Your Call

On this edition of Your Call’s One Planet Series, we're discussing Manzanar, Diverted: When Water Becomes Dust, an award winning documentary that explores the history of Native Americans who were forced out of their ancestral lands in what is now called Owens Valley, which is 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Their forced removal made way for white settlers and 11,070 Japanese Americans who were incarcerated in the Valley’s Manzanar camp from March 1942 to November 1945.

In the film, we meet intergenerational women from Native American, Japanese American, and rancher communities who form an unexpected alliance to defend their land and water from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which bought out much of valley to supply fresh water to the growing population in Los Angeles.

On this edition of Your Call's media roundtable, we're discussing the political and economic crisis in Sri Lanka, and the mass protest movement demanding the resignation of the country's top official. Sri Lankan president Gotabaya Rajapaksa finally emailed his resignation after fleeing to Singapore.

What's next for Sri Lanka, as millions are struggling with daily power outages and shortages of basic necessities, including fuel, food, and medicines?

Nearly five million people, or 22 per cent of the Sri Lankan population, are food insecure and in need of assistance, and 86 per cent of families are resorting to at least one coping mechanism, including eating less, eating less nutritious food, and even skipping meals altogether, according to the World Food Program.

On this edition of Your Call’s media roundtable, we’ll discuss coverage of President Biden’s trip to Israel and the US response to the killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank.

Her family demanded a meeting with President Biden. According to reports, the White House did not respond. Instead, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he invited the family to Washington DC.

How does President Biden's Israel-Palestine policy compare to his predecessors?

What will it take to fight the powerful far-right machine?

On this edition of Your Call, we’re airing part two of our interview with Anne Nelson, author of Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.

We're delving deeper into her research about the Council for National Policy, a network of evangelicals, oil barons, gun lobbyists, and Republican operatives working to dismantle the social safety net and civil liberties. What will it take to organize and fight this powerful machine? And why aren’t the national media doing a better job of connecting the dots?

On this edition of Your Call, we're discussing the latest January 6 hearing, which focused on the role extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers played in the deadly insurrection.

The evidence presented showed that members of Donald Trump's inner circle were in close communication with these groups in the lead-up to the attack. During his testimony, former Oath Keeper spokesperson Jason Van Tatenhove said, "I think we need to quit mincing words and just talk about truths, and what it was going to be was an armed revolution."

Democrats and watchdog groups say the evidence shown so far must result in charges against everyone involved, including Donald Trump. "Everything I hear from the January 6 committee hearings shows all the puzzle pieces put together. No more gaps," said Representative Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. "All of it points to the urgent need for DOJ to prosecute Donald Trump. If he is not held accountable, there will be enormous consequences to our democracy."

On this edition of Your Call, we discuss The Territory, a new documentary about the ongoing fight to save the Amazon rainforest from land grabbers, loggers, and corporations.

On this edition of Your Call's media roundtable, we're discussing a recent West Virginia ruling in favor of three major US drug distributors in a landmark opioid lawsuit. The city of Huntington and Cabell County will not receive the $2.5 billion they sought from McKesson, Cardinal Health, and Amerisource Berge to help deal with the crisis.

Those companies shipped 81 million pain pills to Cabell County from 2006 to 2014, according to federal data made public during the trial. West Virginia is ground zero of the opioid crisis.

How will this ruling affect other opioid related lawsuits in cities across the country?

On this edition of Your Call’s Media Roundtable, we're discussing the Supreme Court’s decision to hear oral arguments regarding a North Carolina gerrymandering case that could take power away from state courts and allow Republican legislators to control elections.

We'll also discuss the Democratic Party's failure to respond to authoritarianism, gerrymandering, the stolen Supreme Court seat, and the Roe decision.

On this edition of Your Call, we’ll speak with doctors about the unprecedented landscape they face now that Roe has been overturned.

Yesterday, Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, closed its doors. The clinic’s owner Diane Derzis has worked in abortion care for 50 years. She told Newsweek abortion bans will be in place for decades to come. "Most doctors are not going to jail for murder and I don’t think people realize that," she said. Doctors across the country are so frightened that "you’re going to see women of privilege start dying." Derzis is opening a new clinic in New Mexico, where abortion is legal.

Whole Woman’s Health, an independent abortion provider in Texas for 20 years, is also closing four clinics and relocating to New Mexico.

With providers fleeing states where bans are now enforced, patients could lose access to birth control, prenatal care, and other reproductive health services. What will happen to pregnant patients dealing with life threatening circumstances? Who will care for them?

On this edition of Your Call, media analyst Anne Nelson will discuss her book, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. She writes about the Council for National Policy, a powerful group of Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists who formed during the Reagan administration. Their goal was to attack civil liberties and the social safety net.

Nelson traces how the collapse of local journalism laid the foundation for the Policy's information war. She also reveals how they eventually collaborated with the Koch network to transform our current political landscape.

What will it take to fight this powerful machine?