The Real News Podcast

After the independent and worker-led Amazon Labor Union made history by unionizing the JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island—the first Amazon facility in the US to successfully vote to unionize—workers at a second facility in the same Staten Island complex, the LDJ5 sorting center, are voting in their own union election this week. On Sunday, April 24, the ALU held a rally in support of LDJ5 wor...

If you didn’t enjoy Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic book Station Eleven, you’re not alone—Lyta didn’t like it either. However, the HBO Max mini-series, starring Mackenzie Rio Davis and Himesh Patel, brings a powerful, unique, and deeply human quality to St. John Mandel’s story of a devastating global flu pandemic and societal collapse. In the latest installment of Art for the End Times, L...

On Sunday, April 24, the independent Amazon Labor Union held a rally outside the JFK8 fulfillment center on Staten Island, New York, where, just one month ago, workers shocked the world by becoming the first Amazon workforce in the US to successfully vote to unionize. With supporters from organized labor and the surrounding community showing up in full force, along with high-profile appearances fr...

After two-plus years of pandemic hell, it is beyond understandable that so many desperately want to forget the horror and havoc of COVID-19 and move on with their lives, but it’s imperative that we learn from catastrophic pandemic policy mistakes and hold accountable the powerful forces that took advantage of this crisis for their own gain. Aided by governments and public-private partnerships, Big...

The continued arrests of a group of Texas cop watchers is raising serious questions about how the law is applied to citizen journalists. In this episode of the Police Accountability Report, hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis investigate two recent arrests of Corners News, whom police charged after he tried to film a series of accident scenes. We discuss the applicable laws and rising legal threat...

Right now, a majority of residential advisers at Kenyon College, organized with the Kenyon Student Worker Organizing Committee, are on an indefinite strike over unfair labor practices. At the same time, over 1,750 graduate student workers at Indiana University with the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition are on strike, demanding that the university administration formally recognize their union, pay...

Alamance County, North Carolina, is probably best known for its defense of Confederate monuments and backing Republicans in every presidential campaign since Jimmy Carter. But an important grassroots fight for racial and economic justice is currently unfolding there. One of the leaders of that fight is Dreama Caldwell, a Black working mother who, in 2015, faced a $40,000 bail for a crime she didn’...

As is the case with any war, the war in Ukraine is being fought on many fronts: in the streets, in the financial realm, and in the media. The battle over information about the war itself, how it started, and who is most at fault (and what their motivations are) is a critical factor shaping how governments and citizens around the world respond to the unfolding conflict. In this panel, TRNN contribu...

The debate over defunding police has become part of a broad ideological battle over how and when law enforcement should face public accountability. Police Accountability Report hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis examine this debate in the context of their own reporting on police overreach and abuse. The pair breaks down the flaws in the anti-defund argument by revealing how law enforcement partis...

Throughout our special special series of The Marc Steiner Show, co-hosted by Marc Steiner and Bill Fletcher Jr., we have examined the rise of the right in the US and beyond, we have explored the different tendencies and motivations fueling today’s surge in far-right politics, and we have engaged with a range of critical voices who have helped us understand how we got here and what we can do about...

Just over ten years ago, the landscape for workers’ rights and organized labor in the state of Wisconsin changed dramatically. The passage of Act 10 under Republican Gov. Scott Walker was a hammer blow to the labor movement that essentially stripped collective bargaining rights from public sector workers, made it much more difficult for workers to organize, and forced unions to take massive conces...

As of this year, the total outstanding federal student loan debt is over $1.7 trillion, which is collectively held by around 46 million borrowers. Even with temporary, pandemic-related pauses on student loan repayments, the debt crisis continues to worsen, and calls for complete debt cancellation continue to mount. On April 4, as part of a national day of action, members and allies of the Debt Col...

On March 10, the Moriah Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility in upstate New York closed its doors. Opponents to the closure said that the Moriah Shock facility provided essential jobs for the community and that the military bootcamp style of the program at so-called “shock" camps helps inmates recover from issues with alcohol and drug abuse. But is this true? What are “shock” camps? What goes...

Over the course of our special podcast series on the “Rise of the Right,” we have sought to understand the scope of the far right’s growth and influence in the US and beyond, the historical and ideological roots of today’s far-right movements, and how those movements are interconnected. But it would be inexcusable to end this series without exploring what can be done to blunt, if not fully defeat,...

Last Friday, Amazon workers at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island shocked the world by pulling off one of the great labor victories in US history, becoming the first Amazon workforce in the country to vote to unionize. A thousand miles away, in the rural setting of Brookwood, Alabama, 1,100 coal miners on strike at Warrior Met Coal have just passed the one-year anniversary of the day they hit the...

In the 1970s and ‘80s, the image of the Black “welfare queen” was used as a racist scare tactic and a propaganda tool to justify gutting the postwar welfare state, “public good” institutions, and economic programs that benefited the poor and working class. This systemic and systematic assault, which we now attribute to the political project of neoliberalism, was very much a bipartisan effort that...

We talk with radical artist, registered nurse, and feminist barrier-breaker Susan Simensky Bietila about her life making art and ‘making good trouble.’ To commemorate Working People’s 200th episode, we have a special installment of our series of conversations with teachers, organizers, scholars, and activists in Wisconsin that TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez, Cameron Granadino (TRNN), and...

The election of Donald Trump and the siege of the US Capitol on Jan. 6 made clear the rising political power of the right in America, but this is not an isolated phenomenon—right-wing power is surging across the globe. From India, Brazil, and the Philippines, to Hungary and the US, we find right-wing political movements that are challenging the established order and that are fueled by anti-immigra...

JK Rowling, the now-infamous author of the Harry Potter series, has been rightfully condemned for her stances on trans people and gender identity. But what are we supposed to do with her still-popular and influential books and the deep attachments we have to them? It would be easy to condemn Harry Potter and all its fans as neoliberal trash, but, as Lyta and her guests discuss, that’s a reductive...

From the moment Russian troops invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, people in the West have been glued to their TV, computer, and phone screens, furiously consuming news about the war and posting their reactions online. As the war in Ukraine enters its second month, it’s become clearer than ever that our corporate and social media ecosystem has not given us the tools to critically navigate the incessant mi...

Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began on Feb. 24, pundits and politicians in the West have uncritically made bizarre claims that we are witnessing Vladimir Putin’s master plan to “revive the Soviet empire” or re-establish the pre-Soviet Russian empire. At the same time, in other corners of political discourse occupied by the left, it can seem like “empire” is a term that can only be used...

As the Russian military invasion of Ukraine enters its second month and diplomatic relations between the US and Russia are at their most strained point in decades, seven-time WNBA All-Star Brittney Griner is being held as a political prisoner by Russian authorities. As famed sports analyst and journalist Dave Zirin recently wrote for MSNBC News, “While Griner’s detention has received a measure of...

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a historic civil rights organization that, for 50 years, has been advancing social justice through legal, educational, and advocacy efforts, primarily in the Deep South. However, after overwhelmingly voting to unionize in 2019, staff at SPLC say the organization has been stalling negotiations over their first union contract and unfairly treating its lowest-paid a...

According to The Sentencing Project, “Private prisons in the United States incarcerated 115,428 people in 2019, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population.” However, while private prisons still make up a minority of carceral institutions in the US, the infiltration of privatization has spread throughout the prison-industrial complex. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, Mans...

Whenever women have raised their voices and demanded equity in our society, or whenever oppressive gender relations have been threatened, a vicious backlash or counterattack inevitably follows. Sometimes under the cover of religion, other times justified by appealing to culture, tradition, or science, male supremacy and misogyny are central and alarmingly consistent features defining the politics...