Leid Stories

Leid Stories - You Are A Woman. What Does That Mean? - 03/24/14

Lost in the noise and dissonance of gender politics in the United States is a simple, yet extremely complicated, question: What does it mean to be a woman?

Not surprisingly, this question raises other questions that also are simple, yet extremely complicated: Who decides? Based on what?

Leid Stories discusses gender politics essentially as a reflection of internecine conflicts within the white world, between white women and white men, over the power to rule all others. Hence, the apparent agreement to ignore race, class and culture—factors that would unnecessarily complicate what both sides understand and accept as the primary reason for adversarial engagement. 

Leid Stories - 03/21/14

It’s Friday. Free Your Mind on Leid Stories!

It’s the end of the week and you are besotted with new thoughts and ideas. Think this is accidental? No, it’s not. It’s part of an evil plot (NSA?) to overload and short-circuit your brain and ruin any chance of you having a fun-filled, worry-free weekend.

Be kind to your mind. Bring your new thoughts and ideas to “Free Your Mind Friday” on Leid Stories and share with others similarly situated. You are assured a sympathetic, though analytical, hearing.

Leid Stories - Stalwart Soldiers In the Battle Against Educational Genocide - 03/20/14

The crisis in public education in the United States not only persists, but has become even more intense at the state and local levels because of the domino effect of the Obama administration’s “new-Democrat” policies.

Urban school districts, which serve the majority of the nation’s schoolchildren of color, are experiencing the fiercest battles in years over educational policy and administration, budget cuts, union contracts, teacher layoffs, testing, privatization, community control and school closings. Leid Stories’ guests today for decades have been stalwart soldiers in the battle to preserve public schools and to end educational inequality.

Karen Lewis, president of the 30,000-member Chicago Teachers Union, provides a status report on resistance to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s “reforms.”

And the well-known and venerated activist Helen Moore, a frontline civil-rights soldier for almost 50 years, discusses the violation of children’s rights to a quality education in Detroit.

Leid Stories - The U.S. Postal Service: African Americans and the Fight for Jobs, Justice and Equality” - 03/19/14

The U.S. Postal Service: African Americans and the Fight for Jobs, Justice and Equality”

The U.S. Postal Service currently is the target of congressional committees seeking to implement “reforms” that will “right-size” and “modernize” its operations, they say, and put an end to its inefficiency and, most particularly, its reputed losses.

(The USPS is the only federal entity that is required, under the constitutionally questionable Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006, to prefund 75 years worth of retirees’ health benefits with current payments—amounting to $5.5 billion a year for the next 10 years.)

But as was revealed in Leid Stories’ first edition on a series on the USPS (March 13), the government itself is the cause of the USPS’s fiscal woes, and the committees now pressing for “reforms” refuse to address, let alone investigate, how their own colleagues have used the USPS and its assets as a multibillion-dollar gift that keeps on giving. The push is for wholesale privatization, Leid Stories’ guests said, and the “reforms” calls for massive layoffs, closing post offices and selling the real estate, and increasing costs to consumers.

In this edition, ex-letter carrier Philip F. Rubio, now associate professor of history at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro and author of the award-winning There's Always Work at the Post Office:African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice and Equality and A History of Affirmative Action, 1619-2000, discusses the USPS as the epicenter of a struggle that yielded for African Americans social and economic mobility. The generational benefit of this struggle, he says, is threatened.

Leid Stories - Charter Schools: Politically Authorized and Endorsed Educational Apartheid - 03/17/14

March 4 found Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York and an array of elected officials standing behind him in a joyous mood despite the cold. Looking out at a sea of about 11,000 schoolchildren, parents and teachers who filled the plaza outside the state Capitol, Cuomo assured them, political-rally style, that they had a friend in Albany; he’ll vigorously defend charter schools against New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s threats to limit them.

The first in a series of discussions about charter schools, Leid Stories takes a look at the recent showdown, which illustrates a number of disturbing but symptomatic aspects of the charter school movement—including the rise of charter schools and the closing of public schools; the targeted populations being overwhelmingly children of color; the relationship between charter schools and community destabilization; and the neoliberal agenda behind charter schools.

Leid Stories - Decompress From the Week’s Woes, It’s “Free Your Mind Friday!” - 03/14/14

Are you sullen and on edge because your brilliant analysis of current events or masterful deconstruction of a complex issue hasn’t been heard, let alone appreciated? Is that what’s bothering you, friend?

Well, suffer in silence no more! It’s Free Your Mind Friday on Leid Stories, and we’re all here, waiting for you! We’re a fine bunch—big-hearted, even tempered, well mannered, and connoisseurs of good ideas. You’ll be in great company.

Call in and express yourself. Your mind will thank you for unburdening, and will reward you with a wonderful weekend.

Leid Stores - U.S. Postal Service ‘Reforms’ Have Big Money Behind Them - 03/13/14

The U.S. Postal Service for many years has been the poster child for what’s wrong with “big government.” Ever-increasing operational costs, loss of market share and revenue to electronic mail and the private mailing industry, and staggering deficits ($5 billion last year) haven’t helped the USPS any. Now powerful forces are behind a push in Congress to institute “reforms” that will have devastating impact on postal workers, consumers and communities across the nation.

The Senate’s Postal Reform Act of 2014, shepherded by Thomas Carper (D-Del.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) through the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, and the Postal Reform Act of 2013 authored by Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, are the latest incarnations of a master plan to “right-size” the USPS. Union leaders and the rank and file, understanding what that means, are already in battle mode.

Leid Stories begins a series of discussions on the seamy undersides of the legislative “solutions” to USPS’s woes.

Investigative reporter Peter Byrne, author of Going Postal: Dianne Feinstein’s Husband Sells Post Offices to His Friends, Cheap, tackles the “solution” to shut down “unnecessary” post offices across the country. It’s a real estate bonanza, he says, and the politically connected have their feet in the door.

Retired letter carrier John Dennie, who two years ago attempted a citizen’s arrest of Postmaster General Patrick R. Donahoe for administrative crimes, contends that the government itself engineered USPS’s fiscal crisis.    

Leid Stories - The IRP6 & the FBI, Chapter 7 - 03/12/14

Appeal Lawyers Cite Major Violations by Judge, Prosecutor; 200 Pages of Trial Transcript Mysteriously Disappear

Convicted and sent to prison on federal conspiracy and fraud charges in a trial rife with highly irregular actions by the prosecutor and judge, the six executives of Investigative Resource Planning Solutions Inc. (the IRP 6) pinned their hopes of vindication on appeals. But that process, too, has been plagued with aberrations, not the least of which is the mysterious disappearance of at least 200 pages of the transcript of the trial considered very damaging to the judge and prosecutor.

Gwendolyn Solomon, co-counsel with Mark Geragos in handling the appeals, explains the many ways the IRP6 were denied a fair trial and railroaded into sentences of up to 11 years.

Sam Thurman and Cliff Stewart—who both worked at IRP and, through an advocacy group, A Just Cause, have been advocating for their colleagues’ release and a Justice Department investigation into the case—discuss the toll it has taken on their families and the business.

Listeners are invited to ask questions, as this edition rounds out a comprehensive overview of the case, pending further developments.

Leid Stories - More on Obamacare and Snowden - 03/11/14

Obamacare: A Pain for Workers, Says Mega Union President;

Snowden’s  ‘State-of-the-Internet’ at SXSW Gives A Puzzling Clue

The promise of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) may be well-intended—providing health care coverage to the uninsured and underinsured. But it’s a boondoggle of a program that’s hitting workers hard in the wallet, says our guest, Donald Taylor, president of Unite Here, a union representing 270,000 hospitality workers.

Taylor discusses major financial consequences for workers under the ACA that, he says, will widen and deepen income inequality in America. And he’ll also explain why he’s publicly breaking with many major unions that harbor similar sentiments but are reluctant to criticize the president and Democratic Party over the very flawed ACA.

Fugitive Edward Snowden in a teleconference from Russia yesterday told attendees at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, that he remains convinced that public knowledge of the government’s violation of citizens’ privacy rights is worth his theft of classified National Security Agency files that exposed it.

But in the course of a carefully managed interview with Ben Wizner, his legal counsel, and Wizner’s colleague at the ACLU, Chris Sogohian, Snowden made a startling statement that everyone missed. Leid Stories tells what it is.

Leid Stories - 03/10/14

The U.S. Constitution: Too Much Deference to It, Not Enough Difference With It

The framers of the U.S. Constitution never meant it to be the unassailable, fix-resistant final word on “the law of the land,” but the basis for vigorous debate, and even open challenges, in pursuit of a more just and democratic society, says our guest, Louis Michael Seidman, professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University.

Too much deference is given to the Constitution and not enough difference taken with it, he says in his recently published On Constitutional Disobedience. Consequently, Americans have been living under a compact that compels them to forfeit what the framers regarded as a most basic right for themselves—the right to question or disobey even “supreme” laws and policies that might pass the test constitutionally but nonetheless are wrong.

Seidman has written several books and scholarly papers on the U.S. Constitution generally challenging “the sheer oddity of making modern decisions based upon an old and archaic text,” as he put it in his current release.