Épisodes

  • 2025 Highlights

    2025 Highlights
    Jan 3 2026
    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 ...
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    1 h et 22 min
  • How The Democrats Lost the White House

    How The Democrats Lost the White House
    Dec 27 2025

    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 Rosenthal

    One 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
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    58 min
  • Trouble in Toyland 2025 / Stop Underride

    Trouble in Toyland 2025 / Stop Underride
    Dec 20 2025
    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
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    1 h et 9 min
  • Burned By Billionaires/What's Spiking Your Electric Bill?

    Burned By Billionaires/What's Spiking Your Electric Bill?
    Dec 13 2025
    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
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    1 h et 48 min
  • The Problem with Plastic

    The Problem with Plastic
    Dec 6 2025
    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 ...
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    1 h et 13 min
  • Because Democracy Depends On It

    Because Democracy Depends On It
    Nov 29 2025
    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 ...
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    1 h et 17 min
  • Nuclear Delusion/Biohazard Whistleblower

    Nuclear Delusion/Biohazard Whistleblower
    Nov 22 2025
    We welcome back nuclear power expert, Peter Bradford, former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner and board member for the Union of Concerned Scientists to update us on the latest nuclear power boondoggles that force customers to pay for the construction of nuclear reactors sometimes decades before they benefit from any energy that’s produced. Plus, molecular biologist, Becky McClain, who got infected by a dangerous virus in her workplace, joins us to discuss her book, “Exposed: A Pfizer Scientist Battles Corruption, Lies, and Betrayal, and Becomes a Biohazard Whistleblower.”Peter Bradford teaches and advises on utility regulation, nuclear power, and energy policy in the United States and overseas. He is a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and is on the board of the Union of Concerned Scientists.Basically, (nuclear power) is like trying to stop world hunger with caviar. It’s too expensive, takes much too long, you wind up buying too little of it, and you displace all of the better sources.Peter BradfordIt’s almost like there’s a bubble being built on top of a bubble, because there’s a real chance that we’re not going to see all the artificial intelligence demand that people have been saying. And then on top of that, it’s for damn sure that we’re not going to see successful companies developing all the small reactors that are on their drawing boards.Peter BradfordBecky McClain is a retired biotech worker and research scientist. She is known as the first successful biotech whistleblower who spoke and reported on biolab safety issues of public concern. On April 1, 2010, Ms. McClain won a federal court whistleblower trial against Pfizer, Inc., which centered on free speech rights concerning biosafety and public health. She is the author of “Exposed: A Pfizer Scientist Battles Corruption, Lies, and Betrayal, and Becomes a Biohazard Whistleblower.”I was exposed to a dangerous virus and OSHA worked against me. My medical care was blocked. My complaints ignored. No safety inspection occurred after I had documented complaints shown to them from several scientists. They stole my documents. It seemed like every institution that I went for help, they just became part of the danger.Becky McClainThe book really provides the public an understanding of the culture of health and safety operating within 21st century biotechnology. Once the reader reads it, they probably will feel the terrible repercussions that the public could face if it’s not countered and balanced with effective whistleblower protections and improved worker health and safety rights.Becky McClainWhen you were exposed and became sick, you tried to go to the workers’ compensation agency, the state of Connecticut, and their response was totally dismaying. They ruled that trade secrets of Pfizer superseded your rights to get exposure records from Pfizer for your healthcare.Ralph NaderFar, far more people die from silent violence of workplace and environmental contaminants than are killed in street crimes every year in the United States.Ralph NaderNews 11/21/25* This week, Congress voted to demand the release of the Epstein files. This is the culmination of a months-long pressure campaign which overcame stiff opposition from the Trump White House and its allies in Congress. While only four Republicans broke ranks to sign the discharge petition in order to force the House vote, nearly every House Republican – save for Representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana – voted for the bill in the end after Trump reversed course and gave his blessing for them to vote yea. According to Reuters, Trump then lobbied senators to “slow walk” the bill in the upper chamber, but that effort failed and the Senate approved the measure quickly and unanimously. Trump now claims to have signed the bill, which starts a 30-day timer for the Justice Department to release all of the Epstein files. However, many have expressed concern about manipulation of the files by DOJ leadership, including politically-motivated delays or redactions. This issue, and Trump’s response, has been very damaging for him among his own base. A recent poll, cited in the Reuters piece, found that “just 44% of Republicans thought Trump was handling the Epstein situation well.” It remains to be seen whether this new attempt to control the narrative will help or hurt his standing.* In order to distract from domestic political problems, Trump is turning to a tried-and-true political tactic: saber rattling abroad. In a statement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the U.S. would designate “the Cartel de los Soles,” or Cartel of the Suns, a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), claiming that this supposed gang is “headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.” Yet, as the Intercept notes, “There’s just one ...
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    1 h et 44 min
  • Caving on the Shutdown/ Campaigning for Gaza/ Dementia Man

    Caving on the Shutdown/ Campaigning for Gaza/ Dementia Man
    Nov 15 2025
    On today’s wide-ranging program, Ralph welcomes David Dayen of “The American Prospect” to discuss the Democrats caving on the shutdown. Then, Ralph speaks to Dani Noble from Jewish Voice for Peace about their BDS campaigns, efforts to block weapons shipments to Israel, and the state of the ceasefire in Gaza. Finally, Ralph speaks to original Nader’s Raider Sam Simon about his new memoir, “Dementia Man: An Existential Journey.”David Dayen is the executive editor of the American Prospect, an independent political magazine that aims to advance liberal and progressive goals through reporting, analysis and debate. His work has appeared in the Intercept, HuffPost, the Washington Post, and more. He is the author of Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud and Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.If Congress is saying: We have the power of the purse, and we have the ability to dictate to the President what he is able to do or not do with federal funding, then why not go the whole way? To me, that was the entire purpose of the shutdown— to stop the President from ignoring Congress and initiating his own prerogatives as it relates to government funding. It is really making Congress completely irrelevant in the process which they constitutionally are supposed to dictate.David DayenEvery time Trump has been in power and there’s been a national election, he’s lost it. He lost the midterm elections in 2018. He lost the presidential election in 2020. He lost the off-year elections in 2017 and 2019. He lost (just last week) the elections in 2025. He is not equipped to have an agenda that appeals to the American people when he’s in power. And so I firmly agree that Democrats are likely to do well in the elections next year, as they just did. The one thing that can stop that is: completely punching your base in the face, after you succeed politically in backing Republicans into a corner.David DayenDani Noble is a Strategic Campaigns Organizer at Jewish Voice for Peace.Israel bonds (which very few people know much about) are direct loans to the Israeli military and government. They are unrestricted. They have no guardrails around what those funds can be used for, et cetera. And this is a main way that the Israeli military and government generate an unrestricted slush fund to be able to continue their genocidal assault on Gaza, to continue funding for the atrocities being committed against Palestinians—even as their government and economy suffers and/or operates with a massive deficit.Dani NobleThis bill would essentially block the Trump administration from delivering some of the deadliest weapons to Israel. So it’s an essential, essential step in what we need to do fundamentally—which is a full arms embargo to stop arming the Israeli military and government…It’s the most supported piece of legislation in support of Palestinian rights that we’ve ever seen.Dani NobleSam Simon is an author, playwright, and attorney. His new book Dementia Man: An Existential Journey is based on his award-winning play of the same name.There’s also a social cost. A sense that everything I’ve ever built personally—my cars, my homes, my savings—that were all going to be available as a legacy to my family, they have to be spent in my few years of my life just to keep me alive. There needs to be a community response to that—and that’s shorthand for the government. It doesn’t force people to go broke to stay alive.Sam SimonNews 11/14/25* This week, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a new tranche of over 20,000 pages of documents related to infamous financier and sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. These documents include damning emails between Epstein and various high-power individuals like Steve Bannon, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and current U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack. However, the emails that have received the most attention are those regarding President Donald Trump. In these emails, Epstein claimed Trump “knew about the girls,” and claimed that, “i [i.e. Epstein] am the one able to take him [i.e. Trump] down.” Perhaps most shocking, Epstein claims to have been with Trump during Thanksgiving in 2017, according to NBC. If true, it would directly contradict Trump’s repeated insistence that he had no contact with Epstein since their falling out in the mid 2000s, either 2004 or 2007, per PBS.* The newly released Epstein files reinforce another narrative as well: that Epstein was an asset for Israeli intelligence. Drop Site news has done excellent reporting on Epstein helping to “Broker [an] Israeli Security Agreement With Mongolia,” “Build a Backchannel to Russia Amid [the] Syrian Civil War” and “Sell a Surveillance State to Côte d’Ivoire.” Most recently the independent outlet has published an expose on Epstein’s relationship with known Mossad spy Yoni Koren. According to this ...
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    1 h et 35 min