The Real News Podcast

The efforts of cop watchers and First Amendment auditors to record police continues to be a controversial subject. Some use aggressive tactics that critics say go too far, others argue the country's law-enforcement-industrial complex needs to be aggressively challenged to yield results. PAR examines the contours of this debate through the case of Denver cop watcher DJ Kdot the party. Dj Kdot was arrested by police in Aurora, Colorado, for allegedly interfering with an investigation while filming a traffic stop. What happened when the case went to trial reveals much about the state of cop watching today, the extent of our First Amendment protections, and the expansive reach of the US criminal justice system.Read the transcript of this interview: https://therealnews.com/cops-arrested-him-for-filming-a-traffic-stop-then-the-case-went-to-courtPre-Production/Studio: Stephen JanisPost-Production: Stephen Janis, Dwayne GladdenHelp us continue producing Police Accountability Report by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-pod-parSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/nl-pod-parGet Police Accountability Report updates: https://therealnews.com/pod-up-parLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnewsBecome 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!

Since Nov. 3, workers represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers' International Union (BCTGM) Local 37 have been on strike against Rich Products at the Jon Donaire Desserts plant in Santa Fe Springs, California. Working in perpetually cold and wet conditions, these workers make ice cream cakes for household-name stores like Baskin-Robbins, Cold Stone Creamery, Walmart, Costco, Ralph’s, Vons, Smart & Final, and Safeway.As Cristina Lujan, a worker at the Santa Fe Springs plant and BCTGM Local 37 member, recently told Forbes: "We are on strike because we’re fighting for higher wages, affordable health care and to be treated with respect and dignity." In this interview, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Lujan about the current state of the strike and what brought workers to the picket line in the first place.Read the transcript of this interview: https://therealnews.com/just-desserts-striking-bakery-workers-in-ca-demand-respectPre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Dwayne GladdenHelp us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-podSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/newsletter-podLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnewsBecome 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!

This past fall, the United Nations Human Rights Council declared a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment to be a human right. (The US does not currently have a seat on the Council, and China, India, Japan and the Russian Federation all abstained from the vote.) Moreover, through a second Council resolution, the post of Special Rapporteur was created to promote human rights in the context of climate change. While hailed as groundbreaking by numerous environmental advocates, what concrete results can we expect from these resolutions? With the world running out of time to curb the effects of extreme climate change, can the United Nations’ assertion of humanity’s right to a healthy environment and stable climate push the world’s nations to take serious action?In this interview, TRNN contributor David Kattenburg examines these UN resolutions and what they do and don’t mean for humanity’s fight against climate catastrophe with Todd Howland and Saher Rashid Baig. Todd Howland, who helped draft the two UN resolutions, is chief of the Development, Economic and Social Issues Branch of the United Nations’ Human Rights Office. Saher Rashid Baig is a youth, environmental, and human rights advocate based in Karachi, Pakistan, who is engaged with the Climate Change Virtual Conference of Youth and with YOUNGO, a global network of young activists seeking to empower youth voices in shaping global climate policies.Read the transcript of this interview: https://therealnews.com/un-declares-healthy-environment-a-human-right-now-whatPre-Production: David KattenburgStudio/Post Production: Cameron GranadinoHelp us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-podSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/newsletter-podLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnewsBecome 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 Director for the Sierra Club of Hawai’i Wayne Tanaka recently wrote in The Guardian, the US Navy’s Red Hill Fuel Storage Facility is “a massive underground ‘farm’ of 18 million-liter fuel tanks and pipes just 100 feet above metropolitan O’ahu. Its construction began before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Since then, it has leaked over 180,000 gallons of petroleum into the groundwater aquifer that provides drinking water for over 400,000 residents and visitors from Hālawa to Hawaiʻi Kai.”Regardless of the major threat the facility poses to the local water system and demands from Native Hawaiians and supporters to address the crisis and hold the US military accountable, it wasn’t until hundreds of military families living near Pearl Harbor reported symptoms of petroleum poisoning that Red Hill’s operations were paused in late November. But the root causes of the environmental and public health crisis remain untouched, and the fight to shut down Red Hill is still very much ongoing.In this segment of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks about that fight with Mikey Inouye, an independent filmmaker born and raised in Hawai‘i, community organizer, and member of O‘ahu Water Protectors. The O‘ahu Water Protectors is an organization that formed out of a coalition of Kānaka Maoli organizers, Sierra Club members and supporters, Hawai‘i Peace and Justice, and other groups working toward sovereignty, decolonization, and demilitarization.Read the transcript of this interview: Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Monday and Thursday on TRNN.Pre-Production/Studio: Dwayne GladdenPost Production: Stephen FrankHelp us continue producing The Marc Steiner Show by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer:Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-pod-mssSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/nl-pod-stGet The Marc Steiner Show updates: https://therealnews.com/up-pod-stLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnewsBecome 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!

A recent HBO documentary entitled The Slow Hustle has brought renewed attention to the mysterious death of Baltimore homicide detective Sean Suiter in 2017. Police initially claimed Suiter was the victim of a lone assailant after his body was found in a West Baltimore alley with a gunshot wound to the head. But as details began to emerge regarding Suiter's involvement with some of Baltimore's most corrupt cops, the case took a turn that raised serious questions about what actually happened and if his death was part of a broader cover-up.Shortly after Suiter died, Police Accountability Report hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis produced a podcast series that looked behind the scenes and examined how Suiter's death told a more complex story about police corruption in Baltimore. In Part 2 of this podcast series, Graham and Janis take a closer look at the Baltimore Police Department’s own investigation into Suiter’s death and explain why the facts don’t add up.Read the transcript of this interview: https://therealnews.com/the-missing-evidence-that-makes-baltimore-detective-sean-suiters-death-even-more-mysteriousHelp us continue producing Police Accountability Report by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-pod-parSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/nl-pod-parGet Police Accountability Report updates: https://therealnews.com/pod-up-parLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnewsBecome 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!

Aaron Reinas was just blocks from his home when a San Bernardino, California, sheriff accosted and accused him of burglarizing cars. What happened next reveals the dangers of unchecked police power and the dire consequences individual citizens can face for standing up for their rights. PAR investigates Reinas's questionable arrest and why police often ignore the law in pursuit of phantom crimes.Read the transcript of this interview: https://therealnews.com/a-cop-tried-to-arrest-him-for-wearing-a-hoodie-but-thats-not-where-the-harassment-endedHelp us continue producing Police Accountability Report by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-pod-parSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/nl-pod-parGet Police Accountability Report updates: https://therealnews.com/pod-up-parLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnewsBecome 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!

In her latest book, Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion, world-renowned scholar and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “The United States has never been ‘a nation of immigrants.’ It has always been a settler state with a core of descendents from the original colonial settlers, that is, primarily Anglo-Saxons, Scots Irish, and German. The vortex of settler colonialism sucked immigrants through a kind of seasoning process of Americanization, not as rigid and organized as the ‘seasoning’ of Africans, which rendered them into human commodities, but effective nonetheless.”The mythology of the United States as “a nation of immigrants” has a complex political history. And studying the history of how and why this mythology emerged can actually tell us a lot more about America than the myth itself. In this extensive and wide-ranging conversation, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez and Dunbar-Ortiz trace the history of this particular national mythology and the political functions it serves in the larger project of US settler colonialism, economic domination, and military imperialism.Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma in a tenant farming family. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than 4 decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. She is the winner of the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize, and she has authored and edited many books, including An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, which won the 2015 American Book Award, and Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment.Read the transcript of this interview: https://therealnews.com/a-dangerous-myth-the-us-has-never-been-a-nation-of-immigrantsPre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Cameron GranadinoHelp us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-podSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/newsletter-podLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnewsBecome 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 were all kids once, and time forces all of us to grow up sooner or later, but not all coming-of-age stories are the same. In this episode of Art for the End Times, Lyta sits down with superstar writer Bertrand Cooper to discuss coming-of-age films, class, the politics of pop culture representation, and whose stories get told—and who gets to tell them—on the silver screen.Bertrand Cooper is a writer whose work focuses on the intersection of poverty, Black America, education, and popular culture. Read Bertrand’s seminal essay, published in 2021 in Current Affairs, “Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?”Read the transcript of this podcast: Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Dwayne GladdenHelp us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-podSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/newsletter-podLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnewsBecome 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 societal ramifications of the death of local journalism in the United States are as widespread as they are depressingly predictable. As Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols recently wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, “It is not simply that functional self-government is impossible without credible journalism with all that forebodes; it is that local newspapers have provided the social glue that brought communities to life, as places where people see themselves as participating in a joint enterprise with people they know and understand and care about. That is disintegrating.”In this segment of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with McChesney and Nichols about how the slow death of America’s journalism ecosystem in the digital age has corresponded with the disintegration of the social fabric of the American republic. They also discuss McChesney and Nichols’s proposal of a Local Journalism Initiative and how it could improve life for communities around the country. Robert W. McChesney is Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. John Nichols writes for The Nation and the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin. Along with cofounding Free Press with Josh Silver and Kimberly Longey in 2003, McChesney and Nichols have written several books on media and politics together, including most recently The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again.Read the transcript of this interview: https://therealnews.com/you-cant-revive-american-democracy-without-reviving-local-journalismTune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Monday and Thursday on TRNN.Pre-Production/Studio: Cameron GranadinoPost Production: Stephen FrankHelp us continue producing The Marc Steiner Show by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer:Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-pod-mssSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/nl-pod-stGet The Marc Steiner Show updates: https://therealnews.com/up-pod-stLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnewsBecome 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!

Walter Lomax was wrongfully imprisoned in the state of Maryland for 39 years until he eventually had his conviction vacated by a judge in 2006. While he was incarcerated and fighting for his freedom, Lomax worked with other inmates on the long process of lobbying for a bill in the state legislature that would end Maryland’s designation as one of only three states—along with California and Oklahoma—that granted the governor the power to veto parole recommendations made by the parole commission. In December of 2021, that fight finally ended and the Maryland legislature stripped the governor’s power to overturn parole decisions for inmates serving life sentences.In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway and cohost-in-training Charles Hopkins, better known as Mansa Musa, speak with Walter Lomax about his incarceration and the long fight to change Maryland’s parole system. After being fully exonerated in 2014, Walter Lomax became the face of the effort to fix the state’s compensation system for wrongfully convicted and imprisoned Marylanders, culminating in the passage of “The Walter Lomax Act” in 2021. He is also the founder and executive director of the Maryland Restorative Justice Initiative, a non-profit organization that advocates for humane and sensible criminal justice and sentencing policies for those incarcerated long term in Maryland prisons.Read the transcript of this interview: https://therealnews.com/how-maryland-prisoners-took-on-the-governorPre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Cameron GranadinoHelp us continue producing Rattling the Bars by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-pod-rtbSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/nl-pod-rtbGet Rattling the Bars updates: https://therealnews.com/up-pod-rtbLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnewsBecome 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!