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Ralph Nader Radio Hour

Ralph Nader Radio Hour

By: Ralph Nader
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Ralph Nader talks about what’s happening in America, what’s happening around the world, and most importantly what’s happening underneath it all.

www.ralphnaderradiohour.comRalph Nader Political Science Politics & Government
Episodes
  • How To Save $1 Trillion!

    How To Save $1 Trillion!
    10 Oct 2026
    Ralph welcomes Dr. Alison Galvani, the founding director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis, and co-author of the forthcoming article, “Projected Economic Gains and Lives Saved Under Universal Health Care in the United States.” Then our constitutional law expert, Bruce Fein, stops by to tell us about a letter he and Ralph sent to states Attorneys General urging them to prosecute Donald Trump for exhorting his followers to commit voter fraud in the forthcoming midterm congressional elections. Finally, we respond to your feedback on how to be a smart voter.Alison Galvani is the founding director of the Yale Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis and the Burnett and Stender Families Professor of Epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, Yale School of Medicine. She has applied her modelling and health economics skills to address public health challenges including HIV/AIDS, Zika, Ebola, influenza, and COVID-19. And she is co-author of the forthcoming article “Projected economic gains and lives saved under universal healthcare in the United States.”We analyze the American healthcare system as a national balance sheet. And on one side of the ledger, we have: covering the uninsured and expanding care for the uninsured (that costs money). And we took into account that utilization will increase for people that currently have inadequate health care… And when we initially started looking at this in 2019…I anticipated a hefty price tag as well. Our work has focused on the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of public health policy in the US and around the world, and usually we’re asking: How much will it cost to save lives? And we rarely get a no-brainer where you save money and you’re saving lives.Alison GalvaniCurrently, no country spends more on health care than America (even though millions of Americans are completely uninsured and many more have inadequate insurance). And despite spending so much, we trail dozens of nations in life expectancy, infant survival, maternal mortality, and deaths that timely medical care should prevent. The prevailing issue is that even though we’re spending so much, a lot of the money we’re spending isn’t going to health care delivery itself. So much of it is extracted by for-profit insurance companies and directed away from care towards shareholders. There’s a misalignment of incentives—insurers make more profit when health care is denied. So, Americans are literally forfeiting their health so that corporate shareholders can make more money. And that’s just the architecture of our current health care system by having for-profit companies at so many junctures, even beyond the health care insurers.Alison GalvaniPeople are dying not because their conditions couldn’t be prevented or treated, but because they couldn’t afford to see a doctor or fill their prescriptions. People without health insurance are more likely to die than insured people of the same age—that’s been empirically shown. So we took those empirical parameters and we applied that increased risk to the uninsured population in each age group, and then the difference between the deaths we have and the deaths we would be able to avert under universal health care coverage is more than 114,000 lives a year, we estimated. And last year’s Big Beautiful Bill, with its health care retractions, will only exacerbate the toll.Alison GalvaniBruce 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 US Supreme Court] issued this very broad immunity theory that Presidents have immunity from criminal prosecution for discharging Constitutional responsibilities entrusted to the President. And this was way outside that scope because it relates to Mr. Trump’s activity as the head of the Republican Party, trying to promote results in Congressional campaigns. And to the extent there’s any federal role in Congressional campaigns, it’s entrusted to Congress, not the President…Trump should not be subject to any different standard than any citizen who would likewise make such a claim of fraud. I can guarantee you, if you had a Democrat stand up and say, “Democrats should take a pledge to commit fraud, vote even if you’re not registered,” there’d be a grand jury at the federal level summoned within 24 hours. And why should it be any different with Mr. Trump—by state attorneys general, who have the same authority and requirement to enforce state laws against fraud at the state level as the President does at the federal level?Bruce FeinAction Alert!Call or write your state’s Attorney General about the following...September 15, 2026Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, President, National Association of ...
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    1 hr and 39 min
  • American Doctor

    American Doctor
    3 Oct 2026
    Ralph speaks to Dr. Feroze Sidhwa for an update on the death toll in Gaza as well as the new documentary film “American Doctor.” Then Ralph and economic William Lazonick discuss Nvidia’s planned $235 billion stock buyback.Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a general, trauma, and critical care surgeon in California. He is also a humanitarian surgeon who has worked in Palestine, Ukraine, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Burkina Faso. He most recently volunteered at Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Younis, Gaza. He was blocked from entering Gaza by Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service in November 2025. His work in Gaza is featured in the new documentary film American Doctor.If I’m remembering the exact time right, March of 2016 was the deadliest month for children that [Airwars] had ever studied anywhere—so that’s the 31 days of March of 2016. In the first 25 days of the US-Israeli assault on Gaza, the rate of killing of children was 71 to 142 times higher than in the deadliest month they had ever studied for children anywhere else. And just to put these numbers in a little bit of perspective…If you look at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine versus Israel’s invasion of Gaza, Russian forces killed the same percentage of children in Ukraine in 10 months as the US and Israel kill in Gaza every 18 to 37 hours.Dr. Feroze SidhwaI want to emphasize to people that [American Doctor] is not a gory movie. This movie is nothing— Saving Private Ryan is a much bloodier movie than this. But nevertheless, this movie is a tough watch sometimes because the things you see (like what [Dr. Mark Perlmutter] shows at the very beginning) are difficult. They are scenes of dead bodies—not bodies that have been ripped to shreds, but bodies that are just dead. And it forces you to realize what our bombs do to people. You know, our bombs are not made of magic and pixie dust. They cause pressure waves, they cause blast injuries, they cause all sorts of death and destruction. And in that opening scene that’s what Mark is trying to get the director [Poh Si Teng] to understand—that if she blurs these images, if she pixelates them, if she refuses to show people what it looks like to kill children and what dead children actually look like and force people to look (to really just look), that she’ll be doing people a disservice. And you hear it at the end of the trailer when he’s saying “People have a right to know the truth.” Well, the truth is pretty uncomfortable.Dr. Feroze SidhwaThe most effective medical care that human beings provide to each other is provided to small children so that they can reach the age of five (at that point they become a bit more robust and they can survive the challenges that the world throws at them) and to pregnant women. Those are the two groups that benefit most from medical care. When you destroy a medical system…This is literally every hospital in Gaza, and not just the hospitals. Most of the clinics have been destroyed. Most of the pharmaceutical warehouses have been destroyed. Most of the veterinary medicine spots have been destroyed. So when you attack a health care system like this, you’re basically condemning women and children to die. There’s no other effect that it could even be expected to have. The same goes with the destruction of Gaza’s sewage system, it’s the destruction of its educational system, the destruction of the water treatment facilities, the destruction of almost all of the housing in Gaza, the destruction of the entire arable land and food distribution system, the destruction of almost every bakery in Gaza, the destruction of every chicken farm, it just goes on and on and on. Everything that sustains life, especially for an urbanized population, has been destroyed. And that’s why the vast majority of international experts consider this to be genocidal.Dr. Feroze SidhwaWilliam Lazonick is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and co-founder and president of the Academic-Industry Research Network, a non-profit research organization . His recent work includes Predatory Value Extraction: How the Looting of the Business Corporation Became the US Norm and How Sustainable Prosperity Can Be Restored, and Investing in Innovation: Confronting Predatory Value Extraction in the U.S. Corporation.’When [Nvidia] issued this press release a couple days ago about the [$235 billion] buyback, one of the things it says is that it’s “returning capital to shareholders”. I mean, Jensen Huang (who’s a founder and CEO of Nvidia) knows that’s nonsense. The only time they ever raised money from shareholders on the stock market was in their IPO in 1999 (January 1999). And that was $40 million. One of his three co-founders, Curtis Priem, sold all his stock in 2006 for about $30 million. It’s estimated that if he had held the stock to the present, it would be worth $70 billion. So if those people who originally bought the stock at the IPO had ...
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    1 hr and 27 min
  • The Legacy of Wendell Berry

    The Legacy of Wendell Berry
    26 Sep 2026
    Ralph welcomes Mary Berry the daughter of the late American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer, Wendell Berry. Ms. Berry runs the non-profit Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky, which serves as a repository for the study of small farm agriculture and preserves the legacy of her family’s work. Then, with the midterms on the horizon, Ralph and the team talk about how to be a smart voter. Plus, Ralph has some choice words for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s so-called “Free Enterprise Express.”Leave a comment about how you are a smart voter. We will collect these and discuss them on our next program.Click the button below to get Professor Laura Nader’s book Controlling Processes.Mary Berry is Executive Director of the Berry Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing focus, knowledge and cohesion to the work of changing our ruinous industrial agricultural system into a system and culture that uses nature as the standard, accepts no permanent damage to the ecosphere, and takes into consideration human health in local communities.[Wendell Berry] lived the way he thought one should live. He used to say to people when they kind of congratulated him for coming home to Kentucky to live and to farm (as if that was some kind of sacrifice), he would say, “I just did what I wanted to do.” So he was an exceptional person, an extraordinary person, and he’s left an absence that is going to be keenly felt for quite some time.Mary BerryWe have (since the end of the tobacco program) lost 15,000 farms in Kentucky. And we’ve lost the rural culture. And we’ve lost the rural culture that sustained good life here and good land use… Without an economic backstop, people begin to fall apart. It takes a lot to hold culture together. It takes a lot to hold people together. So I took a list to my father and said we’ve got to work on these things—the miseducation of farmers, access to capital, terrible land use, we’ve got to study the tobacco program (this is not about tobacco, this is about the principles of a program that protected farmers). And he said: well, it sounds like you’re starting a center.Mary BerryOne of the reasons I started the Berry Center is because I saw the local food movement as a failure. And I began to understand that we could not just have entrepreneurial farming or industrial farming, with nothing in the middle. We were going to have to try to put something in the middle that would take care of marketing and pricing and so on for farmers, so they didn’t have to do it all.Mary BerryI think one of the things that makes my father’s work singular is that he never talked about the land without talking about the people— talking about the people, talking about the land, the two never separated.Mary BerryNews 9/25/26* Our first two stories this week have to do with the Senate race in the state of Michigan. First up, Dropsite is out with an expose of “Michigan Jews Against Extremism,” a group that emerged in August which sought to astroturf opposition to Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed among Jewish voters. Yet, while the avowed members of this group purport to be “Democrats and Independents” Dropsite finds that in fact, “many of the Jewish community leaders involved have deep ties to the GOP, as well as to pro-Israel activist groups such as AIPAC.” Among the signatories, “Nearly 50 were involved in a nearly identical gambit in 2012 that went by the name ‘Jews for Mitt.’...[arguing that] Then-President Barack Obama…was so “anti-Israel” that their consciences drove them to abandon the Democratic Party to support Republican nominee Mitt Romney.” All in all, Dropsite finds that “nearly 90% of the first 430 signatories are either connected to pro-Israel activist groups, GOP aligned, Jews for Mitt voters, or may not live in Michigan,” at all. This piece notes that Jewish voters typically go for Democrats by a ratio of about 2:1, making them a key part of the Democratic coalition.* Helping to counter the narrative pushed by this group and others, this week Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel formally endorsed El-Sayed, the Detroit News reports. In an interview conducted side by side with him, Nessel said she “can’t be true to my values if I even consider voting for Mike Rogers,” adding that he is the “one candidate that I know is going to fight against the Trump administration…to protect…our physical security, our safety, our health and our futures.” Nessel has been critical of El-Sayed in the past; in August, she gave a private speech to Jewish Democrats in which she implied that Democrats critical of Israel, like El-Sayed, “have thrown us,” referring to Jewish Democrats, “under the bus, despite our lifelong contributions to our party.” Many Democrats worried that her disagreements with El-Sayed over Israel would undermine his candidacy. By coming around on the candidate,...
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    1 hr and 52 min
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