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Bruce Stenman's avatar

What is overlooked 100% of the time is that 90% of the media in the USA is controlled by 6 corporations. The Republicans have been de-funding public media and intimidating them to the degree they no longer provide an alternate perspective or factual information. In rural areas the situation is terrible with cable providers only having Fox News for their customers which explains the voting behavior of people living in these areas. The elites control the media every bit as much as those in Russia or China or other non-democratic countries.

L O's avatar

not "elites", the Parasitic Predatory class, they are not elite, they are insanely greedy

Ralph's avatar

People need to think for themselves. What a bunch of sheep!

Don Harris's avatar

Unfortunately Ralph only talks about combating this problem by getting the big money corporate controlled legislators to pass legislation that the big money interests have no interest in passing. That will not work any better in the next fifty years than it did in the last fifty years.

We can accomplish the goal of media that provides alternative perspectives and factual information without getting the big money corporate controlled legislators to pass any legislation.

We can start it by getting Ralph to explore an alternative perspective of forming a non-profit media conglomerate selling shares for 100 dollars each. These shares must be owned by citizens and no one person can own more than ten shares.

The shares could only be sold for 100 dollars as the purpose of owning the shares is for ordinary citizens to control the media conglomerate and not to make money off the value of the shares.

Just 6-7% of the 150 million voters investing in one share would total 1 billion dollars to get this started and could be just the tip of the iceberg.

If you would like to do more than just recognize the problem then send Ralph an email at info@csrl.org telling him you want him to help make this non-profit media conglomerate a reality.

SH's avatar

e-mail sent - think it is a great idea :)

Eric Brooks's avatar

Bruce, that takeover of the media happened under President Bill Clinton, not the Republicans. Look up the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Paul Palmer's avatar

Bruce: Also overlooked is that people seem to choose to listen to those bought and sold media over and over. I don't know why people are wedded to CNN etc. but they are. And you can't get them to listen to a more free medium. I don't know why but I've had no success with that.

John Bolger's avatar

It’s a uniparty. The liberal class, which is useless, cannot see neoliberalist political tactics bc they are more difficult than bashing the Orange overlord. My relatives have a cognitive dissonance about this. They went to university and are good boyscouts & Girl Scouts so they throw radicals & iconoclasts who have courage, under the bus on behalf of their “alcohol parent political abusers.” Take Assange for example. All corporate media is corporate state media today. Fox’s war on journalism is 20+ years old. The corporate state runs everything including campaigns. AIPac of course. Kamala & Trump both served 3 letter agencies & the Zionists.

Sister Stan's avatar

Corporations own America with constitutional rights as if human, living persons. The issue extends way beyond Citizens United & "money as free speech". PLEASE Support Move To Amend. Help fight to end this travesty of justice. MTA is national, non-profit grassroots organization working with other like minded groups for over 10 years; they will NOT back down despite the notion that it is an impossibility, given our current supreme court. Hard? Yes. Quit? NO!!Be part of the solution, Support We The People Amendment, HJR54 moving through the House https://www.movetoamend.org/

shirley saffy's avatar

We have never been given a breakdown of the 2024 vote count. Nor was it ever acknowledged publicly that dissenters were never given a hearing on taxpayer dollars being paid to fund the destruction of Palestine.

The vote “ uncommitted” or for a third party candidate in protest were never published and meant election result discussions that followed were hollow and meaningless.

Shirley Saffy

Kathlean J Keesler's avatar

And Sending out unconditional love towards all captive to the Ralph Nader radio hour.

May God continue to fill your lungs with air.

Doug Girard's avatar

To see Hilary Clinton still out there speaking up for Genocide and belittling young people who protest against such evil actions is indicative of how the Democrats have truly lost their way. She is repugnant and is certainly turning a wide range of voters away from participating in elects; as they recognize that it would be a better world and a more inclusive society if voices like Ms. Clinton’s would shut the hell up and just fade away.

Selina Sweet's avatar

We must figure out how to dump the current Democratic Leadership en masse. Totally unsurprising is their chicken hearted response to publicizing the evaluation of their dastardly handling of the (undemocratic) presidential race. Gutless. They cannot stand looking at their own shadow. Just like corporations have to be dragged into court for their malfeasance, the Democratic Leadership is incapable of courageous self-reflection on their own. They choose to remain blind to the truth of their own (gross) inadequacy as they choose to remain blind and dumb to the grave seriousness of the conditions of the greater citizenry. Blind and dumb because the redress of such conditions requires access to creative thought outside the systems that created such dire conditions. And the current Democratic Leadership - for all their fine education and political experience and greed - is wholly out-of-step incapable of accessing such thought realms. Their identities are stagnant.

Doug Girard's avatar

Stagnant is the perfect word, like a pond with no nutrients to enrich its biodiversity, which has been taken over by scum. Anti-Trump is a weak platform to stand on, a gutless diversion away from substance. Sad.

Bill Kryzanowski's avatar

Autopsy is RIGHT!! Democrats are STILL BRAIN DEAD!! ZOHRAN Mamdani is leading the way!! Millionaire Democrats (to include Warren & Doggett & Harris & Walz) HAVE HOPELESSLY FAILED POOR WORKERS!! It took a poor unknown, ZOHRAN MAMDANI!! To rekindle some spark among BRAIN DEAD & DO-NOTHING, SO-CALLED "Democrats" !!

Selina Sweet's avatar

The Democratic Leadership must be rendered vulnerable to being replaced entirely by ambitious, democratically minded, socialistically angled, group of humanity with eyes to see ears to hear and brain-hearted to manifest creative, practical answers to the needs of the greater citizenry - health, home, income, dignity, work, education, climate, and capable of decent, expert diplomacy for an emphasis on cooperation and collaboration as substitutes for war in a multinodal world.

Selina Sweet's avatar

Isn't it an illusion to harbor a notion that the Democratic Party leadership is open to alternative points of view when their actions/support have been consistently rigidly

attached to "centrism"? At least since Reagan? Isn't that leadership a shared psychological or character type born, bred, nurtured at the managerial, Ivy League, corporatized, bankafied, collegial, upper-middle and upper socio-economic class nest? What wild impulse would oblige them to "break set"? Render them sensitive to, vulnerable to risking their comfort of status, money, power, connection not to suffer apoplexy at a vision of supporting a candidate like Mamdani or Bernie for President? Didn't they engineer the ditching of Hogg as Vice President for his audacity to promote primarying stale and or Repub-lite so called "Democrats" (think: Josh Gottheimer)? What I want to know is how can this crew (like Carville, Clintons, Obamas, Schumer etc) be sent out to pasture and replaced by fresh, creative, politically astute (think: Mamdani) younger, bright, ambitiously devoted to raising the poor, curbing corporate/Wall Street and War Industry power, instituting Medicare for All-job training-basic income for all and worthwhile necessarily ambitious climate change actions. Schumer and Jeffries types have got to be pushed out into privatized jobs because they are wholly insufficient to meet the political necessities of the moment.

SH's avatar

Shucks, I suspect if offered enough $$$ they would leave, isn't that the D's MO? - or are they promised more if they stick around and do the Corp bidding awhile longer ..

Selina Sweet's avatar

I really understand your cynicism and ridicule - fully. And, share it. And, at the same time, I crave ideas that advance possibilities. Given what we know of the whole world picture and the USA's "state" in it, including too our planet Gaia's "state", I sense we have very little time - if any - to organize, envision, act in ways we've never done before to transform. what must be transformed. I refuse "give-up" and "passivity" because our world is so infinitely wondrous and life in all its forms so incredibly astonishing.

SH's avatar

I agree - I haven't given up on we the people, only on the DP ...

See my post above ...

Barbara Beth Ferrill's avatar

You should have Professor Richard Wolfe on your show. He's predicting the end of US domination and the failure of capitalism as we know it. In the not too distant future.

L O's avatar

Ralph! they lost because blue is also the other cheek of the most corrupt uni-party in American history.

In your wildest dreams, when you were fighting the big corporations of the day, did you see these multinationals spreading into this cancerous monster controling every part of our lives?

SH's avatar

I suspect he did - that's why he ran for Pres 4 times ...

photogart's avatar

Yes, he did see that. He warned about it. Not enough people listened to him, sadly.

TomL's avatar

No one has the guts to do the right thing once they are in government unless there are groundswells of public support and teams of dedicated public servants so they can act as a coalition. FDR was able to do a lot of good after an economic collapse with great pain. That would have to happen again for major positive political change to occur. Let's face it, most of us have been too comfortable for too long living in our bubbles of privilege. None of those who are ideologically righteous give up 50%-90% of their wealth to support the needy or to advance righteous causes. They give slivers of money to charity, maybe even the pharisaical and sanctimonious 10% and take all their tax deductions. We'll never have major and dramatic political or social change without large numbers making daily and sacrificial personal sacrifices with lots of pain.

Eric Brooks's avatar

We *must* stop with self delusion like that of Roots Action in this week's first segment. It is destroying progressivism and our country. I trained with Nader's PIRGs in 1985 and have been a full time, small donor funded, environmental, social justice and consumer grassroots organizer ever since. When I started (when Reagan and then George H W Bush were president) we were still making net environmental and social justice gains because the legacy and power of the global 60s movement forced both Republicans and Democrats to respond to public demands.

But in backlash to this, and spurred by the Powell memo, corporations and banks set out to reverse these gains, and they *succeeded*.

Beginning with the Clinton administration banks like Citigroup and Goldman Sachs along with other corporate interests (most prominently fossil fuel companies) simply took over the Democratic Party. The net balance ever since is that we have been *badly* losing ground on environmental and social justice protections with almost no gains whatsoever.

Under the Clinton Administration, the US prison population was doubled, welfare was drastically rolled back, media was delivered into the ownership of a handful of corporate giants (essentially ending free speech on political and environmental matters) and the White House was *literally* run by former bank executives (as it has been ever since under *both* Democrats and Republicans).

The Democrats under Clinton, Obama and Biden, have expanded fossil fuel extraction and use *more* than their Republican counterparts *including* Trump.

The Democratic and Republican "Parties" are *not* political parties any more. They are corporations, funded by corporations, banks, and investment firms like BlackRock.

The idea that we can somehow reform the now completely corporate Democratic Party is as absurd as the idea that if we just work hard enough we can get McDonald's to switch from selling hamburgers, to selling nothing but healthy garden salads from the produce of local farmers. It will not *ever* happen.

We MUST face reality, stop wasting massive time, people power and resources trying to reform the DNC and GOP, and instead put all of those resources into *aggressively* changing local and state election laws in order to shift voting to Proportional Representation and Ranked Choice, and institute 100% universal public financing of electoral campaigns.

This is the only way to reverse the political collapse of this country, and if we don't do it, in a decade or two, we won't *have* a country.

Mike DiMaio's avatar

Doesn't matter what the "democratic" party does, I will never, ever, support/vote for another one again, the cancer at the "leadership" position is stage 5 and can't be fixed, voting only 3rd party from here on out, the party is as dead to me as the republican party and I used to be a district member, fuck them, they way they fucked you. Cuck Schumer is a corrupt piece of shit and AIPAC Hakeem is a joke, they shouldn't even be in congress, let alone "leadership", the fact they are in leadership shows you how awful the dem congress really is, like I said, NEVER again.

Ralph's avatar

The Democrats have been on the take since the early 70s. They will continue to push centrists policies and politicians. They will LOEE !

L O's avatar

is this really Ralph Nader writing these replies (Ralph's Substack)

Steve Skrovan's avatar

No. That is some other Ralph. The Ralph Nader Radio Hour is Ralph's Substack.

Riley (He/Him)'s avatar

Ralph was cooking this ep!

don dunne's avatar

For decades the democratic party forgot the working stuffs of America and let those smart a _ _ lazy MBA business school graduates and those Nobel Prize economist's with know ethical concerns or knowledge of democracy take over and use the financial and legal systems to line their pockets.

Once MBA graduates were taught by our leading university and business schools " take all you can get , we need your endorsements at pay back time, as in the movie, " The God Father, " it's only business" , it didn't take long before our government leaders fell pray to the lobbyist, into and out the door to and from government with profits for all.

Welcome to America government and business finance, hedge funds, leverage and lease buy outs, private capital and equity funding,, questionable IPO's , foot notes, regarding off balance sheet executive ceo agreements. Today is it really worth the time to read corporate financial statements ? Would you like a baloney sandwich for lunch? Etc etc etc .

All the Republicans needed was an easy to manipulata narsistic old geezer blow hart,,a sorta phoney, unwise street type, a loser named Trump to come along in a dark blue business suit and red tie coming down an escalator to fool the average Joe ," he's one of us " really?

There is an old saying,"you can fool some of the people some of the time but you can't fool all the people all of the time."

Are the Republicans going to get their come up ins ?

Unfortunately the Republicans ( including the maga's) the people are beginning to find out that the old gas bag Adolf Trump is beginning to run out of gas ,,( how many countries is trump going to declare war on before both parties get involved to stop him ? Is a chip company really worth 5 trillion dollars , the last time I checked there were only about 8 billion people in the world. Is $5 a good deal for a half a loaf of bread? Gasoline's cheap , are we heading for a world wide recession like last time ?

Sometimes when you clean house or an apartment or the old barn all you need is a big stick,a shovel and a big broom, maybe that's all both parties will need to clean house in 26 .

How about it America?

Happy New Year !

Good luck America have a great day my friends.

'

William Frenger's avatar

It matters not which side of this corrupt duopoly Americans give their religious allegiance to, there will be no change as long as they keep voting for it. Israel and the Capitalist order own this government and more than half of brainwashed Americans line up, Red or Blue, to perpetuate it in every election. There can be no change as long as Americans continue to languish in this.

Frances's avatar

Great show. Ralph was on fire today , his questions were very on point . For party options why not interview Maurice Mitchell from the Working Families Party, it would be important for voters choices .

https://workingfamilies.org/

SH's avatar

The problem I have seen with the WFP is that they never seem to run a candidate of their own but always wind up cross-endorsing the D .. so whats the point ...