Our guest Suzanne Gordon, author of ''The Battle for Veterans' Healthcare, Dispatches From the Front lines of Policy Making and Patient Care'', discusses what the VA is, the effects of underfunding and rules made by Congress; who is eligible; the difference between VA health care and private health care; what happens when veterans are moved from the VA to private service providers.

We talk with Jason Kafoury and Dan Meek of the OR Progressive Party. Why does the OR Progressive Party exist? What special focus makes the party valuable? Jason and Dan talk about limits on campaign contributions/expenditures - getting big special interests out of our elections and the two currents efforts to do that. Other issues of importance include support for a carbon tax, controlling diesel engines, $15/hour min wage everywhere, creating a State Bank as well as municipal public banks,...

Leslie Gregory is President and founder of Right2Health and she joins us today to talk about how racism is a causative factor in poor health outcomes for African-Americans.. It is so important that the CDC should recognize it as such and declare it. But it refuses. How do we change the CDC opinion? Leslie feels it is time to stop asking if racism is a factor and to declare that it is so.

What do we do when the federal agency charged with protecting the free and open Internet instead attacks it, allowing large corporations to charge more depending on who is providing the content? In Portland OR, citizens have organized to create a municipal broadband system. We talk with Garrett Hour, founder of municipalbroadbandpdx.org, and Russell Senior, Pres. of Personal Telco Project on why Portland OR should create their own system, instead of having to rely on the private IPS...

Because our sceduled guest could not join us, we built a composite of past programs, featuring: 1) Marty Hart-Landsberg on the crisis about Korea; 2) Walt McRee on public banking; 3) Floy Jones on Portland city reservoirs and treatment of our water; 4) Robin Hahnel, economist on taxing corporations in Oregon; and 5) Aaron Brown, on the false hope of freeway expansions to solve traffic conjunction.

With the ever increasing numbers of incarcerated, we need to discuss how we want the criminal justice system to work.Part of that discussion needs to be around one of the least accountable aspects of the system - the District Attorneys. Daniel Lewkow, campaign manager for the Oregon ACLU's :"They Report to You" campaign, talks about the DA's power and how we can make them accountable. DAs have a lot of power without a lot of oversight. We can...

Guest Anais Tuepker talks about the proposed Portland Just Energy Transition initiative petition for the City of Portland. Noting that environmental groups and communities of color have not in the past worked together, she says that this has been written by a collaboration between them. It would apply a 1% surcharge on the business license fee of national and multinational retail business with revenue of over $1 billion with the funds being used for retrofitting existing homes for energy...

We talk with Nakisha Nathan, Environmental Justice organizer with the Oregon Sierra Club. Just transitions and deep democracy are two aspects of environmental justice and we talk about their interrelationship. We also talk about the difference between the environmental movement historically and who benefited from it, and the environmental justice movement seeking to bring everyone to the table; the differences between the environmental movement and the environmental justice movement and how we...

This is a series of weekly interviews between host David Delk and various guests working to end corporate domination and establishing true democracy.

The pushers of the economic trend of neo-liberal capitalism looked at NAFTA as a way to be cutting edge in their free'trade agreements...with the intention of radically transforming Mexico's economy." Russell Lum, Trade Justice Coordinator with Oregon Fair Trade Campaign talks about the contradictory reasons for NAFTA's enactment; how NAFTA has transformed the US and Mexico; and what "We the People" should demand of a re-negotiated NAFTA.

Ending no-cause evictions! Lack of rent controls! Those are issues being targeted by guest Margot Black, organizer with Portland Tenants United, a two year old tenant rights activist organization in Portland OR. Margo talks about origins of the the organization and actions taken at both the city and state level to level the playing field between land and apartment owners and the tenants.

Charles Johnson of the Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility's Joint Task Force on Nuclear talks with us again about the current state of the nuclear industry. He starts by focusing on SB990 in the Oregon Legislature and its demise. And then move to discussion of the Columbia Generating Station in Wash. state and efforts to close it down with a focus on how we replace its energy production with wind and solar renewable energy. And combine the renewable energy with storage abilities like...

Our guest Julia DeGraw, NW Senior Organizer with Food and Water Watch talks with us on the efforts of Nestle to establish its first bottled water plant in the Pacific NW in the Oregon town of Cascade Locks.

Host David Delk talks with Food and Water Watch's (FWW) Julia DeGraw about who and what FWW is and does. Julia continues with a discussion of current campaignswhich will focus on local and state action because we can not expect leadership on the climate crisis to come from the federal level. FWW has a new campaign to get "Off Fossil Fuels" by 2035. We also talk about their campaign for GMO labeling and the future of that. Julia also talks about the massive mega-dairy, Three Mile Dairy, in...

Guest Martin Hart-Landsberg, retired economics professor at Lewis & Clark College and member of the board of the Korea Policy Institute, talks with host David Delk about the causes of the rising tensions between the US and No Korea. Martin also has a blog called Report from the Economic Front. We talk about the history of American involvement with both North and South Korea, how So Korea outspends No Korea on their militaries, the lack of good faith bargaining on the part of the US....

Our guests are Chuck Johnson, Director of the Joint Task Fore on Nuclear Power, OR/WA Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Dan Meek, legal advisor to the Oregon Progressive Party.

Chuck Johnson, Director of the Joint Task Force on Nuclear Power, talks with host David Delk about small nuclear modular reactors(SMR). Chuck explains the reasons for opposing the development of nuclear energy and the similarity between tradition nuclear plants and SMRs. We touch on the current difficulties of the nuclear industry with the bankruptcy of Westinghouse. And we look at the current status of SB990 in the Oregon legislature, written to override existing prohibitions in Oregon to...

Our guest is Dr. Martin Donohoe, adviser to Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility and author of "Public Health and Social Justice". The topic is "Science in the New Dark Age". What is the New Dark Age? What is science? How has science been attacked in the past? How has Pres. Trump attached science and with what consequences? What is the role of corporate lobbyists and the media in this present attack? After addressing that, we also talk about single-payer health care and more. We...

Departing from the usual Populist Dialogues format, today we instead watch three shorter clips. The first clip is of an interview with David Delk by Jim Lockhart on Oregon bill SB 990 which would overrule existing Oregon law which prevents the building of nuclear power sites in the state; the second clip is an advocacy piece produced by David Delk for a 28th Constitutional Amendment; and the third clip is of Walt McRee, Chair of the Public Banking institute.

Host David Delk talks with Dan Serres, Conservation Director of Columbia Riverkeeper. Dan describes the demise of most fossil fuel projects in the Pacific Northwest as well as the current state of those that remain - the coal terminal in Longview (WA), the methanol plant in Kalama, WA and the coal terminal in Longview, WA. We also discusses the proposal by Portland General Election to develop their old Boardman coal burning plant to use natural gas instead, exchanging one fossil fuel for...

National Organizing Director of Citizens Trade Campaign, Elizabeth Swager, talks with us about corporate trade agreements, like NAFTA, CAFTA and many more. She draws the differences between these agreements and what progressive people and organizations would like. Progressives want policies which are fair and just for the people, no for multi-national corporations. She cites one specific example of how these agreements have elevated corporate rights over human rights. The conversation ends...