Your Call

The horrific stories and images coming out of Charlottesville have sparked widespread outrage and international media coverage. Last week, we saw white supremacists groups carrying torches, guns, confederate flags, and Nazi paraphernalia.

June marked the 50th anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. After visiting the occupied territories, renowned novelists and essayists Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman marked the anniversary by inviting international writers to bear witness to the human cost the Israeli occupation.

Venezuela is dealing with the world’s highest inflation, severe food shortages, high crime, and political repression. Venezuela is also home to the world’s largest oil reserves. So what explains the political and economic turmoil?

Mike Gonzalez, author of Hugo Chavez, argues that as President Nicolas Maduro’s anti-democratic government battles violent right-wing forces, ordinary Venezuelans are watching the gains of Chavismo slip away. 

Guests:

In 1967, during a public health meeting at UCSF, Dr. David Smith declared that health care is a right, not a privilege. Shortly thereafter, he opened the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic.

On Saturday, hundreds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and members of the Ku Klux Klan marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. They came with guns, shields and clubs, Nazi-style helmets, confederate flags, and Nazi paraphernalia. 

This week, several media outlets have reported on the Sinclair Broadcast Group’s $3.9 billion bid for Tribune media. The deal would allow Sinclair to reach 72 percent of US households.

Why do the vast majority of Americans eat animals when we now have so many alternatives? That’s the question Free From Harm director Robert Grillo explores in his new book Farm to Fable: The Fictions of Our Animal-Consuming Culture.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, private equity firms have taken over public services like ambulance services and emergency health care.

The extension of California’s cap-and-trade program has divided environmentalists. The five-year program requires companies to buy permits to release greenhouse gas emissions. 

Over 100 million Americans have no dental insurance -- and that number could grow if the Affordable Care Act is repealed. In her new book Teeth, veteran health journalist Mary Otto takes readers on a disturbing journey into America’s silent epidemic of oral disease.

On this week’s media roundtable, we’ll discuss the worsening economic and political crisis in Venezuela, which has led to a widespread shortage of food and medicine, rising crime, and skyrocketing inflation. As of last year, nearly 82 percent of Venezuelans lived in a state of poverty. How are the media covering the underlying reasons for Venezuela’s catastrophic economic and political meltdown?

Native Americans who opposed the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline were subjected to tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets, and strip searches. The Intercept reports that they were also heavily surveilled.

142 Americans die of a drug overdose every day, according to the CDC. A White House commission is urging the Trump administration to declare a national emergency. A number of states, cities, and counties, including Ohio and Missouri, are suing pharmaceutical companies saying they caused the crisis with a campaign of fraud and deception. 

After the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s, 1,100 people were prosecuted, including top executives at many of the largest failed banks. After the 2008 financial crisis, the government charged just 47 low-level employees.

Even though the Republican plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act is dead for now, far too many of us are still stuck with high premiums and plans that don’t provide adequate coverage. We’re constantly told that we need to shop around for the best plan.

On this week’s media roundtable, we’ll discuss coverage of Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon’s plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan by handing it over to Erik Prince, founder of the mercenary army Blackwater, and Stephen Feinberg, the owner DynCorp, the largest US contractor in Afghanistan.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Senate rejected a plan to repeal major parts of the Affordable Care Act without providing a replacement. Seven Republicans and every Democrat voted against it.

The Trump administration has used its executive power to challenge the status of national monuments and to open off-coast marine sanctuaries to oil drilling.

In 2006, Al Gore’s award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth started a national conversation about climate change. What’s been accomplished since then?

  Award-winning science journalist Julie Rehmeyer spent years battling chronic fatigue syndrome. Her quest to heal her body led her to remove mold from her environment, leave the Bay Area, and a take a solo expedition to Death Valley. 

This week, shocking images of Syrian refugees who died in Lebanese military custody, allegedly during or after torture, have received widespread coverage. The majority of Syrian refugees are living in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. Who’s telling their stories? 

In early June, the California Senate passed Senate Bill 562, the Healthy California Act, but it passed without details on how to pay for it. A few weeks later, it was shelved by the California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. He said, "We have never found a funding source. All the other details that were missing made it woefully incomplete."

In his new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, Yale Law Professor James Forman examines the role African-American leaders played in advocating tough-on-crime measures and policies that led to mass incarceration.

How do you know your organic food is really organic?

The award-winning documentary Step follows the lives of three seniors at the Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women.

This week, public interest groups and several corporations took part in a day of action to protest the FCC’s plan to kill net neutrality, which ensures an open Internet for all.

After months of pushback from federal courts across the country, this June the US Supreme Court allowed parts of Trump’s controversial travel ban to be implemented until it hears the case in October.

As rents and evictions continue to soar throughout Northern California, several cities are taking action. On Election Day, a number of Bay Area cities passed or strengthened rent control laws.

We’ll have a conversation with education historian Diane Ravitch about the state of public education under the Trump Administration and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

Historian Nancy MacLean joins us to discuss her new book “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.”