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Thursday Jul 09, 2015
Thursday Jul 09, 2015
Bleeding to Debt: As With Detroit, So With Puerto Rico?
Puerto Rico is in a “death spiral,” Gov. Alejandro García Padilla has declared, unable to pay off an estimated $72 billion in debts. Padilla’s plea to creditors for concessions and more time on overdue notes isn’t playing well with bondholders, and Puerto Ricans have had it with government cutbacks and runaway increases in the cost of living to service the debt.
Padilla sees a way out—declaring bankruptcy. The problem is, by law only U.S. municipalities and states can seek bankruptcy protection from the courts, and Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory; it must first seek special dispensation from Congress.
Padilla has hired former federal judge Stephen Rhodes as a consultant on restructuring Puerto Rico’s debt. For many, it’s a troubling sign. Rhodes, now in private practice, was the judge who presided over Detroit’s contentious $18-billion bankruptcy, sanctioning wholesale plunder of the once-prosperous city.
Abayomi Azikiwe, editor in chief of Pan African News Wire and our correspondent on Detroit’s bankruptcy, says Padilla’s hiring of Rhodes is an indication that the Detroit bankruptcy model is about to be applied to Puerto Rico.
Tuesday Jul 07, 2015
Tuesday Jul 07, 2015
Talking Things Over, Talking Things Through
Yay! We’re reconnected, PRN having accomplished its move into brand-new studios.
To make for time lost on our regularly scheduled “Free Your Mind Fridays,” Leid Stories devotes today’s program to listeners’ thoughts and opinions about current issues and events.
Monday Jul 06, 2015
Monday Jul 06, 2015
Trump’s Racist Comments Have Deep Roots
What is instructive about Donald Trump’s racist comments about Mexican immigrants is its epistemology.
Leid Stories examines Trump’s immigrant background, making the connection between his crudely touted credentials as an American oligarch and the concessions his German grandfather, Friedrich Drumpf, clearly made to succeed in a white-supremacist culture.
Trump’s benefits of the accumulation and transference of wealth over just three generations compares starkly with that of another Republican presidential candidate, Ben Carson, as Leid Stories explains.
Friday Jul 03, 2015
Friday Jul 03, 2015
Whose Independence?: The Fourth of July and What It Really Means
Leid Stories wraps up its series on systems of white supremacy and their centrality to practically all aspects of life in the United States with two history lessons.
Dr. Gerald Horne, the John J. and Rebecca Moores chair of history and African American studies and professor of diplomatic history at the University of Houston and author of The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, explains the War of Independence as a counterrevolution by the power elite against the inevitability of the abolition of slavery by Britain.
The prescient words of Frederick Douglass still ring true. The late actor and activist Ossie Davis gives voice to “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” Douglass’s speech to the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y., on July 5, 1852.
Thursday Jul 02, 2015
Thursday Jul 02, 2015
Activist Attorney’s Case Against Obama: He’s A ‘Race Traitor’
In a June 29 article in the political journal CounterPunch, Thomas Ruffin, an activist and attorney in private practice in Washington, D.C., makes the case that President Barack Obama is “a race traitor.”
Ruffin’s provocative article is the focal point of Leid Stories’ discussion today.
Wednesday Jul 01, 2015
Wednesday Jul 01, 2015
A Burning Faith: Black Churches, White Supremacy
Hillary Clinton’s Storied “Struggle to Fit In” with Obama
Federal investigators probing a fire that destroyed Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Greeleyville, S.C., last night reportedly believe arson was not the cause. The church was burned 20 years ago by Klansmen, and Mount Zion AME’s razing, the seventh Black church in the South to be destroyed by fire in recent weeks, has revived a history of white-supremacist terrorism against African Americans.
Leid Stories discusses the history of white-supremacist attacks on Black churches.
The ongoing sanitization by the media of the political history of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton continues. A Reuters story today reports that the presumptive Democratic nominee “struggled to fit in with Obama’s White House” as secretary of state. The story, typical of major-media coverage of Clinton and her campaign, deliberately omits historical perspective on how she got the Cabinet position in the first place, which might have had something to do with her storied “struggle to fit in.” Leid Stories explains.
Tuesday Jun 30, 2015
Tuesday Jun 30, 2015
U.S. Supreme Court Decisions 2015: ‘Not All Settled Law’
The U.S. Supreme Court has wrapped up its term with a bumper crop of history-making decisions. The court may have settled several controversial matters of law, but it also has triggered questions about the politicization of the justices and their seemingly limitless authority as the last word on laws enacted by Congress and presidential action.
Josh Blackman, an assistant professor of law at the South Texas College of Law and an expert on constitutional law, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the intersection of law and technology, discusses key decisions of the court’s term.
Author of Unprecedented: The Constitutional Challenge to Obamacare, Blackman deconstructs the court’s decision on the Affordable Care Act.
Monday Jun 29, 2015
Monday Jun 29, 2015
Obama Makes ‘Historic’ Speech, But Is Oblivious to History
President Barack Obama has received rave reviews for his eulogy Friday (June 26) of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney—the pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., who was assassinated by a white-supremacist gunman during a prayer and bible-studies meeting at the church on June 17. The killer also massacred eight others.
But, as Leid Stories points out, the president’s panegyric on several counts was oblivious to history and decidedly revisionist.
Friday Jun 26, 2015
Thursday Jun 25, 2015
Thursday Jun 25, 2015
Sister Hillary Preaches the Word, and Nothing’s Sacred
The June 17 massacre of nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., by a white-supremacist gunman provided Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton the perfect opportunity to go stomping for black votes. She was not about to let a crisis go to waste.
Clinton on Tuesday appeared at Christ the King United Church of Christ in Florissant, Missouri, and to enthusiastic applause laid out her political vision and agenda for African Americans. Clinton’s speech was meant to convey her deep understanding of the issues affecting African Americans and her connection with this constituency, but as Leid Stories reveals, Clinton’s address confirmed the candidate’s own racism, the distorted views she has of people of color, and her sense of entitlement.