Ralph Nader Radio Hour

Ralph welcomes international security expert Paul Rogers to discuss the US-Israeli war on Iran. Then, Ralph speaks to constitutional law experts Bruce Fein and John Bonifaz about their upcoming impeachment symposium.Paul Rogers is Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies in the Department of Peace Studies and International Relations at Bradford University, and an Honorary Fellow at the Joint Service Command and Staff College. He is open Democracy’s international security correspondent.I think if you look at the war overall, then essentially of the three (I use the term as a crude term) participants, the one that is basically doing most badly is the United States, followed by Israel, followed least by Iran. Relatively speaking, the Iranians (particularly the Revolutionary Guard Corps) are closer to where they wanted to be, which is not true of the United States and certainly isn’t true to a very large extent of the Israelis as well. In other words, the war is going badly. for the people who are determined to try and defeat Iran.Paul RogersPeople tend to think Iran is on its own against these huge odds. Well, it isn’t. In many ways, certainly Russia and certainly China have a real interest in what is happening. But as far as China is concerned, they will not help directly. They will not, in other words, as far as we know, arm Iran without payment. They will see them as a reasonable customer. I think (more widely than we realize) as far as you get away from D.C., then I think you see the world in a rather different way, particularly across the global south it is certainly seen in a different way…And I would come back to a point which I think is a fair point made earlier—essentially, the Iranian Republican Revolutionary Guard Corps has been working towards this time for decades. And they will not be easily dislodged. It could happen eventually, but I think it’s highly unlikely.Paul RogersJohn Bonifaz is a constitutional attorney and the co-founder and president of Free Speech For People. Mr. Bonifaz previously served as the executive director and general counsel of the National Voting Rights Institute, and as the legal director of Voter Action. He is the author of Warrior-King: The Case For Impeaching George W. Bush and the co-author (with Ron Fein and Ben Clements) of The Constitution Demands It: The Case For The Impeachment of Donald Trump.Threatening to execute members of Congress is unique to Trump. Kidnapping people off the streets and sending them to foreign torture prisons is unique to Trump. Freezing public funds that have been duly appropriated by the United States Congress and not distributing those funds is unique to Trump. Attacking the United States judiciary, refusing to comply with multiple court orders issued by federal courts across the country is unique to Trump. Engaging in these murders on the high seas…these paramilitary attacks on people in the Pacific and in the Caribbean is unique to Trump. Now, it’s true that there have been other violations of the War Powers Clause…But the scale of the War Powers violations today is unique to Trump. And this current new, illegal, and unconstitutional war against Iran is threatening the entire world. And so I think that whether they be Democrats or Republicans or Independents, they have to wake up and recognize they have a duty here.John BonifazBruce 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.Ralph, me and John have been trying to impeach Presidents—Democrat, Republican—for decades for these illegalities. The idea that we picked out Trump is absurd. Look at my history. Half of my life has been devoted to getting Presidents impeached and removed from office…So the idea that this is partisan, at least among us, is factually absurd.Bruce FeinI think we need to be even more candid about the nature of the crimes. This is not just illegal wars under the Constitution. He is committing the crime of aggression, the same crime that we sentence Nazis to death at Nuremberg for committing aggression against Poland, against Denmark, against Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, etc.Bruce FeinThis is what is defined as a dictator by any ordinary use of the English language. We need to get away from “authoritarian,” “Oh, he’s pushing the envelope.” This is what dictators do. He stated, “I can do anything I want.” And he does it. He kills people. He deports them without due process. He spies on them. He suppresses free speech by using the government to penalize anyone who says anything that’s critical, detracts from Mr. Trump. I mean, it is impossible to conceive of the framers thinking anyone like Donald Trump, given his words and his actions, would remain in office more than a fortnight if Congress was doing its duty.Bruce FeinNews 4/3/26* This week, the Trump administration backed down and allowed the Russian oil tanker Anatoly Kolodkin to pass through the American blockade and deliver a shipment of 730,000 barrels of oil to Cuba. The AP writes, the shipment could produce about 180,000 barrels of diesel, enough to feed Cuba’s daily energy demand for nine or 10 days. Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío commented on the situation, “The arrival of an oil tanker to a country has likely never generated so much news as the Russian one to Cuba…It’s a sign of the brutal siege Cubans endure with heroism and stoicism. It’s a demonstration of the criminal cruelty of imperialism against a nation that refuses to be dominated.” Trump’s public statements on the matter however loom ominously over the island nation. On Sunday night, Trump told reporters “Cuba’s finished…whether or not they get a boat of oil, it’s not going to matter.”* In more news of Trump backing down, or “chickening out” as the saying goes, the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is telling his inner circle that he is willing to end the military operation in Iran without reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, he wants the U.S. to stick to its original 4-6 week timeline and focus on “hobbling Iran’s navy and its missile stocks…while pressuring Tehran diplomatically.” This report adds that if this fails, Trump plans to “press allies in Europe and the Gulf to take the lead on reopening the strait.” This aligns with Trump’s recent statements on Truth Social, telling allies like the UK to “Go get your own oil!” With all of this said, Trump has sent the USS Tripoli and the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit to the region, is weighing the deployment of another 10,000 ground troops, and is considering a “complex and risky mission to seize the regime’s uranium,” all while calling the war an “excursion” and “a lovely stay.”* Meanwhile, 25 Senate Democrats have signed a letter by Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia requesting that Senator Roger Wicker, the Republican Chairman of the Armed Services Committee launch a bipartisan probe – complete with hearings and a report – into the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School for girls in Minab, Iran at the beginning of the war. This letter notes that the majority of those killed were girls between ages seven and 12. Moreover, this letter implies that the Pentagon chose this target based on wildly outdated intelligence, raising grave questions about the competence of the military apparatus. While several high-ranking Democrats signed this letter, including Dick Durbin and Cory Booker, along with progressives like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s name is nowhere to be found.* Elsewhere in the region, the Israeli Knesset has passed a new law effectively proscribing the death penalty exclusively to Palestinians. Human Rights Watch states “the bill imposes the death penalty for the deliberate killing of a person with the intention of negating the existence of the State of Israel.’” HRW adds that the new law “mandates execution by hanging, restricts access to legal counsel and visits from family members, limits external oversight, and grants immunity to those involved in carrying out executions.” In a piece calling for the immediate repeal of this law, Erika Guevara-Rosas of Amnesty International writes “By authorizing military courts, which have a conviction rate of over 99% for Palestinian defendants and which are notorious for disregarding due process and fair trial safeguards, to impose effectively mandatory death sentences and ordering the execution within just 90 days of the final ruling, Israel is brazenly granting itself carte blanche to execute Palestinians while stripping away the most basic fair-trial safeguards.” In an interview with CNN, Mustafa Barghouti said this law “confirms very serious fascist tendencies in Israel” and “consolidates further the system of apartheid.”* Anti-Palestinian extremism continues to grow within the United States as well. Al Jazeera reports that last week, domestic law enforcement “foiled a plot against prominent Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani in New York City.” Kiswani is the founder of Within Our Lifetime, a pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist group active in the City. The suspect, apprehended by the FBI in an undercover operation, has been identified as a New Jersey man named Andrew Heifler, a young man affiliated with an offshoot of the far-right Jewish Defense League (JDL), described as an extremist group with a history of violent attacks targeting Arab American activists during the 1970s and 1980s. Heifler was reportedly planning to target Kiswani’s home with Molotov cocktails. Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the plot, saying “We will not tolerate violent extremism in our city. No one should face violence for their political beliefs or their advocacy…Our city must meet hate with solidarity, and meet fear with an unshakable commitment to justice

Ralph welcomes Wes Bryant, a retired Air Force special operations master sergeant and former analyst at the Civilian Protection Center who talks to us about how civilians, either through incompetence or negligence, are not being protected during American missile strikes. Then our resident constitutional scholar, Bruce Fein, joins us to break down his latest op-ed “The Power to Declare War Belongs to Congress Alone.”Wes Bryant is a defense and national security analyst with focus on foreign policy and global conflict, counterterrorism and extremism, strike and joint targeting operations, and civilian harm. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 2018 at the rank of Master Sergeant after twenty years of active duty service. He was formerly a senior policy analyst and advisor on precision warfare and civilian harm mitigation at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where he led as the first-ever Branch Chief of Civilian Harm Assessments.This strike [on the girls’ school in Minab, Iran] violated standing practices and doctrine we’ve had in place for two, three decades. That’s aside from even the work we were doing at the Pentagon in civilian harm mitigation to get better at this sort of thing and prevent these things from happening…This is just one of many. My colleagues at Airwars who track civilian harm incidents in conflict zones—right now, they’re tracking over 130 separate incidents throughout Iran (that’s between the U.S. and Israel) and that number is going to spike. And of course we’re tracking, I believe, it’s over 2,000 civilian casualties. That number is surely going to spike once the smoke clears.Wes BryantI believe that right now, with the way we are conducting ourselves as a nation on the international stage—and most importantly, the way we’re using or abusing our military and the use of lethal military force—we are carrying out state terrorism. Israel assuredly has been for years.Wes BryantWe hear all these people (especially Hegseth most recently) talking about “precision” —”precision strikes” and “no one’s more precise” and “precision warfare”. Well, I was an expert in precision warfare. I was one of the people helping develop our standards for precision warfare and try to make us get to the point where we’re actually carrying out precision warfare consistently. Precision warfare really means the minimal use of resources, the minimal use of (as Hegseth says) lethality in order to accomplish strategic objectives—and the protection of civilians and civilian infrastructure. We have in Gaza simply the use of precision weapons to decimate an entire urban infrastructure and decimate parts of the population. So what I say is (and not flippantly, unfortunately, I say it somberly) the only thing being applied here in terms of precision is that civilians and civilian infrastructure are being killed and destroyed more precisely.Wes BryantBruce 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.When we decided in the culture that we would rather be an empire that got an adrenaline high from being a colossus and surrendering our republican virtues of rule of law, everyone gets to march to their own drummer, find fulfillment as long as they’re not harming anyone else, you then find this repeated disrespect for the Declare War Clause.Bruce FeinNews 3/27/26* Our top stories this week have to do with the tiny, blockaded island nation of Cuba. Cuba, famous for its medical innovations including a lung cancer vaccine, has long maintained medical missions abroad. In recent days, the United States has pressured foreign governments to end these partnerships, including passing a law that opens up the possibility of sanctions on countries that accept these medical missions. This week, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced Mexico will retain the Cuban doctors in defiance of American threats. Since 2022, thousands of Cuban medical workers have been deployed in poor, rural areas of the country. Sheinbaum emphasized that “It’s hard to get Mexican doctors and specialists to go out to many rural areas where we need medical specialists, and the Cubans are willing to work there,” per Al Jazeera. However, Mexico is the exception. Within the past month, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Guyana and the Bahamas have all announced that the Cuban doctors will leave their countries under American pressure. It is tragic to think of the number of poor people in the rural areas of these countries who will needlessly suffer and die simply because they are caught in the crossfire of American imperialism.* In more Cuba news, Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio told Drop Site that the Cuban government is preparing to submit a proposal to the United States offering lump sum payments to Americans and American firms that lost property during the 1959 revolution. As this piece notes, Cuba negotiated lump sum compensation agreements with Canada, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Spain, and France in the wake of the revolution, but the United States refused this offer and instead sought to destabilize the Castro government for decades. The Cuban officials admit that they lack the reserves to make good on this offer right away, but argue that if the Americans eased the sanctions regime they could use the new capital flow to finance this agreement. With all of that said, Cossio also contends that “the Cuban people and the Cuban nation…deserves…to be compensated for the damage done by the economic blockade, by the invasion, by terrorism, by assassinations…[and by] violent actions against the [Cuban] economy.”* In more news from Latin America, CBS reports Neiyerver Adrián Leon Rengel, a 28-year old Venezuelan man deported from the U.S. and detained in the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador last year has filed a tort suit alleging false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress and demanding $1.3 million in damages from the United States. According to Rengel, he and fellow detainees were constantly beaten by prison guards, forced to drink the same water he and other inmates bathed in, and was told by guards that he would be there for 90 years. Rengel was eventually freed in a prisoner exchange with Venezuela in July of 2025. Rengel, who entered the country legally, was deported on the basis of alleged ties to the Tren de Aragua gang. He denies having any connection with that criminal organization.* Turning to the Middle East, while the American war on Iran rages, the new Israeli offensive in Lebanon has largely slipped under the radar. But as this campaign grows larger and larger, it cannot be ignored. According to Reuters, Israel is planning to seize a “chunk” of southern Lebanon south of the Litani River to create a “buffer zone” against Hezbollah militants. Approximately 8% of Lebanese territory lies south of this line of demarcation. On March 24th, Israeli Defence Minister Katz said Israel had “destroyed five bridges over the river and that the military would ‘control the remaining bridges and the security zone up to the Litani,’ adding that Israeli troops would remain as long as there is “terrorism and missiles.” As part of this offensive, Israel has ordered the evacuation of all Lebanese south of the Litani. In practice, this means over 1.16 million people – 25% of the population of Lebanon – has been displaced, per Social Affairs Minister Haneen Sayyed. This from Drop Site.* Meanwhile, the Hill reports that the Progressive Caucus – Chaired by Texas progressive congressman Greg Casar – will uniformly vote against any proposed supplemental funding for the Pentagon to prosecute the war in Iran. Casar told the publication, “Democrats should unite against funding this illegal war and force Republicans to answer to the American people for it.” The Progressive Caucus argues that the eye-popping $200 billion price tag of the supplement could be better used to fund programs to expand health care subsidies, cover pre-K education costs, build more affordable housing, cover school lunches and eradicate medical debt. Congresswoman Sara Jacobs added that the supplement request is “not a one-time cost to wrap things up” but rather “a down payment on a long war.”* Even as Congress debates the supplementary funding bill, Democrats are eyeing a new War Powers Resolution. Axios reports that while the previous War Powers Resolution on Iran failed by a margin of 219 to 212, the four Democrats who crossed party lines to vote down the resolution last time are “poised to flip” the next time party leadership forces a war powers vote and Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace is hinting that she would support a new resolution as well. If all Democrats vote for the measure, along with the two Republicans – Reps. Thomas Massie and Warren Davidson – who supported the resolution last time maintain their support, Mace’s support wouldn’t even be necessary for a majority vote. Unfortunately, Axios notes that even if both the House and Senate pass the resolution, President Trump can veto the measure and it would be nearly impossible to get the necessary two-thirds vote in both chambers to override his veto.* Turning to tech news, Wired reports that Senator Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill in the Senate designed to institute a national moratorium on construction of AI datacenters “until legislation is enacted that safeguards the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence.” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez plans to introduce a companion bill in the House in the coming days. In a speech, Sanders contended that “A moratorium will give us the chance to figure out how to make sure that AI benefits the working families of this country, not just a handful of billionaires…A moratoriu

Ralph welcomes international human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber to discuss the U.S. and Israel’s illegal war on Iran. Then, Ralph speaks to investigative reporter David Cay Johnston about the finances of Donald Trump.Craig Mokhiber is an international human rights lawyer and activist, and a former senior United Nations human rights official. A human rights activist in the 1980s, he would go on to serve for more than three decades at the United Nations, with postings in Switzerland, Palestine, Afghanistan, and UN Headquarters in New York. In October of 2023, he left the United Nations, penning a widely read letter criticizing the UN’s human rights failures in the Middle East, warning of unfolding genocide in Gaza, and calling for a new approach to Palestine and Israel based on international law, human rights, and equality.Anyone who pays attention knows that Iran wasn’t attacked because it has nuclear weapons. It was attacked because it doesn’t have nuclear weapons, and was therefore viewed by Israel and the U.S. as being a state that could be overcome militarily. But what really is, I think, most telling about this is the hypocrisy of the claims, because the only party in the region that has stockpiles of nuclear weapons (which are entirely undeclared and unsupervised) is the Israeli regime, not the Iranian. And the Israeli regime was joined in attacking Iran by another nuclear power—the United States.Craig MokhiberIsrael (which has attacked the United Nations throughout its entire life and declared that the United Nations is an anti-Semitic terror organization) fights like hell to stay in the United Nations, pays its dues every year to make sure that it stays in…and renews its treaty obligations as a member of the United Nations (that, of course, it violates with impunity). So it’s very funny that Israel calls the UN an anti-Semitic terror organization, yet it insists on being a member and paying its dues to fund that so-called anti-Semitic terror organization.Craig MokhiberI don’t think that putting Iran in an existential crisis is the best way to tell them you don’t need nuclear weapons. I think stopping attacking them, their economy, their currency, their scientists, their political leaders, their military personnel, their civilians, their girls’ schools—if you want a country to believe that it doesn’t need to arm itself, this is not the way to go about it.Craig MokhiberDavid Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, specialist in economics and tax issues, and a professor of practice teaching law, public policy, and journalism at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, including The Making of Donald Trump and It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What The Trump Administration Is Doing To America. He is also the co-founder of DCReport, a nonprofit news service that reports what the President and Congress DO, not what they SAY.Convicting Donald Trump of tax fraud would be very easy. You establish these corporations [reporting major losses] don’t exist. You establish that he took tax losses from these multiple corporations (in all, about 60 entries over the six years of tax returns). And there’s no defense for that. It’s flat-out fraud. It’s blatant fraud. So Trump has gotten away with this because we don’t seriously treat high-level tax fraud in this country.David Cay JohnstonNews 3/20/26* Our top story this week concerns a new study titled “Inequality, not regulation, drives America’s housing affordability crisis.” As summarized in Hell Gate, this study demonstrates that the precipitous rise in rent prices are not primarily the result of insufficient housing supply or of vacancy rates. Moreover, contrary to the claims of the so-called Abundance movement, reducing regulations to spur new construction is unlikely to create significantly more housing. Even if it did, that would probably fail to bring down rents, because the real cause of the rental spike is “Steep national inequality.” So, what can be done to bring down rents? Maximilian Buchholz, the lead author of the study, puts it bluntly in this interview: “rent control, tenant protection policies like just cause eviction, and income supports for people toward the bottom.” Simply put, the best policies to lower rents are policies that lower rents. This has been demonstrated time and time again in different policy areas, yet on the whole, Democrats still seem to prefer byzantine policy formulae instead of straightforward policy solutions to the glaring issues facing the American people. * Speaking of rising costs, Washingtonian magazine is out with a new story on the Washington Post hiking prices for subscribers. Yet apparently not all subscribers are created equal. According to this story, these increases are accompanied by a simple yet insidious message: “This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data.” This is the latest deployment of what has become known as algorithmic – or “surveillance” – pricing. This piece notes other examples of surveillance pricing, ranging from the Princeton Review charging more for the same SAT tutoring package in areas with higher Asian populations (they called it the “tiger mom tax”) to Amazon charging local school districts vastly different prices for the same supplies. However, this new policy from the Post is especially brazen given the straits the paper has recently found itself in, declining by a million subscribers between 2021 and 2026 and hemorrhaging key reporters to a new rival paper sponsored by Robert Albritton, including Dana Milbank, Jeff Stein, Paul Kane and Paige Cunningham, among others, per the Hill.* In more media news, Variety reports that ratings for CBS Evening News are cratering, falling back to where executives at the news division behind the show “hoped never to return.” The nightly news program, anchored by Tony Dokoupil, has fallen below 4 million viewers; when the previous iteration of the program anchored by Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson fell to this nadir, Paramount Skydance pulled the plug. While this is perhaps just a symptom of the collapse of cable news, Variety notes that ABC’s “World News Tonight,” averaged nearly 8 and a half million viewers and “NBC Nightly News” scored just over 6 and half million. Dokoupil did score a slight uptick in viewership when he took over the Evening News, but that seems to have been nothing more than a flash in the pan. This pathetic showing seems to confirm what seemed obvious all along: there is simply little audience for the editorial viewpoint espoused by CBS’s new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss.* The bad news for Bari doesn’t end there, either. According to the Wrap, the new chief is locked in contentious negotiations with the unionized staff of CBS, specifically the 60-person unit behind the network’s streaming service, “CBS News 24/7.” These workers staged a 24 hour walkout earlier this week. Their grievances include everything from new grueling 12-hour weekend shifts – despite no weekend-specific live programming – as well as CBS News’ reported plans to lay off 15% of staff. CBS News already laid off roughly 100 people in October after Paramount merged with Skydance and many believe more layoffs will come if the merger with CNN, which is not unionized, goes through as part of the Paramount Warner Bros. deal.* In other news, a recent study reveals a fascinating disconnect between the self-description of Democrats and their policy preferences. The study, conducted on behalf of the New Republic by Embold Research, gave respondents five choices to describe their ideology: conservative, moderate, moderate-to-liberal, liberal, and progressive. Only 12% identified as moderate, but another 21% called themselves moderate-to-liberal. Yet, among this combined group, approximately 70% said Democrats are “too timid” on taxing the rich and corporations, and cracking down on corporate criminals. Fewer than 5% of moderates said Democrats are “too aggressive” on these issues. In a word, even the moderates among the Democratic base think the party should take a more strident economic populist line. This tracks with polling conducted during the Texas Democratic Senate primary which found that 47% of voters who identified as socialists also identified as moderates.* Our next several stories this week have to do with the intersection of foreign policy and energy. The AP reports that on Tuesday, Cuba reconnected its energy grid following a 29-hour long nationwide blackout. This story notes that this reconnection will only provide scant and temporary relief, because not enough power is being generated. The energy crisis in Cuba has gotten progressively worse since the beginning of the year, as the new government in Venezuela and the newly reinforced sanctions regime have both served to cut off the island from energy imports. That said, cracks in this blockade are beginning to form. Bloomberg reports that a “tanker carrying more than 700,000 barrels of Russian crude is expected to arrive in Cuba by the end of the month,” and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has announced that her administration is “looking into different possibilities” to resume fuel shipments to Cuba as well. Sheinbaum stressed that Mexico is “sovereign” and able to “have trade agreements with any country in the world,” per the Latin Times. The U.S. government has already eased sanctions on Russian oil sales to India, but has now announced that they will not allow the Russians to send oil to Cuba, per Bloomberg. As the ship is already on its way, it is an open question of how far the U.S. will go to prevent Russia from sending lifesaving resources to the country that has held out against American pressure for so long.* Next, a stunning story in the Wall Street Journal documents how the Trump administration settled on their final course of action in Venezuela. According to this piece, the Central Intelligence Agency consulted former Chevron exec

Ralph spends the whole hour with progressive activist, Corbin Trent, former communications director for Alexandria Ocasio Cortez to discuss the lack of vision and the spineless leadership in the corporate Democratic Party.Corbin Trent is a co-founder of Brand New Congress and former co-director of Justice Democrats, two grassroots organizations working to elect progressive Democrats to Congress. He was the National Campaign Coordinator for the Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign, and recently served as the Communications Director for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He writes about rebuilding America at AmericasUndoing.com.This is a [Democratic] Party that is led by sinecurists and apparatchiks who never look at themselves in the mirror after they lose to the most vicious, cruel, ignorant, anti-worker, anti-women, anti-environment, anti-small taxpayer, pro-war Republican Party. They never look into it. It’s always: they blame the Greens or they blame some third party or Independent candidate. And they never ask themselves why as a national party did they abandon half the country, which are now called red states?Ralph NaderThe Democratic Party I think, ultimately, is leaderless because it’s visionless. It doesn’t really see. I don’t think the Democratic Party as an entity or as an ideology has a real vision for how to go forward differently. And, therefore, it’s hard to be led. It’s hard to lead if you don’t have a direction.Corbin TrentThe Democratic Party—like your Chuck Schumers, like your Hakeem Jeffries, and like most of the people that are elected there and in leadership positions at all, look at this system, the system of neoliberalism, and they think that somehow it’s going to magically start working again. And the fact is that it’s not. They have been unable so far to internalize the depth of the brokenness of this system. And then really unable to, I think, really internalize why Trump was powerful, why his messages were powerful. They want to look at it through this extremely narrow and negative lens of racism, bigotry and fear. As opposed to a complete and utter disdain for the system which is sucking from their lives and extracting from their communities. And I think that spells trouble.Corbin TrentIt’s not my job as a voter to inspire myself to vote for you. It’s your job as a candidate or as a party or as somebody to build a vision that inspires me to vote.Corbin TrentNews 3/13/26* This week, the New York City Council held a hearing on proposed legislation to carry out Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pledge to repossess property from “landlords who have racked up housing code violations and debt from unpaid taxes and fines.” This bill would empower the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development to turn these buildings over to owners they deem “more responsible.” This would be an update of a program the city has tried to implement before, called “third-party transfer.” However, the council is hesitant to take this step, worrying that it could disproportionately affect small landlords that simply lack the resources to fix code violations or pay fees, as opposed to venture capital backed corporate landlords. Rosa Kelly, chief of staff to the housing commissioner, said the department “views the program as a key part of [their] broader enforcement and preservation toolkit to ensure that housing remains safe and livable for New Yorkers.” This from Gothamist.* In more local news, this week Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser released a long-awaited report on congestion traffic pricing in the District of Columbia. According to the Washington Examiner, the study was conducted in 2021 and the Mayor has delayed the release until now. Along with the release of the study, Mayor Bowser sent a letter to D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, wherein the Mayor described the “congestion pricing tax scheme,” which includes a proposed $10 charge for people entering the city, as a “bad idea,” and argued that D.C. could not be compared to Midtown Manhattan, which recently implemented a successful congestion pricing system. Democratic Socialist Councilwoman and leading Mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis-George refused to dismiss the study out of hand, writing “Now that the report is public, the Council has an opportunity to dig into the findings & explore what they could mean for the District—including opportunities to reduce congestion, improve air quality & public health, & strengthen public transit for residents across the city.”* Meanwhile, on the West Coast, a new poll shows incumbent Mayor Karen Bass drawing under 20% of the vote in the upcoming primary for her reelection campaign. While this still puts Bass in the lead, it is clearly a weak showing and would be far below the 50% threshold she would need to win to avoid a November runoff. This poll also finds former reality television star Spencer Pratt in second place with around 10% support, and councilmember Nithya Raman – who has been both endorsed and censured by DSA LA in the past – in third with just over 9%, per KTLA. The LA Mayoral race mirrors the California gubernatorial race, which features ten candidates, none of whom draws over 20% in the polls. At some point, the party will have to step in to pressure underperforming candidates to drop out and endorse more viable alternatives, but June is quickly approaching with little sign of party unity.* Speaking of the Democrats, POLITICO is out with a new story on how red state Democratic parties are undermining their best chances of toppling incumbent Republican Senators – independent populist left candidates. In Montana, former University of Montana President Seth Bodnar has launched an independent bid for Senate, with the backing of former longtime Montana Democratic Senator Jon Tester. Bodnar filed on the final day candidates could get on the ballot in the state, and on that same day, three-term incumbent Republican Senator Steve Daines announced he would not run for reelection. POLITICO describes this as “an explicit effort to keep Democrats from fielding a strong candidate of their own.” The state party however shows no interest in stepping aside to clear a path for Bodnar. A similar dynamic is unfolding in South Dakota, with the state party feuding with independent candidate Brian Bengs – who has “raised more than five times his Democratic opponent and more than any non-Republican candidate in the state in 16 years” – while in Idaho, former Democratic state lawmaker Todd Achilles is running as an independent and the state party has played their strategy close to the vest. Only in Nebraska has the state party fully thrown their weight behind the popular independent candidate Dan Osborn, who came within approximately 60,000 votes of longtime incumbent Deb Fischer in 2024 and is polling within a single point of Senator Pete Ricketts this cycle.* In Congress, Republicans have independent problems of their own. Last week, Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley announced he would register as “no party preference,” instead of as a Republican, as he seeks reelection to Congress in his newly redrawn California congressional district. Axios quotes a Kiley spokesperson who said it is “not official yet” whether he will leave the party or the conference, adding: “For now, he’s just filing as an independent for his reelection campaign.” If Kiley did leave the Republican conference, it would further imperil the Republicans’ razor-thin House majority, which has been continuously whittled down over the course of the 119th Congress.* Turning to foreign affairs, Reuters reports that on Sunday, Colombia held congressional elections which saw the leftist Historic Pact win the most seats in the Senate, but with only 25 out of 102 seats, the Pact will have to compete against the right-wing Democratic Center in order to form a coalition government. Democratic Center, led by ⁠former President Alvaro Uribe, won 17 seats. Ivan Cepeda, the presidential candidate of Historic Pact, called the election results a “categorical ​victory.” In the House, Democratic Center won 32 out of 182 seats, followed by the ‌Liberal ⁠Party with 31, and the Historic Pact with 29. Colombia will choose a new president in May, but according to Ariel Avila, a re-elected senator from the Green Alliance, whether that president is left or right they will likely face a “vetocracy” where “lawmakers block parties ​simply because they come from the opposing side.”* In more news from Latin America, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) reports the right-wing government of Daniel Noboa in Ecuador has suspended the largest opposition party – the leftist Citizens’ Revolution or RC – for nine months. If carried out, RC, led by former leftist president Rafael Correa, will effectively be barred from registering candidates for the 2027 local elections. CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot is quoted saying “The government of President Daniel Noboa, who is strongly backed by President Trump, is trying to accelerate the destruction of what is left of democracy in Ecuador.” CEPR Director of International Policy Alex Main added “Democracy has been under attack since the presidency of Lenín Moreno (2017–2021), with not only the exclusion of political parties, but with persecution by lawfare, the imprisonment or forced exile of political opponents, and Noboa’s repeated assumption of ‘emergency’ powers and other abuses that have gutted civil liberties.” Recently, President Noboa has been closely collaborating with Trump and the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) to carry out joint “lethal kinetic operations” in Ecuador.* Turning to the Middle East, NBC reports Iran is launching its ‘most intense’ strikes of the war, firing some of its most advanced ballistic missiles toward Tel Aviv and Haifa and attacking multiple ships attempting passage through the blockaded Straits of Hormuz. Additionally, reports are trickling out through the Israeli press, which operates under military cens

Ralph welcomes sociologist and historian Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi to discuss the United States' war of aggression on Iran.Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is an Iranian-born American historian and sociologist. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. He was the Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Director of the Sharmin and Bijan Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of four books on different aspects and historical context of the Iranian revolution of 1979 and its aftermath.The only countries that I see that are in constant violation of international law is the United States and Israel. And frankly, I am speechless, although I’m speaking, but I am speechless—in what universe can this war be justified as self-defense? You listened to Secretary Rubio’s speech in Munich where he laments 400 years of colonial rule being lost to this international law and laws of fighting wars because they want to go back to the way things were in the 18th and 19th century. This is a naked expansionist, extortionist administration here, and that’s the only reason they have launched this war, and there is absolutely no justification for it.Behrooz Ghamari-TabriziFor years and years, the Israelis have been assassinating Iranian scientists. They were sabotaging Iranian industries. And actually, the Iranian government showed tremendous restraint in responding to these Israeli provocations because they didn’t want to create the situation in which we find ourselves today. But then at the end of the day, calling Iran the aggressor here I think is a total ignorance of history and the context in which this war has started.Behrooz Ghamari-TabriziAll these things are not to suggest that the Iranian government in any form or shape is a democratic and just state. But the question here is about the sovereignty of the Iranian state. And the only inheritance of the revolution that has been kept throughout these forty-odd years was the question of sovereignty. Because that was one of the demands of the revolution. The question of social justice was thrown out of the window after the revolution. The question of civil liberties was thrown out of the window after the revolution. The only thing that is left is Iranian sovereignty. And according to every single intelligence study, what Iranians do outside their borders is a defensive posture. Iran does not have an expansionist agenda.Behrooz Ghamari-TabriziNews 3/6/26* Last week, Bill and Hillary Clinton testified before the House Oversight Committee on their respective relationships with financier and sexual predator, Jeffrey Epstein. Hillary Clinton, in a deposition described as contentious, maintained that she had virtually zero connections with Epstein, stating at one point “I am so tired of answering that question,” per PBS. Former President Bill Clinton meanwhile, tried to downplay his relationship with Epstein, describing it as “cordial,” and claiming that he had come to an arrangement with Epstein where the financier provided his private jet for humanitarian trips in exchange for Clinton discussing politics and economics with him. The committee pressed Clinton on this point, noting that Epstein visited the White House numerous times during Clinton’s presidency and that there are photos of the two men shaking hands. Clinton told lawmakers he “did not recall those interactions.” These answers leave much to be desired.* Meanwhile, another Epstein associate occupies the Oval Office today – Donald Trump – and on February 26th the Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Justice, under the stewardship of Attorney General Pam Bondi, has been withholding interviews with a woman who accused President Donald Trump of sexual assault back in the 1980s. As the Journal writes, the suppression of this interview “raises new questions about the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files release and the pages that have been kept private.” The Journal adds that “Trump officials initially opposed the release of the files and then fumbled their response, including inconsistent redactions that exposed dozens of Epstein victims and initially kept some prominent men’s names hidden.” However, on March 5th, POLITICO reported that the FBI has now published a trio of FBI interviews with the woman who accused the president of sexually assaulting her in collusion with Jeffrey Epstein. Trump and his allies categorically deny any wrongdoing on the part of the president, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt calling the allegations “completely baseless…backed by zero credible evidence, from a sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history.” This story also highlights what is sure to be the next flashpoint in this saga: on Wednesday, a House committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to testify about her handling of the Epstein files.* Turning to media news, last week we covered how Paramount-Skydance, led by the Ellison family and backed by the Trump administration, outmaneuvered Netflix to close a deal acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery – including CNN. Throughout this process, many have raised the alarm that if the Ellisons were to get their hands on CNN, they would turn it over to their ideological attack dog, Bari Weiss, as they did with CBS News. Variety is now echoing those concerns, reporting that “It’s expected that Weiss will have a big role in steering CNN.” Just what exactly this role will be remains to be seen, but given her tenure as editor-in-chief of CBS News, there is much cause for concern.* In related news, Variety reports Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav has filed to sell 4,004,149 shares – over $114 million worth of stock – in the company following the announcement of the sale to Paramount, including Paramount’s eye-popping offer of $31 per share. Zaslav retains additional stock and options which he could cash out as the deal moves forward. Curiously, even as the Trump administration backed the Paramount buyout over the Netflix deal, the president himself continues to bank on the fiscal stability of the streaming giant, with the Hollywood Reporter documenting that Trump bought between $600,000 and $1.25 million worth of Netflix debt in January, adding to the $500,000 to $1 million in Netflix bonds that he purchased in December. This story notes that while the Netflix-Warner deal fell through, Netflix walked away with a $2.8 billion “break-up fee,” and an investment grade credit rating, unlike both WBD and Paramount.* Looking at domestic politics, this week primaries were held in Texas and North Carolina which yielded the nomination of James Talarico in Texas, beating out Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett for the Democratic nod, and the razor thin victory of incumbent Valerie Foushee over her progressive challenger Nida Allam in the Durham-Chapel Hill region. But many more primary battles lay ahead, perhaps the most interesting of which is unfolding in Maine, where the Bernie Sanders-backed veteran-turned-oysterman Graham Platner is duking it out with Chuck Schumer’s preferred candidate, outgoing Governor Janet Mills. Platner, despite damaging stories, has continued to draw massive crowds and enjoys a huge polling advantage. Last week, Platner’s allies, led by United Autoworkers President Shawn Fain, staged a sort of intervention with Schumer, with Fain lambasting the “shortcomings” in Democratic leaders’ approach to the 2026 midterms, “particularly their failure to adequately listen to working-class voters.” Michael Monahan, a high-level official in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, also sent a letter to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee strongly urging the DSCC to “refrain from intervening further in [the Maine] primary.” A mid-February independent poll found Platner with a 38-point lead over Mills among likely Democratic primary voters, yet the party continues to back Mills to the hilt. This from NBC.* Our remaining stories this week concern foreign affairs. First, in South Africa, it seems the forces of the Left are looking to pool their support by entering into a political alliance. According to TimesLIVE, a prominent South African online newspaper, the country’s largest standalone Left party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has convened with the South African Communist Party (SACP) to discuss such an electoral pact. The SACP has long participated in a tripartite alliance with the African National Congress party (ANC), which has ruled South Africa since the end of Apartheid, but recently announced they would contest elections independently. The EFF and SACP emphasized that their priorities align on the “deep crises confronting South Africa: de-industrialisation, austerity-driven fiscal consolidation, collapsing energy security, mass unemployment, and extreme poverty.”* In another major political realignment, the Green Party of England and Wales is surging as the Labour Party, under the centrist leadership of Prime Minister Keir Starmer, continues to lose ground to the Nigel Farage-led far right party, Reform UK. The rise of the Green Party has been bubbling for some time, as progressive voters feel betrayed by Labour and the momentum behind Jeremy Corbyn’s “Your Party” has fizzled, but the first major test occurred recently in the Labour stronghold riding of Groton and Denton in Greater Manchester. According to the BBC, this marks the first ever win for the Greens in a by-election, with 34-year-old plumber Hannah Spencer becoming the party’s first ever MP in northern England. Reform ran second, with Labour dropping by 25% into third place. Moreover, Zeteo reports the Greens have leapfrogged ahead of Labour in national polling, second only to Reform and has become the single most popular party among voters under 50. For the past five months, the Greens have been led by self-described “eco-pop

Events are moving rapidly in the Middle East, so we wanted to provide our loyal podcast listeners with some context to help digest everything that’s happened so far. We hope to provide a longer view of the what, where, who, how and why and offer some perspective on this military action’s broader historical, political, and legal implications.Ted Postol is Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy Emeritus in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. His expertise is in nuclear weapon systems, including submarine warfare, applications of nuclear weapons, ballistic missile defense, and ballistic missiles more generally. He previously worked as an analyst at the Office of Technology Assessment and as a science and policy adviser to the chief of naval operations. In 2016, he received the Garwin Prize from the Federation of American Scientists for his work in assessing and critiquing the government’s claims about missile defenses.Ambassador Chas Freeman is a retired career diplomat who has negotiated on behalf of the United States with over 100 foreign governments in East and South Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and both Western and Eastern Europe. Ambassador Freeman was previously a Senior Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and Deputy Chief of Mission and Chargé d’Affaires in the American embassies at both Bangkok and Beijing. He was Director for Chinese Affairs at the U.S. Department of State from 1979-1981. He was the principal American interpreter during the late President Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972. In addition to Chinese, Ambassador Freeman speaks French and Spanish at the professional level and can converse in Arabic and several other languages.Bruce 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.Ralph Nader Radio Hour is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Thanks for reading Ralph Nader Radio Hour! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Washington Post personal finance columnist, Michelle Singletary, tells the moving story of how a visit to her grade school by the Reverend Jesse Jackson inspired her life and career as described in her column, “How the Rev. Jesse Jackson Taught Me to Keep Hope Alive." Then Ralph welcomes Professor Eric S. Fish from U.C Davis School of Law to explain how grand juries are no longer rubber-stamping frivolous cases brought to them by the Trump Administration. Plus, Ralph gives us his take on Trump’s marathon State of the Union speech and the Democratic response.Michelle Singletary writes the nationally-syndicated personal finance column “The Color of Money,” which appears in the Washington Post on Wednesdays and Sundays. In 2021, she won the Gerald Loeb award for commentary. She has written four personal finance books, including, What to Do With Your Money When Crisis Hits: A Survival Guide and The 21-Day Financial Fast: Your Path to Financial Peace and Freedom.The Trump administration’s destruction of diversity, equity, and inclusion—they misunderstand what that means. It doesn’t mean that you’re giving jobs to people who are unqualified. It means that you recognize that the playing field wasn’t even, and let’s even this playing field. I liken it to a football team. You can’t have a football team of all quarterbacks and win. You have to have a quarterback, a running back, a linebacker, you have to have a good kicker. It’s the same thing—your team has to encompass people that represent all kinds of abilities to have a winning team. So DEI isn’t a giveaway. It isn’t charity. It recognizes that when you have people from different backgrounds and different perspectives and different skill levels, you have a winning team.Michelle SingletaryEric S Fish is professor of law at the UC Davis School of Law. Professor Fish’s primary research is in criminal law, with particular focus on the ethical duties of participants in the criminal process, the structure of immigration crimes, and the system’s emphasis on administrative efficiency. He has also served as a public defender, first with the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, and later as a Federal Defender in San Diego.This has been a really remarkable series of rejections of the Trump administration’s prosecutions by ordinary people serving on grand juries, and one that is largely unprecedented in modern American history. I can’t think of another example of grand juries rejecting such high-profile cases (and so many of them). Nothing really comes to mind. So in a certain sense, one might say this is the grand jury’s original purpose…Initially they were a democratic institution of governance. They were a local check on the colonial oppression of the British (at least in the early colonial period). They refused to indict prosecutions under the Stamp Act, under the revenue laws. They were a tool of anti-colonial resistance to British oppression, and this seems at least broadly analogous to that—local grand juries in places like Minnesota, Chicago, Washington, D.C. are rejecting the Trump administration’s attempts to prosecute its political enemies and bring trumped-up charges against protesters.Eric S. FishAll in all, [the State of the Union address] was fodder for political scientists for years to come. A dictatorial serial law violator, self-enriching chronic liar, cruel, vicious to vulnerable people and people without power (which is a majority of the people) elected dictator. This speech—which went for one hour and 48 minutes, the longest State of the Union speech ever—will be analyzed for a long time with the question at the center of the analysis being: How could so many tens of millions of voters be taken in by Trump’s mouth, his lies, his false statements, his fantasies, his fake promises, his lack of any kind of record, whether as a businessman where he used bankruptcies as a strategy…and his record as a politician in his first term? That’s the question we have to ask ourselves. And it’s too easy to say that the Trump voters couldn’t stand the Democrats who abandoned them. That’s not enough. They could have not voted for Trump. They could have written in a vote. They could have voted for the Green, Libertarian, or other minor parties. They can’t use the Democrats as a 100% excuse for voting for Trump. And a lot of them didn’t. They just liked Trump. They liked his prejudices. They liked his lies. They liked his fantasies. They liked his fake promises.Ralph NaderNews 2/27/26* Our top stories this week come to us from our southern neighbor, Mexico. First, on February 22nd, Mexican authorities announced they had successfully conducted an operation resulting in the death of Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, aka “El Mencho,” who headed the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). In retaliation, the cartels launched a wave of violence throughout the country. Bafflingly, given the obvious enmity between the cartels and the government of Claudia Sheinbaum, Elon Musk implied that Sheinbaum is in the pocket of the very drug cartels with whom she is practically at war. Reuters reports Musk “responded to a 2025 video of Sheinbaum discussing cartel violence and alleged that she was ‘saying what her cartel bosses tell her to say.” Reuters notes that Musk did not provide further evidence. In fact, much of the strength of the Mexican cartels would actually be more accurately attributed to the United States. As USA Today writes, Mexican officials recovered a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, 10 long arm [rifles], handguns, and grenades, from El Mencho’s weapons stockpile. Mexican Defense Minister, Ricardo Trevilla Trejo estimated that about 80% of the recovered weapons were purchased in the United States and smuggled into Mexico. This represents just the tip of the iceberg of the so-called “iron river” of firearms flooding Mexico’s black market from the U.S. As opposed to the lax gun laws in the states, gun ownership in Mexico is “tightly restricted…[and] There is only one military-run gun store in the country.”* Meanwhile, President Sheinbaum is bucking American pressure by continuing to send humanitarian aid to the tiny, embattled island nation of Cuba. AP reports that last week, “Two Mexican Navy ships laden with humanitarian aid docked in Cuba…two weeks after…President Donald Trump threatened to impose tariffs on countries that sell oil to the island.” These ships carried 800 tons worth of bundles of “Made in Mexico” goods, including rice, beans, amaranth and crackers — complemented by a bottle of oil, large cans of sardines and canned peaches. Another 1,500 tons of powdered milk and beans are expected to be sent to Cuba in the coming days. The U.S. has taken a more bellicose line with Cuba than it has in quite some time, even taking naval action in the waters surrounding the island, making Mexico’s support that much more critical.* In another Cuba story, a diplomatic incident is unfolding this week regarding a Florida-registered speedboat. According to the island’s government, the boat, carrying 10 passengers, entered Cuban territorial waters and opened fire on Cuban soldiers. The Cubans responded in kind, killing four people aboard the craft and wounding six others. According to the Cuban authorities, most of the passengers “have a known history of criminal and violent activity.” These include Amijail Sánchez González and Leordan Enrique Cruz Gómez, both wanted by Cuban authorities based on their involvement in “the promotion, planning, organization, financing, support or commission of…acts of terrorism.” The Cubans also claim to have arrested one Duniel Hernández Santos, who was supposedly “sent from the United States to guarantee the reception of the armed infiltration.” They claim Hernández Santos has confessed. American authorities have so far evinced confusion more than anything else, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying “We’re going to figure out exactly what happened.” This from AP.* Whatever cloak and dagger games the administration may be playing in the Caribbean, they have been pointedly unsubtle about their saber rattling regarding Iran – and the reaction from Congress has been meager. While anti-war members in the House and Senate are pushing war powers resolutions, namely Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie along with Senator Tim Kaine, not even the nominal opposition party is supporting these efforts. According to Capital & Empire, Democrats are seeking to “dampen momentum” and even “prevent the Iran war powers vote from advancing.” Democrats Josh Gottheimer and Jared Moskowitz, both arch Iran hawks, have publicly stated they will not back the war powers resolution, and many others have sought to split the difference, saying Trump should only move on Iran after consulting with Congress. As the Hill notes, the Senate did pass a war powers resolution restricting the president’s use of military force against Iran without congressional approval during Trump’s first term, with eight Senate Republicans backing the Democrats in support of the bill. It is hard to imagine such a bipartisan show of force this time around.* In more disappointing congressional news, on Tuesday the House voted down the bipartisan ROTOR Act, which would have beefed up aviation safety standards, NPR reports. This bill was drafted in the wake of the deadly midair collision over Washington D.C. last year. This bill, principally authored by Senator Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee which oversees transportation, would have required wider use of Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast – safety technology designed to transmit an aircraft’s location to other aircraft. The Senate unanimously passed the bill in December, with the support of the Defense Department – now styling itself the Department of War – but the Pentagon yanked its support just before the House vote, citing “unresolved budgetary burdens and operational security risks.” The final House vo

Ralph welcomes J.B. Branch (Public Citizen's Big Tech accountability advocate) to discuss some of the sectors that Big Tech is disrupting with artificial intelligence. Then, Steve, David, and Hannah speak to Russell Mokhiber about the latest issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen. Finally, Ralph speaks on the legacy of the late Rev. Jesse Jackson.J.B. Branch is the Big Tech accountability advocate for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. He leads Public Citizen’s advocacy efforts on artificial intelligence accountability, consumer data and privacy rights, tech product safety, platform oversight, and child online safety protections.What’s happening is these AI companies are taking a page out of the playbook of the social media days. When social media was brand new, they were trying to say that this technology is going to lead to people being more connected, it’s going to lead to efficiencies, it’s going to lead to overall positives. And in fact, there were times where you had big tech CEOs who were saying that a lot of this money was going to trickle down. And you look down, and you look up, and I’m not any richer because Facebook stock is soaring or Microsoft’s is soaring. What we’re really seeing is the same thing that’s happened with these large tech companies—which is that they promised the world, they offer back very little, and in fact, what they offer up is a series of harms.JB BranchCongress has been really bought into AI. They’re buying into this idea that it’s a race for the world between us and China. So you have some congressional folks who believe that this is a race against China and that we need to harness this weapon. And then you have a lot of corporate money from these AI companies…They’re dumping a lot of money into congressional races, to ensure that they’re propping up candidates who align with this deregulatory scheme.JB BranchRussell Mokhiber is editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter and the Capitol Hill Citizen. He is also founder of singlepayeraction.org, and editor of the website Morgan County USA.I see [the Capitol Hill Citizen] philosophy along a couple lines. One is that it’s not left right, it’s top down. We consider both political parties corrupt to the core, but there’s a rising tide of activism against both parties, against the institutional parties. And so, for example, in the current issue, we bristle against those who are what we call “negativo”. We’re very “positivo”. So while we’re living in very difficult times, there’s a rising tide of activism challenging members of Congress, both current members in Congress as citizen activists and also as candidates…And so what we’re seeing is this up-down resurgence from the bottom—populists of all stripes rising up against the technocratic billionaires who’ve brought us to this state.Russell Mokhiber[Jesse Jackson] was an advocate of non-violence, of self-reliance. And the amazing thing about him is how he appeared everywhere. I mean there was nothing remote about Jesse Jackson. He appeared everywhere. If the farmers were being driven into bankruptcy by agribusiness, he was there. If there need to be prisoners released in foreign countries, he was there… The thing that most people didn’t realize is how much personal pressure he was under by his opponents. In those days, challenging certain conditions that we don’t even know about now because of Jesse and other civil rights leaders’ works, really upset the power structure. And they didn’t take it lying down. So all these places he went to, he was very much under great pressure.Ralph NaderNews 2/20/26* Our top stories this week concern the continuing fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. First, the Columbus Dispatch reports Republican Senator Jon Husted of Ohio accepted more than $100,000 from Epstein associate Les Wexner. Husted’s opponent in his reelection campaign, former Ohio Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, blasted Husted for accepting this money and implied that Wexner’s donations pushed Husted to initially vote against releasing the Epstein files. In damage control mode, the Husted campaign announced they would donate Wexner’s campaign contributions to charity. Wexner himself appeared in front of the House Oversight committee this week. Wexner denied any wrongdoing, claiming that Epstein “conned” him and called him a “clever, diabolical … master manipulator.” Democrats on the committee were skeptical, with Congressman Robert Garcia stating “There is no single person that was more involved with providing Jeffrey Epstein with the financial support to commit his crimes than Les Wexner,” per the Hill.* In related news, the New York Times reports Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, has been arrested for misconduct stemming from his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Specifically, he stands accused of passing along confidential information to Epstein while the disgraced former prince served as a British trade envoy. His brother, King Charles III is quoted saying he supports a “full, fair and proper process” to investigate these claims. The Times notes the striking disparity in the official response from law enforcement in the U.K. versus the U.S., writing, “The British authorities have moved aggressively to investigate the possibility of crimes emerging from the three million pages of correspondence with Mr. Epstein… police in the United States have not.”* Meanwhile in Los Angeles, prominent entertainment executive and sports agent Casey Wasserman has drawn fire from many LA politicians, including City Controller Kenneth Mejia, L.A. County Supervisor Lindsay Horvath, City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez and fellow Councilmember and mayoral candidate Nithya Raman over his ties to Epstein lieutenant Ghislane Maxwell, as revealed in the latest tranche of files. High-profile clients of Wasserman’s agency immediately began to abandon the firm. High profile deserters include pop star Chappell Roan and Olympic gold medalist Abby Wambach. Wasserman announced he would sell the agency shortly thereafter. However, Wasserman still chairs the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics Committee. This week, LA Mayor Karen Bass weighed in to call Wasserman’s behavior “abhorrent” and say that while she cannot fire him, it is her opinion that he should step down. Astonishingly, the LA28 board announced after a review of Wasserman’s conduct that he should remain on as committee chair. This from LA Magazine.* Speaking of local boards, this week New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the appointment of six new members of the Rent Guidelines Board, including a new Chair. With these six appointments, comprising two-thirds of the total board, Mamdani is poised to deliver on one of his key campaign promises – a rent freeze for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments. These appointees range from experienced civil servants to academics to union organizers, among others. This is a major victory for Mamdani, and comes at a key moment when other items on his governing agenda are being challenged by budgetary constraints due to long-term mismanagement of the city’s finances.* Another rent-related story comes to us from Minnesota. CBS reports the tenants union Twin Cities Tenants, along with five labor unions totaling over 25,000 workers, are calling for a statewide rent strike to pressure lawmakers to enact an eviction moratorium. This comes in the context of Operation Metro Surge, the federal government’s sprawling immigration enforcement action which resulted in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. As this piece notes, many residents of the Twin Cities stayed home from work during the operation, out of fear of being detained, resulting in many tenants being short on rent ahead of March 1st. According to an analysis by the University of Minnesota renters in the state have racked up between $27 and $51 million in rent debt since the onset of Metro Surge. This in addition to the average statewide rent debt of $44.6 million in any two-month period.* Turning to Gaza-related news, this week saw major updates in the legal drama of Palestine Action in Britain. On February 13th, AP reported that the country’s High Court ruled the government acted unlawfully by outlawing Palestine Action and deeming it a terrorist organization. The Judges said that Palestine Action’s activities did not meet the “level, scale and persistence” that would justify a legal proscription. However, the court allowed the government to keep the ban in place pending the government’s appeal. The group was banned last June after breaking into a Royal Air Force base to protest the slaughter in Gaza. Despite this ruling in the group’s favor, which came on the heels of a ruling dismissing charges against six Palestine Action activists, the BBC reports those activists will be retried by the government over their alleged role in causing damage to an Elbit Systems facility near Bristol. Charges against 18 other defendants accused of participating in the break-in will be dropped.* Meanwhile, Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and one of the Catholic Church’s highest officials, was asked to comment on President Trump’s proposed Board of Peace, the international body intended to oversee the governance and reconstruction of Gaza. Pizzaballa replied “What do I think of the Board of Peace? I think it is a colonialist operation: others deciding for the Palestinians.” The Patriarch added “They asked us to enter. I’ve never had a billion (dollars),” referring to the $1 billion price for a permanent board seat, but “above all, this is not the Church’s task: It is the sacraments, the dignity of the person.” This from OSV News. Pizzaballa has long sought self-determination for the Palestinians alongside peace in the region, even putting his own life on the line for that cause. Just after the October 7th Hamas attacks, Pizzaballa offered to exchange himself for the Israeli hostages in Hamas custody.* And in East

Ralph welcomes, Robert Weissman co-president of Public Citizen, to discuss his Senate testimony about the many ways the Trump Administration’s assault on fraud is itself fraudulent. Plus, Ralph informs us of a report from Aljazeera about the MK-84 weapon the IDF is using in Gaza that is designed to generate so much heat it literally vaporizes people.Robert 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, he has spearheaded the effort to loosen the chokehold corporations and the wealthy have over our democracy.Every American should be worried about fraud. So it’s fine for the committee to be talking about fraud, but it should be based on actual facts and what’s actually happening, which is not what’s going on with this focus on Minnesota… And without a doubt, if the concern is about fraud in the public or the private economy right now, the number one problem with fraud is the Trump administration.Robert WeissmanThanks to the Supreme Court decision on Presidential immunity, Trump believes (correctly) that he will not be held criminally accountable for anything that he does while he’s President. And that is true so long as that Supreme Court decision stands. And I think it’s fair to say that basically everyone who’s working for him right now—who I think are committing all kinds of crimes, including through the sale of pardons and through the outrageous use of ICE in Minnesota and around the country—I think they expect they’re going to get pardoned before he goes. So I think they think they too will be (and they’re probably not wrong in expecting it) that they too will be immune from criminal prosecution (at least federal criminal prosecution) for any crimes they commit while they’re in the administration.Robert WeissmanIn Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantisNews 2/13/26* Our top stories this week concern the Jeffrey Epstein case. According to POLITICO, Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, who, along with Republican Congressman Thomas Massie has led the charge to release the Epstein files, “took to the House floor Tuesday and read aloud the names of six ‘wealthy, powerful men’ whose names were originally redacted,” in the files. These names include billionaire Victoria’s Secret owner Leslie Wexner, Emirati shipping magnate Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, and Italian politician Nicola Caputo, among other more mysterious figures like Salvatore Nuara and Leonic Leonov. Khanna used congressional representatives’ unique power under the speech and debate clause to make these names public, after combing through the files personally along with Rep. Massie. Khanna added “if we found six men that they were hiding in two hours, imagine how many men they are covering up for in those 3 million files.”* Speaking of hiding names in the files, Axios reports that Representative Jamie Raskin stated that “when he searched President Trump’s name in the unredacted Epstein files… it came up ‘more than a million times.’” The implication of this statement is clear: Trump’s cronies in the Justice Department are covering up the extent of Trump’s relationship and involvement with Jeffrey Epstein. Another member of the administration, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, admitted under Senate questioning that he had lunch with Epstein on his island, along with his family, claiming he “could not recall” why they did. The administration is allowing members of Congress to view the unredacted files within certain hours via a database they describe as confusing, unreliable, and clunky.* Another surprising revelation from the files is that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries apparently solicited campaign donations from Epstein back in 2013. According to MSN, Epstein received a campaign solicitation via email from a fundraising firm touting Jeffries as “one of the rising stars in the New York Congressional delegation,” and offering Epstein “an opportunity to get to know Hakeem better.” Jeffries denies having any knowledge of this firm’s outreach to Epstein and decried House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer’s implication that he had any relationship with the late sexual predator and financier, calling Comer a “stone cold liar” and a “malignant clown.”* In non-Epstein related news from Capitol Hill, last week lawmakers held a hearing to probe the operations of autonomous taxi service Waymo. While Republicans chose to focus on Waymo’s supposed ties to Chinese companies, Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts grilled the chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, on the company’s reliance on workers abroad for key safety decisions. Peña admitted that while some operators are located in the US, others – who step in when robotaxis encounter “unusual situations” – work remotely from the Philippines. Markey called this “completely unacceptable,” emphasizing that these workers may need to react “in a split second” during dangerous scenarios. Waymo is just the latest company marketing its services as high tech and autonomous, but later revealed to be reliant on cheap foreign labor. This from Business Insider.* ICE lawlessness continues to roil Congress. Many Democrats are now sounding the alarm that Trump’s immigration police – masked, armed, accountable directly to him and backed to the hilt by the administration – could be used as a tool to suppress voter turnout by conducting raids at or near polling locations, thereby scaring citizens into staying home. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said “Trump is trying to create a pretext to rig the election.” Murphy, along with some Senate Democratic allies, pushed leadership to demand that ICE be banned from polling sites as a condition of government shutdown negotiations, but leadership balked, per POLITICO. While such a scenario can sound far-fetched, Trump has “falsely and repeatedly claimed for more than a decade that millions of illegal immigrants vote in the U.S., arguing that was one factor in his 2020 loss,” and, just before the 2020 election, he pledged to send “sheriffs” and “law enforcement” to polling places.* Drop Site News’ Jacqueline Sweet reports 70 organizations, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Unitarian, as well as civil rights, academic, legal, peace, and human rights groups, submitted a formal request to the National Security Division of the Justice Department seeking a “Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) investigation into Canary Mission.” Canary Mission is a shadowy, infamous group that tracks pro-Palestine activity on college campuses. In 2018, they appeared at the George Washington University wearing spooky masks in an attempt to intimidate the student government into voting down a BDS resolution. They failed. This latest letter comes on the heels of a Drop Site story from January that “showed among other things that Canary is operated in Israel by a large Israeli team.” As the letter notes, the Foreign Agent Registration Act “exists precisely to address this type of potential activity carried out in the United States for the benefit of a foreign country.”* In more news regarding pro-Palestine activism, last week, six defendants linked to Palestine Action, a direct action protest group in the United Kingdom, were acquitted of aggravated burglary in connection with an alleged break in at Elbit Systems, a defense firm with close ties to the Israeli military, in August 2024. The persecution of Palestine Action has gone far beyond normal law enforcement. Some activists have been in pre-trial detention for over 500 days, more than double the maximum limit set by the Crown Prosecution Service. The case of the Palestine Action protestors has drawn outcry from international human rights groups, including the United Nations and Human Rights Watch. As HRW notes, in July of last year, the British government declared Palestine Action a terrorist organization and have now detained over 2,700 protestors over infractions as minor as holding a sign reading “I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action.” As of now, over 20 activists are still in detention awaiting trial, many beyond the legal limits, and the six acquitted activists may face retrial. But for now, the group has scored a major victory in the face of overwhelming odds.* Turning back to domestic news, New York Governor Kathy Hochul appears to have pulled off a fait accompli in her reelection campaign. Last year, former Representative Elise Stefanik dropped her bid for the Republican gubernatorial nomination and sitting Rep. Mike Lawler declined to run. Now, Hochul’s main primary opponent – Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado – has dropped his bid after Hochul secured the endorsements of New York City Mayor and political superstar Zohran Mamdani as well as the entirety of the New York Democratic congressional delegation. This from the New York Times. This is a stunning political feat for a Governor who won the narrowest gubernatorial election in the state since 1994 when she was last up in 2022. It now seems that Hochul will square off against Bruce Blakeman, the Trump-endorsed Republican executive of Nassau County in November.* Meanwhile in Los Angeles, the dynamic of the Mayoral race was upended this week by the last-minute decision of Councilmember Nithya Raman to throw her hat into the ring against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. Raman, an urban planner by trade, chairs the Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee and has “built her political identity around tenant protections, homelessness policy and efforts to accelerate housing production,” per the Los Angeles Daily News. Raman was the first of several Councilmembers elected with DSA support and she has maintained a strong relationship with the local branch despite tensions with the national organization, primarily over Israel/Palestine issues. Bass, wh

Ralph welcomes Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson to discuss a wide range of topics, including NATO, Greenland, Gaza, and more. Then, Ralph speaks to Rabbi Alissa Wise (founding director of Rabbis for Ceasefire) about the “Jews for Food Aid for People in Gaza" campaign. Finally, Ralph and the team address some current events.Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired U.S. Army colonel. Over his 31 years of service, Colonel Wilkerson served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff from 2002 to 2005, and Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993. Colonel Wilkerson also served as Deputy Director and Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia, and for fifteen years he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, senior advisor to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and co-founder of the All-Volunteer Force Forum.You aren't a newspaper, not really, if you don't have the guts to go out and get the news wherever it's happening. And you're reporting, nonetheless, to the American people [on the truth]. And it's nothing about the truth. It's as bad as what Netanyahu does in his own country in Hebrew. It's propaganda. And in many cases, it's not even accurate propaganda. It's falsified propaganda. You know, there used to be a law. And the law prohibited anyone in the Defense Department, for example, but any of the government agencies (Defense Department was the most guilty) that said: you cannot propagandize the American people. You can propagandize foreign audiences—even in wartime, you can propagandize those audiences, but you must not propagandize the American people. You have to tell them the truth or tell nothing at all. And if you're a media outlet, you should be telling them the truth, or the truth as you best can determine it. We don't honor that law anymore.Colonel Lawrence WilkersonI think [NATO and the EU are] gone, but I think the prospect for the future ought to be that we replace them. We don't just let them go and not have a replacement. And the replacement should be a European security architecture, which includes the Russians. And last time I checked a Rand McNally map, Russia (at least from the Urals inward) was a part of Europe. And it needs to be based not on spheres of influence, but on economic and financial and other needs that all of that group of people have. That's how you create something that will keep Europe and Russia together and not at loggerheads.Colonel Lawrence WilkersonI've said this a number of times (publicly I've said it) —the January 6th attempt to overthrow the United States government in favor of Donald Trump didn't fail because the system held. It failed because the coup plotters were incompetent, and their incompetence was most visible in not having the military (or a sizable segment thereof). They will not do that again.Colonel Lawrence WilkersonRabbi Alissa Wise is the Lead Organizer of Rabbis for Ceasefire, which she founded in October 2023. She was a staff leader at Jewish Voice for Peace from 2011-2021 and co-founded the JVP Rabbinical Council in 2010. She is co-author of “Solidarity is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing”. She is also one of the organizers of the “Jews for Food Aid for People in Gaza” campaign.I think there is a lot of support in the Jewish community for living up to core liberatory values that there are within Jewish tradition. This is true in every religious tradition and it's true in Judaism, where you can open the sacred text and find a justification for oppression or you could open a sacred text and find a pathway to liberation. And so what we're inviting people into is to pull the thread of liberatory Judaism. And making the conscious choice that those are the threads of the tradition that we want to pull on.Rabbi Alissa WiseThere's nothing Jewish about what the state of Israel is doing—about the state of Israel at all. It's not actually a fulfillment of Jewish practice or tradition or Torah. It's not a Torah-based government. It's government. It's a nation state. It's a military. And it uses—as I was saying before, one could open the Torah and identify justification for endless war or justification for freedom. And I think they often use their Jewishness as a fig leaf in order to shield themselves from criticism because “when you criticize them, you're being anti-Semitic.” And they pull on certain quotes or elements of Jewish teachings that either seem to uphold what they're doing while at the same time being palatable and accessible to the Christian Zionists that actually have for a long time been empowering US foreign policy.Rabbi Alissa WiseNews 2/6/26* Last week, we discussed the showdown in Congress over forcing Bill and Hillary Clinton to testify before the House Oversight Committee regarding the Epstein probe. Despite pressure from Democratic House leadership, many Democrats broke ranks to vote in favor of holding the former President and former Secretary of State in contempt of Congress. If this vote had gone to the full House, it is possible the couple could have been jailed until they agreed to testify. Instead, this week, Bill and Hillary Clinton agreed to appear before the Committee. Bill Clinton’s relationship with Epstein is well-documented through the flight logs and photos that have emerged since the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Hillary Clinton claims never to have met or spoken with the late sex offender and financier, per the BBC. Former President Clinton will appear for a deposition on February 27th; the former Secretary of State will appear the day before. This piece notes that this will mark the first time a former president has testified to Congress since Gerald Ford did so in 1983 – marking a watershed moment for Congress reasserting its constitutional authority.* In more news of Congress asserting its authority vis-a-vis the Epstein scandal, Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie appeared on “Meet the Press,” this week and said that while the release of the latest batch of files is “significant,” it “is not good enough.” Khanna estimates that only about half of the Epstein files have been released so far. Given how much we have learned from the files so far, it is anyone’s guess what lurks in the files they have yet to release. Crucially, withholding the files is in direct contravention of the law authored by the two lawmakers. Khanna stated plainly that “If we don’t get the remaining files…Thomas Massie and I are prepared to move on impeachment,” of Attorney General Pam Bondi. This from CNBC.* The Epstein scandal has contributed to growing fissures in the MAGA movement. Perhaps the most notable defector from that camp is retired Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. This week, Greene sat for an interview with conservative radio personality Kim Iversen, and said that President Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan was “all a lie…a big lie for the people,” adding “What MAGA is really serving in this administration, who they’re serving, is their big donors,” per the Hill. Elaborating further, Greene said that Trump’s financial backers are the real beneficiaries of the supposedly populist movement, saying “They get the government contracts, they get the pardons, or somebody they love or one of their friends gets a pardon.” While Greene has resigned her seat in Congress, she shows little sign of disappearing from the public eye. Many speculate she could seek political office in the future, even the presidency, charting a path forward for a post-Trump GOP.* Another major fight in Congress has to do with checking the out of control Department of Homeland Security. While congressional Democrats’ response to the events in Minneapolis leaves much to be desired, Senate Democratic leadership is pushing for reforms to “rein in” ICE and Border Patrol, including “body camera requirements, an end to roving patrols, elevated warrant requirements and a measure to ban officers from wearing masks,” per the Hill. While these reforms fall far short of what is needed, they would go a long way toward checking the worst excesses of these out of control organizations that have come to resemble nothing so much as secret police.* At the state level, the New York Times reports New York Attorney General Letitia James announced that her office will “deploy legal observers to document raids conducted by federal immigration authorities across the state.” These observers, who will be outfitted with clearly identifiable purple vests, are intended to serve as “neutral witnesses on the ground,” and will be “instructed not to interfere with enforcement activity.” This piece highlights that California and New York have already “unveiled online portals for residents to upload photos and videos of misconduct by federal agents that could be used in state lawsuits against the federal government.” A similar effort is being launched by New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill. It remains to be seen whether these attempts to step up oversight of ICE and CBP activity will check the flagrant misconduct we have seen in places in Minneapolis.* In more state and local news, the Root reports the Gullah-Geechee people – descendants of enslaved Africans who formed unique communities including a distinct culture and even language on the coasts of states like Georgia, Florida and the Carolinas – have scored a victory against gentrification on Sapelo Island, the only surviving Gullah-Geechee community in Georgia. In 2023, developers came in and, with local commissioners in their pockets attempted to “eliminate special zoning laws… [and] double the maximum home size on the island…to 3,000 square feet.” In response, local activists and groups like Keep Sapelo Geechee collected thousands of signatures to for

Capitalism as an economic system has been around in various forms for over a thousand years and according to our featured guest this week, it keeps evolving. Join us for a lively and challenging discussion between Ralph and Harvard history professor, Sven Beckert, as they discuss his book “Capitalism: A Global History.”Sven Beckert is the Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University. He has written widely on the economic, social, and political history of capitalism. His book Empire of Cotton won the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is Capitalism: A Global History.Capitalism has existed within a whole range of political systems of organizing political power. And this includes authoritarian regimes; this includes fascist regimes; and this includes also liberal democratic regimes such as Great Britain and the United States. And you see this kind of tension emerging today within the United States in which there is a kind of concern, I think, among some capital-owning elites about liberal democracy. They see that as being limiting to some of their business interests.Sven BeckertIn a way, the book tries to not make us to be just powerless cogs in a machine and not powerless cogs in the unfolding of history. But the book very much emphasizes that the particular shape that capitalism has taken at any particular moment in time has a lot to do also with questions of the state. It has a lot to do with questions of political power. It has a lot to do with questions of social contestation. And sometimes capitalism has been reshaped drastically by the actions of people with very little power. And I show that in particular when I look at the end of the slave-based plantation economy in the Americas, which is very much driven by the collective mobilization of some of the poorest and most exploited people on planet Earth—namely the enslaved workers who grow all that sugar and all that cotton or that tobacco in the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.Sven BeckertI think markets and market activities have existed in all human societies. That is not particular to capitalism. And the few efforts in world history in which people have tried to get rid of the market in its entirety have been pretty much economic disasters. So there is a place for the market. There has been a place for the market in all human societies. But in capitalism, the market takes on an importance that it didn’t take on in other forms of economic life… I think it is so important to think about this, because, as I said earlier, capitalism is not natural. It’s not the only form of economic life on planet Earth. Indeed, it’s the opposite. It’s a revolutionary departure from older forms of the organization of economic life.Sven BeckertTrump seems really concerned about impeachment because it’s beyond his control. And he sees if (with inflation) the economy starts going down more, unemployment up, prices up, all these campaign promises bogus, polls going down—he fears impeachment. And I’ve yet to hear him say if he was impeached and removed from office, he wouldn’t leave the White House—while he’s defied all other federal laws, constitutional provisions, and foreign treaties.Ralph NaderNews 1/30/26* Following the murders of U.S. citizens Alex Pretti and Renée Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis – along with the shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis, the abduction of 5-year-old Liam Ramos along with his father, and the arrest of an estimated 3,000 people – the Minnesota AFL-CIO called a General Strike for workers to demand ICE leave the state. This one-day general strike, staged during temperatures of -20°F, drew as many as 100,000 workers into the streets, according to Labor Notes. Participating unions included the SEIU, AFT, and the CWA, along with UNITE HERE Local 17, OPEIU Local 12, IATSE Local 13, and AFSCME Council 5, among many others. Minneapolis has been the site of major labor actions before, perhaps most famously the 1934 General Strike, and it remains a relatively union-dense hub today. It was also the locus of the 2020 George Floyd protests, which many see as a reason why the Trump administration has been so hostile towards the locals.* With the spiraling situation in Minnesota, the Trump administration has finally moved to deescalate somewhat. Per POLITICO, “DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, has…been sidelined,” and border czar Tom Homan has been dispatched to the state to take over operations there. Moreover, the Atlantic reports “Gregory Bovino has been removed from his role as Border Patrol ‘commander at large’ and will return to his former job in El Centro, California, where he is expected to retire soon.” While hardly an adequate response to the crisis, these moves do show that Trump sees how badly his lieutenants have bungled their mission. It remains to be seen whether this will mark the end of the high-lawlessness period of ICE activity or if the agency will simply shift its primary theater of operation.* For Minnesota Republicans meanwhile, the situation is nothing short of catastrophic. While the party’s fortunes had looked promising just weeks ago, some, like Republican attorney Chris Madel, now say “National Republicans have made it nearly impossible for a Republican to win a statewide election in Minnesota.” Madel had been a candidate for the GOP gubernatorial nomination, but dropped out abruptly this week, citing national Republicans’ “stated retribution on the citizens of our state,” per the Star Tribune. While the election is still 10 months away – “a lifetime in politics,” as one person quoted in the story puts it – it is hard to imagine Minnesotans forgetting about the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti and delivering a statewide victory for Republicans for the first time since 2006.* Speaking of dropping out, the New York Times reports Eleanor Holmes Norton, the 18-term incumbent delegate representing Washington, D.C. in Congress, has filed a termination notice for her re-election campaign. Norton, a civil rights activist and law professor, was elected D.C. delegate in 1991 and earned a reputation as D.C.’s “warrior on the Hill.” Today, she is the oldest person serving in the House at 88 years old. Norton has shown signs of cognitive decline but insisted she would seek reelection and even after her campaign filed this termination paperwork Norton did not make a public statement for days, raising questions about how aware she even was of this decision – a disgraceful end to a towering career. If any silver lining is to be found, one hopes this will serve as a cautionary tale for other members of Congress not to cling to their seats to the bitter end.* In more congressional news, Axios reports, “Nearly half of the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee broke with their party’s leadership in stunning fashion…by voting to hold former President Bill Clinton in contempt of Congress,” for his refusal to testify in the committee’s probe related to Jeffrey Epstein. While House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries whipped votes against the motion, Ranking Member Robert Garcia gave committee members permission to “vote their conscience.” With the defections, the vote to hold former President Clinton in contempt was a lopsided 34-8. Nine Democrats voted yes, eight no, and two present. On a separate vote to hold Hillary Clinton in contempt, far fewer Democrats broke ranks. In that vote, Democrats Rashida Tlaib, Summer Lee and Melanie Stansbury voted yes, Dave Min voted present, and the rest voted no. The contempt measure will now move to the House floor and Jeffries must decide whether or not to formally whip votes against the measure there. If it passes a full house vote, the Clintons could be held in jail on contempt charges until they agree to testify, as Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were during the January 6th investigation.* In more news out of D.C., legendary modern classical composer Philip Glass has pulled the world premiere of his Lincoln Symphony from the Kennedy Center in protest of the venue’s takeover by Trump and his cronies. In a statement, Glass wrote “After thoughtful consideration , I have decided to withdraw my Symphony No. 15” because the symphony is “a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center [and its current leadership] today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony.” Just days after this embarrassing fiasco, Kevin Couch, the Center’s new head of artistic programming, abruptly resigned without explanation, per the Hill.* Meanwhile, in Alaska, the Anchorage Daily News reports the Alaskan Independence Party – the state’s third largest political party founded in the 1970s to push for Alaskan independence from the United States – has voted to dissolve itself. Ballot Access News reports that the party leaders felt that there is “little support” for Alaskan independence today and “the public doesn’t even understand the party’s original purpose.” Still, the party stands as one of the most successful minor parties of the twentieth century, electing Walter Hickel Governor in 1999 and electing a state legislator in 1992. It almost elected another candidate Tyler Ivanoff, in 2022; he won 48.73% of the vote. The state of Alaska will now give the roughly 19,000 members of the AIP the chance to re-register with another party, per Alaska Public Media.* In more positive independent political news, the Chicago Tribune reports Southwest Side Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez has launched an independent bid for Illinois’ 4th Congressional District seat. Sigcho-Lopez, a DSA member and progressive firebrand in Chicago, is campaigning to “end tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and dramatically expand social services in housing and health care,” in Congress and is “aligned with working-class labor unions and street protesters pushing back against Trump.” This seat is currently held by stalwart progressive Jesús “Chuy” García, but he pulled an unsavory bait and switch, announcing

Ralph welcomes professor and historian Daniel Immerwahr to discuss the history of the United States' overseas possessions and his book "How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States."Daniel Immerwahr is a professor and historian at Northwestern University. He is the author of Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development and How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States.What I wanted to do in the book was to look at the United States and to take seriously the parts of the United States that don’t always feature in the textbooks—that are outside of the mainland, the contiguous blob. And what I discovered when I did that was that these places were often in the mainland’s mind seen as peripheral places, but this was not a peripheral history…It turns out that once you’ve got the territories in view, you have a different understanding of them. And so a lot of US history (and really important parts of US history) has actually taken place outside of the part of the country that we normally think of as the United States.Daniel ImmerwahrI got really interested in the book in how it came to be and why it mattered that US standards prevailed and how other countries dealt with that by either jumping on the ship or trying to resist and that became difficult for them. And how emotionally hard it is for other parts of the world to [face] this onslaught of not just the US military, not just US planes, its bombs—we know all that stuff, and I don’t want to diminish it, but all the US stuff and ways of talking and the English language and the dollar. And each one of those comes as a kind of challenge: Are you going to adopt this or not? Because life’s going to be a little harder if you don’t, but if you do, you’re kind of a puppet. And everyone in the world has had to deal with that challenge on a daily basis—what screws they use, what language they speak, all that kind of stuff. And we don’t talk about that a lot, but that actually strikes me as a really important facet of US power.Daniel ImmerwahrNews 1/23/26* Our first two stories this week come to us from New York City. On January 16th, Mayor Zohran Mamdani drew a line in the sand in an address celebrating a historic settlement with A&E real estate. While A&E is a serial offender, racking up “over 140,000 total violations, including 35,000 in the last year alone,” Mayor Mamdani made clear that this was to serve as an example for other landlords, saying “City Hall will not sit idly by and accept this illegality, nor will we allow bad actors to continue to harass tenants with impunity.” Mayor Mamdani made tenants rights a central pillar of his campaign and is signaling that it will be a major aspect of his administration as well, with the centerpiece being the “Rental Ripoff” hearings he plans to hold in all five boroughs. Yet again, Mamdani provides a blueprint for other Democratic elected officials in cities across the nation, if only they would pick up the mantle.* In other news out of New York, on January 13th New York State Attorney General Letitia James announced a “settlement ending Betar US’s…campaign of violence, harassment, and intimidation against Arab, Muslim, and Jewish New Yorkers.” Betar, an extremist Zionist outfit, is considered so fringe that even the ultra-Zionist Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has labeled it an “extremist group” for its “embrace of Islamophobia and harass[ment] of Muslims.” Examples of Betar’s bias-motivated harassment include labeling keffiyehs, traditional Palestinian scarves – as “rape rags” and claiming that the number of babies who had died in Gaza was “not enough,” adding, “we demand blood in Gaza.” According to this announcement, Betar is seeking to dissolve its nonprofit corporation and intends to wind down operations in New York. Mayor Mamdani added, “For years, Betar has sowed a campaign of hatred across New York, trafficking in Islamophobic extremism and harassing those with whom they disagreed. There is no place for their bigotry in our politics, and I’m grateful for [Attorney General James’s] unflagging pursuit of justice.”* In more Israel news, earlier this week Israeli human rights lawyer Alon Sapir recounted the following story on social media. “On Saturday, I represented an American Jewish activist in deportation proceedings from the country due to his leftism. In the hearing, they presented him with a photo from a demonstration in the US to link him to anti-Israel organizations.” The photo in question was “taken at a demonstration against the Nazis in Charlottesville [Virginia],” and the Israelis “apparently took it from a page that promotes white supremacy.” This deportation proceeding – wherein the Israeli government used a white-supremacist photograph of an activist protesting Nazism to deport him on the grounds of being anti-Israel, is of course, stunningly backwards. But, as Sapir writes, “Indeed, [this is] grounds for deportation from the Jewish state.” * In more news from abroad, the New York Times reports the People’s Republic of China has hit a new economic milestone: the world’s largest trade surplus ever. According to economic data released by the country’s General Administration of Customs, “China’s surplus, the value of goods and services it sold abroad versus its imports, reached $1.19 trillion, an increase of 20 percent from 2024.” As this piece notes, “The enormous trade surplus…came despite efforts by President Trump to use tariffs to contain China’s factories.” While the tariffs succeeded in reducing China’s trade surplus with the United States by 22% last year, Chinese firms compensated by increasing sales to other regions and “in many cases bypassing American tariffs by shipping goods to the United States through Southeast Asia and elsewhere.” In short, the tariffs have succeeded only in raising prices for American consumers by forcing Chinese firms to route their products through secondary markets instead of selling directly to Americans – further enriching China while further immiserating everyday Americans.* This trade surplus is expected to widen further with news of an economic thaw between China and Canada. AP reports Canada has “agreed to cut its 100% tariff on Chinese electric cars in return for lower tariffs on Canadian farm products,” according to Prime Minister Mark Carney. Carney added that there would initially be an annual cap of 49,000 Chinese EVs coming into the Canadian market at a tariff rate of 6.1%, but this cap would grow to about 70,000 over the next five years. In return, China will “reduce its total tariff on canola seeds, a major Canadian export, from 84% to about 15%,” and allow visa-free travel to China for Canadian citizens, many of whom are of Chinese descent. This deal is obviously a humiliating disaster for President Trump, who sought to both isolate China economically and force Canada to further subjugate itself to the United States, going so far as to muse about annexing the country and making it the “51st state.” Like the Greenland fiasco, this is a case of Trump needlessly alienating American allies, driving them into the open arms of more rational partners like China.* Meanwhile, in South Korea, Al Jazeera reports former Prime Minister Han Duck-soo has been sentenced to 23 years in prison for his role in the failed coup attempt orchestrated by ousted president Yoon Suk-yeol. In a moving statement, Judge Lee Jin-gwan of the Seoul Central District Court, said Han “disregarded his duty and responsibility as prime minister,” and “As a result…South Korea was in danger ​of returning to the dark past ‌when the basic rights and liberal democratic order of the people were violated, potentially preventing them from escaping from the quagmire of dictatorship.” These words sound especially tragic to American ears at this moment, as our country slides ever further away from basic rights and liberal democratic order. Han is “the first member of Yoon’s cabinet to be found guilty and sentenced to jail,” and his sentence gives an indication of how seriously the court is taking this matter. As we discussed last week, prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Yoon himself.* Moving back to American politics, NOTUS reports Congresswoman and Senate hopeful Jasmine Crockett is amassing money from some unsavory donors. These include, “Tech titan and conservative provocateur Marc Andreessen [and] Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss of Facebook fame,” as well as several super PACs funded by the cryptocurrency lobby. Perhaps most damningly though, she has received donations from the PACs for BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, and massive defense contractor Lockheed Martin. Crockett’s acceptance of these donations has sent ripples through the progressive community. Fellow Texas Democratic Congressman Lloyd Doggett called it “very troubling that she would be reliant on those kinds of contributions.” Adam Green, a co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, is quoted in this piece refuting characterizations of Crockett as in line with that group’s preferences, saying “To call her in any way the progressive or leftist candidate is a misnomer...She’s a somewhat effective anti-Trump troll and resistance liberal, but is not one of us when it comes to a progressive populist or anti-corporate warrior.” Green added that his group will likely endorse Crockett’s opponent in the primary, Texas State Representative James Talarico. As of mid-January, Talarico leads Crockett 47% to 38% in the polls, with 15% undecided, per Emerson.* Another red state senate race, this one in Montana, just got more interesting in its own way. According to the Montana Free Press, “University of Montana President Seth Bodnar is expected to run for U.S. Senate as an independent,” which the paper claims is “part of an elaborate plan apparently backed by former U.S. Sen. Jon Tester.” Apparently, this move has angered Montana Democrats, two of whom have fil

With the American republic hanging in the balance, Ralph calls on Democrats to pressure Republicans in the House and Senate to impeach Trump before the midterms or suffer the consequences. Then, we welcome Dino Grandoni, co-author of a Washington Post report on the surprising ways various species of animals and plants help advance our own health and longevity.Dino Grandoni is a reporter who covers life sciences for the Washington Post. He was part of a reporting team that was a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for coverage of Hurricane Helene. He previously covered the Environmental Protection Agency and wrote a daily tipsheet on energy and environmental policy. He is co-author (with Hailey Haymond and Katty Huertas) of the feature “50 Species That Save Us.”The Democrats—while there are people like constitutional law expert Jamie Raskin (who has said a shadow hearing to publicly educate the American people on impeachment “is a good idea”) he’s been muzzled by Hakeem Jeffries and Charlie Schumer, who basically don’t want the Democrats to use the word impeachment. So who’s using the word impeachment the most? Donald Trump—not only wants to impeach judges who decide against him, but he’s talking about the Democrats impeaching him, and he uses the word all the time. So we have an upside-down situation here where the opposition party is not in the opposition on the most critical factor, which is that we have the most impeachable President in American history, getting worse by the day.Ralph NaderIf the founding fathers came back to life today, would any of them oppose the impeachment, conviction, and removal of office of Donald J. Trump, who talks about being a monarch? That’s what they fought King George over. Of course, they would all support it.Ralph NaderWhat we have in these cards and in our stories at the Washington Post here are examples of the ways we know, the ways that scientists have uncovered how plants and animals help us. But we don’t know what we don’t know. There are likely numerous other ways that plants and animals are protecting human well-being that we don’t know and we may very well never know if some of these species go extinct.Dino GrandoniI’m always eager to find these connections between human well-being and the well-being of nature and try to describe them in ways that are compelling to readers that get them to care about protecting nature. And also finding those instances (because I want to be objective here) of when human well-being and the well-being of nature might be in conflict, and that might involve some tough decisions that we as a society or policymakers have to make.Dino GrandoniNews 1/16/25* Our top two stories this week concern corporate wrongdoing. First, Business Insider reports that the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection has released a new report which estimates Uber Eats and DoorDash, by altering their tipping processes in the city – moving tipping prompts to less prominent locations after checkout so upfront delivery costs would appear lower – have deprived gig delivery workers of $550 million since December 2023. As this piece notes, that was the month that New York City’s minimum pay law for delivery workers took effect. As a result, “The average tip for delivery workers on the apps dropped 75%...from $3.66 to $0.93, one week after the apps made the changes…The figure has since declined to $0.76 per delivery.” This report presages a new city law that “requires the apps to offer customers the option to tip before or during checkout. Both Uber and DoorDash have sued the City over the law, which is set to take effect on January 26.” Whether the administration will stick to their guns on this issue, in the face of corporate pressure, will be a major early test for Mayor Zohran Mamdani.* Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports UnitedHealth Group “deployed aggressive tactics to collect payment-boosting diagnoses for its Medicare Advantage members.” As the Journal explains, “In Medicare Advantage, the federal government pays insurers a lump sum to oversee medical benefits for seniors and disabled people. The government pays extra for patients with certain costly medical conditions, a process called risk adjustment.” A new report from the Senate Judiciary Committee found that UnitedHealth had “turned risk adjustment into a business,” thereby exploiting Medicare Advantage and systematically and fraudulently overbilling the federal government. Due to its structure, advocates like Ralph Nader have long warned that Medicare Advantage is ripe for waste fraud and abuse, in addition to being an inferior program for seniors compared to traditional Medicare. This report supports the accuracy of these warnings. Yet, Dr. Mehmet Oz Trump’s appointee to head the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, is a longtime proselytizer for Medicare Advantage and this setback is unlikely to make him reverse course, no matter the cost to patients or taxpayers.* Yet, even as these instances of corporate criminal lawlessness pile up, the Trump administration is all but abolishing the police on the corporate crime beat. In a new report, Rick Claypool, corporate crime research director at Public Citizen, documents how the administration has “canceled or halted a total of 159 enforcement actions against 166 corporations.” This amounts to corporations avoiding payments totaling $3.1 billion in penalties for misconduct. This report further documents how these corporations have ingratiated themselves with Trump, via donations to his inauguration or ballroom project, or more typical revolving door or lobbying arrangements. As Claypool himself puts it, “The ‘law enforcement’ claims the White House uses as a pretext for authoritarian anti-immigrant crackdowns, city occupations, and imperial resource seizures abroad lose all credibility when cast against the lawlessness Trump allows for the pursuit of corporate profits.”* In another instance of a Trump administration giveaway to corporations, the New York Times reports the Environmental Protection Agency will “Stop Considering Lives Saved When Setting Rules on Air Pollution.” Under the new regulatory regime, the EPA will “estimate only the costs to businesses of complying with the rules.” The Times explains that different administrations have balanced these competing interests differently, always faced with the morbid dilemma of how much, in a dollar amount, to value human life; but “until now, no administration has counted it as zero.”* Moving to Congress, the big news from the Legislative Branch this week has to do with Bill and Hillary Clinton. NPR reports Congressman James Comer, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, issued subpoenas to the former president and former Secretary of State to testify in a committee hearing related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In a letter published earlier this week, the Clintons formally rejected the subpoenas, calling them “legally invalid.” The Clintons’ refusal to appear tees up an opportunity for Congress to exercise its contempt power and force the couple to testify. Democrats on the Oversight Committee, who agreed to issue the subpoenas as part of a larger list, have noted that “most of the other people have not been forced to testify,” indicating that this is a political stunt rather than an earnest effort. That said, there is little doubt that, at least, former President Clinton knows more about the Epstein affair than he has stated publicly thus far and there is a good chance Congress will vote through a contempt resolution and force him to testify.* In the Senate, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Murphy and other liberal Senators are “urging their Democratic colleagues to pivot to economic populism by ‘confronting’ corporate power and billionaires, warning that just talking about affordability alone won’t move swing voters who backed President Trump in 2024,” per the Hill. Senators Adam Schiff of California and Tina Smith of Minnesota also signed this memo. The Senators cited a recent poll that found Americans “increasingly cannot afford basic goods such as medical care and groceries,” but they also warned that “Bland policy proposals — without a narrative explaining who is getting screwed and who is doing the screwing – will not work.” Hopefully this forceful urging by fellow Senators will move the needle within the Democratic caucus in the upper house. Nothing else seems to have driven the point home.* One candidate who seems to understand this message is Graham Platner of Maine. Platner, who is endorsed by Bernie Sanders, has a controversial past that includes a career in the Marines and a stint working for the private military contractor Blackwater. However, he is running as a staunch economic populist and New Deal style progressive Democrat – and the message appears to be working. According to Zeteo, a poll conducted in mid-December found Platner up by 15 points in the primary over his opponent, current Governor Janet Mills. More concerning is the fact that this same poll shows both Platner and Mills in a dead heat with incumbent Republican Senator Susan Collins, indicating this could be a brutal, protracted and expensive campaign.* On the other end of the spectrum, Axios reported this week that former Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, who once led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and then served as President Biden’s ambassador to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, has accepted a role as CEO and president of the Coalition for Prediction Markets. The coalition is essentially a trade association for betting websites; members include Kalshi, Crypto.com Robinhood and Coinbase, among others. The coalition will leverage Maloney’s influence with Democrats, along with former Republican Congressman Patrick McHenry’s influence across the aisle, to lobby for favorable regulation for their industry.* Turning to foreign affai

This week we focus on the Trump Administration’s seizure of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro as Ralph welcomes legendary former ambassador, Chas Freeman, who calls it nothing more than a “gas station stick-up.” Then our resident Constitutional scholar, Bruce Fein, lays out some of the legal ramifications of the whole affair.Ambassador Chas Freeman is a retired career diplomat who has negotiated on behalf of the United States with over 100 foreign governments in East and South Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and both Western and Eastern Europe. Ambassador Freeman was previously a Senior Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and Deputy Chief of Mission and Chargé d’Affaires in the American embassies at both Bangkok and Beijing. He was Director for Chinese Affairs at the U.S. Department of State from 1979-1981. He was the principal American interpreter during the late President Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972. In addition to Chinese, Ambassador Freeman speaks French and Spanish at the professional level and can converse in Arabic and several other languages.We have been engaged in murder on the high seas, people who are suspected on flimsy grounds of carrying narcotics. If they are carrying narcotics, it is not to the United States [but] between Venezuela and Trinidad, from which the drugs go to Western Europe and West Africa. We have been guilty of acts of piracy, seizing vessels on the high seas, on the basis of no authority. And (very dangerously) we have seized a Russian-flagged tanker…And we are risking a war with a nuclear-armed superpower over an issue that is peripheral to Venezuela.Ambassador Chas FreemanDomestically, we have a constitutional crisis. We are the most powerful country on the planet, and our domestic constitutional crisis has turned out to be contagious to the international system. And so we’re seeing the disappearance of well-established norms of human behavior, interactions between states. It will not be easy to resurrect those. The precedents we’ve just set could come home to trouble us.Ambassador Chas FreemanI think we have scared everybody around the world. If there is no protection from international law, people will arm themselves as heavily as they can to defend themselves. So diplomacy is not prospering in this environment. And I would just conclude by saying that the Trump administration has more than decimated our diplomatic service. About one third of the diplomatic service has left or is in the process of leaving public service of the government. So they join scientists and engineers in trying to bail out from what they consider to be an increasingly intolerable situation. Not a happy picture.Ambassador Chas FreemanBruce 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 fact is, if you read the NATO Charter Article 5—I think right now we’ve got 32 members of NATO, and 31 countries would be obliged to take up war and arms against the United States. [The United States’ intervention in Venezuela] is an invasion. It’s every bit as much of an invasion as Hitler going into the Sudetenland after Munich. Everybody knows this isn’t going to be a voluntary secession. If it isn’t by military conquest, it’ll be by coercion, by threats. So we may be at war with all the other NATO members. That’s why I liken this to the Napoleonic Era when France and Napoleon were against all of Europe. He had no allies anymore, and I think we will have no allies either. Bruce FeinNews 1/9/25* Our top story this week is, of course, the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Maduro, who has served as president of the Bolivarian Republic since 2013, was abducted from his home, along with his wife, by the Fort Bragg-based Delta Force squadron. Maduro was then transported to New York and is now being held in detention pending trial. Before getting into the fallout of this operation, it is critical to note the complicity of the mainstream press. Semafor reports, “The New York Times and Washington Post learned of a secret US raid on Venezuela soon before it was scheduled to begin Friday night — but held off publishing what they knew.” The preeminent American newspapers justified their decision to withhold this critical information from the public by claiming that publishing what they knew could have endangered American soldiers. This decision however raises longstanding questions about what the role of the media should be in national security matters. Is it their responsibility to protect American forces as they carry out legally dubious missions? Or is it their responsibility to inform the public of their own government’s shadowy operations if they might endanger all Americans?* Meanwhile, the future of Venezuela appears deeply uncertain. Despite pressure from the Venezuelan exile community to install one of their own to lead the country, such as Maria Corina Machado, Trump has shown little interest in this path, saying Machado “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country,” per Reuters. Instead, he has so far supported the elevation of Vice President Delcy Rodríguez. Rodríguez, who has been “likened…to a sort of Venezuelan Deng Xiaoping,” according to NBC, has sought to court Trump in the past and it seems that for the time being at least, he is content to keep her in place so long as she is willing to accede to the demands of the American oil companies.* Whatever the long-term outlook for Venezuela in general, this incident is sure to have certain short-term consequences. At the administration level, this operation was seen as a rousing success and is likely to embolden them to attempt similar operations in other countries deemed adversarial. The Hill reports Trump said “Colombia…[is] Run by a sick man,” referring to Colombian President Gustavo Petro, but won’t be for “very long.” Similarly, he remarked that “We’re going to have to do something [about Mexico].” Cuba, he said, is “ready to fall.” South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, traveling with Trump, added that Cuba’s days are “numbered.” It remains to be seen how far Trump will go with regime change operations in these sovereign nations, but the success of the Maduro abduction makes each one – and the inevitable blowback from these actions – that much more likely.* Beyond Latin America, Trump is again pressing for an American annexation of Greenland. According to the BBC, the administration is discussing “a range of options” including military force. Ironically, the White House is claiming that the acquisition of Greenland – a semi-autonomous region of Denmark – is a “national security priority,” despite Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s warning that any attack would mean the end of NATO, rattling the foundations of U.S. international security architecture. Nevertheless, Trump has continuously returned to the idea of annexing Greenland, so do not count on this quietly fading away, consequences be damned.* Moving to domestic politics, the AP reports the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the private entity created in 1967 to shepherd public funding to PBS, NPR and hundreds of public television and radio stations across the country, has voted to dissolve itself. The CPB has been under heavy assault by the Trump administration, which pushed Congress to defund the entity last year. Patricia Harrison, the organization’s president and CEO, is quoted saying “CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks.” With the shuttering of CPB, the future of public media hangs in the balance. It will be up to the next Congress to restore funding, or allow these cherished institutions to fall into the dustbin of history.* Alongside the federal assault on public media, the federal government continues its assaults on public health. The New York Times reports Jim O’Neill, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has “announced dramatic revisions to the slate of vaccines recommended for American children,” drawing down the number from 17 to just 11. The six vaccines on the chopping block, those for hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningococcal disease, rotavirus, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus – which, the Times notes, is the “leading cause of hospitalization in American infants,” – will only be recommended for some high-risk groups. Meanwhile, the New York Post reports Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, has unveiled new federal guidelines recommending alcohol use. Dr. Oz is quoted saying “Alcohol is a social lubricant that brings people together…it does allow people an excuse to bond and socialize, and there’s probably nothing healthier than having a good time with friends in a safe way.” He added that the takeaway should be, “Don’t have it for breakfast.” Given the well documented health risks of alcohol consumption, it is difficult to see this as anything besides a sop to the alcohol industry.* In more local news, the primary race between incumbent Congressman Dan Goldman and former Comptroller Brad Lander in New York’s 10th congressional district is turning into nothing short of a proxy war between different factions within the Democratic Party. Goldman, who officially announced his reelection bid this week, was immediately endorsed by New York Governor Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, per the New York Daily News. Lander on the oth

Steve, David, Hannah, Jimmy, Matthew. and Francesco give Ralph a well-deserved break and highlight some of the clips they want to revisit from another challenging, inspiring, fascinating, infuriating, and galvanizing year. Featuring interviews with Chris Hedges, Jon Merryman, Mike German, and more.Featured ClipsDouglas Brinkley — The Legacy of Jimmy Carter (January 11, 2025)Chris Hedges — A Genocide Foretold/ World BEYOND War (March 29, 2025)Peter Beinart — Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza (March 15, 2025)John Bonifaz — Impeach Trump!... Again (August 30, 2025)Mike German — Policing White Supremacy (March 8, 2025)Stephen Witt — The AI Prompt That Could End the World (November 8, 2025)Jon Merryman — Trading Life For Death (July 12, 2025)News 1/2/26* Our top story this week is of course the news that the CIA has conducted a drone strike inside the sovereign borders of Venezuela. CNN reports U.S. Special Operations Forces provided intelligence support for this strike, though spec-ops leadership denies this claim. Unsurprisingly, the CIA itself declined to comment. Earlier this month, self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth compared Venezuelan “narcoterrorists,” to Al-Qaeda, indicating that the U.S. plans to use the same counterterrorism playbook that they deployed in the Middle East in Latin America. This, of course, begs the question of whether the United States is willing to reckon with creating a miniature Iraq or Afghanistan so close to home.* Giving the game away, Mike Pompeo – who served as Trump’s Secretary of State from 2018 to 2021, told Fox News that the U.S. “can help rebuild…their oil sector,” and that, following a successful ouster of President Nicolás Maduro, American energy companies like Halliburton and Chevron would be able to “go down to Venezuela, [and] build out an economic capitalist model.” This from CBS Austin. President Trump has certainly not been subtle about his designs on Venezuela’s oil, but this naked salivation over handing the country’s fossil fuel deposits over to Halliburton is another eerie re-rerun of Iraq.* In more news from Latin America, ABC reports workers in Bolivia have declared a general strike to protest the new neoliberal government’s announcement that they would scrap longstanding fuel subsidies in the impoverished nation. The fuel subsidies were first introduced under the Leftist government of Evo Morales nearly twenty years ago and have been maintained ever since; President Rodrigo Paz, who took office in November, marks the first non-leftist government elected in the country since 2006. The strike was called by Bolivia’s powerful Central Union of Workers, but so far has largely been led by miners with other sectors, such as transportation workers, appearing more hesitant. When united, organized labor in Bolivia has delivered stunning victories in the past, but it remains to be seen how this strike will unfold.* In more foreign policy news, Israel has become the first country to formally recognize the East African breakaway state of Somaliland. Many question why Israel is making this decision at all and particularly why they are doing so at this moment; speculation abounds about a potential quid pro quo, with Israel extending recognition in exchange for Somaliland agreeing to accept Palestinians pushed out of Gaza. Somalia is currently a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. In a statement with other non-permanent council members Algeria, Guyana and Sierra Leone, Somalia’s UN Ambassador Abukar Dahir Osman said Somalia, “unequivocally reject any steps aimed at advancing this objective, including any attempt by Israel to relocate the Palestinian population from Gaza to the northwestern region of Somalia.” This from Reuters.* In more Israel-Palestine news, American Jewish activist Cameron Kasky – a survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting currently running in the primary to succeed Rep. Jerrold Nadler in New York’s 12th congressional district – took the unprecedented step of visiting Palestine over the holidays to see the “reality on the ground.” He spent Christmas at a “peace march in Bethlehem calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza,” and issued a statement on the need to “end the settlements that violate international law and stop encouraging New Yorkers to move there,” in a social media post that garnered nearly 2 million views. Kasky is seeking to consolidate progressive support in this crowded primary, which pits him against Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg, among many others.* Turning to domestic news, lawmakers in the House and Senate are considering their options to force Attorney General Pam Bondi to release the totality of the documents related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Among these are two tools often cited by Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein but rarely invoked by Congress: inherent contempt and impeachment. Per NBC, Representative Thomas Massie said “The quickest way, and…most expeditious way, to get justice for these victims is to bring inherent contempt against Pam Bondi,” with Congressman Ro Khanna adding that the lawmakers are “building a bipartisan coalition, and it would fine Pam Bondi for every day that she’s not releasing these documents.” Meanwhile, Newsweek reports Massie polled his followers and over 35,000 responded that Bondi should be impeached. However, no articles of impeachment against Bondi have yet been filed. It remains to be seen whether Congress will actually use the immense power vested in the body by the Constitution, or if these efforts will be stymied by the obsequious leadership of the Republican caucus.* Speaking of political party cowardice, this week the DNC announced that they would block the release of their own “autopsy” of what went wrong in the disastrous 2024 presidential election campaign. Writing in the Guardian, friend of the show Norman Solomon – director of RootsAction, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy – excoriated the party leadership for dodging hard questions such as “how much money went to insider consultants and advertising contractors as the Harris campaign managed to spend $1.5bn during the hallowed 107 days of her presidential campaign last year,” and the wisdom of “Harris continuing to toe the Biden line for huge arms shipments to Israel while its military continued to slaughter Palestinian civilians in Gaza.” More bluntly, an anonymous DNC member quoted in this piece said the decision to block the autopsy is, “about protecting people who fucked up.” RootsAction has released their own autopsy, which pulls no punches.* Our next two stories have to do with online gambling. First, in an address to mayors from across Italy this week, Pope Leo XIV denounced the “scourge of gambling,” which has “ruined many families,” and characterized the issue as a form of “loneliness.” He warned of a litany of other forms of loneliness as well, including “mental disorders, depression, cultural and spiritual poverty, and social abandonment,” according to the Catholic News Agency. Pope Leo cited a report from Caritas showing a surge in gambling across Italy, though this phenomenon is by no means constrained to the country. In the U.S., study after study shows Americans engaging in gambling at unprecedented levels. For example, a 2025 National Institutes of Health study showed 61.3% of adults in North America reported gambling within the past 12 months.* Meanwhile, USA Today reports Drake has been hit with a RICO lawsuit for “promoting an illegal online casino while using proceeds from the site to artificially inflate streams of his music.” This lawsuit, which also names streamers Adin Ross and George Nguyen, centers around Stake.us, which, the suit alleges “was created to bypass restrictions after Stake.com was banned from operating everywhere in the U.S.” As this piece explains, Stake claims that it does not allow gambling with real money in order to evade regulations, but in fact uses stand-ins like “Stake Cash” which can be exchanged for real currency. Drake and Ross were “paid to promote the platform by participating in livestreamed gambling with cash ‘surreptitiously’ provided by Stake.” In turn, Drake is accused of using the illicit funds to “[deploy] automated bots and streaming farms to artificially inflate play counts of his music across major platforms, such as Spotify,” as part of his feud with fellow rapper Kendrick Lamar. If nothing else, this story shows how ubiquitous online gambling has become, infecting all facets and all levels of popular culture.* Finally, for some good news, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was sworn in at midnight on New Years Eve. Mamdani took the oath of office in the decommissioned subway station underneath City Hall, in a small ceremony, followed by a large public inauguration on New Years Day. In his Executive Order 01, Mamdani officially rescinded “All Executive Orders issued on or after September 26, 2024,” otherwise known as the date of outgoing Mayor Eric Adams’ indictment on charges of corruption. These now-rescinded executive orders included officially adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, a definition which includes antizionism, and other pro-Israel actions. That said, Mamdani explicitly stated he will retain an order establishing a Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism. Others include an order allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to operate on Riker’s Island, and a blanket ban on the city’s horse carriage industry. The New York Daily News notes “Mamdani has voiced support for banning the industry, but says he first wants to engage in dialogue with the union advocating for carriage drivers.” All in all, this marks the beginning of a new chapter in the history of America’s largest city. We wish the city, and the mayor, good luck.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohou

We welcome Sam Rosenthal, political director of Roots Action, to analyze their “Autopsy” report on why in 2024 the Democratic Party lost to the worst, most corrupt GOP in American history. Plus, Ralph answers some of your listener questions.Sam Rosenthal is an organizer and researcher who serves as Political Director at RootsAction.We’re talking about young voters, voters of color in major urban centers and college towns who looked at their choices last year (2024), looked at the candidates in the way the Democratic Party had conducted business and said, “I don’t really see anyone here who’s representing my best interests.” So it’s not that these folks necessarily went and voted for Donald Trump (although some did) or voted third party (although some did). But by and large, people just didn’t come out and vote. They were not inspired. They were not galvanized. And they didn’t see how it would benefit their material interests to come out and support the Democratic Party as they had in 2020. So that’s the ballgame, basically. It’s incredibly hard to come back from a nearly 7 million vote drop from Presidential cycle to Presidential cycle. And everything else that we point to in this report, I think, is a bit secondary to that top line.Sam RosenthalOne of the reasons we wanted to write this report is because we haven’t seen a similar type of reflection from the DNC, from anyone inside the Democratic Party apparatus. There’s reporting that there’s some kind of autopsy underway inside the DNC. But the subsequent reporting was that there was so much infighting about who’s looking bad, which sect of consultant-types looks bad in that report and which comes out on top that it became too rancorous. It’s not clear that they’re going to release that report. We think this is complete political malpractice. If you can’t have an assessment by the party of what went wrong, they are doomed to run a similar campaign in 2028.Sam Rosenthal Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph welcomes RJ Cross from USPIRG to discuss the Trouble in Toyland 2025 report. Then, Ralph speaks with truck safety activist Marianne Karth about the need for stronger truck safety regulation. Plus, the RNRH team has a spirited debate about spectator sports.R.J. Cross is the Director of the Our Online Life program, Don’t Sell My Data campaign, and U.S. PIRG Education Fund. Her work as a writer and researcher ranges from the risks of commercialization of personal data, to consumer harms like scams and data breaches, to emerging threats from AI. In her work as a Policy Analyst at Frontier Group, she has authored research reports on government transparency, consumer debt and predatory auto lending, and has testified before Congress.A lot of the toys we found either claim to be or are using one of OpenAI’s chatbots. Even though OpenAI has said that its products are not for kids under the age of 13—but they’re allowing their chatbots to be used in toys, which are products by definition for children. So there’s a real discrepancy here. OpenAI’s just not taking nearly as much responsibility for these failures as we think they should be. And then the toymakers are clearly just moving way too fast and really are not putting out products that are ready for primetime.R.J. CrossThat’s what the attitude has been: we put it out, we watch what happens, and then we make adjustments as the public or as regulators demand it to happen. So I think that dynamic is terrible. I think it’s really harmful. We’d much rather we see the precautionary principle—which is where a company should take safety really, really seriously up front and do more holistic testing before it releases to the public. But so far, that’s not really the attitude you see, especially in Silicon Valley.R.J. CrossFor as challenging as working with Congress is these days (and even as across the political spectrum it’s hard to find something to agree on) I think “AI-powered teddy bears should not talk to your kids about sex” has been very effective. Everyone can be on the same page about that, right? And so it’s been really fun to get to talk to all sorts of decisionmakers and media outlets, who—everyone wants to tell the same story that this is not okay and big tech isn’t taking safety seriously. Everyone agrees on that.R.J. CrossMarianne Karth graduated from the University of Michigan School of Public Health with an MPH in Health Behavior and Health Education in 1979. She worked for a variety of nonprofit organizations in program administration before raising and teaching her nine children at home. After losing two of her daughters in a car crash in 2013, Karth and her husband, Jerry Karth, became involved in advocacy for safer trucks and changes to truck underride regulations.There’s often a “blame the victim” [narrative] that goes on and [policymakers] say it’s not their responsibility. And they’ll say it’s often the fault of the four-wheeler. They basically do not want to take responsibility for it. And part of the problem is that for underride protection, it’s not like crash-worthy features like seatbelts or airbags that are on the vehicle that’s being protected. It’s on the vehicle that we collide with. By the way, when an underride occurs, it cancels out all the effectiveness of all those crash-worthy features built into cars.Marianne KarthUnderride deaths are very undercounted because there’s not even a checkbox in most state crash report forms for underride. So it’s very undercounted, but there are, at minimum, 600 per year. That is how many passenger car occupant deaths there are. But many types of road users should be counted as well — pedestrians , bicyclists, and motorscyclists. That would be 1760 underride deaths per year. And this is a known, unreasonable risk. And engineers who love to solve problems—they’ve solved the problem. They know how to solve the problem. So it’s a preventable problem.Marianne KarthFor years we’ve been urging our listeners to form these Congress watchdog groups. It can start small and build from a letterhead, really get the attention of their members, summon their members to town meetings created by the citizenry with their own agenda, and confront their Senators and Representatives directly… See what you can do in your congressional district. No one can stop you from doing that, for heaven’s sake. You always have to start the struggle for justice in ways that nobody can stop you.Ralph Nader Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph once again welcomes Chuck Collins, heir to the Oscar Meyer fortune and one of the founders of Patriotic Millionaires, to discuss his agenda for reform outlined in his new book BURNED BY BILLIONAIRES: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. Then Sarah Moskowitz, Executive Director of the Citizens Utility Board of Illinois (CUB), joins us to tell us how to fight back against AI data centers that are spiking your electric bills.Chuck Collins directs the Charity Reform Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he also co-edits Inequality.org. He co-founded the Patriotic Millionaires and United for a Fair Economy, and he is the author of Born on Third Base and The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions. His new book is Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet.There’s a number of examples of how we could create a decency floor that many societies have (including, obviously, Canada) that you can’t fall below those levels. Same with education, access to education. These are universal opportunity programs that good societies maintain. You raise the floor and you create a level playing field. But the reality is we’re not going to get any of those if we don’t address this concentration of wealth and power, which is essentially blocking us from moving toward these reforms we’re talking about.Chuck CollinsSarah Moskowitz is Executive Director of the Citizens Utility Board, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group with the mission to fight for the rights of customers of investor-owned electric, gas and telecom utilities across Illinois.That’s part of what we’re really proud of here at CUB Illinois is that you can reach a human. You might have to leave a message, but we will call you back and answer your questions and then talk through what’s really going on.Sarah MoskowitzA lot of our work at CUB is just helping people connect the dots behind the policies that are resulting in these really high bills. It’s shrouded in mystery and it’s dry. It’s boring. You don’t want to think about it after you’ve been working all day. And that’s why we’re here—to keep tabs on all that stuff and help illuminate that for folks…And it’s a moving target. Things are happening at the state level. Things are happening at the federal level. And so when you’re looking at your bill, it’s a culmination of a whole spectrum of jurisdictions and a whole spectrum of regulators making decisions, each having an impact on what you pay every month in a different way. And it’s quite overwhelming.Sarah MoskowitzMore Show Notes:CUB ProjectUtility Consumers Action NetworkCub Model Law Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph welcomes Judith Enck (founder and president of Beyond Plastics, whose goal is to eliminate plastic pollution everywhere) to discuss her new book “The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late.” Then, Ralph reflects on the 60th anniversary of “Unsafe at Any Speed.”Judith Enck is the founder and president of Beyond Plastics, whose goal is to eliminate plastic pollution everywhere. In 2009, she was appointed by President Obama to serve as regional administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and served as deputy secretary for the environment in the New York Governor’s Office. She is currently a professor at Bennington College, where she teaches classes on plastic pollution. She is co-author (with Adam Mahoney) of The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late.I support recycling…But the sad reality is that plastic recycling has been an abysmal failure. Always has, always will be…You cannot really accomplish high levels of recycling with plastics because you would literally have to do hundreds, if not thousands of different sorting. The people who know this the most are the plastic manufacturers. Yet they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars confusing and deceiving the public into thinking: “Don’t worry about all your plastic, just toss it in your recycling bin,” knowing that most plastic never gets recycled.Judith EnckA lot of people feel overwhelmed and that it’s hopeless and what can one person do? And that fails to acknowledge that the reason we’re not making more progress on climate change is because of the political power of fossil fuel companies. On the plastics issue, we’re taking on fossil fuel, chemical, and consumer brand companies and plastics companies. So it’s a lot. It’s amazing we get anything done. But people around the country are coming together and they’re getting victories.Judith EnckI do think if you start paying attention to plastic in your own life, you see that there are alternatives. And then you climb the civic ladder. So you try to reduce plastic in your own home. Then you look at your kid’s school. Then you look at your faith community. Then before you know it, you’re at your city council asking what can the city do to reduce plastics. You’re going to get a couple victories there. And then you find the statewide environmental groups that are working on this. This is for the long haul.Judith EnckThe important thing about [Unsafe at Any Speed] now is: sure, it saved millions of lives and the laws are still on the books, and even Donald Trump can’t tear seatbelts and airbags out of our cars. But if we tried to do this again today, it wouldn’t happen. And that’s because the concentration of corporate power over Congress and the media is so much more intense now. And it’s also because the decline of civic institutions and democratic institutions has been very pronounced over the last few decades. And that is sobering us up.Ralph NaderNews 12/5/251. Our top stories this week are on Venezuela. First, the BBCis out with a report on the American military build-up around the Latin American nation, which includes “air and naval forces…a nuclear-powered submarine and spy planes...a range of aircraft carriers, guided-missile destroyers, and amphibious assault ships capable of landing thousands of troops.” So far, the Trump administration has sent mixed messages on whether they plan to launch a full-scale invasion of the Bolivarian Republic, but Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro shows no signs of stepping down without a fight, having declared a “massive mobilisation” of 200,000 military personnel throughout the country. Most ominously, on November 29th, President Trump declared Venezuela’s sovereign airspace closed, per the Wall Street Journal.2. However, American bellicosity towards Venezuela is unpopular at home. A CBS poll found that only 30% of Americans would favor the U.S. taking military action in Venezuela, compared to a whopping 70% opposed. Another question in this same poll found that only 13% of Americans consider Venezuela a “major threat” with 48% considering the country a “minor threat” and 39% report they don’t think Venezuela is a threat at all. Unfortunately, the lack of popular support for war is unlikely to constrain the Trump administration much, but it is a notable difference from the lead-up to the Iraq War, when 70% of Americans favored an invasion. The American people want peace, even if the government does not. 3. Another key detail from the CBS poll is that “Three in four Americans…say Trump would need congressional approvalbefore taking military action in Venezuela, including just over half of Republicans.” In light of this fact, it is significant that a bipartisan group in Congress is pushing a War Powers resolution to “block strikes on Venezuela,” per the Intercept. This new push in the House is sponsored by stalwart progressive Congressman Jim McGovern and co-sponsored by dissident Republican Thomas Massie along with other progressives like Reps. Ro Khanna, Lloyd Doggett, and Joaquin Castro, among others. As the Intercept piece notes, this resolution must be acted on in the House within 15 days, but by then the administration may have already acted, pre-empting the resolution. A similar resolution has also been introduced in the Senate, primarily backed by Senators Tim Kaine and Rand Paul, with backing from other Senate Democrats, per the Hill.4. Of course, American aggression towards Venezuela is reverberating out into the international community in myriad ways. Generally speaking, while United Nations officials decry the actions, America’s European allies have kept quiet – with many speculating that these countries would prefer Maduro’s ouster in order to get ready access to Venezuelan oil and decrease their dependence on Russia. China however, has issued a stiff condemnation of American actions. The Iranian Students News Agencyquotes Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lin Jian’s statement at a Beijing press conference, which where in he stated, “China opposes any action that violates the purposes and principles of the UN Charter or infringes upon the sovereignty and security of other countries…[and] opposes foreign forces interfering in Venezuela’s internal affairs under any pretext.” He added, “We urge all parties to keep the Latin American and Caribbean region a peaceful zone and not allow the situation to escalate further.” However, beyond these condemnations, it remains unclear what, if anything, China will do to check American aggression.5. Despite all of this however, House Democratic leadership is typically feckless. In a corollary to the increasing likelihood of strikes against Venezuela directly, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has stepped up the campaign of striking boats off the country’s coast. Recently, the Washington Post revealed that after a strike in September which left survivors clinging to life, Hegseth ordered a second strike, directing Admiral Frank Bradley to “kill everybody.” This revelation led to calls for House Democrats to pursue impeachment against Hegseth on charges that he violated the laws of war. However, Axiosreports House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will not pursue a Hegseth impeachment. While true that such a push would likely be DOA, it sends a dark signal that the administration can do something like this and face virtually zero official condemnation. 6. Nevertheless, Republicans have taken such unpopular actions that it seems Democrats will retake the House, perhaps by a wide margin, in the 2026 midterms – or perhaps before. So far, 31 House Republicans have announced they will not seek re-election, with some retiring and others running for other offices. Still others however are signaling that they will resign their offices before the midterms, shaving the slim House GOP majority ever slimmer. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has announced she will retire in January 2026. Now, Congresswoman Nancy Mace is reportedly considering resigning early as well, though she has denied such rumors, per KOMO News. Either way, Democrats should be taking this moment to prepare an agenda for if and when they retake control of the chamber. 7. Turning to consumer protection news, Jalopnik reports Senate Republicans are seeking to rollback decades of automobile safety regulations. In a recent hearing held by the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation ostensibly to put the CEOs of the Big Three American car manufacturers, as well as Tesla, on the record as to why cars have become so expensive, Republicans on the committee used the opportunity to blame safety regulations. Jalopnik notes that Republican Senators specifically targeted “automated emergency braking, the requirements for which will not come into effect until 2029 and have no bearing on current car prices…[and] back-seat alarms to remind you if you’ve left a child or pet back there. According to Kids and Car Safety, since 1990 at least 1,165 children have sweltered to death in hot cars, and another 7,500 survived with varying degrees of injury.” The cost of these sensors will amount to about $50 per vehicle. In short, while there are many reasons cars have become considerably more expensive in recent years – including everything from tariffs to data centers buying up all electronic parts – blaming safety regulations is a tired canard. 8. Meanwhile, RFK Jr. is moving to kill a proposed Food and Drug Administration rule to test for asbestos in talc-based cosmetics, the Guardian reports. As this report notes, cosmetics companies have known about potential asbestos contamination of talc since the 1950s, but that fact, like so many other corporate secrets, was suppressed, only coming to light in the 1970s. Asbestos is a highly carcinogenic substance. It has been banned in over 50 countries and “No…level of exposure is considered safe.” However, attempts to

Ralph welcomes distinguished educators Dr. Tina Ellsworth and Kelly McFarland Stratman of the National Council for the Social Studies to discuss how our democracy depends on our children learning the civic tools of social studies. Then, civic legend Lois Gibbs, who exposed the Love Canal toxic dump that was poisoning families in her area and then went on to found a national organization to help other ordinary people fight toxic exposure joins us to update us on her latest campaigns.Kelly Stratman is the Executive Director of National Council for the Social Studies. Ms. Stratman’s career began in education, first teaching English to middle and high school students in Japan, and later as a classroom teacher for kindergarten and 4th grade in Ohio and Massachusetts. Currently, she serves as vice chair of AFS-USA, a nonprofit that promotes global citizenship and intercultural learning through international exchange.Dr. Tina Ellsworth is president of the National Council for the Social Studies. Dr. Ellsworth is currently an assistant professor at Northwest Missouri State University. Dr. Ellsworth is also an assistant professor of social studies education at the University of Central Missouri. Her research interests center on history education, pedagogical content knowledge for teaching history, and teaching with primary sources. She is currently a co-writer and co-editor for a book on teaching with primary sources expected to be released in fall 2026.The emphasis at certain levels of education and government is on STEM, computer skills, learning about AI. And of course, these are just tools to use or misuse. They are taught by asking the question: how? And the social studies ask the question: why? Much more fundamental, much more portentous in order to make sure that these tools are wisely used—or, at times, not used at all.Ralph NaderI hardly remember my physics and chemistry courses. Why? Because they were sterile. For example, in the physics course, while we learned about equations, et cetera, we never applied physics to anything in the community. We never studied the weather, for example. In the chemistry course, we never studied the drinking water. We had two dirty rivers and a very clean reservoir up on a hill, and it was never part of it. It was just studying the periodic table.Ralph NaderThe important thing for us to realize is that these different subject areas in schools are not mutually exclusive. In order to do STEM well, you need social studies and need the ability to make good decisions. You need the ability to critically interrogate any kind of sources that you might be encountering and ultimately do things with your work to make the world a better place. That is all social studies skills that we’re talking about. Helping kids to become critical thinkers, to really ask good questions I think is really important. And thinking about students more than just their future career, but really preparing students for this civic life too.Dr. Tina EllsworthTeachers right now are a little bit fearful about teaching anything that is focused on civics. They’re uncertain about where the project could go when you give kids the agency to be able to do that, or how the community might respond with what students are doing. Sometimes members of the public may even say, “Oh, you’re turning students into activists.” As if having students engage in their community to make it better is something that’s bad. So I don’t quite understand a lot of that vernacular that’s being thrown around as having kids care about their community is a bad thing. So I think we need to do more to take charge of the narrative and to help better connect the parents and the people in the community with the school and with the kids to see how we can all do this better.Dr. Tina EllsworthWhen we think about how important our students are, how important education is, how that funding happens and where that funding happens—it is all at that local level. And so when we think about how we can get engaged and what we can do, just as everyday citizens, we can be those role models. Where we are getting engaged, where we are asking the questions ourselves of our communities, where we’re taking those best practices that we learned in our social studies classes and we’re putting them out there. And statistics show that when you take your child with you, when you go to vote at a very young age, that becomes a habit for them. So we’re the models for our students, whether we’re in the classroom, whether we’re a parent, whether we’re a neighbor, or just a member of the community, we need to be the advocates that we want to see happen.Kelly StratmanThis is why we are such strong advocates for this inquiry-based approach. Because it gives students the tools they need to navigate [technology], whether they’re trying to pull apart things in the virtual space or in real life. These are important skillsets that they can use as they go forward—not just take things that are given to them and just walk away without questioning it, but really feeling empowered to stop and evaluate and have the tools at their disposal to be able to do a really thoughtful evaluation.Kelly StratmanLois Gibbs is the founder of the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, a project of People’s Action Institute. In 1978 she blew the whistle on Love Canal after learning her kindergartener’s school was built on a toxic dump. Her work led to the creation of Superfund.[The central role of women in the environmental movement] is not dead yet, by the way. That movement is still alive and well. And they’re participating in many other things that are happening today like the No Kings rallies…They’re extraordinary people who learned how to fight this battle not from a book, not from television, but from the seat of their pants. And what was really clear in 1980 and is still clear to me today is that if the people decide that change is needed and they gather together and they organize around it, it doesn’t matter whether Democrats or Republicans are in office. It doesn’t matter who has power. They can create that change. And that’s what we really need in this country.Lois GibbsWhen you think about the national policies that have been set around the environmental movement (the environmental health movement and the environmental movement), all of that came from grassroots efforts.Lois Gibbs[The philosophy we have] is not to build an office with 15 people and do a top-down kind of organizing, but build and train hubs of people all across the country to come together and fight locally. Because when the local people move, so will the Congress, so will corporate America. Because they have no choice. I mean, you saw what we did with Target. Oh my goodness. Target rolled over on everything. Disney rolled over on everything. Because when the people say “We’re not playing this way anymore”, then the corporations and Congress will roll over.Lois Gibbs Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe