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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-governor
Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Cameron Granadino
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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 1 of this podcast series, Graham and Janis examine the initial discovery of Suiter’s body, the police-led manhunt that ensued, and the moment when the official explanation of Suiter’s death began to unravel.
Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/the-mysterious-death-of-detective-sean-suiter-how-deep-does-the-corruption-go
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With the omicron variant spreading like wildfire, COVID-19 cases around the country have shattered previous highs. The federal government has essentially given up on trying to fight the virus and a familiar ghoulish chorus of media pundits and wealthy business executives are berating working people to suck it up and put themselves in harm's way for the sake of the economy. What's worse, workers who stand up for themselves are being viciously vilified and scapegoated for the systemic failures that have put us in this mess.
Perhaps no group is facing more backlash right now than educators. Earlier this week, nearly 3/4 of the membership of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) voted to return to virtual work until a deal to implement necessary safety measures is reached with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) or until the city's positivity rate falls below 10%. In response, Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the CPS administration have locked educators out of their virtual classrooms, replaying their actions from last year when COVID cases were surging and teachers were locked out of their employee accounts, and had their pay docked if they refused to return from teaching remotely. In this urgent, unscheduled episode of Working People, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez talks about the lockout with Ana, a CPS teacher and CTU member, and Quetzalli Castro, a CPS teacher and a delegate and organizer within the CTU.
Additional links/info below...
Chicago Teachers Union website, Facebook page, and Twitter page:
https://www.ctulocal1.org/
https://www.facebook.com/ctulocal1
https://twitter.com/CTULocal1
Working People, "Mini-cast: #SafeReturnOrNoReturn (w/ Paula Ladin & Mariana Ruiz)": https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93b3JraW5ncGVvcGxlLmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz/episode/MGZiZWQ2MjQtZTYyMC00NjhiLWI1ZjgtYWJiMTU5Y2ZjY2Q5?ep=14
Quinn Meyer, Block Club Chicago, "Chicago Teachers Say They Want To Return To Classrooms, But They Need Better COVID-19 Safety Measures": https://blockclubchicago.org/2022/01/05/chicago-teachers-say-they-want-to-return-to-classrooms-but-they-need-better-covid-safety-measures/
Monica Eng, Axios Chicago, "Chicago Public Schools Cancel Thursday Classes": https://www.axios.com/local/chicago/2022/01/06/chicago-public-schools-cancel-thursday-classes?fbclid=IwAR2gfx0eWCmYPJnuGs1QqfCTXvUxOMPSpK24T2U363I8NS5Yh-lmca-tRdw
Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive at freemusicarchive.org):
Jules Taylor, "Working People Theme Song"
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The insurrectionary violence at the US Capitol that Donald Trump instigated on Jan. 6, 2021, marked another dark page in American history. But while many saw the events of Jan. 6 as an aberration that did not represent who or what America is supposed to be, the fact of the matter is that anti-democratic conservative minorities resorting to violence to maintain power is as American as apple pie. Confronting this fact is essential for understanding how the antecedents to today’s right wing have shaped our society—and how we can fight back today.
In this segment of The Marc Steiner Show, published one year after the attack on the Capitol, we discuss the long road to Jan. 6, the failures of corporate media and a feckless Democratic party to address the serious threats posed by the right, and what everyday people can do to stop the rising authoritarian tide. This is the first installment of “Rise of the Right,” a new, ongoing series on The Marc Steiner Show co-hosted by Marc and Bill Fletcher Jr. that critically and fearlessly examines the roots of today’s right-wing movement—where it came from, the existential threats it poses, and how to combat it.
In this conversation, Marc and Fletcher Jr. are joined by world-renowned journalist and historian of the American right Rick Perlstein. Perlstein’s most recent book, the fourth in an award-winning series investigating the history of modern American conservatism, is Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976–1980. Bill Fletcher Jr. has been an activist since his teen years and previously served as a senior staff person in the national AFL-CIO; he is the former president of TransAfrica Forum, a senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, and the author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction, including ‘They’re Bankrupting Us!’ And 20 Other Myths about Unions and The Man Who Fell from the Sky.
Tune in for new episodes of The Marc Steiner Show every Monday and Thursday on TRNN.
Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/this-is-not-an-aberration-jan-6-and-americas-heart-of-darkness
Pre-Production/Studio: Dwayne Gladden
Post Production: Stephen Frank
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Announced on Sept. 15 2021, AUKUS is a trilateral security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which involves the US and UK sharing nuclear propulsion technology with Australia. As Michael Safi of The Guardian notes, “When Boris Johnson, Joe Biden and Scott Morrison announced a new deal that would provide Australia with the technology to run silent nuclear submarines as part of its navy, one phrase kept coming up: ‘stability in the Indo-Pacific.’ The word the leaders of the UK, the US and Australia did not use may be more important: China.”
While numerous pundits and high-ranking national officials have tried to downplay AUKUS as just another defense procurement deal, it is clear that this move will sharpen the United States’s new Cold War with China, which the Biden administration is waging with equal if not greater zeal than the Trump administration. How does AUKUS figure into the US’s larger plan for “strategic competition” with China? What does this security pact reveal about the geopolitical realignment between the US, post-Brexit UK, and continental Europe? In this interview, TRNN contributor Radhika Desai delves into these critical questions with scholar and anti-war activist Kate Hudson. Hudson is the general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), media officer of Left Unity in the UK, and she has been an officer of the Stop the War Coalition since 2002. She was also the head of Social and Policy Studies at London South Bank University from 2003-2010 and is now a visiting research fellow.
Read the transcript of this interview: https://therealnews.com/aukus-and-the-wests-dangerous-war-games-with-china
Pre-Production: Paul Graham
Studio/Post Production: Adam Coley, Dwayne Gladden
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In a recent piece for Protean magazine entitled “The American Prison System’s War on Reading,” Alex Skopic writes, “Across the United States, the agencies responsible for mass imprisonment are trying to severely limit incarcerated people’s access to the written word—an alarming trend, and one that bears closer examination.” From outright banning books and letting prison libraries fall into decay to the intrusion of for-profit electronic reading services that inmates have to pay for, the assault on prisoners’ ability to read books while incarcerated is one of many calculated cruelties that make the US carceral system so inhumane.
In this episode of Rattling the Bars, TRNN Executive Producer Eddie Conway speaks with Skopic about the American prison system’s war on reading and its deep (and racist) historical roots. Alex Skopic is a freelance writer from Springville, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in Anthracite Unite, Current Affairs, and Vastarien: A Literary Journal, among other places.
Read the transcript of this interview: https://therealnews.com/why-us-prisons-dont-want-prisoners-to-read
Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Cameron Granadino
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Nearly 20 years ago, Mark Neocleous published a seminal book entitled A Critical Theory of Police Power: The Fabrication of the Social Order, which examines how law enforcement and capitalism work in tandem to control the working class and enforce a brutal social and economic order. In this conversation for the Police Accountability Report podcast, PAR host Stephen Janis speaks with Neocleous about his book, the potential it has to transform the debate over the future of law enforcement, and how our unchecked policing system amounts to a radical form of state power that is both unnecessary and antithetical to democracy. Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University London and the author of numerous books, including War Power, Police Power and The Universal Adversary: Security, Capital and 'The Enemies of All Mankind'.
Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/this-groundbreaking-book-could-change-the-debate-over-defunding-law-enforcement
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2021 was an energizing year for a labor movement that has had its back against the wall for a long time. From record numbers of American workers voluntarily quitting their jobs to publicly supported strikes and unionization drives in different sectors of the economy, more and more working people are taking action and standing up for themselves. But this is just the beginning—there’s still a lot of work to do, and 2022 will provide a crucial test for the labor movement and its supporters. In this special panel episode of Working People, originally published in November as a bonus episode for patrons, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez talks to three full-time union organizers—Puja Datta (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), Margaret McLaughlin (United University Professions), and Diana Hussein (UNITE HERE)—about what Striketober and 2021 in general have meant for the labor movement. They also discuss the day-to-day work of being a union organizer and what people around the country can do to build working-class power.
Read the transcript of this interview: https://therealnews.com/what-has-2021-meant-for-the-labor-movement-three-union-organizers-discuss
Additional links/info below...
Puja's Twitter page: https://twitter.com/oohpujie
Margaret's Twitter page: https://twitter.com/mags_mclaugh
Diana's Twitter page: https://twitter.com/heyadiana
Luis Feliz Leon & Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, "Beneath Striketober Fanfare, the Lower Frequencies of Class Struggle Need to Be Heard": https://therealnews.com/beneath-striketober-fanfare-the-lower-frequencies-of-class-struggle-need-to-be-heard
Marc Steiner, The Real News Network, "Can Today's Labor Militancy Become a Transformative Political Force?": https://therealnews.com/can-todays-labor-militancy-become-a-transformative-political-force
Labor Notes, Secrets of a Successful Organizer: https://labornotes.org/secrets
AFL-CIO, "Know Your Workplace Rights": https://aflcio.org/what-unions-do/your-workplace-rights
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“There is no doubt that racism is real and has negative consequences for people’s lives,” Adolph Reed Jr. and Touré F. Reed note in the abstract to their article “The Evolution of ‘Race’ and Racial Justice under Neoliberalism.” “This is why we have consistently argued for the continued value of anti-discrimination policies. But race reductionism’s insistence on uncoupling disparities from political economy lends itself to individualist reforms (anti-racism training and swelling the ranks of black capitalists) as responses to structural ailments. We must reject race-reductionist analyses and refuse to accommodate charges that a left focused first and foremost on critique of and challenge to capitalist political economy as such, with its corrosive human consequences, is unacceptably ‘class reductionist.’”
What is race reductionism and how does it close off possibilities for liberational politics? How is it that we’ve come to have such a restrictive understanding of race, culture, identity, and “authenticity” today? How have the political, economic, and ideological changes to society that comprise what we call neoliberalism created a situation where discussions of race and racism are divorced from analyses of class and “capitalist political economy”?
As part of a new collaboration between The Real News Network and the podcast THIS IS REVOLUTION, co-hosts Jason Myles and Pascal Robert speak with scholar and activist Adolph Reed Jr. about the genealogy of American conceptions of race and racism, and about the folly of fighting neoliberalism on neoliberalism’s own terms. Adolph Reed Jr. is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, a longtime activist, scholar, and commentator, and the author of numerous books, including: Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene; Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era; and The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics.
Read the transcript of this interview: https://therealnews.com/when-identity-becomes-a-prison-there-can-be-no-liberational-politics
Pre-Production/Studio: Jason Myles
Post Production: Cameron Granadino
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With news that Democrats will likely be caving to pressure from “centrist” lawmakers like Sen. Joe Manchin, shelving President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better package, and reneging on their campaign promises to voters, the party’s electoral fortunes are looking bleak heading into 2022. If Democrats continue failing to deliver on their campaign promises, what will the repercussions be in states like Wisconsin—a key swing state that played a pivotal role in securing electoral victories for Donald Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020?
Reporting from Wisconsin, TRNN’s Jaisal Noor sat down with Robert Kraig, executive director of the pro-democracy nonprofit Citizen Action of Wisconsin, to discuss the steep hill Democrats already have to climb to combat voter suppression from Republicans, to say nothing of the struggle to keep voters from giving up on both parties entirely.
Read the transcript of this interview: https://therealnews.com/democrats-are-in-for-a-world-of-hurt-in-swing-states-like-wisconsin
Pre-Production/Studio/Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
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