Ralph Nader Radio Hour Ralph Nader

Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent the last forty-two of his seventy years on Earth behind the bars of a Pennsylvania state prison, twenty-nine and a half of those on Death Row based on a dubious and extremely flawed and biased conviction for murder. Today, we explore his story and what it tells us about what Ralph calls our “criminal injustice system.” We speak to Noelle Hanranah, the founder and legal director of Prison Radio for which Mumia has done thousands of commentaries, and Professor Joy James, political philosopher, academic and author, who has studied America’s carceral state. Plus, we get the rare opportunity to speak to Mumia himself, who answers our questions from prison.
Joy James is Ebenezer Fitch Professor of Humanities at Williams College. Professor James has published numerous articles on: political theory, police, prison and slavery abolition; radicalizing feminisms; diasporic anti-black racism; and US politics. She is the author and editor of several books including The New Abolitionists: (Neo)Slave Narratives and Contemporary Prison Writings, Imprisoned Intellectuals, Resisting State Violence, and Warfare in the American Homeland.
[Mumia’s] a treasure. And I don't want to make him an isolate. I think there are a number of people who have been incarcerated for decades who study and struggle—that's a phrase people use in terms of books reaching the incarcerated, but also the writings of the incarcerated coming out of prisons. They enable us to be able to learn and study with them. If not physically in the same space, definitely with the same ethics and the same commitments.
Joy James
The way that I see what we're struggling against—which I believe echoes what Mumia has been writing about and talking about—is very complex, overlapping systems of containment and control in which poor- and working-class people are going to be the most negatively affected.
Joy James
Noelle Hanrahan is the founder and legal director of Prison Radio, a multimedia production studio that brings the voices of incarcerated people into the public debate. Since 1992, she has produced over 3,500 multimedia recordings from over 100 prison radio correspondents, including the critically acclaimed work of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
[Mumia Abu-Jamal is] facing a system in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, which literally does not privilege the U.S. Constitution. It's more interested in finality…So they privilege procedure over merit.
Noelle Hanrahan
Mumia Abu Jamal is an award-winning broadcast journalist, essayist, and author of 12 books. Most recently, he’s completed the historic trilogy Murder Incorporated (Perfecting Tyranny, Dreaming of Empire, and America’s Favorite Pastime.) In the late 1970s, Abu-Jamal worked as a reporter for radio stations throughout the Delaware Valley. In 1981, Abu-Jamal was elected president of the Association of Black Journalists’ Philadelphia chapter. Since 1982, Abu-Jamal has lived in state prison (28 of those years were spent in solitary confinement on death row.) Currently, he’s serving life without parole at SCI Mahanoy in Frackville, PA. Abu-Jamal’s 1982 trial and its resultant first-degree murder conviction have been criticized as unconstitutionally corrupt by legal and activist groups for decades, including by Amnesty International and Nobel Laureates Nelson Mandela, Toni Morrison, and Desmond Tutu.

I love it when I hear or read about so-called conservatives talking about “two tiers of justice.” Justice if anything is at least three tiers— it's one tier for white people, another tier for black folks, and a third tier for the very rich. Now guess who gets sweetest deals? I mean look, it doesn't take a rocket scientist, right? If you're rich in this country, you can get every break that you can afford. You can get the best justice, the best lawyers, and they will fight wars.
Mumia Abu-Jamal
When prisoners use the phone or go to the commissary—every item you buy, every call you make, it's

Ralph welcomes Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs to discuss what's motivating anti-Palestinian extremism in Israel, how the U.S. has been complicit in Israel's theft of Palestinian territory and genocide against the Palestinian people, and what the United Nations can do to help achieve a lasting peace. Plus, we share Ralph's recent column: "Israeli Leaders’ Objective All Along Has Been the Expulsion of Occupied Palestinians and Seizure of Their Remaining Land."
Jeffrrey Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he holds the rank of University Professor (the university’s highest academic rank) and he served as Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University from 2002 to 2016. Mr. Sachs has also served in numerous positions at the United Nations, including as President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

The reason that diplomacy is not happening is perfectly obvious. Which is that the core of this government does not want diplomacy, even if it were to deliver security. Their aim is not security through diplomacy. Their aim is “Greater Israel.”
Jeffrey Sachs
I have lived through…watching the U.S. government abandon so many projects, from Southeast Asia through the Americas—these have been terrible projects often—but the U.S. loses interest, it moves on. And Israel needs to actually live in its neighborhood if it's going to survive. And counting on military might to do that is a profound mistake. It's eating away at its own fundamental capacity to act as a society—the idea that you can stand alone in the world community and have no one support you. This is a huge mistake. So I've tried to say to my counterparts in Israel…that this path is not only wrong and immoral, but doomed to fail as well.
Jeffrey Sachs
The Palestinians have one of the highest literacy rates—97 % — in the world. Under dire conditions, they have accomplished farmers, physicians, scientists, engineers, poets, musicians, novelists, artists, and a deep entrepreneurial tradition carried on by the Palestinian diaspora around the world. It is no accident that Israeli bombers directly target Palestinian cultural and educational institutions in their recurrent assaults on Gaza. Israeli militarists have to degrade all Palestinians… to expel them from their ancestral lands.
Ralph Nader
In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis
News 4/10/24
1. An unsettling story in Business Insider recounts how the Israeli military uses an AI system – chillingly called “Where’s Daddy?” – to track Hamas militants to their homes. As one IDF officer put it, “We[‘re] not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they…[are] engaged in a military activity…On the contrary, the IDF bomb[s] them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It's much easier to bomb a family's home.” This policy of bombing family homes “as a first option” is a major factor in why so many Palestinian families have lost unimaginable numbers of relatives in Israeli strikes. IDF officers added “human input in the target identification process…[is] essentially [to] ‘rubber stamp’ the machine's picks after little more than ‘20 seconds’ of consideration — which was largely to double-check the target is male.”
2. As we know from the recent polling on the issue, only 22.5% of Democrats now support military aid to Israel, while 83% want a permanent ceasefire. More surprising is that only 41% of Republicans want  the U.S. to send military aid to Israel, and 58% want a permanent ceasefire. This poll is now joined by a similar poll from the United Kingdom, showing 56% of the British public – including 74% of Labour Party voters – support their government refusing to sell more weapons to Israel, with only 17% in support of continuing such sales. Pressing on this issue, progressive members of Congress Mark Pocan and Jan Schakowsky have penned a lette

Ralph welcomes Chris Anderson, author of “Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading” where he explains how techniques for tapping into the potential of “the internet to turbocharge generosity” can fund and scale-up bold, audacious projects for the common good.
Chris Anderson is the founder of the Sapling Foundation, and Curator of TED, a nonprofit devoted to sharing valuable ideas, primarily through the medium of 'TED Talks' — short talks that are offered free online to a global audience. He is the author of Infectious Generosity: The Ultimate Idea Worth Spreading.
There're actually so many ways to be generous. And in the connected world, just acts of human kindness and sharing stories of human generosity can help transform the culture. We've somehow convinced ourselves that humans are pretty awful and especially “those other humans over there” are really awful and scary, and we don't want anything to do with them. And this is really dangerous because we're taking away what I think is humanity's superpower, which is the ability for very very different people to connect and to negotiate and to agree and to find ways of cooperating.
Chris Anderson
The key mind shift here is to flip from saying what change could I pull off on my own or with someone I know, to saying how can we create a moment of ignition, a moment of bringing people together in a way that they see each other and are persuaded by each other to do something big together.
Chris Anderson
Generosity is way beyond just money. It's time, advice, experience. It's a retired lawyer, a retired doctor, for example, providing counsel to local neighborhood or community groups. Sometimes they make connections, they help networking in these groups. So it's always good, I think, when you ask people for money to ask them for their advice, their time, their networks, the benefits of their experience. And oftentimes that way you can actually raise more money than if you just ask them for money.
Ralph Nader

In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantisNews 4/3/24
1. In an airstrike, Israel killed six foreign aid workers, including an American citizen, along with their Palestinian driver, Al Jazeera reports. These workers were affiliated with Chef Jose Andres’s World Central Kitchen, which had been doing what it could to fill the gap left by UNRWA after the U.S. and other Israel-allied nations pulled the organization’s funding following dubious claims about UNRWA workers colluding with Hamas. On Twitter, Andres wrote “These are people…angels…They are not faceless…they are not nameless. The Israeli government needs to stop this indiscriminate killing…and stop using food as a weapon.” Israel claims that striking the convoy was unintentional, with PM Netanyahu saying “This happens in wartime,” while smirking in a video message. World Central Kitchen CEO Erin Goran, quoted in the Washington Post, maintains that this strike was “[a] targeted attack” by the IDF and called the strike “unforgivable.”
2. The “uncommitted” electoral protest movement continues to pick up votes in Democratic primaries nationwide. In Missouri, Uncommitted took nearly 12% of the vote statewide and over 20% in the first Congressional district - represented by outspoken ceasefire advocate Cori Bush - per St. Louis Public Radio. In Maine, blank ballots - that state’s version of an uncommitted ballot line - took over 10% of the vote statewide, a tenfold increase from 2020, per political blogger Ettingermentum.
3. More troubling for the Biden campaign are the polls - nationwide and in swing states - that show widespread discontent with his handling of Israel’s murderous rampage. A recent Gallup poll shows that a majority of Americans now disapprove of Israel’s campaign by a margin of 55% to 36%, the result of an 18% drop among Democrats and Independents, and a 7% drop among Republicans. The same poll shows that only 27% of Americans approve of

Not a lot of lawyers can say that they helped create a whole new legal field, but William Shernoff can. On this week's episode, Ralph welcomes trailblazing attorney William Shernoff to discuss predatory insurance practices, and how consumers can protect themselves. This special episode was co-presented by The American Museum of Tort Law, and was recorded in front of a live virtual audience.
William Shernoff is the founding partner of Shernoff Bidart Echeverria, a law firm specializing in insurance bad faith litigation. A longtime consumer advocate, he has made a career of representing insurance consumers in their cases against insurance companies. Often called the “father” of bad faith insurance law, in 1979, Mr. Shernoff persuaded the California Supreme Court to establish new case law that permits plaintiffs to sue insurance companies for bad faith seeking both compensatory and punitive damages when they unreasonably handle a policyholder’s claim (Egan v. Mutual of Omaha).
A frequent lecturer and writer, Mr. Shernoff co-authored the legal textbook, Insurance Bad Faith Litigation, which has become the field’s definitive treatise, as well as How to Make Insurance Companies Pay Your Claims . . . . And What To Do If They Don’t, Fight Back and Win – And How To Make Your HMO Pay Up, and Payment Refused. 

Under bad faith law in California and in most states, you not only could get the benefits you deserve under the insurance policy—whether it be life insurance or disability insurance or health insurance. But you can also get damages over and above the policy limits, which are emotional distress damages…Not only can you get the emotional distress damages, but any aggravation of your medical condition. And then punitive damages are on top of that. And attorney's fees are on top of that. So all of these damages are coming from insurance bad faith if the insurance bad faith law applies. And punitive damages are designed to punish the insurance company so that they correct their wrongful conduct in the future, and deter them from unfair claims practices. 
William Shernoff

Most people, if they get a letter from an insurance company—which they consider to be an authoritative source— and the insurance company says, “Your claim is denied because…” and then they cite all kinds of fine print in the insurance policy, most people accept that and don't do anything. They don't see a lawyer. They just accept what their insurance company told them because it sounded quite official to them.
William Shernoff

Insurance regulation is state-controlled. The federal government has been blocked for decades and the Congress has imposed itself on the federal Federal Trade Commission and said that they can't even investigate the insurance companies without being allowed to by a committee in the House or the Senate that has jurisdiction over such matters. So the privileges of the insurance lobby are quite extraordinary even by comparison with other corporate lobbies.
Ralph Nader 

More people should know about bad-faith cases rights—and use them. And not take whatever is dealt to them by insurance companies—denials, rescission of insurance policies, refusing to renew, other delays, or other crazy obstructions. Learn about your rights.
Ralph Nader 

In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis
News 3/27/24
1. CNN reports the United Nations Security Council has passed a Gaza ceasefire resolution. The resolution itself is imperfect, calling only for a ceasefire during the month of Ramadan, but this watered down language paved the way for the United States to allow the resolution to pass. The U.S. has vetoed every previous ceasefire resolution before the Security Council and disputes the extent to which this resolution is legally binding. For its part, Israel’s Foreign Minister stated unequivocally that Israel “will not cease fire,” per CNN.
2. Following the passage of the Security Council resolution, Prime Mini

Legendary public school reform advocate, Jonathan Kozol, joins us to discuss his latest book “An End To Inequality: Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America.” Then, we do a deep dive into the scourge that is kratom, the dangerous so-called pain relief supplement our guest, lawyer Matt Wetherington, calls “gas station heroin.”
Jonathan Kozol is a leading advocate for equality and racial justice in our nation’s schools, and he travels and lectures about educational inequality and racial injustice. Mr. Kozol is the author of nearly a dozen books about young children and their public schools, including Death at an Early Age (for which he received the National Book Award), Savage Inequalities, and The Shame of the Nation. His latest book is An End to Inequality: Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America.
I still give [Jonathan Kozol’s book Death at an Early Age] out to people to show them what indignant writing backed by irrefutable evidence is like. There's too much cool writing in America today about ghastly situations.
Ralph Nader
The Brown decision is now like the Ghost of Christmas Past.  Most school officials have pretty much turned their back on the legacy of Brown and the dream of Dr. King, who was very explicit in his condemnation of segregated schools. I find it particularly heartbreaking that segregation is now at its highest level since the early 1990s. And many of the schools I visit are far more deeply segregated than the one that I described in Death in Early Age.
Jonathan Kozol
We hear a lot about the “school-to-prison pipeline,” but this is a case where the prison is already there. It's right there. They don't have to wait 20 years. Children get a taste of our racist penal system when they're barely out of diapers.
Jonathan Kozol
The excuse, of course, we always hear in the big cities is that finances are scarce— “We would love to make these corrections. We would love to build new buildings. We would love to clean out the lead. But we just don't have enough resources to do this.” I call it the myth of scarcity. It's starvation funding for minority children in one of the richest nations in the world.
Jonathan Kozol
I'm always asked, “Why don't you come up with upbeat suggestions?” I always say I'm not going to be forced into a phony optimism to please my critics. The fact is, right now, we have a racist and autocratic education system teed specifically to the historic victims of American society. And it's not gonna change until teachers can expand their reach politically to the parents of their children, to the surrounding communities, to the unions—not only the teacher unions, but other unions of all sorts—in order to transform the political leadership of this nation.
Jonathan Kozol
Matt Wetherington is ​​a nationally-recognized lawyer focused on high-stakes cases involving personal injury, wrongful death, and class actions. He currently represents plaintiffs in a wrongful death lawsuit against more than a dozen defendants, including manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of Kratom products.
Under the guise of safety, the [American Kratom Association] have tricked legislatures— and now they're trying to do it on the federal level—into making a product that is dangerous, deadly, and has absolutely no proven medicinal purpose, de facto legal.
Matt Wetherington
The kratom industry is trying to put the burden on safety advocates to prove that kratom is unsafe. Rather than going through the normal model that literally every other drug has gone through, which is to prove a medicinal purpose before it can be sold anywhere. They've put the cart ahead of the horse here by saying, until you can prove that it's unsafe, you can get this heroin-like drug at any gas station. So I reject the premise that we have to be the ones that come out and prove that this is unsafe. And the reality is that they have the burden of proving that it has a medicinal pu

Ralph is joined by Tim Judson from the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (N.I.R.S.) to discuss the growing support for nuclear power in Congress, and the persistent myths that fuel nuclear advocates' false hopes for a nuclear future. Then, Ralph pays tribute to Boeing whistleblower John Barnett, who died unexpectedly this week in the middle of giving his deposition for a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit against Boeing. Plus, Ralph answers some of your audience feedback from last week's interview with Barbara McQuade. 
Tim Judson is Executive Director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (N.I.R.S.). Mr. Judson leads N.I.R.S.’ work on nuclear reactor and climate change issues, and has written a series of reports on nuclear bailouts and sustainable energy. He is Chair of the Board of Citizens Awareness Network, one of the lead organizations in the successful campaign to close the Vermont Yankee reactor, and co-founder of Alliance for a Green Economy in New York.

Listeners should know that this very complex system called the nuclear fuel cycle—that starts with uranium mines out west piling up radioactive tailings, which have exposed people downwind to radioactive hazards…And then they have to enrich the uranium—and that is often done by burning coal, which pollutes the air and contributes to climate disruption. And then they have to fabricate the fuel rods and build the nuclear plants. And then they have to make sure that these nuclear plants are secure against sabotage. And then you have the problem of transporting—by trucks or rail—radioactive waste to some depositories that don't exist. And they have to go through towns, cities, and villages. And what is all this for? It's to boil water. 
Ralph Nader
In 2021 and 2022, when the big infrastructure bills— the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the Inflation Reduction Act—were being passed by Congress, the utility industry spent $192 million on federal lobbying in those two years. That's more than the oil industry spent in those two years on lobbying. These are the utility companies that are present in every community around the country. And their business is actually less in selling electricity and natural gas, and more in lobbying state and federal governments to get their rates approved…The utility industry (and the nuclear industry as a subset of that) have been lobbying Congress relentlessly for years to protect what they've got.
Tim Judson
Fusion is one of these technologies that's always been 30 years away. Whenever there's an announcement about an advancement in fusion research, it's still “going to be 30 years before we get a reactor going.” Now there's a lot more hype, and these tech investors are putting money into fusion with the promise that they're going to have a reactor online in a few years. But there's no track record to suggest that that's going to happen. It keeps the dream of nuclear alive— “We could have infinite amounts of clean energy for the future.” It sounds too good to be true. It's always proven to be too good to be true.
Tim Judson
One of the lines that they're using to promote theAtomic Energy Advancement Act and all of these investments in nuclear… is that we can't let Russia and China be the ones that are expanding nuclear energy worldwide. It's got to be the US that does it.
Tim Judson

In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis
News 3/12/24
1. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, has released a report claiming that “employees released into Gaza from Israeli detention [were] pressured by Israeli authorities into falsely stating that the agency has Hamas links and that staff took part in the October 7 attacks,” per the Times of Israel. These supposed admissions of guilt led to the United States and many European countries cutting off or delaying aid to the agency. The unpublished report alleges that UNRWA staffers were “detained by the Israeli army, and…experien