Your Call

On this edition of Your Call, we discuss Mississippi's deadly tornado, which ripped through the Delta region and parts of Alabama on Friday.

At least 25 people have died in Mississippi and one person died in Alabama. More than 1,600 homes were damaged or destroyed.

The 2,000 person town of Rolling Fork, Mississippi was decimated. Homes were completely leveled, cars were crushed, and every building in the town has extensive damage. The aerial footage is devastating.

Officials say long term recovery will likely take years. Mississippi is one of the poorest states in the US and in the majority-Black Delta region, many people work paycheck to paycheck in jobs tied to agriculture, according to the Los Angeles Times. Two counties hit hardest by the storms, Sharkey and Humphreys, have poverty rates of 35 percent and 33 percent.

On this edition of Your Call, we’ll discuss The Movement and the “Madman,” a new PBS documentary that shows how two antiwar protests in the fall of 1969 — the largest the country had ever seen — caused President Nixon to cancel what he called his “madman” plans for a massive escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam, including his threats to use nuclear weapons.

The filmmakers say at the time, protestors had no idea what they had prevented and how many lives they had saved.

The Movement and the “Madman” is airing now on PBS.

In the documentary Collision, scientists and researchers say whales are being killed by ship strikes all over the world. They are becoming the ocean's road kill.

We discuss coverage of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq and the US media's acceptance and promotion of the Bush administration's fabricated claims about Iraq.

On this edition of Your Call, we find out why workers who run the country’s second largest school district are on strike for the third straight day.

Los Angeles school support staff are demanding a 30 percent pay increase, saying they barely make more than the minimum wage.

On this edition of Your Call, we speak with three winners of this year's Bay Nature Local Hero Awards.

Since 2011, Bay Nature Institute has honored Bay Area-based conservation leaders and activists for their outstanding contributions to the people and natural world of our region.

This year’s winners include an outdoor environmental educator breaking down barriers to promote equity for people of color, a grassroots community leader working on conservation efforts in Sonoma County, and a scientist engaging with some of the most endangered plants and animals in the Bay Area.

On this edition of Your Call, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway discuss their new book, The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.

They detail how politicians, the corporate class, and major media outlets have promoted free market ideology in all aspects of life. They say this propaganda campaign has given us the housing crisis, the opioid scourge, climate destruction, and the election of Donald Trump.

They write, “Only by understanding this history can we imagine a future where markets will serve, not stifle, democracy.

The Bush administration's so-called "shock and awe" aerial bombardment unleashed 29,200 bombs and missiles on Iraq in the first five weeks of the war.

On this edition of Your Call's One Planet Series, we discuss ConocoPhillips’ $8 billion oil and gas Willow Project in Alaska's fragile and pristine western Arctic region.

Earlier this month, President Biden approved the oil drilling project, despite fierce opposition from environmental and Native Alaskan groups.

The Willow project would lock in an estimated 9.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year — equal to driving nearly two million gas-powered cars, or the annual output of 66 American coal plants — for 30 years.

On this edition of Your Call’s Media Roundtable, we discuss a new ProPublica investigation about how Leonard Leo, a key architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, and his group Teneo, aim to influence all aspects of American politics and culture by building "networks of conservatives that can roll back" liberal influence in Wall Street and Silicon Valley.