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Ralph Nader Radio Hour

Ralph Nader Radio Hour

Von: 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.

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  • Gas Station Stick-Up

    Gas Station Stick-Up
    Jan 10 2026
    This week we focus on the Trump Administration’s seizure of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro as Ralph welcomes legendary former ambassador, Chas Freeman, who calls it nothing more than a “gas station stick-up.” Then our resident Constitutional scholar, Bruce Fein, lays out some of the legal ramifications of the whole affair.Ambassador Chas Freeman is a retired career diplomat who has negotiated on behalf of the United States with over 100 foreign governments in East and South Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and both Western and Eastern Europe. Ambassador Freeman was previously a Senior Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and served as U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, acting Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and Deputy Chief of Mission and Chargé d’Affaires in the American embassies at both Bangkok and Beijing. He was Director for Chinese Affairs at the U.S. Department of State from 1979-1981. He was the principal American interpreter during the late President Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972. In addition to Chinese, Ambassador Freeman speaks French and Spanish at the professional level and can converse in Arabic and several other languages.We have been engaged in murder on the high seas, people who are suspected on flimsy grounds of carrying narcotics. If they are carrying narcotics, it is not to the United States [but] between Venezuela and Trinidad, from which the drugs go to Western Europe and West Africa. We have been guilty of acts of piracy, seizing vessels on the high seas, on the basis of no authority. And (very dangerously) we have seized a Russian-flagged tanker…And we are risking a war with a nuclear-armed superpower over an issue that is peripheral to Venezuela.Ambassador Chas FreemanDomestically, we have a constitutional crisis. We are the most powerful country on the planet, and our domestic constitutional crisis has turned out to be contagious to the international system. And so we’re seeing the disappearance of well-established norms of human behavior, interactions between states. It will not be easy to resurrect those. The precedents we’ve just set could come home to trouble us.Ambassador Chas FreemanI think we have scared everybody around the world. If there is no protection from international law, people will arm themselves as heavily as they can to defend themselves. So diplomacy is not prospering in this environment. And I would just conclude by saying that the Trump administration has more than decimated our diplomatic service. About one third of the diplomatic service has left or is in the process of leaving public service of the government. So they join scientists and engineers in trying to bail out from what they consider to be an increasingly intolerable situation. Not a happy picture.Ambassador Chas FreemanBruce Fein is a Constitutional scholar and an expert on international law. Mr. Fein was Associate Deputy Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and he is the author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy, and American Empire: Before the Fall.The fact is, if you read the NATO Charter Article 5—I think right now we’ve got 32 members of NATO, and 31 countries would be obliged to take up war and arms against the United States. [The United States’ intervention in Venezuela] is an invasion. It’s every bit as much of an invasion as Hitler going into the Sudetenland after Munich. Everybody knows this isn’t going to be a voluntary secession. If it isn’t by military conquest, it’ll be by coercion, by threats. So we may be at war with all the other NATO members. That’s why I liken this to the Napoleonic Era when France and Napoleon were against all of Europe. He had no allies anymore, and I think we will have no allies either. Bruce FeinNews 1/9/25* Our top story this week is, of course, the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Maduro, who has served as president of the Bolivarian Republic since 2013, was abducted from his home, along with his wife, by the Fort Bragg-based Delta Force squadron. Maduro was then transported to New York and is now being held in detention pending trial. Before getting into the fallout of this operation, it is critical to note the complicity of the mainstream press. Semafor reports, “The New York Times and Washington Post learned of a secret US raid on Venezuela soon before it was scheduled to begin Friday night — but held off publishing what they knew.” The preeminent American newspapers justified their decision to withhold this critical information from the public by claiming that publishing what they knew could have endangered American soldiers. This decision however raises longstanding questions about what the role of the media should be in national security matters. Is it their responsibility to protect American forces as they ...
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    1 Std. und 38 Min.
  • 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 Std. und 22 Min.
  • 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 Min.
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