The Real News Podcast

Public debates about "Defund the Police" have seemingly devolved into an all-or-nothing rhetorical war with little room for nuance. But opponents of the slogan and the movement behind it routinely ignore the decades of profligate spending and wasteful use of taxpayer dollars that has become commonplace for many police departments. In this TRNN podcast, the hosts of the Police Accountability Report take a close look at the numbers and expose some of the most egregious police spending.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 in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer.Follow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetworkBecome a member and join the Supporters Club for The Real News Podcast today!

Earlier this month, No Evil Foods, a “progressive” vegan meat company founded in North Carolina, notified its staff that they were closing their Asheville production plant and moving to a co-manufacturing facility in Illinois. After working through the COVID-19 pandemic, workers were suddenly notified that they were now unemployed and would be receiving no severance. In this urgent episode, Jon Reynolds and Meagan Sullivan, two former NEF employees who shared their testimonies in our previous Working People episode on NEF's union-busting campaign, join us again to discuss the plant closure and how to support laid-off workers.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 in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer.Follow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetworkBecome a member and join the Supporters Club for The Real News Podcast today!

Voters in Georgia stunned the nation in 2020 by delivering key presidential and Senate victories for Democrats. In response, Republicans have launched a renewed assault on voting rights that, critics argue, directly targets traditionally non-Republican voters and will be especially detrimental to Black, Brown, and working-class people. Among other provisions, Georgia Senate Bill 202 (the Election Integrity Act of 2021), imposes stricter voter identification requirements and makes it even more difficult to secure and submit absentee ballots. In this week’s first segment of The Marc Steiner Show, we continue our ongoing investigation into the battle over voting rights in the US by talking with State Rep. Renitta Shannon (District 84) from the Georgia House of Representatives about this blatant attack on democracy and how we can fight back.Then, in our recurring monthly segment featuring writers for Jacobin magazine, Marc talks with Suyapa Portillo Villeda and Miguel Tinker Salas about Vice President Kamala Harris’s recent trip to Mexico and Guatemala. Having vowed to address the “root causes” of Central American migration, Harris did everything but on her trip, and instead delivered a particularly callous message to would-be migrants: “Do not come” to the US. Miguel Tinker Salas is the Leslie Farmer Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of History and Chicana/o Latina/o Studies at Pomona College and the author of Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know and The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela; Suyapa Portillo Villeda is associate professor of Chicano/a Latino/a Transnational Studies at Pitzer College and author of Roots of Resistance: A Story of Gender, Race, and Labor on the North Coast of Honduras.Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Tuesday on TRNN.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 in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer.Follow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetworkBecome a member and join the Supporters Club for The Real News Podcast today!

We will be back to our regular Working People schedule next week. Until then, to tide listeners over, and to celebrate his book recently receiving Honorable Mention for the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award, we're unlocking our bonus episode conversation with historian Nate Holdren. We talk with Nate about his latest book, Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era, and about what exactly people lose when they are injured at work. (C/W: some descriptions of workplace injuries.)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 in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer.Follow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetworkBecome a member and join the Supporters Club for The Real News Podcast today!

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 would go on to work as the chief medical investigator for Nueces County, Texas, for 20 years. In this special episode, Jules speaks with Ric about the events in his life that shaped his career path, and they discuss how working around death influences the way one sees the world.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 in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer.Follow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetworkBecome a member and join the Supporters Club for The Real News Podcast today!

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 monitoring, investigating, and threatening "further action" against the Vermont labor council. Why? We talk with David Van Deusen, President of the Vermont State Labor Council, AFL-CIO.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 in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer.Follow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetworkBecome a member and join the Supporters Club for The Real News Podcast today!

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 out against the Israeli occupation. 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 in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer.Follow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetworkBecome a member and join the Supporters Club for The Real News Podcast today!

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 their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem. However, Palestinian resistance in Israel and the occupied territories, coupled with a growing international wave of resistance to the occupation, and solidarity with the people of Palestine, is reaching unprecedented levels, prompting many to wonder if the tide may actually be turning.In this urgent episode of “The Marc Steiner Show,” we bring you on-the-ground reports from Palestine and from the U.S. and Canada, where Jewish and Palestinian-American activists are fighting to end the occupation. In the first segment, Marc speaks with Palestine correspondent for Mondoweiss Yumna Patel, who’s been reporting on the ground in the West Bank for five years, about what she’s been seeing and reporting on these past two weeks. Then, we discuss the efforts of Palestinian-Americans in the U.S. to resist the occupation with Sammy Alqasem, Palestinian-American organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement in North America, and Laura Albast, Palestinian-American journalist, translator, digital content editor, and organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement in North America.Lastly, we kick off our ongoing series “Not in Our Name,” which will highlight the diverse voices of Jewish activists, artists, intellectuals, and others who are speaking out against the Israeli occupation. In the first installment of this series, Marc chats with Israeli-Canadian journalist, documentary filmmaker, and former TRNN Israel/Palestine correspondent Lia Tarachansky, as well as artist, author, and author of “Drawing Blood” and "Brothers of the Gun" (co-authored with Marwan Hisham), Molly Crabapple. Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Tuesday on TRNN.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 in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer.Follow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetworkBecome a member and join the Supporters Club for The Real News Podcast today!

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 their own erasure; in Colombia, millions have taken to the streets to fight against a corrupt system by which the government, the police, and the forces of international oligarchic plunder have waged class war on working people. In this special episode of Working People, spanning three continents, we talk to Irene Vélez Torres and Toufic Haddad about the world-changing struggles they are living through in Colombia and Palestine, and about what working people around the world, especially in North America, can do to join the fight.Interview with Irene Vélez Torres begins at 20:25Interview with Toufic Haddad begins at 46:51Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-news-podcast--2952221/support.Help us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer.Follow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetworkBecome a member and join the Supporters Club for The Real News Podcast today!

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 or upending the social peace embodied in the Good Friday Agreement. TRNN contributor Radhika Desai takes a deep dive into the unfolding political situation with economist and political advisor Michael Burke.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 in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer.Follow us on:Bluesky: @therealnews.comFacebook: The Real News NetworkTwitter: @TheRealNewsYouTube: @therealnewsInstagram: @therealnewsnetworkBecome a member and join the Supporters Club for The Real News Podcast today!