Leid Stories

Gina Haspel, the President Donald Trump-backed acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, appears very likely to get the job. Since May 9, when the Senate Intelligence Committee began questioning her, it was embarrassingly clear that “national security” concerns would not allow her to be specific about her key role in running secret prisons (called “black sites”) in several locations all over the world that specialized in torturing alleged terrorists.

Leid Stories discusses Haspel successfully diverted attention away from her role in the torture program.

On May 7, Leid Stories did a commentary titled, “The Always-Lying President Just Keeps On Lying,” noting: “He lies about big things and small. He lies to make himself look good, and others bad. He even lies about lying. There is no hope, it seems, that the lying will stop, but President Trump’s lies are quite consequential; his lying ways have caught on in his administration.”

Well, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg ran with the theme in a commencement speech he delivered at Rice University on May 12. Without calling any names, he talked about the “epidemic of dishonesty” that has entrenched itself in American politics and society, and warned that, left unchecked and unchallenged, it will destroy democracy.

Here you are at the end of a very trying week. You’ve triumphed over the conspiracy to drive you mad with a torrent of “news” and “information” designed to confuse you, throw you off kilter, and dumb you down.

Disassemble the mishmash we’ve been fed all week and tell us what we really ought to know. Call 888-874-4888 and help us free our minds.

Historian and prolific author Gerald Horne, Ph.D., looks at a few contemporary issues and events, domestic and global, through the lens of history.

Horne, the John J. and Rebecca Moores Chair of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston, regularly decodes complex social, political and economic issues on Leid Stories.

He has written more than 30 books and 100 scholarly papers on global struggles against imperialism, colonialism, fascism and racism. Most recently: The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox (2017); Storming the Heavens: African Americans and the Early Struggle for the Right to Fly (2017); Facing the Rising Sun: African Americans, Japan the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity (2018); and The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy and Capitalism in Seventeenth Century North America and the Caribbean (2018).

Last Tuesday, May 1, the Rev. Edward Pinkney, a longtime grassroots activist, received some good news—albeit after serving a full 30-month prison sentence on a bogus conviction for election fraud. The Michigan Supreme Court, finally reviewing his case, unanimously ordered his convictions vacated and all charges against him dismissed.

Pinkney, a leading voice against corrupt political leadership and massive corporate land grabs in many Black cities in the state, continued to organize even while in prison. Democracy works when people make it work, and work together to make it work, he says.

Leid Stories takes time to celebrate the fighting spirit of Rev. Pinkney and the people of Benton Harbor, who are in a pitched battle with major corporations wanting to drive them out and take their land.

The draconian programs that the Trump administration has vowed to implement to curb illegal immigration into the United States are having ripple effect elsewhere in the hemisphere. Several Central and South American countries are doing thee same, expelling hundreds of thousands who previously were welcomed under a number of national and international humanitarian compacts but now want their foreign guests gone.

Kim Ives, editor of the English edition of Haïti Liberté, has been traveling with Haitian exiles in Central and South America who under extreme difficulty and bleak prospects are trying to return home.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman resigns at the end of the business day today, and already the list of possible replacements is long. Gov. Andrew Cuomo urged Schneiderman to quit after a New Yorker magazine exposé reported that at least four women linked to him romantically said he was physically abusive to them.

Leid Stories discusses Schneiderman’s history of legal abuse of communities of color in New York state.

He lies about big things and small. He lies to make himself look good, and others bad. He even lies about lying. There is no hope, it seems, that the lying will stop.

But President Trump’s lies are quite consequential. And as we have seen, his lying ways have caught on in his administration.

Leid Stories discusses Trump’s compulsive lying—not as some personality quirk, but as an integral part of how he lives in and manipulates the world.

This is no time to be confused. Your mind needs to be uncluttered and in good shape, and “Free Your Mind Friday” on Leid Stories is here to help.

Get a head start with “Free Your Mind Friday” on Leid Stories. It’s the best open forum on the planet. Call in (888-874-4888) and share your thoughts about the issues of the day or any subject you think warrants further discussion or debate. Prepare us for the madness ahead!