Episodes

  • How To Win the Midterms

    How To Win the Midterms
    Oct 24 2026
    With the midterm elections just over the horizon, Ralph makes his impassioned pitch for how the Democrats can beat MAGA Republicans to Democratic pollster, Celinda Lake and executive director of Progressive Democrats of America, Alan Minsky. Plus, the team takes a brief moment to analyze Donald Trump’s apparent obsession with hot male backsides.Celinda Lake is a political strategist and president of Lake Research Partners. She and her firm are known for cutting-edge research on issues including the economy, health care, the environment and education, and have worked for a number of institutions including the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Governor’s Association, AFL-CIO, SEIU, CWA, Sierra Club, NARAL, Human Rights Campaign, Planned Parenthood, VoteVets Action Fund, and the Kaiser Family Foundation. Her international work has included work in Liberia, Kyrgyzstan, Belarus Ukraine, South Africa, and Central America.One factor is the most important thing that you can play a major, major role in: We have to get young people out to vote. They are our best voting group in some races...they are so strongly for the candidate. It could be just pulling out every young person to vote. And they vote for our candidates by 70-80%.Celinda LakeDemocrats have been very good about voting early and getting their ballots in early. And we’ve dominated the early vote 60-70%. So that’s helped to mute [the impact of election interference]. But you can bet on a lot of people trying to interfere with people voting on Election Day, and it’s going to be very, very important for us to insist that everyone can vote and every vote be counted.Celinda LakeWe have 60% of the voters who don’t like socialism, but only 50% of the voters who say they know what it is.Celinda LakeAlan Minsky is a lifelong activist and Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of America. Alan has worked as a progressive journalist for the past two decades, and he has coordinated Pacifica Radio’s national coverage of elections. He is the creator and producer of the political podcasts for The Nation and Jacobin, as well as a contributor to Common Dreams and Truthdig.[Democrats] are told that if they’re going to get Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) money, they can’t be endorsing anybody who’s running against the incumbent Democrat. And that’s relevant in California, because there are some races that are Dem-on-Dem still on November 3rd. And the other thing they’re told is they have to (in advance) endorse Jeffries for speaker. So that’s the kind of pressure they put on even these incoming progressives. And it’s sad. It’s pathetic. It’s absolutely something that we hope that, if and when progressives take over the Democratic Party (and that’s a heavy lift, but that’s what our intention is), something like that will never happen again.Alan MinskyNews 10/23/26* Our top story this week is an exposé published in the New Republic showing how Bari Weiss, as editor in chief of CBS News, has weaponized the network against specific Democratic candidates. This piece shows how Weiss, described herein as an “anti-woke crusader…urged her newsroom to cover right-wing conspiracy theories regarding Democratic Senate candidates James Talarico and Abdul El-Sayed.” Specifically, Weiss encouraged reporters to investigate “El-Sayed’s (nonexistent) ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and 9/11, and Talarico’s (also nonexistent) trip to a mental health facility.” El-Sayed, who is Egyptian American, has in fact denounced the Muslim Brotherhood on numerous occasions. Talarico, who became the subject of a conspiracy theory claiming he had checked into a mental hospital in Ohio after a week-long absence from the campaign trail, simply had the flu. In a viral post, Talarico added “I’ve never even been to Ohio.” TNR notes that, “both Talarico and El-Sayed are progressive candidates who have been critical of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, something that Weiss, her pro-Israel The Free Press blog, and CBS have covered with extreme bias.”* Turning to the Executive Branch, the Washington Sun reports that the Trump administration is gearing up to “impose financial penalties on millions of Americans in default on their federal student loans next year.” The administration has tried to “seize federal benefits and wages from defaulted borrowers,” in the past, but divisions between the Education Department, the Office of Management and Budget and the Treasury have stymied these efforts. Now, the administration is signaling that they are committed to this policy, either by seizing “expected payments…such as…tax refunds, Social Security…or the earned income tax credit and child tax credit,” or by garnishing wages. The Treasury continues to fight against these moves, arguing that such measures would harm low-income borrowers and further depress an unsturdy economy. ...
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    1 hr and 19 mins
  • Big Pharma Perks

    Big Pharma Perks
    Oct 17 2026
    Ralph speaks to Peter Maybarduk of Public Citizen about how the Trump Administration's drug pricing deals favor Big Pharma. Then, some advice for progressive candidates from Ralph and former NYC Public Advocate Mark Green.Peter Maybarduk directs Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program, which helps partners worldwide make medicine available and affordable for all. He has provided technical and strategic assistance to government agencies and health organizations in dozens of countries, and sits on the governance board of the Medicines Patent Pool, a United Nations-backed organization that negotiates licenses among drugmakers to expand global availability of affordable generics.Trump has several different drug pricing initiatives, but he’s hollowing them out himself by negotiating exemptions from his own drug pricing programs on behalf of the Big Pharma corporations. Trump has been signing a series of deals in the White House so far with 27 drug makers, and they get the PR from this, right? They come out and say, “We’ve got a new deal. We’re going to offer the best prices in the world.” But those deals are secret. Part of what we know now is the deals actually exempt the drug makers from any of the binding mandatory programs that Trump is trying to run.Peter MaybardukAlmost every new drug relies on some kind of US-government funding at some stage. Sometimes it’s just in the research chain (in the literature, the publications) that link back to NIH research. Sometimes it’s all the way up through development…So there’s a lot to be said for public R&D, which already happens. There’s also: we could just manufacture more drugs publicly in the late stage...And generally, if you had, for example, a government-owned-contractor-operated model or a fully public model of production and the proper terms attached to it, you could fight rationing. You could ensure that there’s a basic supply of essential medicines available for people. It would help you fight during pandemics and not have to be reliant on pharma’s profit-maximizing decisions about who is going to get vaccines, for example, at what price and when. You could bring those things under public authority and make them accountable. There’s a lot of levers that we’re not yet using that we could use to make medicine affordable and available for all.Peter MaybardukMark Green is a former Nader’s Raider, who ran Public Citizen’s Congress Watch for ten years and was elected New York City’s first Public Advocate. He’s a prolific author, and has collaborated with Ralph on Fake President: Decoding Trump’s Gaslighting, Corruption, and General B******t, and Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All.As the GOP spends hundreds of millions on negative ads in the final month, here’s a suggested strategy and narrative for aggressive and progressive Democrats in close contests. First: yes, Assume Trump’s “on the ballot” (in his phrase), to tarnish your rival with his erratic extremism. And second: frame everything under the memorable banner of “Progress, not corruption.” [Trump] has pushed America to an inflection election when voters determine whether Trumpism survives Trump, or whether it becomes a pariah ideology like McCarthyism.Mark GreenNews 10/16/26* Our top story this week is the resounding reelection victory of United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain. As Jacobin reports, Fain won his first term in 2022, taking out the long-entrenched leadership clique at the union following internal democratic reforms, including direct election of union leadership. Under Fain, the UAW has again become a fighting union, winning “record agreements at the Big Three,” automakers following a successful stand-up strike, “delivering 25 percent wage increases, eliminating wage tiers, restoring cost-of-living adjustments, securing bonuses for retirees for the first time in decades, winning the right to strike over product commitments, and bringing electric vehicle battery production under the union’s master agreements.” Fain’s UAW also secured “life-changing contracts” at Daimler Truck, American Axle, Allison Transmission, Cornell University and Rolls-Royce, along with unionizing the workers at “Volkswagen’s sole US assembly plant in Tennessee, which became the first foreign-owned Southern auto plant to be organized in US history.” Fain has also expanded the UAW’s horizons in terms of international solidarity, making it the largest union to call for a ceasefire in Gaza in 2023. In response, and many say, in retaliation, a federal monitor was appointed to oversee the union and, some allege, to sabotage Fain’s governing program. Hopefully, Fain’s renewed mandate will send a signal throughout the labor movement that there is nothing to be lost – and everything to be gained – to, as this piece puts it, “wage a real fight for working-class people in this country.”* In more ...
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    1 hr and 41 mins
  • How To Save $1 Trillion!

    How To Save $1 Trillion!
    Oct 10 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 mins
  • American Doctor

    American Doctor
    Oct 3 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 mins
  • The Legacy of Wendell Berry

    The Legacy of Wendell Berry
    Sep 26 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 mins
  • Coding Kids

    Coding Kids
    Sep 19 2026
    Ralph welcomes “New York Times” reporter Natasha Singer to discuss her new book, “Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools.” Then, Ralph talks about Donald Trump’s midterm convention speeches and the latest impeachment drive with Constitutional law expert Bruce Fein.Natasha Singer is a New York Times reporter covering the intersection of technology, business and education. She has covered tech industry influence in schools for the New York Times for more than a decade, and her school tech reporting helped prompt California to enact a landmark student online data protection law. In 2019, she was part of a Times team whose tech coverage won a George Polk Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting. She is also the author of the book Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools.It’s not about the companies immediately making money off schools. It’s about influencing kids, getting customers early and for life. But I think more importantly, it’s about imprinting Silicon Valley worldviews and values on young people. So that you get docile consumers who maybe aren’t worried about wholesale surveillance and data gathering, and docile employees who are not going to push back against being surveilled by their employer or using AI tools or having AI replace them. And so I think this story about tech companies capturing the classroom is not just about how they’re shaping learning. It’s about how some of the most powerful, wealthiest corporations on the planet are able to influence school systems.Natasha SingerSince the time of Steve Jobs, Silicon Valley has attached this fancy word “literacy” to whatever product they have, and then told schools they needed to teach it. So in the era of Steve Jobs, there was suddenly this fervor that we had to teach “computer literacy” because Japan was ahead and if we wanted our country to compete, we needed computer literacy. And then the internet came and we got “internet literacy” and “smartphone literacy” and then “digital literacy”... And now we’re in this moment where Silicon Valley and tech-funded nonprofit groups are pushing “AI literacy”, except we don’t know what AI literacy is and we don’t know how to teach AI. And so it makes it sound really fancy: “AI literacy”. But oftentimes the companies are really just talking about: “Learn how to use our chatbot.” And now you have asked: When are we going to stop listening to these people? When are we going to stop rushing to teach whatever product “literacy” Silicon Valley is pushing us to do this week, and then pivot with whiplash to whatever they’re pushing next week? And I think that’s the question of the hour.Natasha SingerBruce 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.They’re playing to dodge accountability by saying, “We’re neither for nor against this,” like someone who’s claiming they’re agnostic. Now, how you could be agnostic on Donald Trump, whose impeachable offenses are proven out of his own mouth? All these statements that he’s made are open and notorious. And so it’s almost implausible to suggest that these people don’t know that he has committed impeachable offenses and are deciding to duck for political, partisan purposes (their calculation as to what would help them politically). Now, that, of course, is directly contrary to their oaths of office. Hakeem Jeffries, like his colleagues, has taken an oath (without mental reservation or purpose of evasion) to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. At present, the Constitution is in flames under Donald Trump. And to sit and do nothing—to declare neutrality between the firefighter and the fire—is itself an impeachable offense for which they should be impeached and be prosecuted for perjury when they were sworn into office.Bruce FeinNews 9/18/26* Our first stories this week are about impeachment. On the Democratic side, outgoing Congressman Al Green, long a champion of impeachment, introduced a resolution which “sought to impeach Mr. Trump over the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection…[citing] the killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero by federal immigration agents this year,” per CBS. House Democratic Leadership punted, announcing that they would neither whip votes for nor oppose the resolution, opting instead to simply vote “present” on the motion to table Green’s resolution. Ultimately 47 members voted present and 147 voted against tabling, but even put together it would not have been enough to overcome the 232 votes in favor of setting the resolution aside. ...
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    1 hr and 37 mins
  • Citizens Impeachment/Stopping Corporate Abuse

    Citizens Impeachment/Stopping Corporate Abuse
    Sep 12 2026
    Ralph welcomes Keira Havens a United States Air Force veteran and the executive director of Citizens’ Impeachment a grassroots organization that lobbies Congress and supports candidates who are willing to impeach and convict Donald Trump for a myriad of Constitutional violations. Then Michael Marx, founder of the group CorpEthics that conducts marketing campaigns that apply public pressure to corporations to change their behavior, joins us to discuss his new book “Reining in the Bulls: How to Stop Corporate Abuse in an Age of Unbridled Greed.”Keira Havens is a United States Air Force veteran, a former scientist, and a longtime political activist. She is the executive director of Citizens’ Impeachment.I am a veteran. I was in the United States Air Force. My job was to launch nuclear missiles. I was an ICBM crew commander for four years. And that entire system, that entire weapons system is based on trust that the person at the top has a handle on what needs to be done and has good faith and good leadership to navigate this country. That is not the case right now. That cornerstone is beyond weakened—it has just crumbled straight into dust. The trust and faith in the American President as a capable leader, capable of effective leadership, is an assumption we can no longer make.Keira HavensHis entire cabinet, everybody that gets appointed to the judicial system under his people, everybody that is building out the roadmap for what the economy looks like, all of these failures of leadership—yes, they roll upward to the President. But it is an entire administration of people that do not respect the Constitution, and are not planning on upholding it, and require impeachment, removal and conviction at the bare minimum. Because these folks have had a taste of power now, and they will be back for more. And impeachment is the only way to insist that they never be allowed to hold power again.Keira Havens[Democrats] will talk about how bad things are (and they will fundraise off it repeatedly over and over again), but they will not take the additional step and say: “And that is why I will impose consequences.” Our recommended consequence is: impeachment, conviction, removal. But there is more that can be done. There is their making a more plain-spoken assessment of the current situation. And people are hungry to hear it. You don’t have to pretend that this is business as usual. You can actually identify this as a crisis for the Constitution and for this democracy and outline the steps that you will take in your own legislative power.Keira HavensMichael Marx is one of the world’s premier environmental corporate campaigners. He served as campaign director for both Rainforest Action Network and Sierra Club. He was the co-founder and executive director of ForestEthics (now Stand.earth) and founder of CorpEthics. He is the author of  Reining in the Bulls: How to Stop Corporate Abuse in an Age of Unbridled Greed.I think we’re a corporatocracy. I think we have the illusion of being a democracy, but really we’re controlled by corporations. Because from the beginning, they control the way we think with their advertising, with the kind of programs they put on, with their investments in local and state and federal political campaigns. And then, they own the government. I mean…not only can they literally get away with murder (particularly not just in the U.S., but worldwide) but the government protects them from liability.Michael MarxIf you want to fight these companies—right now we’re on the defense, and particularly on the defense in the government. And the only thing saving us right now is legal cases in the courts by Earth Justice and NRDC and Sierra Club and groups like that. And we need to go on offense even stronger in the marketplace because companies don’t own civil society. They can’t buy the advocacy wing, the more ethical wing of civil society. And they don’t know how to play that game as well as they know how to play the government game.Michael MarxNews 9/11/26* Our first story this week comes to us from New York City, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani used the occasion of Labor Day to launch the Mayor’s Office of Worker Power (MOWP). According to the city’s website, the MOWP is the “first office of its kind in the nation, [designed] to use the resources and convening power of City Hall to help workers get informed, connected and organized.” The MOWP will be led by Tony Perlstein, a former longshoreman and United Auto Workers (UAW) organizing director. Mayor Mamdani is quoted saying, “Every day, working New Yorkers show up, do their jobs, and keep this city running. Too often, they have no say in the conditions they work under…The Mayor’s Office of Worker Power will make sure workers have a seat at the table before exploitation becomes a crisis and violations become routine. We’re connecting workers to their rights, to each other and to the organizations ready to stand...
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    1 hr and 47 mins
  • The People's Historian / Galvanizing Labor Day

    The People's Historian / Galvanizing Labor Day
    Sep 5 2026
    Ralph welcomes sportswriter Dave Zirin to talk about his new book, "The People's Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn." Then Ralph speaks to labor activist Gene Bruskin about their upcoming Labor Day event at Busboys and Poets in DC, "Galvanizing Labor Day for a Workers’ Compact."Dave Zirin is the sports editor for The Nation, a columnist for the Progressive, and the author of eight books on the politics of sports, including What’s My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States and A People’s History of Sports in the United States. His new book is The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn.There’s a despondency that exists now, I believe, among people who are also very angry about the state of our politics. And the thing that Howard always insisted upon—he was an activist who happened to be a historian, not a historian who was an activist. And that doesn’t denigrate his incredible skills as a historian, it just says where his priorities were in his time on this planet. And one of the things that Howard believed so strongly is that the movements themselves needed to have a strong sense of history. The movements needed to know that we live in a time of great ups and downs.Dave ZirinPeople did step up to create the Zinn Education Project. And every book event I’m doing, I’m showing up with copies of their materials and they usually have somebody on the ground doing the organizing at the event. And at the very least, we’re helping it be a little bit sticky. You know what I’m saying? Like, it’s not just a book event. It’s not just celebrating Howard. But it’s also something that allows us to be able to make it matter in a way that it otherwise would not—because it’s not just about selling books, it really is about building a movement.Dave ZirinGene Bruskin is a veteran of the labor movement as a local union president, an organizer, and campaign coordinator for numerous local and national unions. He has done extensive international labor solidarity work, including with Iraqi workers and unions, and is a founder of US Labor Against the War.What we’re breaking through here now (and partly this has been the definition of this resistance movement) it’s workers versus billionaires. And I think the labor movement in general coming out of World War II has been captured by this mythology that “What’s good for General Electric is good for the nation.” And the more the economy “prospers,” the more it’s good for everybody. And it turns out that that’s not really the case, because we don’t have that kind of equality. And also what’s in the national interest in terms of our foreign policy is not in the interest of the average working class person. A lot of that stuff is being challenged and reversed—not enough, but it’s forcing some of the more moderate forces to the left, just as we’re seeing in some of these Senate and House elections.Gene BruskinI think this is a really important moment for Labor Day because Labor Day, among other things, is generally the kickoff for whatever elections are happening in November. And it’s going to be that on steroids this year. But I think the important thing is that, of course, we want to throw out a bunch of these Neanderthal Republicans in the House and Senate. But it’s not just a matter of restoring a Democratic majority in the House and Senate. The question is: to what end? And what is on the agenda of a Democratic-majority Congress at this minute? What is the vision that we have for our future that we have to be fighting for? … We have to change this whole climate so that people have some kind of hope, some kind of vision for what we want and what we deserve. And the same old, same old, whether it’s a Democratic Congress or not, is not acceptable anymore.Gene BruskinGalvanizing Labor Day for a Workers’ Compact (Sep 7, 2026 2:00 pm ET): Busboys and Poets and Ralph Nader present Galvanizing Labor Day for a Workers’ Compact, a discussion of how unions can maximize the impact of Labor Day to mobilize workers and voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections and afterwards. (Event is in-person @ Busboys and Poets 14th & V + Livestreamed. Free and open to all, but registration is required.)News 9/4/26* Our top story this week is the neo-colonial oil extraction deal that has been struck between the Trump administration and the government of Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela. This government has been running the country under the barrel of a gun since Trump sent Delta Force to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro from his home in the Bolivarian Republic in January. According to the BBC, the new deal “grants a US-led company 100-year concessions over 17 oilfields in Venezuela, amounting to a staggering 65 billion barrels of crude,” or over one-fifth of the country’s proven oil reserves. The White House has released a fact sheet, stating that much of the new extraction will be conducted by ...
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    1 hr and 32 mins