Ralph Nader Radio Hour

Ralph welcomes Maxim Thorne director of the non-partisan Civic Influencers, an organization that trains young people to inspire their peers to vote and therefore swing elections toward issues they care about and also fights “generational gerrymandering,” efforts by certain states to make it harder for 18 to 29-year-olds to vote. Plus, Ralph gives his take on some recent news items, answers your questions, and comments on your recent feedback.Maxim Thorne is a lawyer, activist, philanthropist, and a Lecturer at Yale. He has worked with the NAACP, Human Rights Campaign, New Jersey Head Start Association, GLAAD, the Executive Committee of the Yale Law School, and the Yale Alumni Task Force on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. He currently serves as Chief Executive of Civic Influencers, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to inspiring young people to make their voices heard—and their votes count.When we think about how important young people are to saving our democracy, and voting on pro-democracy candidates, and voting on issues like climate change and abortion rights and LGBTQ rights— what are we giving them? If you are not moving to relieve their student debt, and you are not moving to allow them to organize so they get better paid jobs that allow them to lead a decent life, you’re not giving that most important part of our electorate what they need and what they’re demanding.Maxim ThorneWe can show [young people] the power of their vote— that’s the marching band, the glee club, the gospel choir, the football team, the cheerleaders alone could swing that election. One dorm could swing that election. That is power.Maxim ThorneIt’s really amazing how, after the civil rights battles and the civil rights laws in the 1960s and ‘70s, most people thought, “That battle is over, it’s up to you to vote, and no one’s going to obstruct you.” And along come some of these rightwing corporate lawyers for the GOP. And they say, “Hey, we can develop all kinds of ways to harass, delay, expunge, purge, and not count votes!” And that’s what a lot of Republican governors are doing from Florida to Texas.Ralph NaderIn Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis1. For the first time in 20 years, Israel has attacked the Jenin Palestinian refugee camp, the New York Times reports. Less than two weeks earlier, far-right Israeli defense minister Itamar Ben Gvir went on record saying “We have to settle the land of Israel and at the same time need to launch a military campaign, blow up buildings, assassinate terrorists. Not one, or two, but dozens, hundreds, or if needed, thousands.” This brutal attack has reignited international outcry against Israeli apartheid, including from the United Nations, but few expect the Biden administration to impose serious penalties in response.2. A group of congressional progressives is speaking out in response to the White House’s decision to transfer cluster munitions to Ukraine. In a statement, this group wrote “Cluster munitions have been banned by nearly 125 countries…because of the indiscriminate harm they cause, including mass civilian injury and death.” This statement also notes that the administration is circumventing clear directives from Congress restricting the transfer of these weapons. This statement was signed by Reps. Pramila Jayapal, Barbara Lee, and Ilhan Omar, among other progressives.3. Per Ryan Grim of the Intercept, on the other side of the aisle, Matt Gaetz – the dissident House Republican – has committed to cosponsoring the amendment to bar the transfer of cluster munitions. One hopes this Left-Right coalition can expand and stop this move.4. The Verge reports that Microsoft has won the first round of its legal battle with the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC sought a preliminary injunction to prevent the tech giant’s acquisition of the video game conglomerate Activision Blizzard. The ruling follows “five days of grueling testimony.” Despite their victory, Microsoft still faces an antitrust lawsuit.5. In Guatemala, an electoral crisis is unfolding. Shocking results in the June 25th elections put Bernardo Arevalo – a progressive anti-corruption candidate and son of former left-wing president Juan Jose Arevalo – into the second round, defeating the daughter of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt and setting up a showdown with the former first lady Sandra Torres. However, a coalition of nine right wing parties have filed a lawsuit to suspend the results, citing far-fetched allegations of fraud. The Organization of American States is urging the Guatemalan authorities to reject the lawsuit because "The Mission verified that no serious irregularities were revealed and that no significant changes were registered with respect to the preliminary results of Sunday, June 25." This from Reuters.6. The sports pages of both the LA Times and New York Times took major hits this week. According to the Sporting Tribune, the LA Times “will no longer have box scores, standings, game stori

Ralph welcomes Abigail Disney, to discuss her work trying to get her namesake’s company to pay their workers a fair, livable wage as told in her documentary, “The American Dream: And Other Fairy Tales.” Plus, Erica Payne cofounder of The Patriotic Millionaires and co-author of “Tax The Rich!” returns to update us on their latest work educating ordinary Americans about how they can advocate for a fairer tax system.Abigail Disney is a social activist, philanthropist, and an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker. She is also Chair and Co-Founder of Level Forward, an ecosystem of storytellers, entrepreneurs, and social change-makers dedicated to balancing artistic vision, social impact, and stakeholder return. She also created the nonprofit Peace is Loud, which uses storytelling to advance social movements, and the Daphne Foundation, which supports organizations working for a more equitable, fair, and peaceful New York City. She is Co-Founder of Fork Films, a nonfiction media production company, which produces original documentaries and the podcast All Ears. Her latest film, which she co-directed with Kathleen Hughes, is The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales.Heirs and heiresses have gotten into a lot of trouble down the years trying to impose their will on the world. I think that my job, if I have one, is to impose the will of the world on wealthy people instead of the other way around.Abigail DisneyWe need to reinvigorate the IRS, we need to reinvigorate OSHA, we need to reinvigorate the NLRB and the other referees that have been made anemic by the constant assault of budget cuts.Abigail DisneyIt is amazing to me that, as this far rightwing guy, [Roy Disney] would never have treated his workers in a million years the way that the CEO at the time—Bob Iger, who was toying with running for president as a Democrat—was treating them on the regular. And that was the total capture of the entire American political spectrum by an idea about work and working that was the inverse—in a relatively short period of time— of what my grandfather was doing as a matter of course.Abigail DisneyErica Payne is the founder and president of Patriotic Millionaires, an organization of high-net-worth individuals that aims to restructure America’s political economy to suit the needs of all Americans. Their work includes advocating for a highly progressive tax system, a livable minimum wage, and equal political representation for all citizens. She is the co-author, with Morris Pearl, of Tax the Rich: How Lies, Loopholes and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer.As far as I can tell, the billionaire class bought up the entire Republican Party and a sufficient number of Democrats that they got a stranglehold on this economy. What they basically created is a system that guarantees we become more unequal more quickly over time, they destabilize the entire country, they threaten democratic capitalism around the world…Mathematically, there’s absolutely no direction this country can go in other than more unequal. And we’re looking at a game of economic Jenga, where we’re basically pulling money out of the bottom and the middle and putting it on the top and the whole thing’s in the process of collapsing.Erica PayneIf they are talking to you about something other than money, they are stealing your money. So the next time someone is talking to you about abortion, or transgender rights, or critical race theory, or any of these other things, you can rest assured that these politicians on the back end are stealing your money.Erica PayneI’m glad you mentioned Reagan, because I think liberals and progressives underestimate the gigantic impact this cruel man with a smile had on the culture with his market fundamentalism.Ralph NaderThe book giveaway for "Tax the Rich!: How Lies, Loopholes, and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer" by Erica Payne and Morris Pearl is now closed. We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to all those who showed interest and participated in this event. In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeStantis1. As the reinvigorated Teamsters union engages in a massive contract renegotiation with UPS, the labor group has announced they scored a major victory – elimination of 22.4, the “two-tier” system, meaning “all drivers currently classified under the 22.4 system would be reclassified immediately to Regular Package Car Drivers, placed in seniority, and have their pay adjusted to the appropriate RPCD rate.” The two-tier system has been a central issue for organized labor in recent years, and a catalyst for the proliferation of a more militant labor movement.2. For the past six years, the Department of Energy has been attempting to clean up a “highly radioactive” spill near the Columbia River in Washington State. Now, the Tri-City Herald reports that the spill is “both deeper and broader than anticipated.” The Energy Department is already quoted saying “the soil beneath the 324 Building is so radioactively hot that it would be letha

Ralph welcomes journalist and executive director for intellectual capital at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Hal Weitzman, to discuss his book “What’s The Matter With Delaware? How the First State Has Favored the Rich, Powerful, and Criminal—and How It Costs Us All.”Hal Weitzman is Executive Director for Intellectual Capital at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and editor-in-chief of Chicago Booth Review. A former Financial Times editor and foreign correspondent, he is the author of Latin Lessons: How South America Stopped Listening to the United States and Started Prospering and What’s the Matter with Delaware?: How the First State Has Favored the Rich, Powerful, and Criminal—and How It Costs Us All.We know that lawyers and investors in corporations hate political uncertainty because it might affect their profit-making process. And in Delaware they’ve perfected that system. They have completely bypassed any political uncertainty, and therefore also bypassed any oversight or regulation.Hal WeitzmanThe state of Delaware, the major law firms, the legislature, and the State Secretary of State over the years have created a very powerful embrace to make sure that Delaware stays #1 in terms of being a haven for these kinds of corporations, and in terms of making sure that the federal government interferes the least.Ralph NaderIn Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis1. The Lever reports that in Delaware, The Company State, in a little town called Seaford, corporations may soon have the right to vote. The town has proposed an amendment to their charter granting LLCs, corporations, trusts or partnerships suffrage in municipal elections. Claire Snyder-Hall, executive director of Common Cause Delaware called this a "shocking...attempt to [give] artificial entities… voting rights," and characterized it as the “flipside [of voter suppression]." This proposal would require the blessing of both houses of the Delaware legislature, and while unlikely to pass, the corporate control of the First State is so powerful that passage cannot be entirely counted out either.2. Senate HELP Committee Chair Bernie Sanders has launched an investigation into safety at Amazon. Chairman Sanders wrote on Twitter “If Amazon can afford to spend $6 billion on stock buybacks last year, it can afford to make sure its warehouses are safe. If Amazon can afford to pay its CEO $289 million over the past 2 years, it can afford to treat all of its workers with dignity and respect, not contempt.” To further this investigation, the HELP committee has launched an online portal allowing “current or former workers, supervisors, medical staff, or anyone else in Amazon's warehouses,” to submit their stories of mistreatment.3. A troubling new report from the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) highlights the rise in pedestrian fatalities in recent years. According to the data, over 8,000 pedestrians were killed on US roadways in 2022, more than double the number who were killed in 2010 and higher than any year since 1980. Regulators must take pedestrian safety as seriously as that of automobile drivers.4. Last Thursday, Indian Prime Minister and Right-wing extremist Narendra Modi addressed Congress, following his meeting with President Biden. A number of progressive Democrats boycotted the event, including Reps. Summer Lee, Cori Bush, Ilhan Omar, Jamaal Bowman, Rashida Tlaib, and AOC. In a joint statement issued by Bush and Bowman, the members wrote “by bestowing Prime Minister Modi…the rare honor of a joint address, Congress undermines its ability to be a credible advocate for the rights of religious minorities and journalists around the world.” This from the Hill.5. People’s Dispatch reports that the New York City Council has passed a resolution calling for the United States to end the blockade on Cuba. New York City now joins Washington, D.C. and Chicago in passing such resolutions. This resolution notes “Every year since 1992, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly has adopted a resolution declaring the embargo a violation of both the Charter of the United Nations and international law”.6. In the recent Virginia primaries, reform prosecutors swept their respective elections, per Bolts Magazine. Steve Descano, Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, and Buta Biberaj, prosecutors in Fairfax, Loudoun, and Arlington each fended off primary challenges from the right, two of whom were endorsed by police unions and a third who was backed by none other than the local Republican Party. The reform prosecutors trounced these regressive opponents by margins of 10 to 13 points. Deghani-Tafti told the magazine “If this election was a referendum on reform, our voters emphatically responded that they will not go backward.”7. The Reykjavik Grapevine reports that no whaling will occur in Iceland this Summer, following months of protest. Interestingly, the article notes that “Whaling is not a traditional practice in Iceland. Not only is

Ralph spends the entire hour with co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, Norman Solomon, to discuss his latest book, “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine,” which examines how our “military-industrial-media-intelligence complex” conspires to suppress the truth about war.Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and his newest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.The tacit motto of huge media outlets like the New York Times is: Being pro-war means never having to say you’re sorry. If a journalist or a media outlet is in favor of the US engaging in war, that is couched as “objective.” If a journalist (such as Phil Donahue on MSNBC) in the leadup to the war even raises questions, serious questions critical of an impending invasion or ongoing US war then that's considered “biased.”Norman SolomonThese wars are treated as though they aren’t wars. That they don’t exist. That “there’s nothing to see here, folks!” Because we say so. We have our own criteria. And part of that is the jingoism and the nationalism and the racism that says if the people at the other end of US firepower don’t look like us, are not in a country aligned with us, then we don’t think there’s really a reason to consider it a major problem. It’s only a problem when Americans are dying.Norman SolomonThis was a real sociocide—thousands and thousands of bombs and missiles dropped on Iraq. And here’s the New York Times, being fed by one of their reporters Judith Miller total lies about Saddam importing uranium from Niger and Africa and other falsehoods that made page one in the New York Times. What is clearly probably its darkest journalistic chapter… There doesn’t seem to be anything learned today. They could just as well do it today against another country.Ralph NaderIn Case You Haven’t Heard1. On Wednesday, The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against Amazon, alleging that the online retailer “tricked and trapped people into recurring subscriptions [for Amazon Prime] without their consent, not only frustrating users but also costing them significant money,” according to FTC Chair Lina Khan. Khan added “These manipulative tactics harm consumers and law-abiding businesses alike.” According to internal documents “Amazon named [the cancellation] process ‘Iliad,’…refer[ing] to Homer’s epic about the long, arduous Trojan War.” More about this lawsuit is available at the Washington Post.2. As the Teamsters continue to negotiate for a better deal with UPS, the membership has voted overwhelmingly to approve a strike. This vote – which passed with 97 percent support – gives the union “maximum leverage to win demands at the bargaining table,” according to the union’s statement. The statement goes on to note that the Teamsters represent more than 340,000 UPS package delivery drivers and warehouse logistics workers nationwide. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien added “The strongest leverage our members have is their labor and they are prepared to withhold it to ensure UPS acts accordingly.”3. For the fist time since 2019, the Democratic-controlled Senate Banking committee will hold a “mark-up” session on a bill – a key step toward enacting any legislation. This bill – sponsored by Senators Sherrod Brown, who chairs the committee, and Tim Scott of South Carolina – seeks to claw back excessive compensation from executives at failed banks and penalize them for misconduct. This legislation was almost certainly drafted in response to the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. The draft text of this bill is available at Punchbowl News.4. The American Prospect reports that, according to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Association, Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” or FSD has led to at least 736 crashes – causing 17 fatalities – since 2021. Mile for mile, Tesla’s FSD system is “likely…ten times more dangerous at driving than humans.”5. Leaving aside self-driving, a CBS News report sheds light on new dangers associated with electric vehicles. “Their batteries make the vehicles heavier, offering better protection to the passengers inside, but that extra weight — hundreds to even thousands of pounds — has traffic safety advocates concerned about the potential risk to other drivers.” To give some perspective on how heavy these vehicles are, “GMC's Hummer EV weighs more than 9,000 pounds…more than 3,000 pounds heavier than the GMC's full-size pickup. The Hummer EV's battery alone weighs about the same as a Toyota Corolla.”6. The Washington Post reports that the strike at Insider magazine, the “longest ever [strike] in digital media,” has ended. The new deal raises the minimum salary for Insider staff and prevents any further layoffs this year, along with an immediate 3.5 percent raise upon ratification of the

This week we welcome back Professor Randall Kennedy to help us pay tribute to three principled, uncompromising African American activists, Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report, human rights champion, Randall Robinson, and legendary actor, singer, and activist, Harry Belafonte.Randall Kennedy is Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on contracts, criminal law, and the regulation of race relations. He is the author of several books, including Contracts: Happiness and Heartbreak, For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law, and Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture.You’ve chosen three very interesting people [Randall Robinson, Harry Belafonte, and Glen Ford]. And I think that one thing that the listeners should keep in mind is that the three that you’ve chosen are all progressive; they are very different… Because the tent of progressivism should be a large tent— not everybody’s going to think the same, and indeed there’s going to be some friction between various tendencies among progressives.Randall KennedyI don’t think that progressives pay enough attention to the people who have been in their camp. We don’t pay enough attention to people who have passed away. We don’t pay enough attention to recalling people who have been heroic in our midst. And, again, I say this as a person who is sometimes extremely critical of some of the people that you’ve mentioned.Randall KennedyWe need people like Glen Ford to pull in one direction uncompromisingly—because the corporate interests always pull in the other direction uncompromisingly—and then we need people who are in between and sometimes have to face the hard realities you’ve pointed out.Ralph NaderIn Case You Haven’t Heard1. The Wall Street Journal and the Corporate Crime Reporter have announced that, following decades of citizen pressure, and action last year by Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, Senator Richard Blumenthal, and Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin, the Department of Justice has finally created a Corporate Crime Database. Under President Biden, the Justice Department has taken a tougher rhetorical stance on corporate crime, but as Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco notes, the department “cannot ignore the data showing overall decline in corporate criminal prosecutions over the last decade...We need to do more and move faster.” Among civic groups, The Center for Study of Responsive Law and Public Citizen lead the charge to create these corporate rap sheets and are already working to expand and strengthen this new resource for corporate crime data.2. If you live on the East Coast, you have likely experienced dangerous levels of air pollution in the last week due to smoke moving South from Canadian wildfires. Yet, the Lever reports that under current air quality rules, fossil fuel producers will not have to curb their emissions to offset this spike in air pollution because they have successfully lobbied for a loophole protecting themselves in the case of “exceptional events” outside their control. Environmental regulators are currently mulling a new rule to clamp down on this type of air pollution, but face stiff opposition from industry groups.3. The Washington Post reports that, in an exercise of his leverage in the tightly divided Senate, Bernie Sanders has vowed to oppose all Biden health nominees until the administration produces a “comprehensive” plan to lower prescription drug prices. Sanders’ role as Chair of the Health Education Labor and Pensions committee means these nominees cannot advance without his blessing. This notably includes Biden’s nominee for director of the National Institutes of Health, or NIH. Sanders said “Politicians for years have talked about the high cost of prescription drugs, relatively little has been done, and it’s time that we act decisively.”4. The Progressive International has issued a statement decrying the “soft coup” underway against left-wing President Gustavo Petro in Colombia. Their statement reads “Ever since the election of the country’s first progressive government...Colombia’s traditional powers have been organizing to restore an order marked by extreme inequality, environmental destruction, and state-sponsored violence.” The statement goes on to excoriate officials who have sought to undermine the Petro administration and “former generals, colonels, and members of the Colombian military [who] have not only proclaimed their opposition to President...Petro — but even marched outside Congress to call for a coup d’état against his government.” Signatories to this letter include over 400 political and industrial leaders, including Noam Chomsky, Jeremy Corbyn, Jean Luc Mélenchon, and Former Leftist President of Ecuador Rafael Correa.5. The City, a news site covering New York, reports that food delivery drivers in NYC have won a substantial wage increase. This victory caps off a 3-year long campaign by Los Deliveristas Unidos, and makes New York the “first major U.S. ci

Ralph welcomes New York Times reporter, Binyamin Applebaum, author of “The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society” about how Chicago School economists of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s “who believed in the power and the glory of markets… transformed the business of government, the conduct of business, and, as a result, the patterns of everyday life.”Binyamin Appelbaum is the lead business and economics writer on the Editorial Board of the New York Times. From 2010 to 2019, he was a Washington correspondent for the Times, covering economic policy in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. He previously worked for the Charlotte Observer, where his reporting on subprime lending won a George Polk Award and was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society.The central attraction of neoliberalism—of market fundamentalism— is that it tells rich and powerful people that they are right and good. It underscores for them, it affirms them, it tells them that their priorities—their interests— are the right ones. And if society just does what it can to enrich them and empower them, then everyone will be better off. That’s an enormously attractive message.Binyamin ApplebaumIn area after area, we saw economists reaching broad conclusions about theories, about long-term truths, about how the world works on the basis of very limited data. Broad data. Data that aggregated everyone and treated them as if they were a single individual, rather than acknowledging the important differences among actors in the economy. Data that took very brief periods of history and extrapolated out to the unforeseeable future. And on that basis, economists reached conclusions that have proven to be empirically wrong as we’ve learned more about it.Binyamin ApplebaumEconomic analysis tends to exclude things that don’t fit neatly into its formulas— that can’t be easily counted or tabulated, that don’t count as data in the view of the economists… We can have very good real-world experience of the effects of drug regulation regimes or of corporate behavior and monopolistic contexts, and if it doesn’t tally on the data sheet it gets excluded from the analysis. It doesn’t become part of our policy-making conversation.Binyamin ApplebaumWe have a huge societal problem with our conception of spending on corporations as investment and spending on people as spending. When we talk about education, it’s an expense. When we talk about semiconductors, it’s an investment into the future. That’s insane. Spending on education is the most productive investment that we can make.Binyamin ApplebaumWhat the market fundamentalist economists fail to take into account is greed and power, connected to one another, are infinite. There’s no discernible boundary. And that leads to a regulation by corporations of the competitive free market. So, monopolies distort markets. Subsidies and bailouts by the government distort market discipline. Political influence of big business over small business distorts market discipline. And consumer fraud, corporate consumer crimes, deceptive advertising distorts market discipline.Ralph Nader Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

A “license to loot” is what our guest, economist William Lazonick, calls stock buybacks. Until the Reagan Revolution, stock buybacks were considered market manipulation and at the very least are an unproductive use of profits used only to pump up the stock price and enrich upper management, while neglecting workers’ wages, capital expansion, and innovation. Ralph and Professor Lazonick break it all down for you.William Lazonick is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. His recent work includes Predatory Value Extraction: How the Looting of the Business Corporation Became the US Norm and How Sustainable Prosperity Can Be Restored, and the forthcoming book Investing in Innovation: Confronting Predatory Value Extraction in the U.S. Corporation.The ideology that enables buybacks, that makes a lot of people including economists say, “Oh, they’re just fine. The money’s just going to the economy,” is what I call the myth of the market economy—the way in which we get capital formation in the economy is just by money zipping around. But it doesn’t work that way. The money has to stop somewhere.William LazonickIt’s not because the United States does not have the capability to do these things— the capability is in the wrong hands. And it’s being wasted and destroyed. So it’s not simply the amount of money that’s making people rich. But those people who are getting rich are actually getting rich by helping to destroy the industrial base of the United States, including the middle class.William LazonickThese giant companies— these US companies that grew in the USA on the back of their workers, went to Washington for subsidies or bailouts when they were greedy or in trouble, and had the US Marines defend them around the world— are not only disinvesting on a massive scale in the necessities for a productive economy. But they are engaging in the ironic trend that can be called the corporate destruction of capitalism, whose base, in essence, is investment.Ralph NaderWhile these corporate bosses insist on massive domination of our political economy—from Washington to Wall Street— they’re not delivering. For the economy, for the workers, for the people who are trying to make it through every day and protect their families and their descendants. In behaving this way, they have reached a historic level of conflict of interest with their own companies.Ralph NaderIn Case You Haven’t Heard1. The automotive news website Jalopnik reports that a whistleblower has turned over 100 gigabtyes of “Tesla Secrets” to German media. These files contain “more than 2,400 self-acceleration complaints and more than 1,500 braking function problems, including 139 cases of unintentional emergency braking and 383 reported phantom stops resulting from false collision warnings. The number of crashes is more than 1000.”2. While national Democrats dither and cave to outrageous Republican demands on the debt ceiling, the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party has delivered on an expansive progressive agenda. In the current session, with only a single-vote majority in the upper house, Common Dreams reports that they have passed bills to mandate 20 weeks of paid family and medical leave, legalized recreational cannabis, and made school meals free for public and charter students. They also passed a bill codifying Roe v. Wade, established legal protections for transgender youth, set a livable minimum wage for Uber and Lyft drivers, and approved Right to Repair legislation. While not all of these will be signed into law, it is clear that Minnesota is setting the bar for Democratic-controlled state legislatures throughout the country, and putting Congress to shame.3. A new piece in the Lever covers “The $20 Billion Scam At The Heart Of Medicare Advantage.” The article details how insurers are manipulating the medicare privatization scheme and “milking massive profits from systematic overbilling and kneecapping modest Biden proposals to stop the scheme.” Rep. Ro Khanna, responding to this article, advocated for his “Save Medicare Act,” cosponsored by Reps. Mark Pocan and Jan Schakowsky, to ban private insurers from “profiting off the Medicare brand.”4. NPR reports that The White House has unveiled its plan to combat rising antisemitism in the United States, and in a major victory for Left-wing anti-zionists, they did not adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which would gag criticism of Israel. In response, Palestine Legal tweeted “After months of Israel advocacy groups calling on the White House to adopt the distorted IHRA definition of antisemitism, today even the staunchly pro-Israel Biden administration declined to do so. Why? Because IHRA is wrong, useless, and clearly unconstitutional.”5. A leaked document from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, published in the Intercept, expresses frustration that the budget of populist Left-wing Mexican President Lopez Obrador – commonly known as AMLO – prioriti

Ralph welcomes Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Gretchen Morgenson, co-author of “These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs – And Wrecks – America,” where they name names in this “heads we win, tails you lose” system of predatory capitalism.Gretchen Morgenson is the senior financial reporter for the NBC News Investigative Unit. A former stockbroker, she won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her “trenchant and incisive” reporting on Wall Street. Previously at the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal,” she and coauthor Joshua Rosner wrote the bestseller Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon about the mortgage crisis. Their latest book is These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America.The way corporate criminals get their way is by trying to make things too complex and too abstract for your daily lives. But when Gretchen [Morgenson] talks about these plunderers, and let’s call them “predatory capitalists”, don’t think that you’re not being affected— whether your loved ones are patients in nursing homes, whether you’re workers being laid off, whether you’re consumers being gouged for drug or healthcare prices, whether your community’s going to be hollowed out because the company that was doing okay was taken over by these vultures and closed down after they extracted the wealth.Ralph NaderIt’s interesting now that David Rubenstein is retired [from the Carlyle Group], he’s a philanthropist. This is what these wealthy people do once they’ve finished their careers and made so much money. They become philanthropists… We’ve all read about David Rubenstein and Steve Schwarzman and Leon Black and Henry Kravis. We read about them constantly. They are always lauded for their brilliance and their billionaire status. What we just don’t hear about are the people on the other side of their transactions.Gretchen Morgenson, co-author of “These Are The Plunderers.”The disappointing thing about the Justice Department is that when they bring these cases against the companies that are doing Medicare fraud (like in the Manor Care situation), they don’t move up the corporate ladder to the owner of the company. The Justice Department does the work on the particular company that is owned by private equity, but they don’t go up the ladder. And that has a way of allowing the firms—like Carlyle in the Manor Care case— to escape scrutiny and to escape accountability. So that would be an ideal thing to change.Gretchen Morgenson co-author of “These Are The Plunderers.”In Case You Haven’t Heard 1. Amid the debt limit fight, progressives are calling for President Biden to invoke the 14th amendment, which they believe would allow Biden to bypass the Republican House and raise the debt limit without concessions like adding further work requirements to public benefits. In a press conference by the Senate progressives, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania said "This is the whole reason why the 14th Amendment exists, & we need to be prepared to use it. And, if our unelected Supreme Court Justices try to block the use of the 14th amendment and blow up our economy, that’s on them.” However, POLITICO reports that the administration is privately telling progressives to stand down. Instead, the White House seems more interested in negotiating with Speaker McCarthy, even if that means caving to outrageous Republican demands.2. As the Writers Guild strike grinds on – at a cost of $30 million per day according to Deadline – the Screen Actors Guild is now on the verge of their own strike. Last week, SAG-AFTRA’s National Board voted unanimously to ask members for strike authorization, and the Daily Beast reported that SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher urged members to “make three a charm with an emphatic ‘yes’ for a strike authorization vote!” adding that to do so would be “an unprecedented show of solidarity.” An actor’s strike against the studios has not happened since 1980.3. Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Healthy Families Act of 2023, which would guarantee 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave. This bill features a companion in the House, led by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, and carries the support of 122 members of the House and Senate. Sanders is quoted saying “It is time to end this absurdity...It is time Congress passed this legislation to ensure workers receive the basic dignity and benefits that they deserve.” The introduction of this legislation comes on the heels of the reintroduction of a Medicare for All bill in this Congress.4. A damning new report in the Wall Street Journal indicates that “Jeffrey Epstein discovered that Bill Gates had an affair with a Russian bridge player” and later used this knowledge to attempt to threaten the Microsoft co-founder. The report goes on to say that “at the time, Epstein was trying to set up a multibillion-dollar charitable fund with JPMorgan...[which] hinged on securing support from Gates.” When this money was no

Auto safety expert, Byron Bloch, joins us to tell the story of how citizens in conjunction with the Sierra Club defeated a highway widening boondoggle in Maryland. Then we welcome microgrids manager at the Green Justice Coalition, Sari Kayyali, to tell us how microgrids in his community have saved money and the environment. Finally, we catch up with the director of Progressive Democrats of America, Alan Minsky, in Washington DC to talk about high speed rail and the post-Bernie progressive movement.Byron Bloch is an independent consultant and court-qualified expert in Auto Safety Design and Vehicle Crashworthiness. Over the years, he has fought for safer fuel tanks, stronger seats, the need for airbags, better truck underride guards, and has testified on these safety issues at Congressional Hearings, and to NHTSA. He contributed to the Sierra Club’s successful campaign to strongly oppose and stop the proposed widening of the 1-270 and Capital Beltway and the scheme to also add privatized toll lanes.What we have to do is refocus and say, “We are a people-oriented nation. Not a vehicle-oriented nation.” And if you look at it in those terms—people-oriented nation— then you say, “Well, what are the economics, what are the health and safety issues that affect people?” But instead, it becomes the almighty vehicle-ization of the nation and that means more lanes, more traffic, more lanes, and then more traffic.Byron Bloch Activist and auto safety expertThe corporate state arrives in different manifestations— the military industrial complex, the Pentagon, and this is what’s going on at the state level. It doesn’t get many national headlines, but it's the merger of corporations with state government. And there’s a lot of secrecy involved, a lot of phony promises, a lot of misleading rhetoric, and the legislators are compromised by the campaign contributions and the pressure from the governor’s office.Ralph NaderSari Kayyali is a mechanical engineer and the Microgrids Manager at Microgrids Chelsea and Chinatown Power.The technology around clean electric generation—solar panels and battery storage—are experiencing a revolution. Just in the last decade alone, solar panels have dropped to a third of what they used to cost to manufacture. Battery storage has improved dramatically in terms of energy density, cost, and reliability. And so, a lot of places around the country are looking to these as solutions. Microgrids have been around for a while, they don’t necessarily need to use clean technology but specifically clean microgrids are really catching on all around the country, and around the world.Sari Kayyali Microgrids Manager at the Green Justice CoalitionAlan Minsky is a lifelong activist, and Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of America. Alan has worked as a progressive journalist for the past two decades, he was Program Director at KPFK Los Angeles from 2009-2018, and he has coordinated Pacifica Radio’s national coverage of elections. He is the creator and producer of the political podcasts for The Nation and Jacobin, as well as a contributor to Common Dreams and Truthdig.There’s a whole bunch of elements that the progressive movement hasn’t been that attentive to. Including things like industrial production and the transformation it requires between business and government to transform American society, so that it’s operating on clean energy, so that its industrial manufacturing doesn’t have breaks in supply chains… So I got involved with a lot of projects that aren’t that common for progressives to be involved in.Alan Minsky, Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of AmericaIn Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis1. CNBC reports that the FTC is mulling a proposal to bar Meta (formerly Facebook) from monetizing the data of minors. This follows the agency’s allegation that the company violated a 2020 privacy order. The FTC quoted an independent assessor who found “several gaps and weaknesses in Facebook’s privacy program” that posed “substantial risks to the public.” Hopefully, this action will put other tech companies on notice regarding monetization of children’s data.2. Dr. Steve Feldman, a Jewish dermatologist, is being penalized by the state of Arkansas for his refusal to sign a loyalty pledge to the state of Israel, the Arkansas Times reports. After giving a lecture to medical students in Little Rock, he was prompted to check a box agreeing not to boycott Israel, which he refused to do. As a result, the state is withholding his payment for the lecture. The Arkansas Times also refused to sign the pledge. Feldman said “What’s nuts is they’re asking a newspaper to say they won’t boycott Israel, they’re asking Americans who have a conscience, who know Israel is keeping Palestinians from their homes.” The ultra-conservative Supreme Court declined to hear the newspaper’s legal challenge to the state law, and therefore it is still in place.3. In Rochester, New York, Coca-Cola is building a new

We welcome former Writers Guild of America (West) president and current co-chair of the negotiating committee, David Goodman, who also happens to be the head writer for many of your favorite TV shows like “The Family Guy” to tell us why TV and movie writers are on strike. Then, grad students Sandra Oseguera and Jesus Gutierrez stop by to update us on their continuing fight to save the anthropology library at UC Berkeley, a battle that has wider implications for how more and more universities across the country are becoming corporatized. Plus, Ralph highlights some trenchant listener feedback.David A. Goodman has written for over 20 television series. His best-known work is as head writer and executive producer on Family Guy. He was the president of the Writer’s Guild of America West from 2017 to 2021. In that capacity, Mr. Goodman led the Guild in a campaign to force the Hollywood talent agencies into adopting a new Code of Conduct to better serve the needs of their writers. Today, he serves as co-chair of the WGA negotiating committee in their strike against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers.These companies that we work for are spending billions of dollars, making billions of dollars on the product that we create. And writers currently (many of them) can’t afford to pay their rent. Can’t afford to live in the cities where they’re required to work. Need to take second jobs. Now, that’s a very familiar situation in labor across this country. And what we’re saying is if these companies are profitable… we need to fight.David Goodman, co-chair of the WGA negotiating committeeThe reason that our strike does have power is because America and the world relies on this product that we create. Those stories that we create are a connection, are a way for people to connect. And because of corporatization some people are losing sight of that, and hopefully this strike will bring them back.David Goodman, co-chair of the WGA negotiating committeeLet our listeners know that a lot of those programs that they watch on TV or listen to on the radio all over the country are written by the people who are on the picket lines and are pretty mercilessly exploited by the corporate titans that rake off the profits.Ralph NaderSandra Oseguera and Jesús Gutiérrez are graduate students in the Anthropology department at the University of California, Berkeley. Earlier this year, campus administration announced their plan to close the Anthropology Library, one of only three dedicated Anthropology libraries in the US. In response, stakeholders including students and faculty have organized to demand that the Anthropology Library be protected and fully supported by the University.We truly disagree with the vision that the administration has for this university, and we believe that it can be different. That this can truly be a public university for students, underrepresented minorities, but also for the public. The public can come here—especially to our library— and be curious, collect knowledge, and have a refuge where they can find themselves in the shelves.Sandra OsegueraIt has been really inspiring to see our occupation space make our Anthropology Library into the space of encounter and transformation that it is supposed to be. The administration— and the press, to some degree initially— portrayed us as passively occupying, just sleeping and reading in the space. But the reality on the ground has been that the library has become an organizing space. Those of us who are occupying also gather, and then from there we fan out and make plans to go talk to our fellow students, make plans to go confront these core decision makers and hold them accountable for what they are doing to our education, what they are doing to these essential public resources.Jesús GutiérrezWe are not chasing symbolic wins. We want a fully functional library. That is what matters to us. And the overwhelming desire of the department, faculty, and grad students is to keep our library open.Sandra OsegueraDear Ralph Nader & Radio Hour Staff,I Hope that you and your families are all doing well. I look forward weekly to your Radio Hour via KPFA.org Mondays 11am-12pm.I was excited at the beginning of the hour that you were addressing the topic of sports in the U.S.A. By the end of the hour, I was extremely disappointed at the coverage. I have never been disappointed in the years listening to your radio show and otherwise.Neither the staff, your guest speaker, nor yourself, mentioned the state of affairs for women in sports, their unfair disadvantages, lack of equity in competing for sports funding from cradle to grave, competing for funding in infrastructure building of training centers, stadiums…, unfair medi coverage, and lastly focusing on the today’s show coverage, girls and women’s injuries, physical, psychological, whether she plays recreationally, professionally, or is not able to reach her potential due to discrimination against her gender, race, et

In conjunction with the American Museum of Tort Law, we conduct another live Zoom recording where Ralph welcomes legendary trial lawyer Shanin Spector to discuss the constitutional right of wrongfully injured people to have their day in court and the corporate forces that are trying to limit this most basic of American principles. Then, Ralph and Mr. Spector take questions from our live audience.Shanin Specter is a founding partner of Kline & Specter, one of the leading catastrophic injury firms in the United States. Beyond winning substantial monetary compensation for his clients, many of Shanin’s cases have prompted beneficial societal changes. He has also taught law for many years and this academic year is teaching tort and trial courses at UC Law SF, Drexel Kline and Stanford Law Schools.Last week, I found myself in Washington DC at the Federalist Society debating the resolution that America should abolish the right of trial by jury, which is being advocated by an otherwise distinguished professor at George Washington University School of Law, Professor [Renée Lettow] Lerner… You don’t have to scratch the surface of her argument very much to see that it is based upon the statistics of the American Tort Reform Association and the like. It’s essentially a Trojan horse for the Fortune 500.Shanin SpecterWhy don’t you describe this assault on the tort system by lobbyists who don’t want to argue their case in court— that’s too open, too full of cross-examination, too fair in terms of the procedures. They want to lobby lawmakers in states all over the country so the lawmakers, in effect, enact laws that tie the hands of juries and judges— the only people who actually see, hear, and evaluate the cases in the courtroom.Ralph NaderIn Case You Haven’t Heard1. The FTC has issued a statement regarding the proposed merger between CalPortland & Martin Marietta. Chair Lina Khan tweeted that this deal “would’ve resulted in a single firm owning half of all cement plants serving Southern California, enabling the firm to hike prices.” Following an FTC investigation, the firms have abandoned the deal.2. AP reports that Colorado has become the first state to pass “Right to Repair” legislation, which “compels manufacturers to provide the necessary manuals, tools, parts and software,” to “ensure farmers can fix their own tractors and combines.” This idea has drawn support from left and right factions including at the national level. In a similar move regarding home repairs, Senator John Fetterman is pushing to expand Pennsylvania’s "Whole Home Repair" program – which “helps Pennsylvanians with needed repairs and eliminate[s] blight” – to the nation.3. Former U.S.-backed Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó has been ejected from Colombia after attempting to “gatecrash” a summit on the future of the Bolivarian republic, the Guardian reports. Guaidó has fallen out of favor among Venezuelan dissidents and, while some western nations still recognize him on paper as Venezuela’s president – despite never winning such an election – many have quietly reengaged with the Maduro government to negotiate for oil. The Guardian added that Mr. Guaidó has now relocated to Miami.4. Slate reports that automakers are finally beginning to backpedal on digital displays in cars. David Zipper writes “The touch screen pullback is the result of consumer backlash, not the enactment of overdue regulations or an awakening of corporate responsibility. Many drivers want buttons, not screens, and they’ve given carmakers an earful about it. Auto executives have long brushed aside safety concerns about their complex displays—and all signs suggest they would have happily kept doing so. But their customers are revolting, which has forced them to pay attention.” Zipper goes on to pin the blame for the proliferation of these expensive and unpopular displays on one culprit: Elon Musk’s Tesla.5. From the Tampa Bay Times: State legislators in Florida are leading a crusade to shred local tenants rights laws, which set standards regarding rent increases, applications and evictions. The recently-passed HB 1417 and its companion SB 1586 would strip away these protections. Rep. Tiffany Esposito, of Fort Myers, who sponsored the House bill, is quoted saying “This bill protects tenants, this bill protects property owners and this bill protects capitalism.” Rep. Angie Nixon of Jacksonville responded “This bill is designed to help corporate landlords at the expense of tenants, many of which are already struggling to stay in their homes.”6. Ben & Jerry’s announced that it has reached an agreement with workers at its flagship store in Burlington, Vermont on rules to ensure a fair union election, after workers announced last week that they are seeking to unionize, per the New York Times. “The agreement is likely to pave the way for the store to become the only unionized Ben & Jerry’s location in the United States. All of the nearly 40 workers eligible to join a union at the s

On a relatively lighter note, we welcome national baseball writer for the New York Times, Tyler Kepner, to talk about issues in the sports world in general but more specifically about his latest book “The Grandest Stage: A History Of The World Series.” Also joining the conversation will be friend of the program, Ken Reed, policy director of League of Fans, whose book “How to Save Sports: A Game Plan” has been updated. Plus, Ralph pays tribute to the late activist and entertainer, Harry Belafonte and has some choice words for Bernie Sanders’ early endorsement of Joe Biden’s 2024 presidential campaign.Tyler Kepner is national baseball writer for the New York Times, where he has covered every World Series Game of the last two decades. He's not just a sports reporter, he's a sports historian. He is the author of K: A History Of Baseball In Ten Pitches, and The Grandest Stage: A History Of The World Series.Certainly, it’s the apex of the season— the thing that every fan ultimately looks forward to. The World Series as an event has had some challenges—certainly the Super Bowl has overtaken it in terms of eyeballs. But that’s just one game. The World Series is a weeklong event. It’s always fascinating to me the history behind it, the way it’s managed within the games, the way certain players respond to that spotlight, the way momentum can turn so quickly.Tyler Kepner, author of "The Grandest Stage: A History of the World Series"Dr. Ken Reed is Sports Policy Director for the League of Fans and the author of How We Can Save Sports: A Game Plan, Ego vs. Soul in Sports: Essays on Sport at Its Best and Worst, and The Sports Reformers: Working to Make the World of Sports a Better Place. Ken's writing has been highly praised by legendary sports writers Robert Lipsyte and Frank Deford, and he is a long-time sports marketing consultant, sports studies instructor, sports issues analyst, columnist, and author.Some people ask me “Why do you hate sports?” or “Why are you so angry about sports?” Ironically, I'm probably one of the most passionate people there are about sports. But I think if you love sports, you have to be angry at some of these issues that we’ve talked about. I always go back to a RFK quote that I love— “The sharpest criticism often goes hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country.” And I think that applies to me with sports, and that’s why we do what we do at League of Fans.Ken Reed policy director "League of Fans"Harry Belafonte was a great entertainer and a great social activist for justice, civil rights, and African Americans. He grew up in the Caribbean, and he never faltered. He never was co-opted. He never put ambition before his candid statements, again and again, on the violations on the civil rights of people who were powerless.Ralph NaderI think it was a strategic mistake. [Bernie Sanders] endorsed [Joe Biden] without any conditions. He didn’t get any commitments from Joe Biden for his endorsement. And because of his leadership role among progressive politicians, he’s undermined progressive legislators from holding out and pulling Biden and the corporate Democrats more into progressive territory. I was shocked.Ralph NaderIn Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis1. Who is behind the recent campaign to deregulate child labor? A new Washington Post report finds that a Florida based right-wing think tank called the Foundation for Government Accountability, and its lobbying arm the Opportunity Solutions Project, have been the prime movers behind the laws passed in Arkansas and Iowa, as well as efforts to do the same in Minnesota, Ohio, and Georgia. This campaign goes beyond the pale even for some traditional conservative groups. Randy Zook, president of the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce, said in an interview that his state’s law was “a solution looking for a problem.”2. From the Intercept: The war in Yemen appears to be winding down, as Saudi Arabia and the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have agreed to a long-term ceasefire brokered by China. Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, weighed in, saying “Biden promised to end the war in Yemen. Two years into his presidency, China may have delivered on that promise.” This breakthrough comes amid a broader Saudi-Iranian rapprochement – also driven by China – which has taken on the role of peacemaker both in the Middle East and in Ukraine in the absence of strong peace leadership from the US. Rep. Ro Khanna tweeted “It’s past time for Saudis to end their brutal eight-year war and blockade on Yemen, as I've advocated for years. This will create the opportunity for the Yemeni people to decide their own political future.”3. Arizona activist Kai Newkirk reports that “By an overwhelming vote, the Arizona Democratic Party...passed a resolution calling on Democrats nationwide — from grassroots activists to party leaders — to pledge to support the winner of the Democratic primary to replace Ky

Ralph welcomes Samuel Levine who heads the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the Federal Trade Commission to give you tips on how to use this government agency to protect yourself from corporate fraud and abuse. Plus, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, Dr. Michael Carome stops by to give us the latest warnings about harmful medical devices and his take on the safety of the mRNA Covid vaccine.Samuel Levine serves as Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. Before assuming this role, he served as an attorney advisor to Commissioner Rohit Chopra and as a staff attorney in the Midwest Regional Office. Prior to joining the FTC, Mr. Levine worked for the Illinois Attorney General, where he prosecuted predatory for-profit colleges and participated in rulemaking and other policy initiatives to promote affordability and accountability in higher education.We announced what we call a “click to cancel” rule. And this is a rule about subscription plans. What the proposed rule says is that companies – vendors – should make it no more difficult to cancel a subscription than it is to sign up… It’s very easy for consumers to sign up for these services. We want to make it just as easy for consumers to exit these services.Samuel Levine Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTCEarlier this year, we announced a market study sending subpoenas to major social media platforms to ask them what they’re doing to stop the huge proliferation of fraudulent ads over social media. We’re also doing a study now on the franchise relationship and the potential power asymmetries between franchisee and franchisers. We’re looking at the cloud computing market. We have a whole host of initiatives right now that are not geared around law enforcement but are geared around shining a light on often opaque industries to help shape public policy and eventually shape FTC law enforcement as well.Samuel Levine, Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTCDr. Michael Carome is an expert on issues of drug and medical device safety, FDA oversight, and healthcare policy. He is the director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group.In 2002, Congress passed for the first time what’s called the Medical Device User Fee Act… So, the companies now pay the FDA for the review and oversight of their products. Those user fees fundamentally changed the relationship between the FDA, the regulatory agency, and the medical device companies that are regulated by the agency. And that relationship which should be in part an adversarial relationship now is viewed as a partnership by both the agency and the medical device industry. The agency even in some of their documents refers to these companies as “partners,” as “customers.”… Customer satisfaction is key for the FDA and their customers in their eyes - rather than patients and the public - are the companies.Dr. Michael Carome, Director of Public Citizen’s Health Research GroupThe FDA in our view had a very rigorous process for requiring the testing of those (Covid 19) vaccines… And we ourselves looked independently at the clinical trial data… We quickly concluded that independent of the FDA and any corporations that these vaccines were highly effective and very safe… Since then, there have been hundreds of millions of doses received by hundreds of millions of people across the world and they really have prevented serious complications and probably prevented millions of deaths with some very limited and rare adverse effects.Dr. Michael Carome, Director of Public Citizen’s Health Research GroupSquishing the federal cop on the corporate crime beat is a prime priority for lobbyists in Congress.Ralph NaderIn Case You Haven’t Heard w/ Francesco DeSantis 1. In Arlington, Amazon has halted construction of their much-vaunted second headquarters – or “HQ2” according to the Washington Post. Some may remember the race to the bottom in terms of corporate tax cuts and subsidies that ensued across much of the country in 2017 and ‘18 when Amazon suggested cities and states could compete for this development. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez famously opposed these giveaways to Amazon and was pilloried for that in the mainstream press. Turns out, she was right on the money. Despite the fact that Amazon is postponing the construction of this facility, they are still poised to reap over $150 million in taxpayer subsidies from the state of Virginia.2. Harvard University has accepted a $300 million donation from hedge fund manager and right wing billionaire donor Ken Griffin, according to the New York Daily News. In exchange, Harvard will rename their Graduate School of Arts and Sciences to the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.3. In Palestine, trade unions have issued an open letter calling for global solidarity. This letter urged global publics to eliminate procurement from companies complicit in Israeli apartheid and the occupation, divest pension funds from State of Is

In a live Zoom event in conjunction with the American Museum of Tort Law, Ralph welcomes safety expert, Russell Kendzior, who runs the National Floor Safety Institute to discuss where, why, and how slip-and-falls happen, how to prevent them, the legitimacy of slip-and-fall lawsuits, and the role of the Consumer Product Safety Commission for a phenomenon that for older adults every year causes over 36,000 deaths and $50 billion in medical costs.Russell Kendzior is the President of Traction Experts, Inc. and founder of the National Floor Safety Institute. Mr. Kendzior is internationally recognized as the leading expert in slip and fall accident prevention and has been retained in more than 1,000 slip, trip, and fall lawsuits. He hosts the podcast The Safety Matters Show, and he is the author of several books, including Falls Aren’t Funny: America’s Multi-Billion Dollar Slip-And-Fall Crisis.This concept of simply testing to an internationally-recognized consensus standard and labeling the product is really what we’re asking the government to do. We’re not demanding any level of performance, but simply tell the consumer.Russell KendziorYou can participate in the public review process— the process whereby commissioners are asking members of the public for comments… It’s important that the people of our country have a voice, and that they be represented, and that the safety of these products that are contributing to six million hospital emergency room visits a year need to be better managed.Russell KendziorWe should emphasize that all these situations [involving slips, trips, and falls] in the court of law are under tort law… It's good to talk about them as torts, because people often don’t recognize how important tort law is to protect them, to help compensate them, to disclose to the larger audience the hazards for their own protection, and to engage in prevention.Ralph NaderIn Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis1. In a major blow to Governor Greg Abbott, the Texas House of Representatives voted 86-52 in favor of an amendment to bar state funds from being used for private school vouchers, according to KXAN. This was achieved through a coalition of Democrats and rural Republicans in the Lone Star State, per NBC.2. The Washington Post reports that greater numbers of assisted-living facilities are rejecting Medicaid and evicting seniors from their homes. One particularly harrowing story involves Shirley Holtz, a 91 year old with mobility issues and dementia who was evicted from her hospice care because the facility decided to refuse Medicaid payments.3. In a statement responding to the ProPublica report on undisclosed gifts received by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin stressed that “Supreme Court Justices must be held to an enforceable code of conduct, just like every other federal judge. The ProPublica report is a call to action, and the Senate Judiciary Committee will act.” However, the Judiciary Committee has been hamstrung by Democratic absences, particularly that of California Senator Dianne Feinstein, who has missed nearly 60 votes since February, according to The San Francisco Chronice.4. Barak Ravid reports that the U.S. has blocked the release of a planned United Nations Security Council statement decrying the Israeli police raid at the al-Aqsa mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam, during Ramadan.5. More Perfect Union has issued a statement saying “Months after 440 Planned Parenthood nurses and staff in five Midwest states voted to unionize, management has fired 2 members of the union’s bargaining team and issued ‘final written warnings’ to all 11 other bargaining team members threatening immediate termination.”6. From Truthout, Rep. Pramila Jayapal has filed an official constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. A constitutional amendment is currently the only means available for reversing this catastrophic decision.7. In a video obtained by Gothamist, NYPD officers arresting a man wearing a Black Lives Matter sticker on his bike helmet were recorded bragging about “milking” overtime, referred to a female arrestee a "liberal [c word]," and joked about committing the arrestee to a mental hospital. This comes as Mayor Eric Adams announced that NYPD officers who work for five years will now make approximately $50K more per year than teachers with the same amount of time, an overall increase of $5.5 billion to the most expensive police department in the country, according to CBS.8. Robert Costa of CBS reports that former Rep. Dennis Kucinich is advising Robert F Kennedy Jr. on his presidential run. Costa went on to say that Kucinich could be the campaign manager or a top political adviser, and that Kucinich has urged Kennedy to focus more on the environment than his signature anti-vaccine message.9. Kansas Public Media KCUR reports that Republicans in that state overrode the Democratic Governor’s veto and authorized genital inspect

We continue our indictment of the U.S. war machine by welcoming William Hartung of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft to break down the bloated military budget and what we can do about it. Then Cindy Sheehan, joins us to talk about her journey as the mother of a fallen soldier to become the most prominent anti-war activist of the Bush/Cheney era. Plus, Ralph comes down hard on states that deny their citizens Medicaid.William Hartung is an expert on the arms industry and US military budget, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex, and the co-editor of Lessons from Iraq: Avoiding the Next War.The Pentagon wants to get rid of some of these weapon system programs, and the Congress says “Oh no, we’re going to continue them because… it’s a jobs program. It creates jobs, or it retains jobs that are already in shipyards or elsewhere.” Of course, you can never get these members of Congress to understand that a billion dollars in civilian infrastructure investment in this country creates far more jobs than a highly capital-intensive billion dollars in another unneeded weapons system.Ralph NaderI think there’s three pillars…What are the costs of this—the opportunity costs?...What do we need to defend ourselves?...And then I think people need to feel like they can influence the government. I think a lot of people have given up. They forget that citizens’ movements have had tremendous victories in the past, and they can do so again.William HartungCindy Sheehan is the mother of Casey A. Sheehan, who was killed in action in Iraq on April 4, 2004. She is an anti-war activist, the founder of Gold Star Families, and an organizer of the 2018 Women’s March on the Pentagon. She is the author of Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox Newsletter on Substack.I think that as long as you stay in the safe zone of only criticizing Republicans if you're a Democrat, or only criticizing Democrats if you're a Republican, then they give you a platform, they let you use your voice on this national stage. But once I recognized that the Democratic Party were, at that point, enablers of the Bush/Cheney war of terror around the world, and I left the party, then I started to be even more marginalized. And I lost so much support.Cindy SheehanWhat gave me a little bit of hope was the county DA of New York indicting and arresting Donald Trump— for things I think were far less damaging and far less criminal than what the other living presidents like George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama did. I think that if the DA can prosecute Donald Trump for something less than mass murder or genocide, then maybe my DA in my county I live in can prosecute George Bush for murdering my son.Cindy SheehanIn Case You Haven’t Heard1. CNN reports that seven investigators from the Centers for Disease Control fell ill “while studying the possible health impacts” of the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. These investigators experienced sore throats, headaches, coughing and nausea, the same symptoms many residents have reported. In testimony before the Senate in March, Alan Shaw, CEO of Norfolk Southern, said “I believe that the air is safe. I believe that the water is safe.”2. A contingent of left-wing youth at the recent protests in Israel burned their IDF enlistment orders. While this exceedingly courageous act garnered much attention on social media, the sad reality is that the overwhelming majority of Israeli youth are in fact more right-wing than older Israelis and far more right-wing than young people in most every other country. A 2021 poll written up by Haaretz, revealed that “nearly half of ultra-Orthodox and national religious Israeli youth expressed hatred toward Arabs and noted support for stripping them of their citizenship, a sentiment shared by 23 percent of secular youth.”3. A new poll, published in Forbes, shows the impact of Governor Ron DeSantis’ education policies: “91% of prospective college students disagree with the governor’s policies, 1 in 8 graduating high school students won’t attend college in Florida due to the education policy in the state, [and] 1 in 20 current college students in the state plan to transfer because of those policies.”4. The Huffington Post reports that Amazon spent $14.2 million on anti-union consultants in 2022, up nearly $10 million from 2021. This is clearly in response to the successful unionization vote at the JFK8 facility under the auspices of the independent Amazon Labor Union last year.5. In a related story, Bloomberg reports that a federal appeals court has ruled that Elon Musk “must delete his 2018 Twitter post suggesting that Tesla...workers could lose stock options if they formed a union, as it violated labor law.” The panel of 5th circuit judges unanimously opined that “Tesla’s history of labor violations supports the NLRB’s finding that employees would unders

We are joined for the full hour by geopolitical financial expert and financial historian, Nomi Prins, to discuss her new book, “Permanent Distortion: How Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever,” which highlights the huge gap between the high-flying stock market, versus back down here on earth, where average people struggle to make ends meet.Nomi Prins is an economist, author, geopolitical financial expert and financial historian. She is the author of several books, including Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, All the Presidents’ Bankers, Other People’s Money: The Corporate Mugging of America, and It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street. Her latest book is Permanent Distortion: How Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever.The idea of “Permanent Distortion” is that when the financial system needs it, it gets the money. And lot of it. And in an uncapped way. And in an unregulated way. And in a non-transparent way. When the real economy needs it, it’s years of debate.Nomi PrinsThere’s no such thing as, “This bailout didn’t cost taxpayers money.” Because…money that goes into the banking system does not go into the real economy. Which means there is a shortfall in the real economy. Which means that money cannot be reallocated into the real economy. Whether that is to build bridges, or hospitals, or to enhance our education system, or help workers. Because it’s going somewhere else.Nomi PrinsThere are people that will say, “Well, SVB (the failure of Silicon Valley Bank) has nothing to do with Glass-Steagall,” and that’s just simply wrong. Any over-leverage in the banking system that can take down the rest of the banking system— or that can create that sort of lack of confidence, instability, creation of money to save it that doesn’t go into the real economy— is a part of that problem.Nomi PrinsThere’s a huge propaganda machine. And it’s interesting that the destabilization of the real economy comes so frequently from the speculation of the paper economy.Ralph NaderIn Case You Haven’t Heard1. In Israel, the planned judicial reform law has sparked nothing less than a popular uprising, with Haaretz reporting that as many as half a million protesters have taken to the streets. Prime Minister Netanyahu is wheeling and dealing like mad to cling to power. Barak Ravid reports that Netanyahu sacked the Minister of Defense after he called for suspending the judicial reform push. Itamar Ben-Gvir, leader of perhaps the most extreme party in the right-wing coalition government, has threatened to quit the coalition if the judicial overhaul is delayed – but may have been appeased by a promise from Netanyahu to make the National Guard answerable directly to Ben-Gvir, per the Jerusalem Post. Axios reports that Jewish Democrats in Congress met with the Israeli Ambassador and warned him that if the bill is pushed through, it will be harder for them “to talk about Israel the same way they used to.”2. A new paper published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review – by David Arkush of Public Citizen and Donald Braman of the George Washington University Law School – posits whether fossil fuel companies should be charged with homicide. The authors argue these corporations “have not simply been lying to the public, they have been killing members of the public at an accelerating rate, and prosecutors should bring that crime to the public’s attention.”3. In the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders has introduced legislation that would bar big bank executives from serving on Federal Reserve Boards. Chairman Sanders said “The Fed has got to become a more democratic institution that is responsive to the needs of working people and the middle class.”4. The Huffington Post reports that Rep. Ilhan Omar has introduced a bill to “Condemn Anti-Muslim Hate.” The bill was crafted to honor the 51 Muslims killed in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, and it was introduced on the first day of Ramadan. Omar is quoted saying “We...know that this increase in hate is not isolated to only Muslims. Church bombings, synagogue attacks, and racial hate crimes are also on the rise. In order to confront the evils of religious bigotry and hatred, we must come to understand that all our destinies are linked.”5. An investigation by Morgan Baskin of DCist found that “local developers are buying rent-controlled apartments, clearing out existing tenants, and marketing to housing choice voucher holders” because the DC Housing Authority engages in routine over-payments. In so doing, these developers are “eroding affordable housing.”6. In Brazil, Democracy Now! reports that the Lula government has successfully removed “almost all illegal gold mining operations…from Yanomami Indigenous territory.” Lula campaigned on the promise to remove these mining operations, which have “displaced people, dev

Ralph welcomes economist, attorney, and investigative journalist, James Henry for his expert take on what is going on in the banking system and what we can do to keep it from blowing up. And Professor and former Nader’s Raider, Alison Dundes Renteln, takes on the commercialization of our universities in her book “The Ethical University: Transforming Higher Education.”James Henry is a leading economist, attorney, consultant, and investigative journalist, who has written and spoken widely on the problems of tax justice and development finance. He is a lecturer and Global Justice Fellow at Yale University.The first thing we learn from the history of banking crises in the United States is that banks are really the Achilles heel of capitalism. This keeps happening. And we got used to a period when banking crises— we thought— had been taken care of, that we could just assume that someone in the Fed, or in the US Treasury, or regulators at the global level would understand all this stuff and they would reform the system.James HenryAlison Dundes Renteln is a Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at the University of Southern California where she teaches Law and Public Policy with an emphasis on international law and human rights. She is co-editor, with Wanda Teays, of The Ethical University: Transforming Higher Education.We really should be thinking about how to make universities a place for learning, and the production of knowledge, and making the world a better place. And the book is really an attempt to argue for reimagining universities so we return to the mission of universities, which is not to promote future corporate leaders… but to produce people who will contribute in many different ways in society.Alison Dundes RentelnIt’s really quite remarkable that in an institution that’s supposed to be devoted to democratic deliberation, intellectual life, justice, opportunity broadly defined, that the decisions are made by the administrators and the board of trustees— largely in secret.Ralph NaderIn Case You Haven’t Heard1. For the first time ever, a new Gallup poll shows that Democrats sympathize more with Palestinians than Israelis, by a margin of 48% to 39%. This represents an 11 point shift in attitudes since just last year. Republicans still sympathize far more with Israelis, by a margin of 78 to 11 per cent.2. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA, sent a letter to the Pentagon last week urging them to cease testing pulse radiation on animals in connection with the “Havana Syndrome” hoax. In 2020, PETA criticized the Army for reversing a previous ban on weapons testing on dogs, cats, marine animals and nonhuman primates and last year accused the Army of hiding such weapons tests after the service rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for documents relating to the experiments, POLITICO reports.3. The Texas Education Agency has announced a takeover of the Houston school district. The elected school board will be replaced by state-appointed managers, who will wield tremendous power. Houston Public Media reports that “they can control the budget, school closures, collaborations with charter networks, policies around curriculum and library books, as well as hiring or firing the superintendent.”4. At a recent town hall, Rep. Pramila Jayapal was asked by an activist from Seattle for Assange whether she thought it was time to free Mr. Assange. She responded with a simple “yes” and invited the activist to continue the conversation. Rep. Jayapal chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.5. A wild story in Creative Loafing Tampa covers “How a Florida city targets unwanted residents using police and code enforcement.” The story follows a Jewish woman who moved to Florida from New York. “Last March, the cops broke into her home when she wasn’t there to inspect alleged code violations, using an illegal search warrant. Body camera video...revealed them making jokes about Anne Frank...Her home security camera system showed the police going through her personal belongings and code enforcement personnel looking through her garbage...[she] faced criminal charges for the alleged violations—an uncommon practice in the state.”6. Common Dreams reports that last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez met with Okinawa Governor Denny Tamaki, who lobbied her and other US officials to oppose construction of a new US base in Okinawa. He also urged the US to ease tensions with China. Okinawa hosts over 70% of US military presence in Japan. Tamaki stressed that toxic PFAs contamination of soil and water from the bases are “worsening and require immediate studies by the US government.” She told the Okinawa Times that her office will review the contents of the meeting and consider what action is necessary. Governor Tamaki also met with Senator Todd Young of Indiana and Rep. Jill Tokuda of Hawaii, as well as aides of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Ed Markey, and the Senate Armed Services Committ

In a lively and insightful roundtable discussion, Ralph hosts former Marine company commander, Matthew Hoh, who when not deployed also worked in the Pentagon and the State Department and independent and unembedded Iraq war correspondent, Dahr Jamail. They mark the twentieth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and discuss the consequences of that misbegotten and illegal war. Plus, we hear a clip from Ralph’s and Patti Smith’s antiwar concert tour conducted in 2005.Dahr Jamail is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, as well as The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption. He is co-editor (with Stan Rushworth) of We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth.It’s hard to even articulate the level of suffering (in Iraq). And this is the country that exists today, that I got to leave, the military got to leave— at least for the most part. But the Iraqi people can’t leave. And this is what they have to live with today.Dahr JamailMatthew Hoh is a Senior Fellow with the Center for International Policy. Mr. Hoh took part in the American occupation of Iraq, first with a State Department reconstruction and governance team and then as a Marine Corps company commander. When not deployed, he worked on Afghanistan and Iraq war policy and operations issues at the Pentagon and State Department. In 2009, he resigned in protest from his post in Afghanistan with the State Department over the American escalation of the war.This consistent line of violence directed against the Iraqi people to achieve American political aims had been established for decades. And I went into it thinking that somehow we were different… “If I go into this war, I can affect the people around me because I am going to be good and I am going to be moral and I am not going to do bad things.” And that’s a complete fallacy. That’s an incredible mistake.Matthew HohWe have to go into this history because it’s going to happen again and again and again. The warmongers are active again on the Ukraine War now. More and more, we’re moving toward a conflict with Russia...Who knows what will happen, because there’s no break on our government. It’s as if it was a dictatorship when it comes to foreign policy.Ralph NaderIn Case You Haven’t Heard1. From Jewish Currents: Last May, amid rising antisemitic attacks by the far-right, Anti-Defamation League president Jonathan Greenblatt announced that the organization would devote more energy to combating anti-Zionism and described Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) as “extremist” and the “photo inverse of the extreme right.” Within the group, staffers dissented to this rhetoric. Greenblatt called a special meeting over Zoom to address this dissent, ending by stating “[if] you...can’t square the fact that anti-Zionism is antisemitism, then maybe this isn’t the place for you.”2. The Congressional Workers Union continues along its long road. The union reports 100% of staffers for Senator Ed Markey voted to unionize; once recognized, this will be the first ever unionized Senate office. Additionally, while the Republican majority in the House has sought to arrest unionization efforts, a new report from Demand Progress’ Kevin Mulshine (a former counsel at the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights) contends that they can continue their efforts under the Congressional Accountability Act.5. In Georgia, judges denied bail to 22 of 23 citizens engaged in peaceful protest against the Cop City project. These protesters are charged with “domestic terrorism,” according to NPR. Many prominent civil liberties organizations signed a letter objecting to this decision, including Amnesty International, the National Lawyers Guild, Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, Palestine Legal, the American Friends Service Committee, and CODEPINK. Additionally, an independent autopsy published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution suggests that – contrary to the police’s statement at the time – murdered protester Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán was in a cross-legged, seated position with their hands raised when they were shot to death by Georgia police.6. From The Hill: Following a two-year battle, Gigi Sohn has requested that President Biden withdraw her nomination for the Federal Communications Commission. This follows three confirmation hearings and a nasty media campaign against Ms. Sohn, who confounded “Public Knowledge” alongside Laurie Racine and David Bollier. The opposition to her nomination came primarily from Republicans, but Democrats caving on this nomination is just another in a long pattern. The FCC is now left with a 2-2 partisan deadlock.8. Editors for Saturday Night Live will strike if they can’t reach a deal on their contract by the end of the month, the LA Times reports. According to the Motion Picture Editors Gui

In a jam-packed program full of abundant insight, Ralph first welcomes back Dahr Jamail to discuss his work “We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth” about what we can learn from indigenous people who have survived incredible disruptions to the climate to their families and to their way of life. Then Karen Friedman from the Pension Rights Center gives us an update on how they are fighting to save our hard-earned money. And finally, Cal Berkeley grad students, Sandra Oseguera and Jesus Gutierrez explain the university’s “inverted priorities” as it spends millions of dollars on football coaches’ salaries and real estate while shutting down campus libraries.Dahr Jamail is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, as well as The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption. He is co-editor (with Stan Rushworth) of We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth.One of the themes of the book is the difference between the Western settler-colonialist mindset of: What are my rights? I have my rights. Versus a more Indigenous perspective that we came across time and again in the book of: We have two primary obligations that we are born into. One is the obligation to serve and be a good steward of the planet. The other obligation is to serve future generations of all species. So, if I focus on my obligations, it’s very very clear that I have plenty of work to do in service to those. If I focus only on my rights, I’m going to be chronically frustrated.Dahr Jamail, editor of We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing EarthKaren Friedman is the Executive Director of the Pension Rights Center. She develops solutions and implements strategies to protect and promote the rights of consumers, and for more than 20 years has represented their interests in the media and before congressional committees.Social Security is the strongest system we have. While opponents of Social Security have tried to undermine confidence in its future, the truth is that Social Security is one of the most universal, efficient, secure, and fair sources of retirement income…It’s not going broke, folks. It's a great system. That’s all propaganda, meant to scare the bejesus out of you.Karen FriedmanSandra Oseguera and Jesús Gutierrez are graduate students in the Anthropology department at The University of California, Berkeley. Last month, campus administration announced their plan to close the Anthropology Library, one of only three dedicated Anthropology libraries in the US. In response, stakeholders including students and faculty have organized to demand that the Anthropology Library be protected and fully supported by the University.[Fighting to save the library] has been a wonderful experience of community and collaboration among many stakeholders. However, we the grad students see ourselves as the keepers and also the main users of [the Anthropology Library’s] collection because all of our research really relies on the resources that are there.Sandra OsegueraThe library is a really valuable space. It’s not only a space for simply going in and accessing a book. It’s also a space of encounter. The kind of thing that the University is trying to destroy is essentially this possibility for having a happenstance run-in with a book that you may not necessarily have intended to type into the catalog system or with a person who you may not otherwise run into.Jesús GutierrezThe situation at Berkeley has become grotesquely inverted, in terms of the University. They have millions for football and other sports and paying coaches huge salaries. They have millions for administrative officials. But they want to shut down one of the great Anthropology libraries in the Western World.Ralph NaderIn Case You Haven’t Heard1. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that six former Phillies players have died of the same brain cancer. All six played between 1971 and 2003. The paper obtained samples of the astroturf used between 1977 and 1981, and found 16 different types of PFAS, otherwise known as “forever chemicals.” Researchers only discovered that PFAs were present in artificial turf in 2019, so it is unknown whether these chemicals are linked to this cancer cluster.2. Reps. Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan, both outspoken progressives, have introduced the “People Over Pentagon Act” which would cut $100 billion dollars from the defense budget. The Biden administration requested $813.3 billion in Pentagon funding in 2022. This bill would redirect these funds to healthcare, education, combating the climate crisis, and more. Public Citizen is fighting hard to advance this legislation.3. The Hill reports a bipartisan group of Senators have introduced a bill to lift the embargo on Cuba. This “gang” is primarily made up of Senators representing states with large agric

Ralph welcomes William Kleinknecht, author of “States of Neglect: How Red-State Leaders Have Failed Their Citizens and Undermined America” about how red state governors and legislatures fight culture wars while starving education and health care, empowering polluters, engaging in voter suppression, and neglecting their citizens’ well-being in the interest of cutting taxes for their wealthy donors. Plus, Oliver Hall, founder of the Center for Competitive Democracy tells us all about how ordinary people can use an extremely underused legal forum, Small Claims Court.William Kleinknecht is a longtime newspaper reporter who covered politics, government, criminal justice, and the environment for the Detroit Free Press, New York Daily News, and Newark Star-Ledger. He is the author of The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America and States of Neglect: How Red-State Leaders Have Failed Their Citizens and Undermined America.I wrote the book because when national news organizations talk about the red states, the focus is always on hot-button issues like abortion, immigration, election subversion, and even Critical Race Theory. And that’s by the design of the Republicans who run those states— that’s what they want people to be talking about because that fires up their base. What has gotten very little attention is just how damaging Republican leadership in those states has been for a longer period of time and across a much broader range of issues.William Kleinknecht, author of States of Neglect: How Red-State Leaders Have Failed Their Citizens and Undermined AmericaI found that when I went to where the poorest people were— and the people who were suffering from environmental degradation or poor healthcare— I think they got it. I think it’s a different segment of their population that is the MAGA Republicans. And I didn't spend as much time around them because I was looking for where the damage was.William Kleinknecht, author of States of Neglect: How Red-State Leaders Have Failed Their Citizens and Undermined AmericaOliver Hall is a public interest attorney in Washington, DC. He is founder of and legal counsel to the Center for Competitive Democracy, which aims to strengthen American democracy by increasing electoral competition.The fact is, in our increasingly corporatized world where transactions are automated, contracts are one-sided (contracts that corporations create with so much fine print you couldn’t possibly read it all, and ostensibly require you to sign away your rights), I think people get intimidated. Or they assume that they don’t have the right to pursue a claim in small claims court. And the fact is they do have that right. It can be done. And there's no reason more people shouldn’t do it, especially given the level and pervasiveness of corporate abuses, just in terms of everyday normal transactions that we all engage in.Oliver Hall on Small Claims CourtI’ve been listening to Elon Musk speak out against government subsidies of corporations over the months— and talking about himself as a great capitalist entrepreneur— when, in reality, he takes all kinds of corporate welfare… Anytime he opens up a plant or starts a company like Starlink, he demands all kinds of subsidies, handouts, giveaways, grants, and especially a tax referral or tax holidays or tax breaks.Ralph Nader on his Twitter exchange with Elon MuskIn Case You Haven’t Heard: 1. Former Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who opposed COVID aid, admitted that he retired due to complications from long COVID. He suggested that many other members of Congress are also struggling with long COVID but have kept that fact hidden from the public.Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/republican-senator-opposed-covid-aid-retired-due-long-covid-2023-22. The Jewish Federations of North America, which represents nearly 150 Jewish federations, penned a letter calling on Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to drop the override clause, which would allow the Knesset to override laws deemed unconstitutional by the Israeli Supreme Court. The Federations warn that “such a dramatic change to the Israeli system of governance will have far-reaching consequences in North America.”Source: https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2023-02-21/ty-article/.premium/major-u-s-jewish-org-calls-for-negotiations-between-netanyahu-and-lapid/00000186-755e-dcba-a19e-f77fc52e00003. In Florida, legislators are considering a “Dealer Bill” which would block consumers from purchasing electric cars directly from manufacturers like Ford and Honda. If passed, consumers would be forced to deal with notoriously usurious car salesmen to purchase these vehicles. The sponsor of this legislation, state rep. Jason Shoaf received $10,000 from Braman Motors – owned by billionaire car magnate Norman Braman – one week after filing the bill.Source: 4. On February 21st, over 30 members of CodePink occupied the offices of Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. They

Legendary investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh, tells us all about the story he broke that describes in great detail how the U.S. blew up the Nordstream pipelines in a covert “act of war” against Russia. Plus, Mickey Huff, of Project Censored joins us to speak to Ralph about the state of the so-called “free press.”Seymour Hersh is the pre-eminent investigative journalist of our time. He has won five George Polk Awards, two National Magazine Awards, and more than a dozen other prizes for investigative reporting. In 1970, Mr. Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the My Lai Massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War. In 2004, Mr. Hersh exposed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in a series of pieces in The New Yorker. Among his many books are The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, The Dark Side of Camelot, The Samson Option, The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, and his latest, a memoir of his storied, decades-long career, entitled simply Reporter.The pipeline industry all know that Russia didn’t [sabotage the Nord Stream pipeline]. Everybody knows they did not do it. There might have been some vagueness about who. But they were pretty sure all along who. Because who else threatened to do it, but the President and his Under Secretary Victoria Nuland? They’re the two that went public with it— much to the dismay of the people actually doing the covert operation. Seymour HershWe always saw the Russians’ great abundance of gas and the Russian delivery of gas to Europe—from Jack Kennedy in 1962— we saw it as weaponizing gas.Seymour HershIt’s a famous notion that the CIA and all those secret groups, they don’t work for the Constitution. They work for the Crown. They work for the President.Seymour HershMickey Huff is the director of Project Censored and the founder and host of The Project Censored Show, a weekly syndicated public affairs program. He is professor of social science, history, and journalism at Diablo Valley College. He has authored and edited several books including ​​United States of Distraction: Media Manipulation in Post-Truth America (and what we can do about it), Let’s Agree to Disagree, The Media and Me: A Guide to Critical Media Literacy for Young People, and Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2023: The News That Didn’t Make the News—And Why.[The Norfolk Southern crash] is a bipartisan disaster. It’s a direct example of what happens with regulatory capture. And it shows, once again, the gross failure of the corporate media— they’ll cover balloons, and the Super Bowl, and a bunch of other distractions, instead of things that really matter to working class Americans.Mickey Huff, co-editor of State of the Free Press 2023: The News That Didn’t Make the News—And WhyYou’re not allowed to ask the tough questions, Ralph. And anybody who’s been in the press pool long enough knows that. They don’t have to be told that. The censorship doesn’t have to be directly from the government, or even from the corporate owners. Reporters know that if they ask questions that don’t get answered too often, and get overlooked, they’re going to get yanked. They’re going to get called back to the office. They might end up losing their jobs because they don’t have copy and they don’t have stories.Mickey Huff, co-editor of State of the Free Press 2023: The News That Didn’t Make the News—And WhyEncourage members of the press not to forget [the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq on March 19th]. That was a massive war crime— over a million innocent Iraqis died, the country destroyed, falling apart to this day— and Bush and Cheney are luxuriating in the US without any accountability whatsoever. There’s a lot of talk now on the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But very little talk about the US and its sociocide destruction of the Iraqi people. And I think that illustrates how important it is to ask questions on subjects that have been taboo or censored.Ralph Nader Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph welcomes old friend, Judge Andrew Napolitano, to talk about why the U.S. government offered a plea deal to the supposed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four others. He asks, “Why would the government agree to such a plea for the persons it claims are the monsters who murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11?... What does the government fear?” Plus, Ralph gives us his take on the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. And then on a lighter note, we talk about the Super Bowl.Judge Andrew Napolitano is a former Superior Court Judge, a syndicated columnist, and host of the Judging Freedom podcast. Judge Napolitano has taught constitutional law and jurisprudence at Delaware Law School and Seton Hall Law School, and he was Fox News’ Senior Judicial Analyst from 1997 to 2021. He is the author of several books on the U.S. Constitution, the most recent entitled Freedom’s Anchor: An Introduction to Natural Law Jurisprudence in American Constitutional History.“I would try (Bush & Cheney) for war crimes for which there is no statute of limitations… the war crimes are well-known. The war crimes are leading us into war under false pretenses; intentionally targeting civilians in the Middle East; authorizing torture and purporting to protect it against state law if done in the U.S. and international law. These are all well-known war crimes for which the penalty is life in prison. They can also be execution… There is still an E.U.-wide arrest warrant live out there issued by Spanish authorities for the arrest of George W. Bush, because of the war crimes I have just summarized.”Judge Andrew Napolitano“George W. Bush, arguably the worst president in the post-World War II era for bringing us into two totally useless and very costly wars – Afghanistan and Iraq – which cost us in excess of two trillion dollars, which had over 850 thousand people killed – only five thousand were Americans – which destroyed the moral order in that part of the world for a full generation also instituted a regime of torture. I believe, Ralph, as do many of us who follow this – we haven’t seen it in writing – that Bush somehow pardoned or granted immunity to the torturers, because the torture was so vast and so extensive, and no one has been prosecuted for it. Obama and Holder who said loudly that they were against torture had every opportunity to do it. And they knew the names of the torturers, but it just didn’t happen.”Judge Andrew Napolitano“I do believe that Rupert Murdoch called up Donald Trump and said to him, to Murdoch’s credit - to his face, although it was on the phone – ‘you are just not institutionally, constitutionally, or temperamentally, or intellectually qualified to be the president of the United States and we will not support you.’”Judge Andrew NapolitanoThis is super Sparta on steroids—the aggressiveness, the lack of diplomacy, the lack of waging peace by the US government. It’s like they’ve mothballed the charter of the State Department, which was diplomacy. They’ve turned it into a bellicose agency, sometimes much worse than the spokespeople for the Defense Department.Ralph Nader Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph welcomes Dr. Nason Maani, co-editor of “The Commercial Determinants of Health,” to explore the larger forces, forces beyond the power of an individual to control, that shape our environment and therefore our health. Then Chris Hedges stops by to discuss his latest article, “Woke Imperialism” which highlights the tension between class politics and identity politics. Plus, Ralph gives us a short take on President Biden’s State of the Union address.Dr. Nason Maani is a lecturer in Inequalities and Global Health Policy at the University of Edinburgh. He is also the host of Money Power Health, a podcast on how our health is influenced by commercial forces, wealth, and power. He is co-editor of the new book The Commercial Determinants of Health.These are forces that science should bear witness to. The same way we bear witness to physical forces like gravity, we should be able to bear witness to commercial forces and describe the ways in which they influence the world.Dr. Nason Maani, co-editor of The Commercial Determinants of HealthChris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is the host of The Chris Hedges Report, and he is a prolific author— his latest book is The Greatest Evil Is War.These people are selected to essentially provide an appealing face to a system that carries out tremendous cruelty and imparts tremendous suffering on the very people these women or people of color claim to represent. So, they’re not actually serving their communities. They’re serving the system.Chris Hedges on "Woke Imperialism"I have a little suggestion for listeners: next time you meet someone, instead of saying, “How are you?” why don’t you ask, “How’s your civic life?”Ralph Nader Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph welcomes professor Karen Levy, who talks to us about how regulations aimed at making trucking safer have been turned into a tool of corporate surveillance as chronicled in her book “Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance.” And on the opposite side of the tech spectrum, high school senior, Logan Lane joins to tell us how she and her friends have liberated themselves from their iPhones and social media by forming a group they call “The Luddite Club.”Karen Levy is an associate professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, associate member of the faculty at Cornell Law School, and field faculty in Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, Media Studies, and Data Science. Her new book is Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance.I think we’re actually all aligned in our interests. Truckers don’t want to die on the road any more than the rest of us do. So, if safety is really the motivation for the electronic logging device, it feels as though we might all be able to get behind legislation and regulation that helps address the root causes of this fatigue.Karen Levy, author of Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace SurveillanceLogan Lane is a high school senior in Brooklyn and the founder of the Luddite Club.It felt like when I became a Luddite, I started off on this reading journey. We’re all on our individual reading journeys. I saw mine starting with Anaïs Nin’s Collages, and it was amazing, and it was something I didn’t think I could have interacted with so much and been so passionate about if I had been on the phone. And from then onwards I started doing this reading challenge. Every year I would set a goal— so my first year I read 50 books, the second year 95 books… It felt like the friends I’d lost on social media; I’d picked up those friends in the authors I was reading.Logan Lane Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph welcomes James Damico and Mark Baildon, authors of “How to Confront Denial: Literacy, Social Studies, and Climate Change.” They discuss all forms of denial including climate science denial and climate action denial. Then, Ralph, Steve, David, and Hannah discuss three topics in the news, mass shootings, the war in Ukraine, and the outrage of pharmaceutical companies raising the prices of taxpayer funded Covid vaccines.James Damico is a professor of literacy, culture, and language education at Indiana University Bloomington and a former elementary and middle school teacher from New Jersey. He is co-author of How to Confront Climate Denial: Literacy, Social Studies, and Climate Change.There tends to be a lot of emphasis on “personal responsibility” for climate change. And I think we need a lot more nuance about how we talk about personal responsibility, but we want to start with an industry lens. Because that’s the kind of inquiry we think will be most productive in social studies and university classrooms.James DamicoMark Baildon is an associate professor in foundations of education at the United Arab Emirates University and a former middle and high school social studies teacher in schools around the world (United States, Israel, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan). He is co-author of How to Confront Climate Denial: Literacy, Social Studies, and Climate Change.Social Studies is a pretty crowded field. But if we use climate as a connecting point, it’s an opportunity to talk about environmental racism, to look at the most vulnerable populations in societies and how they’re being affected by climate change.Mark BaildonWe should never forget that many of these industries would never be in existence— much less the size they are— without government research and development funds. And that means your taxpayer money. And the industries include the aerospace industry, the biotech industry, the computer industry, the nanotech industry, the containerization industry. You name it, one industry after another was given a huge birth give by the taxpayer from Washington, D.C.Ralph Nader Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

January 6th has become one of those days like September 11th where you need to say no more than the date for people to know what you’re talking about. Ralph welcomes New York Times congressional reporter, Luke Broadwater, who was in the Senate chamber when the rioters breached the building and has not only been covering the January 6th hearings but wrote the introduction to the NY Times version of the final report.Luke Broadwater is a congressional reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times. He played a key role in the paper's coverage of the January 6th attack on the Capitol, for which the Times was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His work is featured in the Twelve Books edition of The January 6 Report: Findings from the Select Committee to Investigate the Attack on the U.S. Capitol with Reporting, Analysis and Visuals by The New York Times.Congress is a place that, for better or worse, prides itself as its own island of niceties. You’re not supposed to criticize another member by name on the floor, and you're supposed to pretend that you’re all colleagues and there’s a level of respect between people. And it was seen on the Hill as very aggressive that they even issued a subpoena.Luke BroadwaterBruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.In the Watergate situation, we had the star witnesses who appeared in person… That was vivid. The American people were riveted. There were no star witnesses who were shown in the January 6th hearings. These were all second- or third-tier people. Even someone like Pat Cipollone was interviewed in private, not in public. And that’s why I think the impact was so much less than in Watergate— you’re never going to get a public to oppose a president based upon paper documents, and not flesh-and-blood where the public can make their own evaluation of credibility.Bruce FeinThe civic community that used to get a lot of media in the ‘60s and ‘70s and connected with members of Congress and changed the consumer, worker, and environmental framework of legislation in those golden years is no more. And civic community’s shut out like beyond my wildest nightmares.Ralph NaderThe letter from a listener concerning Apple’s privacy policy that Ralph referred to in the program as a sterling example of constructive correction… of him:Hello RNRH Team,I am a loyal listener, active Congress Club member and grateful for the important work you do.Thank you for all that your team invests in creating your show and, Ralph, for your decades of service and tireless efforts to hold our elected officials accountable so that our government will actually serve the People.Your work is important, and I am grateful for all you do.I do my best to keep an open mind when listening and very rarely question any of the perspectives that you and your team share during your show.Nevertheless, I believe that fairness and accuracy is critical for trusted sources of information like your show.In the recent Big Tech Spying episode of your Podcast you make this statement:“That's what Apple and Google are deliberately doing; they’re making it difficult…"I believe that Google and Apple approach this issue quite differently, but this was not communicated in the episode - instead, the companies were lumped together as though their work in this space is the same or very similar, which I believe was not accurate and, therefore, concerning.Disclosure: I’ve worked at Apple for 15 years - mostly in our Retail locations though I’ve supported Recruiting for the past 5 years - and I’ve done my best to mitigate my biases as I listened and now drafted this message.I am not an executive earning ridiculous salary and stock options, so this is not an effort to protect the status quo because I’m living high on the hog.My wife and I have lived in the same 2 room Studio apartment in San Francisco because it’s rent-controlled and enables us to save so we might purchase a home and move into the next phase of our lives.Nothing I share here represents Apple in any way, and no-one at Apple knows or would approve of my sending this message since I’m not part of the PR team.* I’ve anonymized my email address and signature as I could experience repercussions should any details of this message become known to Apple.I am an individual with opinions and not a spokesperson for the company, and I am also a worker who has contributed much of my salary to participate in Apple’s Employee Stock Purchase Program so that my wife and I might one day purchase a home and find the quality of life we strive for.I often work 50 - 60 hour weeks and have done so for more than a decade, and I hope that this hard work will provide us financial security.So, admittedly, my own self-interest influences my perspective and

Ralph welcomes back retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson to talk about American military policy, including the record $816.7 billion Pentagon budget, the war in Ukraine, the insanity of nuclear weapons, potential conflict with China and what the right-wing caucus in the House of Representatives really wants when they say they want to cut military spending. Plus, Ralph reads and responds to your questions and feedback from previous programs.Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired U.S. Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. During the course of his military service, Colonel Wilkerson was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster, the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Bronze Star among other awards and decorations. At the Department of State, he earned the Secretary’s Distinguished Service Award, as well as two Superior Honor Awards.My position on Ukraine now is: Shut up and start talking. To both sides. I’m convinced, from my contacts in Moscow, that the Russians would do that. If we even seemed to be serious. We’re the impediment.Colonel Lawrence WilkersonLet’s just take a scenario: let’s put ourselves down on the ground in Ukraine. Let’s say we put our army (which is smaller than the army of Bangladesh) on the ground in Ukraine, with the purpose of fighting the Russians. We would have 10,000 casualties a day for the first 30 days… The American people have never had these kinds of casualties. NEVER. Never. Not in any of their lives have they had these kinds of casualties. And they’re going to have them. That’s what it’s all about.Colonel Lawrence WilkersonOne person, an otherwise very gifted diplomat, said to me the other day, “We don’t know how to do diplomacy anymore. We don't do diplomacy anymore. Because our diplomacy has been replaced by bombs, bullets, and bayonets.” He’s right. He’s absolutely right. That’s what we’ve done. That’s the kind of insanity I’m talking about. You have no diplomacy.Colonel Lawrence WilkersonWe do not have a democracy. We have a deep-state oligarchical corporatocracy. And the American people are on the outside. And the American people— intuitively and, in some cases, intellectually— understand that and go about their business and do what they have to do… but they don’t participate in the government.Colonel Lawrence Wilkerso Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph explains it all for you, the history and the consequences of the legal fiction that is corporate personhood. Then his associate, Francesco DeSantis, from the Center of Study of Responsive law updates us on progress being made to institute a corporate crime data base along the lines of the street crime database in order to track repeat corporate criminal offenders.Francesco DeSantis is a public interest advocate and Outreach Coordinator at the Center for Study of Responsive Law. He has coordinated with the offices of Representative Mary Gay Scanlon and Senator Dick Durbin to get the Corporate Crime Database issue back on the Congressional agenda, and he’s advocated for it among members of Congress and consumer, labor, and environmental groups.Once unleashed, [a corporation] doesn’t conform to normal human accountabilities. It doesn’t have the same level of shame or guilt. It can make a lot of mistakes and hurt a lot of people and still be credible.Ralph NaderIt’s important for all of our listeners to know that corporations are not created by investors. They are created by state authority.Ralph NaderLimited liability was the yeast that unfurled the future elaborations of corporate power. Ralph NaderThe Justice Department has every statutory authority to [create a corporate crime database] on their own. It completely, 100% falls within their purview to monitor crime, to attempt to arrest criminals, to prevent recidivism… So, we are very hopeful that the Justice Department will see the light on this issue.Francesco DeSantisIf you think about the kind of crimes that corporations engage in, they would be completely beyond the pale for any individual.Francesco DeSantisIf the American people—journalists, academics, prosecutors, and so on— were able to see that “X Corporation” committed a crime, committed it again, committed it a third time, and each time got basically no serious penalty, I think that that would go a long way towards the political movement to demand more from the corporate criminal enforcement division of the Department of Justice.Francesco DeSantis Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

It is well documented how much more cost effective a Medicare for All system would be in the aggregate. But do you want to know how much money per year a Medicare for All system would personally save you? Listen to Dr. James Kahn, explain the calculator he developed to help you figure that out. Plus, we invite Dr. Fred Hyde and healthcare consultant, Kip Sullivan, back to answer the feedback you sent us on the topic of Medicare (dis)Advantage.Dr. James Kahn is an expert in policy modeling in health care, cost-effectiveness analysis, and evidence-based medicine. He is an Emeritus Professor of Health Policy, Epidemiology, and Global Health at the University of California, San Francisco. He is also past president of the California chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program. He recently launched the Medicare for All Savings Calculator, which compares what individuals or families currently spend to what they would pay under Improved Medicare for All.If you compare 70% of our healthcare spending to total healthcare spending in any other wealthy country around the world, we’re already spending more in public money than any other country spends in total. I like to say we’re already paying for universal healthcare, we’re just not getting it.Dr. James KahnWhy the American people do not wake up and demand that their members of Congress come to their town meetings back home— run by the people, where they talk all about this health care shenanigans— and send their Senators and Representatives back to Washington with instructions to support the kinds of single-payer that was illustrated in H.R.676 two years ago…HR676 is the gold standard, and it should be reintroduced in the next Congress so that people can rally around it.Ralph NaderDr. Fred Hyde is a consultant to hospitals, medical schools and physicians, as well as to unions, community groups and others interested in the health of hospitals, health care facilities and organizations. Dr. Hyde is also the publisher of a daily health policy newsletter called DCMedical News.A problem aside from the extraordinary cost of our medical care system is its complexity. I’m not surprised that your listeners have questions. I have questions, and I’ve been in the field fifty years. I teach graduate students in hospital operations and healthcare finance, and, trust me, everyone has questions when it comes to their own coverage… Complexity is itself an issue. And we live in a society where there are a good deal of middlemen who undertake to smooth over the complexity of our society, and make a buck doing so.Dr. Fred HydeKip Sullivan is a Health Care Advisor with Health Care for All Minnesota, and has written several hundred articles on health policy. He is an active member of Physicians for a National Health Program, which advocates for universal, comprehensive single-payer national health insurance.It is impossible to give you a dollars and cents comparison of the costs of Medicare Advantage with either Medicare alone or Medicare with supplemental coverage. And the reason it’s impossible is: you don’t know what you bought from Medicare Advantage until you need it.Kip Sullivan Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

In a live Zoom event in conjunction with the American Museum of Tort Law, we welcome back Claire Nader, author of “You Are Your Own Best Teacher” and Susan Linn, author of “Who’s Raising the Kids?” for a lively panel discussion moderated by child advocacy legal expert, Robert Fellmeth, on the ongoing corporatization of childhood. We also hear from audience members but not just old people talking about “kids today.” A thoughtful seventh grader gives us a young person’s perspective.Robert Fellmeth is the Price Professor of Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego and the Executive Director of the Center for Public Interest Law. He is also Executive Director of the Children's Advocacy Institute, which authored The Fleecing of Foster Children: How We Confiscate Their Assets and Undermine Their Financial SecurityWe have one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in the history of the world, which basically equates corporations with individuals. It equates corporate entities with private citizens. And they’re not the same thing…You cannot have the Citizens United-type case that equates the two and still have a democracy.Robert FellmethDr. Susan Linn is an author, psychologist, and award-winning ventriloquist. She was the Founding Director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (now known as Fairplay), and she is a world-renowned expert on creative play and the impact of media and commercial marketing on children. Her latest book is Who’s Raising The Kids? Big Tech, Big Business and the Lives of Children.I think what people don’t understand is that these beloved characters are used to sell things to kids. And that there is really almost no place in media—including public media, today— where children can go, where someone is not trying to sell them something.Dr. Susan Linn, author of Who’s Raising The Kids? Big Tech, Big Business and the Lives of ChildrenClaire Nader is a political scientist and author recognized for her work on the impact of science on society. She is an advocate for numerous causes at the local, national and international level. As the first social scientist working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, she joined pioneering initiatives in energy conservation and the multifaceted connections between science, technology and public policy. Her latest book is You Are Your Own Best Teacher! Sparking the Curiosity, Imagination and Intellect of Tweens.[How children suffer due to corporate predators] scares me to death, as a matter of fact. I want to run away from the lives of children under these conditions. But I can run to a different atmosphere for children—if you will— and that’s what I try to put in my book.Claire Nader, author of You Are Your Own Best Teacher! Sparking the Curiosity, Imagination and Intellect of Tweens Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph welcomes the Washington Post’s technology columnist, Geoffrey Fowler, to explain all the ways your smart devices are gathering information about you, your garage door, your soap dispenser, your vacuum cleaner and even your toilet.Geoffrey Fowler is The Washington Post’s technology columnist. Before joining the Post he spent sixteen years with the Wall Street Journal writing about consumer technology, Silicon Valley, national affairs and China.I’m actually really excited by technology. I love it… What angers me is that we’ve allowed a couple of really big corporations—Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook— to give us (as consumers, as users of this stuff) a false choice. And the false choice is, “You can either live in a world where you have all these great conveniences, you can use this new technology… But if you want that, you have to give us all of this data. You have to allow us to surveille you. You have to allow us to watch everything your kids do so we can market to them.” And the false choice here is: if you don’t want that, you can’t have the future. You just have to go live under a rock.Geoffrey FowlerWe looked at the 1000 most popular iPhone apps that are likely to be used by children, and found that 2/3rds of them were collecting data about children— personal information, including their location— and sending it off to the advertising industry… By the time a child reaches 13, online advertising companies hold an average of 72 million data points about them. Each kid.Geoffrey Fowler Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph welcomes Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times investigative reporter, Eric Lipton, to give us the over/under on how professional sports in the U.S. is now part of a multibillion-dollar corporate gambling enterprise that can now even reach children. And before you buy toys for your loved ones this holiday season you need to hear our interview with Teresa Murray, director of U.S. PIRG’s Consumer Watchdog office, discussing their latest report on dangerous toys, entitled “Trouble in Toyland.”Eric Lipton is a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, and an investigative reporter for the New York Times. He traveled to Topeka, Kansas to report on lobbying and sports-betting legislation for the New York Times’ new series that examines how the sports-gambling industry has expanded in the US.The end goal for the sports betting industry is not sports betting. It’s actually something they call “iGaming”... They’re pushing states that have already adopted sports betting to move on now to iGaming. And we’ll see how successful they are, but already we have witnessed—just since 2018— the largest expansion of legalized gambling in United States history.Eric LiptonYeah, it’s true that many people bet on the side— college basketball or Super Bowl betting— that’s been around for so long. But with the institutionalization and the legalization now it’s become such a part of the enterprise of sports. It has fundamentally transformed the relationship we have with such an important part of our culture.Eric LiptonA major-league ballplayer is not going to strike out in a key game in order to collect some hidden gambling bets from their family or friends. But it’s terrible for appearances, and it’s fertile for suspicions— where you’re sitting there, watching, and you know that there are all kinds of endorsements and entanglements, and you say “Ah, he couldn’t have bungled that play! That was deliberate.” And so, there’s a stench that begins arising by people who suspect that this greed does penetrate the games. Ralph NaderTeresa Murray is a Consumer Watchdog with the US Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, and she directs US PIRG's Consumer Watchdog office, which looks out for consumers' health, safety and financial security. She is the primary author of “Trouble In Toyland 2022”, the Consumer Watchdog’s annual toy safety report.We have an increasing number of smart toys. Which, on some levels, can be good— maybe it keeps the kid’s interest, maybe there’s an educational value… The problems are when these toys are invading our children’s privacy, collecting information about them, maybe without the parents’ knowledge. And then in some cases the information can be used to market to the child, which is wrong. Or spy on the child, which is creepy. Or in some cases perhaps even stalk the child.Teresa MurrayFamilies should realize and remember that just because a toy is for sale, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily safe. It could be a recalled toy. It could be a counterfeit toy. Or it could be a toy that’s just not appropriate for your child.Teresa Murray Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph invites longtime colleague, Joan Claybrook, to the program to help him pay tribute to the work of the legendary, Michael Pertschuk, an individual responsible for an enormous amount of landmark, lifesaving consumer legislation. Then Steve and David interview Claire Nader about her book “You Are Your Own Best Teacher! Sparking the Curiosity, Imagination and Intellect of Tweens.” Plus, Ralph once again warns against falling for Medicare (Dis)Advantage.Joan Claybrook is one of the public interest champions of the modern consumer movement. She is president emeritus of Public Citizen. During the Carter Administration, Ms. Claybrook headed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation. Ms. Claybrook has testified frequently before congressional committees on many public interest issues, but with a particular focus on auto and highway safety.There is not anyone in this country who has not benefitted from what [Michael Pertschuk] did.Ralph Nader[Michael Pertschuk’s] strategies were brilliant because he figured out how to get people to work with him, as opposed to against him… And he did that beautifully. He was a charming guy. Very sweet, very smart, and he didn’t act like a “tough insider,” but he worked with people.Joan ClaybrookI think that every staffer and every member of Congress ought to read [When the Senate Worked for Us: The Invisible Role of Staffers in Countering Corporate Lobbies], because it shows how you can achieve a legislative goal and get things to the finish line, as opposed to just having hearings, or introducing bills, or voting on someone else's bill.Joan ClaybrookClaire Nader is a political scientist and author recognized for her work on the impact of science on society. She is an advocate for numerous causes at the local, national and international level. As the first social scientist working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, she joined pioneering initiatives in energy conservation and the multifaceted connections between science, technology and public policy. Her latest book is You Are Your Own Best Teacher! Sparking the Curiosity, Imagination and Intellect of Tweens.[Tweens] will tell you what’s on their mind, and you can’t help but notice that they have no ax to grind. And you’re asking yourself, as an adult “What is my ax?” And what’s the difference if you don’t have an ax to grind? Then you really focus on the problem, not any self-interest.Claire Nader, author of You Are Your Own Best Teacher! Sparking the Curiosity, Imagination and Intellect of TweensAARP comes across in its own promotion as a great consumer advocate for elderly people. But it was commercialized years ago. It’s a nonprofit, and in 2021 it made over $800 million in profits by working with the UnitedHealthcare corporation, selling royalties off the use of its name and trademarks, etc, and it pays its CEO $1.3 million a year.Ralph NaderAll this is to warn listeners if you know elderly people that are being swarmed over with these deceptive brochures – tens of millions of people have been receiving them for several weeks – tell them not to go into Medicare Advantage. It’s a snare and a delusion. And it’s a cruel surprise when you’re really sick, and you need to get those bills paid.Ralph Nader Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

On this week of Thanksgiving, Ralph welcomes two distinguished anti-war activists and Nobel Peace Prize nominees, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODE Pink to discuss her book “War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict” and David Swanson of World Beyond War to not only put the conflict in Ukraine in context but also to reveal the financial incentives that drive endless war.Medea Benjamin is the co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK and the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange. Her most recent book, coauthored with Nicolas J.S. Davies, is War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict.I remember everybody was talking about the peace dividend: “Hey, the Soviet Union collapsed. Now, we can shrink the military budget. We can disarm more. We can put the money back into communities. We can rebuild and restore America’s public works— our so-called infrastructure.” We didn’t count on the profit motive of the determined, deliberate, limitless greed and power of the military industrial complex.Ralph NaderWe have a history of the US making coups in countries around the world. And it’s oftentimes decades after those coups that we find out the information about the extent of US involvement. That will be the case in [Ukraine] as well.Medea BenjaminWe are looking sector by sector about how to mobilize and put pressure on our Congress and directly on the White House. Because I think that it’s the only way that we, in this country, can use our influence. And we must do it.Medea BenjaminDavid Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, radio host and Nobel Peace Prize nominee. He is executive director of World BEYOND War and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. His books include War Is A Lie and When the World Outlawed War.When you see these videos contrasting “all the money going to Ukraine” and the homelessness problem and the poverty problem in the United States, we shouldn’t imagine this money as benefiting the people of Ukraine at the expense of benefiting the people of the United States. It’s exacerbating and prolonging a war that is devastating the people of Ukraine.David SwansonThey’ve made war something that involves no US lives— or very, very few, and not officially a US war—and they’ve made it all about assisting a “struggling little democracy” against a “brutal authoritarian dictatorship”. And it has been the most phenomenal propaganda success I can recall or have read about in history.David SwansonBruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.NATO expansion only happened because the Senate ratified the inclusion of all of these new countries in amending the NATO treaty. So, Congress is a partner with the President in flouting the pledges to Gorbachev (at the time) against further NATO expansion east after the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union. Just another example of congressional dereliction.Bruce Fein Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph welcomes back old friend and America’s Number One Populist, Jim Hightower to hash out a whole range of topics including what happened with Beto O’Rourke in the recent governor’s race in Texas, the battle between corporate Dems vs. progressive Dems and much, much more. Plus, Ralph warns again about falling for the relentless corporate pitch for Medicare (Dis)Advantage and gives us an update on the ongoing Boeing Max 8 litigation.Jim Hightower is a syndicated columnist, national radio commentator, and America’s Number One populist. He has written many books including Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow. Mr. Hightower is a board member of Public Citizen. He is also a founding member of Our Revolution, an organization inspired by the issues brought up in the Bernie Sanders campaign. Along with that, he writes a monthly newsletter called the Hightower Lowdown.Shakespeare said “First, kill all the lawyers,” but I think first, kill all the consultants.Jim Hightower[To see what’s gone wrong], you’ve got to go back… to when the Democratic Party didn’t just abandon Texas, they abandoned grassroots politics. They went with the money.Jim HightowerIf you don’t show up, you’re not gonna win. And we’re not going to win just by going to cities and the inner suburbs. Yes, we have to be strongly active there. Yes, we have to be totally committed to women’s right to control their own bodies. All of that is a given. But you’ve got to have something in addition to that.Jim HightowerRepublican attorneys general, Republican congressional leaders when they’re in charge, they use power. And they use it to change the structure of the system… And we tend to fumble around with it and say we’ve got to be cautious, we don’t want to offend anybody, and we need to pursue the law carefully. That’s why we have to have grassroots movements that build power at a local level.Jim Hightower Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph invites political psychologist Dr. Drew Westen back to the program to give his analysis of what happened in the midterm elections. What the Dems did right and what they still do wrong. And we also welcome back labor journalist, Steve Early, co-author of “Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs.”Dr. Drew Westen is a clinical, personality, and political psychologist and neuroscientist, and Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University. Dr. Westen is the author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation and is the founder of Westen Strategies, a strategic messaging consulting firm. He has advised a range of candidates and organizations, from presidential and congressional campaigns to major progressive organizations to the House and Senate Democratic Caucuses.Normally, within the first couple of years of a president’s administration, he’s usually picking up from where the last president left things— which is usually with a bad economy. And voters blame the new president for it, and that’s why you see these historic midterm effects where the party in power usually gets killed. And this time, the Democrats didn’t get killed. Let’s give them that first.Dr. Drew WestenDemocrats have trouble figuring out that if you just speak honestly as a populist, you can win anywhere… Because people know when they’re getting screwed. And they know when somebody has their back. And they know when someone is speaking honestly to them. Dr. Drew WestenAll politicians—with very few exceptions— flatter the voters. When do we say, “It’s the voter’s responsibility”? That they have exerted a wave of masochistic voting against their own interest?Ralph NaderSteve Early is a lawyer, organizer, union representative, and labor journalist. He is the author of Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City, and co-author, with Suzanne Gordon and Jasper Craven, of Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs.One of the great things about the VA is that a third of the VA caregiving workforce is veterans themselves. So you have this unique culture of solidarity and empathy, connection between patients and providers. You don’t find that at Kaiser, or Sutter, or UnitedHealth, or any of the other big for-profit or nonprofit healthcare chains. So this is a real national treasure that needs to be defended.Steve Early, author of Our Veterans: Winners, Losers, Friends, and Enemies on the New Terrain of Veterans Affairs Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Counterpunch’s Joshua Frank joins Ralph to discuss his new book, “Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America” about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State— the Cold War plutonium manufacturing facility that even after a $677 billion taxpayer clean-up bill still leaks radioactivity. And immigration lawyer extraordinaire, Susan Cohen, regales us about her experience representing asylum seekers and refugees as chronicled in her book “Journey From There to Here: Stories of Immigrant Trials, Triumphs and Contributions.” Plus, Ralph makes one final pitch before the midterms for “Winning America.”Joshua Frank is an investigative journalist and the managing editor of the political magazine CounterPunch. He is also an author— his latest book is Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America.”Everyone would agree that any amount of money should be spent to clean this place up (Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State), but if it’s lining the pockets of private corporations and the job’s not getting done, then something’s wrong.Joshua Frank, author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in AmericaThat’s their answer (to radioactive waste)—tarps. They don’t have an answer. Because it’s a very technical, very laborious process. And, I would argue, takes more ingenuity in figuring out how to clean this up than it did to produce it in the first place.Joshua Frank, author of Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in AmericaSusan Cohen is an immigration attorney and founding Chair of Mintz Levin’s Immigration Practice. She is president of the board of the Political Asylum/Immigration Representation (PAIR) Project, and led a team working with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts to obtain a temporary restraining order on Trump’s 2017 Travel Ban. She is the author of Journeys From There to Here: Stories of Immigrant Trials, Triumphs and Contributions.The fact that there are so many authoritarian regimes and corrupt regimes that we have had a hand in supporting over the years—where people can’t get justice when they’ve been egregiously harmed, or where the facts are evident and there’s not a question about what happened— is just another indication of the kinds of intolerable life situations that people face in these countries where they truly have to escape for their very lives.Susan Cohen, author of Journeys From There to Here: Stories of Immigrant Trials, Triumphs and ContributionsThe stark choice on November 8th is between a fascist/autocratic party and one that supports a major social safety net for tens of millions of Americans and their children. For anybody who says, “What about third parties?” I say, “Go for it.” But you know what’s going to happen on November 8th— it’s either going to be the Republican or the Democratic candidates for the duopoly. And there's never been a bigger gap in domestic policy— they’re very similar on empire— than at the present time.Ralph Nader Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph invites back award-winning war correspondent and author, Chris Hedges, to discuss his new book “The Greatest Evil is War” in which he points out that war is not only a racket but - no matter what its causes - a moral obscenity. And Mark Green joins us to elaborate on “Winning America” a compendium of rhetorical strategies and concrete policies Democrats should be running on to win the midterm elections. Plus, we plug Tort Law Education Day!Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is the host of The Chris Hedges Report, and he is a prolific author— his latest book is The Greatest Evil Is War.Unchecked militarism is cancerous to a civilization. And it overreaches in the end. So, as it decays— as we have decayed — it engages in more forms of military adventurism in an attempt to reclaim a lost hegemony and a lost glory and a lost power.Chris Hedges, author of The Greatest Evil Is WarDemocratic administrations are wholly in lockstep with the Republicans on militarism. In some cases, even worse, because they provide more cover… So, we have to hold those who prosecute permanent war— Democrat or Republican— accountable. And I think that by surrendering to a Democratic administration in the idea that it's “the least worst,” we weaken our power and our credibility.Chris Hedges, author of The Greatest Evil Is WarBloodthirsty military action books sell far more than books that challenge the grizzly evil and crimes of war. It's books of aggression, violence, military prowess that gained the bestseller listRalph NaderMark Green is a former Nader’s Raider, who ran Public Citizen’s Congress Watch for ten years and was elected New York City’s first Public Advocate. He’s a prolific author, and has collaborated with Ralph Nader on Fake President: Decoding Trump’s Gaslighting, Corruption, and General B******t, and Wrecking America: How Trump's Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All. He is co-founder, with Ralph Nader of Winning America.To summarize, dangerous extremists are trying to steal our votes and our wallets. [Progressive candidates] have to get in both: “They’re destroying democracy,” and “That economically hurts our families.”Mark Green, co-founder of Winning AmericaTrump’s GOP— they want to be lawmakers to break the law, violate the Constitution and crush our democracy, and put the plutocrats in charge. Behind all these Trumpsters is the corporate state… turning the government against its own people.Ralph Nader Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph and Rhode Island Senator, Sheldon Whitehouse, dive into his new book “The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court.” And Ralph takes the opportunity with the Senator to pitch his "Winning America" strategy for the Democrats to use in the midterms. In addition, our resident constitutional expert, Bruce Fein, stops by to argue that so many of the books about Trump and other American presidents emphasize personality and ignore the constitutional implications of their decisions. Plus, Ralph urges listeners to sign up for Tort Law Day, Saturday October 29th to celebrate our constitutional right to have our day in court.Sheldon Whitehouse represents Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate. He has served as his state’s United States Attorney and as the state Attorney General, as well as its top business regulator. He is the author of Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy, and the new book The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court.We just had a vote on [the DISCLOSE Act] in the Senate, and every single Republican voted against it. They voted— to a person—to protect dark money. Despite not only 80% of Republican voters feeling opposed and hostile to dark money and all this corporate influence, but really angrily opposed to it. These are people that come in with a very high sense of frustration and fury. It's a very salient and even emotional issue, and yet they all voted— to a person— against it. Because, in my view, they've become as dependent on dark money as a deep-sea diver is on an air hose.Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, author of The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme CourtImagine blaming Joe Biden for high gas prices when the fossil fuel industry actually sets the gas prices. If they actually let Joe Biden set gas prices when they were high, he could have knocked a dollar per gallon off like that. But of course, you can’t. We’ve got a market economy. But they blame him for it.Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, author of The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme CourtBruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.There's only one oath that all of our members of Congress and the President and the judiciary take— the one oath to hold and support the Constitution of the United States. They don't take an oath to support their political party. They don’t take an oath to get re-elected. They don't take an oath for any other purpose other than to uphold and defend the Constitution.Bruce FeinThe crux of our Republic is process— following process as prescribed in the Constitution, and if you lose, you go back and you make a better argument, or if you think the Constitution is defective, you propose an amendment…that is what makes us different from other countries. And this preoccupation with personalities is leading us off of a cliff very fast.Bruce FeinYour broader point, Bruce, is truly being occluded by people who engage in the public press and Congressional activities. Your broadest point is that we are living in an age of massive serial violations of our Constitution by our elected representatives, and of course, by implication, government officials who are working under these elected representatives in the branches of government. And this breeds a culture of lawlessness all the way down to the corporate crime wave to violations of consumers’ rights, workers’ rights, civil rights, civil liberties.Ralph Nader Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph welcomes Marta Tellado, president and CEO of Consumer Reports and author of “Buyer Aware: Harnessing Our Consumer Power for a Safe, Fair, and Transparent Marketplace.” She and Ralph tackle many consumer related issues including how consumer rights are also civil rights. And previous guest Professor Michael Hudson rejoins us to forcefully rebut a listener comment about his view of the Federal Reserve, quantitative easing, and who runs the US Treasury. Plus, Ralph has some choice words about how we should be thinking about immigration.Marta Tellado is president and CEO of Consumer Reports, an independent nonprofit that works side-by-side with consumers to create a fair and just marketplace. She is the author of Buyer Aware: Harnessing Our Consumer Power for a Safe, Fair, and Transparent Marketplace.I believe that democratic freedoms can coexist and thrive with economic equity. And I wrote the book in part to tell a larger story about how our democracy can only thrive if we really have a marketplace that has opportunity that is fair and just across all populations. And so, it really is a way of engaging a broader audience in this idea that a fair marketplace is absolutely essential to a fair democracy. Economic freedom is a civil right.Marta Tellado, author of Buyer Aware: Harnessing Our Consumer Power for a Safe, Fair, and Transparent MarketplaceWith each individual [consumer] action, we really talk about some of the big changes we need to see in the marketplace. Particularly now, with the domination, lack of competition, and the concentration of the power that we have. How do we, as a collective force, drive a marketplace that is safer by design? That is private by design? That doesn't put all the burden on consumers?Marta Tellado, author of Buyer Aware: Harnessing Our Consumer Power for a Safe, Fair, and Transparent Marketplace[On harnessing consumer spending] All this money that Apple and Amazon make— all the money they use to lobby, all the money they use to propagandize— it all starts with consumer dollars that are given to them in return for services.Ralph NaderMichael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, a Wall Street Financial Analyst, and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, …and forgive them their debts – Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year, and Finance Capitalism and its Discontents.When you realize that the purpose of quantitative easing was to raise real estate and stock market prices, why would they do it, if not to rescue the banks? It didn’t make the economy healthier. It raised the cost of living. It added to the debt deflation… So, by re-inflating the financial markets, this created a whole new business for banks— lending credit.Michael Hudson Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph does a deep dive into the commercialization of childhood with Dr. Susan Linn, psychologist, and author of “Who’s Raising the Kids? Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children.” Plus, Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, fills us in on their campaign to end the tenure of Louis DeJoy, the Trump-appointed Post Master, who is trying to dismantle the US Postal Service.Dr. Susan Linn is an author, psychologist, and award-winning ventriloquist. She was the Founding Director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (now known as Fairplay), and she is a world-renowned expert on creative play and the impact of media and commercial marketing on children. Her latest book is Who’s Raising The Kids? Big Tech, Big Business and the Lives of Children.The combination of this incredibly compelling and sophisticated and seductive technology and unregulated capitalism is already terrible for children— and it’s going to get even more terrible. And one of the things that I think it’s important for people to remember is that commercialism, or advertising and marketing— which is what all these devices we love so much were basically made for— that it doesn’t just sell products. It sells values and behaviors. And the values of commercial culture— “me first”, materialism, image is more important than anything else—those values are so harmful to society.Dr. Susan LinnIt’s enraging — at a time when books are being banned, teachers and librarians are being silenced and can’t talk to kids about important things— that the tech companies are pretty much unregulated and can say basically anything they want to children.Dr. Susan LinnEvery major religion in the world, thousands of years ago, warned their adherents not to give too much power to the merchant class. Because the commercial motive is relentless and all-encompassing. It will destroy or co-opt other civic values that are far more important for society to sustain.Ralph NaderRobert Weissman is a staunch public interest advocate and activist, as well as an expert on a wide variety of issues ranging from corporate accountability and government transparency, to trade and globalization, to economic and regulatory policy. As the President of Public Citizen, Weissman has spearheaded the effort to loosen the chokehold corporations and the wealthy have over our democracy.You can’t cut [the USPS] down to save it, you have to expand it and make it more robust. Its significance in American history and its future depends on it being a network that connects all of us and does so efficiently. So, the more you reduce it, the less chance it has to be relevant to the lives of Americans.Robert WeissmanSupport for the government and federal agencies is stronger than people realize, among the public. Most of the public supports most of what the federal government does— at least when they do it well. But support for the Postal Service is through the roof. And it’s in significant part, because it may be that a lot of the “elite opinion makers” themselves don’t personally rely on as much on the postal service and the post offices around the country as regular people do.Robert WeissmanDeJoy is playing the Republican game: You undermine public services as the reason to argue for corporatizing them.Ralph Nader Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Do not sign-up for Medicare Advantage! We don’t care what Joe Namath tells you. That’s the message of healthcare expert, Kip Sullivan, who returns to remind us why Medicare Advantage is simply a further for-profit corporate takeover of Medicare. Plus, we rifle through the mailbag where Ralph answers your questions and comments on your feedback about past programs.Kip Sullivan is a Health Care Advisor with Health Care for All Minnesota, and has written several hundred articles on health policy. He is an active member of Physicians for a National Health Program, which advocates for universal, comprehensive single-payer national health insurance.With the original Medicare you know what you’re buying. The two parts of this scam that we’re talking about is United Healthcare puts out this brochure making it sound like because they’re so efficient that they can offer these extra services. It’s not true. They’re overpaid. We’re wasting money on them. And the other piece of the scam is when you get sick you may very well not get the coverage that is described in the policy.Kip SullivanYou can’t overstate the enthusiasm with which the Biden administration is promoting the takeover of Medicare by both Medicare Advantage plans and this new breed of parasite called the Accountable Care Organization, or ACO.Kip SullivanThere are multiple reasons to oppose the takeover of Medicare by these corporations. But the Democrats ought to be thinking about their own political future and looking ahead to this so-called crisis in 2028.Kip SullivanWe’re underinvesting in the consequences of global warming— the climate disruption, droughts, gigantic wildfires, floods, surges from the sea, hurricanes. But we’re overinvesting in blowing up countries overseas that do not threaten us… This is a sign of the collective insanity of the corporate state.Ralph NaderThis article by Diane Archer would be very useful for any listeners just turning 65 and trying to figure out whether to enroll in MA or stay in traditional Medicare:Four things to think about when choosing a plan to fill gaps in Medicare, a “Medigap” or Medicare supplemental insurance plan Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

“Everyone is entitled to a defense” contend large law firms when they represent notorious corporate clients, but many of these firms push the ethical envelope. That’s the crux of the discussion Ralph has with David Enrich as outlined in his book, “Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice.” Plus, we welcome Dr. Michael Jacobson, founder, and former director of Science in the Public Interest to tell us how we need to raise taxes on Science in the Public Interest to reduce alcohol-related deaths and mayhem.David Enrich is the Business Investigations Editor at the New York Times, and the bestselling author of Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail of Destruction. His latest book is Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice.There’s a lot of lip service that the leaders of the legal industry pay to being good corporate citizens and being public-spirited officers of the court. And you often scratch a little bit beneath the surface of these giant law firms, and you realize that is just not true.David Enrich, author of Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of JusticeIt was very clear to me the vast power that these law firms were wielding, not only defending their clients in and out of court, but also shaping the public’s perception of how these fights were transpiring— in large part through the media. It’s more or less taboo— in the mainstream media in particular— to really pull back the curtain on the way that those law firms are operatingDavid Enrich, author of Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of Justice[Jones Day] is not a monolith, and it’s not a place that I regard as evil. But it’s really a classic example of a place where even well-intentioned lawyers go, and—to make a living or to repay their debts or whatever—and they sometimes end up really pushing the envelope.David Enrich, author of Servants of the Damned: Giant Law Firms, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of JusticeWhen they say “we believe in the position of the clients we represent…” it really isn’t true. They don’t believe in all the positions of their clients. And when you nail them on that issue, they say “Well, we’re required by the professional code of ethics of our profession to zealously represent these clients. It’s not up to us to expose their Achilles heel— that’s what the adversarial system is for.”Ralph NaderMichael Jacobson holds a PhD. in microbiology from MIT. He is well-known for his nutrition advocacy that helped eliminate artificial trans-fat from the food supply, expose the enormous calorie counts of movie theater popcorn and many restaurant foods and make Nutrition Facts mandatory on food packages. Dr. Jacobson is the author of Salt Wars: The Battle Over the Biggest Killer in the American Diet.There’s no doubt that raising alcohol taxes would raise the price of alcoholic beverages, and consumption would decline. For any kind of imaginable tax increase, alcohol problems and deaths would not go to zero. But there would be a significant decline in proportion to the increase in tax rates.Dr. Michael Jacobson Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph does a deep dive into the real purpose of the Federal Reserve and other aspects of the American economy with progressive economist, Michael Hudson. Plus, our resident constitutional scholar, Bruce Fein, joins us to talk about the elected official from New Mexico, who got removed from office because of his role in the Jan. 6th insurrection and what that possibly could mean for Donald’s Trump eligibility for office. And he also discusses a letter from retired Secretaries of Defense and Joint Chiefs about military leaders rejecting illegal presidential orders.Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends, a Wall Street Financial Analyst, and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, …and forgive them their debts – Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year, and Finance Capitalism and its Discontents.The Federal Reserve was created to stop social purpose spending by the government, by essentially cutting the Treasury out of the monetary management process. And that’s true, not only of the Federal Reserve in America, but of central banks all over the world.Michael HudsonThe economy has never really recovered from Obama’s bailout of the banks in 2008. And government and the Federal Reserve have been keeping the financial markets afloat by quantitative easing, but they really haven’t helped the population at large.Michael HudsonIf money should be a public utility, just like the dollar bills in your pocket, the credit cards and the electronic payments should be a public utility. But instead, it’s privatized. It’s turned into a monopoly, and it’s a source of monopoly rents for the banks that really is unnecessary.Michael HudsonThe important thing about gambling is the casino always wins, and the second important thing is that there’s always a loser for every winner. And if you’re gambling on the stock market or on derivatives, the insiders— especially the crooks— always end up the winners. And the honest people… end up the losers.Michael HudsonThe drive is to get people not to use cash, check, or money order, and to do everything by credit card, debit card, and other multiplying payment systems. It impresses me as being a major controlling process. Once they suck you into the credit card gulag, they can penalize you, overcharge you, ruin your credit score… In effect, they strip you of control over your own money.Ralph NaderBruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.[The decision to disqualify Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin from holding office] demonstrates that when [Trump], if he does try to run for the presidency in 2024, that he will confront a hurdle of having provided material assistance to the insurrection of January 6th— irrespective of whether he’s committed a crime or not.Bruce Fein Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph welcomes Washington Post columnist, Dana Milbank, who draws a direct line from Newt Gingrich’s ascendency to Speaker of the House in 1994 to the January 6th insurrection in his book “The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party.” Plus, a new Capitol Hill Citizen is out! Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph interviews North Carolina attorney, Mona Lisa Wallace, whose litigation team won more than $500 million in damages for the facility’s North Carolina neighbors against the hog production component of Smithfield Foods along with author Corban Addison who chronicled the gripping John Grisham-like tale in his book: “Wastelands: The True Story Of Farm Country On Trial.” Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

In a live Zoom recording, Ralph welcomes attorney Josh Koskoff, who tells us how he won a groundbreaking 73 million dollars from Remington and other gun manufacturers on behalf of the families of the Sandy Hook mass school shooting. Ralph and Josh lay out the story then Josh takes questions from our virtual audience. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

In a packed program, Ralph first speaks to our resident constitutional scholar, Bruce Fein, about the latest Trump-anigans from Mar a Lago, then Washington Post business reporter, Allan Sloan, joins to talk about the Federal Reserve and answers the question of whether we are headed for an economic recession or a recovery. And finally, Steve Silberstein of National Popular Vote comes by to update us on their latest efforts to ensure that the candidate for president who wins the popular vote actually wins the election. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Software hacking expert, Dan O’Dowd, founder of “The Dawn Project” joins us to critique Tesla’s Fully Self-Driving cars where they found they made a critical error every eight minutes. Then Ralph welcomes Steve Hutkins, the founder and editor of “Save the Post Office,” to ask why Trump’s Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, still has a job. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph welcomes Washington Post investigative reporters, Sari Horowitz and Scott Higham, authors of “American Cartel: Inside the Battle to Bring Down the Opioid Industry,” that tells the thrilling David versus Goliath story that goes beyond the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma to expose the many other corporate criminals who aided and abetted the crisis and chronicles the heroes who fought to bring them to justice. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe