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UPDATE (7/1/2022): One day after this segment aired, prison authorities announced that they had “reconsidered” their earlier decision, clearing the way for Atiba to earn his degree.
Education is one of the few rehabilitative options available to incarcerated people, yet all across America prisoners are prevented from pursuing their education. “Atiba” Demetrius Brown, for instance, has been dedicated to improving himself and his post-incarceration prospects by taking correspondence courses while incarcerated in Maryland, but thanks to a draconian new decree by the Department of Public Safety & Correctional Services (DPSCS), Atiba can’t take his exams. In this installment of Rattling the Bars, Victor Wallis joins Mansa Musa to discuss the case of “Atiba” Demetrius Brown and the calculated cruelty of the prison-industrial complex.
Victor Wallis is a professor in the Liberal Arts Department at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He has been involved in prisoner support activities since the 1970s in Indiana, and he is the author of numerous books, including Democracy Denied: Five Lectures on US Politics, which has been used in prison education projects.
To contact “Atiba” Demetrius Brown:
Demetrius Brown #401226
sid #2642892
MCTC
18800 Roxbury Rd.
Hagerstown, MD 21746
Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/how-maryland-is-preventing-prisoners-from-getting-college-degrees
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The COVID-19 pandemic and the corresponding failure at every level of government to prevent its spread dealt a devastating blow to healthcare workers. Nurses, doctors, and other medical workers faced increasingly dangerous conditions, along with employers more concerned with increasing profits than saving the lives of their patients or employees. At St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, nurses fought back against their corporate employer by organizing a strike of over 700 workers that lasted for 10 months. Filmed by TRNN contributor Gino Canella, these interviews with St. Vincent nurses comprise an oral history of a ferocious labor battle that became the longest nurses’ strike in Massachusetts state history.
Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/an-oral-history-of-the-10-month-st-vincent-hospital-strike
Pre-Production/Studio: Gino Canella
Post-Production: Adam Coley
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From Dollar General and Dollar Tree to Family Dollar, dollar stores are spreading rapidly throughout Louisiana and across the country, often strategically located in low-income communities and “food deserts.” But dollar store workers notoriously have to endure low pay, understaffing, and hazardous working conditions; some workers report frequently working alone in stores and having their air conditioning controlled from corporate headquarters in another state. That's why Step Up Louisiana, "a community based organization committed to building power to win education and economic justice for all," is organizing employees, customers, and community members to fight for safer stores and better pay and working conditions for dollar store workers. In this episode, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Kenya Slaughter, who has been an organizer and frontline worker at Dollar General for a number of years, and Curtis Williams, a dollar store customer who has gotten involved in Step Up Louisiana's campaign.
To read the transcript of this episode and read show notes, visit: https://therealnews.com/louisiana-dollar-store-workers-cant-control-air-conditioning-in-their-own-stores
Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive at freemusicarchive.org):
Jules Taylor, "Working People Theme Song:
Pre-Production/Studio: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
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“It took most of us far too long to fully comprehend that Trump’s presidency represented a qualitative uptick in the determination and capacity of the right to impose minority rule,” Linda Burnham, Max Elbaum, and Maria Poblet write in the introductory essay to their co-edited book Power Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections. “Forty years of Republican anti-tax, anti-regulatory, anti-government ideology and governance; backlash against the election of the nation’s first Black president; fear of demographic change; the growth of a far-right, all-encompassing media environment; and long-standing, deeply rooted patterns of white and Christian supremacy set the stage for his election.” Now, as a conservative-dominated Supreme Court is poised to launch a legalistic assault on civil rights and Republicans continue to undermine the democratic process around the country, the right is reaping the gains it has sought and fought for over the course of generations. In this installment of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc speaks with Burnham and Elbaum about how the right’s long-term strategy paid off and how the contributions compiled in their new book chart a path for the left to fight back.
Linda Burnham served as national research director and senior advisor at the National Domestic Workers Alliance for nearly a decade and co-authored, with Nik Theodore, Home Economics: The Invisible and Unregulated World of Domestic Work. She was a leader in the Third World Women’s Alliance in the 1970s, and co-founded, with Miriam Ching Louie, the Women of Color Resource Center, serving as the organization’s executive director for 18 years. Max Elbaum has been involved in peace, anti-racist, and radical movements since joining Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s. The third edition of his book about the US revolutionary efforts that emerged from the 1960s upsurge, Revolution in the Air, was released in 2018 by Verso Books. He is currently on the editorial board of Convergence (formerly Organizing Upgrade).
Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/the-right-won-by-playing-the-long-game-what-is-the-lefts-response
Pre-Production/Studio: Dwayne Gladden
Post-Production: Stephen Frank
Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Monday on TRNN, and subscribe to the TRNN YouTube channel for video versions of The Marc Steiner Show podcast.
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Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/how-native-organizers-won-voting-access-and-reached-record-turnout-in-2020
Native Americans overcame multiple challenges to turn out in record numbers during the 2020 elections, playing a crucial role in Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump. One of those challenges: many Native reservations lack their own polling sites, forcing residents to sometimes travel hours to cast a ballot. As part of our series “Defending Democracy in the 2022 Midterm Elections,” TRNN’s Jaisal Noor and Carly Sauvageau speak with leaders of the Walker River Paiute and Pyramid Lake Paiute, two tribes that successfully sued Nevada for the right to get polling sites on their reservations, which played a key role in Native organizers' efforts to mobilize and empower their community.
This story is part of a series that was made possible with the support of the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.
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The best-selling and (mostly) critically acclaimed Irish novelist Sally Rooney has sometimes come under fire for not—despite her professed personal left-leaning politics—writing “Marxist” novels. But what does a Marxist novel look like? Is the novel form itself inherently bourgeois? In this episode of Art for the End Times, Lyta Gold sits down with writer and McGill University PhD candidate Richard Joseph to discuss Rooneymania, love stories, the limitations of the realist novel, and what exactly we are asking of writers when we ask them to tell “Marxist” stories.
Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/lets-talk-about-sally-rooney-what-makes-a-novel-socialist
Richard Joseph, LA Review of Books, "Everyone's a Critic": https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/everyones-a-critic/
Pre-Production/Studio: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Brent Tomchik
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In this urgent episode of Working People, we get an update on Starbucks' escalating retaliation against pro-union workers and Starbucks Workers United. As Rina Torchinsky writes for NPR, "Starbucks is closing a store in Ithaca, NY, in what Starbucks union organizers are calling an illegal move of retaliation after workers at the location voted to unionize. The coffee giant gave the employees at the College Ave. location near Cornell University a one-week notice of the closure, the union says, with the store slated to permanently close on June 10. The coffee giant has said the decision to close the store was unrelated to the unionization effort.” In this mini-cast, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez talks with Nadia Vitek, a partner at the College Ave. location and a worker-organizer with Starbucks Workers United, about the sudden decision to close the store and the mounting evidence that this is an illegal act of retaliation meant to send a chilling message to pro-union workers around the country.
To read the transcript of this episode and read show notes, visit: https://therealnews.com/definitely-its-retaliation-starbucks-closes-unionized-store-in-ithaca
Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive at freemusicarchive.org):
Jules Taylor, "Working People Theme Song:
Pre-Production/Studio: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Help us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer:
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In the richest country in the world, poor and low-income people are disproportionately harmed by everything from economic inequality and climate change to COVID-19 and gun violence, yet they are disproportionately excluded from the process of addressing any of these crises. That is why, on June 18, tens of thousands from around the country are expected to descend on Washington, DC, for the Poor People’s and Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls, organized by the Poor People’s Campaign. In this installment of The Marc Steiner Show, Marc is joined once again by Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis of the Poor People’s Campaign to discuss this historic march on Washington and the need to channel the pain, anger, and struggles of the nation’s poor into a powerful force that can drive systemic political and economic change.
Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis is co-director of the Kairos Center, as well as a founder and coordinator of the Poverty Initiative. She is co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral Revival, and author of Always with Us?: What Jesus Really Said about the Poor. She is also an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and a biblical scholar in New Testament and Christian origins.
Read the transcript of this episode: https://therealnews.com/the-nations-poor-are-descending-on-washington
Pre-Production/Studio: Adam Coley
Post-Production: Stephen Frank
Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Monday on TRNN, and subscribe to the TRNN YouTube channel for video versions of The Marc Steiner Show podcast.
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“At least 40% of people incarcerated in American women’s prisons identify somewhere under the broad lesbian-bisexual-trans-queer umbrella—a shocking statistic that holds true when looking at detention centers for youths as well,” historian Hugh Ryan recently wrote in The Washington Post. “As women’s incarceration skyrockets in America—increasing 700% in just the past 40 years—naming and dealing with the homophobia and transphobia at its root is crucial to understanding this phenomenon and unraveling it.” In this edition of Rattling the Bars, Mansa Musa speaks with Ryan about why so many LGBTQ people are incarcerated today and how sexism, homophobia, and transphobia became baked-in features of our modern prison-industrial complex.
Hugh Ryan is a New York-based historian, curator, and author of The Women's House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison and When Brooklyn Was Queer.
Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/why-are-so-many-lgbtq-people-incarcerated-in-the-us
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The story of one Minnesota couple's ongoing problems with police provides a pointed example of the systematic overpolicing of rural communities across the country. In this episode of the Police Accountability Report, hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis describe the couple's most recent encounter with cops, then they provide updates on a number of previous investigations into police overreach that they are committed to following.
Read the transcript of this episode: https://therealnews.com/a-cop-pulled-them-over-for-a-minor-infraction-then-the-encounter-took-a-bizarre-turn
Pre-Production/Studio: Stephen Janis
Post-Production: Adam Coley
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