available supply.

IPS (3/4/26)

And what that also does is it inflates the value of their CEO paychecks, because CEOs get most of their compensation in some form of stock-based pay. And every dollar that’s spent on those buybacks is a dollar that’s not spent on worker wages.

And so at Home Depot, if they’d taken all the money that they spent on buybacks over the past six years, and instead gave it to their workers, they could have given every one of their 419,000 US employees a $15,000 bonus every year for those six years.

At Lowe’s, Home Depot’s competitor in the home improvement field, the figures are even more insane. I think that they could have doubled the level of median pay at that company if they had spent money on worker wages instead of stock buybacks.

So it’s not that these companies don’t have the resources to be paying something other than poverty wages; it’s that they’re choosing to use their resources to enrich those at the top.

JJ: It’s so important to indicate that these are choices. When you read economic reporting, it’s often like, “They had to pass the cost on to customers.” Like they had to. No, these are choices. These are priorities that are being made. We could talk about them that way.

SA: Absolutely. They also say, “Well, of course pay is low at these companies, because the workers are mostly part-time.” Again, that is a choice, to have a business model that’s based on an overwhelmingly part-time workforce, which comes with all kinds of costs. It tends to contribute to higher levels of turnover, and people not feeling as invested in their workplace.

And so there’s all kinds of business arguments as to why it might make more sense for them to have more full-time employees with benefits, but it’s a choice. They want more part-time workers so they don’t have to pay benefits, so they can keep their labor costs down. So it is a choice. It’s not just something like the weather, that just happens out of their control.

BLS Reports (5/24)

JJ: Right. And it’s a storyline. It’s such an old storyline: “We don’t need to pay fast food workers a livable wage because they’re teenagers, and they’re just getting pick-up money to go to the movies.” And it’s so outdated and unrealistic. And I have such frustration with the unending power of these narratives.

SA: Exactly. There’s such a large share of these low-wage workers are parents, many of them single parents, who are really struggling to make ends meet. We’ve talked about our country’s largest private-sector employer, Walmart, but if you look at Amazon, too—we were able to get data from a handful of state governments that report how many employees big companies have on public-assistance programs.

The state of Nevada actually is the only one that reveals this information for Medicaid, and Amazon had 8,900 employees in Nevada on Medicaid, and that was 48% of their whole workforce. So imagine that, they’re the second-largest private-sector employer, with a gazillionaire founder in Jeff Bezos. They’re generating enormous wealth for people at the top, and yet 48% of their employees in this one state are on Medicaid.

JJ: OK. I’m going to need to talk to you more about this, I suspect, but for now, I just would ask you, what could happen today, tomorrow, policy-wise, legislatively? What could happen that could start to address this situation?

The Nation (3/11/26)

SA: Yeah, there’s a lot that could be done. First of all, raising the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for 16 years now. We could strengthen our labor laws, so that workers like the ones at Amazon and Starbucks that have voted to unionize about four years ago now, but still don’t have a first contract because our protections for union rights are so weak, and these companies have just used every trick in the book to undermine the desires of their employees to be members of unions to bargain collectively for better pay.

And then I’m very excited about efforts to also use the tax code to address this issue of overpaying CEOs and underpaying workers. And this year, there are ballot initiatives moving ahead in both Los Angeles and San Francisco that would raise local taxes on businesses based on the size of the gap between their CEO and their worker pay, as an incentive for them to either narrow those gaps by lifting up worker pay or bringing down CEO pay, or, if companies refuse to do that, and want to stick with the status quo of having really large pay gaps, then they would pay more taxes into public services and infrastructure that is so needed by so many states and cities because of the federal cutbacks in funding.

JJ: All right, then. OK. We’ll end there for now, but I suspect I’ll be talking with you again soon.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and co-edits the IPS website Inequality.org. The report we’re talking about is “America’s 20 Largest Low-Wage Employers and the Affordability Crisis,” and I encourage you to check it out.

Sarah Anderson, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SA: My pleasure. Thank you.

The Hollywood Reporter (2/27/26) reported Paramount‘s disclosure that funding for its WBD takeover “may include other strategic and financial partners” who go unnamed. The Reporter noted that “previous bids included funding from Middle East sovereign wealth funds, Tencent and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners.”

The ultra-wealthy have long leveraged their capital to build sprawling media empires that narrow our public range of debate (FAIR.org, 6/1/87). But Paramount Skydance‘s winning bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) marks a major milestone in media monopolization that, if successful, will further expand Trump-allied tech moguls Larry and David Ellison’s burgeoning power over US news and entertainment media.

Even before a winner was announced, the bidding war among Paramount, Netflix and Comcast to take over WBD had attracted intense scrutiny, as the acquisition would not only confer lucrative franchises and a huge advantage in the streaming wars, but also control of major media outlets, including CNN, consolidating a greater swath of the media ecosystem under a single owner.

The fallout of the deal was destined to enhance the power of an already-sizable media behemoth, no matter which corporate giant won. On February 27, 2026, after a series of hostile takeover bids by Paramount that disrupted what seemed to be a done deal between Netflix and WBD, Netflix abruptly pulled out of the struggle for ownership, stating that it would not be matching Paramount’s higher offer.

The current Paramount offer is valued at $31 per share and, including WBD’s debt load, amounts to a grand total of roughly $111 billion.

Father-and-son moguls

Alex Shephard (New Republic, 10/27/25): “The administration will use its antitrust power to ensure that it gets the owner of Warner Bros. that it wants: the Ellison family.”

Steering this deal, and Paramount’s rapid expansion, are Larry and David Ellison, father-and-son moguls who, in just a single year, have parlayed their tech fortune into a colossal media empire. Larry Ellison, billionaire co-founder of Oracle, has bankrolled Paramount’s ballooning growth, which is overseen by his son David. The pair are notoriously close to Donald Trump, and have already weaponized their newfound media control to shift public discourse to the right (FAIR.org, 9/9/25, 9/19/25, 10/9/25, 11/6/25).

In August 2025, the Ellisons’ Skydance Media acquired Paramount, owner of CBS, and spearheaded a blatant ideological overhaul of the news network (FAIR.org, 7/24/25). This MAGA-friendly transformation has been aided by Ellison-appointed editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who had previously made a name for herself as an “anti-woke” crusader and founder of the right-wing media company Free Press. Weiss has been at the forefront of such decisions as canceling the Late Show With Stephen Colbert, pulling a 60 Minutes episode that criticized the Trump administration’s mistreatment of Venezuelan migrants, and promoting Tony Dokoupil to primetime anchor, where he promptly gave War Secretary Pete Hegseth an extended and uncritical platform.

Less than six months after the closure of the Paramount deal, in January 2026, Larry Ellison finalized a deal with TikTok, which sold 80% of its US operations to an investor consortium that includes Oracle, and left Ellison with a majority stake in TikTok’s US operations.

Since then, a number of changes have been implemented that reek of censorship and surveillance. For one, TikTok immediately altered its privacy policy to permit more extensive data collection, including tracking user location.

There have also been accusations of content suppression. This became a prominent conversation after the murder of Alex Pretti, as many users reported that they were unable to upload anti-ICE posts and that, if uploaded, their content was receiving unusually low engagement. Researchers found there was a site-wide outage at the time, but they pointed out that because TikTok isn’t transparent with its data or its algorithm, there’s no way to confirm it’s not shadowbanning content (NPR, 2/4/26)

Now, on the precipice of acquiring WBD, with a targeted completion date of September 30, 2026, the Ellisons are slated to have massively expanded their entertainment, media and tech empire in barely over a year. If the deal moves forward, the family would gain control of a vast portfolio spanning legacy media and Big Tech—including film, news, television, sports and social media—granting them substantial influence over how the world is seen and understood.

Shuffling the media oligarchy

In FAIR’s recent online news ownership study (2/3/26), WBD took the third spot and Paramount/Skydance the 16th. By taking over WBD, the Ellisons would vault into third, just behind Rupert Murdoch’s dynasty.

What does this look like in terms of numbers? According to Pew, 37% of adults in the US use TikTok. Pew notes that “just over half of US adults who use TikTok (55%) say they regularly get news there. That works out to 20% of all US adults,” or about 54 million people. Given TikTok’s expanding reach as a news source, the Ellisons’ ownership of the platform is especially significant.

When factoring in CBS and the additional audience that would accompany an acquisition of CNN, the scope of Ellison-owned media widens even more. As FAIR noted in a recent study (2/3/26), the digital reach alone of these networks is considerable—from December 2024 to November 2025, CBS and CNN attracted 905 million and 4 billion views, respectively. If we use these numbers to project a future in which the Ellisons control CNN, their annual online news view count would be around 5 billion.

The actual broadcast and cable TV viewership of CBS and CNN adds relatively little to the Ellisons’ reach: In a recent week in March, CNN averaged 751,000 total primetime viewers, while the CBS Evening News typically had an audience of 4.3 million in the first quarter of 2026.

While the Ellisons’ rapidly consolidating media dynasty is not unprecedented, these developments have reconfigured the media oligarchy, partially displacing established players and amassing holdings that extend beyond traditional cable and print news into digital and technology media.

Revisiting FAIR’s ranking of digital media owners by site traffic, an Ellison acquisition of WBD would catapult them to the No. 3 spot, driven by CNN’s more than 4 billion annual visits, placing them just behind the No. 1 Ochs-Sulzberger family of the New York Times and the No. 2 Murdoch family.

However, unlike with the Ochs-Sulzbergers, the Ellison media empire would also translate to a strong broadcast and cable news presence, as CNN is regarded as one of the “Big Three” cable news channels, generally trailing only Fox News and Comcast’s MS NOW (formerly MSNBC).

And, although the Murdochs wield considerable power in cable, digital and print news, the Ellison portfolio expands into the social media realm as well. This is notable considering the ever-increasing number of Americans that rely on social media for news. According to Pew, 53% of US adults get news from social media “sometimes” or “often.” Facebook and YouTube are the most popular sites for news, while 20% get news “regularly” from Instagram and TikTok.

While the Ellisons do not lead in social media news ownership—that distinction belongs to Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google (which owns YouTube)—their media empire, like the Murdochs’, ranks prominently across multiple platforms.

Corrupted regulation

The Wall Street Journal (12/8/25) reported that “David Ellison offered assurances to Trump administration officials that if he bought Warner, he’d make sweeping changes to CNN…. Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.”

The Paramount/WBD deal has been unanimously approved by the boards of both companies. The next phase is a WBD shareholders vote, which is scheduled to take place on April 23, 2026, and is expected to move forward without complications.

Reuters (2/27/26) reports that approval in the EU is not anticipated to pose a significant hurdle, given that a combined Paramount/WBD entity would hold less than a 20% market share across European markets.

In the US, the merger would require clearance from both the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which are both controlled by Trump appointees. The anti–public interest antics of FCC chair Brendan Carr are already well-documented by FAIR (2/26/25, 4/2/26; CounterSpin, 4/4/25), and newly appointed Attorney General Todd Blanche appears to have been promoted solely for his unwavering deference to Trump.

DoJ official Omeed Assefi, himself a Trump appointee, has insisted that the transaction would “absolutely not” be fast-tracked for political reasons. Yet this claim has been loudly contradicted by statements from Trump’s inner circle. For instance, Hegseth recently said, “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network [CNN], the better.”

A lawsuit filed against Paramount and assorted executives by a former consultant alleges that the elder Ellison was told by Trump, “Larry, it looks like Netflix is gonna get Warner Bros., but if you really really want it, Larry, I’ll make sure you get it” (Hollywood Reporter, 3/17/26).

Even if Trump has not explicitly vocalized his preference for an Ellison-owned CNN, it is clear that his personal preference effectively amounts to federal regulatory approval. Put simply, when it comes to antitrust matters, or virtually anything regulatory, pandering to Trump is a prerequisite.

And the Ellisons are not shy about pandering: In early December 2025, while the Netflix deal was still in play, David Ellison met with Trump and DoJ officials in Washington, DC, where he publicly pitched that, if Paramount acquired WBD, he would implement “sweeping changes” at CNN.

As Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo (12/8/25) observed, shady backdoor dealing and political corruption form the scaffolding of the media oligarchy, a dynamic that reaches new extremes under the Trump regime:

Trump has refashioned antitrust oversight to be little more than a personal veto for the Trump family. Friends can do mergers; foes can’t. Indeed, the indifferent and uncommitted can’t either. You need to get right with the Trump family.

Hope from the states

David Dayen (American Prospect, 2/27/26): “A lifeline exists outside of Trump’s grasp to rethink this looming disaster…. But the state AGs are going to have to act fast.”

While it seems unlikely that federal officials with the power to intervene will do so, there is some cause for optimism at the state level. State governments, particularly state attorneys general, have both the authority and a track record of blocking mergers, even those approved by federal agencies.

Currently leading the charge is California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who, immediately following the news of a potential Paramount/WBD deal, posted on X (2/26/26) that his office would vigorously investigate the merger. California has taken center stage in this fight, due to the outsized impact that such a deal would have on the state’s television and film workforce.

Recent history underscores the validity of these concerns. Just last year, mass layoffs followed the Ellisons’ Skydance/Paramount merger, demonstrating the damage that monopolistic practices wreak on workers.

How effective this resistance will be against the sheer capital and political forces driving the Paramount/WBD deal remains uncertain. As David Dayen explains in the American Prospect (2/27/26), states are well aware of the path forward, and there is historical precedence for them to invoke the Clayton Act to challenge the merger. However, he emphasizes the need to act quickly, noting that states “are in a race against Paramount’s savvy consultants, who are trying to speedrun the deal in a matter of weeks.”

ACTION ALERT: The progressive media policy group Free Press has a petition encouraging state attorneys general to block Paramount‘s takeover of WBD. 

According to the New York Times (4/7/26), US intelligence officials assured Trump that “crippling Iran’s capacity to project power and threaten its neighbors” was “achievable with American intelligence and military power.”

A New York Times exposé (4/7/26) detailed a presentation by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to President Donald Trump in the White House Situation Room—meant to sell the president on a war with Iran roughly two weeks before the US’s initial attack—and Trump’s subsequent discussions with his inner circle.

The Times report, headlined “How Trump Took the US to War in Iran,” is sparking renewed corporate media attention to how this conflict began. But that discussion has been clouded by the report’s fixation on Netanyahu’s sway over Trump and alleged divisions among his advisers.

That Trump was narcissistic and gullible enough to believe lies Netanyahu told him, as the report lays out, was undoubtedly an important factor in the time and manner of a US/Israeli assault that has killed thousands and effectively widened the scope of the Gaza genocide.

But buried within the report is an interesting detail indicating more structural forces were also at work: The Times‘ Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman reported that the US intelligence community determined that, while the prospect of regime change was “farcical,” “crippling Iran’s capacity to project power and threaten its neighbors” was “achievable with American intelligence and military power.” Iran’s continued capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz and exact a heavy toll on US bases in the region demonstrates this was a faulty assessment.

Whether it was by groupthink, incompetence or the influence of neoconservatives and the Israel lobby, the fact that the national security state came to such an erroneous determination is going criminally underdiscussed.

Military/industrial megaphone

Despite Mossad openly bragging that its agents had directly participated in an armed uprising against the Iranian government, the New York Times  (1/14/26) held that Tehran’s depictions of “protesters as puppets of foreign enemies” were “smears” that “should not intimidate the world into inaction.” This was the paper’s last Iran editorial before Trump and Netanyahu launched the war.

A full accounting of how this disaster came about must grapple with the US military/industrial complex and its push for war. No less important is reckoning with that complex’s megaphone: the compliant US corporate media. And juicy scoops on palace intrigue concerning the leaders in the White House and Tel Aviv won’t wash away the Times’ participation in that push.

The Times’ streak of failing to challenge, or even actively encouraging, major US wars (FAIR.org, 10/23/17) remains unbroken during this latest misadventure. Their approach this time was more disjointed than in the past: First, the usual bluster. But then, an all-too-conspicuous silence.

When war with Iran—a heavily armed nation of 90 million people with eminent geographic advantages—was just theoretical, the New York Times’ editorial board was as hawkish as usual. That included cynically deploying humanitarian concerns in Iran to advocate for regime change just 12 days before the armada’s arrival in the gulf (FAIR.org, 2/10/26).

In that January editorial (1/14/26), headlined “Iran’s Murderous Regime Is Irredeemable,” the Times pulled out arguments from the old regime-change playbook. The Iranian government, the Times said, is “among the world’s most nefarious regimes, and the people who bear the biggest cost are the citizens of Iran.”

Having neatly packaged their argument urging empathy for the Iranian people, the Times then offered a familiar sleight-of-hand for its readers: It is possible—natural even—for coercive US power to be utilized to help the Iranian people “achieve liberty.” Offering the considerations it thought Trump should be taking into account, the Times wrote:

The crucial question is what measures—diplomatic, economic and potentially militarily—have the best chance to strengthen the protest movement and sow division among elites allied with the Khamenei government.

Never mind that US policy has been to the detriment of Iranians’ “liberty” for the better part of a century. The papers’ editors advised Trump that, if  he chooses the military option, he should do so “much more judiciously than he typically does.”

Suddenly silent

As war became increasingly likely—that is, once Trump began amassing his “armada” in the Persian Gulf—the editorial board went silent. No more calls for coercive force. No more discussion of Iran at all.

From January 26 to February 27—the 32-day period of military buildup, during which Trump was weighing one of the most consequential US foreign policy decisions of this century—the Times’ editorial board had nothing to say.

That is unprecedented, given the page’s historic role in promoting US adventurism. In the 32 days preceding the US invasion of Iraq, for instance, the New York Times published 13 editorials perpetuating the weapons of mass destruction myth, which to them was sufficient justification for a war against Iraq.

The public debate over whether or not to go to war with Iraq was so ubiquitous leading up to the invasion that one of the Times’ pro-war editorials (2/23/03) acknowledged that “the debate over Iraq has exhausted everyone.”

That voluminous public debate, replete with fabrication and misinformation as it was, manifested in broad public support for the war. In the first days of the conflict, 76% of the US public favored military intervention in Iraq.

The Iran War, on the other hand, is only the second major US war (after the 2011 Libyan intervention) in the era of modern polling to start with more Americans opposed than supportive of it. Any propaganda campaign in favor of war with Iran would have a steep hill to climb after two decades of experience with Middle East interventions.

Mirroring Democratic silence

While quibbling about how Trump went about attacking Iran, the New York Times (2/28/26) agreed that Iran’s government was a “distinct threat” that combines “murderous ideology with nuclear ambitions.” It counseled readers that “recent history demonstrates that military action, for all its awful costs, can have positive consequences.”

In the last two weeks before Trump launched his attack, details of his military deployment, like the inclusion of E-3 Sentry Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft, indicated that the potential for war was serious.

Still, the Times editorial board found no reason for comment. Given that the editors were advocating for regime change mere days before Trump took up their suggestion by ramping up its forces in West Asia, it is highly doubtful that they learned from their history of mistakes and had a change of heart. In any case, if they did, they didn’t voice it.

What can be said is that the Times’ silence mirrors that of Democratic leaders in Congress, who also barely let out a peep during this period. For their part, it is clear that they aimed to conceal their support for the war from their base, who overwhelmingly oppose it. Within that dynamic, congressional Democrats waited until after the war began to propose a war powers resolution—demonstrating their issues, if any, were about process, not substance.

The Times likewise saved its feckless criticism until after the war began, penning an editorial (2/28/26) the day Trump launched the war (proving their capacity to move quickly when convenient) voicing process concerns: Trump lacked clear achievable objectives, threatened to mire the US in another “endless war,” and failed to consult Congress. Like Democratic leaders, the Times failed to reject—and indeed reiterated—the logic of the war itself: that article of faith that Iran is an intolerably evil and belligerent state (FAIR.org, 3/13/26).

Just like Democratic leaders, the New York Times failed to use its outsized influence to challenge this monstrous war. Instead, it participated in its genesis, through cowardice as much as through sanctimony.

Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

Inequality.org (3/4/26)

This week on CounterSpin:  Tesla reported $5.7 billion in US profits in 2025 and paid $0.0 in taxes. As Rebecca Crosby and Judd Legum at Popular Information report, there’s little mystery to this miracle: Tesla used corporate tax breaks, proffered by Trump and co. in what reporters with straight faces call the “One Big Beautiful Bill”—including 100% bonus depreciation; and they exploited a long-standing deduction for executive stock options.

At least 88 profitable corporations have reported paying $0 in federal income taxes last year, according to the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy. Citigroup, CVS, Walt Disney—they “made” billions but, weirdly it turns out, they somehow owe the federal government bupkis, whereas you and I are playing a chump’s game, evidently. Cheaters cheat, grifters grift, but why do news media label companies “successful” when that success stems from cheating and grifting and, crucially, shafting their workers?

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-edits the site Inequality.org. She’s written a new report that gets to the heart of America’s “Low-Wage Employers and the Affordability Crisis.” We hear from her this week.

Fight for the Future (4/13/26)

Also on the show: The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is a nonprofit digital library with the fundamental mission of preserving web pages. For example, a union organizer used it to look up old job listings and check how what the company says it offers has shifted over time. When police edited a press release after a journalist reported on it, and then said her report was false, she was able to prove that the department had changed their statement.

It’s kind of Information 101. But it’s under threat. We hear about that from artist and activist Lia Holland, campaigns and communications director at the group Fight for the Future.

Religion News Service (4/9/26): “The synagogue was leveled in a strike overnight Monday (April 6) before the ceasefire was declared, one of scores of religious and cultural heritage sites destroyed or significantly damaged by the war led by Israeli and US forces.”

An Israeli missile attack destroyed a Tehran synagogue during the Jewish Passover holiday (Religion News Service, 4/9/26). The Israeli military “expressed regret over what it called ‘collateral damage’ to a synagogue in Tehran caused by an overnight strike,” which was “targeting a senior Iranian commander,” said the Middle East Eye (4/7/26).

Photos of the wreckage at the Rafi-Nia Synagogue have accompanied many of these pieces. The Council on American-Islamic relations condemned the attack in a statement (4/7/26):

We strongly condemn the Israeli regime’s bombing of a synagogue in Tehran, which was the predictable end result of the indiscriminate US/Israel bombing campaign against mosques, hospitals, schools, apartments and other civilian sites across Iran.

The group challenged “various Israel advocacy groups and politicians that support this war in the name of protecting Israel to condemn Israel’s synagogue attack.”

Buried at best

The Wall Street Journal headline (4/7/26) refers to the “damage” Israel did to a Tehran synagogue—similar to the “damage” done to the World Trade Center by Al Qaeda.

The story of the attack on the Tehran synagogue was, at best, buried in the US corporate media. CNN posted a brief video (4/7/26) about the bombing but had no online article about it. The New York Times (4/7/26, 4/7/26) mentioned the attack, but as background in broader stories about the US/Israel war on Iran.

A search for “Rafi-Nia” on the Washington Post website yields no results. Ditto for the AP, although the news service did post a video to YouTube (4/7/26). Al Jazeera’s coverage (4/7/26) of the attack was a mélange of AP and AFP copy. CBS News (4/7/26) also used a few paragraphs of AFP copy to report on the attack, although it was buried in the middle of a general timeline about the war.

The Wall Street Journal (4/7/26) had the story, but led with Israel’s contrition over the destruction; that’s not a journalistic construction we see in US news coverage when it comes to the Israeli bombings of other civilian structures in Iran, Gaza or Lebanon. When Israel destroys a hospital, apartment building, encampment, etc., the stories don’t lead with official regret, but rather include Israeli claims that the civilian facilities were actually legitimate military targets. The Journal’s lead provided the government with public relations cover over the sensitive issue of destroying a Jewish house of worship.

Newsweek (4/8/26), once a bigger player in the US media landscape, led with condemnation of the attack from Jewish Iranian leaders, who declared “their unwavering solidarity with Iran in defending the homeland.”

Jewish presence in Iran

Palestine Chronicle (3/6/26): “The Iranian Jewish community sees itself as part of the broader Iranian society rather than as an extension of Israel.”

Underplaying the story obscures not only the wantonness of Israel’s aggression, but the actual nature of Iranian society, which is portrayed as obsessed with wiping Jews off the map (ADL, 6/25/25). “Iranian foreign policy freely mixes anti-Israel furies with anti-Jewish ones,” wrote New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (1/13/26), a pro-war cheerleader (2/22/26, 3/24/26).

In fact, while Israel is obviously the center of Mideastern Jewish life, the Iranian Jewish population dwarfs those elsewhere in the Middle East. “Estimates range from 9,000 to 20,000 Jews currently living in Iran,” according to the Forward (6/18/25).

Wrote the Palestine Chronicle (3/6/26): “The Jewish presence in Iran is among the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world, with roots that historians trace back more than two millennia.”

Yes, Iran is a theocracy; the government is no model for an open society. But there is a Jewish member of Iran’s parliament, who even went on record this year openly criticizing Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian’s handling of popular unrest (i24, 1/29/26).

‘Well-protected second-class citizens’

Reporting on Judaic studies in the holy city of Qom, the Forward‘s Larry Cohler-Esses (8/27/15) writes of “the absolute distinction between Judaism and Zionism that the [Iranian] government makes.”

Cohler-Esses told FAIR that Jews in Iran are “well-protected second-class citizens.” In fact, when he read about the attack, he “wondered if it was the synagogue I spent Shabbat in, but it wasn’t,” because there are more than a dozen active synagogues in Tehran—a reflection of the size of the Jewish community there.

Recalling his 2015 reporting trip, Cohler-Esses said that on Shabbat, Jews would spill out of their synagogues and mingle in the street after services, a sight he didn’t often see in many places in Europe. In one instance, after he left a synagogue service, one of the congregants ran after him through a street teeming with people, wearing a kippah and a tallit (traditional religious attire), and “no one batted an eye.”

The Jews of Iran do suffer discrimination, because Muslims are favored in the legal code over all non-Muslims, Cohler-Esses said. He noted that the Jewish population of Iran has shrunk significantly since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

“Iranian Jews are viewed by Iranians as indigenous,” he said. “They’re the original Bundists,” a nod to the Jewish political movement that “stood not just for socialism, but for do’ikayt—Yiddish for ‘hereness,’” the concept that a Jew’s homeland was in whatever nation they resided in (New York Times, 4/6/26).

Cohler-Esses was hopeful that coverage of the synagogue’s destruction in the Jewish and Israeli press (JTA, 4/7/26; Jerusalem Post, 4/7/26) had the “potential to make Jewish readers of Jewish media outlets go, ‘Oh, they have synagogues there.’” But with the underplaying of the story in US media, it’s a missed teachable moment for news consumers generally.

More robust press coverage of the attack could have taught Americans that the Jews of Iran do have something to fear: Israel.

Janine Jackson interviewed Defending Rights and Dissent’s Chip Gibbons about holding Donald Trump accountable for the April 10, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Reuters (4/7/26)

Janine Jackson: You don’t have to have deep thoughts about the history of the Middle East to see that a president who publicly threatens to end a civilization should not be in charge of a lemonade stand.

Elite media have spent years telling us that if we object to the ground rules of grownup conversation—which include the idea that killing civilians in other sovereign countries is fine if current US leaders want them to change their leadership—well, then, we’re just not smart enough to be in that grownup conversation, because freedom, or something.

Americans are used to having our voices co-opted, misrepresented, to being told we’re “demanding” things we’ve never even been asked about, told we don’t care about prices, or else we do, depending on who’s selling what and why.

When leadership looks out of control, what kinds of power citizens actually have is among the most vital questions we can ask. But don’t look for major news media to host that conversation.

Chip Gibbons is a longtime activist and researcher. He’s policy director at the group Defending Rights and Dissent. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Chip Gibbons.

Chip Gibbons: Thank you for having me. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, although the topics we talk about are less pleasant.

JJ: Never, never pleasant, never pleasant.

Guardian (10/24/24)

CG: But it’s good to have CounterSpin out there, after all these years, for challenging the corporate media. I think I’ve told this before, but I started relying on you guys during Bush’s illegal war in Iraq. And yesterday I was at the Capitol to hear Dennis Kucinich, at an event organized by Ralph Nader, discussing impeaching the president for war crimes in the Middle East, and I wasn’t sure if it was 2006 or 2026.

JJ: Exactly. There’s a whole lot of deja vu going on right now.

Well, all right. Even if you don’t think that Trump has a personality disorder, or whatever—which it’s hard to know how you avoid thinking that kind of thought, with a person who just confabulates and makes things up out of whole cloth, and who talks about reducing prices by 500%, and who talks about war crimes as though that’s not a thing. Everyone has their own list of things that they’re like, “All right, this is beyond the pale.” This is being “unable to discharge the powers and duties of office,” isn’t it?

But until the last few days or the last week or so, we haven’t really seen news media taking impeachment seriously as an option; and that might be shifting now. But the thing is, it’s not just a rhetorical threat. It’s not a tool of punishment, per se. It’s a real tool that we can use because folks in the past thought we might need to use it. But I want to ask you, what would need to happen, and does the War Powers Act need to come first? What’s the process there?

Chip Gibbons: “War of aggression, UN charter, Nuremberg precedent: These are not foreign things being imposed on the US. These are part of our domestic legal system.”

CG: I think that’s a really complicated question. And I think that whatever we think of the Framers, I don’t think they quite envisioned a situation like this, in which the Congress is just totally cowardly, helpless and contemptible, and in league with the Executive Branch.

I mean, I would say the War Powers Act needs to come first, because you need to end this war right now. It is an unconstitutional war. Of course, even if it was constitutional, that would not make it lawful under international law; Trump has violated the United Nations Charter, which, under the US Constitution, because it was ratified by the Senate, has the weight of federal law. The war of aggression is, of course, the charge that the US and others brought against the Nazi high commander in Nuremberg. They were convicted of it.

So war of aggression, UN charter, Nuremberg precedent: These are not foreign things being imposed on the US. These are part of our domestic legal system. We just have not followed them for 80 some years.

And even if Trump’s war was somehow lawful under international law, it would not be moral. So ending this horrific war is the first step here, but we have a Congress that has so far refused to invoke the War Powers Act, even though Trump has engaged in one of the most blatantly unlawful, unconstitutional acts of many presidents.

I mean, every president breaks the War Powers Act. Every president bombs people without congressional authorization. And some of the legal authorizations cited by our friend (I say sarcastically) Barack Obama to bomb Libya without congressional approval have been cited by the Trump administration, both in term one to bomb Syria, and in this term to do all kinds of things.

But the scale of the war, the scale of the atrocities, the scale of the blowback is very intense with this one. It is just troubling, and you need to end the war right now.

Le Monde (9/27/24)

And on top of that, not only is the war illegal, Trump is actively boasting, not just of war crimes anymore, but now of potentially committing genocide. “An entire civilization will die, never to return.” That’s outside the realm of war crimes. That is into the realm of genocide. This is just like—I don’t know what it is. We are deliberately plotting to bomb power plants, bridges. At one point they were talking about bombing desalination plants. These are unquestionably war crimes.

And, of course, the US bombed the dikes during Vietnam, Clinton bombed the bridges in Yugoslavia. It’s not totally new, but there is something about the blood lust and openness about it that does feel very new. We are engaged in the campaign of assassinations. The CIA, of course, has a long history of assassinations, but the party who has pioneered this tactic has been Israel, our partners in this.

And, again, US foreign policy has been murderous. There was a My Lai every day in Vietnam. You and I remember the killings of civilians we learned about during the Winter Soldier Hearings in Iraq, that was the veterans talking. Reagan mining harbors in Nicaragua.

But this is very much an Israelification of American war fight. And we are employing the Gaza model on Iran, and it’s not to downplay the atrocities of past wars, but I spoke multiple times to Anthony Aguilar, who was a US soldier, who was then later in Gaza, becoming a whistleblower. And he was in some of the worst war zones in the world, where the US did awful things. And he said he never saw anything like Gaza.

FAIR.org (7/7/09)

I was talking to someone who has—I won’t say who—a background in intelligence, and yet they said assassinating the Ayatollah, that’s very much an Israeli thing. And of course we know that assassinating the Palestinian leadership and assassinating Lebanese leadership has been the Israeli strategy. So we are pursuing some of the most heinous crimes imaginable: killing children in schools, bombing power plants, threatening civilizations.

So ending the war is the first step, but it isn’t enough to end it. We have to actually hold someone accountable. I remember the lame duck period during Bush and Obama, talking to a Vietnam veteran who said, “Worst mistake my generation did was not holding McNamara, the Johnson secretary of Defense, accountable for Vietnam. We have to hold Bush accountable or this will happen again.”

And if we do not see Trump and Netanyahu imprisoned or impeached, I don’t know what we’re doing. It’s a long shot, but you cannot get away with what we’re doing. The world is only going to get darker, bleaker, more ugly, more violent if people can get away with this.

JJ: I would have you go on, I appreciate it. I would just say that in terms of when we look for accountability, because it seems like everyone fails upward in US foreign policy, you can miscalculate, you can get things wrong, you can lead to horrendous devastation. And somehow you’re still the expert that we go to the next time. And I would only say that that extends also to pundits and to media experts who can sit around and stroke their chins and predict things that the opposite happens, and yet they’re still the experts that we’re going to hear from the next time around. There is no measurable accountability in terms of changing things so that things don’t happen again.

Economist (11/16/19)

CG: I’m old enough to remember all the “Noam Chomsky was right in Vietnam, but he’s wrong on Iraq” articles, only to live through the “Noam Chomsky was right about Iraq, but wrong about this thing” articles. It wasn’t just him, others as well. Or there’s always like the Economist always says it’s not a coup this time, even though it was last time. So during the Allende coup, “that’s not a coup,” and 30 years later, they’d admit it’s a coup, but Bolivia’s not a coup, right? I mean, somehow the people who are always wrong are still always right, even if they admit their critics were right the last time, but this time they’re not. It’s very, very weird.

Although, I don’t know, is anybody outside the Fox News sphere optimistic about this war? This feels fundamentally different than some past US military crimes, in that other than Elon Musk’s X, where I’m exposed to the most insane opinions from people who I’m sure are totally, totally real, I don’t see anything like I saw during the Iraq War drive.

Then I was living amongst Christian fundamentalists. Now I live in a neighborhood where there’s all these “no war” signs up. So, I mean, I have moved.

Ipsos (3/31/26)

But I’m not seeing the level of support for this that you have in past wars. It feels like real end-term US empire stuff, in that the government is dramatically disconnected from the people.

And even the media isn’t…. I mean, they’re awful, but I don’t think they’re doing as awful a job as they used to. But you’ve studied the media more than I do. Maybe I’m off.

JJ: Well, they’re just more just middling around. What I would say is maybe you’re not seeing the same vociferous support, but you are seeing, as I discussed with our earlier guest, a kind of gentle consensus that, “Yeah, this is messed up, but you know, we got to do it, because that regime needs to change. The Iranian regime needs to change.” And so even though there is concern about violence, there’s concern about mistakes being made, I don’t see the voice that would say: “These are war crimes. This has to stop. We need to do whatever it needs to stop.” There is kind of like a, “Yeah, but this is power being power, and so let’s just see how it plays out” is more of the vibe.

CG: I totally agree with that. I do. I just think being middling, as opposed to vociferous, is such a low bar. But it indicates that we are a dying empire, that it’s getting harder and harder to defend. And you have a madman, just a mile, half-mile from where I’m standing right now, who wants to kill an entire civilization, because that’s a great negotiating tactic.

I keep seeing on Elon Musk’s Twitter, from people who I assume are totally real, that I just don’t understand his excellent negotiation that he used in his business. How many bankruptcies did he have in business, Janine?

JJ: No, no, but “Art of the Deal.” Art of the Deal, Chip.

CG: I’m not sure. I’m starting to learn, if this is how he negotiates, why he kept having companies go bankrupt.

Defending Rights & Dissent (4/6/26)

JJ: Yeah. Well, listen, we can’t do everything today, but what I wanted to kind of start up with you is just the conversation that we don’t have to only sit passively by in horror, that it’s worth learning about what levers of power we have. And we can be frustrated with them. They need to be stronger. We need to build new ones. But just in closing, the idea that all we can do is watch this on TV, we can’t sit with that, no?

CG: I know people are really sick of hearing “talk to your member of Congress,” especially how awful the Congress is, but each of these War Powers votes we’re having, we’re getting closer and closer. And I do think just a handful of Republican defections, which I think we may able to get with public pressure, I do think we could invoke the War Powers Act, but if the pressure’s really there.

And I think that Trump is clearly losing the plot. A majority of Americans disapprove of Israel. If you’re a semi-skilled politician, and you believe there’s anything resembling democracy left in the United States—which maybe there are no semi-skilled politicians, and maybe they don’t believe there’s any democracy left—you are looking at this and you are sweating. So keep the pressure up, and let’s try to get this War Powers Act invoked. And then let’s talk about impeaching him and putting him in prison.

JJ: Absolutely.

We’ve been speaking with activist and writer Chip Gibbons from Defending Rights and Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org. There’s lots of work to see there.

Chip Gibbons, thank you so much for speaking with CounterSpin today.

CG: Thank you.