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Johanna Bozuwa on Public Utilities, Jake Johnston on Haitiview post on FAIR.orgPlay Stop  (photo: Wikimedia) This week on CounterSpin: People are using words like “unlivable” to describe parts of California, where wildfires and power outages are driving new kinds of crisis and exacerbating existing ones. At the heart of it: climate disruption, of course, but also a private utility system that isn’t now and never has been incentivized to address it. As we record, young Californians are sitting in at Nancy Pelosi’s office, saying business as usual is over. Media should be looking forward, too, but will they? We’ll talk about the drive for a publicly owned, community-controlled energy system with Johanna Bozuwa, co-manager of the Climate & Energy Program at the Democracy Collaborative. Play Stop  (cc photo: FMSC) Also on the show: Listen to this sentence from the New York Times: “Weeks of unrest around Haiti, coupled with rampant corruption and economic malaise, have led to soaring prices, a disintegration of public services and a galloping sense of insecurity and lawlessness.” Weeks of unrest have led to insecurity? Economic malaise causes prices to soar? “Coupled” is the best way to describe the relationship between the unrest and the corruption and/or malaise? This word salad is the kind of earnest carelessness you exhibit when you’re talking about some place unalterably foreign . Haiti, the upshot is, is just an unholy mess that might not even reward the effort to make sense of. It’s a useful dodge that lets the US off the hook for its past and present role in immiserating Haiti, which is indeed in severe crisis. We’ll hear from Jake Johnston of the Center for Economic Policy Research. Play Stop Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the lack of coverage of the arrest of Max Blumenthal. Play Stop |