Ralph Nader Radio Hour

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 Galvani

Currently, 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 Galvani

People 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 Galvani

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.

[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 Fein

Action Alert!

Call or write your state’s Attorney General about the following...

September 15, 2026

Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, President, National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG)

Re: State prosecutions of Donald Trump for inciting or aiding and abetting state electoral fraud in the midterm 2026 congressional elections

Dear Mr. Tong:

We urge every member of NAAG to consider state prosecution of President Donald Trump under their respective state laws for urging, in his non-presidential capacity, to commit voter fraud in the forthcoming midterm congressional elections. Speaking in his capacity as a leader of the Republican Party in Dallas, Texas, on September 10, 2026, unprotected by the constitutional immunity shield of Trump v. United States (July 1, 2024), Mr. Trump urged attendees to take a pledge as follows: “I don’t care if I’m registered or not. I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they do.”

If an ordinary person uttered such an exhortation to industrial-scale electoral fraud, a state prosecution would be forthcoming. The United States abandoned “the King can do no wrong” doctrine of Great Britain 250 years ago on July 4, 1776.

We are eager to explore this idea further with NAAG.

Sincerely,

Bruce Fein, Esq. | Ralph Nader, Esq.

News 10/9/26

* Our first stories this week concern the progressive campaigns underway in Michigan. In the Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed made headlines after he announced that he would be joined on the trail by former President Barack Obama. According to the Detroit Free Press, “President Obama will rally voters and encourage them to vote early for Democrats up and down the ballot,” in an event to be held October 24th. In addition to El-Sayed, Obama is expected to stump hard for Democratic Gubernatorial nominee Jocelyn Benson. At the same time, El-Sayed announced that he will also be joined on the campaign trail by New York progressive firebrands AOC and Zohran Mamdani, per the Washington Examiner. El-Sayed being able to bring together these factions of the fractious Democratic Party bodes well not only for his campaign but for his ability to govern effectively if he is ultimately elected to the Senate.

* Meanwhile, in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, incumbent Republican Congressman Tom Barrett faced off against his Democratic challenger, climate organizer William Lawrence, in the first debate of this race. Lawrence took the opportunity to tie Barrett to support for data centers and Trump’s tariffs – as well as Trump himself, who currently holds an approval rating of between 32% and 39% in Michigan, according to recent polling. On the issue of affordability, Lawrence argued that Barrett is “taking money from the corporations that are raising our costs and making our lives more challenging,” while Lawrence himself has “never taken a dime of corporate PAC money.” Barrett won this seat in 2024 by a margin of under 1%; this seat is considered a must-win for Democrats to retake the House. This from WLNS.

* The first debate of the Senate campaign in Maine was held this week as well. CNN reports incumbent Senator Susan Collins “touted her ‘effective leadership’ securing federal funds for Maine, while [Democratic challenger Troy] Jackson sought to nationalize the race with persistent criticism of her relationship with Trump and 2018 vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who later voted to overturn the federal right to an abortion.” Collins refused to disavow her support of the Kavanaugh nomination, though she admitted that she “clearly doesn’t agree with how Brett Kavanaugh voted on Roe v. Wade,” per the Bangor Daily News. The most-watched moment of the night came when “Collins boasted that she has been the ‘most outspoken opponent of tariffs with Canada,’ noting she has won exemptions for products such as road salt.” Jackson retorted “what about everything else? We can’t eat road salt.” Collins has weathered extremely challenging political headwinds in the past, but many see the national conditions in this race as simply too much for her to overcome.

* In other news, a nasty intra-party feud is roiling the Democratic Party in Brooklyn. At the center of the storm is Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, who became the first woman to lead the Brooklyn Democratic Party back in 2020. Since then, Bichotte Hermelyn has faced persistent criticism from progressive groups for operating the party as an old fashioned political machine. Following the June primaries, a gang of reformers calling themselves “Brooklyn Can’t Wait” won a controlling majority of seats on the party’s 42-member executive committee and sought to oust Bichotte Hermelyn. Instead, she retaliated by aggressively expanding the executive committee – adding 26 new seats and allocating those to loyalists. Facing enormous blowback from New York Democrats for this dictatorial move, Bichotte Hermelyn seemed to back down, announcing she would not seek re-election and declaring herself Chair Emeritus instead. However, legal battles over her actions continue to move their way through the courts. Last week, Bichotte Hermelyn and her allies suffered a major setback, when Supreme Court judge Lisa Lewis ruled that the legal head of the Brooklyn party was now powerful longtime Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, while another court upheld the legal challenge on the rules fight thereby blocking the expansion of the executive committee. This from City and State NY. With all of that said, Bichotte Hermelyn and her clique organized yet another counterstrike over the weekend, convening via Zoom in the dead of night to elect Assemblywoman Nikki Lucas, a Bichotte Hermelyn ally, as party chair. Unsurprisingly, the reformers cried foul and are seeking a contempt-of-court ruling. We will surely continue to monitor this story closely.

* In Washington, NBC4 reports Amazon will refund over $7 million to residents in the city’s Ward 7 and Ward 8, part of a settlement with the office of DC Attorney General Brian Schwalb. According to the lawsuit, Amazon “violated DC consumer protection law by secretly excluding two DC ZIP codes east of the Anacostia River from Amazon’s in-house, Amazon-branded delivery services — significantly slowing Prime deliveries to those areas — while continuing to charge tens of thousands of DC residents living there the full Prime subscription price.” Amazon denies any wrongdoing, with a spokesman maintaining that “In the zip codes at issue, drivers faced specific, documented safety threats, and we adjusted operations to protect them, while still supporting delivery through other carriers.” This settlement will apply to just under 70,000 residents of the District of Columbia. In addition to the refunds, Amazon will pay $1 million in penalties.

* On the other side of Washington, this week the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) issued a statement decrying the latest round of layoffs at the Kennedy Center, this time targeting Box Office employees. In this statement, IATSE lays out that it “believes that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts continues to use the temporary closure to permanently eliminate jobs, reduce services, and weaken its Box Office, whose employees have been represented by Local 868 for decades.” IATSE adds that the Kennedy Center’s justification for the layoffs, that “the existing and projected programming schedule provides insufficient Box Office work,” to keep on the employees “flies in the face of reality.” IATSE explains this further and outlines the myriad other ways the Kennedy Center has sought to undermine and undercut the institution’s collective bargaining agreements, and ends by noting they will file unfair labor practice charges, though given the Trump administration’s hollowing out of the NLRB it is not at all clear how effective this will be. The Kennedy Center itself remains closed for the foreseeable future.

* Turning to international news, elections were held in Brazil this week resulting in a resounding victory of the right-wing. Al Jazeera reports the presidential election will head to a second round between incumbent leftist President Lula and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro, currently serving 27 years for his attempt to overturn the 2022 election. The younger Bolsonaro won the most votes at 56 million, with Lula close behind at approximately 53 million. Neither won over 50% of the vote. If Lula ultimately does win the second round of the presidential election, he has little hope of pushing through legislation with this new, ultra-conservative Congress; on the other hand, if Flávio Bolsonaro wins, he will have a substantial legislative majority he can use to carry out his agenda, most notably amnesty for Jair Bolsonaro. Right-wing parties made huge gains in the Brazilian Congress as well, including victories for former First Lady Michelle Bolsonaro, who won a Senate seat, as did Carlos Bolsonaro. The right-wing has gained power throughout Latin America in the past several years, turning back a left-wing wave throughout the region. The major exception to this is Mexico, which has sustained a progressive supermajority for nearly a decade with no sign that the coalition that brought AMLO and now Claudia Sheinbaum to power is losing steam.

* Elections were also held in Quebec this week, resulting in a huge victory for the Quebec separatist Parti Québécois (PQ). While the PQ won the most seats, it failed to win a majority, meaning “the separatists will need other parties’ support to achieve their aims - such as a new public vote on independence,” per the BBC. This is the first time in over a decade the PQ has been in power. This piece notes that despite the PQ’s victory, polls show only about 30% of Quebecers favor voting for an independence referendum. In a vote on the question in 1980, Quebecers rejected the proposition by a margin of around 60%-40%, though a 1995 referendum was far closer, falling short by only about 1%. Despite what is largely seen as a victory for the separatist right-wing, the “left-leaning sovereigntist party,” Quebec Solidaire held on to nine of its 11 seats and could potentially serve as a governing partner with the victorious PQ.

* In an amusing story with dark undertones, Expression, the Substack affiliated with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is out with a story about a progressive blogger in Ohio named D.J. Byrnes who was jailed after sending critical text messages to State Senator Jerry Cirino. The messages included references to Cirino’s “oft-repeated and derisive nickname ‘Young Mussolini,’” as well as “a digitally altered version of Shrek, the ogre with a titular children’s movie franchise…‘fully nude with an exposed and erect humanlike penis engaged in an act of masturbation.” While perhaps in bad taste, it is hard to imagine that this constitutes “telecommunications harassment,” which is what Mr. Byrnes has been charged with and even arrested for. He was released after 23 hours in jail. Hopefully these far-fetched charges will be dismissed, but the fact that this case has gone even this far is a troubling indication of the status of free speech online in the modern era.

* For our final story, we turn to the Wall Street Journal, which reports the Trump Justice Department is seeking to rewrite what it sees as the unfair railroading of a Republican President – this time however, instead of Trump, they are examining the investigation of Richard Nixon. Specifically, the Journal reports the DOJ is “reviewing whether the special prosecutor’s office that investigated the famed Watergate break-in committed misconduct.” Apparently, the DOJ recently hosted “Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide turned Watergate historian and revisionist,” to give a “two-hour presentation at Justice Department headquarters that laid out his theory that the deep state took Nixon down,” in a presentation titled “Watergate As Lawfare.” Vice President JD Vance echoed this line during a recent speech at the Nixon Library, where he said “If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it’s not all that different from what the same groups of people—the same institutions—tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration…There is a parallel.” The irony of this statement is of course that there is a parallel: Trump is every bit as paranoid, power hungry and hubristic as Nixon ever was. In a just world, Trump would face the same fate as the 37th president: forced to resign the office or face impeachment.

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.

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 Sidhwa

I 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 Sidhwa

The 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 Sidhwa

William 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 held on to it, you don’t need to return anything else to them. They’ve got plenty and plenty of money for holding on. So this is just a manipulation of the stock market.

William Lazonick

News 10/2/26

* Our first story this week comes to us from Florida, where Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Angie Nixon made news by saying in an interview with Newsweek that she thinks “there needs to be a moratorium [on the construction of data centers] until more research is done,” but that “if people want to build a data center, they should put it on Mar-a-Lago.” Nixon is careful to explain that she is open to data center construction given the appropriate safety guidelines and under the correct circumstances, such as “requiring or creating a mechanism for communities affected by data centers to receive some form of financial benefit.” While the invitation to build a data center on Mar-a-Lago is obviously incendiary, Nixon rejects the notion that her campaign is primarily about Trump, saying “I’m not pushing an anti-Trump message,” in the president’s adoptive home state, instead arguing that she is “pushing a message about how people should decide what their economies and communities look like.”

* Meanwhile the Hill reports Senate Democrats, led by Senators Mark Warner, Brian Schatz and Andy Kim, sought to pass a package of AI guardrails via unanimous consent this week, but were blocked by Ted Cruz. According to this report, the Artificial Intelligence Risk Management and Security Act of 2026 sought to “establish a permanent AI safety board within the Commerce Department,” which “would develop standards for evaluating frontier models and securing their testing environments, with developers required to give the panel access to models at least 45 days before they go public.” Cruz blocked the unanimous consent resolution on the basis that it would “give the executive branch too much power over private AI companies.”

* For our final tech story for the week, the Huffington Post reports that shortly after the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute fiasco which saw the group accept, then reject major donations from Palantir, the controversial high-tech surveillance firm was apparently “acknowledged as a supporter of the annual gala” for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, the CBC’s “charitable arm,” in Washington. Many remarked on the perverse symbolism of “one digital banner…[upon which] the firm was listed among the conference’s ‘top supporters…’...[while] The background featured a faded portrait of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, whose campaign motto ‘unbought and unbossed’ symbolized resistance to corporate influence.” This piece observes that Palantir has “long sought to curry favor with Democratic-aligned institutions,” while simultaneously cultivating close ties with ICE and the military and the firm’s founders, notably Peter Thiel, publicly espouse far-right ideas. In a statement, Palantir wrote that they are “proud and honored to support the CBC Foundation’s mission of creating pathways for promising young people to enter public service who may not have the networks or financial means to do so without support.”

* Turning to local news, the first corruption trial for DC councilmember Trayon White has ended in a mistrial, according to WTOP. White represents Ward 8, Washington’s most heavily African-American and historically most impoverished district. United States Attorney for the District of Columbia and former Fox News host Jenine Pirro said in a statement that “We have video showing piles of cash being given to a D.C. councilmember as part of a $156,000 bribe. Rest assured that we will retry this case and every corruption case to verdict.” However, White maintains that “The prosecutors knew, and the FBI knew that they didn’t have a strong case…[because] there was never a quid pro quo.” White further posted on social media that the jury split was nine-to-three in favor of a not guilty verdict. White, who was reelected to the council last year after being unanimously expelled added that his “focus remains on serving our residents, and [his] office remains open to help with constituent concerns.”

* In New York City, the legal battle over Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax grinds on. This week, CNN reports Judge Wayne M. Ozzi of Staten Island ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, who “did not challenge the legality of the tax itself, but…alleged the city had incorrectly ‘identified their homes as potentially subject to the surcharge,’ despite being their primary residences.” The tax was intended to impose a “surcharge on non-primary residences in New York City valued over $5 million, as well as co-ops valued at $1 million.” In effect, this ruling cancels the 17,000 notices sent out to residents notifying them that they either had to file for exemption or submit to the tax. Judge Ozzi allowed that new notices can be sent out only if they comply with a particular list of rules. In a statement, Mamdani spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach said “The pied-à-terre surcharge is about a basic principle of fairness: if you can afford a luxury second home in New York City, you can afford to pay your fair share for the schools, streets and parks that make this city work…Our Administration is fighting every day to deliver for working New Yorkers. The ultra-wealthy are fighting in court to avoid paying their fair share. They have filed lawsuit after lawsuit to protect their privilege, and we will not back down.” The Mamdani administration has already filed to appeal the ruling.

* Our final local story of the week takes us to Los Angeles, where mayoral hopeful Nithya Raman is in the news this week for sticking to her guns and defending her use of the term genocide to describe Israel’s murderous campaign in Gaza during a Jewish Federation forum at the Skirball Cultural Center. The LA Times reports Raman was questioned about her relationship with DSA, as well as with streamer Hasan Piker – recently described by the Financial Times as the Republican Party’s bogeyman – and finally about her use of the term genocide, which moderator Alex Cohen called a “highly inflammatory term.” Raman reportedly said that she deferred to international experts, including within Israel, adding that she used it because she “felt compelled to speak out about…the targeting of hospitals, the deaths of children.” Incumbent Mayor Karen Bass indicated that she does not think the term genocide is appropriate because it engenders “divisiveness.” Pressed further on her views on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, Raman called it “a legitimate form of peaceful protest” and vowed to “fight for that right” whether or not she agrees with the protesters. Bass said she would block a BDS bill even if it made it through the LA City Council.

* Elsewhere in California, the incoming class of left-wing House freshman, including Melat Kiros, Adam Hamawy, Chris Rabb, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, and Donavan McKinney – a group some have begun to dub “the Bloc” – are moving in force to support the campaign of Mai Vang in the Golden State’s 7th Congressional District. The Bloc will “collectively endorse” Vang in her insurgent challenge against incumbent Democratic Congresswoman Doris Matsui and travel out to the district, which includes Sacramento, to bolster her campaign. This from POLITICO. Matsui is 82 years old and running for her 12th term in the House; Vang is four decades her junior. Vang finished first in the June primary, winning 31.2% to Matsui’s 29.1%,

* POLITICO is also reporting that Bernie Sanders is “cracking open his war chest” on behalf of campaigns he is backing, including the Senate campaign of Peggy Flanagan, and Attorney General reelection campaign of Keith Ellison, both in Minnesota, and the Angie Nixon Senate campaign in Florida. In addition to direct transfers of funds to these campaigns, Sanders is “also spending to hire more full-time organizers in Michigan, Minnesota and Florida…and is planning get-out-the-vote text campaigns for federal candidates he’s endorsed,” as well as planning a California swing where he will campaign with Aisha Wahab and Randy Villegas, in the state’s 14th and 22nd Congressional Districts. This piece also indicates he may rally with Rebecca Cooke, running to oust a Republican incumbent in Wisconsin. Cooke has openly said she does not want to campaign with Kamala Harris, but said Sanders speaks to many of the same voters who backed Trump, and emphasized that his “sincerity about standing up for people who are getting screwed resonates a lot with families like mine.”

* Turning to foreign affairs, this week British Prime Minister Andy Burnham delivered a blockbuster speech at the Labour Party conference, which included calls to bring back public control of public services, most notably water, and reform the voting system toward a proportional representation model. Yet, what garnered the most attention in international news was his hinting that the United Kingdom could go “all the way” towards rejoining the European Union. Reuters reports Burnham saying Brexit has “done more harm than good” and that the country should explore all options for a future relationship with Europe, including options short of full membership, such as “rejoining ⁠the EU’s single market and/or a customs union.” However, while Burnham may want to split the baby as it were, others within the EU are more skeptical of these half measures. French President Emmanuel Macron is quoted saying “when [Great Britain] wants to re-engage with us…you cannot pick and choose among the Union’s freedoms, nor can you decide to take only what suits you while rejecting the rest.” Support for rejoining the EU has skyrocketed in the UK, now standing at 55% support among voters and only 34% opposed, though individual aspects such as adoption of the Euro or reentry into the Schengen Area may prove more politically unpopular. Burnham is set to participate in a summit with EU leaders next month.

* Our final story this week is a dark and stunning expose published on the After-Action Report Substack, titled “The CIA Killed Him. The Navy Blamed My Friend.” In this story, journalist Seth Hettena recounts the story of Dan Cerrillo, a Navy SEAL prosecuted for the barbarous abuse of Iraqi prisoner Manadel al-Jamadi at the Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. Cerrillo, who died at age 50 in 2023, went to his grave denying this and maintaining that instead, he was set up to take the fall for the CIA. Now, a declassified report by the CIA Office of the Inspector General confirms this quite directly, with damning excerpts reading “OIG determined that…officers contributed to the death of Al-Jamaidi by failing to abide by Agency interrogation policies and displaying a reckless disregard for his welfare while in their custody,” and “Agency officers took steps that impeded the subsequent investigations…into Al-Jamaidi’s death,” including withholding evidence from investigators, removing key evidence from the death scene, and even destroying evidence while the OIG investigation was ongoing. The full report is worth reading, as it traces the full story, including the author’s battle to pry information from the CIA using FOIA over the course of 20 years. In an era when conspiracy theories, often centering on the CIA, are everywhere, it is worth examining a genuine case of a CIA crime and coverup, and how even just one person can expose the truth.

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.

Leave a comment about how you are a smart voter. We will collect these and discuss them on our next program.

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 Berry

We 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 Berry

One 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 Berry

I 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 Berry

News 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, she immediately becomes one of his strongest surrogates in the Michigan Jewish community and helps to unite the often fractious Democratic coalition behind him. Recent polling has favored El-Sayed over Rogers by an increasing margin. While a Detroit News/WDIV-TV poll conducted in late August and early September found Rogers leading by one point, a Suffolk University poll conducted in mid-to-late September found El-Sayed ahead by seven.

* In more Senate race news, this week saw the publication of a bombshell report of corruption on the part of longtime Maine Senator Susan Collins – and how Trump helped to cover it up. According to ProPublica Martin Kao, CEO of defense contractor Navatek, funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Collins Super PAC through a shell company in exchange for her intervening on behalf of his company to secure lucrative military contracts, part of a “sweeping pay-to-play” scheme. When the feds caught onto Kao, leaving him staring down the barrel of a lengthy prison sentence, he told-all. This piece notes that while the Supreme Court has “narrowed what counts as bribery” to require “extraordinary proof of a quid pro quo arrangement,” the FBI “had enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties,” by late 2024. After the election however, Trump “stacked the Department of Justice with his personal lawyers” and “eviscerated” the “specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations,” because they had been involved in cases deemed lawfare against him specifically. The investigation based upon Kao’s story, substantiated by reams of evidence, is now regarded as dead in the water. In light of all of this, whether or not Collins faces accountability for this brazen corruption falls to the voters of Maine.

* In our last Senate story of the week, the Texas Tribune reports the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the “main outside group affiliated with Senate Majority Leader John Thune,” will “book an additional $30 million in ads,” on behalf of Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton through its connected entity, Texas PAC. Piled on top of SLF’s previous spending of nearly $70 million, this “will to bring its total spend to the $100 million mark.” This spending confirms that the GOP considers this race highly competitive and tracks with past predictions by SLF, which estimated that “a Paxton candidacy would cost $200 million to $250 million in order to keep the seat in Republican hands.” On top of the SLF’s $100 million spend, other groups have poured around $40 million into this race. Some wondered whether the Republicans, defending a broad array of seats, would be willing to bail out Paxton’s flailing candidacy. This new monetary commitment seems to confirm that they will throw as much money as they deem necessary to prevent the victory of James Talarico. While Talarico has raised and spent colossal amounts of money as well, this new infusion of Republican cash has swamped his spending thus far – with the Tribune reporting that in the “month of September, Texas PAC alone has spent nearly $66 million to Talarico’s approximately $22 million, with other Republican groups bringing the GOP’s spending total to about $103 million this month.” For now, Talarico maintains a slim but consistent lead in the polls, with even Republican polling firm Trafalgar Group finding him ahead by one point.

* Turning to House races, the national Democratic Socialists of America have endorsed Angela Gonzales-Torres, who is challenging incumbent Congressman Jimmy Gomez in California’s 34th congressional district. In their announcement, DSA stated that it is “proud” to endorse Gonzales-Torres, touting her agenda which foregrounds “an arms embargo on Israel, labor protections, Medicare for All and abolishing ICE.” DSA also highlights Gonzales-Torres’ life story, having been “Born and raised in Highland Park…the daughter of a deportee and grew up with a single mother who relied on SNAP and Medicaid,” adding that “Her organizing work includes helping people move from prison into higher education.” Gonzales-Torres thanked DSA for backing her campaign, and took the opportunity to attack Gomez for being “complicit in genocide, endorsed by Leading the Future—the AI super PAC of Palantir and OpenAI co-founders—and…under investigation for sexual misconduct.” If Gonzales-Torres and Mai Vang, another DSA candidate in California’s seventh district, emerge victorious in November, they will be the eighth and ninth DSA members of the next Congress, a stunning number not rivaled ever before in American history.

* Also in Los Angeles, new polling seems to show DSA-endorsed mayoral candidate Nithya Raman leading incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, according to the LA Times. The poll, conducted by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found Raman at 39%, over 10 points ahead of Bass at 28%. While this is certainly an encouraging result for Raman – who finished second against Bass in the June primary and has so far largely trailed the incumbent Mayor in the polls – Raman is still far off from 50% + 1 and 33% of voters in the poll responded that they were undecided about whom they would ultimately back in November. However, numbers besides the raw support tallies are encouraging for Raman as well. This poll found Bass far underwater, with 63% unfavorable ratings, compared to just 28% favorable and 9% having no opinion. Raman’s favorables, 40%, outweigh her unfavorables, 39%, if just barely, while 21% registered no opinion. In short, this race is far from over but as Mark DiCamillo, the director of the Berkeley IGS Poll says in this piece, “Raman clearly has the advantage. Her task is…less onerous than Bass’.”

* Meanwhile, in New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced this week that DoorDash will pay an enormous settlement of $131.5 million, including more than $115 million directly to delivery workers and more than $16 million in civil penalties and costs, for the widespread underpayment of 260,000 workers including “workers who were not paid at all or were paid late for work they had already performed.” The Mayor’s office notes that this is the “largest worker settlement in New York City history and the largest settlement involving food delivery workers in the United States.” Samuel A.A. Levine, Commissioner of the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), is quoted saying “New York City’s delivery workers are showing that opaque algorithms will not have the final word when it comes to how much they are paid for the hard work they do…With this record-breaking settlement and innovative compliance monitoring strategy, the Mamdani administration is demonstrating what it looks like to build an economy that puts working people first.” Moreover, the agency announced they will be partnering with the “Workers Justice Project and the Workers’ Algorithm Observatory to develop software that will allow workers to share their DoorDash trip and earnings data directly with the agency.” This “new worker-driven compliance system will give DCWP an independent way to identify underpayment and other violations rather than waiting for workers to discover problems after they have occurred.”

* In some local news from abroad, the city of Berlin held elections this week, resulting in Die Linke – literally ‘The Left’ – winning the plurality of the vote, “more than doubling its score in the previous contest in 2023.” Die Linke rode to victory on a platform focused on the cost of living, namely doing something to arrest skyrocketing rents, with Jacobin noting that “the sell-off of the public housing stock to private profiteers in the 1990s–2000s, plus a lack of new builds, has pushed up costs.” As the top vote-getter, Die Linke’s mayoral candidate – Elif Eralp, whom the media has christened Berlin’s Zohran Mamdani – is poised to assume the chief executive job as part of a “red-red-green” coalition with the German Green Party and the Social Democrats (SPD). Perhaps surprisingly given Berlin’s modern reputation as a bastion of progressivism, these three parties combined won a mere 52% of the vote, while the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won 16% of the vote, an increase of seven points since 2023. Eralp herself is the daughter of Turkish “trade unionists and socialists from Istanbul who were imprisoned after a military coup for their political beliefs…[and] only allowed out of jail because [her mother] was heavily pregnant with Eralp.” Eralp became a human rights lawyer and joined Die Linke after the AfD entered the Bundestag in 2017, per the Guardian.

* Turning back to the U.S., this week the Democratic State Attorneys General, after talking a big game, caved and allowed the Paramount acquisition of Warner Bros. to proceed. Bloomberg reports the terms of the settlement reached between Paramount and the states will “include a financial penalty if the company fails to make good on a promise to distribute 30 films per year in theaters,” with this financial penalty said to be “$30 million for each film that falls short of that goal.” Bloomberg also notes that “If the final terms are approved, the agreement would spare Paramount from having to pay late fees to Warner Bros. of $7 million a day, which were to begin on Oct. 1.” Even with these concessions, it is hard to see how the deal will avoid the concerns raised in the lawsuit, brought by 12 state attorneys general and the Writers Guild, who argued it would “stifle competition for film and cable-TV distribution, raise prices for consumers and in the writers’ case, lower their wages.” This settlement was reached despite a heroic last stand by some of the more progressive state AGs, including Minnesota’s Keith Ellison as well as those of Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut – who argued that the terms of the settlement were “too lenient to Paramount.” However, this gang of four were undercut by California AG Rob Bonta, who was under immense pressure to settle the case after Paramount announced they would leave California, Deadline reports. In addition to acquiring the vast intellectual property catalogue of Warner Bros., including Batman, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, Paramount will now add CNN to its portfolio, in addition to CBS which it has already purchased and put under the editorial guidance of arch-zionist Bari Weiss. According to these reports, the gang of four did secure a concession on this point, with Paramount agreeing to establish “independent editorial boards for CBS and CNN” – though what this will mean in practice remains unclear.

* For our final story this week, let us consider a new poll from the Center for Strategic Politics which shows Democrats support removing Trump by almost any means necessary. The vast preponderance of Democrats favor impeachment, with 86% positive and only 7% negative. The second most popular option is removal via the 25th amendment, which is favored by 84% of Democrats with, again, only 7% negative on the idea. President Trump dying in his sleep registers at +40% net sentiment, and even a hypothetical officers coup, framed as “a group of U.S. military leaders” removing President Trump from power and assuming “control of the United States” in order to “safeguard the Constitution,” wins 59% positive ratings compared to just 28% negative. In fact, the only option under water is an assassination attempt, which still scores 31% positive, though outweighed by the 43% negative response. This and many more insights are available from Liberal Currents.

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.

Ralph welcomes “New York Times” reporter Natasha Singer to discuss her new book, “Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools.” Then, Ralph talks about Donald Trump’s midterm convention speeches and the latest impeachment drive with Constitutional law expert Bruce Fein.

Natasha Singer is a New York Times reporter covering the intersection of technology, business and education. She has covered tech industry influence in schools for the New York Times for more than a decade, and her school tech reporting helped prompt California to enact a landmark student online data protection law. In 2019, she was part of a Times team whose tech coverage won a George Polk Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting. She is also the author of the book Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools.

It’s not about the companies immediately making money off schools. It’s about influencing kids, getting customers early and for life. But I think more importantly, it’s about imprinting Silicon Valley worldviews and values on young people. So that you get docile consumers who maybe aren’t worried about wholesale surveillance and data gathering, and docile employees who are not going to push back against being surveilled by their employer or using AI tools or having AI replace them. And so I think this story about tech companies capturing the classroom is not just about how they’re shaping learning. It’s about how some of the most powerful, wealthiest corporations on the planet are able to influence school systems.

Natasha Singer

Since the time of Steve Jobs, Silicon Valley has attached this fancy word “literacy” to whatever product they have, and then told schools they needed to teach it. So in the era of Steve Jobs, there was suddenly this fervor that we had to teach “computer literacy” because Japan was ahead and if we wanted our country to compete, we needed computer literacy. And then the internet came and we got “internet literacy” and “smartphone literacy” and then “digital literacy”... And now we’re in this moment where Silicon Valley and tech-funded nonprofit groups are pushing “AI literacy”, except we don’t know what AI literacy is and we don’t know how to teach AI. And so it makes it sound really fancy: “AI literacy”. But oftentimes the companies are really just talking about: “Learn how to use our chatbot.” And now you have asked: When are we going to stop listening to these people? When are we going to stop rushing to teach whatever product “literacy” Silicon Valley is pushing us to do this week, and then pivot with whiplash to whatever they’re pushing next week? And I think that’s the question of the hour.

Natasha Singer

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.

They’re playing to dodge accountability by saying, “We’re neither for nor against this,” like someone who’s claiming they’re agnostic. Now, how you could be agnostic on Donald Trump, whose impeachable offenses are proven out of his own mouth? All these statements that he’s made are open and notorious. And so it’s almost implausible to suggest that these people don’t know that he has committed impeachable offenses and are deciding to duck for political, partisan purposes (their calculation as to what would help them politically). Now, that, of course, is directly contrary to their oaths of office. Hakeem Jeffries, like his colleagues, has taken an oath (without mental reservation or purpose of evasion) to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. At present, the Constitution is in flames under Donald Trump. And to sit and do nothing—to declare neutrality between the firefighter and the fire—is itself an impeachable offense for which they should be impeached and be prosecuted for perjury when they were sworn into office.

Bruce Fein

News 9/18/26

* Our first stories this week are about impeachment. On the Democratic side, outgoing Congressman Al Green, long a champion of impeachment, introduced a resolution which “sought to impeach Mr. Trump over the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection…[citing] the killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero by federal immigration agents this year,” per CBS. House Democratic Leadership punted, announcing that they would neither whip votes for nor oppose the resolution, opting instead to simply vote “present” on the motion to table Green’s resolution. Ultimately 47 members voted present and 147 voted against tabling, but even put together it would not have been enough to overcome the 232 votes in favor of setting the resolution aside. Impeachment has resurfaced as a major question for Democrats as they appear poised to retake the House and perhaps even the Senate. Jamie Raskin, who would become Chair of the House Judiciary Committee if Democrats retake the majority, said earlier this month that Democrats “will not hesitate” to use the tool if needed and that Mr. Trump has “undoubtedly” committed impeachable offenses. However, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar said this week that impeachment is “not anything that is top of the agenda for House Democrats.”

* On the other side of the aisle, outgoing Congressman Thomas Massie also introduced articles of impeachment, with these singling out Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for frustrating “Congress’s ability to exercise its most solemn constitutional responsibility” and allowing an “unlawful war” to continue in Iran. Axios notes that this resolution also includes articles concerning “U.S. military operations in Venezuela and Yemen, including accusing [Hegseth] of illegally directing the operation to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro without congressional authorization.” Massie lost his re-election primary earlier this year to a Trump-backed opponent; he has since made noises about pursuing the creation of a third party in conjunction with other dissident right-wing figures like Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene. It remains to be seen what he will do once he is out of office come January.

* Speaking of bucking one’s party, this week POLITICO reported that conservative House Democrats Jared Golden and Marie Glusenkamp-Perez again broke with leadership to “advance a slate of GOP bills in a procedural vote that was otherwise on track to fail.” The rules in question set up votes to grant yet more power to President Trump, including “new authorities to sanction Russia’s trading partners…[and] rolling back…EPA regulations.” This same duo voted with the GOP several weeks ago, after which House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries promised a “serious response.” However, he “later indicated that there would be no public consequences.” It is impossible to imagine a progressive being given this kind of long leash by leadership. For his part, Golden is not seeking re-election, but Gluesenkamp-Perez is and if she wins – no guarantee as her district went for Trump in 2024 – she will certainly come into the next Congress with a substantial amount of enmity built up from the rest of the Democratic caucus.

* In more news from the Hill, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute (CHCI) went into crisis mode earlier this week when some of the high-profile progressives in the caucus, namely AOC and Nydia Velázquez, found out that the institute’s Annual Awards Gala – at which Velázquez, who is not seeking re-election is to be presented with a lifetime achievement award – had agreed to be sponsored by Palantir. Apparently, the deal was brokered by CEO and President of the CHCI Marco Davis and Velázquez went “ballistic” upon hearing the news. Congressman Darren Soto, the Chair of the CHCI claims to have been “unaware of the donation” and that as soon as he learned of it, Soto “ordered Davis to return the money.” CHCI “has not said publicly what tier Palantir bought, what it paid, or…whether CHCI has any written policy governing which corporations may sponsor its events.” Palantir is the corporation responsible for the “ImmigrationOS platform used to target immigrants for arrest and deportation.” This from Migrant Insider.

* In a final story from the nation’s capital, AP reports the celebrated John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will close, following a vote from the Trump-controlled board which came on the heels of a ruling blocking the president from returning his name to the building without the approval of Congress. According to this story, “Trump said the closure was needed for safety repairs. But he said the repairs, which Congress has allocated $257 million to cover, would only happen if the board was allowed to move forward with plans to add his name to the building.” All involved agree that the building is in need of major repairs. The administration however is hinting that if they do not move ahead with the plan to inscribe Trump’s name in multiple locations in the complex, “the building may need to be demolished,” a threat with added gravity in the wake of his demolition of the East Wing of the White House.

* Turning to the campaign trail, this week former West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat-turned-Independent, endorsed his former colleague, Maine Republican Susan Collins. In a statement, he said “[if you] lose the Susan Collinses of the Senate, you’re losing the soul of the Senate.” Whether that “soul” is worth preserving is not something Manchin addresses. Manchin has also expressed support for Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for Senate in Michigan, and Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski. Collins for her part said she was “honored” to have Manchin’s support, calling him “a dear friend and trusted colleague,” though many have noted she never broke ranks to endorse her “dear friend” from across the aisle. In July, Manchin launched the Independent Leadership Council, a group dedicated to building up a centrist political base outside of the major parties. This from CNN.

* In Michigan, the Detroit News reports the Democratic Party has, at long last, added progressive climate activist and Democratic nominee in the state’s 7th Congressional District to its heralded “Red to Blue” list. Lawrence, celebrating being added to the list, called it a “validation of all the hard work we’ve been doing and the movement we’ve built,” adding “I’m just proud of all the volunteers and the whole team. This shows this is one of the most critical races in the whole country that will determine control of the U.S. House in November.” This week, Lawrence also scored the endorsement of the Human Rights Campaign, which called Lawrence a “Pro-Equality Champion.” The News highlights that Lawrence has “raised about $1.2 million from July 2025 through July 2026, and had about $383,000 on hand as of July 15…[he has also] organized a large grassroots movement to support his campaign and knocked over 100,000 doors ahead of his primary.”

* In Los Angeles, new polling shows progressive challenger Angela Gonzales-Torres edging out embattled incumbent Congressman Jimmy Gomez. The new poll in question, conducted by Upswing Research and Strategy and commissioned by “Guardrails Alliance…[which] was formed this year to counter the influence of pro-AI groups like the Leading the Future super PAC network,” shows Gonzales-Torres at 41% and Gomez at 38%, with 20% undecided. The margin of error is calculated to be just under 5%. Guardrails Alliance is “keeping a close eye on the race,” because Gomez is considered among the most progressive Democrats who is close with the AI industry, being endorsed by Leading the Future, a Super PAC funded by and opposed to most government regulation of the AI industry. According to the same poll, “Gonzales-Torres leads 63% to Gomez’s 22% after voters are told he is backed by Leading the Future.” This from Semafor.

* Meanwhile, in the final primaries in the nation, Spotlight Delaware is reporting a progressive sweep in state house races throughout the “First State.” According to this piece, the Working Families Party won eight out of the 13 races in which it endorsed candidates, including “five new House members, one incumbent House member, [and] one new State Senator,” as well as a new council member in New Castle County. This piece also highlights the victory of Tyeisha “Tye” Grier, who defeated Rep. Bill “Lumpy” Carson, a “nearly 20-year incumbent who represents the Smyrna-area 28th House District.” Another highlight is the victory of Delaware DSA-backed candidate Shay Frisby, who defeated incumbent State Senator Ray Seigfried. While centrist incumbents higher up the ballot, namely Senator Chris Coons, sailed to re-election, these down ballot victories will help build up a bench of progressive candidates for the future. Now, with the primary season officially over, we begin the final countdown to election day 2026.

* Our final story this week takes us “across the pond,” where the unity of the United Kingdom is at a breaking point. On Monday, the political leadership of the three semi-autonomous regions of the U.K. – Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales – signed a pact affirming that “Scotland, Wales and Ireland have distinct histories, identities and political traditions…[including] the right to self-determination.” Elsewhere in this document, the parties agree that “the future of [their] nations [belong] in the European Union,” and “Westminster’s time is coming to an end.” ABC notes that this is “the first time the leaders of all three countries are either from pro-independence parties,” referring to the Scottish National Party and the Welsh Plaid Cymru or pro-unification in the case of Northern Ireland, which is led by Sinn Féin for the first time in its history. The pact ends with a demand for the “British Government to prepare for, plan and facilitate constitutional change in each jurisdiction,” such that the “voices of [their] nations are heard, that [their] people have the opportunity to thrive, and that cooperation between Scotland, Wales and Ireland can be strengthened.” This stunning declaration surely presents a crisis to the Labour government of Andy Burnham, who only took control from former Prime Minister Keir Starmer at the end of July. Where things go from here is anyone’s guess.

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.

Ralph welcomes Keira Havens a United States Air Force veteran and the executive director of Citizens’ Impeachment a grassroots organization that lobbies Congress and supports candidates who are willing to impeach and convict Donald Trump for a myriad of Constitutional violations. Then Michael Marx, founder of the group CorpEthics that conducts marketing campaigns that apply public pressure to corporations to change their behavior, joins us to discuss his new book “Reining in the Bulls: How to Stop Corporate Abuse in an Age of Unbridled Greed.”

Keira Havens is a United States Air Force veteran, a former scientist, and a longtime political activist. She is the executive director of Citizens’ Impeachment.

I am a veteran. I was in the United States Air Force. My job was to launch nuclear missiles. I was an ICBM crew commander for four years. And that entire system, that entire weapons system is based on trust that the person at the top has a handle on what needs to be done and has good faith and good leadership to navigate this country. That is not the case right now. That cornerstone is beyond weakened—it has just crumbled straight into dust. The trust and faith in the American President as a capable leader, capable of effective leadership, is an assumption we can no longer make.

Keira Havens

His entire cabinet, everybody that gets appointed to the judicial system under his people, everybody that is building out the roadmap for what the economy looks like, all of these failures of leadership—yes, they roll upward to the President. But it is an entire administration of people that do not respect the Constitution, and are not planning on upholding it, and require impeachment, removal and conviction at the bare minimum. Because these folks have had a taste of power now, and they will be back for more. And impeachment is the only way to insist that they never be allowed to hold power again.

Keira Havens

[Democrats] will talk about how bad things are (and they will fundraise off it repeatedly over and over again), but they will not take the additional step and say: “And that is why I will impose consequences.” Our recommended consequence is: impeachment, conviction, removal. But there is more that can be done. There is their making a more plain-spoken assessment of the current situation. And people are hungry to hear it. You don’t have to pretend that this is business as usual. You can actually identify this as a crisis for the Constitution and for this democracy and outline the steps that you will take in your own legislative power.

Keira Havens

Michael Marx is one of the world’s premier environmental corporate campaigners. He served as campaign director for both Rainforest Action Network and Sierra Club. He was the co-founder and executive director of ForestEthics (now Stand.earth) and founder of CorpEthics. He is the author of  Reining in the Bulls: How to Stop Corporate Abuse in an Age of Unbridled Greed.

I think we’re a corporatocracy. I think we have the illusion of being a democracy, but really we’re controlled by corporations. Because from the beginning, they control the way we think with their advertising, with the kind of programs they put on, with their investments in local and state and federal political campaigns. And then, they own the government. I mean…not only can they literally get away with murder (particularly not just in the U.S., but worldwide) but the government protects them from liability.

Michael Marx

If you want to fight these companies—right now we’re on the defense, and particularly on the defense in the government. And the only thing saving us right now is legal cases in the courts by Earth Justice and NRDC and Sierra Club and groups like that. And we need to go on offense even stronger in the marketplace because companies don’t own civil society. They can’t buy the advocacy wing, the more ethical wing of civil society. And they don’t know how to play that game as well as they know how to play the government game.

Michael Marx

News 9/11/26

* Our first story this week comes to us from New York City, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani used the occasion of Labor Day to launch the Mayor’s Office of Worker Power (MOWP). According to the city’s website, the MOWP is the “first office of its kind in the nation, [designed] to use the resources and convening power of City Hall to help workers get informed, connected and organized.” The MOWP will be led by Tony Perlstein, a former longshoreman and United Auto Workers (UAW) organizing director. Mayor Mamdani is quoted saying, “Every day, working New Yorkers show up, do their jobs, and keep this city running. Too often, they have no say in the conditions they work under…The Mayor’s Office of Worker Power will make sure workers have a seat at the table before exploitation becomes a crisis and violations become routine. We’re connecting workers to their rights, to each other and to the organizations ready to stand with them. Because when workers have power, this city works better for everyone.” Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice and former Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su added “This office allows us to get ahead of exploitation instead of simply responding to it…By building relationships with workers, unions and worker centers, we can understand what is happening on the ground and act before problems become crises. That is how we build an economy that delivers for working people.”

* On the other end of the spectrum, ProPublica is out with a new report on the abject capitulation of the Trump administration to corporate interests in the field of consumer protection. This piece explains how Russell Vought – Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Acting Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) until August of this year – previously “boasted” that he’d “refashioned” the CFPB’s approach to pursuing banks and other financial companies accused of exploiting Americans, focusing instead on deregulation, embracing “humility” and adopting a “collaborative approach” to its dealings with companies that harm consumers. This article highlights the example of Bilt, which “fumbled a critical transition” earlier in the year, and instead of using the tools the CFPB might have in the past, such as investigating Bilt’s technology platforms for potential flaws, questioning its third-party contractors or issuing subpoenas, Vought’s hollowed out shell of a CFPB instead bragged that they were able to solve the issue “before it got to the adversarial part of the process.” Lo and behold, just two weeks later “Bilt cardholders received mistaken debt collection notices and saw their credit scores go down as a result, sparking more embarrassing news stories and angry complaints.” This story just goes to show that whatever issues the CFPB might have had in the past, companies simply will not change their bad behavior if there is no proverbial stick in the incentive structure. This piece characterizes Vought’s plan as turning the Bureau from a watchdog into a golden retriever; the problem here is that the retriever has no bite.

* Meanwhile, at least one Democrat is courting a key faction of Trump’s base: POLITICO reports Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is seeking inroads into the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) world. According to this story, AOC’s team has undertaken a monthslong effort behind the scenes to find common ground with this slice of the MAGA base on “pesticides, corporate power and access to safe food,” among other issues. AOC’s team argue that pesticides and chemicals are issues “the traditional left has cared about for decades.” Additionally, influential figures in this world are coming to the realization that these issues transcend partisan politics, something Ralph Nader has preached for his entire career. Zen Honeycutt of Moms Across America is quoted saying “I don’t agree with socialism…but…do believe in corporate responsibility…Even if somebody is into

socialism or a conservative, I think we should agree that everyone should have access to

nontoxic food.” Even Alex Clark of Turning Point USA is quoted saying “MAHA voters are not Republican…They’re so focused on health issues. They don’t care who it is that is saying they’re going to get it done.”

* In more democratic socialist news, the LA Times reports DSA LA has voted to endorse mayoral candidate Nithya Raman in her race against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. DSA LA requires a 60% yes vote in order to endorse a candidate; Raman came in just over that threshold, with 937 yes votes out of almost 1,500 cast. Raman’s relationship with DSA LA has been rocky in the past. She was a member before she ever ran for city council in 2020, becoming the first DSA member on the council following her victory, but was formally censured by DSA in 2024 for seeking the endorsement of the liberal zionist group Democrats for Israel-Los Angeles. This complicated relationship led many to wonder whether or not DSA LA would ultimately vote to endorse Raman in this election. However, Tal Levy a member of DSA-LA’s electoral politics committee, which voted 3 to 2 to recommend the endorsement of Raman, is quoted saying that “socialists are fed up with the status quo and really want to see a significant change in how the city is run,” and while acknowledging Raman’s imperfections, maintained that “there is near-unanimity that she is the better candidate in the race in the general election.” Bass and Raman finished first and second respectively in the June primary, meaning they will face each other head-to-head in November; Republican candidate and former reality TV star Spencer Pratt failed to advance to the general election.

* DSA LA endorsed other candidates as well, most notably Angela Gonzales-Torres, who is running for Congress against incumbent Jimmy Gomez in California 34th congressional district. Gomez has come under intense scrutiny by progressives for his ties to AIPAC – which spent heavily on his behalf last cycle to help him fend off a primary challenge from his left – as well as the cryptocurrency industry and his previously close relationship with fellow California Democrat Eric Swalwell. In August, NPR reported that Gomez was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee over “allegations of sexual misconduct” including “inappropriate sexual contact with a House staffer.” As for his AIPAC connections, Track AIPAC estimates Gomez has received over $2.6 million from pro-Israel PACs. The LA Times, in a piece about Justice Democrats also endorsing Gonzales-Torres, notes that Gomez fended off a challenge from his left by David Kim in the last three cycles. Kim has now endorsed Gonzales-Torres.

* In more local democratic socialist news, state legislator David Morales emerged victorious from this week’s mayoral primary in Providence, Rhode Island, defeating incumbent Mayor Brett Smiley by approximately five percentage points. A POLITICO article published shortly before the election, which framed Morales as the Mamdani of Providence, drew attention to the fact that Providence is considered the least affordable rental market in the country, with the “average cost of an apartment topping $2,000 per month while the median income for renters was roughly $50,000.” Morales ran on “establishing a rent-regulation system that would cap annual increases at 4 percent,” to be enacted within his first 100 days; Mayor Smiley “vetoed a similar proposal passed by the Council earlier this year.” Smiley also drew the ire of progressives for his support of Flock camera deployment. The Rhode Island primaries were also notable because they saw the first successful primary challenge against a sitting governor since 2018, with Dan McKee losing nearly two-to-one against Helena Foulkes, scion of the Dodd political dynasty. The final primary elections for this cycle will be held in Delaware next week. Then, it is on to November.

* Yet, despite – or perhaps because – of the Left’s success, the Democratic Party refuses to provide the support infrastructure for these progressive candidates the way they would others. This is manifesting very clearly in the case of Will Lawrence, the climate activist who won the Democratic nomination in Michigan’s seventh congressional district. CNN reports that progressives are “fuming that…The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee [DCCC] has so far declined to add Lawrence to a coveted list of their priority House candidates,” called 2026 Red to Blue – widely seen as effectively a “stamp of approval” from party leaders. According to CNN’s sources, this reluctance to promote Lawrence is being driven by the Congressional Black Caucus over Lawrence’s past comments about moderate Black Democrats’ “defang[ing] the White left.” Lawrence has apologized for his “choice of words.” Ironically, this blacklisting of Lawrence would seem to support that very hypothesis. This article also notes that, for as much as the left is a thorn in the side of the establishment party leadership, it was the “centrist bloc that humiliated leadership last week when some of its members showed they were willing to defy the party line on key priorities — even if it meant helping Republicans…[triggering] a messy internal feud” and prompting House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his team to discuss “ways to crack down on any of their members voting for procedural motions that hurt the party – a proposal that has infuriated the left and centrists alike.” Jeffries, who took over the top spot in the House Democratic Caucus in 2023, has never had to lead the caucus while they held a majority in the chamber. He will no doubt face a trial by fire from multiple sides if the Democrats do successfully retake the House, as they seem poised to do.

* Turning to foreign affairs, Bloomberg reports, “The European Union and Canada are working toward a new, all-encompassing relationship that will range from trade to security, as the transatlantic partners seek to build a new alliance to offset the global power politics dominated by the U.S. and China.” This new relationship, which could include “everything short of actual membership,” in the EU is particularly focused on areas of cooperation in defense, space exploration and scientific research. This piece notes that “Canada is the first country outside of the EU to join the EU’s…$174 billion…military procurement fund last year.” More details are set to be announced at European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s state of the union address in Strasbourg, France set for September 16th. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will “attend the speech then address European lawmakers the following day.” The two parties are also scheduled to hold a summit in Canada in October.

* In addition to strengthening trade and security relationships, Canada also seems to be willing to throw their diplomatic weight behind EU priorities. Le Monde reports that this week, Canada and a large group of European nations – including France, Spain, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries, and more – agreed to impose “sanctions against products originating from Israeli settlements in the West Bank.” This piece notes this group is taking their own independent actions, still to be defined, because the 27 EU member states could not agree on a joint action plan. However, as Le Monde puts it, this move “signals a shift toward sanctioning all settlements – not just a handful of violent actors and organizations – while rejecting the gradual normalization on which Israel had long relied.” Joining Canada and the EU member states in this agreement is the United Kingdom, where Foreign Secretary and former Labour Party Leader Ed Miliband – himself the Jewish grandson of a Holocaust survivor – is promising a “broad reset” of the UK’s relations with Israel, centering a more active approach by the Labour government of Andy Burnham in supporting the Palestinian cause, the Guardian reports. Le Monde also emphasized Miliband’s speech to the British Parliament, wherein he used far stronger language than previous administrations, including words like “Ethnic cleansing,” “war crimes,” “violations” of “international humanitarian law,”and “settler terrorists.” In Israel, the Guardian adds, the country’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, appeared to respond to the reports by saying: “Expel the British ambassador tonight!”

* Finally, in more Israel news, Haaretz is out with a bombshell report showing that United Arab Emirates President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed explicitly warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the Hamas attacks planned for October 7th before they occurred. According to this piece, bin Zayed – commonly called MBZ – called Netanyahu from the Presidential Palace in Abu Dhabi a week and a half before October 7th and spoke with him for 45 minutes. In that conversation, MBZ “warned that Hamas’ leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, was planning a major operation against Israel,” and “expressed concern that the event in question would not only lead to bloodshed but also destabilize the entire region and undermine the Abraham Accords,” an impressively accurate and far-sighted prediction. MBZ, who signed the Abraham Accords in 2020, urged Netanyahu to “find an economic solution for the Strip and calming the West Bank to prevent escalation.” Netanyahu apparently brushed off not only this but the warning itself, saying “Hamas intended to operate in the West Bank area,” and assuring bin Zayed that Israel was “prepared for any scenario.” This article goes on to detail meetings between UAE mediators and Sinwar, who told them in no uncertain terms: “Convey a message to [Israel] that I am preparing the mother of all surprises. A terrifying operation. Something extraordinary…[a] zilzal [an earthquake]...Please convey to the Israelis what I am saying word for word.” This reporting has sent shockwaves through the Israeli political class, but it remains to be seen whether even such a clear example of Netanyahu’s malevolent cynicism will be enough to dislodge him politically – either due to domestic resistance or a withdrawal of support from the United States.

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.

Ralph welcomes sportswriter Dave Zirin to talk about his new book, "The People's Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn." Then Ralph speaks to labor activist Gene Bruskin about their upcoming Labor Day event at Busboys and Poets in DC, "Galvanizing Labor Day for a Workers’ Compact."

Dave Zirin is the sports editor for The Nation, a columnist for the Progressive, and the author of eight books on the politics of sports, including What’s My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States and A People’s History of Sports in the United States. His new book is The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn.

There’s a despondency that exists now, I believe, among people who are also very angry about the state of our politics. And the thing that Howard always insisted upon—he was an activist who happened to be a historian, not a historian who was an activist. And that doesn’t denigrate his incredible skills as a historian, it just says where his priorities were in his time on this planet. And one of the things that Howard believed so strongly is that the movements themselves needed to have a strong sense of history. The movements needed to know that we live in a time of great ups and downs.

Dave Zirin

People did step up to create the Zinn Education Project. And every book event I’m doing, I’m showing up with copies of their materials and they usually have somebody on the ground doing the organizing at the event. And at the very least, we’re helping it be a little bit sticky. You know what I’m saying? Like, it’s not just a book event. It’s not just celebrating Howard. But it’s also something that allows us to be able to make it matter in a way that it otherwise would not—because it’s not just about selling books, it really is about building a movement.

Dave Zirin

Gene Bruskin is a veteran of the labor movement as a local union president, an organizer, and campaign coordinator for numerous local and national unions. He has done extensive international labor solidarity work, including with Iraqi workers and unions, and is a founder of US Labor Against the War.

What we’re breaking through here now (and partly this has been the definition of this resistance movement) it’s workers versus billionaires. And I think the labor movement in general coming out of World War II has been captured by this mythology that “What’s good for General Electric is good for the nation.” And the more the economy “prospers,” the more it’s good for everybody. And it turns out that that’s not really the case, because we don’t have that kind of equality. And also what’s in the national interest in terms of our foreign policy is not in the interest of the average working class person. A lot of that stuff is being challenged and reversed—not enough, but it’s forcing some of the more moderate forces to the left, just as we’re seeing in some of these Senate and House elections.

Gene Bruskin

I think this is a really important moment for Labor Day because Labor Day, among other things, is generally the kickoff for whatever elections are happening in November. And it’s going to be that on steroids this year. But I think the important thing is that, of course, we want to throw out a bunch of these Neanderthal Republicans in the House and Senate. But it’s not just a matter of restoring a Democratic majority in the House and Senate. The question is: to what end? And what is on the agenda of a Democratic-majority Congress at this minute? What is the vision that we have for our future that we have to be fighting for? … We have to change this whole climate so that people have some kind of hope, some kind of vision for what we want and what we deserve. And the same old, same old, whether it’s a Democratic Congress or not, is not acceptable anymore.

Gene Bruskin

Galvanizing Labor Day for a Workers’ Compact (Sep 7, 2026 2:00 pm ET): Busboys and Poets and Ralph Nader present Galvanizing Labor Day for a Workers’ Compact, a discussion of how unions can maximize the impact of Labor Day to mobilize workers and voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections and afterwards. (Event is in-person @ Busboys and Poets 14th & V + Livestreamed. Free and open to all, but registration is required.)

News 9/4/26

* Our top story this week is the neo-colonial oil extraction deal that has been struck between the Trump administration and the government of Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela. This government has been running the country under the barrel of a gun since Trump sent Delta Force to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro from his home in the Bolivarian Republic in January. According to the BBC, the new deal “grants a US-led company 100-year concessions over 17 oilfields in Venezuela, amounting to a staggering 65 billion barrels of crude,” or over one-fifth of the country’s proven oil reserves. The White House has released a fact sheet, stating that much of the new extraction will be conducted by North American Blue Energy Partners (Nabep), and that the U.S. government will have “veto power over the appointment of any member of the board of directors, and a majority of Nabep’s board of directors must be US citizens.” The announcement of this deal drew scorn from a wide variety of sources. These range from Trump’s former special representative on Venezuela and Iran, Elliott Abrams who called the deal “terrible” and sees it as Rodríguez “simply complying with the demands she’s getting from Washington,” to Rafael Ramírez, who served as the head of the state-run energy firm, PDVSA, and as the oil minister under former President Hugo Chávez, who is quoted saying the deal “hands over [the oil] and opens the doors to a new colonialism of the United States.”

* In more outrageous foreign policy news, Reuters reports the Trump administration has designated the United Kingdom-based pro-Palestine activist group Palestine Action a ”terrorist organization,” part of the administration’s “campaign to crack down on left-wing groups” using post-9/11 anti-terrorism laws. The United Nations has decried this move, with the UN’s human rights office chief Volker Turk calling it a “disproportionate and unnecessary ⁠restriction on the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association as well as the right ​to participate in public affairs,” adding that the “expansive use ​of the term ‘terrorism’ has been documented to have a chilling effect on civic space.” The UK has sought to bring the legal hammer down on Palestine Action, though these efforts have been somewhat stymied by the courts. Sarah McLaughlin, senior scholar of global expression at free speech group Foundation for Individual Rights and Free Expression (FIRE), ​said that the US “must reject that censorship - not import it.” Reuters notes that “Israel’s foreign ministry welcomed the designation.”

* This is not the only case wherein the Trump administration has gone to extreme lengths to punish pro-Palestine activism. California District Judge Noel Wise highlighted this in her recent decision, excoriating the State Department and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for their attempts to deport noncitizens over protected speech. This ruling, stemming from a lawsuit filed by FIRE, “centred on how the second Trump administration revoked visas and detained international students studying in the US after they engaged in pro-Palestinian advocacy.” Judge Wise stated in her decision that “in the United States, freedom of speech belongs to the people..It is not the government’s to take.” She added that the strength of our democracy is “diminished when members of our society — citizens and noncitizens alike — must self-censor and ‘behave’ or suffer the government’s retaliation.” Mahmoud Khalil, the most prominent victim of the administration’s policy of seeking to deport activists they want to silence, applauded the decision, saying “No one should fear speaking up for Palestine.” This from Al Jazeera.

* Our final Palestine-related story for this week takes us to Hollywood, where prominent actor and activist Mark Ruffalo’s recent comments in opposition to the Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. merger, related to Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison’s ties to his father’s software company Oracle, have been cynically branded as “antisemitic tropes.” According to the LA Times, Ruffalo shared a clip of Safra Catz, Oracle’s former CEO and a current Paramount board member speaking at an Israeli-American Council National Summit conference, where she said that “she couldn’t discuss Oracle’s work with Israel’s military, but ‘we have some profoundly scary technology at Oracle and we wanted to make sure that it was available’ to Israel,” after October 7th. Paramount’s lawyers quickly sought to smear Ruffalo with the charge of antisemitism, including by deploying their allies in pro-Israel groups like the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League. In response, over 150 Jewish filmmakers, academics, writers and even rabbis, signed an open letter which reads, in part, “Pointing out the crucial connections between what is happening in Gaza and what is happening in Hollywood is the exact opposite of antisemitism. It is, for us, the very essence of Jewish ethical duty.”

* In other news, NBC reports the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Friday that “federal commodities-trading law does not preempt Nevada’s gambling law as to the regulation of placing wagers on sports.” This piece notes that the 3-0 ruling marks the prediction markets industry’s most significant legal setback yet and sets up a showdown at the Supreme Court, since the Third Circuit has already ruled that New Jersey cannot regulate Kalshi. The Trump administration has sought to keep regulation of betting markets under the jurisdiction of the federal body known as the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Notably, the commission, usually composed of five appointees, currently boasts only one single member: Michael S. Selig. Selig is extremely friendly to the prediction market industry and has sought to stave off state-level regulation by arguing for federal preemption.

* Kalshi has been in the news for other reasons as well, namely for its attempts to self-regulate. For one, the Wall Street Journal reports that Kalshi issued its first ever lifetime ban this week, to none other than former Congressman and notorious grifter George Santos. This ban was precipitated by Santos’ making over $17,000 by “placing bets on his attendance at President Trump’s State of the Union address.” Kalshi adds that they issued a $71,356 fine to Santos. For his part, Santos tweeted “Hey @Kalshi thanks for the lifetime ban from your gambling platform…Let’s see how much longer you guys are around for.” Newsweek reports that at the same time, Kalshi fined and suspended North Carolina Republican congressional candidate Laurie Buckhout for betting on her own race. Buckhout dismissed her bet as a “dumb mistake” and joked that her “career as a Kalshi trader was short-lived.” Buckhout is running against incumbent Congressman Don Davis in a newly-redrawn district engineered to favor Republicans, but polling shows a tight race. If Buckhout narrowly loses, many will point to this “dumb mistake” as a key reason why.

* Another legal battle is unfolding in New York City, where landlords are challenging Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rent freeze for rent-stabilized tenants. PIX11 reports that the suit, originally filed in Staten Island but now moved to Manhattan, centers on complaints from landlords that the decision by the rent guidelines board (RGB) to keep rents flat on one and two-year lease renewals for NYC’s million rent-stabilized apartments was “predetermined and illegal.” They argue that the board “cherry-picked data and was packed with supporters of Mayor…Mamdani’s campaign promise to freeze rents,” while the Mamdani administration maintains that the board is an “independent body and considers both tenant and landlord concerns.” The mayoral administration will defend the decision in court, while the Legal Aid Society and Legal Services NYC have filed a request for the court to dismiss the suit entirely. An article in POLITICO from earlier this month reports that the plaintiffs in this suit hope to bring this case all the way to the US Supreme Court.

* Our final stories this week take us back to the campaign trail. First up, Alaska Public Media is out with a report about a “chain of political maneuvers in the governor’s race,” kicked off by former Anchorage mayor Tom Begich’s “decision to step down to give fellow Democrat Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins a better shot at winning.” Kreiss-Tomkins finished first in the August primary, followed by Begich in second place and two Republicans in third and fourth respectively. Under Alaska election law, the top four finishers advance to the general election. This piece recounts how Begich’s withdrawal sent shockwaves through the Republican candidate field. With Begich out, “Republican Treg Taylor moved into the fourth spot. But on Sunday, Taylor called for [fellow Republicans Bernadette] Wilson and [Dave] Bronson to consolidate their campaigns and pledged to endorse a combined Republican ticket. In a statement, Taylor urged Republicans to unite behind a single candidate, to counter Kreiss-Tompkins.” While fascinating for political junkies, many have observed that the maneuvers on display here and in Alaska’s Senate race seem to undercut many of the arguments in favor of ranked-choice voting, with more effort being put into confusing voters or seeking to induce so-called “ballot exhaustion” rather than facilitating a more enlightened civil discourse.

* Our final two stories cover the Massachusetts primaries held this Tuesday. The topline, as Semafor reports, is that incumbents swept their primaries in a stark reversal of the insurgent trend in Democratic primaries this cycle. The most notable of these was the crushing victory of 80-year-old incumbent Senator Ed Markey over his 47-year-old challenger, Congressman Seth Moulton. Markey won with approximately two-thirds of the vote. This piece notes that Moulton, younger but running to Markey’s right, was never able to establish the “generational change” dynamic he wanted in this race, as “progressives and LGBTQ rights groups rallied behind…[Senator Markey].” On this latter point, Moulton was roundly criticized by Democratic voters, even in his own district, for “scapegoating” transgender people in the wake of the 2024 election. Reporter Dave Weigel adds a coda to this piece: “The subtext of Markey ‘26 was that he would be a reliable progressive vote for whatever the movement wanted for six more years, and then Ayanna Pressley could come in and replace him. Pressley campaigned [with] Markey, starred in ads; [and] at rallies he gushed about how she was the ‘north star’ and if you wanted to know what the right side of an issue was, it was the side she was on.”

* Finally, with all of that said, the pro-incumbent wave in Massachusetts did cut both ways. Progressive challengers to moderate Democrat incumbents fell short in the state’s eighth congressional district – reelecting Congressman Stephen Lynch for a 14th term over progressive voting rights advocate Patrick Roath. Meanwhile, in the first district, WAMC reports Congressman Richie Neal, a longtime scourge of progressives, fended off a primary challenge from teacher Jeromie Whalen in his bid for a 20th term in the House – though Whalen, a political newcomer, won an impressive 46% of the vote. Neal will however face the formidable independent candidate Nadia Milleron in the general election. Milleron won nearly 40% of the vote against Neal in 2024; perhaps, if she wins over enough of Whalen’s primary supporters, she can pull out a victory in November.

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.

Ralph speaks with Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff for Colin Powell, about the fall of the American Empire and self-proclaimed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth. Then we welcome the CEO and co-founder of the Canadian-based organization Corporate Knights, Toby Heap, to break down Trump’s unprecedented trade war with our closest ally. Plus, Ralph has some choice words for Hakeem Jeffries and his meeting with Jared Kushner and for Hillary Clinton and her take on the war with Iran

.

Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired U.S. Army colonel. Over his 31 years of service, Colonel Wilkerson served as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff from 2002 to 2005, and Special Assistant to General Powell when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993. Colonel Wilkerson also served as Deputy Director and Director of the U.S. Marine Corps War College at Quantico, Virginia, and for fifteen years he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Government and Public Policy at the College of William and Mary. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network, senior advisor to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and co-founder of the All-Volunteer Force Forum.

Two-thirds of the world now thinks that we are an enemy of their state. Two-thirds of the world. And it happens to be the two-thirds that has the greatest amount of the GDP in the world.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson

I’ve lived for 81 years, almost 82, and I’ve watched my country go to hell right in front of my face… And the billionaires who want all of this to happen, they do not want a democracy. A democracy is fallible. A democracy can’t beat China. A democracy can’t beat Russia. A democracy can’t even beat Iran. They want a technocracy that is run by them, armed by them, technical revolution by them. They want all of this, and oh by the way they want to live to 150 while they’re doing it too.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson

Every freaking hour they create a series of war crimes in Iran. Every freaking hour they perpetrate war crimes in the Persian Gulf. Every freaking hour they perpetrate war crimes in Lebanon with Israel. “What’s new?,” I want to say. We are a criminal state. There is no other way to describe it. We are a criminal state. We pay no attention whatsoever to domestic or international law. Only when it benefits the person who is doing the deed do we pay any attention at all.

Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson

Toby Heaps is the CEO and co-founder of Corporate Knights, and Editor-in-Chief of Corporate Knights magazine. He spearheaded the first global ranking of the world’s 100 most sustainable corporations in 2005, and in 2007 coined the term “clean capitalism.”

What we’re seeing is a sort of political physics—for every action is an equal and opposite reaction. Canada has in many ways benefited and rallied around our nationhood. We’re often not the most boisterous or loudest type of folks. But this continued disrespect for our statehood and the continued attacks and the unreasonableness and the unfair play, our prime minister said something to the effect of: when the United States signs something, it’s in pencil. It’s really denigrating the United States’ reputation globally and in Canadians’ minds.

Toby Heaps

News 8/28/26

* This week, the left-wing insurgency in the Democratic Party scored several new victories. First, NBC reports that in Oklahoma, N’Kiyla Jasmine Thomas won the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Markwayne Mullin, who Trump selected to lead the Department of Homeland Security following the resignation of Secretary Kristi Noem. Thomas will go up against Republican Congressman Kevin Hern in November. Unfortunately, Thomas stands little chance of winning the state, which has not elected a Democratic Senator since 1990. Thomas is a member of the Chickasaw Nation and identifies as a Democratic Socialist, but is “not yet” a member of DSA.

* Next, in California, Democracy Now! reports progressive state lawmaker Aisha Wahab has prevailed in the special election to fill the seat vacated by disgraced former Congressman Eric Swalwell. This piece notes that Wahab “overcame a flood of attack ads from pro-Israel groups,” which sought to bolster her Democratic primary rival, Melissa Hernandez. In an interview, Wahab said that she “appreciates” voters in her district for “seeing through” the “lies that were spread by AIPAC.” Wahab will make history as the first Afghan American in Congress and has called for the United States to engage with the Taliban government and attempt to “[steer] them in the right direction” on human rights.

* In Georgia, the Hill reports another progressive – Everton Blair – won the special election to fill the seat of Congressman David Scott, who passed away in April during his 12th term in the seat. Blair, the former chair of the Gwinnett County School Board, defeated Scott’s daughter Marcye Scott. However, Blair will only represent this seat until the end of the year. Beginning in January, State Rep. Jasmine Clark, who won the May primary, will fill the seat for the 120th Congress.

* Meanwhile, in the Cornhusker State, the Nebraska Examiner reports that the “Legal Marijuana NOW U.S. Senate candidate Mike Marvin announced he can’t put more ‘energy’ into the Senate race because of health issues and endorsed nonpartisan U.S. Senate candidate Dan Osborn.” Marvin will remain on the ballot, but is “urging all who supported [him] to now support…Osborn.” This piece notes that this announcement comes on heels of reporting by Flatwater Free Press showing that two staffers from Osborn’s 2024 independent Senate campaign joined the Legal Marijuana NOW executive board and sought to dissolve the party from the inside. This, combined with the fact that former Democratic Senate nominee Cindy Burbank paid Mike Marvin’s $1,740 candidate filing fee and dropped out of the race one day after the secretary of state verified Osborn’s signatures to be on the fall ballot has fueled speculation that these were coordinated efforts to clear the field for Osborn. Marvin for his part disputes this and says he never planned to leave the race. Osborn is quoted saying “We hope to earn the support of the LMN voters and hope that we can represent their concerns well in the US Senate.”

* In more third party news, Trump has launched new broadsides against the emerging ex-MAGA clique – consisting of Tucker Carlson, Congressman Thomas Massie, and former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. According to the Hill, Trump attacked the group, said to be exploring the possibility of founding a new right-wing party, calling Carlson “a loser,” Greene “a highly neurotic woman” and Massie a “real JERK” on Truth Social. The president added, “What a team this would be, THREE LOSERS, and a pocketful of change!...The only chance they have is to join the Radical Left Dumocrats, and try breaking into the Primary System. To all of them I say, PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!” The proximate cause of this latest flare-up between the camps is Trump’s decision to allow in 300,000 metric tons of ground beef to be imported in the next 90 days, a move Massie called “worse than socialism.” Greene, who has been perhaps the most vocal defector from the MAGA camp, said “He attacks us with such vitriol because we actually are everything he claimed to be…he has proven as President that he is nothing more than a neocon puppet for Israel, corporations, big donors with special interests, and his dear friends in the Epstein class…We never changed, Trump did.”

* Another story from this side of the aisle comes to us from NOTUS, which reports that an “unknown actor” has stolen over $16,000 from the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). This incident, alternatively characterized as a “theft” from a “foreign country” or simply a “fraud,” occurred in early July, when the NRCC “attempted to pay a bill from Ranger Wi-Fi Consulting, a Texas-based firm that specializes in helping clients ‘optimize their wireless networks while ensuring healthy security measures are in place.’” Seeking to assuage the fears of donors, NRCC spokesman Will Kiley told the press that “Protecting donor funds is a top priority for the NRCC,” and vowed that the committee is “working to recover the funds, and…taken steps to ensure it can’t happen again.” Listeners might remember that in July, the DNC admitted that they had fallen prey to a scammer, losing almost $30,000 in the process. It would seem that these committees do not have functional safeguards against such schemes.

* Our final stories this week all deal with the Middle East. First up, Axios reports that while AIPAC was gearing up for a major ad blitz in Michigan against Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed and on behalf of Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers, those plans have apparently been iced at the behest of the Rogers campaign. According to this story, Rogers believes that AIPAC spending in the Democratic primary – over $30 million on behalf of El-Syed’s rival Haley Stevens – actually helped boost El-Sayed’s candidacy, making his opposition to AIPAC a “centerpiece of his…campaign, using the group’s spending against him to portray Democratic opponent Haley Stevens as beholden to the pro-Israel lobby.” Rogers fears the same fate, so he has sought to keep his distance from AIPAC while his allies are urging AIPAC to “get involved without putting the group’s name front and center.” However, Rogers’ attempts to put some daylight between his campaign and AIPAC has resulted in the latter turning cold towards the Republican candidate. Republicans now worry that AIPAC will “sit out the general election entirely.” As for the perception of AIPAC in Michigan, a recent poll found that “55% of Michigan voters oppose continued U.S. aid to Israel.”

* On the other end of the Michigan political spectrum, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio demanding that he “ensure the immediate

and permanent release of U.S. citizen Sama Safi, a 20-year-old university student with a severe complex chronic health condition, who the Israeli military has arbitrarily and wrongfully detained since June 2nd.” This letter goes on to describe how “armed Israeli soldiers raided her family’s home in the occupied West Bank in the middle of the night and tore her from her family,” and that since then, she has “suffered under appalling conditions in Israeli military detention including “frequent physical assault, shackling, and the throwing of gas and stun grenades into already overcrowded and poorly ventilated cells,” among other horrors. 40 more members of Congress signed this letter, including six senators, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey and Chris Van Hollen among them. 85 civic groups also signed onto this demand, ranging from faith-based groups to human rights organizations and beyond.

* In the region itself, a broad coalition of Muslim states – including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and, perhaps most notably, the United Arab Emirates – have issued a categorical condemnation of Israel’s new “E1” settlement plan. This plan relates to new settlement activities east of occupied East Jerusalem and the signatories decry the plan as constituting “a dangerous escalation that further advances settlement expansion and annexation and undermines the geographical contiguity of the Occupied Palestinian Territory…thereby threatening the viability and realization of an independent, contiguous Palestinian State based on the 1967 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital.” The UAE was the most significant state in the region to sign onto the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords in 2020, which sought to normalize relations between Israel and its neighbors at the expense of the Palestinians. Saudi Arabia was said to be on the verge of signing the accords prior to October 7th and Israel’s subsequent genocidal military campaign in Gaza. The UAE taking a new stand against Israel on behalf of the Palestinian cause is widely seen as the final death knell of the Abraham Accords and the beginning of a new era of relations in the Middle East.

* Finally, the Economist reports that a group of seven top officials within the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is consolidating power in Iran. The man rumored to be leading this junta is Mohsen Rezaei, the new national-security adviser, former presidential candidate and the longest-serving chief of the IRGC, having led the corps though the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. Others include the head of the navy, currently overseeing Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, as well as the IRGC’s commander-in-chief and founder of the Quds Force. Notably absent from this group is Mojtaba Khamenei, the new Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic. This piece judiciously avoids making any definite predictions about whether this new clique will rule as hardliners or pragmatists, but emphasizes that the late Ali Khamenei expertly “balanced the competing interests of his realm” while these military men favor action.

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.

Ralph welcomes Dr. Mimi Syed to discuss the recent report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project: “Lethal Precision Without Accountability: Israeli Government ‘Quadcopter’ Use in Gaza.” Then, Ralph speaks to Joel McCleary (former Deputy Assistant to President Jimmy Carter and international consultant) about his “Dancing in the Dark” essay series on the strategies that Trump is using to hold onto power at almost any cost.

Dr. Mimi Syed is an emergency medicine physician and assistant clinical professor at University of Washington and Washington State University, and a fellow of the American College of Emergency Physicians. Dr. Syed served in Gaza at both al-Aqsa Hospital and Nasser Hospital, where she documented severe injuries from drone strikes and she has firsthand experience treating civilians targeted by the IDF. She is co-author of the Costs of War Project’s new report: Lethal Precision Without Accountability: Israeli Government “Quadcopter” Use in Gaza.

A lot of the attention has essentially fallen off from Gaza because of this so-called ceasefire…And the media (Western media) unfortunately is complicit in this—has no interest in covering Gaza, has no interest in covering the ongoing slaughter that’s happening in Gaza.

Dr. Mimi Syed

The irony of all of this is that the drones and the capabilities that these drones have to shoot and to distinguish between a civilian and a combatant—the whole purpose of this is to mitigate civilian harm. And instead, perversely, they’re being used for the opposite. They’re being used to target civilians and children. And in the U.N. report, they specifically talk about a soldier describing the experience, saying that it’s like a video game. He can be sitting somewhere far away, away from the dangers of a military zone, away from the dangers of combatants, and essentially target whoever he wants, and shoot. And these drones have the capability of distinguishing between a child, an adult, a combatant. And most of these cases that I documented, the child was by themselves. There was no other adult harmed.

Dr. Mimi Syed

Joel McCleary served as Deputy Assistant to the President during the Carter Administration. As president of the Sawyer-Miller Group he oversaw international strategic advisory work for fourteen prime ministers and presidents. Currently, he is Managing Partner of Four Seasons Ventures, which has conducted in-depth studies for the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security on biodefense. These studies reviewed the emergency powers of the President in the event of a pandemic or major biological weapons attack. He is co-founder of the nonpartisan nonprofit Keep Our Republic.

November 3rd is just the prelude to January 3rd—the game (so to speak) is who controls the Speakership. And that is determined by the certified members who are certified by the current House—they will determine who meets on January 3rd. So obviously what Trump does not want (or any President does not want) is there to be an opposing party’s Speaker.

Joel McCleary

We’re not saying that anything is inevitable. We’re just saying what is possible if you look at what they’re saying and if you look at where they might go if they feel compelled to do so. So NSPM-7 is probably the most frightening aspect of this whole thing. And what’s most frightening is how few people have focused on it. All of us need to read these documents at the ACLU (the Brennan Center has done fantastic work). And Mark Medish and I just are appalled that still, in Democratic circles or other circles, we are not yet comprehending the meaning of NSPM-7 and how it threatens each one of us in reality.

Joel McCleary

News 8/21/26

* This week, another round of primaries were held, most notably in Florida. For progressives, the biggest victory is that of Angie Nixon, a DSA-backed member of the Florida House of Representatives, representing Jacksonville. Nixon trounced her opponent – Alex Vindman, who testified against Trump during the 2019 impeachment effort – winning 56% of the vote to his 44% despite being outspent by a margin of 16 to 1. Forbes reports that in her victory speech, Nixon said “We have proved that everyday people are more powerful than corporations and billionaires…We went up against the political establishment, against millions of dollars of outside spending…and we won. This win was for the little guys and girls…We, the hardworking everyday people of Florida, sent a shock wave to the Washington, D.C., establishment.” Unfortunately, Nixon’s candidacy, like that of any statewide Democratic campaign in the Sunshine State, remains a long shot. The last Democrat to win a U.S. Senate seat in Florida was former astronaut Bill Nelson in 2012.

* More disappointing were the down-ballot results in these primaries. In the 20th congressional district, a majority-minority district centered on Broward County, Debbie Wasserman Schultz won with 45% of the vote, according to NBC. She defeated four Black candidates, including young progressive Elijah Manley. Wasserman Schultz previously represented the 25th district, but following the Republican-led mid-decade redistricting program carried out in Florida, she opted to seek reelection in this heavily Democratic seat. The Black candidates had tried and failed to consolidate behind a single choice.

* And in Florida’s 25th congressional district, ultra-zionist incumbent Congressman Jared Moskowitz “warded off” a challenge from his left in the form of Oliver Larkin, a DSA-backed union organizer. Larkin drew substantial media attention, first when he appeared on Fox and, asked about immigration and crime, he demanded accountability for “this pedophile president Donald Trump” and others implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and again during an interview with WPLG Local 10 when Larkin was “faced with genocide denial.” According to the Middle East Eye, Larkin “raised the topic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, pointing to statements and findings from institutions such as the United Nations, Amnesty International and Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem,” which the interviewer, Glenna Milberg incorrectly dismissed as “factually incorrect.” Larkin “outlined Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilians, restrictions on humanitarian aid and attacks on churches, schools and other places of worship,” and Milberg again “interrupted and said his account was ‘factually not correct.’” The Middle East Eye writes that the exchange was then “cut short when Milberg said she was being told they had to wrap up the interview.”

* Turning to Texas, NOTUS reports Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico – capitalizing on the acrimonious primary battle between sitting Republican Senator John Cornyn and his victorious primary opponent Texas AG Ken Paxton – has taken the extraordinary step of bringing a Cornyn aide onto his campaign. According to this piece, “Jacob Smith, who worked for Cornyn for five years as a deputy legislative director and policy adviser, is taking on the role of deputy policy director for Talarico’s campaign.” In a statement, Smith said that he is “proud” to join Talarico’s campaign and that “Instead of playing partisan politics, Talarico speaks to the needs of everyday people who day in and day out work too hard for too little.” Smith also laid into Paxton, calling him “the most corrupt, self-dealing politician in Texas who would sell their futures to the highest contributor just to hold onto power,” and urging “fellow Republicans who know Ken Paxton is unfit to serve in the Senate to finally hold him accountable at the ballot box.” This piece quotes an anonymous “Republican operative” who characterized this kind of “cross-party hire” as “unheard of.” He added that Talarico has a “better chance than any Democrat has had in the state in a very long time.”

* In more primary news, last week we discussed the victory of former Hartford, Connecticut Mayor Luke Bronin over 14-term incumbent Congressman John Larson. That same day, the Lever published an exposé of Stephen Mandel, a Connecticut-based billionaire hedge fund manager and Democratic mega-donor who is the “largest bankroller of a nascent political machine promising to ‘redefine’ the Democratic Party.” Via two organizations – Majority Democrats and the Bench – Mandel and his wife have funneled tens of millions of dollars to candidates of their choosing in an attempt to form a “new [political] center.” According to this report, Bronin amassed a “sizable war chest,” during his primary challenge against Larson, much of which traces back to Mandel. Not only that, apparently, Bronin “used to be on the payroll of a nonprofit funded by the billionaire,” and his campaign’s policy stances reflect the network’s preferences and priorities. The Lever notes that, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Mandels did not return their requests for comment.

* In more Connecticut news, in the wake of Larson’s defeat, local media is beginning to question whether Senator Richard Blumenthal should run for another term in 2028, with WTNH noting that he will be 82 at the end of his current term. While Blumenthal has not formally announced that he will run for a fourth senate term, he did confirm that he has a campaign committee and it is raising money. This piece notes that Blumenthal is the second oldest member of Connecticut’s congressional delegation, behind only Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, 83, who represents the state’s third congressional district. With the increased scrutiny on aging Democrats, and donors like Stephen Mandel bankrolling primary challenges by younger candidates, Blumenthal’s decision of whether or not to run or anoint a successor could prove critical. For his part, Blumenthal is quoted saying “Age is a state of mind…and I am very, very happy doing my job right now, as energetically as I feel is appropriate.”

* Senator Blumenthal features prominently in another story this week from a different part of Washington. NOTUS reports that on K Street, lobbyists for the defense industry – literally the military industrial complex – are “girding for aggressive investigations of President Donald Trump’s Pentagon and the companies that do business with it,” if the Democrats retake one or both houses of Congress in the midterm elections. This piece emphasizes that Democrats have “spent two years seething that the Trump administration shut Congress out of decisions about the Pentagon, from the Iran war to politically connected contractors and a defense budget that’s ballooned to $1.5 trillion.” Lobbyists are reported to be particularly wary of their clients being caught between outraged congressional Democrats and an uncooperative White House for the next two years. Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate Investigations Subcommittee, is already zeroing in on 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is an investor, and American Ventures, where Eric Trump is an investor, both of which received billions of dollars in government awards. He is quoted saying “We need to look into whether Trump’s sons are profiting from investments in defense contractors that involve insider information or contracts awarded in ways that compromise defense interests.” Other investigations he signaled they might pursue include a probe of “the administration’s growing reliance on single-source contracts and whether the administration has given preferential treatment to companies with political ties, particularly those that donated to Trump’s White House ballroom project.” In the House, Democrats on the Armed Services Committee will likely focus on “military strategy, acquisition decisions and the Pentagon’s rapidly growing budget,” while the Oversight Committee, is more focused on “corruption, conflicts of interest, companies connected to Trump allies such as SpaceX and other ethics issues.” When Republicans won control of the House, Senate, and presidency in 2024, many lobbying firms axed their Democratic staff. It seems they are beginning to regret that decision.

* Our next two stories have to do with the AI boom. First, in Wisconsin, the politics of AI data centers have come to in large part define the ongoing race to succeed Democrat Tony Evers as Governor. DSA-backed candidate Francesca Hong rode her vow of a moratorium on new data center construction to front-runner status in the primary, only to lose by a hair to Evers’ last minute chosen successor, David Crowley. Since becoming the nominee, Crowley has refused to adopt Hong’s signature issue and his opponent, Republican Congressman Tom Tiffany is taking full advantage. According to Wisconsin Public Radio, Tiffany’s campaign has released a new TV ad labeling his opponent “data center David Crowley.” In the ad, Crowley is “seen saying Wisconsin has the opportunity to be ‘an AI and a data hub not only for the entire country, but for the entire globe.’” Ironically, Tiffany himself has cast “pro-data center votes in Congress” and Crowley’s campaign argues that Tiffany “wouldn’t be as hard on developers as his campaign claims,” though he is now campaigning on “ending state subsidies for data centers and creating additional protections for ratepayers and the state’s farmland and water.”

* Next, a stunning feat of reporting by 404 Media exposed how “Amazon is buying massive quantities of books, scanning them for AI training data, and destroying them in the process.“ To investigate this, the outlet placed a tracking device in a rare book that they suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data. Then, when indeed it was, they followed the book around the country to its final destination – an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada – where employees say that “all [they] do is scan books..Some are assigned to cut books, and others go to receive where they get books and scan the bar codes.” The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands. The piece notes that the AI company Anthropic has previously been sued for engaging in the practice of destroying rare books in order to feed them into their large language models, or LLMs, on copyright grounds, but the “judge in the lawsuit ruled it was fair use and not a copyright violation for Anthropic to scan a book for training data in part because it destroyed the original, printed copy.” The author of this piece notes that these rare books are not necessarily monetarily valuable – they could be rare because “not many copies of them were ever printed,” or “they are in a foreign language not many people speak.” Still, as one bookseller said “There are different types of value…[besides monetary value] There’s historical value, intellectual value, sentimental value. All sorts of things, and all of those the AI companies don’t care about. They just want the content as a bunch of words strung together.”

* Finally, we turn to the Vatican, where, Drop Site reports, Pope Leo XIV is using his pulpit to call for the opening of humanitarian corridors for civilians in Sudan. In his weekly Angelus address, the first American Pope highlighted “the plight of civilians in the besieged city of el-Obeid.” In addition to his call for humanitarian corridors, the pontiff called for both sides to “cease attacks on civilian targets.” Drop Site explains that El-Obeid, the largest city in Kordofan – the region comprising central Sudan – has faced intense drone attacks as the rebels of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) battle the Sudanese army for supremacy in the region. An RSF siege has “left over 500,000 people in famine conditions for months and without supplies.” The United Nations warns that if El-Obeid falls, it could follow in the mold of el-Fasher, which fell to the RSF last year and resulted in “mass ethnic cleansing massacres by the RSF that killed an estimated 60,000 people.” We can only hope that the world will heed the Pope’s plea for peace and humanitarian assistance to the civilian population of Sudan.

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.

Ralph speaks to Baroness Beeban Kidron, a member of the UK House of Lords and a leading voice on children’s rights in the digital environment, whose book is “Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back.” Then we welcome back whistleblower Becky McClain a biotech scientist injured in an unsafe lab and author of “Exposed: A Pfizer Scientist Battles Corruption, Lies, and Betrayal, and Becomes a Biohazard Whistleblower.”

Baroness Beeban Kidron is a member of the UK’s House of Lords and a former film director. She is a leading voice on children’s rights in the digital environment and a global authority on digital regulation. She has played a central role in establishing standards for online safety and privacy across the world. She is the author of Users: How Big Tech Took Control and How to Fight Back.

The things that children experience online are deliberately designed to distract them. Now, they are there to distract them because those companies want the attention so they can advertise. They want their data so that they can perfect their commercial terms,their product. And they even want their attention to compete against the other people who are competing for their attention. So here we have an absolute arms race for a child’s attention.

Baroness Beeban Kidron

I do want to say very clearly to anyone listening: This is a battle you shouldn’t be fighting on your own. And there is a responsibility for politicians—for both local politicians and federal politicians (national in our case, here in the UK) —to actually put these companies under the same sort of strictures that all other corporate companies do… One of the things I’m looking at is whether we can recategorize apps as products. And then they’ll have all the product liability, the product safety, consumer rights—all the things that we expect of everything else in our life from our food to our cars to our toys. That they would actually have to think before they roll them out: Are they safe? And when they’ve proven unsafe, we would have a very clear set of legal approaches to address that.

Baroness Beeban Kidron

Becky McClain is a retired biotech worker and research scientist. She is known as the first successful biotech whistleblower who spoke and reported on biolab safety issues of public concern. On April 1, 2010, Ms. McClain won a federal court whistleblower trial against Pfizer, Inc., which centered on free speech rights concerning biosafety and public health. She is the author of Exposed: A Pfizer Scientist Battles Corruption, Lies, and Betrayal, and Becomes a Biohazard Whistleblower.

The public wants transparency to ensure that biolabs are run ethically, safely, responsibly, and with accountability. Transparency into these matters builds public trust with science and with government. But without free-speech protections for scientists and also medical physicians, transparency fails, accountability is dismissed, and the public trust hits rock bottom.

Becky McClain

News 8/14/26

* This week, a new round of primaries was held in the upper midwest and New England. The biggest shock of the night was the defeat of Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary. Hong, a Wisconsin State Assemblywoman and member of Madison DSA, went into election night leading in the polls and while she won an astonishing 311,000 votes, her opponent – Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, with the endorsement of sitting Democratic Governor Tony Evers – maintained a lead of approximately one-half of one percentage point throughout the night. As the final margin will be under 1 percent, Hong is entitled to request a recount, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, but WKOW reports she has conceded the race. Hong was seen as the best chance for the insurgent, DSA-aligned left to capture a gubernatorial nomination this cycle, particularly in a crucial swing state, but her campaign was dogged by electability concerns and unpopular past statements made by the candidate. Crowley will face Republican Congressman Tom Tiffany, who cruised to an easy victory in the GOP gubernatorial primary, in November.

* The Minnesota primaries delivered more encouraging results for the left. In the high-profile Senate primary to replace retiring Senator Tina Smith, Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan emerged victorious over her opponent, Congresswoman Angie Craig. Flanagan was backed by a broad, progressive coalition – including Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, and outgoing Senator Tina Smith herself – while Craig was backed by more centrist Democrats like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and ultrazionist Democratic Congressman Josh Gottheimer. If elected, Flanagan, a citizen of the White Earth Nation, would be the first Native American woman to serve in the U.S. Senate, per the Minnesota Reformer. Flanagan has also gone on record saying that Chuck Schumer, who would be poised to lead the Senate Democrats as Majority Leader if the party retakes that chamber, needs to be replaced with a “progressive champion” though she has not gone as far as Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan who explicitly called for Schumer to be replaced by Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, as reported by Semafor.

* In more Minnesota news, Congresswoman Craig’s decision to vacate her old seat in the state’s second congressional district “created a crowded primary for her seat,” according to the Minnesota Star Tribune. On Tuesday, progressive candidate Matt Little triumphed. Little is a strong proponent of Medicare for All and does not blanch at describing Israel’s campaign in Gaza as a genocide. Little overwhelmingly won the endorsement of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and of congressional progressives like Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Greg Casar, as well as the Progressive Caucus PAC. If Little wins in what the Star Tribune describes as a swing district historically, it will send a strong signal that progressives can win even in tough districts.

* In New England, the results tell a somewhat different story. Specifically, in Connecticut’s first congressional district, 14-term incumbent Congressman John Larson lost his primary to former Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin, over 30 years Larson’s junior, by over 20 points. However, Bronin is far from a progressive challenger. Whereas Larson enjoyed the backing of the Working Families Party and Congressman Jamie Raskin – though he also had the backing of AIPAC – Bronin’s only major national endorsement was from former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. In short, this would best be described as a non-ideological, but rather age-based primary challenge. This will surely set off major alarm bells for another aged incumbent in New England facing a much younger primary challenger: Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. Additionally, as Ryan Grim notes, “John Larson was/is the champion of the bill to expand Social Security, which was up to…200+ cosponsors but [former Speaker Nancy] Pelosi would never allow it to get to the floor. There’s now an extremely popular bill that could actually pass that needs a lead sponsor.”

* Another recent primary loss is worth examining: that of Kshama Sawant in Seattle. Sawant, a former Seattle City Councilmember aligned with the Trotskyist Socialist Alternative party, resigned her council seat and sought to unseat her local Democratic Congressman Adam Smith, running as an independent in Washington’s ninth congressional district. The state of Washington has a top two primary system, so Sawant would have only had to get the second most votes to secure a head-to-head matchup against Smith in November. Yet, instead Sawant finished a distant third behind Smith and the Republican candidate Doug Basler. Perhaps that doesn’t seem surprising – independent and third party candidates are often outspent by huge margins. Yet, the facts belie that explanation. In fact, a new piece on the Joe Wrote substack finds that “Sawant’s campaign wasn’t the rag-tag, bootstrapped operation that we typically see from insurgent socialists. Sawant reported $607,493 in campaign spending, meaning she outspent Republican Doug Basler by over six-to-one and still lost to him.” Wrote goes on to state that “The Sawant campaign spent $25.33 per vote, the highest for any candidate in the race…The only registered PAC that spent on the race was Sawant’s Revolutionary Change PAC, which raised $5,600 through ActBlue and spent it on billboards.” If nothing else, this test case demonstrates that money is not enough for the left to break through the two-party duopoly. A candidate also needs institutional, organizational support – like that of DSA – and, perhaps most importantly, broadbase solidarity with the other component parts of the movement. Going it alone simply will not get the job done.

* In more independent and third party news, we have an update to a previous story about the race for Congress in Pennsylvania’s seventh congressional district. Last week, we discussed Andrew Tupone, a candidate running in this race on the Green Party ballot line, despite the GP of Pennsylvania distancing themselves from him – and spokesman Chris Robinson even calling him a “a nice Republican.” According to Lehigh Valley Public Media, the Green Party is now going a step further, formally requesting the Pennsylvania courts “either kick Tupone off the ballot or require him to identify himself as a member of another party.” In their petition to the court, the Green Party argues that “Candidate Tupone and his agents or affiliates who circulated his nomination papers misled voters into signing the nomination papers on the mistaken belief that they were helping to place a candidate supported by the Green Party onto the ballot.” This piece also notes that three Lehigh Valley residents are challenging the petitions Tupone presented to get on the ballot, arguing that technical errors would disqualify thousands of these signatures. For his part, Tupone “has denied having any ulterior motive to enter the race or accepting financial assistance from any outside groups.”

* At the same time, in Nebraska, it seems there are two, dueling faux third parties seeking to siphon off votes from the other side. The Nebraska Examiner reports that both the “Nebraska Democratic Party and the national Working Families Party have sued Nebraska’s Working People Party to block it from the fall ballot.” The Democrats and WFP are seeking to block Nebraska Secretary of State Bob Evnen from officially recognizing the party, and to “declare that the party’s name is breaking state law because it is meant to confuse voters.” Apparently, Nebraska election law includes a provision allowing the secretary of state to “reject a candidate’s filing if…that someone is not a ‘good-faith candidate’ or is trying to cause confusion for voters,” and that “objections to party names can be considered.” The kicker is that last week, the Nebraska Republican Party filed a lawsuit alleging that the “America First Party” is a similarly bad-faith attempt to confuse and deceive voters and thereby undercut the fortunes of Nebraska Republicans. A Nebraska judge has issued an emergency injunction stopping certification of both the Nebraska Working People Party and America First Party through August 20th.

* Turning to local news, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass appears to be moving against Councilmember Nithya Raman, her Democratic rival for the mayoralty in the general election. LAist reports that while Raman has chaired the Council’s powerful Housing and Homeless Committee since 2023, Bass’ close ally, Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson is “planning to announce…that the city will split the committee into two parts — one on housing, the other on homelessness — neither of which will be led by Raman.” In a campaign video, Raman alleged that the move constituted political retaliation, saying “I called for an audit of our homelessness programs…and now I’ve been removed…I might be getting punished for running against Mayor Bass, but Angelenos are the ones paying the price for these political games.” Mayor Bass and Councilmember Raman finished first and second respectively in the June primary, meaning they will face off in November with no Republican on the ballot.

* In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced this week that he will throw his weight behind a new bill in the city council seeking to curb Amazon’s practice of utilizing subcontractors instead of directly employing delivery workers. The Wall Street Journal explains that although these subcontractors “aren’t direct employees of…Amazon [or other companies], they often wear branded uniforms or vests and drive corporate-branded vans or trucks,” but are not entitled to the same workplace protections and are excluded from collective bargaining. In a statement, Mamdani highlighted how “Corporations like Amazon build billion-dollar business models by insulating themselves from accountability through a system of exploitative subcontracting.” The Journal reports the bill would also “require warehouse operators to obtain licenses from the city,” and in order to get a license, ”operators would have to adhere to new safety, training and employment requirements, including hiring thousands of the city’s contract couriers.” In response, Amazon is, as usual, threatening to move its business out of the city, but also deploying its secret, New York-specific weapon: their chief lobbyist, Jessica Schumer, daughter of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, according to the American Prospect. This sets up a major clash between an array of titanic forces in New York politics and whether or not Mayor Mamdani emerges triumphant will be a huge test of his political clout.

* Finally, AP reports the parliament of Lebanon voted this week to abolish the death penalty, making it the first nation in the Arab world to do so. This piece notes that the country has maintained an unofficial moratorium on capital punishment for over 20 years; while death sentences have been issued since then, they have all been suspended or commuted. The official sentence of capital punishment will be replaced with “life imprisonment with aggravated hard labor,” a somewhat vague legal concept that will have to be defined and refined as time goes on. AP adds that this vote comes amidst the Lebanese parliamentary debate over a proposed general amnesty law, that could “reduce sentences or even release convicted militants,” from the country’s various civil wars, as well as others convicted of drug-related crimes. The parliamentary bloc of Hezbollah voted against the law. Lebanon banning capital punishment stands in stark contrast to the Israeli Knesset, which voted in May to adopt a new death penalty statute described by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights as perpetuating “racial discrimination against Palestinians” and amounting to “a grave erosion of human rights.”

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In case You Haven’t Heard.

Ralph welcomes Robert Reich (professor of Public Policy and former Secretary of Labor) to discuss his "Pledge to Make America Affordable Again." Then, Ralph speaks to Derek Shearer (former economic policy adviser and US Ambassador to Finland) about his recent work, "A Bold Economic Program for America."

Robert Reich is Emeritus Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, including as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. Mr Reich has written eighteen books, including The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, The Common Good, Supercapitalism, and Coming up Short: A Memoir of My America. He is co-founder of Inequality Media, co-founder of the Economic Policy Institute, and co-founding editor of The American Prospect.

Democrats have an opportunity now to talk to the working class about—and not just the working class, the middle class too—about prices, about affordability in ways that are terribly important and meaningful and that really could get prices down or at least stop the onslaught of inflation. And also that are very, very consistent with what we believe as Democrats, as progressives, as people who want to see the nation move back toward its pursuit of social justice.

Robert Reich

You can bet that the right, the apologists for wealth in this country are going to say, “Oh, no, no, no, don’t do that because wealthy people will leave the country!” I mean, what they always do reflexively is say, “If you do that, we’ll leave.” And I say in California the same thing I would say about a national wealth tax—if they want to leave, let them leave. But they’re not going to leave because there are so many advantages to staying in California in terms of: this is where a lot of the high tech talent actually is. This is where the infrastructure for high tech is already. The climate, as I talk to you, I’m looking at a beautiful day out here. You know, who wants to leave California? And if you are a billionaire, and you are just so intent on leaving California because of this one very, very minor tax, then frankly, goodbye.

Robert Reich

I am a believer, though, in the common sense of the American people. Now, if that makes me naive, if that makes me gullible, so be it. But I think at the end of the line, the bottom line here is that the American people will make a decision starting with the midterm elections coming up in just 96 days (something like that). And those elections are going to be critical in terms of trying to constrain Trump and the people, the sycophants and lapdogs behind him and Hegseth and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and all these people who are ripping the social contract to shreds. And I think that the one way that (this brings us back to my pledge, my affordability pledge for Democrats), I think one way the Democrats can be sure to get the House back and maybe even possibly the Senate in 96, 97 days, is to pledge to make America affordable again. And using these 10 particular steps that are widely, widely supported.

Robert Reich

Derek Shearer served as the US Ambassador to Finland from 1994 to 1997. Previously, he worked in government at the national, state, and local levels, including the founding board of directors of the National Consumer Cooperative Bank in 1978 and Deputy Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs in 1993. He is emeritus Chevalier Professor of Diplomacy and World Affairs at Occidental College and Diplomat in Residence at Occidental for 2025-26. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Ambassador Shearer was a senior policy adviser to Bill Clinton and helped to write the campaign’s economic program, Putting People First. He has continued this policy work by co-authoring the comprehensive proposal A Bold Economic Program for America and exploring its political path forward in his recent article, Planning for the Day After Trump.

The point of our program is not that it should be endorsed in its entirety. It’s almost meant to be a discussion document to show what is possible—that this can be done. It doesn’t require some dramatic change in the way the government operates. It just demands a change in priorities and some new laws

Derek Shearer

You can’t get to those issues until you are actually in the government. And if we don’t win back the House and at least have a shot at winning back the Senate, talking about these issues while Trump and the MAGA Republican Party controls the government (and might continue to control it), makes us feel good, but it doesn’t change anything. What I’ve learned about the so-called leaders of the party is you don’t really expect them to lead. They will follow when they see where the voters are going. And they’ll also follow when they see if there is a Presidential candidate who takes off on these kinds of issues…I don’t expect the leadership to lead on these issues. So I don’t rail against them. Because what I’m doing (and I’m doing it with a lot of different people out there, including a lot of young people) is trying to find good candidates, provide them with economic ideas to run on, and then hope that we win back the House and that these kinds of then-elected officials who share our viewpoint become the Democratic Party. I mean, that’s how you do these things. If we don’t win these elections, then we’re just kind of crying in the wilderness.

Derek Shearer

Let’s Start the Revolution

Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People

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News 8/7/26

* This week, a new wave of Democratic primaries were held, most notably in the state of Michigan. In the closely watched Senate primary, which came down to a two-way race, Bernie Sanders-backed progressive Dr. Abdul El-Sayed emerged triumphant. Some have played up the fact that his opponent, Congresswoman Haley Stevens, overperformed relative to her polling in an attempt to downplay the significance of El-Sayed’s victory. Yet, this narrative ignores the fact that Stevens enjoyed the backing of the Democratic Establishment and AIPAC, which gave her an 12-to-1 spending advantage according to Axios, and that she ran misleading ads that made it seem as though former President Barack Obama had endorsed her campaign. Viewed in this light, it is clear just how impressive El-Sayed’s victory – statewide, in a must-win swing state for Democrats – is. El-Sayed will now face off against former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers in the general election.

* In Detroit, the left scored another major win with the victory of Donavan McKinney. McKinney, a DSA member and Michigan state representative, won his primary race against incumbent Congressman Shri Thanedar in Michigan’s 13th congressional district, the Detroit Free Press reports. Thanedar, a millionaire businessman, was a DSA member but left over disagreements over Israel. Thanedar fought hard to keep this seat, which he won in 2022, and was supported by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries despite many members of the Congressional Black Caucus supporting McKinney. Given that this is a heavily Democratic district, McKinney is essentially guaranteed a seat in the next Congress, bringing the number of DSA-backed House Members to an unprecedented high of seven. Moreover, between McKinney and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the city of Detroit will now enjoy all DSA representation in Congress.

* In Michigan’s seventh congressional district, progressive climate activist and co-founder of the Sunrise Movement William Lawrence pulled out a win in his primary as well. NBC notes that Lawrence defeated his two more moderate opponents, retired Navy SEAL Matt Maasdam and former Ambassador to Slovakia Bridget Brink, in part by aggressively criticizing the construction of new AI data centers. Some have alleged that Lawrence received support from Republicans using dark money to boost his campaign because they believe him to be an easier candidate to defeat in the general election. However, the Hillary Clinton campaign’s “pied piper” strategy to boost Donald Trump in 2016 proves that this is ever a risky strategy. Michigan’s seventh district is seen as a critical battleground seat. Donald Trump won the district by just one single percentage point in 2024.

* In more data center news from the Midwest, Hell Gate reports former New York City Mayor Eric Adams was in “Wisconsin Rapids—population 18,654—trying to convince residents that they should allow a real estate developer to build a data center in the heart of their town.” In a video of his pitch, the townspeople can be seen heckling, booing and shouting down the former Mayor, with attendees saying “You belong in prison!” and “You’re here to steal our water!” Community activist Kaitlyn Federwitz is quoted in this piece saying “Our whole town does not want him here at all,” adding “We want our resources to be properly safeguarded, our farmers to be protected, our waterways protected.” The Wisconsin Rapids economy had been largely dependent on a local mill, which closed its doors in 2020; Federwitz spoke to this, arguing that “When the mill closed, we lost 900 jobs. We’re aware we need jobs and industry in our city.” However, she added that the people of Wisconsin Rapids are “not willing to accept that a data center is the answer to that problem.”

* In more news from the midwest, United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain has published a new op-ed in Newsweek contending that “Democrats Must Pick a Side: Billionaires or Working-Class.” Fain cited numerous examples of Democrats in powers betraying their working class supporters, from NAFTA to modern governors like Abigail Spanberger of Virginia vetoing collective bargaining rights for public-sector workers. He criticized Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in particular for vetoing “nine bills restoring pensions, lowering health care costs, and restoring bargaining rights for public-sector workers,” after “Michigan Democrats fought an 18-month legal battle to force the bills to the governor’s desk.” He claims that “When the courts finally ordered [the bills] delivered, Whitmer vetoed all nine the same day—without so much as a phone call to legislative leaders or the unions that helped elect her.” He ends this piece with a call for “every elected official and candidate to…[reject] corporate PAC money,” and “adopt a platform that addresses the needs of working-class people.” This clear-eyed, laser focus on the working class is what has put Fain into conversation for a 2028 presidential run by some on the populist left, particularly if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ultimately declines to run. A recent article in POLITICO quotes Bhaskar Sunkara, the 2020 Sanders surrogate and former vice chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, saying “If he’s willing to run, [Fain] might be the best candidate for the left…Since he’s progressive but very much says his egalitarian value system comes from his Christianity, [he] can speak in a moral language that can reach more independents than other candidates, and I think it would set a good precedent for labor.”

* For the DSA left, all eyes now turn to Wisconsin, where Francesca Hong’s campaign for the gubernatorial nomination continues to pick up steam. Just this week, per Wis Politics, Hong picked up the endorsement of the SEIU Wisconsin Healthcare and Service Workers. In their endorsement statement, SEIU Wisconsin called Hong “a longtime advocate and fighter for the working class,” who is “committed to building back strong labor protections by overturning Act 10 and so-called ‘Right-to-Work’ laws, expanding Badgercare, and abolishing poverty wages in Wisconsin.” The union added that Hong’s “support for a $20 minimum wage, adopting family-centered policies such as paid family leave and affordable child care, and enacting much-needed regulations on corporate monopolies make her the clear choice for all Wisconsinites, not just the wealthy.” Hong currently leads in the polls, despite the sitting Democratic Governor’s attempts to boost her primary rival, David Crowley. Both Hong and Crowley have racked up labor support, though Crowley decidedly leads among the building trades and firefighter unions.

* In St. Louis, the left experienced its biggest setback this cycle, with former Congresswoman Cori Bush losing her comeback bid against Congressman Wesley Bell by a large margin. Bush was ousted in 2024 as part of “a broader strategy by AIPAC to unseat Israel’s sharpest critics in Congress, including the ‘Squad,’ which Bush was a part of,” per the Missouri Independent. This piece notes that AIPAC spent over $8 million to oust Bush in that cycle and outside groups spent $7.2 million on Bell’s behalf this year. Bell’s official campaign outspent Bush’s by a margin well over 10 to 1. Bush is the first candidate backed by National DSA to lose their race in 2026, which, while disappointing in this case, is a stunning testament to the track record of the group.

* In a totally different part of the country, this week Julian Beaudion, the Democratic nominee for Senate in South Dakota, dropped out of the race. Beaudion cited personal hardships for himself and his family in his statement of withdrawal citing a recent house fire. However, many see this as an acknowledgement that the independent candidate in this race, veteran and former park ranger Brian Bengs, has a better chance of defeating incumbent Republican Senator Mike Rounds in a head-to-head matchup. This dynamic has been playing out in other states; Democratic Senate candidates have dropped out to clear the way for independents in Nebraska and Idaho already and there is immense pressure on the Democratic nominee in Montana to do the same. For his part, Beaudion will not endorse either candidate in South Dakota, according to KELOLAND News, but South Dakota Searchlight reports the South Dakota Democratic Party will not replace Beaudion on the ballot, giving the greenlight for Democrats to coalesce around Bengs in the general election.

* In another primary election story, Lehigh Valley Public Media is out with a story on the strange dynamic emerging in Pennsylvania’s 7th congressional district. According to this story, this race – between incumbent Republican Ryan Mackenzie and his Democratic challenger Bob Brooks, who seems to have done the impossible by getting Bernie Sanders and Josh Shapiro on the same side in a primary – has been upended by the entry of one Andrew Tupone. Mr. Tupone, a former Republican candidate, is running on the Green Party ballot line and claims to have “joined the Green Party this spring, drawn by its environmental policies on water conservancy and opposition to data centers, after growing disillusioned with both major parties.” Yet, apparently, “Green Party leaders warned in a statement this month that a wave of candidates may be posing as party members across the state.” Chris Robinson, a Green party spokesman, claims that “The party hasn’t endorsed any congressional candidates in Pennsylvania and has never heard from Tupone.” Robinson adds that he “looked at [Tupone’s] Facebook page, and he seems like he’s a nice Republican.” According to LVPM, “a third-party candidate wouldn’t need to move the needle much,” to influence the outcome of the election, noting that the current Congressman defeated the Democratic incumbent, Rep. Susan Wild by just 1 percentage point, in 2024, while “Tim Silfies, the last third-party congressional candidate to appear on a Lehigh Valley ballot, earned 8,011 votes, or 3 percent of the vote, in 2018.”

* Finally, in more third party news, POLITICO reports several leading figures on the anti-MAGA right – including Congressman Thomas Massie, former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, and commentator Tucker Carlson – convened last weekend to “[sow] the seeds for a future third-party political organization…aimed at undercutting the Republican establishment.” This gang of three, joined by former Trump national security official Joe Kent, are particularly incensed by the president’s intervention in Iran, with Greene writing “We said no more foreign wars and we meant it and supported Donald Trump because he made that promise. But he’s betrayed us all.” This group is reportedly mulling a right-wing, third-party presidential campaign in 2028. While Carlson has declined to launch a presidential bid in the past, despite urging from within his circle, a sprawling new “10-point vision for America” he debuted during a recent stream implies that he is increasingly interested in articulating an alternative vision of right-wing politics from those espoused by Trump. This manifesto, as reported by Axios, includes everything from declassifying records on the JFK assasination and 9/11 to enforcing universal sobriety to “halting immigration until the effects of AI become clearer.” We will be watching closely to see if this effort moves forward or peters out as has been the pattern with other recent third party attempts.

This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.