Leid Stories

Leid Stories - Flight 370 - 04/21/14

Flight 370: The Mystery Is About What’s NOT Being Said

‘Housewives’ Reality Show’s A Big Hit—By And On Black Women

Forty-five days since Malaysia Airline Flight MH370 vanished less than an hour after takeoff from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing and, authorities said, ended in the churning waters of the southern Indian Ocean, an international search for the wreckage has yielded nothing.

U.S. media have been covering the evolving story of the disappearance of MH370, with CNN outmatching them all with almost nonstop coverage, presenting just about every possible angle to the story. Like the wreckage, however, perhaps the most significant angle to the story has not yet been located.  Leid Stories reveals what it is.

It’s been a big hit for Bravo/NBC Universal from Season 1, and Season 6’s wrapup of The Real Housewives of Atlanta (Part 1 of 2) was an even bigger hit—by and on African American women. There they were, six of them all gussied up, reviewing a season of shame and pathology. And soon enough, an intergenerational weave-yanking brawl breaks out on set. Great TV! Leid Stories discusses the roles of these women in contributing to the stereotypes of African Americans.

Leid Stories - It’s Friday! Free Your Mind! - 04/18/14

You know what day it is. It’s Free Your Mind Friday on Leid Stories!

You’ve had a whole week’s worth of issues to ponder, and now’s the time to have your say about them.

Call in (888-874-4888) and get it said, or you’ll be no fun at all this weekend. 

Leid Stories - Peak Oil - 04/17/14

Peak Oil: What You Need to Know About A Looming Global Crisis

Hell In Hanford, WA: America’s Most Contaminated Nuclear Site

Leid Stories listener Jay Smith, an environmental activist, presents an FYI, “Peak Oil: The Basics on A Looming Global Crisis.” 

Recently launched as a “peer-to-peer teaching and learning” component of the program, FYIs are briefings or primers on subjects deserving further study and discussion.

Investigative reporter Paul DeRienzo, working under a Polk Awards journalism grant, files the first installment of “America’s Fukushima”--a series on a longstanding ecological disaster caused by massive contamination from the Hanford Site, a sprawling nuclear-reactor complex on the Columbia River in south-central Washington state.

The now-decommissioned site, built in 1943, housed the world’s first plutonium-production reactor that produced much of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, including the nuclear bombs used against Japan. But the operation of its nine reactors, phased out between 1968 and 1987, has created one of the largest ecological disasters in the United States. 

Leid Stories - Robbed on the Job - 04/16/14

Wage Theft: Workers Robbed On the Job--By Their Employers!

On The Money: Small PAC Takes On Big Campaign-Finance Issue

Bill O’Reilly’s Undiluted, Unrepentant Racism

Hundreds of thousands of American workers are being robbed while on the job, says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the Economic Policy Institute. Employers steal billions of dollars by shortchanging them of fair pay, he says, and the federal government is doing little about it. Wage theft, he reveals, is bigger than bank robberies, convenience store robberies, street and highway robberies, and gas station robberies combined. 

Big-money influence in politics may have met its match. A small political action committee, calling itself Wolf-PAC, has launched an ambitious plan to end corporate financing of political campaigns (reversing the controversial Citizens United U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing corporations the same First Amendment (free-speech) rights as individuals). Todd Jagger, Wolf-PAC’s coordinator for Texas and Western states, says the organization is making inroads.

Fox News’s resident bigot Bill O’Reilly and guest John Calipari, Kentucky’s basketball coach, had a lovely little chat on Monday about Calipari’s experience in coaching and his new book, Players First: Coaching From the Inside Out. Leid Stories’ listeners decipher the content of the five-minute interview.

Leid Stories - News Blues: The Media Still Defiantly Bastions of Whiteness - 04/15/14

America may be changing demographically, but the nation’s newsrooms are not. Studies show that most newsrooms are holding to “diversity” plateaus reached many years ago. Even so, the news continues to reflect a decidedly white perspective in practically every aspect of editorial content.

The Kerner Commission, appointed in 1967 by President Lyndon Johnson to study the root causes of urban rebellions that had broken out across the nation (all of them in communities of color), pointed to political, social, economic and historical factors that contributed to the violence. But the commission also blamed the media for exacerbating and maintaining a deeply entrenched racial divide.

Leid Stories discusses the role of today’s media in a vastly changed America and world.

Leid Stories - Tote That Barge, Lift That Bale - 04/14/14

Obama Still Telling Blacks: ‘Tote That Barge, Lift That Bale’ (Part 1)

Detroit Files Third Bankruptcy-Exit Plan Over Major Protest

President Obama, the keynote speaker Friday (April 11) at the National Action Network’s 16th annual convention in New York, brought his all-too-familiar message to its marginalized minions: “Your only hope is the Democratic Party, and you are duty-bound to support it, unless you want to suffer the catastrophic consequences of a Republican win.”

So warned Obama, now proudly embracing the heretofore avoided and snubbed Al Sharpton.

Leid Stories analyzes Obama’s speech, examining its factual errors, deliberate omissions, and multiple, persistent offenses to African American identity, culture and history.

The City of Detroit today is expected to submit to federal Judge Steven Rhodes its third version of a bankruptcy-exit plan, forecasting solvency by Oct. 15. City unions and hundreds of other petitioners, however, are dead set against the draconian cuts Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr is proposing in his bid to settle the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcy in record time.     

Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of Pan-African News Wire and Detroit organizer for the Workers World Party, reports.

Leid Stories - Another Week of Madness? Another Reason to Free Your Mind! - 04/11/14

Has the craziness of politics gotten to you this week? Not a minute to lose, start your mind-readjustment program now to save your weekend!

It’s Free-Your-Mind Friday on Leid Stories—a pro bono service to those wanting to talk things through to quickly regain their political bearings. Our method is quite effective; most people find themselves happily immune to the bloviators on weekend “analysis” shows.

Call in (888-874-4888) and share your considered thoughts and opinions. A great weekend is in store.

Leid Stories - Getting Short-Changed: Pols Play (Real) Dirty Politics At Women’s Expense - 04/10/14

The Senate yesterday fell seven votes short of the 60 needed to pass S. 2199, the Paycheck Fairness Act. It was a decidedly partisan vote, with all Republicans and Sen. Angus King, the Independent from Maine, turning their thumbs down on the equal-pay-for-equal-work legislation.

Predictably, the vote ignited a furor across the country – but not for the right reason, says Leid Stories. The post-vote furor should be less about gender-based pay inequity and more about the utter failure of the Democratic Party, the principal beneficiary of the so-called “women’s vote,” to assure passage of the legislation for 50 years.

A Leid Stories Commentary puts the matter into proper perspective.

Leid Stories - Smash the Duopoly!: The Case for New Political Parties - 04/09/14

Smash the Duopoly!: The Case for New Political Parties

Buying a car? Hundreds of models to choose from. Looking for a new suit? You can spend a month just looking at thousands of styles. Want to cast a smart vote? Well, now you’re in trouble. There’s Party A or Party B. Pull that lever and rejoice that a whole bunch of people have taken the time to make “democracy” real easy for you.

The Republican-Democrat duopoly has had a stranglehold on Americans’ political choices for way too long, says our guest, Prof. J. David Gillespie, author of Challengers to Duopoly: Why Third Parties Matter in American Two-Party Politics. The lack of political-party choices, he says, is not by happenstance; it’s planned that way, he says.

Tune in and learn how and why the seismic shift to two-party politics is “the norm;” how fledgling parties were targeted for annihilation; and why it’s important that Americans engage in the formation of new parties that reflect their unique concerns.

Leid Stories - Mad About the System? What’s Your Political Fix? - 04/08/14

More and more, American voters are becoming jaded about voting. “Does it change anything?” they ask—the question that has fueled many a poll showing negative views of politics in general by voters who once thought their participation in the political process actually made a difference.

Midterm elections this year and the looming presidential contest in 2016 seem to have stirred these sentiments again—only with even sharper criticisms about politics and a pervasive view that voters are merely bit players in a complex game that’s all about money and power and they have neither.

Leid Stories asks listeners where on the political axis they place themselves as voters today; what they consider to be the most serious problem with American politics; and what they think a better alternative would be.