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Ralph Nader Radio Hour

Ralph Nader Radio Hour

Written by: Ralph Nader
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 Ralph Nader talks about what’s happening in America, what’s happening around the world, and most importantly what’s happening underneath it all.

www.ralphnaderradiohour.comRalph Nader Political Science Politics & Government
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  • 2025 Highlights

    2025 Highlights
    Jan 3 2026
    Steve, David, Hannah, Jimmy, Matthew. and Francesco give Ralph a well-deserved break and highlight some of the clips they want to revisit from another challenging, inspiring, fascinating, infuriating, and galvanizing year. Featuring interviews with Chris Hedges, Jon Merryman, Mike German, and more.Featured ClipsDouglas Brinkley — The Legacy of Jimmy Carter (January 11, 2025)Chris Hedges — A Genocide Foretold/ World BEYOND War (March 29, 2025)Peter Beinart — Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza (March 15, 2025)John Bonifaz — Impeach Trump!... Again (August 30, 2025)Mike German — Policing White Supremacy (March 8, 2025)Stephen Witt — The AI Prompt That Could End the World (November 8, 2025)Jon Merryman — Trading Life For Death (July 12, 2025)News 1/2/26* Our top story this week is of course the news that the CIA has conducted a drone strike inside the sovereign borders of Venezuela. CNN reports U.S. Special Operations Forces provided intelligence support for this strike, though spec-ops leadership denies this claim. Unsurprisingly, the CIA itself declined to comment. Earlier this month, self-styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth compared Venezuelan “narcoterrorists,” to Al-Qaeda, indicating that the U.S. plans to use the same counterterrorism playbook that they deployed in the Middle East in Latin America. This, of course, begs the question of whether the United States is willing to reckon with creating a miniature Iraq or Afghanistan so close to home.* Giving the game away, Mike Pompeo – who served as Trump’s Secretary of State from 2018 to 2021, told Fox News that the U.S. “can help rebuild…their oil sector,” and that, following a successful ouster of President Nicolás Maduro, American energy companies like Halliburton and Chevron would be able to “go down to Venezuela, [and] build out an economic capitalist model.” This from CBS Austin. President Trump has certainly not been subtle about his designs on Venezuela’s oil, but this naked salivation over handing the country’s fossil fuel deposits over to Halliburton is another eerie re-rerun of Iraq.* In more news from Latin America, ABC reports workers in Bolivia have declared a general strike to protest the new neoliberal government’s announcement that they would scrap longstanding fuel subsidies in the impoverished nation. The fuel subsidies were first introduced under the Leftist government of Evo Morales nearly twenty years ago and have been maintained ever since; President Rodrigo Paz, who took office in November, marks the first non-leftist government elected in the country since 2006. The strike was called by Bolivia’s powerful Central Union of Workers, but so far has largely been led by miners with other sectors, such as transportation workers, appearing more hesitant. When united, organized labor in Bolivia has delivered stunning victories in the past, but it remains to be seen how this strike will unfold.* In more foreign policy news, Israel has become the first country to formally recognize the East African breakaway state of Somaliland. Many question why Israel is making this decision at all and particularly why they are doing so at this moment; speculation abounds about a potential quid pro quo, with Israel extending recognition in exchange for Somaliland agreeing to accept Palestinians pushed out of Gaza. Somalia is currently a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. In a statement with other non-permanent council members Algeria, Guyana and Sierra Leone, Somalia’s UN Ambassador Abukar Dahir Osman said Somalia, “unequivocally reject any steps aimed at advancing this objective, including any attempt by Israel to relocate the Palestinian population from Gaza to the northwestern region of Somalia.” This from Reuters.* In more Israel-Palestine news, American Jewish activist Cameron Kasky – a survivor of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school shooting currently running in the primary to succeed Rep. Jerrold Nadler in New York’s 12th congressional district – took the unprecedented step of visiting Palestine over the holidays to see the “reality on the ground.” He spent Christmas at a “peace march in Bethlehem calling for an end to the genocide in Gaza,” and issued a statement on the need to “end the settlements that violate international law and stop encouraging New Yorkers to move there,” in a social media post that garnered nearly 2 million views. Kasky is seeking to consolidate progressive support in this crowded primary, which pits him against Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg, among many others.* Turning to domestic news, lawmakers in the House and Senate are considering their options to force Attorney General Pam Bondi to release the totality of the documents related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Among these are two tools often cited by Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein but rarely invoked by Congress: inherent contempt and ...
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    1 hr and 22 mins
  • How The Democrats Lost the White House

    How The Democrats Lost the White House
    Dec 27 2025

    We welcome Sam Rosenthal, political director of Roots Action, to analyze their “Autopsy” report on why in 2024 the Democratic Party lost to the worst, most corrupt GOP in American history. Plus, Ralph answers some of your listener questions.

    Sam Rosenthal is an organizer and researcher who serves as Political Director at RootsAction.

    We’re talking about young voters, voters of color in major urban centers and college towns who looked at their choices last year (2024), looked at the candidates in the way the Democratic Party had conducted business and said, “I don’t really see anyone here who’s representing my best interests.” So it’s not that these folks necessarily went and voted for Donald Trump (although some did) or voted third party (although some did). But by and large, people just didn’t come out and vote. They were not inspired. They were not galvanized. And they didn’t see how it would benefit their material interests to come out and support the Democratic Party as they had in 2020. So that’s the ballgame, basically. It’s incredibly hard to come back from a nearly 7 million vote drop from Presidential cycle to Presidential cycle. And everything else that we point to in this report, I think, is a bit secondary to that top line.

    Sam Rosenthal

    One of the reasons we wanted to write this report is because we haven’t seen a similar type of reflection from the DNC, from anyone inside the Democratic Party apparatus. There’s reporting that there’s some kind of autopsy underway inside the DNC. But the subsequent reporting was that there was so much infighting about who’s looking bad, which sect of consultant-types looks bad in that report and which comes out on top that it became too rancorous. It’s not clear that they’re going to release that report. We think this is complete political malpractice. If you can’t have an assessment by the party of what went wrong, they are doomed to run a similar campaign in 2028.

    Sam Rosenthal



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    58 mins
  • Trouble in Toyland 2025 / Stop Underride

    Trouble in Toyland 2025 / Stop Underride
    Dec 20 2025
    Ralph welcomes RJ Cross from USPIRG to discuss the Trouble in Toyland 2025 report. Then, Ralph speaks with truck safety activist Marianne Karth about the need for stronger truck safety regulation. Plus, the RNRH team has a spirited debate about spectator sports.R.J. Cross is the Director of the Our Online Life program, Don’t Sell My Data campaign, and U.S. PIRG Education Fund. Her work as a writer and researcher ranges from the risks of commercialization of personal data, to consumer harms like scams and data breaches, to emerging threats from AI. In her work as a Policy Analyst at Frontier Group, she has authored research reports on government transparency, consumer debt and predatory auto lending, and has testified before Congress.A lot of the toys we found either claim to be or are using one of OpenAI’s chatbots. Even though OpenAI has said that its products are not for kids under the age of 13—but they’re allowing their chatbots to be used in toys, which are products by definition for children. So there’s a real discrepancy here. OpenAI’s just not taking nearly as much responsibility for these failures as we think they should be. And then the toymakers are clearly just moving way too fast and really are not putting out products that are ready for primetime.R.J. CrossThat’s what the attitude has been: we put it out, we watch what happens, and then we make adjustments as the public or as regulators demand it to happen. So I think that dynamic is terrible. I think it’s really harmful. We’d much rather we see the precautionary principle—which is where a company should take safety really, really seriously up front and do more holistic testing before it releases to the public. But so far, that’s not really the attitude you see, especially in Silicon Valley.R.J. CrossFor as challenging as working with Congress is these days (and even as across the political spectrum it’s hard to find something to agree on) I think “AI-powered teddy bears should not talk to your kids about sex” has been very effective. Everyone can be on the same page about that, right? And so it’s been really fun to get to talk to all sorts of decisionmakers and media outlets, who—everyone wants to tell the same story that this is not okay and big tech isn’t taking safety seriously. Everyone agrees on that.R.J. CrossMarianne Karth graduated from the University of Michigan School of Public Health with an MPH in Health Behavior and Health Education in 1979. She worked for a variety of nonprofit organizations in program administration before raising and teaching her nine children at home. After losing two of her daughters in a car crash in 2013, Karth and her husband, Jerry Karth, became involved in advocacy for safer trucks and changes to truck underride regulations.There’s often a “blame the victim” [narrative] that goes on and [policymakers] say it’s not their responsibility. And they’ll say it’s often the fault of the four-wheeler. They basically do not want to take responsibility for it. And part of the problem is that for underride protection, it’s not like crash-worthy features like seatbelts or airbags that are on the vehicle that’s being protected. It’s on the vehicle that we collide with. By the way, when an underride occurs, it cancels out all the effectiveness of all those crash-worthy features built into cars.Marianne KarthUnderride deaths are very undercounted because there’s not even a checkbox in most state crash report forms for underride. So it’s very undercounted, but there are, at minimum, 600 per year. That is how many passenger car occupant deaths there are. But many types of road users should be counted as well — pedestrians , bicyclists, and motorscyclists. That would be 1760 underride deaths per year. And this is a known, unreasonable risk. And engineers who love to solve problems—they’ve solved the problem. They know how to solve the problem. So it’s a preventable problem.Marianne KarthFor years we’ve been urging our listeners to form these Congress watchdog groups. It can start small and build from a letterhead, really get the attention of their members, summon their members to town meetings created by the citizenry with their own agenda, and confront their Senators and Representatives directly… See what you can do in your congressional district. No one can stop you from doing that, for heaven’s sake. You always have to start the struggle for justice in ways that nobody can stop you.Ralph Nader Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe
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    1 hr and 9 mins
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