Leid Stories

Leid Stories – 09.02.15

Radioactive Waste Dump in Texas Threatens U.S. Water Supply

The Big Fix: What Ails America and How to Fix It

Highly radioactive waste from nuclear power plants in 36 states is being dumped in a remote area in West Texas, just outside the small town of Andrews. The dumping will continue until a massive hole in the ground dug for that purpose is filled. The nuclear-waste graveyard, however, sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer, the world’s second-largest underground water supply, covering an area of 174,000 square miles.

Independent, award-winning journalist Paul DeRienzo—who had done a six-part series (“America’s Fukushima”) on Leid Stories about the nation’s largest ecological disaster caused by massive contamination from the Hanford Site, a sprawling nuclear-reactor complex on the Columbia River in south-central Washington state—reveals an elaborate scheme by governmental officials and a politically connected waste-disposal company to hide from  the public the clear and present danger of massive contamination of the Ogallala Aquifer.

Leid Stories listeners identify top problems confronting the nation and offer workable solutions.

Leid Stories – 09.01.15

Labor Pains for 137,000: The Auto Workers Union and Detroit’s Big 3

It’s six weeks since the United Auto Workers union began hardball negotiations with Detroit’s Big Three—General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles US—over a slew of issues related to a new contract for some 137,000 workers.

The current contract expires Sept. 14, and with no agreement yet struck on the top grievance—a two-tiered wage system that pays workers hired after 2007 about half what senior workers warn—union members have voted to authorize a strike against all three manufacturers in the event of “bad-faith” negotiations.

Frank Hammer, a retired 32-year GM worker and former chairman and president of the UAW’s 3,500-member  Local 909 in Warren, Mich., for 12 years, takes us behind the scenes of the current negotiations, but with a blistering critique of the UAW. The union’s leadership has been capitulating to the dictates of the auto industry for more than a decade, Hammer contends.

Leid Stories – 08.31.15

Prof. Tanya Golash-Boza is on Leid Stories and the Topic is :  “Not Your Land: The Great American Nativism Revival”

Leid Stories – 08.28.15

It’s Your Special Day, “Free Your Mind” Friday!

Celebrate the joy of free thinking on “Free Your Mind Friday,” an open forum for the exchange of information, opinions and ideas. It’s the best in “talk” radio!

Add your intellectual flavor to this delicious brew. Share your views about the news events or issues of the day, or about anything you think is worthy of consideration.

It’s your call—at 888-874-4888.

Leid Stories – 08.27.15

My Cab Ride From Hell: A Political Metaphor

A harrowing cab ride home one rainy night is recalled as a perfect metaphor for where we are as a nation: Relegated to the back seat as mere passengers, we’re in the hands of a government that can’t see where it’s going but won’t take directions.

In the real-life story about the cab ride, Utrice makes an inspired decision and gets home. Politically speaking, she asks, are we as a nation prepared to do the same?

Leid Stories – 08.26.15

Mass Incarceration USA: Ending It, and What Started It

With 2.4 million people in its prisons, jails and detention centers—and an additional 5 million people under state or federal supervision through probation or parole—the United States leads the world in incarceration.

The United States accounts for only 5 percent of the world’s population, but nearly 22 percent of the world’s prison population, says Amnesty International. The nation’s prison population has grown 500 percent in the past 30 years, says The Sentencing Project.

Our guest, Carl Dix, a national spokesperson for the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA,  has been working to stop mass incarceration since the mid-1990s, and in 2011 played a key role in starting the Stop Mass Incarceration Network. He discusses the nationwide human-rights campaign to end mass incarceration—which, he says, has had devastating impact on communities of color and the poor.

Michelle Alexander, associate professor of law at Ohio State University and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, discusses in a presentation at the University of Tennessee the policies that produced mass incarceration.

Leid Stories – 08.25.15

Israeli President Affirms Zionist ‘Right’ to Build in West Bank

A ‘Fresh Start’ for Ferguson’s Court System, But Is It Justice?

A month after Israeli extremists firebombed a Palestinian home in the West Bank village of Duma, killing a father and his 18-month-old son, President Reuven Rivlin yesterday affirmed to leaders of the settler movement that, contrary to international law, Israel had a “right” to build settlements, as “a basic fact of modern Zionism.”

Mark LeVine, professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of California-Irvine and distinguished visiting professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden, addresses Rivlin’s assertion and related issues.

Five months after the U.S. Department of Justice skewered the police department and criminal-justice system in Ferguson, Missouri, for targeting blacks and treating them largely as source of revenue for the city, newly appointed Municipal Court Judge Donald McCullin yesterday announced a series of changes—chief among them dropping all arrest warrants for minor crimes and infractions issued before December 31, 2014.

It’s a good sign, says Leid Stories in a commentary. But is it justice?

Leid Stories – 08.24.15

St. Louis Police Killing of Mansur Ball-Bey: We Reveals New Details

Party Pooper?: Biden’s Possible Run Confirms Hillary Clinton’s  Vulnerability

Mansur Ball-Bey, 18, was shot dead by police Aug. 19 during a house raid. Two police officers involved in the shooting say he aimed at them with a gun and they fired in self-defense. Witnesses, however, have said the Ball-Bay was not armed. The killing has reignited tensions locally and nationally about police use of force.

The deck’s getting stacked against Hillary Clinton. A campaign scrambling to hold itself together in the face of self-inflicted political wounds, the upsurge in Bernie Sanders’ popularity, a growing unease about her among highly placed fellow Democrats, and the wait-and-see attitudes of major endorsers is now rattled by the possibility that Vice President Joe Biden will run.

Leid Stories says that whether he runs or not, the mere discussion of a Biden candidacy confirms the Democratic Party’s recognition that Clinton is carrying way more baggage than it can carry.

Leid Stories – 08.21.15

Don’t Keep It All to Yourself! Free Your Mind!

You have a treasure trove of great ideas, incisive opinions and sharp analyses of the issues of the day, but they’re all locked up in your head.

Liberate them! Give them a great place to go!

Leid Stories is a bridge between your brainwork and a community of thinkers  who appreciate invigorating discussion and debate.

Leid Stories – 08.20.15

Police Killings: The Problem That Won’t Go Away

Election 2016: Leid Stories Measures the Political Temperature

Leid Stories discusses the fatal shooting yesterday of a black teenager by white police officers in St. Louis, Missouri, which once again has ignited a firestorm over police use of force and the racial dynamic that persists in the policing of communities of color throughout the United States.

Eighteen-year-old Mansur Ball-Bey was shot and killed after fleeing a house where two white police officers were conducting a search, St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson said yesterday. Ball-Bey pointed a gun at them as he fled, Dotson said, of the killing, which prompted local protests that recalled the police killings a year ago of Kajieme Powell in St. Louis and Michael Brown in Ferguson.

A “poll” of Leid Stories listeners registers the political temperature of the 2016 presidential campaign.