Leid Stories

Leid Stories - 08/28/13

Education Apartheid in America / Republicans Pledge Racial Allegiance

When newly elected Gov. George Wallace in 1963 defied the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 and refused to desegregate Alabama’s public schools, his vow of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever,” which he recanted decades later, was nonetheless prophetic.

Fifty years after the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom – including the right to equal education – the nation’s public schools remain bastions of apartheid, says Richard Rothstein, a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law.

The  Democrat-dominated 50th-anniversary March on Washington commemoration has not stifled the Republicans’ desire to be known to African Americans as “the party of freedom.” At an RNC luncheon in Washington, D.C., Rep. James Sensenbrenner vows to restore Voting Rights Act provisions struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, and party chairman Reince Priebus commits to aggressively “telling [the party’s] story” to African American voters.

 

Leid Stories - 08/27/13

Speak Your Mind! Say What You Gotta Say!

It’s Open Forum on Leid Stories.

Speak your mind. Say what you gotta say. Take the conversation wherever you want it to go. Share your thoughts about news and issues of the day, or chart a different course entirely and take us for a philosophical spin.

Whatever you choose, expect to be questioned closely, even challenged – with love and respect, of course!

Leid Stories - 08/26/13

Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nuthin’!

James Brown nailed it in 1972 with the two-part funk commentary he dedicated to  “politicians who were running their mouths but had no knowledge of what life was like for a lot of people in [the United States]” and “some of the cats on their soapboxes … who were telling the people one thing while manipulating their emotions for personal gain.”

Both types were in abundance at this past weekend’s 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the Rev. Al Sharpton as convenor in chief.

Leid Stories reveals the true motives behind the event – which should remove any lingering doubt about the Democratic Party’s willingness, interest or capacity to respond to the unique needs of its staunchest supporters.

Leid Stories - 08/23/13

Chaos In the World and At Home, and We’re Talking to Ourselves

If in fact the left-of-center community has ideas that are alternatives – or, better yet, workable solutions -- to the madness that surrounds us, why isn’t it engaged in direct action? Why is it content to remain above the fray when it should be shoulders-deep in it?

Leid Stories explores the contradictions within this political sector, which is besotted with knowledge and ideas but seemingly reluctant to test their merits in the real world of politics.

Leid Stories - 08/22/13

Leid Stories - 08/21/13

Take the Wheel. You Drive. It’s Open Forum!

It’s Open Forum on Leid Stories – which means you take the conversation wherever you want it to go. Share your thoughts about news and issues of the day, or travel a different course entirely and take us for a philosophical spin.

Whatever you choose, expect to be questioned closely, even challenged – with love and respect, of course!

Leid Stories - 08/20/13

Detroit: The Killing of A City; Extreme Urban Warfare

A contentious legal battle over whether the City of Detroit legally can declare bankruptcy will become even more so in the coming weeks. Aug. 19 was the bankruptcy court’s deadline for objections, and Judge Steven Rhodes will hear arguments on the city’s right to file bankruptcy on Oct. 23.

Leid Stories contends that Detroit’s dire money woes are to be seen in the context of an extreme kind of urban warfare, the principal aim of which is to kill a city in order to “reinvent” it under social, political and economic paradigms designed by a confluence of interests that envision a “different” America.

We get the discussion started with an orientation by Dr. Thomas Sugrue, David Boies Professor of History and Sociology, and director of the Penn Social Science and Policy Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, and contributions from listeners.

Leid Stories - 08/16/13

The NSA ‘Privacy’ Hypocrisy / A Reprieve, But Not Yet Justice, for Tawana Brawley

We’ve been waterboarded yet again with a new Edward Snowden inside-spy story – this one doled out to Jeff (Amazon.com magnate) Bezos’s soon-to-be-acquired Washington Post – about the U.S. government’s insatiable appetite for minding our business without us knowing. A different riff on the same tune.

The grandpappy of all ironies is, Snowden’s drip-by-drip “exposés,” given such dramatic play by compliant media outlets he selects for dissemination of the purloined material, should actually spark a conversation not only about government’s privacy abuses, but how his tech world and its oligarchic leaders are no different; in lockstep capitalistic cooperation with government, they have given us the gift that keeps on taking: “industrial-intelligence complex.”

Plus, a personal reflection on a Virginia circuit court ruling dismissing a defamation claim against Tawana Brawley by Steven Pagones, a former assistant district attorney from Dutchess County, N.Y., said to be one of four white men who kidnapped and sexually assaulted the then-15-year-old over a four-day period in November 1987.

The court’s ruling is the latest legal development in the case, which Brawley and her attorney, Alton H. Maddox Jr., have been blocked by state officials from bringing to trial for 26 years.

Leid Stories - Brawley Part II - 08/15/13

Justice 26 Years Denied: The Real ‘Hoax’ in the Tawana Brawley Case (Part 2)

Leid Stories continues yesterday’s exposé on the most recent legal atrocity in the Tawana Brawley case – an illegal defamation judgment of almost $400,000 awarded Steven Pagones, Brawley’s attorney, Alton H. Maddox Jr., says.

A Dutchess County Supreme Court jury had linked Pagones, a former assistant district attorney in the same county, to the 1987 kidnapping and rape on Brawley over a four-day period that November, Maddox says.

Brawley, then 15, claimed that four white men in an old police-type car grabbed her off the street on her way home from school, took her to a remote area, drugged her and held her as a sex slave for four days before dumping her near the garbage-disposal area of a housing complex.

Leid Stories - Tawana Brawley - 08/14/13

Justice 26 Years Denied: The Real ‘Hoax’ in the Tawana Brawley Case

Allegations in 1987 by a then-15-year-old African American girl from Wappingers Falls, N.Y., that four white men in an old police-type car grabbed her off the street on her way home from school, took her to a remote area, drugged her and held her as a sex slave for four days before dumping her near the garbage-disposal area of a housing complex triggered a series of exceedingly irregular -- and illegal -- actions by state investigators and prosecutors that cast the teen, Tawana Brawley, as an out-and-out liar, her legal advisers as fringe-element wackos looking to start a race war, and the suspects as solid citizens with impeccable reputations.
The alleged suspects included a state trooper; a police officer who was said to be remorseful and mysteriously was murdered in his home (state investigators initially had ruled his death a suicide); and an assistant district attorney in Dutchess County whose father was well connected politically. An outrageously irregular grand-jury “investigation” found Tawana guilty of perpetrating a hoax and slandering the men.
Leid Stories discusses the most recent outrageous illegalities in the case – a Virginia court order garnishing Tawana’s wages as a nurse to compensate the former D.A., Steven Pagones, close to $400,000 for defaming him.
“Attorney at War” Alton H. Maddox Jr., takes us deep into the belly of this 26-year-old legal beast.