Leid Stories

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.”

Coffee giant Starbucks this afternoon is closing more than 8,000 of its stores nationwide to provide racial-bias training for its 175,000 workers. The companywide training comes after Starbucks issued a public apology for the arrest of two black men at a Philadelphia store. The manager of the store said the men were “trespassing,” even though they were waiting only minutes for a third person to arrive to have a meeting. The men’s arrests, videotaped by customers, went viral, and almost instantly led to protests and calls for boycott. Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson called the arrests “reprehensible,” and said they indicated a need for race-bias training for Starbucks employees. The men, meanwhile the men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, have reached an undisclosed settlement with Starbucks, and the company will fund an incubator for young local entrepreneurs.

Leid Stories says the Starbucks defensive in the end will end up using people of color to save its skin.

It is Memorial Day. A dwindled portion of the country will hold parades honoring those who died while serving in or defending America’s various wars; most, however, will be enjoying a long weekend of backyard barbecuing and hunting for good buys at start-of-summer sales.

Memorial Day has all but ceased to be a sobering moment when, as the country honors generations of war dead it also reexamines its bloodlust for war. But there are signs that the all-people’s anti-war resistance movement of the 1960s is gaining renewed strength in a new generation taking on the warmongering administration of President Donald Trump.

Leid Stories today shares a speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in which he warns about six key casualties of war. The speech was made at the height of King’s anti-war activism in 1967, the year before he was assassinated.

Don’t panic, all’s not lost—if you free your mind.

We warmly welcome you to our “gathering place for the exchange of information, opinions and ideas” to engage in vigorous discussion and debate. Add your voice, your perspective, to an unscripted, ongoing dialogue about issues and events that matter to us all. Gain new insights as you help others do the same.

Call in (888-874-4888) and free your mind.

Enough already with Bernie Sanders and his bewildering political morphing—an Independent who also is a Democrat who also is the magnetic center of Our Revolution, the progressive, social-democratic political action spinoff from Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Questions need to be asked—and answered.

Why? Because we need some clarity here, and because of the queasy feeling  we’re already on the slippery slope of being had.

Leid Stories says Sanders’ bizarre political moves are one of many examples of progressive parties and movements cutting corners on principles. In the end, the people lose.