Podcasts about Public Citizen

Washington's MAGA government is shoveling massive giveaways of public money to corporate elites. Worse, though, are its takeaways of people's power to battle the abuse of those same plutocratic corporations. Consider just three recent examples:Travel. Perhaps your family plans a holiday flight to visit grandma. Flying itself has become dicey, but at least the government is requiring airlines that cause long delays or cancellations to compensate us passengers for our loss. Uh… no, no more. Trump's transportation secretary (who was previously a LOBBYIST for the big airlines!) is “loosening” the rules so monopolistic airlines owe nothing to abused customers.Job opportunities. One of the nastiest wage suppression tactics of corporate bosses has been their collusion to make employees sign “noncompete” contracts. These amount to indentured servitude, preventing workers from quitting to take a better job with a competing firm. This corporate lockdown costs American workers some $40 billion a year in wages they could get in an open job market. The FTC was finally moving to ban these noncompete gimmicks – but Trump installed a corporate lackey at the FTC to snuff out this spark of workplace liberty.Pollution. Corporate lobbyists and MAGA lawmakers are rigging the rules to let industrial giants escape responsibility for their massive environmental contamination. For example, the profiteering greedheads who've deceptively caused tons of deadly “forever chemicals” to be spread on our land, water, communities, and families are to be let off the hook by the new, corporate-hugging EPA honcho. He says we taxpayers must pay for the toxic cleanup, not the polluters.If you're unclear about the meaning of “plutocracy,' there it is: Government by and for the despotic rich.Fighting plutocracy on multiple fronts is challenging work, and that's why we recommend getting involved with Public Citizen—they're strategic and have a long track record of protecting Americans on many issues. Check them out at citizen.org.Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe

Sometimes, cosmic oddities come together in comic ways. For example, Google positions the biography of right-wing Texas governor Greg Abbott right under the one for yesteryear's slapstick comedians, Abbott and Costello.It's almost cruel for Gov. Greg to be juxtaposed with that quick-witted duo, for he's a dour, slow-witted, plutocratic pol, with no perceptible sense of humor. As governor, he has focused on demonizing poor people, rigging elections, and doing favors for moneyed elites. Unsurprisingly, only four out of 10 Texas voters now support him. Yet – don't laugh – in a move of burlesque absurdity, Abbott now says he might choose to become president. Yes, of the US!Filled with pomposity, he recently proclaimed, “I will be guided by God.” Well, maybe so, since the god he faithfully follows is Mammon. Indeed, his major credential for becoming the GOP nominee for prez is that he is a pro at the Pay-to-Play game of using taxpayer money to entice special interests to fund his political career. “You pay me, then I pay you” is his corrupt game plan, which he has used to amass a whopping $87 million for his next election.For example, watchdog group Public Citizen has documented some $3 million that Abbott got from executives of eight corporations. In turn, those eight were given nearly a billion dollars in no-bid state contracts – a 33,000% profit on their donations to Abbott!This is Jim Hightower saying… For high rollers, Abbott is better than a winning Powerball lottery ticket. Buy him, and the Pay-to-Play merry-go-round keeps spinning at taxpayer expense. To fight such big money corruption, go to Public Citizen: citizen.org.Jim Hightower's Lowdown is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimhightower.substack.com/subscribe

The Trump administration is using taxpayer dollars on official websites to blame Democrats and the “Radical Left” for the government shutdown — a move House Democrats and watchdog group Public Citizen say flagrantly violates the Hatch Act. Dina Doll reports. Oneskin: Get 15% OFF OneSkin with the code: MISSTRIAL at https://oneskin.co#oneskinpod Visit https://meidasplus.com for more! Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane

Ralph answers some of your recent questions about the genocide in Gaza, how to jumpstart civic engagement, and more!Your feedback is very important. And the more detailed and factual it is, the better off the impact will be by your initiative and getting back to us. You have to be active in a program like this. Because we're not just talking to the choir here. We want the choir to sing back—in affirmation or dissent.Ralph NaderI was astonished…how disinterested the American people are in empowering themselves. That's the problem we have. The lack of civic motivation, the lack of saying, “Look, we've given our power to only 535 people in the Congress, and they've turned it against us on behalf of some 1,500 corporations. We're going to turn it around. We're the sovereign power.” As I've said a hundred times, the Constitution starts with “We the people,” not “We the Congress” or “We the corporations.” And the people don't seem to want to focus on that. If they had anyone in their neighborhood and community who were treating them the way Congress is treating them—as voters, as workers, as consumers, as parents, as children, as taxpayers—they would never allow it.Ralph NaderYou get more and more voters vulnerable to just what comes out of a politician's mouth. Remember, everything Trump has achieved politically has come out of his mouth—not out of his deeds, just out of his mouth. Repeatedly, unrebutted largely over the mass media, and faithfully relayed to the American people by a supine media which points out his mistakes once in a while, but it was too little, too late.Ralph NaderNews 9/26/25* This week, the campaign for Palestinian statehood notched major victories. According to the BBC, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, Australia and Portugal all announced on Sunday that they would recognize the state of Palestine. They are expected to be joined by a number of smaller states, including Belgium, Luxembourg, Malta, Andorra and San Marino. These countries, all traditionally close allies of the United States and Israel, join the 140 countries that already recognize the State of Palestine. A statement by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese explains that this move is “part of a co-ordinated international effort to build new momentum for a two-state solution, starting with a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of the hostages.” These heads of state are pursuing this policy despite a thinly veiled threat from Congressional Republicans, a group of whom – including Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Elise Stefanik – sent a letter to President Macron and Prime Ministers Starmer, Carney and Albanese warning them of possible “punitive measures in response,” and urging them to “reconsider,” per the Guardian.* In more Palestine news, as the Global Sumud Flotilla draws near to the coast of Gaza, they are apparently under low-level attack. Al Jazeera reports the flotilla, “has reported explosions and communications jamming as drones hovered overhead.” In response, the United Nations has called for a probe, with UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan stating, “There must be an independent, impartial and thorough investigation into the reported attacks and harassment by drones and other objects.” In response to this harassment, Reuters reports Italian Defence Minister Guido Crosetto expressed the “strongest condemnation” and ordered the “Italian multi-purpose frigate Fasan, previously sailing north of Crete, to head towards the flotilla ‘for possible rescue operations', focusing primarily on Italian citizens.” The strong response by the Italian government is likely related to the labor unrest the targeting of the flotilla has engendered within the country. ANSA, a leading Italian news outlet, reports the Unione Sindacale di Base or USB “would proclaim a wildcat general strike and protests in 100 Italian cities for Gaza after the success of Monday's stoppage and protests involving an estimated 500,000 people in 80 cities.” The union has organized these massive protests under the slogan “let's block everything.”* In more foreign policy news, following on the heels of the protests in Nepal, anti-corruption protestors took to the streets in the Philippines this week, Time reports. The acute cause of these protests was a recent audit which found widespread corruption in the country's flood control projects. The Philippines has invested around $9.5 billion on such projects since 2022, but these have been plagued by kickback schemes, resulting in shoddy work and even deaths. Even President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., aka “Bongbong,” sympathized with the protestors, saying “Do you blame them for going out into the streets? If I wasn't President, I might be out in the streets with them…Of course, they are enraged. Of course, they are angry. I'm angry. We should all be angry. Because what's happening is not right.” The potency of these protests is likely to grow as the Philippines was hit this week by Typhoon Ragasa, which is reported to have killed three Filipinos this week, per NBC.* For our final foreign policy update, just days after the dubiously-legal strikes that killed 11 Venezuelans on a boat the U.S. claims was being used to transport drugs, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro sent a letter to American special envoy Richard Grenell, per CNN. In this letter, Maduro denies any involvement with narco-trafficking, calling the allegations “fake news, propagated through various media channels,” and calling for Trump to “promote peace through constructive dialogue and mutual understanding throughout the hemisphere.” Trump brushed off Maduro, saying “We'll see what happens with Venezuela,” perhaps implying a renewed attempt to remove the Venezuelan president. Since then, the U.S. has conducted more of these lethal strikes, with no conclusive proof of the victims' criminality. The U.S. government is offering a $50 million bounty for Maduro's arrest.* Moving northward, a disturbing story comes to us from Florida. The Miami Herald reports, “As of the end of August, the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined.” Speaking to the paper, attorneys characterized entering the facility as entering “an alternate [immigration] system where the normal rules don't apply.” This story cites one case of a man “accidentally deported to Guatemala before a scheduled bond hearing,” similar to the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, and a Cuban man supposedly transferred to a facility in California but who could not be located there. This kind of disappearing of migrants adds fuel to the fire of the worst suspicions about the administration's immigration policies. The Florida facility was forced to halt operations after a court ruling in August, but an appeals court has now overruled that ruling. The future of the site and its detainees remains uncertain.* In another instance of what appears to be a cover-up by the Trump administration, NPR reports the Department of Agriculture will “end a longstanding annual food insecurity survey.” In a statement, the USDA called the report “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.” This removes another crucial data tool, following the discontinuation of the Bureau of Labor Statistics' jobs report Trump ended just weeks ago. The signature legislation of Trump's second term thus far, the One Big Beautiful Bill, expanded work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which is estimated to cut food aid to 2.4 million Americans. That will surely add to the 47.4 million food insecure households recorded in 2023. Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC), told NPR “The national food insecurity survey is a critical, reliable data source that shows how many families in America struggle to put food on the table…Without that data, we are flying blind.”* And in another assault on the regulatory state, the Supreme Court this week allowed Trump to keep Rebecca Slaughter – the last remaining Democrat on the Federal Trade Commission – out of her post for another three months. POLITICO reports the high court is reviewing a 90-year-old law which “limit[s] the president's power to fire…officials for political reasons.” According to this report, many expect the conservative majority on the court will rule that that law “unconstitutionally interferes with the president's ability to control the executive branch.” If so, Trump will be able to remove Slaughter permanently – along with any other remaining Democrats within the regulatory apparatus.* On the media front, ABC – and its parent company, Disney – have balked, reinstating Jimmy Kimmel's late night television program after abruptly suspending the show last week. Kimmel, in his return, clarified that “it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man,” but excoriated the ABC affiliates who took his show off the air, calling the move “un-American.” This from AP. Theories abound as to why exactly ABC and/or Disney walked back what seemed like a cancellation; these include a potential costly lawsuit due to wrongful termination of Kimmel's contract, as well as a coordinated boycott campaign targeting Disney's streaming service, Disney+. For his part, President Trump washed his hands of the fiasco, writing that Kimmel can “rot in his bad Ratings,” per New York Magazine.* In tech news, Axios reports the Trump administration has approved Grok, Elon Musk's AI chatbot, for official use by every government agency. This news comes via a press release from the General Services Administration. This release quotes Musk, who says “We look forward to continuing to work with President Trump and his team to rapidly deploy AI throughout the government for the benefit of the country.” This comes after an August 25th letter in which a coalition of over 30 consumer groups – such as Public Citizen, Consumer Federation of America, and the Center for AI and DigitalPolicy – urged the Office of Management and Budget, led by Russell Vought, to “take immediate action to block the deployment or procurement of Grok.” Among the concerns cited in this letter are Grok's penchant for generating “conspiratorial and inflammatory content, including accusations that South Africans were committing a ‘white genocide'...Expressing ‘skepticism' about historical consensus of the Holocaust death toll and espousing Holocaust denial talking points…[and] Referring to itself as ‘MechaHitler'.” It remains to be seen what, if any, next steps opponents can take to halt the incorporation of Grok into the daily functions of the federal government.* Finally, Adelita Grijalva has won the Arizona 7th congressional district special election in a landslide. According to preliminary reports, she swamped her Republican opponent Daniel Butierez by nearly 40 points, according to Newsweek. This is a substantially larger margin than that won by Kamala Harris in 2024, who won the district by 23 points, which itself was a 10-point decline from Joe Biden, who won the district by 33 points in 2020. Grijalva's ascension to the House will further winnow away the Republicans' razor-thin majority in that chamber, bringing the margin to 219-214. She could also prove to be the critical 218th vote in favor of releasing the Epstein files. Adelita is the daughter of Raúl Grijalva, who passed away earlier this year. The elder Grijalva was widely considered one of the most progressive House Democrats, being the first member of Congress to endorse Bernie Sanders in his 2016 campaign and the second to call for Joe Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race. Hopefully, the new Representative Grijalva will fill those big shoes.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

In this episode, human rights expert and senior policy advisor Brian Dooley joins Sarah to share his experience of working in conflict zones and supporting human rights defenders as they work under extremely challenging circumstances.  This episode explores the intersection of activism and policy while offering insights into working in the human rights sector more generally. As Senior Advisor, Brian supports Human Rights First's work with human rights activists in hostile environments. Prior to serving as Senior Advisor, Brian directed Human Rights First's engagement with the U.S. government and other partners to end threats and obstacles to human rights defenders. From 2020 to 2023, he served as Senior Advisor to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders. Prior to joining Human Rights First, Brian spent twenty years working for U.S., Irish, and international NGOs. He led Amnesty International's work on partnering with national NGOs in the global South. Brian has also worked as Head of Media for Amnesty International in London and in Dublin and as Director of Communications for Public Citizen in Washington, D.C. He is the author of several books about civil rights and U.S. politics. He had early experience on Capitol Hill, serving as a legislative researcher for Senator Edward Kennedy in the mid-1980s when he contributed to what ultimately became the 1986 Anti-Apartheid Act. In 1981 and 1982, Brian lived and worked as an English teacher and community organizer in a black township in South Africa, which was prohibited under apartheid's racial segregation laws. Brian earned a PhD in the transnational history of rights from the University of East Anglia, an MPhil in Government and Politics from The Open University in London, and a B.A. with honours in Political Science from the University of East Anglia.

During the 2024 election, the cryptocurrency industry, including political action committees, accounted for nearly half of all of the corporate money going into the election, according to the watchdog group Public Citizen. That spending helped make Congress and the Trump administration more friendly to the crypto industry. Now, in the run-up to the midterms, the AI industry wants to replicate the crypto sector's success. AI companies are amassing millions of dollars to help candidates that favor light regulation over AI. Marketplace's Nova Safo spoke with Amrith Ramkumar, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal who recently wrote about this new pro-AI PAC network.

During the 2024 election, the cryptocurrency industry, including political action committees, accounted for nearly half of all of the corporate money going into the election, according to the watchdog group Public Citizen. That spending helped make Congress and the Trump administration more friendly to the crypto industry. Now, in the run-up to the midterms, the AI industry wants to replicate the crypto sector's success. AI companies are amassing millions of dollars to help candidates that favor light regulation over AI. Marketplace's Nova Safo spoke with Amrith Ramkumar, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal who recently wrote about this new pro-AI PAC network.

But I need my truck to drive to my job at JPMorgan. BONUS EPISODES available on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/deniersplaybook) SOCIALS & MORE (https://linktr.ee/deniersplaybook) WANT TO ADVERTISE WITH US? Please contact sponsors@multitude.productions DISCLAIMER: Some media clips have been edited for length and clarity. CREDITS Created by: Rollie Williams, Nicole Conlan & Ben BoultHosts: Rollie Williams & Nicole ConlanExecutive Producer: Ben Boult Editor: Paul Ramsdell & Laura ConteProducers: Daniella Philipson, Irene PlagianosArchival Producer: Margaux SaxAdditional Research and Fact Checking: Carly Rizzuto & Canute HaroldsonMusic: Tony Domenick Art: Jordan Doll Special Thanks: The Civil Liberties Defense CenterSOURCES18 SUVs Built on a Truck Frame (Truck Based SUV 2023) - Four Wheel Trends (2021, April 18). Four Wheel Trends.Author: Keith Bradsher. (2002). High and mighty: SUVs—the world's most dangerous vehicles and how they got that way. Public Affairs.Jeep Cherokee Commercial (1975). Bionic Disco. (2020, July 3).Propaganda paved the way for an automotive society. Boenau, A. (2023, August 18). Urbanism Speakeasy.Automotive ad investment remains stuck in reverse gear | WARC. Brownsell, A. (2023, September 3).From workhorses to lifestyle vehicles: How pickup trucks got so big. Chase, W., Muller, J., & Whalen, J. (2023, January 23).How To Steal An Election | Climate Town. Climate Town. (2024, September 25).Clean Air Act: A Summary of the Act and Its Major Requirements. Congressional Research Service. (2022).What Year Did They Start Putting Seat Belts in Trucks?. Corp, G. S. (2023, November 25).F.E.A PROPOSING FREER REIN ON OIL. Cowan, E. (1975, May 16). The New York Times.America Made Us | Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep, Ram. Dodge. (2025, May 22).Arab oil embargo | international relations [1973]. Encyclopædia Britannica. (2018).Summary of the Clean Air Act. EPA. (2024, July 31).EPA moves to strike down California vehicle emission rules for good. Fisher, T. (2025, February 17).The Ford Kentucky Truck Plant | Ford Motor Company. Ford Motor Company. (2025, May 2).HISTORY OF FUEL ECONOMY One Decade of Innovation, Two Decades of Inaction 1970s. Frohman Lubetsky, J. (2011).THE ACCESS ALMANAC: The CAFÉ Standards Worked – ACCESS Magazine. Glazer, A. (1994, September).How A Tax On Chicken Changed The Playing Field For U.S. Automakers. Glinton, S. (2015, June 19). NPR.GM squandered our good will, setting off years of licks for corporate America. (2012, July 20).Auto Industry Fears New Rules Would Raise Costs and Lower Mileage. M. Callahan, J. (1975, February 2). The New York Times.Closing the Gap: Reevaluating CAFE Standards and the Light Truck Loophole. Marcotte, B. (2025). LSU Journal of Energy Law and Resources, 13(2).Lessons from Protectionism Past. McGillis, J. (2024, October 10). City Journal.Nader, R. (1965). Unsafe at any speed: the designed-in dangers of the American automobile. Knightsbridge Pub. Co.Drivers remember 1973-74 oil embargo. NBC 26 - Northeast Wisconsin. (2022, June 21).The Chicken Tax Explained. Norman, K. (2020, August 3).1976 Jeep J10 Pickup Commercial - First Date. OsbornTramain. (2016, July 15).1998 New Beetle “What Color do you Dream In” Commercial. pcressma. (2010, July 28).The Consumer's Truth: Myths and Facts about American Consumers and Fuel Economy. Public Citizen. (2003).Ram | Never Stop Being American | Nothing Stops Ram. Ram Trucks. (2025, June 14).50 Years of Progress. South Coast AQMD. (2016).CAFE Standards Could Mean Bigger Cars, Not Smaller Ones – Mechanical Engineering. Stewart, B. (2011, December 9).Subaru “I Survived” Stories. Subaru. (2015, April 17).Oil Crisis | Stock market Crash | OPEC | This Week| 1973. ThamesTv. (2017).The Chicken War of '63 Was a Tale Of Anger, Laughter and Portent. (1964, January 10). The New York Times.Volkswagen Beetle commercial - VW “Dome.”. Tricoastal71. (2009, August 24).A Brief History of US Fuel Efficiency Standards. Union of Concerned Scientists. (2017, December 6).Personal Transportation Factsheet. University of Michigan. (2023).Volkswagen Type 2. (2025). Classic Cars Wiki; Fandom, Inc.The reckless policies that helped fill our streets with ridiculously large cars. Zipper, D. (2024, April 28). Vox.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

American Democracy Minute Radio News Report & Podcast for Aug. 27, 2025President Trump Agitates for Release of Convicted Colorado Clerk Tina Peters; Federal Judge Won't Dismiss Class Action Suit Against Elon MuskWe have updates on two stories we brought you last year, as President Donald Trump attempts to get convicted Colorado county clerk Tina Peters released, and Elon Musk faces a class action suit over alleged empty promises made to swing state petition signers. Some podcasting platforms strip out our links.  To read our resources and see the whole script of today's report, please go to our website at https://AmericanDemocracyMinute.orgToday's LinksArticles & Resources:American Democracy Minute - CO Election Official Tina Peters Got 9 Years for Tampering with Election Machines to Prove the Big Lie.  Trump is Trying to Set Her Free.American Democracy Minute - Wisconsin AG Appeals to State Supreme Court to Block Elon Musk's Million Dollar Lottery for WI GOP Voters – Oops – Make that ‘Spokesmen' Colorado Newsline - (2024) Tina Peters, former Mesa County clerk, sentenced to 9 years in prison over voting systems breachColorado Newsline - Trump threatens ‘harsh measures' in another call for Tina Peters' releaseHuffington Post - Elon Musk Must Face Lawsuit For Duping Trump Supporters In $1 Million Giveaways U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas - Ruling in McAferty  v. MuskGroups Taking Action:Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, Common Cause,  Public Citizen, States United Democracy Center, Issue OnePlease follow us on Facebook and Bluesky Social, and SHARE! Find all of our reports at AmericanDemocracyMinute.orgWant ADM sent to your email?  Sign up here!#News #Democracy  #DemocracyNews #Colorado #ElonMusk #AmericaPAC #TinaPeters #DonaldTrump 

It's Newsday Tuesday on the Majority Report On today's show: Canadian Union of Public Employees President Mark Hancock tears up a government order demanding Air Canada workers end their strike and return to work. Two days later a tentative collective agreement is struck. Co-President of Public Citizen, Lisa Gilbert joins the show to discuss Donald Trump's federal invasion of Washington D.C. and what Public Citizen is doing to resist. Politico's Playbook obtains audio of Andrew Cuomo's 4th fundraisers in the Hamptons which details Cuomo's intentions to work with Trump during his mayorship. In the Fun Half: Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) continues her year of humiliation by making her first public appearance in her district in a long time and gets booed off the stage. Morning Joe invites the MSNBC heavyweights to come on the show and feign enthusiasm for the My Source | News Opinion World (MS NOW) rebranding. On a phone call with Fox & Friends, trump does everything he can to avoid talking about the current state of Ukraine negotiations. Majority Report's Middle School Correspondent, Saul Seder joins us to extort Sam. All that and more. The Congress switchboard number is (202) 224-3121. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the ESVN YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/esvnshow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors RITUAL: Get 25% off during your first month. Visit ritual.com/MAJORITY to start Ritual or add Essential For Men to your subscription today. DELETEME: Get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to joindeleteme.com/MAJORITY and use promo code MAJORITY at checkout. SMALLS: For a limited time only, get 60% off your first order PLUS shipping when you head to Smalls.com and use code MAJORITY SUNSET LAKE: Head on over to Sunset LakeCBD.com and use code Majority for 15% off your first order. Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder – https://majorityreportradio.com

Ralph devotes the entire program to challenging the “official” count of 60 thousand fatalities reported so far in the genocide Israel, aided and abetted by the United States, has perpetrated on the Palestinians in Gaza. First, Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, who volunteered twice in Gaza hospitals, presents the various studies that revise estimates into the hundreds of thousands. Then weapons expert, Professor Theodore Postol, backs that up with his knowledge of the destructive power of the weapons being used and the photographic evidence of the rubble.Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma, general, and critical care surgeon. He has volunteered twice in Gaza since 2024 and three times in Ukraine since 2022. He has published on humanitarian surgical work in the New York Times, Politico, and the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.I've made my point clear month after month that I believe the death toll is now well over 500,000. And it's important to have an accurate death toll to respect the Palestinian dead and to intensify diplomatic, political, and civic pressures from around the world (and particularly from the White House and Congress) to cease fire, to let the humanitarian trucks that are already at the border in (with food, medicine, water, hospital supplies), and to make sure that this conflict is resolved safely.Ralph NaderIt certainly seems that every single international expert on the topic does think that this is a genocidal attack, so I don't see any reason to disbelieve what they're saying. But that doesn't have to do with how many people are killed. So what I'm just trying to point out is that even if the numbers of people that we talk about here today are (like Ralph said) half a million, or whatever number of people have been killed, nobody disputes that huge numbers of mass killings have taken place. And it doesn't seem that anybody who knows what they're talking about disputes that it's genocidal at this point.Dr. Feroze SidhwaIt's been very widely understood by lots and lots of people, of a huge variety of political leanings, a huge variety of life experiences, of professions, et cetera, that this is the image that springs to mind when they go to the Gaza Strip—it's something like a gigantic concentration camp.Dr. Feroze SidhwaIf the U.S. or Israel cared at all about how many people (including, remember, this is a territory that is half children) —if we cared how many people, including children, we have starved to death, have shot dead, have blown up, et cetera, we could figure it out in two weeks and with 10 grand. The Israelis wouldn't even have to stop their assault. They could keep doing it. They could just agree to de-conflict this group of a few people. But they won't do it for obvious reasons. And I shouldn't say “they” —we won't do it for obvious reasons.Dr. Feroze SidhwaTheodore Postol is Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy Emeritus in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. His expertise is in nuclear weapon systems, including submarine warfare, applications of nuclear weapons, ballistic missile defense, and ballistic missiles more generally.When you have a large building collapse, everyone is going to be dead unless they're out of the building. It's just that simple. And even when you have large buildings collapse and you have people coming in to search for people, you typically only find a few people who happen to have been lucky enough to be trapped in a cavity that's near a surface area of the rubble heap. If you're deep in the rubble heap, your chances of surviving are near zero.Professor Theodore PostolNews 8/15/25* New Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index data shows Trump's new tariff regime has resulted in significant increases in tariff-sensitive staple consumer goods. Some startling price spikes include a 38.9% rise in the price of vegetables, 14.5% increase in the price of coffee and an 11.3% increase in the price of beef and veal. Beyond food, electricity is up 5.5%, rent and shelter is up 3.6%, and health insurance is up 4.4%. These increases are sure to be politically unpopular, as Trump campaigned on bringing down inflation and the price of groceries. The reporting of this data also raises questions about Trump's response, given his response to the recent negative BLS data reporting on new job creation.* Speaking of job creation data, while the U.S. only reported the creation of 73,000 new jobs in July, Mexico, under left-wing economic nationalist president and AMLO successor Claudia Scheinbaum, created over 1.26 million new jobs in the same month, according to Mexico News Daily. Furious about the jobs report, Trump forced out the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and is now seeking to install right-wing economist EJ Antoni. According to the BBC, economists have said his “economic commentary [is] rife with basic mistakes.” Antoni, kowtowing to Trump, ​​has proposed ending the monthly jobs report. Antoni would need to be confirmed by Senate Republicans, who have expressed some trepidation about his appointment, but whether that will be enough for them to stand up to Trump on this appointment seems unlikely.* In more domestic economic news, Jacobin reports corporations are experimenting with a new method of worker exploitation – so-called “stay-or-pay” contracts. According to this article, millions of employees – from nurses to pilots to fast food workers – are, often unwittingly, being “inserted into…restrictive labor covenants [which] turn employer-sponsored job training and education programs into conditional loans that must be paid back — sometimes at a premium — if employees leave before a set date.” These contracts, known as Training Repayment Agreement Provisions, or their acronym TRAPs, have become a major new battleground between corporate interests and groups fighting for labor rights, including unions and regulators. However, with Trump administration efforts to rollback even the modest labor protections promulgated under the Biden administration, the possibility of any federal intervention on behalf of workers seems remote.* In more Trump-related news, the occupation of Washington, D.C. has commenced. Trump has deployed federal agents, including officers with the Department of Homeland Security and Drug Enforcement Administration, as well as National Guard troops, to patrol the streets of the capital. Some of these deployments seem to be mostly for media spectacle; feds have been seen patrolling tourist areas like the National Mall, Union Station and Georgetown, but others have been going into District neighborhoods and harassing District residents for smoking on their own property. Moreover, while Trump has said "Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people," the Justice Department has in fact announced that this year violent crime in Washington has hit a 30-year low, per NPR. Trump is restricted to a 30 day takeover of the District by law, but is seeking to extend this window through Congress.* As usual, even as Trump claims to be cracking down on crime, his administration treats corporate crime with kid gloves. Despite major news of corporate misconduct this week – including the reopening of a Boar's Head facility shut down earlier this year due to a listeria outbreak despite ongoing sanitation issues and an explosion at the Clairton Coke Works in Pittsburgh that left at least two dead and ten injured – a new Public Citizen report shows the extent of the administration's soft-on-corporate-crime approach. According to this report, “the Trump administration has already withdrawn or halted enforcement actions against 165 corporations of all types – and one in four of the corporations benefiting from halted or dropped enforcement is from the technology sector, which has spent $1.2 billion on political influence during and since the 2024 elections.”* Turning to Gaza, the Financial Times reports, “Israel has killed…prominent Al Jazeera correspondent [Anas Al-Sharif] in Gaza and four of his colleagues…in an air strike targeting them in a media tent.” This report notes the Israeli military “took credit” for the strike after “months of threats and unproven allegations that [the journalist] was the head of a Hamas cell.” The Committee to Protect Journalists called these claims an attempt to “manufacture consent for his killing.” The network called this move a “desperate attempt to silence voices in anticipation of the occupation of Gaza.” Anas Al-Sharif was a prominent journalist in the Arab world and was part of a Reuters photo team who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024. Israel has already killed six Al Jazeera reporters in Gaza prior to this strike.* Meanwhile, in Egypt, President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi last Tuesday issued his harshest criticism of Israel thus far, accusing the nation of prosecuting “a war for starvation, genocide, and the liquidation of the Palestinian cause.” Yet, according to Drop Site News, Sisi's comments came just days before an announcement that an Israeli company will begin supplying Egypt with vast amounts of gas. This $35 billion deal between Egypt, neighbor to Israel and Palestine and the largest Arab nation, and Israeli energy company NewMed is the largest export agreement in Israel's history. This deal adds a new dimension to other comments Sisi made in those same remarks, wherein he defended Egypt against criticism for “not opening the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing to allow in aid.” It remains to be seen whether the genocide comments represent a new chapter of Egypt-Israel relations, or whether they are just a smokescreen to cover Egypt and Israel's increasing economic interdependence.* In Palestine news from the homefront, Semafor reports the Democratic National Committee will consider two dueling resolutions on Gaza at their meeting this month. According to Dave Weigel, one, introduced by DNC Chair Ken Martin would “[urge] a ceasefire and a return of hostages held by Hamas,” along with a reaffirmation of the increasingly far-fetched two-state solution. The other, introduced by a DNC member on the progressive flank of the party, calls for “suspension of military aid to Israel” and recognition of a Palestinian state. The latter resolution has drawn the ire of Democratic Majority for Israel, a political organization that aims to keep the Democratic Party firmly in the pro-Israel camp. DMFI's president, Brian Romick, is quoted saying that resolution would be a “gift to Republicans” and would “embolden Israel's adversaries.”* In more positive foreign affairs news, Jeremy Corbyn's new party in the United Kingdom appears to be gaining steam. A string of polls indicate the party could win the seats currently held by several high-profile Labour Party MPs, including Health Secretary Wes Streeting and now-resigned Homelessness Secretary Rushanara Ali. Most shockingly, it seems they could even win Holborn and St. Pancras, the seat currently held by Labour Party Prime Minister Keir Starmer. If this Corbynite wave does ultimately crest, it would be a stunning reversal of fortune after the Starmerite Labour Party expelled the former Labour leader in 2023.* Finally, AOL announced this week that they will end their Dial-up internet service in September, Ars Technica reports. AOL launched their Dial-up service in 1991, helping to usher in the era of widespread internet adoption. While this may seem like a natural step in terms of technological advancement, US Census data from 2022 shows that approximately 175,000 American households still connect to the Internet through dial-up services. As this article notes, “These users typically live in rural areas where broadband infrastructure doesn't exist or remains prohibitively expensive to install.” In effect, this move could leave these rural communities completely without internet, a problem compounded by the Trump administration's decision earlier this year to “abandon key elements of a $42.45bn Biden-era plan to connect rural communities to high-speed internet,” per the Guardian. It should be considered a national disgrace if both the private sector and the government leave these rural communities behind.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Our resident constitutional expert Bruce Fein joins to make the case for impeaching the Supreme Court AND the President, and what we—as citizens—can do to make it happen. Then we welcome Lori Wallach of Rethink Trade to evaluate Trump's tariff policy. Are these trade deals bringing manufacturing back to the US? Or is Trump just using tariffs as a cudgel to punish countries that annoy him?Bruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.This has real consequences for you people all over the country because one of their shadow docket decisions (without explanation or hearing) briefs just very recently said that Trump can fire all these people in the IRS or the Education Department or EPA and get away with it. And, in fact, paralyze the workings of his (statutorily-established-by-Congress) Cabinet Secretary and Department…So this is devastating to your health, economic safety, environment, workplace safety, education, all kinds of things that are being ridden into the ground.Ralph NaderIn my judgment, the court has basically abandoned its role as a check on executive power…It's actually become an appendage of the executive branch. Nothing placing any kind of serious or material handcuff on what the President can do on his own. And the President is taking full advantage of that.Bruce FeinLori Wallach is a 30-year veteran of international and U.S. congressional trade battles— starting with the 1990s fights over NAFTA and WTO when she founded the “Global Trade Watch” group at Public Citizen. She is now the director of the Rethink Trade program at the American Economic Liberties Project, and a Senior Advisor to the Citizens Trade Campaign.What these guys are doing [with Trump's tariff policy] it's basically trying to build a house with just a hammer—we are against saws; we are against screwdrivers; we do not actually believe in nails, no other tools; we will just hammer a bunch of wood. And as a result, we're going to make some noise and we're definitely going to break some things, but we're not actually building a new redistributed trade system—which we could.Lori WallachBest that we can tell, the dynamic is something like: Trump is so engaged in the fun and chaos—fun (from his perspective) and chaos of throwing tariff news around like a lightning bolt that he really is not taking advice about it from people who know how you could use tariffs to try and ostensibly achieve the things he promised. He's just enjoying throwing around tariffs.Lori WallachNews 7/18/25* Last week, Elon Musk's pet AI program – Grok – began identifying itself as “MechaHitler,” and spitting out intricate rape threats and sexual fantasies directed at individuals like liberal pundit Will Stancil and now-ex X CEO Linda Yaccarino. This week, Musk rolled out Grok's new “sexy mode” which includes a visual avatar feature depicting the artificial entity as a quasi-pornographic anime-esque character who can flirt with users, per the Standard. So, naturally, the Trump Defense Department awarded xAI, the parent company behind Grok, a $200 million contract. According to CNN, “The contracts will enable the DoD to develop agentic AI workflows and use them to address critical national security challenges.” It is unclear how exactly the entity calling itself MechaHitler will accomplish that.* In local news, a special election was held in Washington DC's Ward 8 this week, seeking to replace corrupt councilmember Trayon White. White was implicated in an FBI bribery investigation and was expelled from the council in February. Yet, because of the splintered opposition, White pulled out a narrow victory on Wednesday, winning with 29.7% of the vote compared to his opponents' 24.3%, 23.7% and 22.3% respectively, per WTOP. In 2024, DC Voters approved a ballot measure to implement ranked-choice voting, which could have helped prevent this outcome, but it has yet to take effect. The DC Council could vote to expel White again more or less immediately; if not, they would likely wait for his trial to commence in January 2026.* Turning to foreign affairs, Israel has bombed the Syrian capital of Damascus, killing three and wounding 34, in strikes primarily targeting the Syrian Defense Ministry headquarters, per NPR. Israel's attack comes amid tensions between the new, post-Assad Syrian government and the Druze minority in the Southern Syrian city of Sweida. The government claims the Druze violated a ceasefire reached earlier in the week and Syrian troops responded; a new ceasefire deal has been reached and the office of interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa issued a statement reading, the “rights [of the citizens of Sweida] will always be protected and…we will not allow any party to tamper with their security or stability.” Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, said in a statement that the U.N. chief “condemns Israel's escalatory airstrikes,” as well as reports of the Israeli military's redeployment of forces in the Golan Heights. As journalist Séamus Malekafzali notes, “Damascus is now the 4th Middle Eastern capital to be bombed by Israel in the past 6 weeks, alongside Tehran, Beirut, and Sana'a.”* In more news from Israel, the Knesset this week sought to expel Palestinian lawmaker Ayman Odeh, leader of the Hadash-Ta'al party. According to Haaretz, “The vote was triggered by a Likud lawmaker after Odeh published a social media post in January, saying that he ‘rejoices' over the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners.” However, the motion failed to reach the 90-vote threshold, meaning Odeh will remain in the legislature. Six members of Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid party voted for the motion, but not Lapid himself. The United Torah Judaism party did not back the motion. Haaretz quotes Hassan Jabareen, an attorney, director of the Adalah Legal Center and legal counsel for Odeh, who said, “The overwhelming support for this initiative – from both the coalition and the opposition – reveals the state's intent to crush Palestinian political representation...This was not a legitimate legal process, but rather a racist, fascist incitement campaign aimed at punishing Odeh for his principled stance against occupation, oppression and Israeli violence.” Senator Bernie Sanders celebrated the failure of the motion, writing “Israel's far right tried to expel Ayman Odeh, an Arab Israeli opposition leader, from the Knesset because of his opposition to Netanyahu's war. Today, they failed. If Israel is going to be considered a democracy, it cannot expel members of parliament for their political views.” This from the Middle East Eye.* Sanders also made news this week by declaring that “Given the illegal and immoral war being waged against the Palestinian people by Netanyahu, NO Democrat should accept money from AIPAC – an organization that also helped deliver the presidency to Donald Trump,” per the Jerusalem Post. Sanders posted this statement in response to a video by Obama foreign policy advisor Ben Rhodes, who said “AIPAC is part of the constellation of forces that have delivered this country into the hands of Donald Trump…These are the wrong people to have under your tent...The kind of people that they are supporting, Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump, I don't want my leaders and my political party cozying up to these people.” Bernie's statement is perhaps the strongest stand taken by any American politician against AIPAC, Israel's front group in American politics and one of the biggest special interest groups in the country. AIPAC throws around eye-popping sums of money to members of both parties; to name just one example, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has accepted over $1.6 million from the group, according to Track AIPAC's Hall of Shame.* In a similar vein, last week we discussed the National Education Association's vote to suspend its ties with the Anti-Defamation League due to the ADL's shift in focus from Jewish civil rights to laundering the reputation of Israel. Since then, the ADL has sought to mobilize their allies to demand the NEA reject the vote. To this end, the ADL has sought the support of J Street, a liberal Jewish group critical of Israel, per the Forward. J Street however has rebuffed the ADL, refusing to sign the group's letter. Though they oppose the NEA resolution, J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami issued a statement reading in part, “charges of antisemitism must not be wielded to quash legitimate criticism of Israeli policy...the NEA vote can[not] be dismissed as being driven by fringe ‘pro-Hamas' antisemitic activists.” Hopefully, more Jewish groups will follow the example of J Street and break with the Zionist orthodoxy of the ADL.* In other foreign policy news, the Guardian reports French President Macron has reached a deal with the leadership of the French “overseas territory” New Caledonia to grant the island statehood and more autonomy within the French legal system. New Caledonia is one of several UN-designated ‘non-self-governing territories.' France has exerted rule over the Pacific Island – over 10,000 miles from Paris – and its nearly 300,000 inhabitants since the 19th century. Last May, riots broke out over France's decision to grant voting rights to thousands of non-indigenous residents. This violence “claimed the lives of 14 people, [and] is estimated to have cost the territory…$2.3 bn... shaving 10% off its gross domestic product.” However, the Times reports indigenous Kanak independence activists reject the deal outright. Brenda Wanabo-Ipeze, a leader of the Co-ordination Cell for Actions on the Ground, who is currently detained in France, said, “This text was signed without us. It does not bind us.” The Times adds that, “The conservative and hard-right French opposition accused Macron of failing to ensure security in the territory. The left accused the president of imposing colonial tactics on a people who should be allowed self-determination.” It remains to be seen whether this deal will prove durable enough to weather criticism from so many angles.* Much has been made of Attorney General Pam Bondi's decision last week to not release any more information related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. A Department of Justice memo reads, “it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” This has created a firestorm in the MAGA world, with many Trump supporters feeling betrayed as the president implied he would declassify these files if reelected. Now, Congressmen Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna have introduced the Epstein Files Transparency Act which would “force the House of Representatives to vote on the complete release of the government's files related to Jeffrey Epstein,” according to a press release from Massie's office. This resolution specifically states the files cannot “be withheld, delayed, or redacted” should they cause “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.” The resolution is attracting support from some Republicans, but it is unclear how far this will go under Speaker Johnson, who maintains there is “no daylight between his position and that of Trump,” per the Hill. The position of congressional Republicans has been further complicated by a bombshell report in the Wall Street Journal documenting previously unknown details of the intimate relationship between the late pedophile financier and the president.* Meanwhile, the Trump administration is once again torching America's reputation abroad – this time literally. The Atlantic reports “Five months into its unprecedented dismantling of foreign-aid programs, the Trump administration has given the order to incinerate food instead of sending it to people abroad who need it. Nearly 500 metric tons of emergency food—enough to feed about 1.5 million children for a week—are set to expire tomorrow, according to current and former government employees with direct knowledge of the rations. Within weeks…the food, meant for children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be ash.” This cartoonishly evil decision paired with the “Big Beautiful Bill”'s provisions cutting food assistance for children in poverty, point to one inescapable conclusion: the Trump administration wants children to starve.* Finally, on the opposite end of the spectrum, Mexico News Daily reports the administration of President Claudia Sheinbaum is debuting a healthy, domestically produced and affordable staple for Mexican consumers – chocolate bars. “This ‘Chocolate de Bienestar' is part of the government's ‘Food for Well-Being' strategy, which aims to bring nutritious and affordable food options to consumers while supporting national producers, particularly those in the southern states of Tabasco and Chiapas — a region that has historically lagged behind other regions in several social and economic indicators.” The Sheinbaum administration is stressing the health benefits of chocolate, noting that, “Studies have shown that chocolate improves cardiovascular health via its antioxidants, provides energy, helps control blood pressure, improves cognitive capacity, satisfies hunger and lifts mood.” At the same time, the administration is seeking to minimize the sugar content “striking a supposedly healthier balance between natural cane sugar and the cacao itself.” This chocolate will be available in three forms:“Chocolate bar containing 50% cacao, and priced at…less than $1.Powdered chocolate with 30% cocoa, priced...$2Chocolate de mesa or tablet chocolate, with 35% cacao, priced at …$5”This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

We begin on a positive note by welcoming a “doer,” citizen extraordinaire, Jon Merryman, who couldn't stand the trash, especially old tires, being dumped in his neighborhood. So, he took it upon himself to clean it up and has now expanded his efforts across the country. Then co-president of Public Citizen, Robert Weissman, joins us to explain how spending in the recent bill passed by the Republican controlled Congress prioritizes the Pentagon and deportation enforcement at the expense of the social safety net, essentially trading life for death.Jon Merryman was a software designer at Lockheed Martin, who after retiring found his true calling, cleaning up trash in every county in America.When I first started looking at the environment next to my place of work, one of the things I did uncover was tires. And they were definitely there from the '20s, the '30s, and the '40s, they've been there for decades. And then just after a while, the soil and the erosion just covers them up. And you just discover them, and you realize this has been going on forever.Jon MerrymanNature is innocent. It really doesn't deserve what we've given it. And I feel like someone's got to step up to undo what we've done.Jon MerrymanRobert Weissman is a staunch public interest advocate and activist, as well as an expert on a wide variety of issues ranging from corporate accountability and government transparency to trade and globalization, to economic and regulatory policy. As the Co-President of Public Citizen, he has spearheaded the effort to loosen the chokehold corporations, and the wealthy have over our democracy.The best estimates are that the loss of insurance and measures in this bill will cost 40,000 lives every year. Not once. Every year.Robert Weissman co-president of Public Citizen on the Budget BillPeople understand there's a rigged system. They understand that generally. They understand that with healthcare. But if you (the Democrats) don't name the health insurance companies as an enemy, as a barrier towards moving forward. You don't say United Health; you don't go after a Big Pharma, which is probably the most despised health sector in the economy, people don't think you're serious. And partially it's because you're not.Robert WeissmanNews 7/11/251. This week, the Financial Times published a stunning story showing the Tony Blair Institute – founded by the former New Labour British Prime Minister and Iraq War accomplice Tony Blair – “participated” in a project to “reimagine Gaza as a thriving trading hub.” This project would include a “Trump Riviera” and an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone”. To accomplish this, the investors would pay half a million Palestinians to leave Gaza to open the enclave up for development – and that is just the tip of the harebrained iceberg. This scheme would also involve creating “artificial islands off the coast akin to those in Dubai, blockchain-based trade initiatives…and low-tax ‘special economic zones'.” The development of this plot is somewhat shadowy. The FT story names a, “group of Israeli businessmen…including tech investor Liran Tancman and venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg,” who helped establish the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in February 2025. GHF has been accused of using supposed aid distribution sites as “death traps,” per France 24. Boston Consulting Group, also named in the FT story, strongly disavowed the project, as did the Tony Blair Institute.2. In more positive news related to Gaza, the National Education Association – the largest labor union in the United States – voted this week to sever ties with the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL, once an important group safeguarding the civil rights and wellbeing of American Jews, has completely abandoned its historic mission and has instead devoted its considerable resources to trying to crush the anti-Zionist movement. The NEA passed a resolution stating that the NEA “will not use, endorse, or publicize materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), such as its curricular materials or statistics,” because, “Despite its reputation as a civil rights organization, the ADL is not the social justice educational partner it claims to be.” Labor Notes writes that the ADL “has been a ubiquitous presence in U.S. schools for forty years, pushing curriculum, direct programming, and teacher training into K-12 schools and increasingly into universities.” One NEA delegate, Stephen Siegel, said from the assembly floor, “Allowing the ADL to determine what constitutes antisemitism would be like allowing the fossil fuel industry to determine what constitutes climate change.”3. Another major labor story from this week concerns sanitation workers in Philadelphia. According to the Delaware News Journal, AFSCME District Council 33 has reached a deal with the city to raise wages for their 9,000 workers by 9% over three years. The union went on strike July 1st, resulting in, “massive piles of trash piling up on city streets and around trash drop-off sites designated by the city,” and “changes to the city's annual Fourth of July concert with headliner LL Cool J and city native Jazmine Sullivan both dropping out,” in solidarity with the striking workers, per WHYY. The deal reached is a major compromise for the union, which was seeking a 32% total pay increase, but they held off on an extended trash pickup strike equivalent to 1986 strike, which went on for three weeks and left 45,000 tons of rotting garbage in the streets, per ABC.4. Yet another labor story brings us to New York City. ABC7 reports the United Federation of Teachers has endorsed Democratic Socialist – and Democratic Party nominee – Zohran Mamdani for mayor. This report notes “UFT is the city's second largest union…[with] 200,000 members.” Announcing the endorsement, UFT President Michael Mulgrew stated, “This is a real crisis and it's a moment for our city, and our city is starting to speak out very loudly…The voters are saying the same thing, 'enough is enough.' The income gap disparity is above…that which we saw during the Gilded Age." All eyes now turn to District Council 37, which ABC7 notes “endorsed Council speaker Adrienne Adams in the primary and has yet to endorse in the general election.”5. The margin of Mamdani's victory, meanwhile, continues to grow as the Board of Elections updates its ranked choice voting tallies. According to the conservative New York Post, Zohran has “won more votes than any other mayoral candidate in New York City primary election history.” Mamdani can now boast having won over 565,000 votes after 102,000 votes were transferred from other candidates. Not only that, “Mamdani's totals are expected to grow as…a small percent of ballots are still being counted.”6. Meanwhile, scandal-ridden incumbent New York City Mayor Eric Adams has yet another scandal on his hands. The New York Daily News reports, “Four high-ranking former NYPD chiefs are suing Mayor Adams, claiming they were forced to retire from the department after complaining that his ‘unqualified' friends were being placed in prestigious police positions, sometimes after allegedly bribing their way into the jobs.” Former Police Commissioner Edward Caban, who was already forced to resign in disgrace amidst a federal corruption investigation, features prominently in this new lawsuit. Among other things, Caban is alleged to have been “selling promotions” to cops for up to $15,000. Adams is running for reelection as an independent, but trails Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani and disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo.7. Turning to the federal government, as the U.S. disinvests in science and technology, a new report published in the Financial Times finds that, “Almost three-quarters of all solar and wind power projects being built globally are in China.” According to the data, gathered by Global Energy Monitor, “China is building 510 gigawatts of utility-scale solar and wind projects… [out of] 689GW under construction globally.” As this report notes, one gigawatt can potentially supply electricity for about one million homes. This report goes on to say that, “China is expected to add at least 246.5GW of solar and 97.7GW of wind this year,” on top of the “1.5 terawatts of solar and wind power capacity up and running as of the end of March.” In the first quarter of 2025, solar and wind accounted for 22.5% of China's total electricity consumption; in 2023, solar and wind accounted for around 14% of electricity consumption in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.8. Developments this week put two key rules promulgated by the Federal Trade Commission under former Chair Lina Khan in jeopardy. First and worse, NPR reports the Republican-controlled FTC is abandoning a rule which would have banned non-compete clauses in employment contracts. These anti-worker provisions “trap workers and depress wages,” according to Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who has introduced legislation to ban them by statute. Perhaps more irritatingly however, Reuters reports the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis has blocked the so-called “click to cancel” rule just days before it was set to take effect. This rule would have, “required retailers, gyms and other businesses to provide cancellation methods for subscriptions, auto-renewals and free trials that convert to paid memberships that are ‘at least as easy to use' as the sign up process.” A coalition of corporate interests sued to block the rule, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a trade group representing major cable and internet providers such as Charter Communications, Comcast and Cox Communications along with media companies like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery. Lina Khan decried “Firms…making people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription, trapping Americans in needless bureaucracy and wasting their time & money.”9. In another betrayal of consumers, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to break promises and speak out of both sides of his mouth. A new report in NPR documents RFK Jr. speaking at a conference in April, where he “spoke about the health effects of exposure to harmful chemicals in our food, air and water…[and] cited recent research on microplastics from researchers in Oregon, finding these tiny particles had shown up in 99% of the seafood they sampled.” Yet Susanne Brander, the author of the study, had gotten word just an hour earlier that “a federal grant she'd relied on to fund her research for years…was being terminated.” Brander is quoted saying "It feels like they are promoting the field while ripping out the foundation." Ripping out the foundation of this research is felt acutely, as “regulators are weakening safeguards that limit pollution and other toxic chemicals.” So Mr. Secretary, which is more important – stopping the proliferation of microplastics or slashing funding for the very scientists studying the issue?10. Finally, in Los Angeles masked federal troops are marauding through the streets on horseback, sowing terror through immigrant communities, per the New York Times. President Trump mobilized approximately 4,000 National Guard members – putting them under federal control – alongside 700 Marines in response to protests against immigration raids in June. As the Times notes, “It has been more than three weeks since the last major demonstration in downtown Los Angeles,” but the federal forces have not been demobilized. While some have dismissed the shows of force as nothing more than stunts designed to fire up the president's base, Gregory Bovino, a Customs and Border Protection chief in Southern California told Fox News “[LA] Better get used to us now, cause this is going to be normal very soon.” As LA Mayor Karen Bass put it, “What I saw…looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation…It's the way a city looks before a coup.”This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

This week's episode is another installment of our legislative wrap-up series as we welcome Adrian Shelley, Texas Director of Public Citizen to talk about the wins and the continued work we need to do on climate and energy policy. We recorded in mid-June, and a lot has gone on in the world since, but the goal of this series is to be a resource for Texans of faith to understand what happened in the 89th legislative session and utilize it as we move into election season next year. Find out more about the work of Public Citizen Texas at www.citizen.org/tags/texas and on social media.

Writer/Activist Steve Skovan talks about his work with Ralph Nader, his substack “Bits and Pieces”, his dad being a comic inspiration, the trouble with politics, Public Citizen a progressive consumer rights group, starting as a stand-up, and how a football coach changed his life without molesting him.Bio:  ​​Steve Skrovan has worked as a stand-up comedian, actor, and TV comedy writer since the early eighties. He has written for many shows, most notably, Seinfeld, Hot in Cleveland, Til Death, Wendell and Vinnie, School of Rock, and the entire nine-year run of Everybody Loves Raymond, a show which he has also adapted internationally in Russia, Israel, and India. He is also co-director/writer/producer of An Unreasonable Man, a documentary about the career of legendary consumer advocate and third-party presidential candidate, Ralph Nader, which was not only an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival but also made the “shortlist” for Academy Award consideration in the documentary category. In 2005, he co-produced the TBS environmental special “Earth to America.”  In addition, Steve co-hosts the weekly radio show Ralph Nader Radio Hour, which runs on the Pacifica network and various other independent radio stations as well as being available on all podcast platforms. He is a board member of the non-partisan public interest organization Public Citizen in Washington DC.

In this episode of Let's Hear It, Eric sits down with two public interest comms powerhouses—Ann Searight Christiano and Angela Bradbury—who've just dropped what might be the most anticipated textbook in our field: Public Interest Communications Strategy for Change Makers. T Ann and Angela share how their years in the trenches at places like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Public Citizen shaped this groundbreaking resource—and why storytelling, systems thinking, and listening (really listening) are the keys to actually making change. They discuss their “six spheres of influence,” the “back-of-the-envelope” strategy tool, and why being strategic isn't the same as shouting into the void (no offense to your latest TikTok brainstorm). It's a lively, insightful conversation filled with warmth, humility, and a generous dose of “finally, someone wrote this down.” If you've ever had a boss say, “just make it go viral,” this one's for you. Enjoy the episode—and if you love it, don't forget to follow, rate, and review. Your support helps others find the show (and helps keep us off TikTok, which we would suck at).

In this episode of Let's Hear It, Eric sits down with two public interest comms powerhouses—Ann Searight Christiano and Angela Bradbery—who've just dropped what might be the most anticipated textbook in our field: Public Interest Communications Strategy for Change Makers.  Ann and Angela share how their years in the trenches at places like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Public Citizen shaped this groundbreaking resource—and why storytelling, systems thinking, and listening (really listening) are the keys to actually making change. They discuss their “six spheres of influence,” the “back-of-the-envelope” strategy tool, and why being strategic isn't the same as shouting into the void (no offense to your latest TikTok brainstorm). It's a lively, insightful conversation filled with warmth, humility, and a generous dose of “finally, someone wrote this down.” If you've ever had a boss say, “just make it go viral,” this one's for you. Enjoy the episode—and if you love it, don't forget to follow, rate, and review. Your support helps others find the show (and helps keep us off TikTok, which we would suck at).

First up, Georgetown law professor and former national legal director at the ACLU, David Cole, joins us to discuss the legal response to the Trump Administration's serial violations of the Constitution. Then Mike Ferner of Veterans for Peace checks in to update us halfway through his Fast for Gaza, 40 days of living on 250 calories per day, which is the average caloric intake of Palestinian survivors in Gaza. Finally, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Joe Holley, stops by to pay tribute to his mentor and colleague, the late crusading journalist, Ronnie Dugger, founder of the progressive Texas Observer.David Cole is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy and former National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He writes about and teaches constitutional law, freedom of speech, and constitutional criminal procedure. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and is the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation.Trump is obviously not concerned about antisemitism. He's concerned about targeting schools because they are places where people can criticize the president, where people can think independently, are taught to think independently, and often don't support what the president is doing. He's using his excuse to target a central institution of civil society.David ColeThe decision on Trump versus the United States is only about criminal liability for criminal acts, not for unconstitutional acts. And violating the Constitution is not a crime. Every president has violated the Constitution probably since George Washington. That's not a crime.David ColeMike Ferner served in the Navy during the Vietnam War, and he is former National Director and current Special Projects Coordinator for Veterans for Peace. He is the author of Inside the Red Zone: A Veteran for Peace Reports from Iraq.Two hundred and fifty calories is technically, officially, a starvation diet, and we're doing it for 40 days. The people in Gaza have been doing it for months and months and months, and they're dying like crazy. That's the whole concern that we're trying to raise. And I'll tell you at the end of this fast, on the 40th day, we are not just going out silently. There are going to be some fireworks before we're done with this thing. So all I'm saying is: stay tuned.Mike Ferner: Special Projects Coordinator of Veterans for Peace on “FastforGaza”They're (The Veterans Administration is) being defamed, Ralph, for the same reason that those right-wing corporatists defamed public education. So they can privatize it. And that's exactly what they're trying to do with the VA. And I can tell you every single member of Veterans for Peace has got nothing but praise for the VA.Mike FernerJoe Holley was the editor of the Texas Observer in the early 1980s. A former staff writer at The Washington Post and a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist at the Houston Chronicle, he is the author of eight books, mostly about Texas.He would talk to people, and he would find out things going on about racial discrimination, about farm workers being mistreated, all kind of stories that the big papers weren't reporting. And this one guy, young Ronnie Dugger, would write these stories and expose things about Texas that a lot of Texans just did not know.Joe Holley on the late progressive journalist, Ronnie DuggerHe knew the dark side of Texas, but he always had an upbeat personality. I had numerous conversations with Ronnie (Dugger), and he was ferociously independent.Ralph NaderNews 6/13/251. On Monday, Israeli forces seized the Madleen, the ship carrying activist Greta Thunberg and others attempting to bring food and other supplies past the Israeli blockade into Gaza, and detained the crew. The ship was part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition and Thunberg had been designated an “Ambassador of Conscience,” by Amnesty International. The group decried her detention, with Secretary General Agnès Callamard writing, “Israel has once again flouted its legal obligations towards civilians in the occupied Gaza Strip and demonstrated its chilling contempt for legally binding orders of the International Court of Justice.” On Tuesday, CBS reported that Israel deported Thunberg. Eight other passengers refused deportation and the Jerusalem Post reports they remain in Israeli custody. They will be represented in Israeli courts by Adalah - The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. One of these detainees is Rima Hassan, a French member of the European Parliament.2. Shortly before the Madleen was intercepted, members of Congress sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio expressing concern for the safety of these activists, citing the deadly 2010 raid of the Mavi Marmara, which ultimately resulted in the death of ten activists, including an American. This letter continued, “any attack on the Madleen or its civilian crew is a clear and blatant violation of international law. United Nations experts have called for the ship's safe passage and warned Israel to “refrain from any act of hostility” against the Madleen and its passengers…We call on you to monitor the Madleen's journey and deter any such hostile actions.” This letter was led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and drew signatures from Congressional progressives like Reps. Summer Lee, AOC, Ilhan Omar, Greg Casar, and others.3. On the other end of the political spectrum, Trump – ever unpredictable – seemed to criticize Israel's detention of Thunberg. In a press conference, “Trump was…asked about Thunberg's claim that she had been kidnapped.” The president responded “I think Israel has enough problems without kidnapping Greta Thunberg…Is that what she said? She was kidnapped by Israel?” The reporter replied “Yes, sir,” to which “Trump responded by shaking his head.” This from Newsweek.4. Of course, the major Trump news this week is his response to the uprising in Los Angeles. Set off by a new wave of ICE raids, protesters have clashed with police in the streets and Trump has responded by increasingly upping the ante, including threatening to arrest California Governor Gavin Newsom, per KTLA. Beyond such bluster however, Trump has moved to deploy U.S. Marines onto the streets of the nation's second-largest city. Reuters reports, “About 700 Marines were in a staging area in the Seal Beach area about 30 miles…south of Los Angeles, awaiting deployment to specific locations,” in addition to 2,100 National Guard troops. The deployment of these troops raises thorny legal questions. Per Reuters, “The Marines and National Guard troops lack the authority to makes arrests and will be charged only with protecting federal property and personnel,” but “California Attorney General Rob Bonta… [said] there was a risk that could violate an 1878 law that…forbids the U.S. military, including the National Guard, from taking part in civilian law enforcement.” Yet, despite all the tumult, these protests seem to have gotten the goods, so to speak: the City of Glendale announced it would, “end its agreement with…ICE to house federal immigration detainees.” All of this sets quite a scene going into Trump's military parade in DC slated for Saturday, June 14th.5. In classic fashion however, Trump's tough posture does not extend to corporate crime. Public Citizen's Rick Claypool reports, “Trump's DOJ just announced American corporations that engage in criminal bribery schemes abroad will no longer be prosecuted.” Claypool cites a June 9th memo from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, which reads, “Effective today, prosecutors shall…not attribute…malfeasance to corporate structures.” Claypool also cites a Wall Street Journal piece noting that “the DOJ has already ended half of its criminal investigations into corporate bribery in foreign countries and shrunk its [Foreign Corrupt Practices Act] unit down to 25 employees.”6. Americans can at least take small comfort in one thing: the departure of Elon Musk from the top rungs of government. It remains to be seen what exactly precipitated his final exit and how deep his rift with Trump goes – Musk has already backed down on his harshest criticisms of the president, deleting his tweet claiming Trump was in Epstein files, per ABC. Yet, this appears to be a victory for Steve Bannon and the forces he represents within Trump's inner circle. On June 5th, the New York Times reported that Bannon, “said he was advising the president to cancel all [Musk's] contracts and… ‘initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status'.” Bannon added, “[Musk] should be deported from the country immediately.'” Bannon has even called for a special counsel probe, per the Hill. Bannon's apparent ascendency goes beyond the Oval Office as well. POLITICO Playbook reports Bannon had a 20-minute-long conversation with Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman on Monday evening – while Fetterman dined with Washington bureau chief for Breitbart, Matt Boyle – at Butterworth's, the DC MAGA “watering hole.” This also from the Hill.7. On the way out, the Daily Beast reports, “Elon Musk's goons at the Department of Government Efficiency transmitted a large amount of data—all of it undetected—using a Starlink Wi-Fi terminal they installed on top of the White House.” Sources “suggested that the [the installation of the Starlink terminal] was intended to bypass White House systems that track the transmission of data—with names and time stamps—and secure it from spies.” It is unknown exactly what data Musk and his minions absconded with, and for what purpose. We can only hope the public gets some answers.8. With Musk and Trump parting ways, other political forces are now seeking to woo the richest man in the world. Semafor reports enigmatic Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley and chaired Bernie Sanders' campaign in California, “talked with one of…Musk's ‘senior confidants' …about whether the ex-DOGE leader…might want to help the Democratic Party in the midterms.” Khanna added, “Having Elon speak out against the irrational tariff policy, against the deficit exploding Trump bill, and the anti-science and anti-immigrant agenda can help check Trump's unconstitutional administration…I look forward to Elon turning his fire against MAGA Republicans instead of Democrats in 2026.” On the other hand, the Hill reports ex-Democrat Andrew Yang is publicly appealing to Musk for an alliance following Musk's call for the establishment of an “America Party.” Yang himself founded the Forward Party in 2021. Yang indicated Musk has not responded to his overtures.9. Meanwhile, the leadership of the Democratic Party appears to be giving up entirely. In a leaked Zoom meeting, DNC Chair Ken Martin – only elected in February – said, “I don't know if I wanna do this anymore,” per POLITICO. On this call, Martin expressed frustration with DNC Vice Chair David Hogg, blaming him for, “[destroying] any chance I have to show the leadership that I need to.” Hogg meanwhile has doubled down, defying DNC leadership by “wading into another primary,” this time for the open seat left by the death of Congressman Gerry Conolly in Virginia, the Washington Post reports. The DNC is still weighing whether to void Hogg's election as Vice Chair.10. Finally, in some good news from New York City, State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani appears to have closed the gap with disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo began the race with a 40-point lead; a new Data for Progress poll shows that lead has been cut down to just two points. Moreover, that poll was conducted before Mamdani was endorsed by AOC, who is expected to bring with her substantial support from Latinos and residents of Queens, among other groups. Notably, Mamdani has racked up tremendous numbers among young men, a demographic the Democratic Party has struggled to attract in recent elections. Cuomo will not go down without a fight however. The political nepo-baby has already secured a separate ballot line for the November election, meaning he will be in the race even if he loses the Democratic primary, and he is being boosted by a new million-dollar digital ad spend by Airbnb, per POLITICO. The New York City Democratic Primary will be held on June 24th.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Protesters held rallies across the country opposing Trump’s agenda on the day of the president’s military parade. They cap a week of demonstrations against immigration raids that began in Los Angeles and spread nationwide. Saturday’s ‘No Kings’ protests were organized by a coalition of groups. John Yang speaks with Lisa Gilbert, the co-president of one of them, Public Citizen. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders

J.B. Branch of Public Citizen discusses the potential issues related to the bankruptcy of 23andMe and the sale of their DNA database. The post 23 and Me Genetic Database Sale for $156 Million: Problems? appeared first on WORT-FM 89.9.

This week on CounterSpin: They say ignorance is bliss, but I know that, for myself and others, our lack of knowledge of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency will only hurt us in our response to the effects that the dealings around that stuff are having on our lives. Bartlett Naylor breaks it down for us; he works at Public Citizen, as a financial policy advocate at their project Congress Watch. Billionaires don't need tax cuts; they already have a system designed to appease them. But it's not enough! Part of the budget bill to give more to those who have everything is an effort to sell off public land for exploitation for fossil fuel companies, who are determined to die taking the last penny from our fingers. Pulling up the covers and waiting for better times isn't the way; if we stay focused, we can save critical elements of, in this case, unspoiled wild places in this country. We hear from Ashley Nunes, public lands policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. Plus Janine Jackson looks back on an interview with the late Robert McChesney.   The post Bartlett Naylor on Meme Coin Grift / Ashley Nunes on Public Land Selloff appeared first on KPFA.

We are proud to have been invited to host a terrific panel of Texas-based enviromental activists and advocates during the recent EarthX conference in Dallas! Advocacy Manager Reagan Stone welcomed representatives of Environment Texas, the Sunrise Movement, Public Citizen and the Environmental Defense Fund for a wide-ranging and enlightening discussion. Enjoy!Thanks for listening! Learn more about how you can support Progress Texas and our ongoing work at https://progresstexas.org/.

We bring Public Citizen's co-president Lisa Gilbert on the show to talk about Trump's newest nefarious schemes with cryptocurrency. 

Ralph welcomes back Erica Payne, founder of Patriotic Millionaires, to update us on that group's latest efforts to save American democracy by lobbying to raise wages for workers and tax the rich. Plus, according to our resident constitutional expert, Bruce Fein, the count of Trump's impeachable offenses is now up to twenty-two and rising faster than a Space X rocket.Erica Payne is the founder and president of Patriotic Millionaires, an organization of high-net-worth individuals that aims to restructure America's political economy to suit the needs of all Americans. Their work includes advocating for a highly progressive tax system, a livable minimum wage, and equal political representation for all citizens. She is the co-author, with Morris Pearl, of Tax the Rich: How Lies, Loopholes and Lobbyists Make the Rich Even Richer.What we saw on January 20th, I believe, was the result of a global oligarchical coup who just took the Queen on the chessboard. When you've got three people whose combined worth is around a trillion dollars standing behind who is an unethical at least, criminal at worst billionaire president, Houston, we have a problem here. And the problem is not actually Donald Trump. The problem is the preconditions that led to the rise of a vulnerability to an authoritarian leader and an oligarchy. And that vulnerability was brought about by the actions of both parties over decades.Erica PayneIf you ran a business, Ralph, would you ever fire your accounts receivable department? No. It would be the last department you would cut. So then it says he's either stupid because that's what he's cutting, which I think is probably inaccurate. So if he's not stupid, then why is he doing it? And he's doing it for the same reason that lawmakers have hacked at the IRS budget forever—they don't want their donors to get taxed. They don't want their donors to be audited. And so they cut the cops. So all these folks who are griping about black Americans calling to defund the police are actually defunding the police that is keeping them in line and keeping them honest.Erica PayneAt a divided moment in America, I think we can agree that the federal government shouldn't tax people into poverty, and (to the extent necessary) rich people should pick up the difference.Erica PayneBruce 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.I start out with the fundamental idea of due process—you simply cannot deprive someone of liberty without giving them an opportunity to explain or to refute what allegations the government has made. And the reason why I start out with that, Ralph, is we've had an experiment in World War II with what happens when you have no due process. We did that with 120,000 Japanese Americans. No, we just said that they're all likely to commit espionage or sabotage, got to put them in concentration camps. We made 120,000 errors (and later apologized for it in 1988). So there's a reason due process is not simply an academic concept. It's essential to preventing these kinds of egregious instances of injustice from happening.Bruce FeinThe Democrats and a lot of liberal economists are not keeping up with the horror show that's going on. They don't use words like cruel and vicious. They don't turn Trump's words like deranged, crazed, corrupt on him. They're still using words like authoritarian practices, or problematic, or distressing, or disconcerting, or concerning. They're not catching up with the horror show here. That's why Trump continues to have a soliloquy. The Democratic Party is now having gatherings to see how are they going to collectively deal with Trump? How does a bank deal with a bank robber? They let the bank robber rob the bank and flee with the gold while they deliberate how they're going to deal with a bank robber they see coming into the bank?Ralph NaderNews 5/2/251. At the eleventh hour, Representative Jim Jordan – Chair of the House Judiciary Committee – pulled his measure to strip the Federal Trade Commission of its antitrust enforcement powers and consolidate those within the Justice Department, Reuters reports. “The House panel…had included the proposal in its budget package on Monday. During a hearing on the package…the committee passed an amendment that would remove the measure.” Trump's FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson opposed Jordan's move and intervened with the White House. As Reuters notes, “The proposal mirrored the One Agency Act, a Republican bill that has gotten support from Elon Musk…[which] would effectively repeal the FTC's...authority to sue companies over unfair methods of competition, which the agency is using in cases against pharmacy benefit managers, Amazon…and John Deere.” In short, the FTC's antitrust powers survive today, but there is no guarantee about tomorrow.2. Yet, while avoiding the worst possible outcome on the corporate crime front, the Trump administration is still hard at work going soft on corporate crooks. Public Citizen's Rick Claypool reports “Two Wells Fargo execs had their fines reduced by 90% (related to the bank's accounting scandal) by Trump's [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency].” Claypool links to a piece in Radical Compliance, which explains that “David Julian, former chief auditor at Wells Fargo, saw his fines cut from $7 million to $100,000 [and] Paul McLinko, executive audit director, had his fines cut from $1.5 million to $50,000.” Both Julian and McLinko were part of the senior leadership team at Wells Fargo in the 2010s, when regulators “charged the bank with turning a blind eye to employees opening bank accounts without customer consent to hit sales quotas. That misconduct eventually led to a $3 billion settlement with Wells Fargo in 2020.”3. Lest you think the Democrats are in danger of seriously opposing Trump's policies, the Bulwark reports that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is putting the kibosh on the recent spate of Democrats' trips to El Salvador exposing the reality of the CECOT deportation scheme. This report alleges that “Cory Booker and the Hispanic Caucus were planning on going [to El Salvador],” but are no longer. Perhaps worse, Jeffries is not giving clear marching orders to the party rank and file. One Democrat is quoted saying “As a member of a party you need to be disciplined…They say, ‘Get on a plane,' ‘Don't get on a plane'—that's what you do. Nine out ten times you do what they ask. But you can't take that approach if you're not having regular communications… You have to be clear in messaging what the plan is and you have to do that regularly if you want to keep people in line.” This is just another example of Jeffries' weak and indecisive leadership of the caucus.4. Advocates are having more luck resisting the administration's overreach in court. On Wednesday, Mohsen Mahdawi – the Columbia student faced with deportation after being lured into an ICE trap with the false promise of a citizenship test – was freed by a federal judge, POLITICO reports. After the judge ordered his release, Mahdawi told the press “I am saying it clear and loud…To President Trump and his Cabinet: I am not afraid of you.” Mahdawi's ordeal is not over, but he will remain free while his case winds its way through the courts and a previous order blocked the administration from changing venues, meaning the case will proceed in the relatively liberal Second Circuit.5. Mahmoud Khalil also scored a major legal victory this week. The Huffington Post reports that the ICE agents sent to arrest Khalil did not, contrary to their false claims in court, have an arrest warrant. Amy Greer, a lawyer for Khalil, is quoted saying “Today, we now know why [the government] never showed Mahmoud [a] warrant — they didn't have one. This is clearly yet another desperate attempt by the Trump administration to justify its unlawful arrest and detention of human rights defender Mahmoud Khalil, who is now, by the government's own tacit admission, a political prisoner of the United States.” The ACLU, also defending Khalil, has now moved for this case to be dismissed.6. Despite these victories though, the repression of anything pro-Palestine continues. At Yale, Prem Thakker reports hundreds of students protested in advance of a speech by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's radical National Security Minister who has previously been arrested many times for inciting racism and supporting pro-Jewish terrorism in Israel itself. Yet the university responded by “stripp[ing] the school's Students for Justice in Palestine Chapter…of its status as an official student group.” If students cannot even protest Ben-Gvir, what will the colleges regard as legitimate protest of Israel?7. In Yemen, Ryan Grim reports on CounterPoints that the Trump administration has been targeting strikes against the Houthis using data gleaned from amateur Open-Source Intelligence or OSINT accounts on X, formerly Twitter. Unsurprisingly, these are completely inaccurate and have led to disastrous strikes on civilians' homes, incorrectly identifying them as “Houthi bases.” One of these accounts is based in Houston, Texas, and another as far away as the Netherlands.8. According to a new World Bank report, Mexico reduced poverty more than any other Latin American country between 2018 and 2023. Not coincidentally, this lines up almost perfectly with the AMLO years in Mexico, which saw a massive increase in the Mexican minimum wage along with other social rights and protections. These policies are now being taken forward by AMLO's successor Claudia Sheinbaum, whose popularity has now surpassed even that of her predecessor, per Bloomberg.9. In Australia, Virginia Giuffre – the most outspoken accuser of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell – has passed away at the age of 41, the BBC reports. Police concluded that Ms. Giuffre died by suicide and her family released a statement indicating that the “toll of abuse... became unbearable.” Yet, her death was preceded by a bizarre chain of events. On March 31st, the BBC reported that Ms. Giuffre's car collided with a school bus, sending her into renal failure with her doctors saying she had “four days to live.” The Miami Herald also reported “At the time of her death, Giuffre had been in a contentious divorce and child custody battle with her husband, Robert.” The family's statement continued “The death is being investigated by Major Crime detectives; [but] early indication is the death is not suspicious.” One can only hope more details come to light.10. Finally, in a different kind of bizarre story, embattled incumbent New York City Mayor Eric Adams – who has already given up on the Democratic primary and was running for reelection as an independent – will now appear on two new ballot lines “EndAntiSemitism” and “Safe&Affordable,” POLITICO reports. Adams has gone to great lengths to cultivate and maintain his support in the Orthodox Jewish community in New York and is seeking to highlight his strengths and undercut former Governor Andrew Cuomo. Apparently, Adams only needs to secure 3,750 signatures from voters by May 27 for each of these ballot lines, a shockingly low threshold for the largest city in America. These ballot lines will appear without spaces, coming in just under the wire for the city's 15-character limit on ballot lines.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

First, Ralph welcomes Washington Post tech journalist Faiz Siddiqui to discuss his new book "Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk." Then, our resident legal expert Bruce Fein stops by to explain how Elon Musk and DOGE are breaking the law. Finally, David picks up our interview with Ralph about Ralph's new book "Civic Self-Respect."Faiz Siddiqui is a technology journalist who writes for the Washington Post and has covered companies such as Tesla, Uber, and Twitter (now X) for the Business Desk. His reporting has focused on transportation, social media and government transformation, among other issues. He is the author of Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk (excerpted here).Over and over throughout this book, there's this recurring theme of victimhood, or at least Elon feeling like his back is against the wall. And why? For what? He and his fans felt they were doing the right things, and yet they were being scrutinized and punished for it.Faiz SiddiquiIn the wake of many Facebook scandals, many Uber scandals, Tesla was the company to work for. Elon was the person to work for. There was no figure as magnetic, who inspired people in the way that Elon did. So recruiting was a strong suit of that company. And the pitch was: come here and change the world.Faiz SiddiquiI think what this book brings is a healthy dose of reality and skepticism… that so far has been lacking from the overall conversation around Musk. And what I you'll find is (I hope you'll find) that you can identify with some of the folks in the book who were lured in by the promises (or just enamored by the guy and what he might be able to bring to society if his goals were ultimately realized) but then ended up feeling disappointed or feeling like—hey, this guy was not all he was cracked up to be. Even if the goals were noble, even if the ambitions were the right ones, the ends might not have justified the means. And so I want people to find, ideally, that their understanding of one of the most powerful people in society today is enriched.Faiz SiddiquiBruce 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.[Elon Musk is] just a walking violation of the federal code.Bruce FeinThere's nowhere to go but up in terms of being a smart consumer. Unfortunately, our Elementary and high schools don't teach consumer skills (they prefer to teach computer skills) and consumer skills result in what is, in effect, a pay raise.Ralph NaderAdam Smith once said many centuries ago that the purpose of production is consumption. And if consumption is informed and feeds back, it can lead to a high-quality economy. It can lead to more integrity to your consumer dollar and to your health and safety. It can lead to less environmental damage. It could lead to stronger regulation of product defects and services that are harmful. It's sort of a bottom-up economic democracy.Ralph NaderComplexity is a tool of power. Complex tax regulations are often blamed on the federal bureaucracy. No, it's the corporate tax lawyers.Ralph NaderNews 4/25/251. On Monday, April 21st, Vatican News announced the death of Pope Francis. This came just one day after Easter Sunday, when Francis met with Vice-President JD Vance. The day prior, Francis had snubbed the VP, sending in his place Cardinal Pietro Parolintoto to “deliver a lecture on compassion,” per the Daily Beast. Pope Francis led the Catholic Church since 2013 and during his tenure sought to move the church in a vastly more progressive direction – preaching against capitalism's destruction of the environment, advocating for abolition of the death penalty and greater acceptance for LGBTQ Catholics within the church, and expanding the reach of the church into non-traditional areas such as Mongolia among many other initiatives. This won him the admiration of many around the world, but also drew the ire of the conservative clergy, particularly in the United States. Francis was the first Jesuit Pope and the first Pope to hail from the New World. Senior churchmen will now assemble to elect a new pope. This conclave is expected to be contentious, with progressives seeking to consolidate Francis' reforms, while the conservatives see an opening to take back the formal organs of the church.2. Instead of death, our next story concerns birth. Noor Abdalla – wife of Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian Columbia University student currently being held by ICE in Louisiana – gave birth to their son on Monday. According to a statement by Abdalla, reported by Arya Sundaram of WNYC, ICE denied a request for Khalil to be temporarily released to meet their son, a “purposeful decision by ICE to make [her], Mahmoud, and our son suffer.” Later in this statement, Abdalla writes, “I will continue to fight every day for Mahmoud to come home to us. I know when Mahmoud is freed, he will show our son how to be brave, thoughtful, and compassionate just like his dad.” Khalil's case continues to wind its way through the courts; the result of this case will have significant ramifications for the Trump administration's ability to remove individuals with legal status on the basis of political speech.3. In an encouraging sign, more and more congressional Democrats are getting personally involved in cases of Trump administration overreach on immigration. In addition to Senator Chris Van Hollen's highly-publicized visit to El Salvador, TruthOut reports that Senator Peter Welch met with Mohsen Mahdawi, the Columbia University student entrapped with a false citizenship test, in Vermont. Meanwhile Cape Cod Times reports that on April 22nd, Senator Ed Markey and Representatives Ayanna Pressley and Jim McGovern of Massachusetts – along with Democratic members of the House Troy Carter and Bennie Thompson – traveled to a Louisiana detention facility to demand the release of Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University grad student who was abducted off the street last month by masked ICE agents. This delegation met with Öztürk herself, as well as Mahmoud Khalil. And CBS reports Representatives Robert Garcia, Maxwell Frost, Yassamin Ansari and Maxine Dexter traveled to El Salvador as well, keeping pressure up regarding the Kilmar Garcia case. Still, hundreds of immigrants of varying status have been deported to the ominous and shadowy CECOT prison camp in El Salvador without due process since Trump began this mass deportation campaign.4. In more troubling Congressional news, Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel on April 16th calling for investigations into the progressive activist group CodePink as well as the New York City cultural center known as the People's Forum. This letter is almost textbook McCarthyite red-baiting, claiming CodePink and the People's Forum are nothing more than mouthpieces for the Chinese Communist Party, thereby violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Beyond the fact that these groups are engaging in nothing more than constitutionally protected political speech, it is clear from the citations within the letter that they are targeting these groups because of their pro-Palestine positions. This is just another escalation in the Orwellian suppression of free-speech critical of the Israel's illegal occupation. Unfortunately, just as with McCarthyism itself, we cannot count on congressional Democrats to go to bat for the free speech rights of the Left.5. In a win for consumers, Bloomberg reports Airbnb announced it will now display the total price of stays – including all fees – to comply with a Federal Trade Commission rule set to go into effect next month. Many worried that the FTC would rescind this rule with the changing of the administration, but for now at least, the Trump FTC seems poised to keep it. This new rule is expected to “nudge hosts to lower their cleaning fees to make rentals more affordable, as the sometimes-exorbitant fees have become a key reason why some customers preferred hotels over Airbnb.”6. Another positive move is that the Trump Department of Justice has proceeded with an anti-trust case against Google's advertising technology, or “adtech.” On April 17th, a judge found Google liable for “willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power,” in two markets for online advertising technology, per Reuters. This follows a similar judgment against Google regarding a monopoly on search, which is only amplified by its adoption of AI. Another trial will determine the remedy for this monopoly, which could include Google being forced to sell off aspects of its business. According to this report, “Google has previously explored selling its ad exchange to appease European antitrust regulators.” Senator Amy Klobuchar, former chair of the antitrust subcommittee, called the ruling “a big win for consumers, small businesses, and content creators that will open digital markets to more innovation and lower prices.”7. On the other hand, Public Citizen's Rick Claypool reports, “58 corporations facing federal investigations & enforcement lawsuits collectively gave $50 million to Trump's inaugural fund. Cases against 11 of these corporations have already been dismissed or withdrawn, and 6 have been halted.” More granular information about each of these enforcement actions is available through Public Citizen's Corporate Enforcement Tracker database, but the big picture is clear: If a corporation wants the government off its back, all they have to do is make a handsome contribution. The Trump administration is pay-to-play and open for business.8. In another instance of the administration tying the hands of key federal regulators, the Food and Drug Administration will “End its Routine Food Safety Inspections,” according to the National Public Health Information Coalition. The FDA plans to “shift most…food safety inspections to state and local agencies.” While some food inspections are conducted at the state and local level, public health advocates are raising concerns about “oversight and consistency.” According to CBS, these plans have not been finalized.9. Turning to the very worst part of this administration, NOTUS reports “The DOGE website, the only public accounting of Elon Musk and President Donald Trump's attempts to reduce federal government spending…[has posted]…revisions that suggest DOGE was previously overstating its savings by hundreds of millions of dollars.” These stunning, if not altogether surprising, overestimations are staggering in scale. “On Tuesday [April 15th] alone, DOGE removed around $962 million in previously claimed cuts and altered hundreds of others to boost individual items' purported ‘savings' values.” The incompetence of DOGE has led Musk to reduce the target goal of spending cuts, down from $1 trillion to just $150 billion – a drop in the bucket when it comes to federal spending and certainly not worth the evisceration of Social Security and other programs these cuts have entailed.10. Finally, in more bad news for Elon Musk, Reuters reports the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is tightening electric vehicle battery safety standards, specifically to “ensure…batteries won't catch fire or explode.” This is quite a humble regulatory goal. However, this new regulation could spell disaster for Tesla. According to Tesla-fire.com, there have been 232 confirmed cases of Tesla fires and “83 Fatalities Involving a Tesla Car Fire.” If I were a Chinese EV regulator, I would be wary of allowing Tesla vehicles on the roads. But that's just me.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

The Trump administration has decided to terminate the IRS's Direct File program, according to a source familiar with the situation, putting an end to the free electronic filing system that congressional Republicans and the tax preparation industry have had in their crosshairs since its creation. Work on Direct File began during Joe Biden's presidency, bringing together some of the administration's top technical and product minds and tapping into funds from the Inflation Reduction Act. Providing all U.S. taxpayers with a free filing tool would have put the country in line with most developed nations. But despite what the IRS considered to be a successful launch last year, Direct File's future was murky after President Donald Trump's election and the administration's welcoming of Elon Musk's DOGE into the government tech world. The pending elimination of the free filing tool was celebrated Wednesday by the makers of TurboTax. Derrick Plummer, an Intuit spokesman, called Direct File “a solution in search of a problem, a drain on critical IRS resources and a waste of taxpayer dollars.” Consumer advocate groups panned the Trump administration's decision. Susan Harley, managing director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch division, said in a statement that scrapping Direct File “is almost literally taking money out of our pockets.” Dean Ball, a policy scholar with a focus on the intersection of history, political theory, policy and technology, is joining the Trump administration as a senior policy advisor on artificial intelligence and emerging technology, he announced Tuesday on the social media platform X. Ball said in his post of joining the Office of Science and Technology Policy: “It is a thrill and honor to serve my country in this role and work alongside the tremendous team [OSTP Director Michael Kratsios] has built.” He comes to OSTP from the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he has served as a research fellow for the past year. Ball is also the author of an AI-focused blog called Hyperdimensional, in which he has defended the AI Safety Institute and commented on the Trump administration's terminations of probationary employees, saying the move had unintended consequences. Ball also wrote recently that he is interested in AI being built at the same time that the Trump administration and Republicans “seek to advance theories of a ‘unitary executive' — the notion that the president exercises the powers granted to him by the Constitution and Congress absolutely.” The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.

On February 10, AVAC and the Journalism Development Network came forward with Public Citizen to sue the new US presidential administration, seeking emergency relief from the funding freeze on all foreign assistance. We know the impact of the withdrawal of funds has been devastating. AVAC's lawsuit is one of several efforts to fight back in the courts. AVAC's Executive Director, Mitchell Warren and Public Citizen Litigator, Lauren Bateman explain these lawsuits and why they matter. For resources and other background go to https://avac.org/resource/lawsuit-wins-and-whats-at-stake/

Ralph welcomes Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, whose group has filed eight lawsuits that have significantly slowed the Trump/Musk cabal's attempt to dismantle the government. Then, our resident Constitutional scholar Bruce Fein reports on Public Interest Law Day at Harvard Law School and how important it is for law schools in general to step up to meet this constitutional crisis. Plus, Ralph answers listener questions!Robert Weissman is a staunch public interest advocate and activist, as well as an expert on a wide variety of issues ranging from corporate accountability and government transparency, to trade and globalization, to economic and regulatory policy. As the President of Public Citizen, he has spearheaded the effort to loosen the chokehold corporations and the wealthy have over our democracy.The efforts in the courts are really vital to stem the illegal, unconstitutional actions of the administration, but also to show that there's a way to fight back. In these early days and months of the administration, there's been a sense that Trump is inevitable and unstoppable. And the actions in the courts, I think, have been really critical to illustrating that that's not true.Robert WeissmanIt's open season for the polluters. And of course, they're also promoting in a variety of ways a rush towards climate catastrophe by undoing the positive measures that have come recently from the Biden administration to deal with the climate crisis.Robert WeissmanIf you pull back all the enforcement rules, and you say we're not going to enforce the rules that are left over, corporations get the message. And they're going to bemore reckless, and it's a near certainty that we're going to have many more serious industrial disasters as a direct result of what they're doing at EPA and other agencies.Robert WeissmanBruce 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.If we don't inform the public (with the law students as well as others in the lead), we're not going to have rule of law and Harvard Law School will become an irrelevancy. It will be a museum piece.Bruce FeinI think the country and the law students are going to pay a price. They're being very narrow and myopic with regard to their immediate preoccupation with their trade school, where they're going to work the next day, and very little given to the fact that if we don't have a country anymore, they aren't going to have a legal career.Bruce FeinIt's a more cowardly, timid type of law school whose explanations are still ready to be discovered. It's a real puzzle…because they have tenure, they have status, they have wealth, and they have the ability to defend themselves because they're skilled lawyers.Ralph NaderNews 4/2/251. Our top stories this week are on the topic of corporate crime. First, the American Prospect reports that the Trump administration is seeking to reverse a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau case against Townstone, a mortgage brokerage firm that blatantly discouraged potential Black borrowers. According to the Prospect, Townstone's owners Barry Sturner and David Hochberg vigorously promoted their firm though “personal-finance call-in infomercials,” on Chicago's WGN radio station. During these infomercials, which generated 90 percent of Townstone's business, Sturner and Hochberg “characterized the South Side of Chicago as a ‘war zone,' downtown Chicago as a ‘jungle' that turned on Friday and Saturday into ‘hoodlum weekend,'” and so on. As the Prospect notes, if Sturner and Hochberg were simply airing these views that would be perfectly legal, however unsavory. Instead, this program is “an informercial, which generates 90 percent of the brokerage's leads, which the brokerage pays WGN to air, presumably punctuated at regular intervals by some phrase along the lines of ‘an equal housing lender.'” Therefore, this rhetoric was determined to have violated the Fair Housing Act, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and the Community Reinvestment Act. The remarkable thing about this case is that it was brought by the Trump administration's CFPB between 2017 and 2020. Townstone eventually settled the case for a little over $100,000. Yet, just last week, the Trump administration 2.0 returned the money to Townstone posting “a long press release about how ‘abusive' and ‘unjust' the whole case had been.” This episode highlights just how much more extreme the new Trump administration is, even compared to the old one.2. Another outrageous case of corporate criminal leniency comes to us from Rick Claypool, a corporate crime expert at Public Citizen. For background, CNBC reports that Trump has “pardoned three co-founders of the BitMEX global cryptocurrency exchange, as well as…a former high-ranking employee.” As this piece explains, the co-founders received criminal sentences of probation…and were ordered to pay civil fines totaling $30 million,” after “Prosecutors accused the men of effectively operating BitMEX as a ‘money laundering platform' …[and] ‘a sham.'” But Trump went beyond pardoning the corporate criminals involved. As Claypool noted, “the crypto corporation pled guilty and was sentenced in January to two years' probation,” leading Claypool to wonder whether Trump would pardon the corporation itself. His question was answered on March 29th when Law360 reported that yes, Trump pardoned the business entity. This is the logical endpoint of regarding corporations as people. Not only will individual crooks be let off the hook, the whole crooked enterprise will come out unscathed.3. New evidence confirms the redistribution of wealth from working people to the capitalist class. A February 2025 RAND Corporation study titled “Measuring the Income Gap from 1975 to 2023” finds that, “the bottom 90 percent of workers would have earned $3.9 trillion more with..more even growth rates [since 1975],” resulting in a “cumulative amount of $79 trillion.” This study extends prior estimates by factoring in “inflation, growth in inequality, and a longer time frame.” And even more recently, an April 2025 article in the Journal of Political Economy, titled “How the Wealth Was Won: Factor Shares as Market Fundamentals,” finds that “40% of [the increase in real per capita value of corporate equity, which grew at an annual rate of 7.2% between 1989 and 2017]…was attributable to a reallocation of rewards to shareholders in a decelerating economy, primarily at the expense of labor compensation.” This study estimates “Economic growth accounted for just 25% of the increase,” and compares this period to the preceding era, “1952–88, [which] experienced only one-third as much growth in market equity, but economic growth accounted for more than 100% of it.” Taken together, these studies starkly illustrate an American economic machine built to make the rich even richer and the poor ever poorer.4. On the other end of the criminal penalty spectrum, the Department of Justice announced on Tuesday that they will seek the death penalty for alleged UnitedHealthcare assassin Luigi Mangione, the BBC reports. The first Trump administration saw the resumption of the federal death penalty after a 16-year hiatus; the Biden administration then issued a new moratorium and commuted the sentences of most federal death row prisoners. Since returning to power, Trump has aggressively pursued federal executions once again.5. In more positive legal news, NBC reports French far-right leader Marine Le Pen was found guilty Monday of embezzling over €3 million of European Union funds. The National Rally party leader was sentenced to four years in prison (with two on house arrest and two suspended), a €100,000 fine, and a ban on holding political office for five years – making her ineligible for the 2027 French presidential election, which polls showed her leading. Her party will, for the time being, be led by her protégé 29-year-old Jordan Bardella. It is unclear if he will enjoy the same popularity Ms. Le Pen held. She announced that she plans to appeal the verdict, but will remain ineligible for public office unless and until she wins that case.6. In more international news, British police last week executed a shocking raid on a congregation of the Quakers. The Guardian reports, “More than 20 uniformed police, some equipped with Tasers, forced their way into the Westminster meeting house…[and] seized attenders' phones and laptops.” In a statement, Paul Parker, the recording clerk for Quakers in Britain, said “No one has been arrested in a Quaker meeting house in living memory… This aggressive violation of our place of worship and the forceful removal of young people holding a protest group meeting clearly shows what happens when a society criminalises protest.” The stated charge is the absurd “conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.” A report on the incident in Church Times adds a statement from Oliver Robertson, head of witness and worship for Quakers in Britain, who said “This raid is not an isolated incident. It reflects a growing trend of excessive policing under new laws brought in by the previous government, which are now being enforced by the current administration.” Even former Tory minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, criticized the raid, stating “There has long been a tradition in this country…that religious spaces should not be invaded by the forces of law and order unless absolutely necessary.”7. Of course, the outrageous use of lawfare on Israel's behalf continues in the halls of Congress as well. In a letter, Congressmen Jim Jordan, Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast – famous for his role as an American volunteer for the IDF – have announced their intention to investigate activist groups critical of the Israeli government – within Israel. According to the Jerusalem Post, these NGOs are being investigated to, “ascertain whether funding they allegedly received from the Biden administration was utilized for the judicial reform protests in 2023.” These groups include the Movement for Quality Government in Israel and Blue and White Future, among others.8. The government's use of brute force to muzzle criticism of Israel continues to rock academia. At Harvard, the Crimson reports 82 of Harvard Law School's 118 active professors have signed a letter which “accused the federal government of exacting retribution on lawyers and law firms for representing clients and causes opposed by President Donald Trump…described Trump's threats as a danger to the rule of law…[and] condemned the government for intimidating individuals based on their past public statements and threatening international students with deportation over ‘lawful speech and political activism.'” The letter reads, in part, “we share a conviction that our Constitution, including its First Amendment, was designed to make dissent and debate possible without fear of government punishment. Neither a law school nor a society can properly function amidst such fear.” This letter stands in stark contrast to the recent statement by Harvard President Alan Garber, in which he pledged to “engage” with the federal government's demands in order to protect the university's $9 billion in federal funding.9. Last week, we reported on the “lynching” of Hamdan Ballal, the Palestinian co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land – and how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences dithered before ultimately releasing a milquetoast statement decrying violence against “artists for their work or their viewpoints,” with no mention of Palestine or even Ballal's name. This caused so much uproar among Academy members that nearly 900 of them signed a letter “denouncing the Academy's silence,” per Variety. The letter and full list of signatories can be found here. Shamed, the Academy leadership was forced to issue a follow-up statement expressing their “regret that we failed to directly acknowledge Mr. Ballal and the film by name.” This statement continues “We sincerely apologize to Mr. Ballal…We abhor the suppression of free speech under any circumstances.”10. Finally, speaking of shame, the Hill reports that the shame of Congressional Republicans is giving Democrats a golden opportunity. According to this piece, “House Democrats are ramping up their aggressive strategy of conducting town halls in Republican-held districts, vying to exploit the GOP's advised moratorium on the events to make inroads with frustrated voters, pick up battleground seats, and flip control of the House in next year's midterms.” One Democrat, Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign co-chair Ro Khanna, has held three town halls in Republican-held districts, whose main takeaway was “People are mad.” Republicans who have bucked the GOP leadership and held town halls anyway, such as Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman and Indiana congresswoman Victoria Spartz have found themselves looking down the barrel of constituents furious at the conduct of the administration in general and DOGE in particular. This, combined with the upset Democratic victories in recent special elections, has the GOP on a defensive backfoot for the first time in months. Could we be looking at the beginning of a Democratic tea party? Only time will tell.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

It's Wednesday! Sam and Emma are joined by Robert Weissman, co-president of the non-profit advocacy organization Public Citizen, which has filed 8 lawsuits against the Trump administration and says they have more coming. Later, Rohan Grey, Assistant Professor of Law at Willamette University, discusses his latest research on the Trump administration's attempt to seize direct political control over the core payments software of the Treasury's Bureau of the Fiscal Service, which handles spending for most of the federal government, to block funds to politically disfavored agencies and programs. First, they run through updates on the victory by liberal Susan Crawford in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, Democrats' growing margins in deep-red regions, Trump's tariff fears, the GOP's anger at proxy voting for new parents, Mike Waltz Gmail whoopsie, Senator Cory Booker's marathon filibuster, the closure of free measles vaccine clinics in Texas amid a breakout, Ed Martin nomination for D.C. U.S. Attorney, Tesla's tanking earnings, and the Senate GOP's budget reconciliation, before expanding on the beautiful revelations around the toxicity of Elon Musk in US politics as seen in the incredible leftward swing amid his intense campaigning for conservative Brad Schimel Wisconsin. Robert Weissman then joins, first previewing the typical work of Public Citizen including advocacy, litigation, and organizing on behalf of the public against corporations, touching on everything from trade and consumer financial protection to drug pricing and campaign finance laws. Weissman then unpacks Public Citizens tactical shift under Trump 2.0, walking through the various legal battles they have taken on against Trump's attempt to dismantle the federal U.S. government through executive reform, with a particular focus on their case to save the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – an agency birthed from the 2008 Financial Crisis' overwhelming impact on consumers – also touching on their effort to protect USAID and the Department of Education. Robert, Sam, and Emma expand on these lawsuits' ultimate goal of preventing the full-scale deletion of these agencies, understanding that, even with success, the Trump Administration will constantly be searching for (and finding) new ways to obstruct any accountability or pushback from this project, and focusing instead on ensuring the potential of rebuilding under future leadership, before wrapping up by looking to the upcoming fights over Trump's insistence on using his executive power to fire any and everybody, and the role of “national emergencies” in bolstering executive power. Rohan Grey then joins, diving right into Elon Musk's outrageous (and obviously untrustworthy) agenda of digitizing America's fiscal regime, stepping back to walk through the process by which US fiscal policy operates, with said policy – be it spending, taxation, issuing debt, etc – originating in Congressional legislation, moving through the Office of Management and Budget under the President to manage the allocated spending over the allotted time, to the Treasury's instructions with the Federal Reserve as the ultimate entity in charge of the dollars. After expanding on the utter absurdity of Elon's plan – outside of if, perhaps, you wanted to completely rid the system of accountability or pushback – Rohan, Sam, and Emma parse through DOGE's opaque takeover of the Bureau of Financial Services amid their project to indiscriminately cut funds, including Elon setting up an obvious assault on Social Security, wrapping up by expanding on what a botched system shift for the federal payment systems would look like, and assessing a more realistic idea for bringing our systems into the modern era. And in the Fun Half: Sam and Emma listen to Wisconsin Justice Susan Crawford celebrate winning an election against tens of millions of Elon Musk's money, unpack Elon's very-related copium, and watch Fox try to justify the extensive negative impact Trump's tariffs will have on the American people. The MR Crew also touches on Cory Booker's marathon filibuster (and the tactics underneath it), admires Lauren Boebert's self-assured idiocy, and dissects the blatant inhumanity on display with the Trump Administration's justification for their indiscriminate renditioning of migrants – legal or not – to a Salvadoran gulag, plus, your IMs! Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Follow us on TikTok here!: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here!: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here!: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here!: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the ESVN YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/esvnshow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase! Check out today's sponsors: FastGrowingTrees: Get 15% off your first purchase. FastGrowingTrees.com/majority Nutrafol: Get $10 off your first month's subscription + free shipping at Nutrafol.com when you use promo code TMR10 Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech @BradKAlsop Check out Matt's show, Left Reckoning, on Youtube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon's show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza's music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder - https://majorityreportradio.com/

The Wisconsin Supreme Court election tested the political power of Musk's money, and voters rejected his candidate. The results have huge implications for the midterms. John Nichols has our analysis. Also: A big victory in federal district court: Trump cannot shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Rob Weissman of Public Citizen will explain.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The Wisconsin Supreme Court election tested the political power of Musk's money, and voters rejected his candidate. The results have huge implications for the midterms. John Nichols has our analysis. Also: A big victory in federal district court: Trump cannot shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Rob Weissman of Public Citizen will explain.

On the radio show this week we cover the problems with the damaging effects of the proposed cuts to Medicaid; the latest with the maternal health emergency in America; how access to childcare is under attack; and how to use a no cost direct file tool for your taxes.   SPECIAL GUESTS: Joan Alker, Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, @JoanAlker1, @georgetownccf, @georgetownccf.bsky.social; Tina Sherman, MomsRising, @TinaShermanNC @MomsRising @MamasConPoder, @momsrising.org @mamasconpoder.org; Martin Balben, Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children, @IdahoAEYC; Susan Harley, Public Citizen, @Public_Citizen, @publiccitizen.bsky.social. 

This week we are recording from the Capitol on a day when many of Texas Impact's priority bills are being heard or voted on. So, we sat down with a few friends and colleagues who are testifying in the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce on SB 819, a regulatory bill that is anti-energy in a time where renewables are increasingly ensuring that Texas has enough energy to meet our growing demand. SB 819 would target the state's nation-leading renewable energy industry with some of the most far-reaching, cumbersome, anti-business regulations that the legislature has ever contemplated.  Joining us for the conversation are Adrian Shelley, Texas Director of Public Citizen, Cheyenne Rendon with the Society of Native Nations and Rev. Dr. Becca Edwards, Policy Advocate for Texas Impact. We are past the halfway mark of the 89th Texas Legislature! Make sure you stay up-to-date by signing up for the Action Alert and the Rapid Response notifications.

*Trump-Musk Attack on Social Security Could Shatter the Progam Serving the Nation's Most Vulnerable; Justin Glawe, an independent journalist, frequent contributor to Rolling Stone magazine; Producer: Scott Harris. *Public Citizen Pushing Back Against Trump Regime's Onslaught of Lawlessness; Lisa Gilbert, Co-President of Public Citizen; Producer: Melinda Tuhus. *Trump Suppression of Free Speech an Unconstitutional Pretext to Deport Palestinian Student Activist; Sam Carliner a journalist and editor at Left Voice; Producer: Scott Harris.

Ralph welcomes Peter Beinart, to discuss his book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza. An observant Jew, Beinart argues “We are not history's permanent virtuous victims. We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it.” Plus, premier global trade expert, Lori Wallach, joins to help sort out the on again, off again tariffs Donald Trump is assessing U.S. trade partners. What kind of a tool is a tariff? When should it be used? Who should it be used against? And are the current tariff threats on Canada really about stopping fentanyl?Peter Beinart is Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He is also Editor-at-Large of Jewish Currents, an MSNBC political commentator, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Foundation for Middle East Peace. His latest book is entitled “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza” and his recent op-ed in the New York Times is “States Don't Have a Right To Exist. People Do.”We are not history's permanent virtuous victims. We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense. It exempts Jews from external judgment. It offers infinite license to fallible human beings.Excerpt from Being Jewish After The Destruction of Gaza by Peter BeinartIsrael can't destroy Hamas. Israel has totally laid waste to Gaza, and yet Hamas is still there. And Hamas will have new recruits from all of these people whose family members were killed by Israel. And Hamas will reconstitute its weapons, because I think actually a lot of the Hamas weapons now are coming from assembling Israeli weapons that were dropped on Gaza, just like the Viet Cong did in Vietnam. They reassemble to make their own weapons. So Hamas will still be there as a force for Israel to continue to fight. And I think Netanyahu will continue this war for as long as he can.Peter BeinartSo what I think Israel is trying to do, to various degrees of self-consciousness, is to try to reduce the population in Gaza and the West Bank. And that's why the Trump plan was so popular in Israel, not just among Netanyahu, but even among his centrist opponents, like Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, who embraced the idea. Because for them, it solves the problem. Israel doesn't have a way of solving the Palestinian problem. So if you have fewer Palestinians, then they're less of a problem. This is, after all, how the United States solved its problem with Native Americans in the 19th century.Peter BeinartLori Wallach is a 30-year veteran of international and U.S. congressional trade battles starting with the 1990s fights over NAFTA and WTO where she founded the Global Trade Watch group at Public Citizen. She is now the director of the Rethink Trade program at American Economic Liberties Project and is also Senior Advisor to the Citizens Trade Campaign, the U.S. national trade justice coalition of unions and environmental, consumer, faith, family farm and other groups.He (Trump) also closed a thing called the de minimis loophole. That is this lunatic trade loophole that allows in uninspected (under $800 value) imports to every American every day… And then four days later, Trump met with the Federal Express CEO, who apparently was not happy because they deliver a bunch of those de minimis packages… This has become a superhighway for fentanyl… He (Trump) basically reversed the ability to stop fentanyl coming from China and to enforce his own China tariffs at the behest of the CEO of Federal Express.Lori WallachSo the difference between whether tariffs raise the consumer price has a lot to do with the same corporate price gouging that we've been seeing over the last couple of years. And we can see right now, for instance, on eggs. The actual supply of egg laying chickens and the actual supply of eggs is not a greatly reduced sector. That sector is now so concentrated at every level that the handful of companies can basically control the markup between what the farmers paid and what the consumer pays.Lori Wallach Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Independent investigative journalism, broadcasting, trouble-making and muckraking with Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com

On this week's episode of Start Making Sense: Trump suffered a big loss at The Supreme Court in the first challenge to his unconstitutional seizure of power: an order to release USAID funding appropriated by Congress. The suit was brought by Public Citizen; their co-president, Robert Weissman, will explain.Also: John Nichols with our protest update for the week. Topics include: includes town hall yelling; Tesla dealer showroom picketing; Ukraine support demonstrating; national park protesting, and Town Hall yelling.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

First, Ralph welcomes economist James Henry to discuss the Trump administration's latest attempts to disable our corporate watchdogs and dismantle the IRS. Then, Ralph is joined by America's Number One Populist Jim Hightower to get his take on what's been happening in our government, and how to fight back.James Henry is an economist, attorney, and investigative journalist who has written numerous articles and several books about international private banking, offshore havens, debt, capital flight, and development. He is a Global Justice Fellow at Yale, and a Senior Fellow at Columbia University's Center for Sustainable Investment. And he is a Senior Advisor to the Tax Justice Network, an international NGO that has led the fight to dismantle tax havens. He has also been an active pro bono environmental and constitutional lawyer in New York.In the past, when so-called business elites (Wall Street, and so on) saw the US government discomforting them, they would send a delegation to the White House. They've done it on matters far less serious than the massive destabilization and disruption that's occurring now.Ralph NaderCorporations are not known (and CEOs are not known) for their courage. But when they see their whole world starting to convulse into chaos… you've got to believe they're going to make their efforts known.Ralph NaderOne thing that I'm just shocked by—it's hard to be shocked by this administration any more than by anything else, but he's basically dismantling the IRS... A lot of what we're talking about here is illegal activity. It isn't even a question.James HenryCountries are pushing back at this bullying tactic. And so this is going to hurt growth. It's going to raise inflation. It's going to blow the deficit targets through the roof. And it's going to also hurt millions of Americans who depend on the government for all kinds of vital, essential assistance…So if you thought there was a rational reason behind Trump's economic plans, this is very hard to justify.James HenryJim Hightower is a syndicated columnist, national radio commentator, and America's Number One populist. He is a board member of Public Citizen, and he is a founding member of Our Revolution, an organization inspired by the issues brought up in the Bernie Sanders campaign. He has written several books including Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, and his newsletter The Hightower Lowdown publishes twice a week on Substack.Well, the good news, as you point out, is that the people are revolting (in the very best sense of that word, by the way). And it is happening in rural towns, counties, as well as big cities, as well as college towns, working class communities, immigrant communities, et cetera. The rebellion is on. And the people are doing it themselves.Jim HightowerBig money happened. And that big money took over the Democratic Party. My party decided, “Well, you know, we could get some of that corporate money too.” The corporations were willing to fund our campaigns. Well, I can tell you that if you accept a corporate check, written on the back of it is the corporate agenda. And they cash the check, not you. And so that led to my party's abandonment of its populist values, its working class constituency, its values—economic fairness, social justice, equal opportunity for all—those are the populist values. And my party turned into a Republican-light organization. But the people keep rebelling.Jim HightowerPeople are in the streets in state after state and community after community all across our country because people know this is the undoing of the common good. And that is essentially what's at stake here. The billionaires have decided that the common good doesn't matter, only their good matters.Jim Hightower Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Independent investigative journalism, broadcasting, trouble-making and muckraking with Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com

I sat down with Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen (citizen.org) to discuss how citizens and the courts can best and most effectively stop what Musk and Trump are doing. We've never seen such a brazen, lawless convergence of concentrated corporate & government power. But we must fight back. Have a listen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Trump has lost a series of major legal battles in the last week, where courts have ruled that key executive orders of his are unconstitutional. But what happens if Trump defies the courts? David Cole comments—he recently stepped down as national legal director of the ACLU to return to teaching law at Georgetown University.Also: “One of the most important lawsuits in the history of the United States” (The American Prospect): the suit brought by Public Citizen to stop Elon Musk's attempted takeover of the Treasury Department's payment system. Robert Weissman explains—he's co-president of Public Citizen.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Independent investigative journalism, broadcasting, trouble-making and muckraking with Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com

Ralph welcomes Constitutional law expert Bruce Fein to analyze Congress' abdication of power in the face of President Trump and Elon Musk's actions to dismantle the federal government, and whether any of it is legal. Then, Ralph is joined by Norman Solomon from RootsAction to discuss the new Chair of the Democratic National Committee, Ken Martin, and whether we should be optimistic about his agenda for the Democrats.Bruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.What I think shows the clear (what I would call malignant) intent, is even though he has Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, he's never contemplated going back to Congress and saying, "Hey, I want you to do X. I want you to do Y. We need to do this in the proper way."Bruce Fein[Trump's] boogeyman is DEI. So he claims that a crash between a helicopter and airplane in Washington, D.C. is a DEI problem. Of course, it's amazing that somebody who has such contempt for meritocracy with his own cabinet appointments suddenly blames, “Oh, well, DEI, it's watering down standards.” Well, he doesn't have any standards himself, so it's kind of ironic there.Bruce FeinImpeachment is not a criminal prosecution. Impeachment is what Benjamin Franklin at the Constitutional Convention said— it's the civilized substitute for tyrannicide…And if you're impeached, it's because you have undertaken attempts to subvert the Constitution so the people no longer view you as a trustworthy steward of our liberties and the rule of law. That's what it is. You don't go to Siberia, you don't go to the guillotine, that's it. And there have been, of course, many federal judges (probably as many as a dozen) who've been impeached, removed from office. And you know what? They still survive. There's not a graveyard of them…So this idea that impeachment is somehow some enormous volcanic eruption on the landscape is totally misleading and wrong.Bruce FeinThere are two informal checkpoints I want to run by you. [Trump] is afraid of the stock market collapsing—and it could well collapse because chaos is the thing that really gets investors and big institutional investors scared. And the second thing he's afraid of is a plunge in the polls, including among Trump voters who represent families that have the same necessities for their children and their neighborhood as liberal families.Ralph NaderNorman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of War Made Easy, Made Love, Got War, and his newest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.Especially when there's not a Democrat in the White House, the leader of the Democratic Party de facto is often the chair of the Democratic National Committee. And we now, of course, have the Democrats in minority in the House and the Senate. Biden's out of there in the White House. And so, really, it falls to the chair of the DNC to ostensibly at least give direction to the Democratic Party. And we've suffered for the last four years under Jamie Harrison as chair of the DNC, who basically did whatever Biden told him to do, and Biden told him to just praise President Biden. And we saw the result, the enabling process from the DNC was just a disaster for the Democratic Party and the country.Norman SolomonLiterally and figuratively in a sense, there needs to be a tearing down of the walls that have been surrounding the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Activists (thousands of us, really, in recent years) have discovered and rediscovered that the DNC is like a fortress. They have the moat, the drawbridge is locked, and we can't even get inside to have a word in edgewise compared to the lobbyists and those who are running the DNC. This is really just remarkable, how difficult it has been for strong Democratic Party activists, if they're not on the DNC (and even if they are, quite often) to get a word in edgewise for the corporate-oriented so-called leadership of the DNC. That might change now.Norman SolomonAlfred Bridi is a U.S. immigration attorney associated with the law firm Scale LLP who specializes in employment- and family-based immigration law. Prior to joining Scale LLP, he practiced law at major international law firms and also worked with leading international organizations on global migration and transparency issues.These executive orders and these executive actions have really created a tension in terms of enforcement officials trying to understand what these mean; in terms of the judiciary and and legal activists contesting a lot of the foundations and the arguments made; in terms of our legal system and our constitutional rights; and I think more than anything, they have had a signaling effect to ordinary Americans and immigrant populations that, “You're not welcome here, and we are going to come after you.” And I think the difference that we've seen is a broadening of the enforcement net and a removal of any sort of refinement or targeting. We've seen American citizens and military veterans being arrested and detained. We've seen Indigenous people being detained. And it's created a sense of terror and panic across the country that I feel is absolutely deliberate, and in line with the campaign promises of this new administration.Alfred BridiNews 2/5/251. The New York Times reports President Trump has ousted Rohit Chopra, the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who was “known for his aggressive enforcement and expansion of consumer protection laws.” During his tenure, Chopra cracked down on junk fees, particularly bank overdraft fees, and sought to remove medical debt from individuals' credit histories. As the Times notes, Chopra “improbably hung on for nearly two weeks [after Trump took office, and]…used that time to impose a $2 million fine on a money transmitter and release reports on auto lending costs, specialty credit reporting companies and rent payment data.” In his letter of resignation, Chopra wrote “With so much power concentrated in the hands of a few, agencies like the C.F.P.B. have never been more critical,” and “I hope that the CFPB will continue to be a pillar of restoring and advancing economic liberty in America.”2. In more Trump administration staffing news, AP reports the Senate Finance Committee voted 13-14 along party lines Tuesday to advance the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a physician by trade and member of the committee who expressed grave concern over Kennedy's stances on vaccines and other health-related matters, said during the hearings “Your past, undermining confidence in vaccines with unfounded or misleading arguments, concerns me.” Ultimately however, Cassidy voted “aye.” Kennedy's nomination will now advance to the full Senate, where the GOP holds a comfortable majority thus almost ensuring his confirmation.3. Speaking of Trump and health, CBS is out with an update on the 2023 East Palestine, Ohio railroad disaster. According to this report, Vice President JD Vance visited the crash site on February 3rd and vowed that the administration would hold Norfolk Southern accountable for “unfilled promises of settlement money and training centers.” That same day, residents of East Palestine filed a lawsuit alleging that Norfolk Southern's actions resulted in the wrongful death of seven people, including a one-week-old baby.4. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has successfully negotiated a month-long delay of Trump's proposed 25% tariffs. According to CNN, the deal reached between the two North American heads of state includes Mexico deploying 10,000 National Guard troops to its northern border to help stem the flow of fentanyl into the U.S., while Trump has reportedly agreed to help end the deluge of American guns moving South. In her regular Monday morning press conference, Sheinbaum said “For humanitarian reasons, we must help the United States address its fentanyl consumption crisis, which is leading to overdose deaths.” Sheinbaum has been roundly praised for her ability to both stand up to and placate Trump. Reuters quoted Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican ambassador to China and member of the opposition Partido Acción Nacional or PAN party, who had to admit “President Sheinbaum played it…Masterfully.”5. Democracy Now! reports a group of Quaker congregations have filed a lawsuit against Immigration and Customs Enforcement in response to the Trump administration's order “allowing federal agents to raid…schools, hospitals, shelters and places of worship.” This lawsuit alleges that “The very threat of [such raids] deters congregants from attending services, especially members of immigrant communities,” and that therefore this order infringes upon the Constitutional “guarantee of religious liberty.” The Quakers have historically been among the most progressive Christian sects, having been leaders in the fight to abolish slavery and to oppose war.6. Reese Gorman of NOTUS reports that so far approximately 24,000 federal employees have accepted Elon Musk's proposed “buyout,” meaning they will leave their jobs and should receive eight months of severance pay. This purge of the federal workforce has been among the most prominent initiatives of Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Less prominently touted however is what the administration plans to do once these employees have been purged. Recent comments from Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Bloomberg however are enlightening. Rubio, commenting on the “potential reorganization” of the Agency for International Development or USAID, indicated that the reduction in the size of the workforce would be paired with greater use of private contractors. Most likely this means farming out government services to Trump lackeys, cronies, and assorted grifters – all on the taxpayers' dime.7. Front and center in combatting Musk's quiet coup is Public Citizen. On Monday, the public interest watchdog announced they are suing the Treasury Department for its “unlawful disclosure of personal & financial information to Elon Musk's DOGE.” Their legal complaint, filed alongside the Alliance for Retired Americans, the Association of Federal Government Employees and the SEIU, reads, in part, “The scale of the intrusion into individuals' privacy is massive and unprecedented. Millions of people cannot avoid engaging in financial transactionswith the federal government and, therefore, cannot avoid having their sensitivepersonal and financial information maintained in government records. SecretaryBessent's action granting DOGE-affiliated individuals full, continuous, and ongoingaccess to that information for an unspecified period of time means that retirees,taxpayers, federal employees, companies, and other individuals from all walks of life have no assurance that their information will receive the protection that federal law affords.”8. Turning to the Middle East, Drop Site News reports “Over 100 journalists…sent a letter to Egyptian authorities on Sunday requesting access to Gaza through the Rafah border crossing.” CNN, NBC, NPR, CBS, ABC, AP, Reuters, BBC, Sky News, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times France 24, Le Monde, El Pais, and others, including Drop Site itself, are signatories on this letter. The letter states “We understand that the situation is fluid regarding the border crossing, but we ask that permission for journalists to cross the Rafah border be at the forefront of the…No international journalists have been able to access Gaza without an Israeli military escort since the war began in October 2023. We request that permission be granted on an expedited basis while Phase 1 of the ceasefire is still in effect.” As Drop Site notes, “Egypt has not allowed journalists to cross Rafah into Gaza since 2013, when Abdel Fattah al-Sisi took power in Egypt in a military coup.” This has meant all journalistic access to Gaza must go through Israel.9. Our last two stories have to do with the Democrats. On February 1st, Ken Martin was elected the new chair of the Democratic National Committee. Martin previously led the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and the Association of State Democratic Parties, per POLITICO. WPR reports Martin's victory was decisive at 246.5 out of 428 votes; the second-place finisher, Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, won only 134.5 votes despite endorsements from House and Senate Minority Leaders Jeffries and Schumer, among many other high-profile elected Democrats, per the Hill. Other candidates included Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders' 2020 campaign manager Faiz Shakir, though he entered late and without substantial backing. Martin's reputation is mixed, with one DNC member telling POLITICO, “he's a knife-fighter.” Perhaps that is what the party needs to turn things around.10. Finally, Variety reports former President Biden has signed with the Creative Arts Agency, or CAA, one of the premier talent agencies in Hollywood. CAA also represents Barack and Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton, per the BBC. With the White House once again occupied by a creature of showbusiness, the symbiotic relationship between politics, media and entertainment has never been clearer. In the words of George Carlin, “It's a big club, and you ain't in it.”This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

It's Cliff Schecter's last show as Tuesday co-host. Elon Musk's DOGE goon squad is raiding the Treasury Department. Musk's lackeys can re-write Treasury source code and blackmail U.S. citizens. The White House doesn't know what Elon is up to. Elon is also monkeying with the IRS. US attorney Ed Martin is threatening anyone who tries to stop DOGE. Heroes of Democracy: Sen. Brian Schatz, Public Citizen, Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, Hakeem Jeffries and the NY Democratis. Chris Murphy, and more! With Cliff Schecter, music by Powder Pink and Sweet, Hannah Fairlight, and more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

First up, Ralph welcomes back constitutional law expert Bruce Fein to talk about his reaction to Donald Trump's inaugural address. Then Ralph is joined by Public Citizen Co-President Robert Weissman to discuss Public Citizen's lawsuit against Trump regarding Elon Musk's D.O.G.E task force. Finally, Ralph speaks with Public Citizen's Government Affairs lobbyist Craig Holman about the flood of donations from corporations and billionaires to Trump's inaugural fund.Bruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.Sitting on that platform at the inauguration was probably trillions of dollars held by individuals—not by companies, just individuals—fabulous wealth. And you have to ask, if these are business people, why are you at the political event? Why aren't you building a better mousetrap? Why aren't you like Thomas Edison, looking to find new ways of doing business? It's because all of their profits come from manipulating government in their favor. It's the opposite of so-called capitalism.Bruce FeinRemember that this lust for power transcends all reason, and that we're endowed with that lust.Bruce FeinRobert Weissman is a staunch public interest advocate and activist, as well as an expert on a wide variety of issues ranging from corporate accountability and government transparency, to trade and globalization, to economic and regulatory policy. As the President of Public Citizen, he has spearheaded the effort to loosen the chokehold corporations and the wealthy have over our democracy.The alleged purpose [of D.O.G.E.] is to advance efficiency of the government. But what it's really about is rolling back regulations—the things that give us clean air, clean water, safe food, fair workplace, economic justice, protections against discrimination, and more—to benefit corporate bottom lines, on the one hand, and on the other, to pursue a right-wing libertarian extremist agenda with slashing government spending, especially to protect the most poor and vulnerable.Robert WeissmanMusk said at first he wanted to try to cut $2 trillion from the budget every year. That's an impossibility, since the entire budget of discretionary spending is less than $2 trillion. Apparently, if you're the richest person in the history of the world, you don't actually have to know anything that you're talking about to be taken seriously.Robert WeissmanCraig Holman serves as Public Citizen's Capitol Hill lobbyist on ethics, lobbying, and campaign finance rules. He is also working with European nongovernmental organizations and members of the European Commission and Parliament in developing a lobbyist registration system for the European Union. Previously, he was senior policy analyst at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, and he has assisted in drafting campaign finance reform legislation (including pay-to-play legislation), and has conducted numerous research projects on the initiative process and the impact of money in politics. What's interesting is that some previous inaugural committees…didn't want to make it look like their administration's on the auction block by taking million-dollar donations from special interests and corporations. And so Bush had limited contributions to $100,000, Obama limited to $50,000 as well—they just didn't want it to look like they're putting their whole administration on the auction block. Trump doesn't seem to care about that.Craig HolmanNews 1/22/25* On January 20th, Joe Biden handed over the presidency to Donald Trump. In one of his last acts before leaving office, former President Biden commuted the sentence of Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, NPR reports. Peltier has been imprisoned for nearly 50 years following his conviction for the murder of two FBI agents at the Pine Ridge reservation; he has never wavered in maintaining his innocence. Despite Peltier being 80 years old and in increasingly poor health, NPR reports FBI Director Christopher Wray urged Biden not to “pardon Leonard Peltier or cut his sentence short.” Biden ultimately did not pardon Peltier, instead merely allowing him to complete his sentence under house arrest. In a statement, Peltier himself said “It's finally over — I'm going home…I want to show the world I'm a good person with a good heart.” Friend of the show Tom Morello, a longtime advocate for Peltier's release, wrote “Leonard has become a friend over the years and I am so glad…he will be able to spend his remaining years with family and friends.” Peltier's daughter Kathy, shocked by Biden's last-minute commutation after decades of being rebuffed by successive presidents of both parties, said “I'm just thankful that he had the balls and the guts to do it.”* Donald Trump was inaugurated on Monday, making him the first president in the modern era to serve non-consecutive terms. Immediately following his formal assumption of power, he issued a flurry of executive orders, including an exhaustive list of “rescissions” of Biden's executive actions. Among these, POLITICO reports that Trump immediately put Cuba back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism, signifying a return to the bad old days of hostility towards our island neighbor. This is only expected to worsen with American foreign policy being directed by Marco Rubio. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel called Trump's reversal “an act of arrogance and disregard for truth,” adding “the legitimate and noble cause of our people will prevail and we will once again succeed.”* Another Trump executive order issued Monday formally created the Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE. However, it seems that instead of creating a new agency, this action mainly just renamed the U.S. Digital Service – an existing executive branch office – the U.S. DOGE service. Moreover, this newly redubbed USDS does not appear to have a mandate to cut the federal workforce. Instead, it seems to be primarily concerned with updating federal information technology systems. Reading between the lines, it seems likely that Trump is putting Elon Musk in charge of this federal IT agency as a means to dole out public money to the tech oligarch and his cronies, rather than streamline the functions of the federal government.* In more Big Tech news, CBS reports President Trump is “set to announce billions of dollars in private sector investment to build artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States.” According to this report, OpenAI, Softbank and Oracle are planning a joint venture called “Stargate,” to begin with a massive data center in Texas. These corporations are planning to pour $500 billion into this project over the next four years. This will almost certainly be augmented by public funds provided by the Trump administration.* Turning to Gaza, Democracy Now! reported Saturday that both Biden and Trump gave Israel the “green light” to resume the assault on Gaza if Netanyahu felt it necessary. This piece quotes Netanyahu, saying that both presidents “gave full backing to Israel's right to return to fighting if Israel reaches the conclusion that negotiations of the second stage is fruitless.” As this piece notes, Israel killed approximately 200 Palestinians after the ceasefire was agreed upon last Wednesday. We can only hope the ceasefire holds and that President Trump sticks to his commitment to enforce the deal.* At the same time, friend of the show Norman Solomon is out with a piece in the Hill on the class action lawsuit filed by 800 Northern California residents, including Solomon himself, against their Democratic representatives in Congress, alleging that they are “illegally helping to provide weapons to Israel for use in committing genocide in Gaza.” As Solomon admits, the suit, directed against Congressmen Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson is unlikely to get far. However, he does believe both that the funding of the genocidal war is illegal under the humanitarian Leahy Laws and that these lawsuits can apply much needed scrutiny to these members and force them to register the opposition of their constituents to their positions – something with which many Democrats have refused to reckon. Solomon hopes to make Gaza a defining issue in the 2026 California Democratic Congressional primaries.* Two weeks ago, we discussed the American Historical Association's vote to condemn the “scholasticide” occurring in Gaza. Since then however, the AHA has tried to backpedal and delegitimize that vote. On January 17th, the AHA Council released a statement in which they write that while they deplore “any intentional destruction of Palestinian educational institutions, libraries, universities, and archives in Gaza,” the council considers the scholasticide resolution “outside the scope of the Association's mission and purpose.” The AHA Council therefore decided to disregard the vote of its membership and unilaterally veto the resolution. This cowardly and disgraceful decision to nullify the voice of America's historians will ironically be a stain on the history of the organization itself.* In more foreign affairs news, the crisis in South Korea continues to deepen. Last week, President Yoon was formally incarcerated pending his trial before the country's Constitutional Court after he attempted to seize power in a coup. Upon his detention, South Korean political newsletter Blue Roof reported that “Pro-Yoon supporters are rioting… storming the courthouse and attacking the marshals.” Security forces however were able to subdue the rioters, per Reuters. The Constitutional Court will now decide whether or not to remove Yoon from the presidency. Yoon could also face a trial on insurrection charges which would carry penalties up to and including life in prison and even capital punishment.* Turning back to domestic news, the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5, representing the cops of Philadelphia, is currently engaging in contract negotiations with the city – and making outrageous new demands. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that beyond pay raises and better vacation policy, “the police union is seeking to roll back transparency and accountability measures that predate the COVID-19 pandemic and civil unrest of 2020.” Indeed, the FOP is seeking to terminate the department's decade-long policy of releasing the names of most officers involved in shootings, prevent the Citizens Police Oversight Commission from investigating police misconduct, and “restrict outside access to currently available records ― such as those detailing how fired officers return to the force through the once-secretive grievance arbitration process.” Beyond these measures to make the police more secretive and less accountable to the public, the FOP is also demanding outrageous new perks for police officers, including interest free home loans and provisions allowing cops to live outside the state. We can only hope the city remains firm in these negotiations and preserves the public's right to know* Finally, CNN is out with a new poll showing the Democratic Party registering its worst ratings in decades. According to this poll, “a 58% majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say that the…Party needs major changes, or to be completely reformed, up from just 34% who said the same after…2022.” This comes on the heels of a January 15th YouGov poll showing that a plurality of Biden 2020 voters who didn't vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 said “ending Israel's violence in Gaza was the top issue affecting their vote choice.” The CNN poll also showed that “Only 49% of Democratic-aligned adults say they expect their party's congressional representatives to be even somewhat effective at resisting GOP policies.” Yet, perhaps the starkest number from this poll is “just 33% of all Americans express a favorable view of the Democratic Party, an all-time low in CNN's polling dating back to 1992.” These abysmal results should be a wakeup call to the moribund leadership of the party as the country drives of a cliff. If history is any indication though, the Democrats will remain asleep at the wheel.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

In the immediate aftermath of the mammoth fires in Los Angeles, Ralph welcomes Douglas Heller, Director of Insurance at Consumer Federation of America to fill us in on what to expect from the industry and how to get the most out of your fire insurance claims. Then, our resident constitutional scholar, Bruce Fein, returns to present a list of constitutional crises to expect upon the second coming of Donald Trump.Douglas Heller is a nationally-recognized insurance expert and Director of Insurance at Consumer Federation of America. In addition to conducting research for and providing expertise to consumer rights organizations, Mr. Heller is a member of the U.S. Department of Treasury's Federal Advisory Committee on Insurance, an appointee of California's Insurance Commissioner, serving as a board member of the California Automobile Assigned Risk Plan, and he serves on the Executive Board of the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud.A key thing for everybody to know is that the premiums that we have paid over the last several years here in California—and this really goes across the country, but in California in particular—have put the insurance industry in a perfectly healthy position to deal with the claims, as dramatic and as severe as these fires are and the amount of damage that they caused…For the insurance companies to cry poverty in the wake of the buildup of capital over the last several years would be outrageous, and so we're going to be watching for that.Douglas HellerThe story around the country was that California was already a terrible hellscape for the insurance companies to do business in. When in fact, they were doing far better than the rest of the country. One of the big trade journals that reports on the industry has said that State Farm has been kept afloat by its performance in California over the last couple of years. And it was more a kind of a climate opportunism—after ignoring the potential (and then, growing) impact of climate change on property risk for years and decades, the insurance companies finally had this kind of revelation that oh they can talk about climate change as a new risk and a justification for demanding whatever they want.Douglas HellerBattle lines seem to be drawn—at least in my opinion—between the “Drill baby, drill. All we need to do is rake the leaves” camp versus “Hey, this is another wake up call to the climate crisis.” Because this was a severe weather event. And there were four major fires at once, and no fire department, whose main daily job is medical emergencies, is equipped to deal with that. Especially since the first two days the winds were so high—hurricane force winds—they couldn't get helicopters and airplanes into the air to make the drops in these canyons. And I don't think there's any amount of brush clearing that would have stopped these winds from whipping up these embers to send them into these residential districts.Steve SkrovanBruce 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 Trump regime has a high probability of being the most lawless dictatorial regime in American history. All presidents violate laws, but Trump has taken this to a new, boastful level of variety.Ralph NaderThe reason why it's more likely that Trump will use this dragnet in a more abusive ways, is because he and his FBI nominee have said openly that they're going to do everything they can to persecute, to go after their enemies list…The only limitation on abuse is that they don't have the manpower to actually use it all.Bruce FeinWe're the guardrails—not Congress anymore. It's the people who have to stand up and protest and not send scoundrels back to office if they're not discharging their obligations under the United States Constitution. If we aren't the guardrails, there aren't any out there.Bruce FeinNews 1/15/251. In Gaza, CNN reports a ceasefire deal has finally been reached. This comes on the heels of negotiations between the warring parties, attended by envoys of both President Biden and incoming President Trump, with Egyptian and Qatari mediators. Under the terms of this deal, Hamas has agreed to free the remaining 33 Israeli hostages in their custody, while Israel will “free hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.” Trump's apparent demand for an immediate settlement with this many Israeli concessions comes as a shock. Israeli journalist Erel Segal, widely seen as a Netanyahu proxy, is quoted saying “We're the 1st to pay a price for Trump's election. [The deal] is being forced upon us… We thought we'd take control of northern Gaza, that they'd let us impede humanitarian aid.”2. In more foreign policy news, the American Prospect is out with a piece on the gifts received by senior foreign policy officials in the Biden Administration. According to this report, Bill Burns – Director of the Central Intelligence Agency – has in the past year received “an $18,000 astrograph, an $11,000 Omega watch, and a ceremonial Saudi war sword.” By comparison, Secretary of State Antony Blinken received $600 worth of memorabilia and “several acrylic landscape portraits.” As this piece notes, individuals cannot keep these gifts – they become public property – yet the disparity in these gifts does reflect the difference in perception toward Blinken and Burns. As one State Department official put it, “When you want someone to drink champagne, you send Blinken. When you need someone to actually fix s**t in Brazil, the Middle East, or Russia, you send Burns.”3. And in the final days of his administration, AP's Matt Lee reports President Biden will reverse Trump's decision to designate Cuba a state sponsor of terror. The state sponsor of terror designation resulted in Cuba facing even harsher sanctions than they had during the decades-long embargo and led to multiple critical shortages of essential goods like fuel. Since the designation was announced in 2021, many have called for it to be reversed, including New York State Senators and representatives in New York, Massachusetts and Minnesota, as well as local representatives and labor unions like the UAW, UE, and others, per People's Dispatch. It is unclear why Biden is taking this action now and Trump can reverse this move as soon as he takes office.4. Turning to labor, NBC reports the Services Employees International Union (SEIU) will rejoin the AFL-CIO, 20 years after leaving the labor federation. With SEIU back in the fold, the AFL-CIO will represent over 15 million workers. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler is quoted saying “We are the, probably, only institution in the country that has an infrastructure in every city, in every state, in every workplace, that is a mobilizing machine…And as they say, outside power builds inside power.” This move is widely seen as an attempt to consolidate worker power ahead of Trump's return to office, though the unions have resisted saying so explicitly. The Teamsters left the AFL-CIO around the same time as the SEIU, but have made no moves to rejoin the labor federation and have instead opted to strategically align themselves with Trump. It remains to be seen which strategy will yield better results.5. In more labor news, Fast Company reports servers at Waffle House franchises around the country claim “the chain forces them to do janitorial work and dishwashing for [sub-minimum] tipped wages, robbing them of up to $46.8 million.” As this piece notes, “Wage theft…is a common practice. As of 2017…workers lose $15 billion annually in minimum wage violations alone.” Moreover, “From 2021 to 2024, the Department of Labor recovered more than $1 billion in back wages and damages for 615,000 employees in the U.S.” Waffle House is a particularly egregious offender, with 90% of workers surveyed reporting they had experienced some form of wage theft in the past year. The state minimum wage in Georgia, where Waffle House is based, is a meager $5.15 per hour, yet the tipped minimum is even lower at just $2.13 – a starvation wage. One worker, Melissa Steach, is quoted saying “Corporations can't keep throwing us around because we make all this money for them…And what are they really doing with it? They are not supporting their workers. They can't keep screwing us around. We're here. We're worth it.”6. On the other end of the spectrum, Apple CEO Tim Cook's staggering compensation package hit nearly $75 million in 2024, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Converted to an hourly wage, this equates to roughly $600 per minute. This is a substantial increase from his 2023 total of $63.2 million, but still lower than the nearly $100 million he received in 2022. In October, Apple reported its services business, including Apple Music and iCloud, hit a revenue of $24.97 billion for the quarter, a “new all-time high for the company.”7. In more tech news, the Intercept reports Meta – parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp – is relaxing their content moderation rules as they relate to hate speech. The Intercept received leaked training materials to this effect, which explicitly outline what users are now allowed to say. These officially permitted statements include “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of s**t,” “Jews are flat out greedier than Christians,” and simply “I'm a proud racist.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation's international freedom of expression director Jillian York is quoted in this piece saying, “While [Meta's previous censorship regime] has often resulted in over-moderation that I and many others have criticized, these examples demonstrate that Meta's policy changes are political in nature and not intended to simply allow more freedom of expression.”8. In a more positive story of social progress, EuroNews reports that the Italian Bishops' Conference has issued new guidelines all but clearing the way for openly gay men to enter the priesthood. According to the newly issued report, titled "Guidelines and norms for seminaries,” "When referring to homosexual tendencies, it's… appropriate not to reduce discernment only to this aspect, but, as for every candidate, to grasp its meaning in the global framework of the young person's personality.” In 2023 Pope Francis told the AP that “being homosexual isn't a crime,” and has endorsed the church “blessing” same-sex unions. Women remain entirely excluded from the priesthood.9. On the domestic front, Axios reports Justice Democrats – the progressive insurgent group – is planning a new wave of primary challenges to unseat “corporatist” incumbent Democrats. While the group's number one target seems to be George Latimer, who ousted Congressman Jamaal Bowman from his newly redrawn seat last cycle, spokesperson Usamah Andrabi told Axios the group is, “keeping every deep blue district on the table.” However, many of the prominent House progressives are shying away from this effort. Pramila Jayapal, former chair of the Progressive Caucus said “I think given what's at stake we feel really urgently that we need to protect all incumbents,” while Ilhan Omar said "There are folks who endorse against their own colleagues, but I don't."10. Finally, Public Citizen co-presidents Rob Weissman and Lisa Gilbert have written a letter to the chairs of the Trump Transition team asking to be named members of the Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE. In this letter, Weissman and Gilbert express their “concerns about DOGE's structure and mission,” particularly with regard to its proposed leaders Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who “hold financial interests that will be directly affected by federal budgetary policies,” but also makes the key argument that DOGE's mission to “slash excess regulation” and “cut wasteful expenditures” must be tied to the other “half of the picture: more efficiently regulating corporations to better protect consumers and the public from harmful corporate practices.” They argue that their “appointment to serve as members of DOGE” would enable them to serve as “voices for the interests of consumers and the public who are the beneficiaries of federal regulatory and spending programs.” Rather than an earnest plea for an appointment, this letter is more likely meant to expose a key issue with the DOGE project: those in charge of cutting supposed government waste are riddled with conflicts of interests. They have too many fingers in the pie. If Trump were serious about reducing government spending generally – and corruption specifically – he would appoint people like Weissman and Gilbert, not Ramaswamy and Musk. And they would start with the unbelievably bloated, unauditable Pentagon budget.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

Ralph welcomes historian Douglas Brinkley (author of "The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House") as well as journalist and former Carter speechwriter James Fallows to reflect on the life and legacy of the late, great President Jimmy Carter.Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, presidential historian for the New-York Historical Society, trustee of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He has authored, co-authored, and edited more than three dozen books on American history, including Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening, Rosa Parks: A Life, and The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House.When [Jimmy Carter] came in in January of 1977, he said, “The Democratic Party is an albatross around my neck…” The Southern Democrats that voted for Carter in 1976 in the Senate because of, you know, “he's a fellow Southerner,” they abandoned him. They wanted nothing to do with him.Douglas BrinkleyRalph, I don't know if anyone's already told you this—there's a lot of Carter in yourself. You have a lot of similarities in my mind in the sense that you both work tirelessly, and are brilliant, and you learn the nuts and bolts of an issue and you lean into it, and both of you are known for your integrity and your honesty and your diligence and your duty. The question then becomes: Where did Carter fail? And it's about media and about power within the Democratic Party. Those two things Carter couldn't conquer.Douglas BrinkleyI've just written a column called “Jimmy Carter Was My Last President.” And by that I meant he was my last president—and I believe he was the last president for progressive civic groups as well—because he was the last president to actively open up the federal government to engagement and participation by long politically-excluded American activists. He did this actively. He took our calls. No president since has done that. He invited us to the White House to discuss issues. No president since has done that. And that's what I think has been missing in a lot of the coverage—he really believed in a democratic society.Ralph NaderJames Fallows is a contributing writer at the Atlantic and author of the newsletter Breaking the News. He began writing for the magazine in the mid-1970s, reporting from China, Japan, Southeast Asia, Europe, and across the United States and has written hundreds of articles for the publication since then. He's also worked as a public radio commentator, a news magazine editor, and for two years he was President Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter. He is the author of twelve books, including Who Runs Congress (with Mark Green and David Zwick), The Water Lords, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, and Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America (with Deborah Fallows).Jimmy Carter, for better and worse, had zero national politics experience. That was part of what made him seem refreshing…But Carter, I think one of his limitations in office was that he didn't know what he didn't know, in various realms. This happens to all of us. That's why many outsiders struggle in their first term as president. And so I think yes, he felt as if he could be in command of many things. And I think if he had a second term, he would have been more effective—as Barack Obama was, and others have been.James FallowsI'm really grateful for the chance to talk with you, Ralph, at this moment. As we reflect on a president of the past and prepare for an administration of the future…There are people whose example lasts because they've been consistent over the decades. And I think you, Ralph, in the decades I've known you, that has been the case with you. I think it's the case of Jimmy Carter as well. For people who are consistent and true to themselves, there are times when fortune smiles in their favor and there's times when fortune works against them, but their lasting example endures and can inspire others.James FallowsNews 1/8/251. According to newly released CIA documents, the agency conducted extensive surveillance on Latino – specifically Mexican and Puerto Rican – political activity in the 1960s, ‘70s, and early ‘80s Axios reports. Among other revelations, these documents prove that the agency infiltrated student activist groups “making demands for Mexican American studies classes” – in direct contravention of the CIA's charter, which prohibits domestic activities. The push to disclose the reality of this spying campaign came from Congressmen Jimmy Gomez and Joaquin Castro, whose mother was monitored by the FBI for her Chicano-related activism. Unlike the CIA, the FBI has not released their records.2. Crusading independent journalists Ken Klippenstein and Daniel Boguslaw are out with a new Substack piece regarding Luigi Mangione. This piece, based on a leaked NYPD intelligence report “Warning of ‘a wide range of extremists' that ‘may view Mangione as a martyr,'” due to their “disdain for corporate greed.” These reporters go on to criticize the media for hiding this report from the public, as they have with other key documents in this case. “The report, produced by the NYPD's Intelligence & Counterterrorism Bureau …was blasted out to law enforcement and counterterror partners across the country. It was also leaked to select major media outlets which refused to permit the public to read the document…By withholding documents and unilaterally deciding which portions merit public disclosure, the media is playing god.”3. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has finalized its rule to remove medical bills from credit reports. The bureau reports this rule will wipe $49 billion in medical bills from the credit reports of approximately 15 million Americans. Further, embedded within this rule is a critical provision barring creditors from access to certain medical information; in the past this has allowed these firms to demand borrowers use medical devices up to and including prosthetic limbs as collateral for loans and as assets the creditors could repossess.4. President Biden has blocked a buyout of US Steel by the Japanese firm Nippon Steel, per the Washington Post. His reasons for doing so remain murky. Many in Biden's inner circle argued against this course of action, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. And despite Biden framing this decision as a move to protect the union employees of US Steel, Nippon had promised to honor the United Steelworkers contract and many workers backed the deal. In fact, the only person Biden seemed to be in complete agreement with on this issue is incoming President Donald Trump.5. In September 2023, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson issued a groundbreaking proposal: a publicly owned grocery store. While such institutions do exist on a very small scale, the Chicago pilot project would have been the largest in the United States by a wide margin. Yet, when the city had the opportunity to apply for Illinois state funds to begin the process of establishing the project, they “passed” according to the Chicago Tribune. Even still, this measure is far sounder than the previous M.O. of Chicago mayors, who lavished public funds on private corporations like Whole Foods to establish or maintain stores in underserved portions of the city, only for those corporations to turn around and shutter those stores once money spigot ran dry.6. On January 5th, the American Historical Association held their annual meeting. Among other proposals, the association voted on a measure to condemn the “scholasticide” being perpetrated by Israel in Gaza. Tim Barker, a PhD candidate at Harvard, reports the AHA passed this measure by a margin of 428 to 88. Along with the condemnation, this measure includes a provision to “form a committee to assist in rebuilding Gaza's educational infrastructure.” The AHA now joins the ever-growing list of organizations slowly coming to grips with the scale of the devastation in Gaza.7. According to Bloomberg, AI data centers are causing potentially massive disruptions to the American power grid. The key problem here is that the huge amounts of power these data centers are gobbling up is resulting in “bad harmonics,” which distort the power that ends up flowing through household appliances like refrigerators and dishwashers. As the piece explains, this harmonic distortion can cause substantial damage to those appliances and even increase the likelihood of electrical fires and blackouts. This issue is a perfect illustration of how tech industry greed is impacting consumers, even those who have nothing to do with their business.8. The Department of Housing and Urban Development reports homelessness increased by over 18% in 2024, per AP. HUD attributes this spike to a dearth of affordable housing, as well as the proliferation of natural disasters. In total, HUD estimates around 770,000 Americans are homeless, though that does not include “those staying with friends or family because they do not have a place of their own.” More granular data is even more appalling; family homelessness, for example, grew by 40%. Homelessness grew by 12% in 2023.9. On January 7th, Public Citizen announced that they have launched a new tracker to “watchdog federal investigations and cases against alleged corporate criminals…that are at risk of being abandoned, weakened, or scaled back under the Trump administration.” This tracker includes 237 investigations, nearly one third of which involve companies with known ties with the Trump administration. These companies include Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Bank of America, Coinbase, Ford, Tesla, Goldman Sachs, Meta, OpenAI, SpaceX, Pfizer, Black & Decker, and Uber among many others. As Corporate Crime expert Rick Claypool, who compiled this tracker, writes, “Corporate crime enforcement fell during Trump's first term, even as his administration pursued ‘tough' policies against immigrants, protestors, and low-level offenders…It's likely Trump's second term will see a similar or worse dropoff in enforcement.”10. Finally, Senate Republicans are pushing for swift confirmation hearings to install Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, per POLITICO. Yet, the renewed spotlight on Gabbard has brought to light her association with the Science of Identity Foundation, an alleged cult led by “guru” Chris Butler, per Newsweek. The New Yorker reports members of this cult are required to “lie face down when Butler enters a room and even sometimes eat his nail clippings or ‘spoonfuls' of the sand he walked on.”This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

A battle is brewing over the restructuring of OpenAI, the creator of pioneering artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. It was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with the goal of developing AI to benefit humanity, not investors. But advanced AI requires massive processing power, which gets expensive, feeding into the company’s decision to take on major investors. Recently, OpenAI unveiled a plan to transition into a for-profit public benefit corporation. That plan has drawn objections from the likes of Elon Musk, Meta and Robert Weissman, co-president of consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, which urged California authorities to ensure that as OpenAI reorganizes, it will repay much of the benefits it received as a nonprofit.

A battle is brewing over the restructuring of OpenAI, the creator of pioneering artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. It was founded as a nonprofit in 2015 with the goal of developing AI to benefit humanity, not investors. But advanced AI requires massive processing power, which gets expensive, feeding into the company’s decision to take on major investors. Recently, OpenAI unveiled a plan to transition into a for-profit public benefit corporation. That plan has drawn objections from the likes of Elon Musk, Meta and Robert Weissman, co-president of consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, which urged California authorities to ensure that as OpenAI reorganizes, it will repay much of the benefits it received as a nonprofit.

Ralph welcomes Marc Rotenberg, founder and president of the Center for AI and Digital Policy to fill us in on the latest international treaty aimed at putting guardrails on the potential Frankenstein monster that is Artificial Intelligence. Plus, as we get to the end of the Medicare enrollment period, we put out one last warning for listeners to avoid the scam that is Medicare Advantage.Marc Rotenberg is the founder and president of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, a global organization focused on emerging challenges associated with Artificial Intelligence. He serves as an expert advisor on AI policy to many organizations including the Council of Europe, the Council on Foreign Relations, the European Parliament, the Global Partnership on AI, the OECD, and UNESCO. What troubles me is the gap between an increasingly obscure, technical, and complex technology—abbreviated into “AI” —and public understanding. You know, when motor vehicles came and we tried to regulate them and did, people understood motor vehicles in their daily lives. When solar energy started coming on, they saw solar roof panels. They could see it, they could understand it, they could actually work putting solar panels on roofs of buildings. This area is just producing a massively expanding gap between the experts from various disciplines, and the power structure of corporatism, and their government servants and the rest of the people in the world.Ralph NaderThe difference between these two types of [AI] systems is that with the old ones we could inspect them and interrogate them. If one of the factors being used for an outcome was, for example, race or nationality, we could say, well, that's impermissible and you can't use an automated system in that way. The problem today with the probabilistic systems that US companies have become increasingly reliant on is that it's very difficult to actually tell whether those factors are contributing to an outcome. And so for that reason, there are a lot of computer scientists rightly concerned about the problem of algorithmic bias.Marc Rotenberg[The sponsors of California SB 1047] wanted companies that were building these big complicated systems to undertake a safety plan, identify the harms, and make those plans available to the Attorney General…In fact, I work with many governments around the world on AI regulation and this concept of having an impact assessment is fairly obvious. You don't want to build these large complex systems without some assessment of what the risk might be.Marc RotenbergWe've always understood that when you create devices that have consequences, there has to be some circuit breaker. The companies didn't like that either. [They said] it's too difficult to predict what those scenarios might be, but that was almost precisely the point of the legislation, you see, because if those scenarios exist and you haven't identified them yet, you choose to deploy these large foundational models without any safety mechanism in place, and all of us are at risk. So I thought it was an important bill and not only am I disappointed that the governor vetoed it, but as I said, I think he made a mistake. This is not simply about politics. This is actually about science, and it's about the direction these systems are heading.Marc RotenbergThat's where we are in this moment—opaque systems that the experts don't understand, increasingly being deployed by organizations that also don't understand these systems, and an industry that says, “don't regulate us.” This is not going to end well.Marc RotenbergIn Case You Haven't Heard with Francesco DesantisNews 11/27/241. Last week, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. According to a statement from ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, the international legal body found reasonable grounds to believe that each has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare and intentionally directing attacks against civilians. This news has been met with varied reactions throughout the world. These have been meticulously documented by Just Security. The United States, which is under no obligation to honor the warrant as it is not a party to the Rome Statute, has said it “fundamentally rejects” the judgment and has called the issuing of warrants “outrageous.” Canada, which is party to the Rome Statue has vowed to uphold their treaty obligations despite their close ties to Israel. Germany however, another signatory to the Rome Statute, has suggested that they would not honor the warrants. In a statement, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said the warrants are “long overdue” and signal that “the days of the Israeli apartheid government operating with impunity are ending.” One can only hope that is true.2. On November 21st, 19 Senators voted for at least one of the three Joint Resolutions of Disapproval regarding additional arms transfers to Israel. As Jewish Voice for Peace Action puts it, “this is an unprecedented show of Senate opposition to President Biden's disastrous foreign policy of unconditional support for the Israeli military.” The 19 Senators include Independents Bernie Sanders and Angus King, progressive Democrats like Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen and Raphael Warnock, and Democratic caucus leaders like Dick Durbin, among many others. Perhaps the most notable supporter however is Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, whom Ryan Grim notes is the only Democrat representing a state Trump won and who is up for reelection in 2026 to vote for the resolution. Ossoff cited President Reagan's decision to withhold cluster munitions during the IDF occupation of Beirut in a floor speech explaining his vote. The Middle East Eye reports that the Biden Administration deployed Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer to whip votes against the JRD.3. Last week, we covered H.R. 9495, aka the “nonprofit killer” bill targeting pro-Palestine NGOs. Since then, the bill has passed the House. Per the Guardian, the bill passed 219-184, with fifteen Democrats crossing the aisle to grant incoming-President Trump the unilateral power to obliterate any non-profit organization he dislikes, a list sure to be extensive. Congressman Jamie Raskin is quoted saying “A sixth-grader would know this is unconstitutional…They want us to vote to give the president Orwellian powers and the not-for-profit sector Kafkaesque nightmares.” The bill now moves to the Senate, where it is unlikely to pass while Democrats cling to control. Come January however, Republicans will hold a decisive majority in the upper chamber.4. President-elect Donald Trump has announced his selection of Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer as his pick for Secretary of Labor. Chavez-DeRemer is perhaps the most pro-labor Republican in Congress, with the AFL-CIO noting that she is one of only three Republicans to cosponsor the PRO Act and one of eight to cosponsor the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. Chavez-DeRemer was reportedly the favored choice of Teamsters President Sean O'Brien, who controversially became the first ever Teamster to address the RNC earlier this year. While her selection has been greeted with cautious optimism by many labor allies, anti-labor conservatives are melting down at the prospect. Akash Chougule of Americans for Prosperity accused Trump of giving “A giant middle finger to red states,” by “picking a teachers union hack” and urged Senate Republicans to reject the nomination.5. Unfortunately, most of Trump's selections are much, much worse. Perhaps worst of all, Trump has chosen Mehmet Cengiz Öz – better known as Dr. Oz – to lead the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Beyond his lack of qualifications and history of promoting crackpot medical theories, Oz is a longtime proponent of pushing more seniors into privatized Medicare Advantage, or “Disadvantage,” plans, per Yahoo! Finance. This report notes that the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 called for making Medicare Advantage the default health program for seniors.6. According to CNN, Brazilian police have arrested five people who conspired to assassinate leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula, in 2022. This assassination plot was allegedly cooked up even before Lula took office, and included plans to kill Lula's Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The conspirators included a former high-ranking Bolsonaro advisor and military special forces personnel. Reuters reports investigators have discovered evidence that Bolsonaro himself was involved in the scheme.7. In more news from Latin America, Drop Site reports that the United States and Colombia engaged in a secretive agreement to allow the country's previous U.S.-backed conservative President Ivan Duque to utilize the Israeli Pegasus spyware for internal surveillance in the country. Details of the transaction and of the utilization of the spyware remain “murky,” but American and Colombian officials maintain it was used to target drug-trafficking groups and not domestic political opponents. Just two months ago, Colombia's leftist President Gustavo Petro delivered a televised speech revealing details of this shadowy arrangement, including that the Duque government flew $11 million cash from Bogotá to Tel Aviv. As Drop Site notes, “In Colombia, there's a long legacy of state intelligence agencies surveilling political opposition leaders. With the news that the U.S. secretly helped acquire and deploy powerful espionage software in their country, the government is furious at the gross violation of their sovereignty. They fear that Colombia's history of politically motivated surveillance, backed by the U.S. government, lives on to this day.”8. Following the Democrats' electoral wipeout, the race for new DNC leadership is on. Media attention has mostly been focused on the race to succeed Jamie Harrison as DNC Chair, but POLITICO is out with a story on James Zogby's bid for the DNC vice chair seat. Zogby, a longtime DNC member, Bernie Sanders ally and president of the Arab American Institute has criticized the party's position on Israel and particularly of the Kamala Harris campaign's refusal to allow a Palestinian-American speaker at this year's convention. He called the move “unimaginative, overly cautious and completely out of touch with where voters are.” This report notes Zogby's involvement in the 2016 DNC Unity Reform Commission, and his successful push to strip substantial power away from the so-called superdelegates.9. Speaking of Democratic Party rot, the Lever reports that in its final days the Biden Administration is handing corporations a “get out of jail free card.” A new Justice Department policy dictates that the government will essentially look the other way at corporate misconduct, even if the company has “committed multiple crimes, earned significant profit from their wrongdoing, and failed to self-disclose the misconduct — as long as the companies demonstrate they ‘acted in good faith' to try to come clean.” This is the logical endpoint of the longstanding Biden era soft-touch approach intended to encourage corporations to self-police, an idea that is patently absurd on its face. Public Citizen's Corporate Crime expert Rick Claypool described the policy as “bending over backward to protect corporations.”10. Finally, on November 23rd lawyer and former progressive congressional candidate Brent Welder posted a fundraising email from Bernie Sanders that immediately attracted substantial interest for its strong language. In this note, Sanders writes “The Democrats ran a campaign protecting the status quo and tinkering around the edges…Will the Democratic leadership learn the lessons of their defeat and create a party that stands with the working class[?]…unlikely.” The email ends with a list of tough questions, including “should we be supporting Independent candidates who are prepared to take on both parties?” Many on the Left read this as Bernie opening the door to a “dirty break” with the Democratic Party, perhaps even an attempt to form some kind of independent alliance or third party. In a follow-up interview with John Nichols in the Nation, Sanders clarified that he is not calling for the creation of a new party, but “Where it is more advantageous to run as an independent, outside of the Democratic [Party]…we should do that.” Whether anything will come of this remains to be seen, but if nothing else the severity of his rhetoric reflects the intensity of dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party in light of their second humiliating defeat at the hands of a clownish, fascistic game show host. Perhaps a populist left third party is a far-fetched, unachievable goal. On the other hand, how many times can we go back to the Democratic Party expecting different results. Something has got to give, or else the few remaining pillars of our democracy will wither and die under sustained assault by the Right and their corporate overlords.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe