The Real News Podcast

While Max is traveling for The Real News Network, “Working People” producer Jules Taylor makes his host debut by interviewing his stepfather Ric Ortiz about his career as a death investigator and paramedic. In a way, it feels like Ric was meant to work around death—he grew up across the street from a cemetery and his first job involved assisting a local gravedigger before he was 10 years old. He w...

Over the past couple years, the Vermont State AFL-CIO and its membership have embraced a more democratic, rank-and-file strategy, building up bonds of solidarity with community organizations, and bringing much-needed energy into a labor council that was on the verge of dying. Instead of commending and encouraging these efforts, however, the AFL-CIO national and AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka are...

As part of our ongoing series "Not in Our Name," we hear a poem from E. Ethelbert Miller. Host Marc Steiner also speaks with scholar and human rights defender Majed Abusalama, and civil rights activist Dorothy Zellner. This is the latest installment of the ongoing series "Not in Our Name," which highlights the diverse voices of Jewish activists, artists, intellectuals, and others who are speaking...

The violence of Israeli occupation and apartheid has been happening for many years with unceasing support from the U.S. government. This is why many are rightly skeptical that anything will fundamentally change, even with the recent international outcry over Israeli forces’ attack on worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque, renewed airstrikes on Gaza, and the forced removal of Palestinian residents from the...

Right now, working people in Palestine and Colombia are being crushed by a relentless onslaught of murderous violence and dispossession, economic degradation, and inhumane exploitation. They are fighting for their lives, and they are asking for international solidarity. In Palestine, against the ceaseless violence of occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing, Palestinians are rising up to resist...

The 1999 Good Friday Agreement brought to an end 30 years of strife in the North of Ireland. Now, less than 25 years after the Agreement was made, social tensions are rising again, prompting many to fear a return to “the Troubles” of the past. In the wake of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s botched handling of Brexit, Northern Ireland is now on the precipice of either breaking its union with the UK...

Appalachia is a region with a rich and complicated political history that is often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented in other parts of the country. In a special “Marc Steiner Show” first, Marc and TRNN audio engineer Stephen Frank take listeners on a narrative journey through the politics and economics of Appalachia today. Guests in this segment include Marie Gunoe, director of the Mother...

While wealthy countries like the United States are rushing to vaccinate their populations and “reopen” their societies, the rest of the world continues to suffer. With hospitals overrun and life-saving oxygen supplies running low, India’s government is reporting over 300,000 new COVID-19 infections every day (though evidence suggests the numbers are even higher). Meanwhile, Brazil suffered 70,000...

In this special episode of “Working People,” we talk with three veterans about how the military and the class system (in the U.S. and around the world) go hand in hand. How does the military market itself to the poor and marginalized (and why is that marketing so effective)? How does our broken economy ensure a constant stream of recruits who will be sent to fight endless imperialist wars just so...

The “F” word has been thrown around a lot in the age of Donald Trump. From President Trump’s “Muslim ban,” to bipartisan support for migrant-filled concentration camps, to the failed insurrection at the Capitol building in January of this year, is “fascism” a useful term for understanding the political reality we’ve been living in? Are we misapplying the term in ways that drain it of its historica...

It’s been four months since supporters of Donald Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol building in early January in a thwarted attempt to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. While many in the Republican and Democratic political establishment hoped to move on from the failed Trumpist insurrection by characterizing it as an unrepeatable anomaly, the fact of the matter is the widespread,...

In this important episode, we interview worker-organizers with the Federation of General Workers Myanmar about the brutal military coup that has been unfolding in their country since Feb. 1 of this year, and we talk about working people's brave and dangerous efforts to stand up and fight back. Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org) Jules Taylor, "Worki...

Last week the country watched anxiously as Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd last May, was found guilty of third-degree murder, second-degree manslaughter, and second-degree unintentional murder. While many breathed a sigh of relief that some modicum of justice had been achieved for Floyd and his family, we were reminded of the continuing inhumanity of th...

In this unearthed, pre-pandemic recording of "Working People," we talk to filmmaker Dominique Rémy about her important full-length documentary project, which investigates the shockingly high maternal morbidity and mortality rates in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities in the U.S. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-news-podcast--2952221/support . Help...

Last week, President Joe Biden announced he will be pulling U.S. troops out of Afghanistan on Sept. 11, 2021, seemingly ending the longest war in U.S. history. But what does that really mean? What happens to Afghanistan next? How can we possibly make reparations for the destruction we’ve wrought, and will we do anything to address the machinations of a military-industrial complex that continually...

On top of the typical stresses, intense work, and long hours common to the profession, nurses working at smaller hospitals in more remote parts of the country face many unique challenges. With fewer staff and 24-7 services, facilities like the two Lehigh Valley Health Network hospitals in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, rely on nurses, nursing assistants, and other staff to perform many jobs simu...

New TRNN contributor Radhika Desai interviews world-renowned sociologist and activist Boris Kagarlitsky about the tectonic shifts in Russian politics—from Alexei Navalny’s return to mass protests and COVID-19—and what Western media gets wrong about Russia. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-news-podcast--2952221/support . Help us continue producing radica...

Miners at Warrior Met Coal sacrificed and made concessions when the company they worked for went bankrupt in 2016. Now that the mines are more productive than ever and bringing in more profits, they’re being asked to give up more. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-news-podcast--2952221/support . Help us continue producing radically independent news and i...

From endless wars and imperialist violence to racist systems of oppression and climate destruction, the battles poor and working people face around the globe are as daunting as they are numerous. What will it take to build a grassroots movement that not only combats these destructive forces, but understands them as fundamentally interconnected? In the first segment of this week’s blockbuster “Marc...

As we continue our investigation into over-policing and mass incarceration in rural America, we return to Pocomoke City on Maryland's lower eastern shore to speak with Michelle Lucas. Lucas is a pizza delivery driver, a proud grandmother, and community activist who asserts that she was railroaded into a felony conviction that could result in up to 2 years in prison. Tune in every Thursday at 9:00...

COVID-19 has put an incredible amount of pressure on higher education and its workers, including graduate students and contingent faculty who shoulder heavy workloads and make poverty-level or near-poverty-level wages. While simultaneously fighting to get universities to recognize them as workers, many graduate students around the U.S. are organizing, demanding, and even going on strike for better...

Georgia Rep. Park Cannon was arrested last week as Georgia became the latest state to implement laws that restrict Black voters' rights. In response to alleged voter fraud, dozens of new voting laws have been introduced in states across the country, even though GOP officials and former President Trump’s own attorney have acknowledged they have no evidence to support said allegations. While the Dem...

After a year of workers organizing, signing union authorization cards, enduring constant union-busting efforts from management, and participating in an election, the historic union drive at the Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, is coming to a close. Vote counting will begin on March 29, and we will know soon after if 5,800 warehouse workers in Bessemer will become the first unionized...

Last summer, during what some have called the largest social justice uprising in United States history, the lives of Black trans people were ignored. While many rightly raged against the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, few know the names of Black trans people like Kim Wirtz, who have also been murdered by a racist policing and prison system. In Baltimore, trans activists from the LGBTQ...

In this episode of "Rattling the Bars," we get an inside and outside view of the ongoing, slow-moving disaster happening in Maryland prisons, which have failed to adequately protect inmates, guards, and the surrounding communities from COVID-19. TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Pamela Sessoms, whose incarcerated fiancé contracted COVID inside a Maryland prison, and Marc Schindler,...