Episodes
Monday Dec 30, 2013
Leid Stories - 12/30/13
Monday Dec 30, 2013
Monday Dec 30, 2013
The Thrill With Obama Is 62.5% Gone. What’s the Agenda for the Next Three Years?
The first year of his second term completed, it is no secret that the various constituencies that delivered for President Barack Obama -- twice -- are less than satisfied with the yield on their political investment.
Hushed rumbling has now become sharp, open criticism as historically marginalized groups see their standard bearer unable and/or unwilling to engage fully in the battle he had promised to wage in their behalf. There is a palpable sense that he has gone to “the other side” of business-as-usual politics, doing what is expedient rather than what is necessary.
Leid Stories closes the tumultuous year assessing where things stand with the original (2008) and extended (2012) contracts between Obama and his political base, and poses the question: “What’s the agenda – his and ours -- for the next three years?”
Friday Dec 27, 2013
Leid Stories - 12/27/13
Friday Dec 27, 2013
Friday Dec 27, 2013
Detroit, now Chicago: A Kick-Start to A Democratic Party Revolt?
On Dec. 19, the Rev. Al Sharpton and a coterie of handpicked elected officials, clergy and community leaders were to “lead a Chicago community town hall meeting to call for a unified commitment to end gun violence,” Sharpton’s public-relations agent said in a media advisory about the nationally hyped event.
Well, let’s just say the agenda was changed. Dramatically. The packed auditorium at Hyde Park Academy reverberated with condemnations of political lackeys and turncoat figureheads, a useless Democratic Party, a hateful Mayor Rahm Emanuel and an indifferent President Obama for mass suffering in Chicago.
Grassroots Detroit has been fully engaged in a pushback and political organizing against extreme misery brought on by the court-permitted bankruptcy of the city – seen essentially as a political gift to banksters and real estate robber barons. And now Chicago.
Leid Stories asks: Is this the start of a Democratic Party revolt?
Friday Dec 27, 2013
Leid Stories - 12/26/13
Friday Dec 27, 2013
Friday Dec 27, 2013
The State of the Union 2013: A People’s Report (Part 2)
Where we’ve been, where we are, and where we ought to be as a nation – that’s the focus of our discussion today on Leid Stories, Part 2 of our own “State of the Union” report.
As we close out the year, listeners offer keen insights on issues, events and people they believe had the greatest impact (positive and/or negative) in 2013, and tell us what they think is ahead in 2014.
Friday Dec 27, 2013
Leid Stories - 12/24/13
Friday Dec 27, 2013
Friday Dec 27, 2013
The State of the Union 2013: A People’s Report on What Was, What’s Ahead
It’s Open Forum on Leid Stories, but with a twist.
Listeners create a “State of the Union” report citing issues, events and people they believe have had the most significant impact in 2013, and forecasting their likely impact, if any, in 2014.
Monday Dec 23, 2013
Leid Stories - 12/23/13
Monday Dec 23, 2013
Monday Dec 23, 2013
“Where Are We? Where Are We Going?: A Year-End Reality Check
At the end of a tumultuous year and on the cusp of another, Leid Stories begins a series of end-of-year discussions to encourage a dialogue about the realities and challenges of life in various segments of our society – both as a reminder that we’re not “all in this together,” and as a caution against the one-size-fits-all, zero-sum model for social, political and economic change.
The series kicks off with attorney Alton H. Maddox Jr., whose deep political activism and four-plus decades as a self-appointed “people’s attorney general” litigating, pro bono, some of the most contentious cases involving official and prosecutorial misconduct in New York history, inform a scathing analysis of the principal impediments to power and progress in the African American community and society at large.
Friday Dec 20, 2013
Leid Stories - 12/20/13
Friday Dec 20, 2013
Friday Dec 20, 2013
Ross Perot Was Right: NAFTA Was ‘A Giant Sucking Sound’;
Detroit: Politically Connected Vultures Hover Over the City’s Assets
Approaching the 20th anniversary of the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on Jan. 1, 2014, Leid Stories does an audit on its central promise: Jobs for Americans. But Robert E. Scott, director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, says that NAFTA-linked trade deficits have cost the United States 682,900 jobs.
Ross Perot, the 1992 independent presidential candidate from Texas, was right: NAFTA was for the U.S. a “giant sucking sound.”
Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African Newswire and community organizer with the Workers World Party, reports on the latest developments in the city’s court-approved bankruptcy. Politically connected vultures are eyeing the city’s assets, he says, and several have already closed bargain-basement deals.
Thursday Dec 19, 2013
Leid Stories - 12/19/13
Thursday Dec 19, 2013
Thursday Dec 19, 2013
Obamacare Should Be the Death Knell for the Two-Party System;
More Questions Than Answers About Supermole Snowden
Option 1: Object all you want, but “it’s the law,” a done deal, so get with the program or the IRS will impose a penalty. Option 2: Object all you want, but “it’s the law,” a done deal, so get with the program or the IRS will impose a penalty.
The stitched-together Obamacare, like Frankenstein, is alive, and it’s a monster. No one in the Democratic Party so far has had the moral fiber to take on the Con Man-in-Chief over his eponymous boondoggle gift to pay-to-play health-care corporations, and no one in the Republican Party has dared advance a credible alternative plan to assure access to quality medical care for all.
Leid Stories makes that we shouldn’t have to choose between the lesser of two evils or the evil of two lessers. The people deserve true democracy – the benefit of competing ideas and solutions from many different political parties.
Plus, a bit more about the mysterious Edward Snowden and the puzzlements that surround him.
Tuesday Dec 17, 2013
Leid Stories - 12/17/13
Tuesday Dec 17, 2013
Tuesday Dec 17, 2013
Get Ready, Get Set, Call In! It’s Open Forum on Leid Stories!
It’s your turn to define what’s news – or, what ought to be.
Take the conversation wherever you want it to go, but be prepared: The smartest people on the planet are listening to you and just might take you on -- with great respect, of course.
Monday Dec 16, 2013
Leid Stories - 12/16/13
Monday Dec 16, 2013
Monday Dec 16, 2013
Detroit’s Sham $18-Billion ‘Bankruptcy’ Gets A Forensic Audit
Snowden’s Stolen NSA Files Launched A $250-Million Business
The former chairman of Michigan’s Board of Accountancy (which certifies public accountants practicing in the state), had told Leid Stories on the eve of the Dec. 3 federal court decision granting Detroit’s filing for bankruptcy that the city’s financial balance sheet showing $18 billion in debt didn’t add up. The debt was grossly overstated and the city’s accounting practices were highly irregular, he said.
Barrow discusses Detroit’s fiscal future based on the debt-relief plan approved by the court.
In the wake of reports that NSA officials consider amnesty for Edward Snowden in return for the files he stole “a conversation worth having” comes a bombshell exposé that the 1.7 million classified documents already have launched a $250-million “checkbook journalism” business.
Friday Dec 13, 2013
Leid Stories - 12/13/13
Friday Dec 13, 2013
Friday Dec 13, 2013
Mandela: A Reluctance to Tell the Whole Story
Media coverage and, therefore, public discourse about and opinion of Nelson Mandela, have neatly excised centuries of racist invasion, plunder and brutal subjugation of a people from the story of the heroic figure. We encounter Mandela at the near end of a cataclysmic era in South Africa, but certainly not unique to it. That history had been replicated all over the black world.
Leid Stories discusses the clear discomfort the media and shapers of opinion have in telling the whole story -- not the hurried, sanitized version that starts with “apartheid” and casts a centuries-old war for reclamation of indigenous natural rights essentially as a higher-octane version of the U.S. civil-rights struggle that ended with Mandela bringing about kumbaya “reconciliation” in 1994.
There is a reason they won’t tell the whole story.