David Kass on Billionaire Election-Buying

  https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250131.mp3 Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).   Tech billionaires at Trump’s second inauguration: Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and X‘s Elon Musk (image: C-SPAN) This week on CounterSpin: You may remember the testimony: former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz pouting to a Senate hearing on the company’s union-busting in which he was referred to as a billionaire that using that “moniker constantly is unfair”: “Yes, I have billions of dollars—I earned it. No one gave it to me. And I’ve shared it constantly with the people of Starbucks.” The delusion that a billionaire “earned” every penny of it, or that it is shared equitably with workers, may be special to billionaires, but the broader notion—that “the government only helps some people; other people do it on their own” is conveyed throughout corporate media’s narrative, even as it’s corrosive to an understanding of democracy, much less the fight for it. The increasing influence of not merely the rich, but the super rich, on the politics and policy we all have to live with is an urgent story, if not a new one. Yet somehow, elite media seem less and less interested in it. We’ll talk with David Kass, executive director of the Americans for Tax Fairness campaign, about that on this week’s show. Transcript: ‘We’ve Seen This Incredible Flow of Billionaire Money Into Campaigns’ https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250131Kass.mp3   Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Trump’s illegal funding freeze, immigration raids and the Gaza death toll. https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250131Banter.mp3