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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
Episodes
  • American Doctor

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

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

    Coding Kids
    Sep 19 2026
    Ralph welcomes “New York Times” reporter Natasha Singer to discuss her new book, “Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools.” Then, Ralph talks about Donald Trump’s midterm convention speeches and the latest impeachment drive with Constitutional law expert Bruce Fein.Natasha Singer is a New York Times reporter covering the intersection of technology, business and education. She has covered tech industry influence in schools for the New York Times for more than a decade, and her school tech reporting helped prompt California to enact a landmark student online data protection law. In 2019, she was part of a Times team whose tech coverage won a George Polk Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for National Reporting. She is also the author of the book Coding Kids: Big Tech’s Battle to Remake Public Schools.It’s not about the companies immediately making money off schools. It’s about influencing kids, getting customers early and for life. But I think more importantly, it’s about imprinting Silicon Valley worldviews and values on young people. So that you get docile consumers who maybe aren’t worried about wholesale surveillance and data gathering, and docile employees who are not going to push back against being surveilled by their employer or using AI tools or having AI replace them. And so I think this story about tech companies capturing the classroom is not just about how they’re shaping learning. It’s about how some of the most powerful, wealthiest corporations on the planet are able to influence school systems.Natasha SingerSince the time of Steve Jobs, Silicon Valley has attached this fancy word “literacy” to whatever product they have, and then told schools they needed to teach it. So in the era of Steve Jobs, there was suddenly this fervor that we had to teach “computer literacy” because Japan was ahead and if we wanted our country to compete, we needed computer literacy. And then the internet came and we got “internet literacy” and “smartphone literacy” and then “digital literacy”... And now we’re in this moment where Silicon Valley and tech-funded nonprofit groups are pushing “AI literacy”, except we don’t know what AI literacy is and we don’t know how to teach AI. And so it makes it sound really fancy: “AI literacy”. But oftentimes the companies are really just talking about: “Learn how to use our chatbot.” And now you have asked: When are we going to stop listening to these people? When are we going to stop rushing to teach whatever product “literacy” Silicon Valley is pushing us to do this week, and then pivot with whiplash to whatever they’re pushing next week? And I think that’s the question of the hour.Natasha SingerBruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.They’re playing to dodge accountability by saying, “We’re neither for nor against this,” like someone who’s claiming they’re agnostic. Now, how you could be agnostic on Donald Trump, whose impeachable offenses are proven out of his own mouth? All these statements that he’s made are open and notorious. And so it’s almost implausible to suggest that these people don’t know that he has committed impeachable offenses and are deciding to duck for political, partisan purposes (their calculation as to what would help them politically). Now, that, of course, is directly contrary to their oaths of office. Hakeem Jeffries, like his colleagues, has taken an oath (without mental reservation or purpose of evasion) to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. At present, the Constitution is in flames under Donald Trump. And to sit and do nothing—to declare neutrality between the firefighter and the fire—is itself an impeachable offense for which they should be impeached and be prosecuted for perjury when they were sworn into office.Bruce FeinNews 9/18/26* Our first stories this week are about impeachment. On the Democratic side, outgoing Congressman Al Green, long a champion of impeachment, introduced a resolution which “sought to impeach Mr. Trump over the conduct of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection…[citing] the killings of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero by federal immigration agents this year,” per CBS. House Democratic Leadership punted, announcing that they would neither whip votes for nor oppose the resolution, opting instead to simply vote “present” on the motion to table Green’s resolution. Ultimately 47 members voted present and 147 voted against tabling, but even put together it would not have been enough to overcome the 232 votes in favor of setting the resolution aside. ...
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    1 hr and 37 mins
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