Episodes
Monday May 14, 2018
Leid Stories—Who/What Can Stop Trump from Lying?--05.14.18
Monday May 14, 2018
Monday May 14, 2018
Gina Haspel, the President Donald Trump-backed acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, appears very likely to get the job. Since May 9, when the Senate Intelligence Committee began questioning her, it was embarrassingly clear that “national security” concerns would not allow her to be specific about her key role in running secret prisons (called “black sites”) in several locations all over the world that specialized in torturing alleged terrorists.
Leid Stories discusses Haspel successfully diverted attention away from her role in the torture program.
On May 7, Leid Stories did a commentary titled, “The Always-Lying President Just Keeps On Lying,” noting: “He lies about big things and small. He lies to make himself look good, and others bad. He even lies about lying. There is no hope, it seems, that the lying will stop, but President Trump’s lies are quite consequential; his lying ways have caught on in his administration.”
Well, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg ran with the theme in a commencement speech he delivered at Rice University on May 12. Without calling any names, he talked about the “epidemic of dishonesty” that has entrenched itself in American politics and society, and warned that, left unchecked and unchallenged, it will destroy democracy.
Friday May 11, 2018
Leid Stories—Free Your Mind. It’s Your Best Defense!—05.11.18
Friday May 11, 2018
Friday May 11, 2018
Here you are at the end of a very trying week. You’ve triumphed over the conspiracy to drive you mad with a torrent of “news” and “information” designed to confuse you, throw you off kilter, and dumb you down.
Disassemble the mishmash we’ve been fed all week and tell us what we really ought to know. Call 888-874-4888 and help us free our minds.
Thursday May 10, 2018
Thursday May 10, 2018
Historian and prolific author Gerald Horne, Ph.D., looks at a few contemporary issues and events, domestic and global, through the lens of history.
Horne, the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, regularly decodes complex social, political and economic issues on Leid Stories.
He has written more than 30 books and 100 scholarly papers on global struggles against imperialism, colonialism, fascism and racism. Most recently: The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox (2017); Storming the Heavens: African Americans and the Early Struggle for the Right to Fly (2017); Facing the Rising Sun: African Americans, Japan the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity (2018); and The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy and Capitalism in Seventeenth Century North America and the Caribbean (2018).
Wednesday May 09, 2018
Wednesday May 09, 2018
Last Tuesday, May 1, the Rev. Edward Pinkney, a longtime grassroots activist, received some good news—albeit after serving a full 30-month prison sentence on a bogus conviction for election fraud. The Michigan Supreme Court, finally reviewing his case, unanimously ordered his convictions vacated and all charges against him dismissed.
Pinkney, a leading voice against corrupt political leadership and massive corporate land grabs in many Black cities in the state, continued to organize even while in prison. Democracy works when people make it work, and work together to make it work, he says.
Leid Stories takes time to celebrate the fighting spirit of Rev. Pinkney and the people of Benton Harbor, who are in a pitched battle with major corporations wanting to drive them out and take their land.
Tuesday May 08, 2018
Tuesday May 08, 2018
The draconian programs that the Trump administration has vowed to implement to curb illegal immigration into the United States are having ripple effect elsewhere in the hemisphere. Several Central and South American countries are doing thee same, expelling hundreds of thousands who previously were welcomed under a number of national and international humanitarian compacts but now want their foreign guests gone.
Kim Ives, editor of the English edition of Haïti Liberté, has been traveling with Haitian exiles in Central and South America who under extreme difficulty and bleak prospects are trying to return home.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman resigns at the end of the business day today, and already the list of possible replacements is long. Gov. Andrew Cuomo urged Schneiderman to quit after a New Yorker magazine exposé reported that at least four women linked to him romantically said he was physically abusive to them.
Leid Stories discusses Schneiderman’s history of legal abuse of communities of color in New York state.
Monday May 07, 2018
Leid Stories—Who/What Can Stop Trump from Lying?--05.07.18
Monday May 07, 2018
Monday May 07, 2018
He lies about big things and small. He lies to make himself look good, and others bad. He even lies about lying. There is no hope, it seems, that the lying will stop.
But President Trump’s lies are quite consequential. And as we have seen, his lying ways have caught on in his administration.
Leid Stories discusses Trump’s compulsive lying—not as some personality quirk, but as an integral part of how he lives in and manipulates the world.
Friday May 04, 2018
Leid Stories—Free Your Mind Now to Deal With the Madness Ahead!—05.04.18
Friday May 04, 2018
Friday May 04, 2018
This is no time to be confused. Your mind needs to be uncluttered and in good shape, and “Free Your Mind Friday” on Leid Stories is here to help.
Get a head start with “Free Your Mind Friday” on Leid Stories. It’s the best open forum on the planet. Call in (888-874-4888) and share your thoughts about the issues of the day or any subject you think warrants further discussion or debate. Prepare us for the madness ahead!
Thursday May 03, 2018
Thursday May 03, 2018
Two African American men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, both 23, were arrested April 12 at a Starbucks in Philadelphia after the store’s manager said they were not paying customers and were not entitled to any of the cafe’s amenities. After protests urging a national boycott of Starbucks, the men have reached undisclosed settlements with the parent company, and each has agreed to a $1 symbolic settlement with the city in exchange for $200,000 to support a program in minority entrepreneurship.
Two Native American men were part of an organized tour of Colorado State University on Monday when campus police showed up and detained them for questioning. A white woman who was on the tour with her daughter had called in a report that the Native American men on the tour were “making her nervous," The Denver Post reported yesterday. After campus security questioned the men, they left the tour and the campus and returned home to New Mexico. CSU officials reached out to the men to apologize, but it appears the damage is done.
Leid Stories notes that “teachable moments” like these almost always come at the expense of victims of racism and not the ones inflicting it.
Entertainer Bill Cosby, convicted April 26 in a Pennsylvania court on three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault, is to learn the length of his prison sentence in June. The maximum for each count is 10 years.
Leid Stories continues with listeners’ observations on the fairness of the trial of Bill Cosby, which ended April 26 with guilty verdicts on three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault—charges that could cost him up to 10 years on each count when he is sentenced next month.
Wednesday May 02, 2018
Wednesday May 02, 2018
The official coroner’s report on the March 18 killing of Stephon Clark by two still-unnamed Sacramento Police Department officers has touched off a new round of tensions. The report, released yesterday, disputes key findings of an earlier, independent autopsy performed by the Clark family’s forensic pathologist. The reports differ in the number of bullets that struck Clark, where about the body he was struck, and whether Clark was facing his shooters or was attempting to run away from them when he was hit.
Entertainer Bill Cosby, convicted April 26 in a Pennsylvania court on three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault, is to learn the length of his prison sentence in June. The maximum for each count is 10 years.
Leid Stories continues with listeners’ observations about the fairness of his trial.
Tuesday May 01, 2018
Tuesday May 01, 2018
A week into a strike by 50,000 teachers in Arizona over long-overdue salary increases and funding for basics like books and school supplies, and one doesn’t get a sense that this constitutes a state of emergency. Similarly, in Colorado, some 10,000 teachers walked off their jobs demanding pay hikes, facility upgrades and new textbooks for students. The state governments say they simply don’t have the money. Shouldn’t this be where Secretary of Education rides to the rescue and brokers a solution?
Vice President Mike Pence decided yesterday to keep the issue of “The Wall” going. He visited a wall-building project in Calexico, Calif., and used it as a backdrop to tell the media that President Trump will have his wall. Earlier in the day, about 150 people (most of them from Central American states) seeking to file for asylum in the United States were turned away at a border-crossing processing center in San Diego. We discuss why it was against both U.S. and international law to turn them away, and why the administration continues to conflate the issue of asylum with illegal immigration.
Listeners continue to share their views about the just-concluded Bill Cosby trial, in which a jury found the entertainer guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault for sexually assaulting a female basketball coach he had mentored in his Philadelphia home in 2004. Cosby, 80, faces up to 10 in prison on each count when he is sentenced in June.