Making Contact

Journalists have been violently targeted by police and arrested alongside demonstrators at Black Lives Matter protests across the country. In this episode we’ll look at the struggle for press freedoms during a time of repression and surveillance.

On this episode of Making Contact, we will look at the privatization of our earth’s most precious resource – water. We will look at the ways people around the world have been organizing against this privatization in the face of climate change and rising sea levels that threaten to contaminate our limited drinking water supplies.

Our radio adaptation of the film, Let the Fire Burn. Directed by Jason Osder, examines the controversial, 1985 clash between police in Philadelphia and MOVE, a radical, non-violent group. On May 13, police dropped a bomb on MOVE's home, killing 11 people and destroying 61 homes.

Producer Robert Raymond interviews Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing--a critical examination on the history of the police, and the police’s evolution as a tool for social control that exacerbates race and class divisions.

44 million Americans hold over 1.6 trillion dollars of student debt and the cost of higher education continues to skyrocket. This unpayable debt causes long term financial damage, especially, for students of color and women. What can we do to fix the debt crisis? We look at two solutions: Free schools like Berea College in Kentucky and the possibility of a student debt strike.