The Real News Podcast

In a special panel co-hosted by The Real News and Haymarket Books, Railroad Workers United members speak about their struggle, the situation on the rails, and how you can get involved in efforts to support them. Help us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-pod Sign up for our new...

20 formerly incarcerated people in Florida are facing charges for exercising their right to vote in the 2020 election. In 2018, a ballot referendum in Florida passed Amendment Four, granting certain former felons the right to vote. While the victory of Amendment Four was celebrated by many, lawmakers in Florida had other plans. A law was passed through the state legislature which stipulated that f...

The wave of grassroots worker organizing is spreading to different industries and businesses around the country, including those that have notoriously resisted any and all unionization efforts in the past. The Home Depot, the single largest home improvement retail company in the US, is one of those businesses, and there is a union drive underway as we speak at a store in Philadelphia. As Johan Fur...

Our contemporary political discourse is rife with claims that certain forms of art, literature or thought are poisoning our culture and advancing the decay of civilization. The right has whipped itself into a frenzy over "critical race theory" bogeymans and campaigns to ban any books that contain even a passing acknowledgment of LGBTQ life. While certainly less zealous, the left can be sanctimonio...

On Oct. 6, President Biden announced an official pardon of anyone incarcerated on federal charges of simple possession of marijuana. Biden framed his pardon in terms of correcting the historic injustices meted out against people of color by the War on Drugs, but is it enough? The pardon itself affects about 6,500 people, but does not necessarily guarantee that every one will have their records exp...

Journalist Oren Ziv joins The Marc Steiner Show to explain how the Israeli government is sending a message of defiance against the international community with its continued attacks on Palestinian NGOs. Post-Production: Brent Tomchik Help us continue producing The Marc Steiner Show by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-pod-mss Sign up for our news...

Read the full transcript and show notes of this interview here: https://therealnews.com/ "On the morning of Oct. 1... almost 500 union members from three United Steel Workers (USW) locals at WestRock’s Mahrt Mill paper mill in Cottonton, Alabama, voted to reject a second contract offer from the company," Jacob Morrison recently reported for The Real News Network. "The refusal to ratify WestRock’s...

In 2020, San Quentin State Prison in California had some of the worst rates of COVID infection in the nation. At least 23 people died from COVID after contracting it at the prison. Prisons, jails, and detention centers across the US proved similarly vulnerable to the pandemic, which easily spread among incarcerated populations and into surrounding communities due to the already abhorrent health, s...

Censorship of voices supportive of Palestinian liberation from Zionist settler colonialism and occupation is nothing new. Journalists, members of the academy, and even schoolteachers have found themselves out of a job after voicing criticism of Israel in the past. Katie Halper, a popular podcast host and former contributor to The Hill TV’s Rising, is the latest big name casualty of such censorship...

The life of a graduate student looks much closer to that of an average worker than many universities care to admit. After completing core courses, most students at this level devote the equivalent of full time working hours or more towards research. Levels of compensation and protections vary across the country, but many graduate students are simply handed paltry stipends that hardly cover their n...

Cases of cholera have been confirmed at Haiti’s National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince. Cholera, which spreads through unsanitary water, has become endemic in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake, and is believed to have been inadvertently introduced by UN peacekeepers. According to advocates, the Haitian prison system has been a ticking time bomb for cholera for years. Migrant justice organizations i...

In May 2006, Rey Rivera disappeared from his North Baltimore home. Roughly a week later, his body was found in the second floor concourse of Baltimore's historic Belvedere hotel. The 2020 Netflix reboot of Unsolved Mysteries brought international attention to Rivera's mysterious death. The Real News journalists Taya Graham and Stephen Janis have previously covered Rivera's death, asking why his in...

A chill is in the air, the leaves are changing, and the spirits of the vengeful proletariat wander the land. It's Halloween time—also known as Spooky Season. Once again, staff members at The Real News join Art for the End Times host Lyta Gold for another special episode on our favorite horror flicks. From vintage classics to revisionist takes on the colonial psychology of the horror genre, Maximil...

The first round of Brazil’s elections has come and gone. As expected, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was the big winner, with 48%. But he fell short of winning outright. Current President Jair Bolsonaro exceeded expectations and came in just a handful of points behind the former president. And it’s going to mean weeks of intense campaigning as Bolsonaro has now become a real contender...

The US has become a major global tax haven. For a discussion on this worrying trend and its effects on wealth inequality, Marc Steiner speaks with Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies and author of The Wealth Hoarders, along with journalist and researcher Kalena Thomhave. Studio: Cameron Granadino, Dwayne Gladden Post-Production: Dwayne Gladden Help us continue producing The Marc Stei...

"Flight attendants at Delta are currently pushing to form a union at the only major airline in the US where flight attendants are not unionized," journalist and friend of the show Michael Sainato recently wrote in The Guardian. "The aim is to allow the airline’s 23,000 flight attendants to vote on whether to unionize with the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA) and will face fierce oppo...

Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/trenton-nj-police-pull-man-from-car-break-his-nose-and-search-his-vehicle-for-aggressive-behavior-body-cameras-tell-a-different-story Michael Q. Banks was in his car one evening when a specialized crime unit of Trenton police suddenly pulled him from his vehicle and slammed him on the pavement, breaking his nose. When PAR traveled to Tre...

It’s been 12 years since the catastrophic explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, killing 11 workers and causing the largest marine oil spill in human history. A lot of forgetting can happen in that time. A lot of cultural amnesia and historical distortion has set in over the past 12 years, whether that came in the form of a years-long PR campaign from British Petroleum (BP), the h...

From 'Game of Thrones' to neo-Nazi viking obsessions, medieval images have a currency in contemporary culture that spans from the mainstream to the fringe. Why does the past have such a hold on us today? And what do we make of debates over medieval 'authenticity' that presume the medieval world was uniformly white, misogynistic and hyper-violent? Real medievalists Tirumular (Drew) Narayanan and Be...

In 1973 the organization 9 to 5 was founded as a national association of women office workers advocating for their rights. Organizing women against workplace discrimination and harassment, 9 to 5 brought a new generation of white-collar women workers into the labor movement, and remains one of the largest organizations of women workers in the United States. Their experiences inspired the 1980 film...

Tensions have been building for months as Brazil heads for an electoral showdown that will have major implications for the country and for the world. Leftist national hero and former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is currently leading in the polls in the race to unseat current far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, but the outcome is all but assured, and fears are mounting that the dark, increas...

This time last year, we introduced listeners to the family of Evan Seyfried, a dedicated Kroger employee in Milford, Ohio, for nearly 20 years, whose beautiful life was tragically cut short after he was targeted and tortured by coworkers and driven to suicide, according to Evan’s family. A lot has happened since we published that episode one year ago, and we wanted to provide Working People listen...

The Amazon is a place that both Brazil’s former military regime and President Jair Bolsonaro have eyed with dreams of development, looking to take advantage of bountiful resources. It’s a place where Bolsonaro’s deconstruction of state institutions is wreaking havoc. Where illegal and armed actors are pushing into formerly protected areas and plundering the land to make a quick profit. Where Indig...

In August 2022, the Israeli Defense Forces conducted dawn raids on the offices of seven Palestinian human rights NGOs. The targeted organizations included groups working to support Palestinian women and children, as well as political prisoners. The Israeli government justified shutting down the organizations under the pretext that they were fronts for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palest...

Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/judge-rules-california-prison-must-close Visiting Lassen County Judge Robert F. Moody ruled against the town of Susanville on Sept. 8 in a lawsuit which aimed to stop California Correctional Center (CCC) from closing. Judge Moody’s ruling lifts the preliminary injunction and allows the state to move forward with plans for closure effecti...