Ralph welcomes international human rights lawyer Craig Mokhiber to discuss the U.S. and Israel’s illegal war on Iran. Then, Ralph speaks to investigative reporter David Cay Johnston about the finances of Donald Trump.

Craig Mokhiber is an international human rights lawyer and activist, and a former senior United Nations human rights official. A human rights activist in the 1980s, he would go on to serve for more than three decades at the United Nations, with postings in Switzerland, Palestine, Afghanistan, and UN Headquarters in New York. In October of 2023, he left the United Nations, penning a widely read letter criticizing the UN’s human rights failures in the Middle East, warning of unfolding genocide in Gaza, and calling for a new approach to Palestine and Israel based on international law, human rights, and equality.

Anyone who pays attention knows that Iran wasn’t attacked because it has nuclear weapons. It was attacked because it doesn’t have nuclear weapons, and was therefore viewed by Israel and the U.S. as being a state that could be overcome militarily. But what really is, I think, most telling about this is the hypocrisy of the claims, because the only party in the region that has stockpiles of nuclear weapons (which are entirely undeclared and unsupervised) is the Israeli regime, not the Iranian. And the Israeli regime was joined in attacking Iran by another nuclear power—the United States.

Craig Mokhiber

Israel (which has attacked the United Nations throughout its entire life and declared that the United Nations is an anti-Semitic terror organization) fights like hell to stay in the United Nations, pays its dues every year to make sure that it stays in…and renews its treaty obligations as a member of the United Nations (that, of course, it violates with impunity). So it’s very funny that Israel calls the UN an anti-Semitic terror organization, yet it insists on being a member and paying its dues to fund that so-called anti-Semitic terror organization.

Craig Mokhiber

I don’t think that putting Iran in an existential crisis is the best way to tell them you don’t need nuclear weapons. I think stopping attacking them, their economy, their currency, their scientists, their political leaders, their military personnel, their civilians, their girls’ schools—if you want a country to believe that it doesn’t need to arm itself, this is not the way to go about it.

Craig Mokhiber

David Cay Johnston is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, specialist in economics and tax issues, and a professor of practice teaching law, public policy, and journalism at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the author of several books, including The Making of Donald Trump and It’s Even Worse Than You Think: What The Trump Administration Is Doing To America. He is also the co-founder of DCReport, a nonprofit news service that reports what the President and Congress DO, not what they SAY.

Convicting Donald Trump of tax fraud would be very easy. You establish these corporations [reporting major losses] don’t exist. You establish that he took tax losses from these multiple corporations (in all, about 60 entries over the six years of tax returns). And there’s no defense for that. It’s flat-out fraud. It’s blatant fraud. So Trump has gotten away with this because we don’t seriously treat high-level tax fraud in this country.

David Cay Johnston

News 3/20/26

* Our top story this week concerns a new study titled “Inequality, not regulation, drives America’s housing affordability crisis.” As summarized in Hell Gate, this study demonstrates that the precipitous rise in rent prices are not primarily the result of insufficient housing supply or of vacancy rates. Moreover, contrary to the claims of the so-called Abundance movement, reducing regulations to spur new construction is unlikely to create significantly more housing. Even if it did, that would probably fail to bring down rents, because the real cause of the rental spike is “Steep national inequality.” So, what can be done to bring down rents? Maximilian Buchholz, the lead author of the study, puts it bluntly in this interview: “rent control, tenant protection policies like just cause eviction, and income supports for people toward the bottom.” Simply put, the best policies to lower rents are policies that lower rents. This has been demonstrated time and time again in different policy areas, yet on the whole, Democrats still seem to prefer byzantine policy formulae instead of straightforward policy solutions to the glaring issues facing the American people.

* Speaking of rising costs, Washingtonian magazine is out with a new story on the Washington Post hiking prices for subscribers. Yet apparently not all subscribers are created equal. According to this story, these increases are accompanied by a simple yet insidious message: “This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data.” This is the latest deployment of what has become known as algorithmic – or “surveillance” – pricing. This piece notes other examples of surveillance pricing, ranging from the Princeton Review charging more for the same SAT tutoring package in areas with higher Asian populations (they called it the “tiger mom tax”) to Amazon charging local school districts vastly different prices for the same supplies. However, this new policy from the Post is especially brazen given the straits the paper has recently found itself in, declining by a million subscribers between 2021 and 2026 and hemorrhaging key reporters to a new rival paper sponsored by Robert Albritton, including Dana Milbank, Jeff Stein, Paul Kane and Paige Cunningham, among others, per the Hill.

* In more media news, Variety reports that ratings for CBS Evening News are cratering, falling back to where executives at the news division behind the show “hoped never to return.” The nightly news program, anchored by Tony Dokoupil, has fallen below 4 million viewers; when the previous iteration of the program anchored by Maurice DuBois and John Dickerson fell to this nadir, Paramount Skydance pulled the plug. While this is perhaps just a symptom of the collapse of cable news, Variety notes that ABC’s “World News Tonight,” averaged nearly 8 and a half million viewers and “NBC Nightly News” scored just over 6 and half million. Dokoupil did score a slight uptick in viewership when he took over the Evening News, but that seems to have been nothing more than a flash in the pan. This pathetic showing seems to confirm what seemed obvious all along: there is simply little audience for the editorial viewpoint espoused by CBS’s new editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss.

* The bad news for Bari doesn’t end there, either. According to the Wrap, the new chief is locked in contentious negotiations with the unionized staff of CBS, specifically the 60-person unit behind the network’s streaming service, “CBS News 24/7.” These workers staged a 24 hour walkout earlier this week. Their grievances include everything from new grueling 12-hour weekend shifts – despite no weekend-specific live programming – as well as CBS News’ reported plans to lay off 15% of staff. CBS News already laid off roughly 100 people in October after Paramount merged with Skydance and many believe more layoffs will come if the merger with CNN, which is not unionized, goes through as part of the Paramount Warner Bros. deal.

* In other news, a recent study reveals a fascinating disconnect between the self-description of Democrats and their policy preferences. The study, conducted on behalf of the New Republic by Embold Research, gave respondents five choices to describe their ideology: conservative, moderate, moderate-to-liberal, liberal, and progressive. Only 12% identified as moderate, but another 21% called themselves moderate-to-liberal. Yet, among this combined group, approximately 70% said Democrats are “too timid” on taxing the rich and corporations, and cracking down on corporate criminals. Fewer than 5% of moderates said Democrats are “too aggressive” on these issues. In a word, even the moderates among the Democratic base think the party should take a more strident economic populist line. This tracks with polling conducted during the Texas Democratic Senate primary which found that 47% of voters who identified ...