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 Berry
We 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 Berry
One 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 Berry
I 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 Berry
News 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, she immediately becomes one of his strongest surrogates in the Michigan Jewish community and helps to unite the often fractious Democratic coalition behind him. Recent polling has favored El-Sayed over Rogers by an increasing margin. While a Detroit News/WDIV-TV poll conducted in late August and early September found Rogers leading by one point, a Suffolk University poll conducted in mid-to-late September found El-Sayed ahead by seven.
In more Senate race news, this week saw the publication of a bombshell report of corruption on the part of longtime Maine Senator Susan Collins – and how Trump helped to cover it up. According to ProPublica Martin Kao, CEO of defense contractor Navatek, funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to a Collins Super PAC through a shell company in exchange for her intervening on behalf of his company to secure lucrative military contracts, part of a “sweeping pay-to-play” scheme. When the feds caught onto Kao, leaving him staring down the barrel of a lengthy prison sentence, he told-all. This piece notes that while the Supreme Court has “narrowed what counts as bribery” to require “extraordinary proof of a quid pro quo arrangement,” the FBI “had enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties,” by late 2024. After the election however, Trump “stacked the Department of Justice with his personal lawyers” and “eviscerated” the “specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations,” because they had been involved in cases deemed lawfare against him specifically. The investigation based upon Kao’s story, substantiated by reams of evidence, is now regarded as dead in the water. In light of all of this, whether or not Collins faces accountability for this brazen corruption falls to the voters of Maine.
In our last Senate story of the week, the Texas Tribune reports the Senate Leadership Fund (SLF), the “main outside group affiliated with Senate Majority Leader John Thune,” will “book an additional $30 million in ads,” on behalf of Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton through its connected entity, Texas PAC. Piled on top of SLF’s previous spending of nearly $70 million, this “will to bring its total spend to the $100 million mark.” This spending confirms that the GOP considers this race highly competitive and tracks with past predictions by SLF, which estimated that “a Paxton candidacy would cost $200 million to $250 million in order to keep the seat in Republican hands.” On top of the SLF’s $100 million spend, other groups have poured around $40 million into this race. Some wondered whether the Republicans, defending a broad array of seats, would be willing to bail out Paxton’s flailing candidacy. This new monetary commitment seems to confirm that they will throw as much money as they deem necessary to prevent the victory of James Talarico. While Talarico has raised and spent colossal amounts of money as well, this new infusion of Republican cash has swamped his spending thus far – with the Tribune reporting that in the “month of September, Texas PAC alone has spent nearly $66 million to Talarico’s approximately $22 million, with other Republican groups bringing the GOP’s spending total to about $103 million this month.” For now, Talarico maintains a slim but consistent lead in the polls, with even Republican polling firm Trafalgar Group finding him ahead by one point.
Turning to House races, the national Democratic Socialists of America have endorsed Angela Gonzales-Torres, who is challenging incumbent Congressman Jimmy Gomez in California’s 34th congressional district. In their announcement, DSA stated that it is “proud” to endorse Gonzales-Torres, touting her agenda which foregrounds “an arms embargo on Israel, labor protections, Medicare for All and abolishing ICE.” DSA also highlights Gonzales-Torres’ life story, having been “Born and raised in Highland Park…the daughter of a deportee and grew up with a single mother who relied on SNAP and Medicaid,” adding that “Her organizing work includes helping people move from prison into higher education.” Gonzales-Torres thanked DSA for backing her campaign, and took the opportunity to attack Gomez for being “complicit in genocide, endorsed by Leading the Future—the AI super PAC of Palantir and OpenAI co-founders—and…under investigation for sexual misconduct.” If Gonzales-Torres and Mai Vang, another DSA candidate in California’s seventh district, emerge victorious in November, they will be the eighth and ninth DSA members of the next Congress, a stunning number not rivaled ever before in American history.
Also in Los Angeles, new polling seems to show DSA-endorsed mayoral candidate Nithya Raman leading incumbent Mayor Karen Bass, according to the LA Times. The poll, conducted by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found Raman at 39%, over 10 points ahead of Bass at 28%. While this is certainly an encouraging result for Raman – who finished second against Bass in the June primary and has so far largely trailed the incumbent Mayor in the polls – Raman is still far off from 50% + 1 and 33% of voters in the poll responded that they were undecided about whom they would ultimately back in November. However, numbers besides the raw support tallies are encouraging for Raman as well. This poll found Bass far underwater, with 63% unfavorable ratings, compared to just 28% favorable and 9% having no opinion. Raman’s favorables, 40%, outweigh her unfavorables, 39%, if just barely, while 21% registered no opinion. In short, this race is far from over but as Mark DiCamillo, the director of the Berkeley IGS Poll says in this piece, “Raman clearly has the advantage. Her task is…less onerous than Bass’.”
Meanwhile, in New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced this week that DoorDash will pay an enormous settlement of $131.5 million, including more than $115 million directly to delivery workers and more than $16 million in civil penalties and costs, for the widespread underpayment of 260,000 workers including “workers who were not paid at all or were paid late for work they had already performed.” The Mayor’s office notes that this is the “largest worker settlement in New York City history and the largest settlement involving food delivery workers in the United States.” Samuel A.A. Levine, Commissioner of the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP), is quoted saying “New York City’s delivery workers are showing that opaque algorithms will not have the final word when it comes to how much they are paid for the hard work they do…With this record-breaking settlement and innovative compliance monitoring strategy, the Mamdani administration is demonstrating what it looks like to build an economy that puts working people first.” Moreover, the agency announced they will be partnering with the “Workers Justice Project and the Workers’ Algorithm Observatory to develop software that will allow workers to share their DoorDash trip and earnings data directly with the agency.” This “new worker-driven compliance system will give DCWP an independent way to identify underpayment and other violations rather than waiting for workers to discover problems after they have occurred.”
In some local news from abroad, the city of Berlin held elections this week, resulting in Die Linke – literally ‘The Left’ – winning the plurality of the vote, “more than doubling its score in the previous contest in 2023.” Die Linke rode to victory on a platform focused on the cost of living, namely doing something to arrest skyrocketing rents, with Jacobin noting that “the sell-off of the public housing stock to private profiteers in the 1990s–2000s, plus a lack of new builds, has pushed up costs.” As the top vote-getter, Die Linke’s mayoral candidate – Elif Eralp, whom the media has christened Berlin’s Zohran Mamdani – is poised to assume the chief executive job as part of a “red-red-green” coalition with the German Green Party and the Social Democrats (SPD). Perhaps surprisingly given Berlin’s modern reputation as a bastion of progressivism, these three parties combined won a mere 52% of the vote, while the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won 16% of the vote, an increase of seven points since 2023. Eralp herself is the daughter of Turkish “trade unionists and socialists from Istanbul who were imprisoned after a military coup for their political beliefs…[and] only allowed out of jail because [her mother] was heavily pregnant with Eralp.” Eralp became a human rights lawyer and joined Die Linke after the AfD entered the Bundestag in 2017, per the Guardian.
Turning back to the U.S., this week the Democratic State Attorneys General, after talking a big game, caved and allowed the Paramount acquisition of Warner Bros. to proceed. Bloomberg reports the terms of the settlement reached between Paramount and the states will “include a financial penalty if the company fails to make good on a promise to distribute 30 films per year in theaters,” with this financial penalty said to be “$30 million for each film that falls short of that goal.” Bloomberg also notes that “If the final terms are approved, the agreement would spare Paramount from having to pay late fees to Warner Bros. of $7 million a day, which were to begin on Oct. 1.” Even with these concessions, it is hard to see how the deal will avoid the concerns raised in the lawsuit, brought by 12 state attorneys general and the Writers Guild, who argued it would “stifle competition for film and cable-TV distribution, raise prices for consumers and in the writers’ case, lower their wages.” This settlement was reached despite a heroic last stand by some of the more progressive state AGs, including Minnesota’s Keith Ellison as well as those of Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut – who argued that the terms of the settlement were “too lenient to Paramount.” However, this gang of four were undercut by California AG Rob Bonta, who was under immense pressure to settle the case after Paramount announced they would leave California, Deadline reports. In addition to acquiring the vast intellectual property catalogue of Warner Bros., including Batman, Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, Paramount will now add CNN to its portfolio, in addition to CBS which it has already purchased and put under the editorial guidance of arch-zionist Bari Weiss. According to these reports, the gang of four did secure a concession on this point, with Paramount agreeing to establish “independent editorial boards for CBS and CNN” – though what this will mean in practice remains unclear.
For our final story this week, let us consider a new poll from the Center for Strategic Politics which shows Democrats support removing Trump by almost any means necessary. The vast preponderance of Democrats favor impeachment, with 86% positive and only 7% negative. The second most popular option is removal via the 25th amendment, which is favored by 84% of Democrats with, again, only 7% negative on the idea. President Trump dying in his sleep registers at +40% net sentiment, and even a hypothetical officers coup, framed as “a group of U.S. military leaders” removing President Trump from power and assuming “control of the United States” in order to “safeguard the Constitution,” wins 59% positive ratings compared to just 28% negative. In fact, the only option under water is an assassination attempt, which still scores 31% positive, though outweighed by the 43% negative response. This and many more insights are available from Liberal Currents.
This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.
