Leid Stories

Leid Stories—Rating Trump’s G-7/Kim Jong Un Shuttle—06.12.18

President Donald Trump can now check off two items on his to-do list. He attended the annual summit of G-7 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) held this year in Quebec, and cut short his time there to meet one-on-one in Singapore with Kim Jong-un, leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Trump left the G-7 summit in a huff, claiming afterwards on Twitter a conspiracy, especially by Canada and France, to hammer U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. He refused to sign a document representing the G-7 nations’ commitment to work together to solve major issues. His  mood was far more optimistic in Singapore, where closed-door talks with Kim Jong-un yielded a promise for continued bilateral negotiations.

Leid Stories listeners offer their impressions of Trump’s tumultuous, history-making week abroad.

Leid Stories—Dept. of Energy’s Nuclear Waste-Disposal Rules Spark Renewed Protests Across the Country—06.11.18

Making good on an election-year promise to the coal mining and nuclear energy industries and a smackdown for environmentalists, President Donald Trump last week ordered Energy Secretary Rick Perry to take “immediate steps” to ensure continued operations of coal mines and nuclear power plants across the country.

This means that the administration is committed to continuing massive, and even fatal, assaults on the environment and on the people working in and living near such projects.

Investigative journalist Paul DeRienzo has filed several reports on Leid Stories about the sketchy state of the nation’s nuclear power plants, the government’s gross mismanagement of nuclear waste, and the health and environmental problems they cause nearby populations.

DeRienzo is joined by Tom Carpenter, executive director of Hanford Challenge, a group seeking the proper disposal of nuclear waste at the decommissioned Hanford Site in Washington state and at all other plants. They explain why the Department of Energy’s new rules on nuclear waste will create environmental and health hazards that will last forever.

Leid Stories—Talk What You Walk and Free Your Mind!—06.08.18

Speak your own truth to power on Leid Stories’ “Free Your Mind Friday,” the best on-air open forum on the planet. Share your take on issues in the news, topics we’ve covered on the program, or whatever you think merits further discussion or debate.

Join us for a mind-freeing hour of great radio. Call 888-874-4888 and talk what you walk!

Leid Stories—A Planned Demise in Michigan—06.07.18

The City of Detroit for years now has been on a terrifying mission. The Depression-era miseries that affected the city after the collapse of the auto industry made the once-thriving city into a wasteland, with the remnants of political leadership hanging on mostly to pick the city’s bones dry. The city went way down, but it wasn’t out. There were vast tracts of available land, real estate interests appreciated the city’s excellent location and its “good bones,” and it was ripe for “reimagining.” One requirement: A totally clean slate. The people, mostly people of color, have to go. They won’t fit into what’s being planned for “new” Detroit.

Abayomi Azikiwe, editor in chief of Pan-African News Wire and a Detroit organizer for the Workers World Party and Moratorium Now!, has been reporting on the aggressive plan to retake Detroit and the devastating consequences and havoc it continues to cause. He tells Leid Stories today that the contagion has spread to other predominantly Black cities.

Leid Stories—Redefining Our Politics and Our Power—06.06.18

Yesterday was The Big Primary Show—the midterm races for the U.S. House and Senate seats, and for governorships, that in turn will shape the 2020 presidential election and the political fortunes of the Democratic and Republican parties.

State-by-state results are still being finalized, but what political analysts are keenly interested in is measuring whether President Donald Trump is helping to grow Republican strongholds or, conversely, whether Democrats are increasing their voter appeal.

Where does that leave those who oppose the duopoly? Whatever the final tally, it should be no surprise that non-duopolists will have little in the way of midterm victories to celebrate.

Leid Stories returns once again to the question of the future of independent politics.

 

Leid Stories—The Starbucks Defensive Lays the Groundwork for A Possible Presidential Run; Remembering Robert F. Kennedy—06.05.18

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz later this month will end his 36-year tenure as executive chairman of the company and “think about a range of options that could include public service.” Read that as a possible presidential run. This adds new perspective on the quick shutdown of public outrage over the “trespassing” arrests of two African American men who were waiting for a third man for a meeting at a Starbucks store in Philadelphia.

Leid Stories commented that the men’s still-undisclosed “settlement,” followed by a companywide “bias-training” session featuring high-profile blacks, wasn’t just about a forward-looking company’s way of heading off a crisis.

On June 5, 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, 42, was mortally wounded at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where supporters were celebrating his clinching of the Democratic nomination with primary election wins in California and South Dakota. He had just left the podium and was heading toward a kitchen exit when shots rang out. He fell, mortally wounded. In the early morning hours of June 6, Kennedy was pronounced dead.

Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian-Jordanian immigrant, was held as the gunman. He claimed that he was brainwashed and didn’t act alone.  He was sentenced to death after trial in 1969. His sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1972.

Leid Stories commemorates the public spirit of Robert F. Kennedy with an interaction he had with students at Columbia University in 1964.

Leid Stories—The Opposition Is Yammering, Not Hammering—06.04.18

President Trump and his administration have given, and continue to give, the opposition more than enough ammunition to blast gaping holes in his anti-humanitarian, anti-democratic agenda and bring it down.

Last Thursday, Spain’s archconservative prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, rejected yet another demand that he and his corrupt government resign. By Saturday, the center-left Socialist Party had pushed through a no-confidence vote against Rajoy in Parliament, removing him from power and replacing him with the party’s Pedro Sanchez instead.

In Spain, a major political change was hammered out. But in the United States, there’s endless yammering by the opposition about Trump’s corrupt and chaotic administration. Yammering is not hammering, says Leid Stories.

Leid Stories—Speak Your Mind and Free All Our Minds!—06.01.18

A strong opinion and a phone call. That’s all it takes to join the best open forum in Radioland!

It’s “Free Your Mind Friday” on Leid Stories, and callers take the program wherever they want it to go—whether on the issues of the day, or topics they consider worthy of further discussion or debate.

Call 888-874-4888 and get your speak on!

Leid Stories—Did Obama Protect the Renegade Clintons’ Massive Charity-Fraud Scheme?—05.31.18

Leid Stories adds another chapter to its long-running series on The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation and affiliated entities, which together were operated as nonprofit organizations doing “good works,” but in fact were multimillion-dollar money mills for the family that defied, and continue to defy, domestic and foreign laws that regulate charities.

Charles Ortel, a retired Wall Street banker turned financial investigator (he exposed  rampant stock overvaluation on Wall Street that led to the 2007 crash), for almost three years has been following the Clinton Foundation’s labyrinthine money trail. His reports have kick-started probes by several governments who had contributed billions of dollars to the foundation’s purported “charities.” But here in the United States, the Clintons have received unprecedented protection, and at the highest levels of government.

Today: How President Obama and key members of his administration provided cover for the Clintons’ massive charity-fraud scheme.

 

Leid Stories—Unconscious/Implicit Bias. Really?—05.30.18

Starbucks, the global coffee franchise, shut down its more than 8,000 stores across the country yesterday to provide a four-hour (voluntary) seminar for its employees on “unconscious bias” in the workplace. The company was praised for its forward-thinking action, the result of a Philadelphia store manager’s decision to call the cops on two African American men waiting at the store for a third person to have a meeting. They had not ordered anything while waiting (just a few minutes, the men said), and one of them asked to use the rest room and was denied. When the police arrived, the manager demanded the men be arrested and charged with trespassing. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson would later call the arrests “reprehensible,” and ordered the seminar.

Leid Stories listeners discussed yesterday the many reasons Johnson ordered companywide training. Today we tackle the issue of “unconscious or implicit bias.”