Episodes

  • Democracy Without Politicians

    Democracy Without Politicians
    Nov 14 2026

    In the wake of yet another seemingly endless political season awash in dark money, Ralph welcomes self-described “recovering politician” and political theorist, Terry Bouricius, to explain how we can replace America’s fatally flawed democracy with a genuine one through the use of citizen councils. The concept is “sortition” and his book is “Democracy Without Politicians: Government by the People.”

    Terry Bouricius is a political theorist and self-described “recovering politician”. From 1981 to 2001, he served as a City Councilor and then as a member of the Vermont House of Representatives. After a decade working on election reform with the organization FairVote his focus shifted to sortition. He has written influential journal articles on sortition, and helped found the international democracy reform organization, Democracy R&D. He is the author of Democracy without Politicians: Government by the People.]

    I was a politician. And I thought we just needed to fix the voting system, so I worked on election reform, ranked choice voting, and so on. And then I found sortition… And many people, when I first talk about replacing politicians with everyday people, they assume that, “Well, the politicians are experts in lawmaking, aren’t they?” And the fact is—no, they’re not. They are experts at winning elections. Their staff do 95% of the legislative work (with the lobbyists, of course). Lawmakers are not lawmakers. They’re public relations experts.

    Terry Bouricius

    If you let politicians pick the issues, they pick ones that are sexy that they can use to mobilize voters, also that foment fear and hatred. That’s what politicians want on the agenda. But that’s not the kind of issues that we need to deal with. We need to deal with climate change, AI. There’s a variety of issues that politicians keep kicking the can down the road…And with sortition, we can set an agenda that is meaningful. You could have a body that reviews proposals from anywhere in society, and then a large jury listening to the pro and con arguments on the draft bill and voting to adopt or reject the proposed bill.

    Terry Bouricius

    Ralph wants to hear from you! When was the last time you bought anything— a product or a service, based directly on the ad that you read or listened to or saw? We will read and discuss your responses on a future program.



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    1 hr and 17 mins
  • The Blue Wave's Wake

    The Blue Wave's Wake
    Nov 7 2026
    Ralph discusses the results of this week’s midterm elections with America’s #1 Populist Jim Hightower, RootsAction founder Norman Solomon, Rep. Al Green (TX-9), and constitutional law expert Bruce Fein.Ralph wants to hear from you! When was the last time you bought anything— a product or a service, based directly on the ad that you read or listened to or saw? We will read and discuss your responses on a future program.Jim 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.This has been a genuine, grassroots, populist rebellion that has happened in this state. The national media seems to be interpreting this as a rebuke of Donald Trump—which it certainly is—but more fundamentally, it is a rebuke of the power structure that has left working people, and farmers, and environmental concerns, et cetera, off of the national agenda. And people have just put it back on the agenda here in the state of Texas.Jim HightowerThe Republicans have the fat cats, but we have the alley cats. We have the grassroots constituency that has long been ignored (including by the Democratic Party) that’s asserted itself this time around. And that people power took on money power at the most fundamental level, talking to people directly.Jim HightowerNorman 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 War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.I have to say (having done a lot of interviews and research in the last few days) that so far, nobody in the House with a “D” after their name has been willing to say that they will challenge Hakeem Jeffries for a speaker. That is just unfortunately the reality. Likewise, over in the Senate, anybody who wants to challenge Chuck Schumer for the majority leader position? Nobody has shown up. Nobody has stuck their heads above the barricades. I think that can only change with an upsurge of outrage at the prospect that after this tremendous victory on Tuesday…that there would be a reversion to the corporate business as usual.Norman SolomonThere are two crucial responsibilities that elected officials have and that really, in a sense, all of us have. One of them is to fight the racists, the xenophobic militarists, the corporate flunkies, the misogynists who have gained control of the Republican Party. That is necessary, but insufficient. The other necessity is to fight for and create and enact a genuine progressive program that takes care of the woeful, terrible deficits in health care, education, housing, environmental protection, diplomacy instead of war. That is the imperative (or among the imperatives) that we need to demand of Congress. It’s not enough to win on election night. We’ve got to win day after day.Norman SolomonAl Green represents Texas’s 9th District in the US Congress. He currently serves on the House Committees on Financial Services, including the Subcommittee on Financial Institutions, and as Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.I’m grateful to see this happen, and I’m hopeful that [Democrats] will take up affordability and accountability. Affordability obviously has been explained many times, and that has to do with the necessities of life—food, clothing, shelter, [health care]. But accountability is also about impeachment. I don’t know how we can have leadership and others say that the President has committed impeachable offenses and not take up the issue of impeachment. That’s antithetical to the verbiage that we are using. You’ve got to acknowledge that your words mean something when you say this.Congressman Al GreenWe now see what happens to Republicans when they’ve gone too far in overlooking the will of the people. And I think that the road to impeachment is one that the persons who are seeking the Presidency are going to have to travel. They’re going to have to explain why they are opposed to it or why they support it. I don’t think this is going to just go away.Congressman Al GreenI firmly, absolutely believe that [Trump will] be impeached before he leaves office. I think that it will happen and it should happen. We should not allow the next would-be Trump to believe that he can create a death squad that takes the lives of people with impunity, giving them a license to kill, making them judge, jury, prosecutor, and executioner. We cannot allow that. If we do, it will be a stain on Congress that posterity will forever be critical of.Congressman Al GreenBruce ...
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    1 hr and 55 mins
  • Election Day 2026: The Final Countdown

    Election Day 2026: The Final Countdown
    Oct 31 2026
    Ralph speaks to America's #1 Populist Jim Hightower to get the lowdown on some potentially historic races coming up in Texas. Then Ralph is joined by Norman Solomon (co-founder of RootsAction) to get his final take on how this round of Democratic campaigns have played out. Finally, Ralph talks to pollster John Zogby about what we can learn from the latest polls.Ralph wants to hear from you! When was the last time you bought anything— a product or a service, based directly on the ad that you read or listened to or saw? We will read and discuss your responses on a future program.Jim 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.Even the current [Texas] Agriculture Commissioner (who Republicans abandoned, even though he is a right-wing Republican himself) has effectively endorsed Clayton Tucker for that position. And one reason, the main reason, is because Clayton took on early the data center corruption in our state. Where our state government under Abbott got fully behind the building of data centers and the coming AI revolution, saying that we were going to be the centerpiece in the world of data centers. And it turns out that, oops, that’s not a very popular position among Republicans in rural areas of our state, because, of course, they’re going to suck up the water, they’re going to take over the land, take over the local government, etc. And people aren’t real keen on that. So there’s been a rebellion building in the countryside. And I’ve got to say, the Democratic Party did not understand that rebellion and did not adopt it early. But Clayton Tucker did.Jim HightowerPeople are finally catching on, getting fed up, and not just getting mad, but doing something about it.Jim HightowerNorman 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 War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.“Tone deaf” from Schumer and Jeffries is part of what they assume to be their job description.Norman SolomonAll too often, people are overly respectful. Sure, you don’t want to go around screaming at your representatives. But the amount of deference, the amount of kowtowing and, “Oh, thank you for all you’ve done. Appreciate it,” it gets translated to, “Well, you’re not a Republican, so thank you very much. You’ve done your job.” No, that’s not your only job. Your job is to represent people against corporate power, against the militarists, against the vicious economic and social system that is crushing millions and millions of people.Norman SolomonWherever you live, if you have somebody in Congress, don’t treat them like a god. Forget about No Kings—don’t treat them like a prince or anything else. They’re there to work for you. And the vast majority of the members of Congress (and that includes Democrats), they haven’t been working for you. They’ve been working for military contractors. They’ve been working for the Fortune 500 and Big Tech. And that has to change. And will change only if we confront them.Norman SolomonJohn Zogby is a public opinion pollster, author, and public speaker. He is the founder of the Zogby poll and the Zogby International poll, and he is founder and Senior Partner at John Zogby Strategies, a consumer opinion survey and political survey company.I’m a little less worried this time around, simply because the Republicans own what’s going on. They can’t blame the Democrats for the lack of affordability, for status anxiety…They own the war in Iran…These are things that they have to defend. In the absence of defending, they blame Democrats for being socialists or blame Democrats for personal foibles. And that may work with some. But the fact of the matter is, what voters really want to know is: What have you done for me lately, and what are you going to do for me next? And they’re not hearing that from Republicans. Now, they’re not necessarily hearing a united message from Democrats either. But the Democrats, at least this time, don’t own the mess.John ZogbyNews 10/30/26* Our top story this week is the shock re-election victory of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, who began his career as a labor leader and dissident under the Brazilian dictatorship, now becomes perhaps the most voted-for individual in the history of the world. Lula placed second in the first round of the presidential election, with his opponent Flávio Bolsonaro coming in first, which makes the reversal in the ...
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    2 hrs
  • How To Win the Midterms

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

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

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

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

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