Why has flying become so crappy? Modern air travel has morphed into a high-altitude endurance test, cramming us into shrinking seats and nickel-and-diming us for every basic necessity. In this episode, we trace the airline industry’s descent from a regulated public utility to a monopoly-driven, irrational oligarchy in the wake of the 1978 Deregulation Act.

We look at the war against airline and airport workers, starting with the smashing of the 1981 PATCO air traffic controllers' strike. We discuss exhausted air traffic controllers and pilots struggling under massive debt, grueling work hours, and poverty wages.

By examining several crashes and close calls, we look at how profit undermines safety, and how the outsourcing and cost-cutting of maintenance is a danger to the whole flying public. We examine how government agencies like the FAA gave a free pass to airline manufacturers like Boeing in pushing through shoddy engineering, like with the 737 Max.

For the airline industry, the “magic of the market” means that profits are privatized but losses are socialized, leading to one government bailout after another. The answer to the airline cartel’s war on its workers is industrialized unions and workers' control of safety.

The "nuclear threat" narrative against Iran is a smokescreen for a decades-long campaign of imperialist aggression designed to crush Iranian sovereignty. In this episode, we strip away the mainstream propaganda and myths to examine how both wings of the U.S. ruling class, working alongside their Zionist partners in Israel, have used murderous sanctions, direct assassinations, and terror to maintain hegemony over the region’s oil-rich resources.

Drawing on the history of colonial domination of Iran, from WWI to the 1953 coup that installed the Shah, to the 1979 Islamic Revolution and beyond, we show that the true madmen aren't in Tehran, but are the ones steering the American war machine. We also highlight how nuclear technology is a cornerstone of Iran’s national identity and scientific independence.

We take a detour into the “U.S. or Israel: Who’s Daddy?" debate that framed our very first episode, challenging the notion that the U.S. is simply a victim of the Zionist lobby and was coerced into this losing war.

The U.S. remains the only power to have used nuclear weapons in combat, and Israel is the only country with a nuclear weapons arsenal in the region (and the insanity to use it). That’s why Iran needs nukes as a deterrent in a struggle for survival against the most destructive force on the planet.

Finally, we connect the carnage abroad to the crisis at home and rippling outward. The global working class is left to pay the bill for an economic crisis, with soaring energy and food costs, that has only barely begun.

The Epstein files offer a raw glimpse into how the U.S. rulers and the entire global capitalist class run society: through sexual and geopolitical violence, criminal exploitation, and legal impunity. The buying and selling of young women, the decadence, and the denigration of all who are not part of their club – this is the “morality” of those in power.

In this episode, we discuss how the Epstein scandal isn’t just about a corrupt sex trafficker, his victims, and a mysterious “suicide.” The real story is the entire financial and political infrastructure around Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, made up of billionaires, shell companies, “philanthropic” foundations, and a world of espionage and blackmail. From the gutter media to the highest echelons of government, they’re all behind a massive Epstein cover-up. The rest of us are told to move along.

We talk about the insights of a handful of journalists who followed the money. Whitney Webb and Nick Bryant point to something far bigger than a trafficking ring: a system of dark money and surveillance linking Wall Street, organized crime, and intelligence. Epstein was a cog in the machine, set up as a fall guy.

We’ve seen only a tiny fraction of what the ruling class does in secret, but what it gets away with in the open is far more sinister: marauding the globe, war against Iran, genocide in Gaza, eviscerating rights at home. The crimes and horrors in the Epstein files are not aberrations, but the very nature of a rotting capitalist system.

Clips included in this episode:

George Carlin: "It's a big club, and you ain't in it"

⁠CIA Whistleblower John Kiriakou on The Diary of a CEO⁠

⁠Nick Bryant on The Chris Hedges Report⁠

⁠Whitney Webb on The Nick Bryant Podcast⁠

“To the man of the bourgeois class, the woman of the working class is not a human being. She is either a beast of burden or a source of cheap pleasure.” – Alexandra Kollontai, 1909

In this episode, we break down how anti-immigrant repression, which has been bipartisan for decades, has escalated into open paramilitary terror under Trump 2.0. We examine the daily raids and deportations by ICE and how they’re also an attack on citizenship and political dissent, acting as a warning shot against the entire working class.

We connect the dots between an empire in decline, domestic scapegoating, and authoritarian control, from the War on Terror to the dragnet targeting pro-Palestinian voices and leftist dissidents, to the killing of Rene Good, Alex Pretti, and countless others rotting in detention centers. The ruling parties have always conjured up an “enemy within” during moments of economic and social crisis to carry out a war on the population.

We dismantle the myth of the US as a so-called welcoming melting pot, and trace the “whites only” history of citizenship, from before the 14th Amendment to today. Basic rights won through struggle are being clawed back in real time. The fight over who belongs is ultimately a fight over who holds power.

In this episode, we’re joined by a special guest, Hamilton Nolan, a journalist, author on labor and politics, union organizer, and activist. We talk about how journalism survived the death of print only to be swallowed and spit out by Big Tech, private equity, and monopoly capitalism.

We trace the rise and fall of online media, digging into Hamilton’s early days at Gawker. We discuss how corporate greed and tech oligarchs crushed newsrooms, turned mainstream media into compliant mouthpieces, and left independent reporting fighting for air. If you’ve ever wondered why layoffs hit newsrooms every few months, or why your favorite journalists are drifting onto Substack, or why AI summaries answer your questions without sending you to the article, this is why.

We delve into how Google’s algorithms and collapsing ad revenue triggered a traffic apocalypse, and how generative AI now threatens to replace the very labor it feeds on. We also talk about why unions are critical for the last remaining scraps of editorial independence and why journalism still matters in an era where "everything is content and nothing is read." Finally, Hamilton shares his take on solutions that might stop the ship from sinking, before the internet finishes eating itself.

To learn more about Hamilton Nolan, check out his website How Things Work and his book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor.

In this episode, we discuss how the latest U.S. assault on Venezuela and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro are part of a centuries-long project of American imperial domination in Latin America.

The goal isn't just to take over Venezuela’s oil reserves. The deeper objective of a new Monroe Doctrine is to control the Western Hemisphere and block China and other rivals from gaining influence.

What happened in Venezuela also reveals something bigger: An empire in decline, without a mask, using brute force to discipline its "backyard." At stake is the future of sovereignty and whether any other country can refuse submission to U.S. power.

We break down why Venezuela has been relentlessly targeted, from the moment Hugo Chávez asserted control over the country’s oil and challenged local elites and foreign capital. We place Venezuela within the longer history of U.S. coups, dictatorships, and dirty wars across Latin America.

We also talk about the political power of a reactionary, white upper-class opposition that has repeatedly aligned itself with Washington against the country’s poor and working-class majority.

Why are so many people hungry in the world's richest nation? In this episode, we unpack how food isn’t just something people eat. It’s a tool of power. From food deserts and ultraprocessed diets to collapsing health, we trace how modern food production is organized to maximize corporate profit while punishing the poor, the working class, and the oppressed.

We discuss how a handful of giant food conglomerates, like Cargill, quietly control the supply chains behind nearly everything you eat. These global monopolies use food as a weapon, flooding weaker countries with exports, destroying local farmers, and forcing nations into cycles of economic dependence where people go hungry at home.

We dive into the long history of food in colonization and racial inequality in the U.S. Drawing from the book Ruin Their Crops on the Ground by Andrea Freeman, we examine how deliberate starvation has been used by the American rulers, from indigenous land theft to the sugar plantations to SNAP benefits. This episode argues that food oppression and inequality are inherent to the capitalist production system.

In our last episode of 2025, we take a look at the American revolutionary John Brown, who believed slavery was a crime so violent and heinous that it could not be ended through patience, compromise, or moral appeals.

Brown’s commitment to Black liberation, which was rooted in faith and a keen understanding of American society, led him from “Bleeding Kansas” to the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, an act that helped ignite the Civil War (The Second American Revolution, 1861-1865). Brown knew his actions would cost him his life, and on the day of his execution, he wrote that the crimes of the U.S. would only be purged “with blood.”

Often dismissed as a madman or fanatic, Brown was in fact one of the few white abolitionists willing to fight to destroy slavery outright. Brown’s life, strategy, and sacrifice should be studied and honored by all those devoted to today’s freedom and resistance struggles. As Malcolm X later put it, “When you want to know good white folks in history where black people are concerned, go read the history of John Brown.”

We also touch on the radical abolitionist tradition, including the uncompromising and quirky Quaker, Benjamin Lay.

Listen to John Brown's Body, sung by Paul Robeson