Nov. 20 is Black Consciousness Day in Brazil. A day celebrating the struggle of Black organizations, people, and movements in Brazil. Celebrating the ongoing fight against racism. And, above all, celebrating the history of Brazil’s most historic Black leader: Zumbi dos Palmares. He was leader of the great Palmares Quilombo, present-day Alagoas, an autonomous state built by escaped slaves in the 1600s. Palmares would last for roughly a century. It would grow to a population of tens of thousands o...
Nov 20, 2025•6 min
Making ends meet in today’s economy is difficult enough, but with so many societal crises affecting working people’s lives on and off the shop floor—from mass layoffs to untenable costs of living, from an authoritarian federal government to AI and the climate crisis—it can feel all but impossible. What does it mean to have a union job, to be a union member, and to be part of the labor movement in these overwhelming times? What role do unions and other labor organizations have to play, not just i...
Nov 20, 2025•58 min
The 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly known as COP30, began on Nov. 10 in Belém, Brazil, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. This year’s COP conference has more fossil fuel lobbyists in attendance than any previous conference, but it has also drawn the biggest delegation of Indigenous peoples from around the world—each group representing competing visions for addressing the climate crisis. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Dharna Noor, fossil fuels...
Nov 19, 2025•28 min
The Alabama prison system functions like a modern-day plantation: overcrowded, understaffed prisons like Bullock Correctional Facility run on forced labor, violence, and deliberate neglect. In this episode of Rattling the Bars , host Mansa Musa speaks with journalist Matthew Vernon Whalan about his book Bullock: Chronicles of Deprivation and Despair in an American Prison , and about the systematic corruption and inhumane horrors endured daily by incarcerated people in Alabama. Guest: Matthew Ver...
Nov 17, 2025•46 min
Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Monday, November 17, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-news-podcast--2952221/support . Help us co...
Nov 17, 2025•7 min
Over 1,000 unionized Starbucks workers in over 40 cities across the US walked off the job on an indefinite Unfair Labor Practice strike on Thursday, Nov. 13. The union, Starbucks Workers United, says more workers at more unionized stores will be joining the picket line during the busy holiday season to pressure Starbucks to return to the bargaining table with proposals that seriously address workers’ ongoing demands regarding better pay and work hours, safe staffing, and resolving the hundreds o...
Nov 14, 2025•11 min
Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Friday, November 14, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-news-podcast--2952221/support . Help us co...
Nov 14, 2025•8 min
It was the Great Depression. Early 1930s. United States. More than a thousand mortgages a day were being foreclosed on. Hundreds of thousands of families were losing their homes each year. Times were hard for everyone. Especially hard for farmers. But neighbors found a way to push back and help their friends in a very creative way. They called it a penny auction. BIG NEWS! This podcast has won Gold in this year’s Signal Awards for best history podcast! It’s a huge honor. Thank you so much to eve...
Nov 14, 2025•4 min
Historian David Hollinger connects the history of the 1964 free speech movement in Berkeley, California, to the protest movements and repressive crackdowns on free speech gripping universities today. In this episode of the Marc Steiner Show, co-hosted by Marc Steiner and Michael Fox, Hollinger draws on his firsthand experience and decades of research to explain the lessons we can learn from 1960s civil rights activists and antiwar organizers about how to defend free speech and academic freedom f...
Nov 13, 2025•48 min
Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Thursday, November 13, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-news-podcast--2952221/support . Help us ...
Nov 13, 2025•7 min
Four years after the first Starbucks store in the US unionized in 2021, workers across the country are still facing rampant union busting and still fighting for a first contract with the coffee giant. That is why a supermajority of unionized baristas with Starbucks Workers United recently voted to authorize an Unfair Labor Practice strike, which is set to begin on Thursday, Nov. 13, on “Red Cup Day,” in over 25 cities around the US. “Union baristas mean business and are ready to do whatever it t...
Nov 12, 2025•53 min
Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Wednesday, November 12, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-news-podcast--2952221/support . Help us...
Nov 12, 2025•6 min
Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Tuesday, November 11, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-news-podcast--2952221/support . Help us c...
Nov 11, 2025•7 min
Rattling the Bars's Mansa Musa explores how a one-woman play, The Peculiar Patriot, reveals the human cost of mass incarceration and the enduring ties between slavery and the prison system. The artist behind the play, Liza Jessie Peterson, has worked with incarcerated youth for decades, bringing their stories to the stage and to national audiences. Performed in more than 35 US prisons and filmed at Louisiana’s Angola Prison—once a plantation, now a maximum-security facility—the play became the b...
Nov 08, 2025•47 min
Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Friday, November 7, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-news-podcast--2952221/support . Help us con...
Nov 07, 2025•8 min
Just 11 months into his second term, President Trump has harnessed the brutal power of the federal government to go to war with American cities, communities, and citizens. Since the launch of “Operation Midway Blitz” in September, Chicago has become the epicenter of the Trump administration’s assault on immigrants, protestors, and political opponents, but Chicagoans on the front lines of that assault say the reality is even worse than people think. In this episode of the Marc Steiner Show, Marc ...
Nov 07, 2025•36 min
Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Thursday, November 6, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-news-podcast--2952221/support . Help us c...
Nov 06, 2025•5 min
Life on college campuses has changed dramatically in the last 10 months. While institutions of higher education continue to reel from the Trump administration’s top-down attacks and scramble to adjust, workers on campus say that their universities are simultaneously expanding their own internal repression and surveillance apparatuses to squash dissent. In this episode, we speak with a panel of graduate student workers and union members from Columbia University and the University of Michigan abou...
Nov 06, 2025•57 min
From chronic overcrowding and inmate deaths to systematic abuse and lawbreaking by corrections officers, prison conditions in the state of Alabama have reached a crisis point. And yet, state leaders continue to push an “Alabama solution” that involves building more mega-prisons and expanding qualified immunity for officers. In this episode of Rattling the Bars, host Mansa Musa speaks with Dakarai Larriett, a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Alabama, about about the true cost of Alabama’s ca...
Nov 05, 2025•34 min
Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Wednesday, November 5, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-news-podcast--2952221/support . Help us ...
Nov 05, 2025•8 min
In the late 1700s, Indigenous peoples in the Spanish colonies of the Andes were forced to work for the Spanish. They tilled the land, worked in the textile mills and the mines. Those that didn’t faced heavy taxes. But in early November 1780, Indigenous Incan leader Tupac Amaru II led an uprising against the Spanish that he hoped would end it all. It was the largest revolt against colonial Spain. Thousands would join the months-long rebellion. It would inspire uprisings elsewhere across the conti...
Nov 04, 2025•6 min
Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Tuesday, November 4, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-news-podcast--2952221/support . Help us co...
Nov 04, 2025•6 min
Taya Graham and Stephen Janis speak with voters in Harlem just 24 hours before the NYC mayoral election about what issues are important to them, what they think of the frontrunner candidate Zohran Mamdani, what they think of his opponent, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, and what they want the mayor to do for them. Credits:Pre-Production: Taya Graham/Stephen Janis Post-Production: Cameron Granadino Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-real-news-podcast--2952221/s...
Nov 04, 2025•4 min
In 2021, when New York City taxi drivers were dying by suicide and others were going on hunger strike, begging City Hall for relief from the debt trap that had set them up for failure and financial ruin, a young NY Assemblyperson named Zohran Mamdani stood with them. Now, taxi drivers are standing with Mamdani in his bid to become the next mayor of New York City. Reporting on the ground in New York, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Yellow Cab driver-owner and NY Taxi Workers ...
Nov 04, 2025•13 min
Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Monday, November 3, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Help us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustai...
Nov 03, 2025•6 min
Just a year ago almost no one had ever heard of him. Just a name in a crowd. A fairly obscure member of the New York State Assembly. Just one in a packed pool of Democratic candidates running for mayor of New York City. A longshot. Now he is the leading candidate in the city’s mayoral race next Tuesday, November 4. A \Democratic socialist who has ignited a movement. A glimmer of hope amid dark days. Hope for not just New York City, but elsewhere around the country, and a road map for other progr...
Oct 31, 2025•7 min
In September, before the current ceasefire deal was announced, we spoke with two Palestinians in Gaza—Mohamed Abu Tawila (a former English teacher) and his nephew Abdul Rahman (a would-be college student)—about surviving 700 days of genocidal destruction at the hands of Israel’s military and with the full backing of the United States. In this critical follow-up episode, we speak once again with Mohamed Abu Tawila from Gaza to get an on-the-ground account of life for Palestinians after the shaky ...
Oct 31, 2025•17 min
Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Friday, October 31, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Help us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustai...
Oct 31, 2025•8 min
Canadian journalist Nora Loreto reads the latest headlines for Thursday, October 30, 2025. TRNN has partnered with Loreto to syndicate and share her daily news digest with our audience. Tune in every morning to the TRNN podcast feed to hear the latest important news stories from Canada and worldwide. Find more headlines from Nora at Sandy & Nora Talk Politics podcast feed . Help us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sust...
Oct 30, 2025•8 min
In this special crossover edition of Working People and The Marc Steiner Show, hosts Maximillian Alvarez and Marc Steiner examine how the “artificial intelligence” (AI) boom is shaping the economy and the impact it is already having—and will continue to have—on working people’s lives, livelihoods, and jobs. Alvarez and Steiner speak with two members of a new mutual aid and advocacy group called Stop Gen AI, which formed this year out of the critical need to provide material support for creatives...
Oct 29, 2025•51 min
