Making Contact

When you call 911, who answers the phone? How do they decide who to send to the scene, and how fast will they get there? We bring you a 2-part special—The Race to An Emergency, produced by KALW radio in San Francisco.

We follow the path of a 911 call, and along the way, encounter decades of mistrust that fuel a lack of confidence in the system.

Special thanks to KALW Radio.

Featuring:

• Lesley Phillips, Sharena Thomas, Peoples Community Medics co-founders
• Nikki Anjenique, Sharena Thomas daughter
• Rick Rocha, California Highway Patrol dispatcher
• Olivia Moy, Wolleen Jones, Oakland police Department dispatchers
• Terry Woodard, Oakland Fire Department Communications dispatcher
• Jason Murphy, Paramedics Plus dispatcher
• Tracy Chin, Rob Thrower, Oakland Fire Fighters
• Brian Murphy, Oakland Police Officer
• Regina Harris Gilliard, Johnna Watson Oakland Police Department spokespeople
• Benjamin Bowser, Cal State East Bay Sociology Professor

In today’s news cycle it’s challenging keeping up with the latest developments around the world. In 2014 we saw pro-democracy protests spanning 75 days in Hong Kong to the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. Often we just get the stories when they first break, then once the height of a conflict diminishes or really when another issue surfaces to the top of the news cycle, that’s it. After that we don’t hear much more about the issue. Even though we know that the issues remain.

On today’s show we’re going to bring you an update on some of the stories we’ve covered this year. We’ll go to a protest to talk to advocates calling for an end to using Native American imagery and stereotypes in sports. We’ll talk to the Center for Food Safety about the political outlook for supporters of better regulations of GMOs and pesticides. And we’ll get an update on US immigration policy from the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

Featuring

• Alice Ollstein, radio producer
• Suzan Shown Harjo, Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee advocate for American Indian rights
• Morning Star Gali, co-chair of Bay Area Coalition to End Racism in Sports
• Jacqueline Keeler, founding member of Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry
• Don Tipping, Seven Seeds Farm owner
• Chris Hardy, Rogue valley farmer
• Sylvia Wu, staff attorney at Center for Food Safety
• Catherine Tactaquin, Executive Director of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

Hundreds of social justice advocates and organizers passed away in 2014, leaving their work behind as their legacy, but often also leaving an irreplaceable hole in their movements.On today’s edition of Making Contact we honor and revisit the lives of just a few of those fallen heroes who passed away this year. Featuring

• Chokwe Lumumba, former mayor of Jackson MS
• Morgan Powell, Bronx River Sankofa founder
• Charity Hicks, Detroit People’s Water Board co-founder
• Darby Tillis, death penalty opponent
• Yuri Kochiyama, civil rights activist
• Ted Gullickson, San Francisco Tenants Union director
• George Carter; Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools participant
• Leslie Feinberg, author of Stone Butch Blues
• Eddie Ellis, prison reform advocate
• Mark Naison, Fordham University African-American history professor
• Lila Cabbil, Rosa Parks Institute president emeritus
• Diane Fujino, author of Heartbeat of Struggle, the revolutionary life of Yuri Kochiyama
• Taiyo Na, author
• Randy Shaw, Tenderloin Housing Clinic executive director
• Qasim Davis, Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools project manager
• Perry Cobb, Darby Tillis’ co-defendant
• Dr. Divine Pryor, executive Director of the center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions

Fossil fuels are a trillion dollar industry but environmentalists say they have a plan to pull the plug on the industry: divestment. The campaign to get institutions to end their investments in oil, gas, and coal companies has won supporters around the US and abroad.

But is the strategy working? We hear from students in Boulder, Colorado who have been campaigning since 2012 and we hear about the close relationship between the oil industry and professional soccer.

Featuring

• Jay Carmona, Community Divestment Campaign Manager for 350.org
• Ben Ayliffe, Greenpeace Arctic Campaign
• Michael Goodman, sports writer for Grantland
• Stefan Szymanski, Professor of Sports Management and Business at the University of Michigan
• PD Gantert, Kelsey Cody, Fossil Free CU campaigners
• Ken Mcconnellogue, Vice President for Communication at the University of Colorado
• Steven Schueth, President and Managing Member of First Affirmative
• David Gross, Senior Instructor of Finance and Faculty Director of the Masters Program in Finance and Real Estate CU Boulder

Over 6,000 migrant deaths were recorded on the U.S. side of the border with Mexico between 1998 and 2013. The true number of deaths is likely higher, and thousands of families never hear from their loved ones again.

This documentary travels to the desert ranch lands of Brooks County and the border town of Reynosa, Tamaulipas to introduce us to the human cost of “prevention through deterrence,” a border enforcement strategy introduced during the Clinton administration.

Featuring:

• Lori Baker, Professor of Anthropology, Baylor University
• Eduardo Canales, Executive Director, South Texas Human rights Center
• Elias,

Every week since January of 1995, Making Contact has been bringing you voices and perspectives from the grassroots…analysis of the larger structures driving our global economies…and solutions being created by people all over the world.

On this special 20th program’s creation by volunteers, and how this little radio show became part of a new generation of media outlets that continues to both counter the mainstream, and transform our conception of who and what is considered newsworthy.

Featuring:

• Dr. Julianne Malveaux, President Emertia of Bennett College for Women
• Peggy Law & Norman Solomon, Making Contact co-founders
• Paul George, Steve Rock, Shelley Kessler, Pam Law, Bill Creighton, early Making Contact volunteers
• Food Not Bombs volunteers
• Laura Livoti, former Making Contact Managing Director
• Michael Eisenmenger, Community Media Center of Marin Executive Director
• David Cole, Georgetown University constitutional law professor
• Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report founder

In September of 2014, Women Rising radio rode the People’s Climate train coast to coast, with over 200 activists heading to New York City to join the largest climate change march in history.

Featuring:

• Valerie Love, Center for Biological Diversity, No Tar Sands Campaigner
• Penny Opal Plant, Indigenous climate activist
• Lauren Wood, Utah’s Peaceful Uprising co-founder
• Teresa Jimenez, Urban Tithe organizer
• Shannon Biggs, Global Exchange Community Rights program director
• Rosalind Harris, Global Climate Justice Alliance
• Michael Brune, Sierra Club executive director
• Sister Santussika, Tony Sirna, Camille Herrera, Carrie, Riders on the People’s Climate Train
• People’s Climate Train Singers

Victims and perpetrators sitting down face to face…it can help heal their wounds, and our society. Incarcerating our way out of crime clearly hasn’t worked, and it’s costing us billions. Meanwhile, school suspensions are reaching record highs.

Now, Institutions across US are finally starting to consider problem solving methods other than punishment. Restorative justice is gaining ground–in the schools, and behind bars.

Featuring:

• Paul Jacobsen, Rosa Parks elementary school principal
• Mekaylah Porter, Marilyn, Rosa Parks elementary students
• Yari Sandel, restorative justice coordinator
• Helen Parker, San Francisco’s restorative practices department coach
• Sonya Shah, Insight Prison Project Justice Program Director
• Nancy Potts, mother of son killed by drunk driver
• Chris Scezech, drunk driver
• Radha Stern, mother of murder victim
• Sam Johnson, San Quentin prison inmate

More than a decade after the start of the second Gulf War, the United States has embarked on a bombing campaign targeting Islamic State forces inside Iraq and Syria. It’s the third U.S. military action inside Iraq in as many decades.

But the reasons for the new war keep shifting, from protecting ethnic and religious minorities, to preventing terrorist attacks on the U.S.

As independent producer Reese Erlich reports from Northern Iraq, this latest conflict, and the future of the region is tightly connected to the oil industry and international politics.

Featuring:

• Antonia Juhasz, author The Bush Agenda, The Tyranny of Oil, and Black Tide
• Fauzi Ali and Aiwa Majdal, Yazidi refugees
• Chenar Rozbyani, photographer
• Richard Nabb, oil company advisor
• Kemal Afaraci assistant district manager Tak Tak oil field
• Shirin Jabar, demonstrator at KDP rally.

In her new book: “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate”, Naomi Klein argues that while it’s too late to stop climate change, we can save our civilization.

But it’s going to take radical steps that will transform the way humans interact with the world. Business as usual is no longer an option. On this edition, Naomi Klein speaks about her new book, and points out signs of hope as the global movement to counter climate change matures.

Featuring:

• Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate