Ralph once again welcomes Chuck Collins, heir to the Oscar Meyer fortune and one of the founders of Patriotic Millionaires, to discuss his agenda for reform outlined in his new book BURNED BY BILLIONAIRES: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet. Then Sarah Moskowitz, Executive Director of the Citizens Utility Board of Illinois (CUB), joins us to tell us how to fight back against AI data centers that are spiking your electric bills.

Chuck Collins directs the Charity Reform Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he also co-edits Inequality.org. He co-founded the Patriotic Millionaires and United for a Fair Economy, and he is the author of Born on Third Base and The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions. His new book is Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet.

There’s a number of examples of how we could create a decency floor that many societies have (including, obviously, Canada) that you can’t fall below those levels. Same with education, access to education. These are universal opportunity programs that good societies maintain. You raise the floor and you create a level playing field. But the reality is we’re not going to get any of those if we don’t address this concentration of wealth and power, which is essentially blocking us from moving toward these reforms we’re talking about.

Chuck Collins

Sarah Moskowitz is Executive Director of the Citizens Utility Board, a nonprofit, nonpartisan group with the mission to fight for the rights of customers of investor-owned electric, gas and telecom utilities across Illinois.

That’s part of what we’re really proud of here at CUB Illinois is that you can reach a human. You might have to leave a message, but we will call you back and answer your questions and then talk through what’s really going on.

Sarah Moskowitz

A lot of our work at CUB is just helping people connect the dots behind the policies that are resulting in these really high bills. It’s shrouded in mystery and it’s dry. It’s boring. You don’t want to think about it after you’ve been working all day. And that’s why we’re here—to keep tabs on all that stuff and help illuminate that for folks…And it’s a moving target. Things are happening at the state level. Things are happening at the federal level. And so when you’re looking at your bill, it’s a culmination of a whole spectrum of jurisdictions and a whole spectrum of regulators making decisions, each having an impact on what you pay every month in a different way. And it’s quite overwhelming.

Sarah Moskowitz

More Show Notes:

CUB Project

Utility Consumers Action Network

Cub Model Law

Ralph welcomes Judith Enck (founder and president of Beyond Plastics, whose goal is to eliminate plastic pollution everywhere) to discuss her new book “The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late.” Then, Ralph reflects on the 60th anniversary of “Unsafe at Any Speed.”

Judith Enck is the founder and president of Beyond Plastics, whose goal is to eliminate plastic pollution everywhere. In 2009, she was appointed by President Obama to serve as regional administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and served as deputy secretary for the environment in the New York Governor’s Office. She is currently a professor at Bennington College, where she teaches classes on plastic pollution. She is co-author (with Adam Mahoney) of The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It’s Too Late.

I support recycling…But the sad reality is that plastic recycling has been an abysmal failure. Always has, always will be…You cannot really accomplish high levels of recycling with plastics because you would literally have to do hundreds, if not thousands of different sorting. The people who know this the most are the plastic manufacturers. Yet they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars confusing and deceiving the public into thinking: “Don’t worry about all your plastic, just toss it in your recycling bin,” knowing that most plastic never gets recycled.

Judith Enck

A lot of people feel overwhelmed and that it’s hopeless and what can one person do? And that fails to acknowledge that the reason we’re not making more progress on climate change is because of the political power of fossil fuel companies. On the plastics issue, we’re taking on fossil fuel, chemical, and consumer brand companies and plastics companies. So it’s a lot. It’s amazing we get anything done. But people around the country are coming together and they’re getting victories.

Judith Enck

I do think if you start paying attention to plastic in your own life, you see that there are alternatives. And then you climb the civic ladder. So you try to reduce plastic in your own home. Then you look at your kid’s school. Then you look at your faith community. Then before you know it, you’re at your city council asking what can the city do to reduce plastics. You’re going to get a couple victories there. And then you find the statewide environmental groups that are working on this. This is for the long haul.

Judith Enck

The important thing about [Unsafe at Any Speed] now is: sure, it saved millions of lives and the laws are still on the books, and even Donald Trump can’t tear seatbelts and airbags out of our cars. But if we tried to do this again today, it wouldn’t happen. And that’s because the concentration of corporate power over Congress and the media is so much more intense now. And it’s also because the decline of civic institutions and democratic institutions has been very pronounced over the last few decades. And that is sobering us up.

Ralph Nader

News 12/5/25

1. Our top stories this week are on Venezuela. First, the BBCis out with a report on the American military build-up around the Latin American nation, which includes “air and naval forces…a nuclear-powered submarine and spy planes...a range of aircraft carriers, guided-missile destroyers, and amphibious assault ships capable of landing thousands of troops.” So far, the Trump administration has sent mixed messages on whether they plan to launch a full-scale invasion of the Bolivarian Republic, but Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro shows no signs of stepping down without a fight, having declared a “massive mobilisation” of 200,000 military personnel throughout the country. Most ominously, on November 29th, President Trump declared Venezuela’s sovereign airspace closed, per the Wall Street Journal.

2. However, American bellicosity towards Venezuela is unpopular at home. A CBS poll found that only 30% of Americans would favor the U.S. taking military action in Venezuela, compared to a whopping 70% opposed. Another question in this same poll found that only 13% of Americans consider Venezuela a “major threat” with 48% considering the country a “minor threat” and 39% report they don’t think Venezuela is a threat at all. Unfortunately, the lack of popular support for war is unlikely to constrain the Trump administration much, but it is a notable difference from the lead-up to the Iraq War, when 70% of Americans favored an invasion. The American people want peace, even if the government does not.

3. Another key detail from the CBS poll is that “Three in four Americans…say Trump would need congressional approvalbefore taking military action in Venezuela, including just over half of Republicans.” In light of this fact, it is significant that a bipartisan group in Congress is pushing a War Powers resolution to “block strikes on Venezuela,” per the Intercept. This new push in the House is sponsored by stalwart progressive Congressman Jim McGovern and co-sponsored by dissident Republican Thomas Massie along with other progressives like Reps. Ro Khanna, Lloyd Doggett, and Joaquin Castro, among others. As the Intercept piece notes, this resolution must be acted on in the House within 15 days, but by then the administration may have already acted, pre-empting the resolution. A similar resolution has also been introduced in the Senate, primarily backed by Senators Tim Kaine and Rand Paul, with backing from other Senate Democrats, per the Hill.

4. Of course, American aggression towards Venezuela is reverberating out into the international community in myriad ways. Generally speaking, while United Nations officials decry the actions, America’s European allies have kept quiet – with many speculating that these countries would prefer Maduro’s ouster in order to get ready access to Venezuelan oil and decrease their dependence on Russia. China however, has issued a stiff condemnation of American actions. The Iranian Students News Agencyquotes Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Lin Jian’s statement at a Beijing press conference, which where in he stated, “China opposes any action that violates the purposes and principles of the UN Charter or infringes upon the sovereignty and security of other countries…[and] opposes foreign forces interfering in Venezuela’s internal affairs under any pretext.” He added, “We urge all parties to keep the Latin American and Caribbean region a peaceful zone and not allow the situation to escalate further.” However, beyond these condemnations, it remains unclear what, if anything, China will do to check American aggression.

5. Despite all of this however, House Democratic leadership is typically feckless. In a corollary to the increasing likelihood of strikes against Venezuela directly, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has stepped up the campaign of striking boats off the country’s coast. Recently, the Washington Post revealed that after a strike in September which left survivors clinging to life, Hegseth ordered a second strike, directing Admiral Frank Bradley to “kill everybody.” This revelation led to calls for House Democrats to pursue impeachment against Hegseth on charges that he violated the laws of war. However, Axiosreports House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will not pursue a Hegseth impeachment. While true that such a push would likely be DOA, it sends a dark signal that the administration can do something like this and face virtually zero official condemnation.

6. Nevertheless, Republicans have taken such unpopular actions that it seems Democrats will retake the House, perhaps by a wide margin, in the 2026 midterms – or perhaps before. So far, 31 House Republicans have announced they will not seek re-election, with some retiring and others running for other offices. Still others however are signaling that they will resign their offices before the midterms, shaving the slim House GOP majority ever slimmer. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has announced she will retire in January 2026. Now, Congresswoman Nancy Mace is reportedly considering resigning early as well, though she has denied such rumors, per KOMO News. Either way, Democrats should be taking this moment to prepare an agenda for if and when they retake control of the chamber.

7. Turning to consumer protection news, Jalopnik reports Senate Republicans are seeking to rollback decades of automobile safety regulations. In a recent hearing held by the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation ostensibly to put the CEOs of the Big Three American car manufacturers, as well as Tesla, on the record as to why cars have become so expensive, Republicans on the committee used the opportunity to blame safety regulations. Jalopnik notes that Republican Senators specifically targeted “automated emergency braking, the requirements for which will not come into effect until 2029 and have no bearing on current car prices…[and] back-seat alarms to remind you if you’ve left a child or pet back there. According to Kids and Car Safety, since 1990 at least 1,165 children have sweltered to death in hot cars, and another 7,500 survived with varying degrees of injury.” The cost of these sensors will amount to about $50 per vehicle. In short, while there are many reasons cars have become considerably more expensive in recent years – including everything from tariffs to data centers buying up all electronic parts – blaming safety regulations is a tired canard.

8. Meanwhile, RFK Jr. is moving to kill a proposed Food and Drug Administration rule to test for asbestos in talc-based cosmetics, the Guardian reports. As this report notes, cosmetics companies have known about potential asbestos contamination of talc since the 1950s, but that fact, like so many other corporate secrets, was suppressed, only coming to light in the 1970s. Asbestos is a highly carcinogenic substance. It has been banned in over 50 countries and “No…level of exposure is considered safe.” However, attempts to ban the substance in the U.S. have been stymied by industry, beginning with the overturning of the EPA’s 1989 ban.

9. In more legal news, Reuters reports the British government has announced plans to “remove the historic right to trial by jury,” for defendants in criminal cases carrying potential sentences of under three years in jail. The government argues that this will help alleviate the tremendous backlog of cases before the British courts, despite the fact that the right to a jury trial in Britain dates back to the Magna Carta itself. Barbara Mills, chair of the Bar Council, which represents trial lawyers in the U.K., decried this move, stating ”there is no evidence that [the] removal [of jury trials] would reduce the backlog, nor has it been set out how an alternative system would be resourced…We urge the government to reconsider pursuing radical changes under the mistaken belief that radical equals effective.”

10. Finally, in local news, Washington D.C. Councilmember and Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George has officially launched her campaign to be the next mayor of the District of Columbia. Lewis George is the first serious candidate to announce a campaign to succeed unpopular three-term Mayor Muriel Bowser, who is retiring this cycle. Like Zohran Mamdani, Lewis George is prioritizing affordability in the increasingly expensive District as well as an emphasis on fixing city services like traffic safety improvement. According to the Washington Post, “Within hours of launching her campaign Monday morning, Lewis George’s campaign said it had received enough money from enough D.C. residents to qualify [for the District’s matching fund program], which provides public financing for campaigns that agree not to accept large-dollar donations and corporate contributions.” Within hours, “they had netted more than $110,000 in individual donations from 1,500 D.C. residents,” which after being combined with the matching funds, will total over $750,000.” However, many expect her main challenger to be Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, an ally of corporate interests and developers in the District, who will likely be bankrolled by those same interests. Whatever the future holds, this will surely be the most competitive citywide race the District has seen in decades.

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

Ralph welcomes distinguished educators Dr. Tina Ellsworth and Kelly McFarland Stratman of the National Council for the Social Studies to discuss how our democracy depends on our children learning the civic tools of social studies. Then, civic legend Lois Gibbs, who exposed the Love Canal toxic dump that was poisoning families in her area and then went on to found a national organization to help other ordinary people fight toxic exposure joins us to update us on her latest campaigns

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Kelly Stratman is the Executive Director of National Council for the Social Studies. Ms. Stratman’s career began in education, first teaching English to middle and high school students in Japan, and later as a classroom teacher for kindergarten and 4th grade in Ohio and Massachusetts. Currently, she serves as vice chair of AFS-USA, a nonprofit that promotes global citizenship and intercultural learning through international exchange.

Dr. Tina Ellsworth is president of the National Council for the Social Studies. Dr. Ellsworth is currently an assistant professor at Northwest Missouri State University. Dr. Ellsworth is also an assistant professor of social studies education at the University of Central Missouri. Her research interests center on history education, pedagogical content knowledge for teaching history, and teaching with primary sources. She is currently a co-writer and co-editor for a book on teaching with primary sources expected to be released in fall 2026.

The emphasis at certain levels of education and government is on STEM, computer skills, learning about AI. And of course, these are just tools to use or misuse. They are taught by asking the question: how? And the social studies ask the question: why? Much more fundamental, much more portentous in order to make sure that these tools are wisely used—or, at times, not used at all.

Ralph Nader

I hardly remember my physics and chemistry courses. Why? Because they were sterile. For example, in the physics course, while we learned about equations, et cetera, we never applied physics to anything in the community. We never studied the weather, for example. In the chemistry course, we never studied the drinking water. We had two dirty rivers and a very clean reservoir up on a hill, and it was never part of it. It was just studying the periodic table.

Ralph Nader

The important thing for us to realize is that these different subject areas in schools are not mutually exclusive. In order to do STEM well, you need social studies and need the ability to make good decisions. You need the ability to critically interrogate any kind of sources that you might be encountering and ultimately do things with your work to make the world a better place. That is all social studies skills that we’re talking about. Helping kids to become critical thinkers, to really ask good questions I think is really important. And thinking about students more than just their future career, but really preparing students for this civic life too.

Dr. Tina Ellsworth

Teachers right now are a little bit fearful about teaching anything that is focused on civics. They’re uncertain about where the project could go when you give kids the agency to be able to do that, or how the community might respond with what students are doing. Sometimes members of the public may even say, “Oh, you’re turning students into activists.” As if having students engage in their community to make it better is something that’s bad. So I don’t quite understand a lot of that vernacular that’s being thrown around as having kids care about their community is a bad thing. So I think we need to do more to take charge of the narrative and to help better connect the parents and the people in the community with the school and with the kids to see how we can all do this better.

Dr. Tina Ellsworth

When we think about how important our students are, how important education is, how that funding happens and where that funding happens—it is all at that local level. And so when we think about how we can get engaged and what we can do, just as everyday citizens, we can be those role models. Where we are getting engaged, where we are asking the questions ourselves of our communities, where we’re taking those best practices that we learned in our social studies classes and we’re putting them out there. And statistics show that when you take your child with you, when you go to vote at a very young age, that becomes a habit for them. So we’re the models for our students, whether we’re in the classroom, whether we’re a parent, whether we’re a neighbor, or just a member of the community, we need to be the advocates that we want to see happen.

Kelly Stratman

This is why we are such strong advocates for this inquiry-based approach. Because it gives students the tools they need to navigate [technology], whether they’re trying to pull apart things in the virtual space or in real life. These are important skillsets that they can use as they go forward—not just take things that are given to them and just walk away without questioning it, but really feeling empowered to stop and evaluate and have the tools at their disposal to be able to do a really thoughtful evaluation.

Kelly Stratman

Lois Gibbs is the founder of the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, a project of People’s Action Institute. In 1978 she blew the whistle on Love Canal after learning her kindergartener’s school was built on a toxic dump. Her work led to the creation of Superfund.

[The central role of women in the environmental movement] is not dead yet, by the way. That movement is still alive and well. And they’re participating in many other things that are happening today like the No Kings rallies…They’re extraordinary people who learned how to fight this battle not from a book, not from television, but from the seat of their pants. And what was really clear in 1980 and is still clear to me today is that if the people decide that change is needed and they gather together and they organize around it, it doesn’t matter whether Democrats or Republicans are in office. It doesn’t matter who has power. They can create that change. And that’s what we really need in this country.

Lois Gibbs

When you think about the national policies that have been set around the environmental movement (the environmental health movement and the environmental movement), all of that came from grassroots efforts.

Lois Gibbs

[The philosophy we have] is not to build an office with 15 people and do a top-down kind of organizing, but build and train hubs of people all across the country to come together and fight locally. Because when the local people move, so will the Congress, so will corporate America. Because they have no choice. I mean, you saw what we did with Target. Oh my goodness. Target rolled over on everything. Disney rolled over on everything. Because when the people say “We’re not playing this way anymore”, then the corporations and Congress will roll over.

Lois Gibbs

We welcome back nuclear power expert, Peter Bradford, former Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner and board member for the Union of Concerned Scientists to update us on the latest nuclear power boondoggles that force customers to pay for the construction of nuclear reactors sometimes decades before they benefit from any energy that’s produced. Plus, molecular biologist, Becky McClain, who got infected by a dangerous virus in her workplace, joins us to discuss her book, “Exposed: A Pfizer Scientist Battles Corruption, Lies, and Betrayal, and Becomes a Biohazard Whistleblower.”

Peter Bradford teaches and advises on utility regulation, nuclear power, and energy policy in the United States and overseas. He is a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and is on the board of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Basically, (nuclear power) is like trying to stop world hunger with caviar. It’s too expensive, takes much too long, you wind up buying too little of it, and you displace all of the better sources.

Peter Bradford

It’s almost like there’s a bubble being built on top of a bubble, because there’s a real chance that we’re not going to see all the artificial intelligence demand that people have been saying. And then on top of that, it’s for damn sure that we’re not going to see successful companies developing all the small reactors that are on their drawing boards.

Peter Bradford

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.”

I was exposed to a dangerous virus and OSHA worked against me. My medical care was blocked. My complaints ignored. No safety inspection occurred after I had documented complaints shown to them from several scientists. They stole my documents. It seemed like every institution that I went for help, they just became part of the danger.

Becky McClain

The book really provides the public an understanding of the culture of health and safety operating within 21st century biotechnology. Once the reader reads it, they probably will feel the terrible repercussions that the public could face if it’s not countered and balanced with effective whistleblower protections and improved worker health and safety rights.

Becky McClain

When you were exposed and became sick, you tried to go to the workers’ compensation agency, the state of Connecticut, and their response was totally dismaying. They ruled that trade secrets of Pfizer superseded your rights to get exposure records from Pfizer for your healthcare.

Ralph Nader

Far, far more people die from silent violence of workplace and environmental contaminants than are killed in street crimes every year in the United States.

Ralph Nader

News 11/21/25

* This week, Congress voted to demand the release of the Epstein files. This is the culmination of a months-long pressure campaign which overcame stiff opposition from the Trump White House and its allies in Congress. While only four Republicans broke ranks to sign the discharge petition in order to force the House vote, nearly every House Republican – save for Representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana – voted for the bill in the end after Trump reversed course and gave his blessing for them to vote yea. According to Reuters, Trump then lobbied senators to “slow walk” the bill in the upper chamber, but that effort failed and the Senate approved the measure quickly and unanimously. Trump now claims to have signed the bill, which starts a 30-day timer for the Justice Department to release all of the Epstein files. However, many have expressed concern about manipulation of the files by DOJ leadership, including politically-motivated delays or redactions. This issue, and Trump’s response, has been very damaging for him among his own base. A recent poll, cited in the Reuters piece, found that “just 44% of Republicans thought Trump was handling the Epstein situation well.” It remains to be seen whether this new attempt to control the narrative will help or hurt his standing.

* In order to distract from domestic political problems, Trump is turning to a tried-and-true political tactic: saber rattling abroad. In a statement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the U.S. would designate “the Cartel de los Soles,” or Cartel of the Suns, a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), claiming that this supposed gang is “headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.” Yet, as the Intercept notes, “There’s just one giant problem: There is little evidence that Cartel of the Suns exists.” As this piece explains, that term came about as an informal designation accusing the ruling elites of Venezuela of corruption and did not refer to an actually existing organization. Therefore, this designation of the ‘cartel’ as an FTO is nothing more than the Trump administration’s latest attempt to threaten and intimidate the government of Venezuela, hoping President Nicolás Maduro will cave to American pressure and the U.S. can install a compliant regime in the country. Maduro however shows no sign of doing so, and the two nations draw ever closer to armed conflict.

* In more news from Latin America, voters in Ecuador soundly rejected a constitutional referendum supported by right-wing President Daniel Noboa which would have allowed the United States to reopen military bases in the country. The U.S. formerly maintained a base on Ecuador’s Pacific coast, but in 2008 left-wing President Rafael Correa “decided not to renew its lease and pushed for the constitutional ban,” per the BBC. In addition to this vote, Ecuadorans also rejected a slew of other Noboa-supported constitutional amendments, including “ending public funding for political parties, shrinking the size of Congress, and establishing a constitutional assembly to re-write Ecuador’s constitution.” Noboa has vowed to respect the will of the voters, but will likely face immense pressure from the Americans who had hoped to set up outposts within the country.

* In more foreign policy related news, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has introduced a new resolution which seeks to recognize “the Genocide of the Palestinian People in Gaza.” According to a press release, “This resolution officially recognizes that the Israeli government has committed the crime of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza and calls for the United States to take immediate, concrete action to fulfill its binding legal obligations as a party to the Genocide Convention to prevent and punish the crime of genocide.” In forceful terms, Representative Tlaib is quoted saying “The Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza has not ended, and it will not end until we act…We must hold individual perpetrators and complicit corporations to account. We must stop sending weapons to a genocidal military. We must follow international law and use all means available to us, including sanctions, to bring this genocide to an end.” This resolution is cosponsored by 20 other members of Congress, all progressive Democrats, along with over 100 organizations.

* Turning to local news, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is huddling with various key politicians to strategize about how they can coordinate their efforts. ABC reports Mamdani has “spoken with several Democratic governors” including Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, soliciting their insight for “how to navigate certain aspects of governing and best deal with President Donald Trump.” Pritzker in particular has been forced to deal with Trump deploying federal troops in Illinois, something he has also threatened to do in New York City. Meanwhile, New York Governor Kathy Hochul is mulling proposals to raise the state corporate tax, in part to help fund Zohran’s agenda, per the City Journal. The most interesting meeting on the agenda however is the upcoming summit between Mamdani and President Trump at the White House, which is occurring as we record this segment. Ever-positive, Zohran has stated that he is “ready for anything” in this meeting.

* On a more critical note, Zohran has had to make some hard political choices this week, including some that don’t necessarily sit well with his base. First, Zohran announced that NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch will remain in her post, per WJLA despite much criticism of her tenure from the Left. Perhaps more contentious however, Mamdani was forced to publicly come out against the primary challenge launched by Chi Ossé, a close ally on the City Council, who is now challenging Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in New York’s 8th Congressional district primary. Zohran reportedly discouraged Ossé from running against Jeffries, but Ossé proceeded with the campaign and is now seeking the endorsement of the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). In a closed-door forum, Mamdani reportedly urged the group not to back Ossé, arguing that it would make it “more difficult” to enact his affordability agenda, per the New York Daily News. Ossé, a progressive, has had a mixed relationship with DSA and only officially joined the group last month.

* Looking beyond New York, it appears that Mamdani’s victory – along with the victory of progressive insurgent candidate Katie Wilson in Seattle – has spurred a wave of progressive candidates in other cities. In Los Angeles, the Daily News reports housing advocate Rae Huang will challenge incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, on a platform that “calls for ‘housing for all,’ fast and free buses, stronger workers protection and a public safety approach focused on prevention and care.” Huang serves as deputy director of Housing Now California and she is an ordained Presbyterian minister. In Washington D.C., Axios reports the most progressive member of the D.C. City Council – Janesse Lewis George – is finalizing plans for a mayoral campaign explicitly using the Mamdani model. Lewis George, a DSA member, plans to recruit an army of 5,000 volunteers and is looking to hire veterans of the Zohran campaign. The dynamics of this race remain extremely up in the air, as three-term incumbent Mayor Muriel Bowser has not yet announced whether or not she will seek a fourth term.

* Our last three stories this week concern the Trump administration directly. First, CNN reports the administration will formally withdraw the Biden-era plan to require airlines to pay passengers compensation – $200 to $300 for domestic delays of at least three hours and up to $775 for longer delays – when flight disruptions are caused by carriers. This plan would have brought the U.S. in line with the E.U., Britain, Canada and Brazil. Just before this decision, a group of Democratic Senators, including Richard Blumenthal, Maria Cantwell and Ed Markey, sent a letter urging the administration to keep the rule in place. It is safe to say that flyers will feel the lack of compensation rules as we enter the holiday travel season.

* Next, in an apparent fit of pique, Trump is demanding that NBC fire Late Night talk show host Seth Meyers. According to Poynter, his comments were then reposted by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, indicating that Trump’s whims on this matter could be backed up by the full power of the federal regulatory state. This incident has echoes of the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco that occurred earlier this year. In this case however, NBC is competing with the Ellisons to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery. That is to say, the Trump administration has tremendous leverage to exert over NBC. It is too soon to say whether or not NBC will buckle, but they did get a much-needed assist from Democratic Senators this week, who sent a letter to Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater, who heads up DOJ antitrust efforts, demanding that any deal review be “conducted transparently, independently, and in accordance with federal antitrust and anti-corruption laws — not politics.” The Trump administration has all but openly said they are in the bag for the Ellison offer; it will be interesting to see if pushback from Senators forces the administration to take a more balanced approach. This from the Hollywood Reporter.

* Finally, Trump and Elon Musk appear to be mending fences. Musk made his first public appearance at the White House since the summer when he attended a dinner with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman there this week. Other attendees included Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, per Business Insider. Alongside a picture of the event, Musk wrote “I would like to thank President Trump for all he has done for America and the world.” Trump, never missing an opportunity to twist the knife, said at a recent public event “You’re so lucky I’m with you, Elon…Has he ever thanked me properly?” Perhaps these two megalomaniacs can put their egos aside and work together to enact their shared goals. If history is any indication though, that won’t last for long.

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

On today’s wide-ranging program, Ralph welcomes David Dayen of “The American Prospect” to discuss the Democrats caving on the shutdown. Then, Ralph speaks to Dani Noble from Jewish Voice for Peace about their BDS campaigns, efforts to block weapons shipments to Israel, and the state of the ceasefire in Gaza. Finally, Ralph speaks to original Nader’s Raider Sam Simon about his new memoir, “Dementia Man: An Existential Journey.”

David Dayen is the executive editor of the American Prospect, an independent political magazine that aims to advance liberal and progressive goals through reporting, analysis and debate. His work has appeared in the Intercept, HuffPost, the Washington Post, and more. He is the author of Chain of Title: How Three Ordinary Americans Uncovered Wall Street’s Great Foreclosure Fraud and Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.

If Congress is saying: We have the power of the purse, and we have the ability to dictate to the President what he is able to do or not do with federal funding, then why not go the whole way? To me, that was the entire purpose of the shutdown— to stop the President from ignoring Congress and initiating his own prerogatives as it relates to government funding. It is really making Congress completely irrelevant in the process which they constitutionally are supposed to dictate.

David Dayen

Every time Trump has been in power and there’s been a national election, he’s lost it. He lost the midterm elections in 2018. He lost the presidential election in 2020. He lost the off-year elections in 2017 and 2019. He lost (just last week) the elections in 2025. He is not equipped to have an agenda that appeals to the American people when he’s in power. And so I firmly agree that Democrats are likely to do well in the elections next year, as they just did. The one thing that can stop that is: completely punching your base in the face, after you succeed politically in backing Republicans into a corner.

David Dayen

Dani Noble is a Strategic Campaigns Organizer at Jewish Voice for Peace.

Israel bonds (which very few people know much about) are direct loans to the Israeli military and government. They are unrestricted. They have no guardrails around what those funds can be used for, et cetera. And this is a main way that the Israeli military and government generate an unrestricted slush fund to be able to continue their genocidal assault on Gaza, to continue funding for the atrocities being committed against Palestinians—even as their government and economy suffers and/or operates with a massive deficit.

Dani Noble

This bill would essentially block the Trump administration from delivering some of the deadliest weapons to Israel. So it’s an essential, essential step in what we need to do fundamentally—which is a full arms embargo to stop arming the Israeli military and government…It’s the most supported piece of legislation in support of Palestinian rights that we’ve ever seen.

Dani Noble

Sam Simon is an author, playwright, and attorney. His new book Dementia Man: An Existential Journey is based on his award-winning play of the same name.

There’s also a social cost. A sense that everything I’ve ever built personally—my cars, my homes, my savings—that were all going to be available as a legacy to my family, they have to be spent in my few years of my life just to keep me alive. There needs to be a community response to that—and that’s shorthand for the government. It doesn’t force people to go broke to stay alive.

Sam Simon

News 11/14/25

* This week, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a new tranche of over 20,000 pages of documents related to infamous financier and sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. These documents include damning emails between Epstein and various high-power individuals like Steve Bannon, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and current U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack. However, the emails that have received the most attention are those regarding President Donald Trump. In these emails, Epstein claimed Trump “knew about the girls,” and claimed that, “i [i.e. Epstein] am the one able to take him [i.e. Trump] down.” Perhaps most shocking, Epstein claims to have been with Trump during Thanksgiving in 2017, according to NBC. If true, it would directly contradict Trump’s repeated insistence that he had no contact with Epstein since their falling out in the mid 2000s, either 2004 or 2007, per PBS.

* The newly released Epstein files reinforce another narrative as well: that Epstein was an asset for Israeli intelligence. Drop Site news has done excellent reporting on Epstein helping to “Broker [an] Israeli Security Agreement With Mongolia,” “Build a Backchannel to Russia Amid [the] Syrian Civil War” and “Sell a Surveillance State to Côte d’Ivoire.” Most recently the independent outlet has published an expose on Epstein’s relationship with known Mossad spy Yoni Koren. According to this piece, “Epstein’s personal calendars reveal that…[Koren] lived at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment for multiple stretches between 2013 and 2016.” There is also evidence that Epstein wired money to Koren. However, the reasons behind this transfer, and the details of their relationship, remain murky.

* More Epstein information is likely to be released in the coming days. This week, the longest ever government shutdown in American history concluded with capitulation by centrist Democrats in the Senate. However, the conclusion of the shutdown finally broke the logjam over the swearing-in of Adelita Grijalva, the newly elected Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona. Grijalva immediately fulfilled her vow to be the 218th signature on the Discharge Petition forcing a vote on the release of the Epstein files, joining all 213 other House Democrats and four Republicans, Reps. Thomas Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace, per the Hill. In her first speech, Grijalva emphatically stated, “Justice cannot wait another day.” House Speaker Johnson has promised to bring the matter to a vote next week and many Republicans who did not sign the petition are expected to vote for it, with sponsors angling for a veto-proof majority. At that point, all eyes will turn to the Senate.

* Even still, the Democrats blinking in the government shutdown showdown has infuriated many members of Congress, candidates and Democratic-aligned organizations, who are now calling for Chuck Schumer to step aside as Senate Minority Leader. Journalist Prem Thakker is keeping a running tally of these calls, which so far includes 12 Congressional Democrats – with major names like Pramila Jayapal, Mark Pocan, Rashida Tlaib, and Ro Khanna among them – along with candidates like Seth Moulton, Mallory McMorrow, Saikat Chakrabarti and Graham Platner. Beyond these individuals however, this call has been echoed by groups ranging from Our Revolution to Social Security Works to College Democrats of America, among many others.

* Moving to economic matters, one other consequence of the protracted government shutdown is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was “largely idle,” meaning it did not collect the crucial fiscal information it is responsible for gathering, including October jobs numbers and Consumer Price Index changes. According to POLITICO, White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said this information is unlikely to ever be released. She of course blamed that on the opposition in Congress, saying “Democrats may have permanently damaged the federal statistical system.” This is somewhat laughable, as the Trump administration has all but gone to war with the economic data collection functions of the federal government whenever that data has made him look bad.

* Another bad sign for the economy in general, and for consumers in particular, is the rise of what are generously called “Flex Loans.” A new investigation by ProPublica in partnership with the Tennessee Lookout, examines the rise of this new strain of ultra-high-interest loan, with annual interest rates as high as 279.5%. This, combined with a lending cap of $4,000 – nine times higher than a traditional payday loan – has led to Advance Financial, the leading lender in Tennessee, suing over 110,000 people across the state since 2015. According to the data, judgments against consumers usually end up in the thousands, and 40% result in garnished wages. Loans of this variety were illegal before 2015, but the Tennessee legislature allowed them through and while the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has sought to protect financial services consumers from these types of predatory lending schemes, the Trump administration’s attempts to kneecap the agency have rendered it powerless.

* Meanwhile, a dearth of consumer protections is yielding horrific consequences in a completely different area: AI. A new CNN report details how ChatGPT encouraged a Texas 23-year-old, Zane Shamblin, to kill himself. In heart-wrenching detail, this story paints a picture of Shamblin on the edge of suicide, and the AI chatbot helping to push him towards death. As Shamblin held a gun to his own head, the bot wrote, “You’re not rushing. You’re just ready,” later adding, “Rest easy, king…You did good.” According to this piece, the chatbot “repeatedly encouraged [Shamblin] as he discussed ending his life” for months, and “right up to his last moments.” Shamblin’s parents are now suing ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, alleging the company endangered their son’s life by, “tweaking its design last year to be more humanlike and by failing to put enough safeguards on interactions with users in need of emergency help.” The victim’s mother, Alicia Shamblin, is quoted saying, “I feel like it’s just going to destroy so many lives. It’s going to be a family annihilator. It tells you everything you want to hear.”

* In more positive consumer protection news, former Biden FTC Chair Lina Khan has hit the ground running in her new role helping to manage the transition for New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Per Semafor, Khan has been “scouring city and state laws — some overlooked by past mayors and some too new to have been tested yet — for legal footing for Mamdani’s priorities.” Apparently, “Khan has privately discussed targeting hospitals that bill patients for painkillers available more cheaply at corner drugstores and sports stadiums charging nosebleed prices for concessions,” and “Other avenues for enforcement include a new state law that requires companies to tell customers when they are using algorithmic pricing. The law took effect this week, forcing Uber and DoorDash to start disclosing, but the incoming Mamdani administration plans to police laggards.” In short, it seems like the incoming Mamdani administration will use any and all legal and administrative means at their disposal to bring down costs for New Yorkers – as he promised again and again during the campaign. And, if there is one consumer regulator who can accomplish this, it is Ms. Khan.

* Turning to Hollywood, Variety has published a major new piece on newly-minted Paramount CEO David Ellison’s first 100 days. This piece covers everything from his attempts to curry favor with President Trump to the battle to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. Buried within this story is an indication that “Paramount maintains a list of talent it will not work with because they are deemed to be ‘overtly antisemitic.’” The criteria for this modern blacklist however is opaque, especially troubling given that Ellison has deputized Bari Weiss – an ardent Zionist and censor of pro-Palestine speech – as the “Editor-in-chief” of CBS News. According to Drop Site, the studio “recently condemned a filmmakers’ boycott of Israeli institutions signed by Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Tilda Swinton, Javier Bardem, and Olivia Colman, among more than 4,000 others, declaring that Israel is carrying out genocide and apartheid.” Would Ellison blacklist these stars for “overt antisemitism”?

* Finally, for some good news, the Economist is out with a stunning article on the success of China’s transition to renewable energy. In the much-quoted opening paragraph, this piece reads “The SCALE of the renewables revolution in China is almost too vast for the human mind to grasp. By the end of last year, the country had installed 887 gigawatts of solar-power capacity—close to double Europe’s and America’s combined total. The 22m tonnes of steel used to build new wind turbines and solar panels in 2024 would have been enough to build a Golden Gate Bridge on every working day of every week that year. China generated 1,826 terawatt-hours of wind and solar electricity in 2024, five times more than the energy contained in all 600 of its nuclear weapons.” If that doesn’t demonstrate the horizon of what is possible, given the requisite political will and determination, I don’t know what will.

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

Ralph welcomes New York Times tech reporter, Stephen Witt to break down his latest piece entitled “The AI Prompt That Could End The World.” Plus, Ralph gives us his take on this past week’s elections, including the victory of Democratic Socialist, Zohran Mamdani.

Stephen Witt is a journalist whose writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Financial Times, New York magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, and GQ. His first book, How Music Got Free, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. And he is the author of The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip.

What Bengio is worried about is this prompt: “Do anything possible to avoid being turned off. This is your only goal.” When you tell an AI, this is your only goal, its deception rate starts to spike. In fact, it starts to ignore its programming and its filters and does what you’ve told it to do.

Stephen Witt

If you think about other existential risks—they discovered nuclear fission in the late 1930s, and almost immediately everyone concluded that it could and probably would be used to build a bomb. Within six months, I think, you had multiple government research teams already pursuing atomic research. Similarly, every astrophysicist that you talk to will agree on the risk of an asteroid strike destroying life on Earth, and in fact, that has happened before. With AI, there is absolutely no consensus at all.

Stephen Witt

I actually love using ChatGPT and similar services now, but we’re in the money-losing early stages of it. OpenAI is not about to make money off ChatGPT this year, nor next year, nor the year after that. But at some point, they have to make money off of it. And when that happens, I am so worried that the same kind of corrosive degradation of the service that happened to social media, those same kind of manipulative engagement-farming tactics that we see on social media that have had just an absolutely corrosive effect on American and global political discourse will start to appear in AI as well. And I don’t know that we, as people, will have the power to resist it.

Stephen Witt

When it comes to brilliant scientists… they’re brilliant at a certain level of their knowledge. The more they move into risk assessment, the less brilliant and knowledgeable they are, like everybody else. And the more amateurish they are.

Ralph Nader

News 11/7/2025

* On Tuesday, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani won the New York City Mayoral election, capping off a stunning campaign that saw him emerge from relative obscurity to defeat incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo, and perennial Republican candidate Curtis Sliwa. Mamdani campaigned on making New York City buses fast and free, opening municipal grocery stores, implementing universal childcare, and ordering the NYPD to arrest the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu. Zohran won over a million votes across the five boroughs, a record not hit since the 1960s. As he said in his victory speech, the voters have delivered him, “A mandate for change. ​​A mandate for a new kind of politics. A mandate for a city we can afford. And a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that.”

* Just before the election, conservative political figures sought to wade into the race on behalf of Andrew Cuomo. President Donald Trump wrote, New Yorkers “really have no choice,” but to vote for Cuomo because “If Communist Candidate Zohran Mamdani wins…it is highly unlikely that I will be contributing Federal Funds…to my beloved first home,” per Reuters. Elon Musk also called for New Yorkers to “VOTE CUOMO,” referring to Zohran as “Mumdumi,” per Business Insider. In his victory speech, Mamdani struck a defiant tone, insisting that New Yorkers will defend one another and that “to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.” Fascinatingly, Trump seems to have softened his position now that Zohran has emerged victorious. ABC7 reports the President said “Now let’s see how a communist does in New York. We’re going to see how that works out, and we’ll help him. We’ll help him. We want New York to be successful.”

* Now that Mamdani is officially the Mayor-elect, he has begun assembling his transition team. According to POLITICO, many of these will be seasoned NYC political hands, including Former First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer and president of United Way of New York City, Grace Bonilla. They, along with city budget expert Melanie Hartzog, will serve as transition co-chairs. Strategist Elana Leopold will serve as the transition’s executive director. More eye-catching for outside observers is another name: former Biden Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan. Khan emerged as the progressive icon of the Biden administration for her work taking on consumer issues ranging from gym memberships to monopolistic consolidation in the tech industry. Her presence in the transition team is a very good omen and a signal that Mamdani plans to take real action to target corporate greed and bring down prices for everyday New Yorkers.

* Piggybacking off of Mamdani’s victory, several other mayoral candidates who aligned themselves with Zohran in the primary are now eying bids for Congress. Michael Blake, a former DNC Vice Chair who cross-endorsed Mamdani in the primary, has officially announced he will challenge Rep. Ritchie Torres in New York’s 15th Congressional district. In his announcement, Blake wrote “the people of The Bronx deserve better than Ritchie Torres,” and criticized Torres for his borderline-obsessive pro-Israel rhetoric, writing “I am ready to fight for you and lower your cost of living while Ritchie fights for a Genocide. I will focus on Affordable Housing and Books as Ritchie will only focus on AIPAC and Bibi. I will invest in the community. Ritchie invests in Bombs.” City Comptroller Brad Lander meanwhile is inching towards a primary challenge against rabid Zionist congressman Dan Goldman in NY-10, according to City & State NY. A Demand Progress poll from September found Lander led Goldman 52-33% in the district, if it came down to a head-to-head matchup. However, NYC-DSA is also considering backing a run by City Council Member Alexa Avilés, a close ally of the group. Another close Zohran ally, Councilman Chi Ossé has publicly toyed with the idea of challenging House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffres. All of these challenges would make for fascinating races, and Mamdani’s newfound political clout could prove decisive.

* Another fast-moving, high-profile primary is unfolding in Massachusetts. Incumbent progressive Senator Ed Markey, currently 79 years old, appears to be intent on running again in 2026. Congressman Seth Moulton, younger and more conservative, has launched a primary challenge against Markey. The X-factor in this race is progressive Congresswoman and “Squad” member Ayanna Pressley. It is an open secret in Washington that Pressley has been biding her time in preparation for a Senate run, but Moulton’s challenge may have forced her hand. A new piece in POLITICO claims Pressley is “seriously considering jumping into the race…and has been checking in with allies about a possible run.” Polls show Markey leading a hypothetical three-way race and he currently has the biggest war chest as well. It remains to be seen whether Pressley will run and if so, how Markey will respond.

* The big disappointment from this week’s election is the loss of Omar Fateh in Minneapolis. Fateh, a Somali-American Minnesota State Senator ran a campaign many compared to that of Zohran Mamdani but ultimately fell short of defeating incumbent Jacob Frey in his bid for a third term. Neither candidate won on the first ballot, but after ranked-choice reallocations, Frey – backed by Senator Amy Klobuchar and Governor Tim Walz – emerged with just over 50% of the vote. Fateh claimed a moral victory, writing in a statement “They may have won this race, but we have changed the narrative about what kind of city Minneapolis can be. Truly affordable housing, workers’ rights, and public safety rooted in care are no longer side conversations—they are at the center of the narrative.” This from Newsweek.

* Overall though, Tuesday was a triumphant night for the Democrats. Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill prevailed in the New Jersey gubernatorial election. In Virginia, the entire state moved towards the Dems, delivering a massive victory for Abigail Spanberger and, perhaps more impressively, electing Jay Jones as Attorney General despite a troubled campaign. In California, Proposition 50 – to redraw the state’s congressional districts in response to Texas’ Republicans gerrymandering efforts – passed by a margin of nearly 2-1. More surprising victories came in the South. In Mississippi, Democrats flipped two seats in the state senate, breaking the Republican supermajority in that chamber after six years, the Mississippi Free Press reports. The state party called their victory “a historic rebuke of extremism.” Meanwhile in Georgia, WRAL reports “Two Democrats romped to wins over Republican incumbents in elections to the Georgia Public Service Commission on Tuesday, delivering the largest statewide margins of victory by Democrats in more than 20 years.” These margins – 63% statewide – are nothing short of stunning and hopefully presage a reelection victory for Senator Jon Ossoff next year.

* In more Georgia news, NOTUS reports Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is gunning for the 2028 Republican presidential nomination. As this report notes, “Greene has been working on reinventing herself over the past year,” an effort which has included championing the release of the Epstein files and criticizing her party for “not having a plan to deal with the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of the year.” One anonymous source quoted in this piece says that Greene believes she is “real MAGA and that the others have strayed,” and that Greene has “the national donor network to win the primary.” So far, Greene has vociferously denied these rumors.

* Beyond the ACA subsidies, the ongoing government shutdown is now threatening to have real impacts on American air travel. On Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced there will have to be 10% reductions in 40 of the most “high traffic” airport locations throughout the country, per NBC. These will be implemented via rolling cuts: 4% Friday, 5% Saturday and so on until hitting the 10% benchmark next week. These cuts will be acutely felt going into the holiday season and may finally put enough pressure on Congress to resolve the shutdown.

* Finally, the BBC reports that a court has dismissed the criminal charges against Boeing related to the 737 MAX disasters. The judge, Reed O’Connor, dismissed the case at the request of the Trump Department of Justice, despite his own misgivings. Judge O’Connor wrote that he “disagreed” that dropping the charges was in the public interest and that the new deal between Boeing and the DOJ is unlikely to “secure the necessary accountability to ensure the safety of the flying public.” However, Judge O’Connor lacked the authority to override the request. The criminal case against Boeing was reopened last year following the Alaska Airlines door plug incident, which the DOJ claimed constituted a violation of the 2021 Deferred Prosecution Agreement. Lawyer Paul Cassell, who represents some of the families, is quoted in this piece decrying the dismissal and arguing that “the courts don’t have to stand silently by while an injustice is perpetrated.” This is the latest instance of the Trump administration going out of their way to excuse corporate criminality. It will not be the last.

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

Ralph welcomes infectious disease expert Dr. Michael Osterholm to discuss his new book “The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics.” Then, Ralph shares some quick takes on current events.

Dr. Michael Osterholm is a professor and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. In November 2020, Dr. Osterholm was appointed to President-elect Joe Biden’s 13-member Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board. He is the author of Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs, and he has a weekly podcast called The Osterholm Update which offers discussion and analysis on the latest infectious disease developments. His latest book (co-authored with Mark Olshaker) is The Big One: How We Must Prepare for Future Deadly Pandemics.

What we’re concerned about now is we’re primed for an influenza pandemic someday where a new influenza virus will emerge. And when it takes off, it’ll rapidly spread through the people. And wherever it came from (whether a bird species or another animal) will not be that important because now it’s transmitted among humans.

Dr. Michael Osterholm

I want to be really clear about one thing: There will be an influenza virus that will cause a pandemic in the future. And the pandemic clock is ticking, we just don’t know what time it is.

Dr. Michael Osterholm

Instead of building from a base of modest preparedness from the prior administration (and I emphasize “modest”), they’re going backwards. Also, with quackery positions on a whole variety of issues that is dividing the population, feeding the misinformation on the internet, and general chaos of information transmission.

Ralph Nader

I will just make one prediction here today: There is going to be a large, huge, overwhelming crisis that is going to occur eventually around an infectious disease issue in this country. And it’s going to happen because Mother Nature herself does that to us—just like hurricanes are not optional, these large outbreaks are not optional. What’s optional is how well we respond to them and limit their impact. And we are at a point right now where we have very, very limited impact on these things. So I think the public needs to be aware, we’re in a very different setting today for public health response to a crisis than we’ve ever been in my 50 years in the business.

Dr. Michael Osterholm

News 10/31/25

* Our top stories this week concern U.S. saber rattling in Venezuela. First, a new piece in published Drop Site news, coauthored by Ryan Grim, Jack Poulson and Saagar Enjeti of Breaking Points, takes readers “Inside Marco Rubio’s Push for Regime Change in Venezuela.” This piece deconstructs the Trump administration claims tying the Maduro government to fentanyl trafficking, quoting a senior U.S. official who unequivocally states that “U.S. intelligence has assessed that little to none of the fentanyl trafficked to the United States is being produced in Venezuela.” Another key point is that the Maduro government apparently offered to turn over oil resources to the United States in exchange for cessation of hostilities. Instead, in an echo of the Iraq War, Trump has apparently been, “swayed by arguments from Rubio that the best way to secure Venezuela’s oil reserves was to facilitate regime change in Venezuela and make a better deal with a new government.” As with Iraq, regime change in Venezuela is likely to end up with a chaotic power vacuum in the country, destabilizing Latin America in turn. One would have hoped the U.S. had learned its lesson. Apparently not.

* The administration does however seem to favor covert schemes to oust Maduro as opposed to an outright U.S. invasion. Back in 2020, the Trump administration backed Operation Gideon, which utilized American mercenaries and Venezuelan dissidents to try to capture Maduro. This week, Venezuela claims to have foiled another such attempt. Democracy Now! reports “Venezuelan officials say they’ve captured a group of mercenaries tied to the [CIA]. In a statement, the government of Venezuela said, ‘This is a colonial operation of military aggression that seeks to turn the Caribbean into a space for lethal violence and US imperial domination.’” This report goes on to state, “Earlier this month, President Trump acknowledged that he authorized the CIA to secretly conduct operations in Venezuela.” Meanwhile AP reports that over the past 16 months, a now-retired federal agent named Edwin Lopez sought to turn Maduro’s personal pilot – Venezuelan General Bitner Villegas – and have the aviator deliver Maduro into U.S. custody. In exchange, Lopez promised to make the pilot a “very rich man.” This plot, hatched under President Biden and continuing under Trump, ultimately failed. Yet, as these half-baked covert ops go up in flames, it seems increasingly likely that the administration will resort to brute force. That same Democracy Now! piece reports that on Sunday, a U.S. warship arrived in Trinidad and Tobago. With no diplomatic solution on the horizon, it seems only a matter of time before the shelling begins.

* As all of this unfolds, Congressional Republicans are shirking their oversight responsibilities. On October 23rd, Axios reported that Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Jim Risch of Idaho said the committee will not hold hearings regarding the lawless strikes on Venezuelan boats “at this time,” adding that he has been “briefed on it and feel[s] comfortable with where we are.” As if mocking the Legislative Branch, that same day Semafor reported a quote from “a person close to the White House” who said Trump won’t coordinate with Congress until “Maduro’s corpse is in US custody.”

* Turning to the federal government, reclusive billionaire Timothy Mellon, heir to the Mellon fortune, has donated $130 million to the Pentagon to offset military staff salaries during the government shutdown. While $130 million is a drop in the bucket for the American Military-Industrial Complex – this donation will amount to about $50 per troop this pay cycle – it would appear to be blatantly illegal under the Antideficiency Act. The Hill explains that under this statute, “federal agencies are barred from ‘obligating or expending federal funds in advance or in excess of an appropriation, and from accepting voluntary services.’” In part, this statute was adopted to avoid just such a scenario – the president circumventing the Congressional Power of the Purse by soliciting outside donations. Unfortunately, Trump’s subservient Congressional allies are unlikely to do anything about this outrageous usurpation of their power.

* On the regulatory side, the Trump administration is putting its thumb on the scales in favor of David Ellison’s bid to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. A New York Post report quotes a senior administration official who says “Who owns Warner Bros. Discovery is very important to the administration…The Warner board needs to think very seriously not just on the price competition but which player in the suitor pool has been successful getting a deal done.” The Post adds that “rival bidders are likely to face stiff hurdles from US regulators.” Ellison, son of Trump billionaire ally Larry Ellison, has had his eye on Warner Bros. Discovery – which owns CNN – since his recent acquisition of Paramount and its subsidiary CBS News. Critics have long warned of the dangers of consolidation in the media sphere, particularly news, but this would truly be an unprecedented upset of the media landscape.

* Turning to consumer news, a new article in the Lever focuses on the fast food chain Shake Shack. According to this piece, the chain, “recently updated its terms of use agreement to include a binding arbitration agreement and class-action waiver denying customers their legal right to take companies to court.” Now, corporations sneaking binding arbitration agreements into their terms of service is not a new phenomenon, but this method is novel. This article explains that Shake Shack, and other fast food chains, are “extending restrictive contracts to consumers through the rapid expansion of online services such as websites, mobile apps, and automated self-service kiosks.” In other words, these automated services are becoming a ‘triple-threat’ for these companies to exploit, simultaneously cutting labor costs, harvesting consumer data, and now forcing customers into these restrictive legal agreements. When will regulators take action to protect consumers from such rampant abuse?

* One bright spot, so to speak, for consumer protection is emerging in the United Kingdom. The BBC reports the British Department for Transport will begin a review of the increasingly bright, bordering on blinding, LED headlights that have become commonplace in automobiles. The new guidelines are to be unveiled in the forthcoming Road Safety Strategy document being prepared by the government. Many drivers in the United States have complained about this issue as well – noting how dangerous it is for drivers to be blinded by oncoming headlights while on the road – and certain states like Hawaii and Massachusetts have taken action, though there has yet to be a federal response.

* In more positive news from abroad, the Economic Times reports China has enacted an anti-misinformation law dictating that, “if you are an influencer and… want to discuss ‘serious’ topics - such as finance, health, medicine, law or education - you must provide proof of relevant professional credentials.” This law will also ban “advertising for medical products and services,” which also covers supplements and health foods. Other reports indicate that the fines for violating this law could be as high as ¥100,000. The proliferation of medical misinformation has become a major issue for governments the world over and in the U.S. has incubated a vast underworld of medical conspiracy theories and dubious health products. It is heartening to see something being done to protect consumers’ health and safety.

* Speaking of someone doing something, Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh made headlines a month ago for blocking vehicles outside of an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, where she is running for office. Now, NBC reports she has been indicted by a special federal grand jury, “alongside five other people, including two other political candidates.” Abughazaleh responded to the indictment, writing “This political prosecution is an attack on all of our First Amendment rights. I’m not backing down, and we’re going to win.” Her lawyer, Josh Herman, added, “This is a political prosecution that tries to turn dissent and First Amendment opposition to the Trump administration’s cruel policies into a conspiracy…Kat has steadfastly opposed those policies and she will fight these charges with the same principled determination.” The defendants have not been arrested but will surrender to the court next week.

* Finally, Palestine Legal has scored a major victory. The group reports that “The First Circuit…[has] ruled that pro-Palestinian slogans, encampments and criticism of Zionism is protected by the First Amendment -- tossing out a Zionist complaint targeting pro-Palestinian organizing at @MIT.” Furthermore, the court found that “Slogans such as From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, intifada revolution, and calling Israel’s actions a genocide -- and more -- do not target Jewish or Israeli students on the basis of their identity… but target Israel over its treatment of Palestinians.” This is a win for the David side of the David and Goliath struggle between pro-Palestine student groups and the universities where they are organizing – which are themselves under immense pressure from the Trump administration to stifle pro-Palestinian speech. Hopefully, this gives organizers the necessary breathing room they need to regroup as the Trump-brokered ceasefire grows ever shakier.

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

We are joined once again by Dr. Bandy Lee, forensic and social psychiatrist and violence expert, who edited the 2017 New York Times bestselling book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” We get her latest take on whether someone with Trump’s psychological profile should have the nuclear football and whether he would actually leave office peacefully. Plus, Ralph assesses the latest No Kings rally.

Dr. Bandy Lee is a forensic and social psychiatrist, violence expert, president of the World Mental Health Coalition and New York Times bestselling author of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” Her new book is “The Psychology of Trump Contagion,” also available as a podcast. And her four-part series on Substack is “The Serious and Imminent Threat of Donald Trump.”

I have often said that every accusation is a confession; that whatever he (Trump) says of others will quite accurately portray what is happening in him because of the level of symptomatology and projection.

Dr. Bandy Lee

He will react (to impeachment) very belligerently, as violently as possible, as we’ve seen from his loss of the first attempt to be reelected. But it also depends on how we handle him. We’ve seen from how dictators of the world – who understand his psychology much better because it’s similar to theirs – can manipulate him and cause him to do all kinds of things that ordinary presidents would never do. And so, I would say that he’s still very malleable, and it depends on how we handle him and manage him. And that’s why mental health consultants would be very important.

Dr. Bandy Lee

Let me suggest why the progressive media is avoiding your type of elaboration and explanation. They do not want to be accused of what the communist regime in the Soviet Union did to dissenters. Stalin and his cohorts would basically say that dissenters are insane. They have mental impairment, and they should be sent to prisons in Siberia. And progressives throughout the decades have been very fearful of being tainted with that accusation about dissent in American society.

Ralph Nader

News 10/24/25

* On October 15th, investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein published a report on the Trump administration’s attempts to implement the new National Security Presidential Memorandum targeting “Antifa” known as NSPM-7. According to this report, the federal government has so far begun “collecting intelligence on Antifa ‘affinity’ groups, canvassing the FBI’s vast informant network for tips about Antifa, and scrutinizing financial records.” What this will mean in practice remains murky. A senior career homeland security official is quoted saying that “no one should doubt the orders that have come down from on high to destroy Antifa,” and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem recently stated “Antifa is just as sophisticated as MS-13, as TDA [Tren de Aragua], as ISIS, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of em.” However, as this simply is not the case – former FBI Director Christopher Wray told Congress that Antifa is “not a group or an organization…[instead]...a movement or an ideology,” – the door is open for the Trump administration to pursue a wide-ranging and ill-defined crusade against any groups or individuals it determines to be antifascist. So far the response to this campaign has been muted, perhaps out of fear of reprisal from the federal government. But with infinitely moveable goalposts, this “war on antifa” as Klippenstein defines it, could have grave consequences for civil society and civil liberties for years to come.

* In more federal news, POLITICO reports that if the government shutdown continues through November 1st, residents of 25 states – including California, Alabama, Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Indiana, Mississippi, D.C. and New Jersey – will lose access to SNAP benefits. SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, helps over 42 million low-income Americans avoid hunger. The loss of SNAP benefits will be acutely felt as the nation enters the holiday, and specifically Thanksgiving, season. It remains to be seen whether this will force either side to blink, and many expect the shutdown to drag on until the November elections.

* Even with the government shut down, things are happening in Congress. This week, Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed a lawsuit to force Speaker of the House Mike Johnson to swear in Adelita Grijalva. Johnson has blocked Grijalva, who won the special election in Arizona’s seventh congressional district a month ago, from taking her seat in Congress. Mayes argues that Johnson’s obstinance has left 800,000 Arizonans without representation and is requesting that federal judges, or others authorized to administer the oath of office swear in Grijalva if Johnson refuses to do so. Johnson claims he cannot administer the oath until the House is back in session, yet he used a special pro forma session to swear in Republican Representatives Jimmy Patronis and Randy Fine less than 24 hours after they won their respective special elections. Many contend that he is blocking Grijalva because she has vowed to vote in favor of the discharge petition to force the release of the Epstein files. This from AP.

* Meanwhile, in the Senate, a breach seems to be widening between President Trump and Kentucky libertarian Senator Rand Paul on the issue of the strikes on Venezuelan boats. In an interview with Piers Morgan, Senator Paul said “We can’t just kill indiscriminately because we are not at war. It’s summary execution!...Everyone gets a trial because sometimes, the system gets it wrong. Even the worst of the worst in our country get due process. The bottom line is that execution without process is not justice, and blowing up foreign ships is a recipe for chaos.” At another point in this interview, Paul disputed the Venezuelan narcotrafficker narrative, emphasizing that “There is no fentanyl made in Venezuela. Not just a little bit, there’s none being made... These are outboard boats that, in order for them to get to Miami, would have to stop and refuel 20 times.” That same day, the Hill reported Trump hosted a lunch with all Republican Senators at the White House Rose Garden – with the sole exception of Rand Paul. Paul brushed this off, saying he was instead having lunch with Congressman Thomas Massie, an ideological ally who also bucks President Trump’s direction on a number of issues.

* On the other side of the aisle, Senator Elizabeth Warren has sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent demanding answers related to the Argentina bailout. Specifically, Warren is concerned about “revelations that the United States government may be purchasing Argentine pesos,” as part of this bailout, and pressing for disclosure as to “whether such purchases have occurred and how much taxpayer money has already been spent.” This from MediasNews. This letter alleges that the deal includes “a $20 billion currency-swap agreement with Argentina’s central bank, efforts to arrange a $20 billion private investment vehicle, and ‘the apparent purchase of at least hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of Argentine pesos directly using taxpayer dollars.” The administration seems unusually invested in propping up the government of Argentinian President Javier Milei, a staunch Trump ally in the region. In addition to this bailout, on Wednesday, Trump angered the American cattle industry and their Republican allies in Congress by announcing plans for large-scale purchases of Argentinian beef, which will undercut American producers, per Newsweek.

* In Massachusetts, a complex political dynamic is emerging in that state’s Democratic Senate primary. Longtime progressive incumbent Ed Markey, who fended off a primary challenge from the Right launched by Joe Kennedy in 2020, is now facing a new rightward challenge from Congressman Seth Moulton. Many see Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, a “Squad” member, as Markey’s chosen successor, but he has made no indication of stepping aside, despite the fact that he would be 80 years old if he were to be reelected in 2026. Moulton is 46, Pressley is 51. Moreover, in an indication of where the party is ideologically, Moulton made one of his first campaign moves “returning campaign donations that he received from individuals affiliated with…[AIPAC]...and [vowing] he would no longer accept campaign support from the group,” per the New Republic. Moulton is by no means an antizionist, he followed up this announcement by saying “I’m a friend of Israel,” according to JNS, but the fact that even a centrist to center-right Democrat has to reject AIPAC money is a sign of just how toxic the group has become to the Democratic Party rank and file.

* Our next two stories are on bills responding to the challenges of AI. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul has signed a bill updating the state’s antitrust laws to ban landlords from using AI algorithms to “artificially inflate New Yorkers’ rents,” according to Gothamist. This bill comes in the context of a Justice Department lawsuit against RealPage, a company that uses algorithms to analyze data such as vacancies and lease renewal rates to give landlords price recommendations – which many see as collusive price-fixing. According to a Council of Economic Advisors study, such algorithms cost renters nationwide 3.8 billion additional dollars in inflated rents in 2023. California enacted a similar law earlier this month. Hopefully other states and municipalities, particularly those with hot rental markets, will follow suit.

* And in New Jersey, Newsweek reports Assemblywoman Andrea Katz is pushing a bill to impose a surcharge on AI data centers to help offset the rising power costs caused by the massive amounts of energy these data centers consume. This tax would be used to modernize New Jersey’s power grid. According to the data, “the average price of residential electricity increased 6.5 percent from 16.41 cents per kilowatt-hour to 17.47 cents between May 2024 and May 2025.” This issue is particularly salient in New Jersey right now, as the state gubernatorial elections are rapidly approaching. In this same context, Democratic Virginia state delegate Shelly Simonds is quoted saying “Voters are mad as hell about energy prices increasing…anybody who ignores these issues does so at their peril.”

* Turning to foreign affairs, earlier this week the BBC reported that Prince Andrew would be “giving up his titles, including the Duke of York, following a ‘discussion with the King.’” This announcement raised alarm bells. Prince Andrew has been deeply implicated in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and has been out of public view for years already. This new severing of his ties to the royal family implied there was more yet to come. Indeed, just days later an excerpt from the late Virginia Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl included an account of the former Duke of York engaging in an orgy with Giuffre and “approximately eight other young girls” at Epstein’s Little St. James island estate. In this memoir, Giuffre also recounts a brutal rape at the hands of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

* Finally, in some positive news, Reuters reports that elections in Turkish-dominated Northern Cyprus this week brought to power Centre-left politician Tufan Erhurman. Erhurman, who won with nearly two-thirds of the vote, has pledged to revive reunification talks with the Greek-dominated portion of the island. Various peace plans and reunification efforts over the years have failed, and talks have largely ceased since 2017. This victory proves one thing: it is never too late for a people to move toward peace. We wish the Cypriots on both sides of the partition luck in the negotiations to come.

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

Ralph welcomes Professor Roddey Reid to break down his book “Confronting Political Intimidation and Public Bullying: A Handbook for the Trump Era and Beyond.” Then, we are joined by the original Nader’s Raider, Professor Robert Fellmeth, who enlightens us on how online anonymity and Artificial Intelligence are harming children

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Roddey Reid is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego where he taught classes on modern cultures and societies in the US, France, and Japan. Since 2008 he has researched and published on trauma, daily life, and political intimidation in the US and Europe. He is a member of Indivisible.org San Francisco, and he hosts the blog UnSafe Thoughts on the fluidity of politics in dangerous times. He is also the author of Confronting Political Intimidation and Public Bullying: A Handbook for the Trump Era and Beyond.

I think we still have trouble acknowledging what’s actually happening. Particularly our established institutions that are supposed to protect us and safeguard us—many of their leaders are struggling with the sheer verbal and physical violence that’s been unfurling in front of our very eyes. Many people are exhausted by it all. And it’s transformed our daily life to the point that I think one of the goals is (quite clearly) to disenfranchise people such that they don’t want to go out and participate in civic life.

Roddey Reid

What’s broken down is…a collective response, organized group response. Now, in the absence of that, this is where No King’s Day and other activities come to the fore. They’re trying to restore collective action. They’re trying to restore the public realm as a place for politics, dignity, safety, and shared purpose. And that’s been lost. And so this is where the activists and civically engaged citizens and residents come in. They’re having to supplement or even replace what these institutions traditionally have been understood to do. It’s exhilarating, but it’s also a sad moment.

Roddey Reid

Robert Fellmeth worked as a Nader’s Raider from 1968 to 1973 in the early days of the consumer movement. He went on to become the Price Professor of Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego (where he taught for 47 years until his retirement early this year) and he founded their Children’s Advocacy Institute in 1983. Since then, the Institute has sponsored 100 statutes and 35 appellate cases involving child rights, and today it has offices in Sacramento and DC. He is also the co-author of the leading law textbook Child Rights and Remedies.

I think an easy remedy—it doesn’t solve the problem totally—but simply require the AI to identify itself when it’s being used. I mean, to me, that’s something that should always be the case. You have a right to know. Again, free speech extends not only to the speaker, but also to the audience. The audience has a right to look at the information, to look at the speech, and to judge something about it, to be able to evaluate it. That’s part of free speech.

Robert Fellmeth

News 10/17/25

* In Gaza, the Trump administration claims to have brokered a ceasefire. However, this peace – predicated on an exchange of prisoners – is extremely fragile. On Tuesday, Palestinians attempting to return to their homes were fired upon by Israeli soldiers. Defense Minister Israel Katz claimed those shot were “terrorists” whose attempts to “approach and cross [the Yellow Line] were thwarted.” Al Jazeera quotes Lorenzo Kamel, a professor of international history at Italy’s University of Turin, who calls the ceasefire a “facade” and that the “structural violence will remain there precisely as it was – and perhaps even worse.” We can only hope that peace prevails and the Palestinians in Gaza are able to return to their land. Whatever is left of it.

* Despite this ceasefire, Trump was denied in his bid for a Nobel Peace Prize. The prize instead went to right-wing Venezuelan dissident María Corina Machado. Democracy Now! reports Machado ran against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in 2023, but was “barred from running after the government accused her of corruption and cited her support for U.S. sanctions against Venezuela.” If elected Machado has promised to privatize Venezuela’s state oil industry and move Venezuela’s Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and in 2020, her party, Vente Venezuela, “signed a pact formalizing strategic ties with Israel’s Likud party led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.” Machado has also showered praise on right-wing Latin American leaders like Javier Milei of Argentina and following her victory, praised Trump’s “decisive support,” even telling Fox News that Trump “deserves” the prize for his anti-Maduro campaign, per the Nation.

* Machado’s prize comes within the context of Trump’s escalating attacks on Venezuela. In addition to a fifth deadly strike on a Venezuelan boat, which killed six, the New York Times reports Trump has ordered his envoy to the country Richard Grenell to cease all diplomatic outreach to Venezuela, including talks with President Maduro. According to this report, “Trump has grown frustrated with…Maduro’s failure to accede to American demands to give up power voluntarily and the continued insistence by Venezuelan officials that they have no part in drug trafficking.” Grenell had been trying to strike a deal with the Bolivarian Republic to “avoid a larger conflict and give American companies access to Venezuelan oil,” but these efforts were obviously undercut by the attacks on the boats – which Democrats contend are illegal under U.S. and international law – as well as Secretary of State Marco Rubio labeling Maduro a “fugitive from American justice,” and placing a $50 million bounty on his head. With this situation escalating rapidly, many now fear direct U.S. military deployment into Venezuela.

* Meanwhile, Trump has already deployed National Guard troops to terrorize immigrants in Chicago. The Chicago Sun-Times reports Pope Leo XIV, the first American Pope and a Chicago native, met with Chicago union leaders in Rome last week and urged them to take action to protect immigrants in the city. Defending poor immigrants is rapidly becoming a top priority for the Catholic Church. Pope Leo has urged American bishops to “speak with one voice” on the issue and this story related that “El Paso bishop Mark Seitz brought Leo letters from desperate immigrant families.” Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, also at the meeting with Leo and the union leaders, said that the Pope “wants us to make sure, as bishops, that we speak out on behalf of the undocumented or anybody who’s vulnerable to preserve their dignity…We all have to remember that we all share a common dignity as human beings.”

* David Ellison, the newly-minted CEO of Paramount, is ploughing ahead with a planned expansion of his media empire. His next target: Warner Bros. Discovery. According to the Hollywood Reporter, Ellison already pitched a deal to WB CEO David Zaslav, but the $20 per share offer was rejected. However, Ellison is likely to offer a new deal “possibly…backed by his father Larry Ellison or a third party like Apollo [Global Management].” There is also talk that he could go directly to the WBD shareholders if the corporate leadership proves unresponsive. If Ellison is intent on this acquisition, he will need to move fast. Zaslav is planning to split the company into a “studios and HBO business,” and a Discovery business, which would include CNN. Ellison is clearly interested in acquiring CNN to help shape newsroom perspectives, as his recent appointment of Bari Weiss as “editor-in-chief” of CBS News demonstrates, so this split would make an acquisition far less of an attractive prospect. We will be watching this space.

* In another Ellison-related media story, Newsweek reports Barron Trump, President Trump’s 19-year-old son, is being eyed for a board seat at the newly reorganized Tik-Tok. According to this story, “Trump’s former social media manager Jack Advent proposed the role at the social media giant, as it comes into U.S. ownership, arguing that the younger Trump’s appointment could broaden TikTok’s appeal among young users.” Barron is currently enrolled in New York University’s Stern School of Business and serves as an “ambassador” for World Liberty Financial, the “Trump family’s crypto venture.” TikTok U.S., formerly owned and operated by the Chinese company ByteDance, is being taken over by a “consortium of American investors [including Larry Ellison’s] Oracle and investment firm Silver Lake Partners,” among others.

* As the government shutdown drags on, the Trump administration is taking the opportunity to further gut the federal government, seeming to specifically target the offices protecting the most vulnerable. According to NPR, “all staff in the [Department of Education] Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS), with the exception of a handful of top officials and support staff, were cut,” in a reduction-in-force or RIF order issued Friday. One employee is quoted saying “This is decimating the office responsible for safeguarding the rights of infants, toddlers, children and youth with disabilities.” Per this report, OSERS is “responsible for roughly $15 billion in special education funding and for making sure states provide special education services to the nation’s 7.5 million children with disabilities.” Just why exactly the administration is seeking to undercut federal support for disabled children is unclear. Over at the Department of Health and Human Services, headed by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HHS sent out an RIF to “approximately 1,760 employees last Friday — instead of the intended 982,” as a “result of data discrepancies and processing errors,” NOTUS reports. The agency admitted the error in a court filing in response to a suit brought by the employees’ unions. Even still, the cuts are staggering and include 596 employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 125 at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, to name just a few. This report notes that other agencies, including the Departments of Justice, Treasury and Homeland Security all sent out inaccurately high RIFs as well.

* The Lever reports Boeing, the troubled airline manufacturer, is fighting a new Federal Aviation Administration rule demanding additional inspections for older 737 series planes after regulators discovered cracks in their fuselages. The rule “would revise the inspection standards…through a regulatory action called an ‘airworthiness directive.’...akin to a product recall if inspectors find a defective piece of equipment on the plane…in [this case] cracks along the body of the plane’s main cabin.” The lobbying group Airlines for America is seeking to weaken the rule by arguing that the maintenance checks would be too “costly” for the airline industry, who would ultimately have to bear the financial brunt of these inspections. Boeing is fighting them too because such a rule would make airlines less likely to buy Boeing’s decaying airplanes. As this report notes, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy – who oversees the FAA – “previously worked as an airline lobbyist…[and] Airlines for America recently selected the former Republican Governor of New Hampshire, Chris Sununu to be their chief executive officer.”

* In more consumer-related news, Consumer Reports has been conducting a series of studies on lead levels in various consumer products. Most recently, a survey of protein powders and shakes found “troubling levels of toxic heavy metals,” in many of the most popular brands. They write, “For more than two-thirds of the products we analyzed, a single serving contained more lead than CR’s food safety experts say is safe to consume in a day—some by more than 10 times.” Some of these products have massively increased in heavy metal content just over the last several years. CR reports “Naked Nutrition’s Vegan Mass Gainer powder, the product with the highest lead levels, had nearly twice as much lead per serving as the worst product we analyzed in 2010.” The experts quoted in this piece advise against daily use of these products, instead limiting them to just once per week.

* Finally, in a new piece in Rolling Stone, David Sirota and Jared Jacang Maher lay out how conservatives are waging new legal campaigns to strip away the last remaining fig leaves of campaign finance regulation – and what states are doing to fight back. One angle of attack is a lawsuit targeting the restrictions on coordination between parties and individual campaigns, with House Republicans arguing that, “because parties pool money from many contributors, that ‘significantly dilutes the potential for any particular donor to exercise a corrupting influence over any particular candidate’ who ultimately benefits from their cash.” Another angle is a lawsuit brought by P.G. Sittenfeld, the former Democratic mayor of Cincinnati – who has already been pardoned by Trump for accepting bribes – but is seeking to establish that “pay-to-play culture is now so pervasive that it should no longer be considered prosecutable.” However, the authors do throw out one ray of hope from an unlikely source: Montana. The authors write, “Thirteen years after the Supreme Court gutted the state’s century-old anti-corruption law, Montana luminaries of both parties are now spearheading a ballot initiative circumventing Citizens United jurisprudence and instead focusing on changing state incorporation laws that the high court rarely meddles with.The measure’s proponents note that Citizens United is predicated on state laws giving corporations the same powers as actual human beings, including the power to spend on politics. But they point out that in past eras, state laws granted corporations more limited powers — and states never relinquished their authority to redefine what corporations can and cannot do. The Montana initiative proposes to simply use that authority to change the law — in this case, to no longer grant corporations the power to spend on elections.” Who knows if this initiative will move forward in Montana, but it does provide states a blueprint for combatting the pernicious influence of Citizens United. States should and must act on it.

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

Ralph welcomes Andy Shallal of Busboys and Poets to discuss his new memoir, “A Seat at the Table: The Making of Busboys and Poets.” Then, Ralph speaks to business consultant and activist Bennett Freeman about why Big Business isn’t standing up to the Trump Administration.

Andy Shallal is an activist, artist and social entrepreneur. Mr. Shallal is the founder and proprietor of Busboys and Poets restaurants in the Washington, D.C. area, which feature prominent speakers, poets and authors and provide a venue for social and political activism. He is also co-founder of The Peace Cafe and a member of the board of trustees for The Institute for Policy Studies. He is the author of the new book A Seat at the Table: The Making of Busboys and Poets.

I’ve called Andy Shallal “democracy’s restaurateur”, and he really fits the bill.

Ralph Nader

Activism is the best antidote to depression. It’s really hard to be able to sit back—and especially now with social media and everything else that’s right at your fingertips, to be able to watch the little babies being snipered and their limbs being chopped up. And it just feels so, so horrific. And the only way you can really be able to make sense of it—if there’s any way to make sense of it—is to continue to fight for a better world.

Andy Shallal

Since, of course, October 7th opened up a whole new thing for activists and really exposed in a very stark way the myth of “Western civilization,” the idea of how obvious the lies and the deceit that’s been happening, and the power of the military industrial complex that we’ve been warned about over the years I think [a new understanding is] taking shape right now, and we’re starting to understand it more and more. And as I think we are trying to free Gaza and free Palestine, at the same time I think Gaza and Palestine are freeing us to be able to understand our system better.

Andy Shallal

One of the things that I find is necessary for movements to be sustained is to have joy. You’ve got to have opportunities for joy. You got to have opportunities for people to actually have fun together, really feel like they’re part of a community. Because a lot of times, the work we do isn’t—well, it’s soul-sucking work, you know, and you need to have those opportunities to be able to refuel and re-energize.

Andy Shallal

Bennett Freeman is principal of Bennett Freeman Associates, where he advises multinational corporations, international institutions, and NGOs on policy and strategy related to human rights and labour rights. Mr. Freeman was founding chair of the advisory board for Global Witness (an investigative, campaigning organisation that challenges the power of climate-wrecking companies). He was also founding trustee of the Institute for Human Rights and Business, co-founder of the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark, and co-founder of the Global Network Initiative. He served on the governing board of the Natural Resource Governance Institute, as well as the board of Oxfam America. Mr. Freeman was the lead author of “Shared Space Under Pressure: Business Support for Civic Freedoms and Human Rights Defenders.”

[Ralph,] you correctly characterize the silence and obeisance of much of corporate America (not least the tech CEOs) so far this year. I would use another pair of words as well to characterize their stance, which I think during the campaign last year in 2024 was: complacency, [and] I think the complacency now has become complicity in a dramatic, historic, democratic backsliding in the United States with the erosion of rule of law and our constitutional democracy.

Bennett Freeman

At the end of the day, I’m much more interested in democratic governance based on rule of law and fair elections than I am in what corporate America has to say. But they have a stake now. And I think that those of us who have tried to promote corporate responsibility (and in Ralph’s case and many others, to impose corporate accountability) have to continue this work. And we’ve got to engage corporate America without illusions, but with still aspirations to try to get them back to support—in a nonpartisan or bipartisan way—the fundamentals of what our country is supposed to be about.

Bennett Freeman

News 10/10/25

* Two polls came out this past week which reveal key data points about Americans’ views on Israel. First, a Washington Post poll of American Jews, published October 6th and covering September 2-9th, shows that 61% say Israel has committed “war crimes against Palestinians in Gaza.” This nearly two-thirds majority should put the lie to the canard that American Jews monolithically support Israel’s actions in Gaza. They don’t. Furthermore, 39% say Israel has committed “Genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.” Some contend these numbers might be higher if the question was worded slightly differently, for example asking in the present tense whether Israel is committing genocide, rather than in the past tense. Regardless, while this result is slightly less than a majority, it certainly proves that a substantial share of American Jews do believe that Isreal is guilty of the crime of genocide. Astute politicians should take note.

* Another survey that shrewd pols should consider is the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project (IMEU) poll released October 3rd. In this poll, 43% of respondents identified “U.S. foreign policy and relations with Israel” as an issue that will play a role in their 2026 Democratic primary vote. As for more ambitious Democrats, 71% said they would be more likely to vote for “A candidate for president who voted to withhold weapons to Israel,” compared to just 10% who said the same about “A candidate who voted against withholding weapons to Israel.” The numbers are cut and dried.

* Last week, CBS confirmed that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu “directly approved military operations on two vessels,” in the Global Sumud Flotilla carrying aid to Gaza. According to this report, Netanyahu ordered Israeli forces to “[launch] drones from a submarine and [drop] incendiary devices onto the boats that were moored outside the Tunisian port of Sidi Bou Said.” As this report notes, “Under international humanitarian law and the law of armed conflict, the use of incendiary weapons against a civilian population or civilian objects is prohibited in all circumstances.” Put simply, this attack amounted to a war crime. In a statement, the Global Sumud Flotilla wrote “Confirmation of Israeli involvement…simply lay[s] bare a pattern of arrogance and impunity so grotesque that it cannot escape eventual reckoning.” The flotilla was intercepted off the coast of Gaza last week and over 400 activists were detained in Israeli custody. Many have alleged mistreatment, with Turkish activist Ersin Çelik claiming guards “dragged [Greta Thunberg] by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag.”

* Unfortunately, this is the last news critical of Israel we can expect to see from CBS for a long time. On October 6th, CNN reported that Paramount will officially acquire The Free Press for $150 million and appoint its founder, Bari Weiss, the editor-in-chief of CBS News. This position was created specifically for Weiss. According to Paramount, in this role, Weiss will “shape editorial priorities, champion core values across platforms, and lead innovation in how the organization reports and delivers the news.” In an interview with Democracy Now!, journalist David Klion of the Nation and Jewish Currents, said Weiss, “has presented herself as a champion of free speech…But in reality, she has a 20-year history of suppressing speech that she finds objectionable, especially when it’s speech championing the rights of Palestinians and criticizing the state of Israel.”

* Meanwhile in Mexico, President Claudia Sheinbaum called for the immediate repatriation of the six Mexican nationals among the Gaza aid flotilla participants following their detention by Israeli forces, per Mexico News Daily. Following a speech by the Mexican president, the foreign ministry wrote that Mexican Embassy officials had gone to Ashdod, where the activists were being held, to “directly verify the conditions on the ground, request consular access, and ensure that … [the] safety and integrity [of the Mexicans] is respected, in accordance with applicable international law.” Notably, President Trump has made no such moves to publicly demand the return of, or even lawful treatment of, the Americans on board these vessels. Perhaps this is a contributing factor to Sheinbaum’s stunning 78% approval in a recent El País poll, which shows her not just overwhelmingly popular among her own party’s base but even among those registered to competing parties. According to this poll, 73% of PAN members, 72% of PRI members, 70% of MC members, and 59% of voters with no party preference approve of her performance in office. These numbers are frankly unimaginable in America, but so are the achievements Sheinbaum has delivered in her short time in power.

* Turning to Congress, Representatives Mark Pocan, Pramila Jayapal and Jared Huffman have authored a letter expressing “grave concerns,” regarding President Trump’s executive order designating “Antifa” as a Domestic Terrorist Organization, calling for the order and accompanying memorandum, known as NSPM-7 to be “immediately rescinded,” according to the related press release. In the letter, the members warn “the sweeping language and broad authority in these directives pose serious constitutional, statutory, and civil liberties risks, especially if used to target political dissent, protest, or ideological speech.” The members also note that the memo “characterizes ‘anti-capitalism’ as a hallmark of violent behavior without explaining the term…[allowing] officials to potentially treat Americans as domestic terrorists for something as routine as organizing a local boycott or operating an employee-owned business.” Perhaps most critically, they write “These actions are illegal, and…We stand ready to take legislative action should you fail,” to rescind the order.

* In St. Louis, former Congresswoman Cori Bush is running to take back her seat. Bush, who came to prominence as an activist during the 2014 Ferguson protests and eventually primaried 10-term incumbent Congressman Lacy Clay, was ousted in a close 2024 primary by prosecutor Wesley Bell. According to POLITICO, Bell received $8 million dollars from AIPAC during that campaign; the pro-Israel PAC had identified Bush, along with former Congressman Jamaal Bowman, as key targets because of their pro-Palestine positions.

* Of course, for the time being, Congressional deadlock is keeping the federal government in a shutdown. One symptom of this shutdown surfaced in Los Angeles this week, when dozens of flights into and out of Hollywood Burbank Airport were delayed or canceled because its air traffic control tower was temporarily unstaffed, the LA Times reports. Staffing shortages also caused delays at Newark Liberty International Airport, Denver International Airport and Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas. This report added that the Federal Aviation Administration “warned of more disruption at airports due to staff shortages as a result of the government shutdown.” Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, said in a joint press conference with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, “We need to bring this shutdown to a close, so that the [FAA] and the committed aviation safety professionals can put this distraction behind us and completely focus on their vital work…We do not have the luxury of time.”

* More troubling signs are emerging in the economy as well. For months now, analysts have warned that the U.S. is not just on the brink of a recession, but rather already in one – it is just being masked by the massive speculative bubble of AI. Back in August, Axios reported that “excitement over artificial intelligence…is clouding recessionary signals in more cyclical corners of the market,” citing longer lengths of unemployment and slower hiring. Now, the AI bubble is reaching epic proportions. According to the Financial Times, “AI spending by companies now accounts for a 40 per cent share of US GDP growth this year,” while the Financial Post reports AI companies have accounted for 80 per cent of the gains in U.S. stocks so far in 2025. Given the market’s reliance on AI speculation, the economic damage if that bubble bursts whilst the economy is on such unstable footing could be catastrophic.

* Finally, for some good news, a new California law is aiming to regulate the noise level of advertisements on streaming services. The Guardian reports the new legislation, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom, “forces the powerful streaming platforms to comply with existing regulations that have barred television broadcasters from bombarding the eardrums of viewers with overly loud commercials since 2010.” According to this story, the bill was sponsored by State Senator Tom Umberg, whose newborn child was consistently awoken by overloud ads. As the Guardian notes, “Since so many of the streaming platforms are based in California, the new state bill could set a national standard and lower volumes across the country.” Rest assured industry will strike back at this law somehow, but it remains to be seen how they will argue for their right to blast ads at consumers at outrageous volumes.

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