Leid Stories

It’s International Workers’ Day, and all across America labor and a wide range of activist groups are staging rallies and demonstrations in solidarity with a global agenda for change. For decades the day—created in memory of workers killed at Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4, 1886 while on strike for eight-hour work days—all but slipped into oblivion. But recent developments and trends in the world of work seem to have created an urgency within the labor movement to safeguard workers’ hard-won turf and to check the corporate-political alliance that is constantly shifting economic goal posts.

Dr. Richard D. Wolff, a Marxist economist, discusses the crisis the U.S. system is in, and the consequential crisis it has created for workers. 

It’s “Free Your Mind Friday” on Leid Stories—the gathering place for the exchange of   information, opinions and ideas. Fired up about a grassroots victory? Fed up about business-as-usual politics? Know secrets to the meaning of life? Share it at our weekly free-form mashup. We’re a stout-hearted bunch who have good manners, appreciate sincere effort  and play fair. Call 888-874-4888 and tell us what we’ve been missing!

What’s most noteworthy about President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, says Leid Stories, is how the president has normalized what not too long ago we would have called madness, and how, as a nation, we seem to be adapting well to life in the age of psychopolitics.

Now that Hillary and Bill Clinton have taken all those restorative walks in the woods and rested up from her bruising 2016 presidential campaign, you’d think they’d be putting things in order at the family foundation (the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation) to comply fully with U.S. and international law—especially since then-candidate Donald Trump had practically put a prosecutorial bounty on their heads for using the foundation as a pay-to-play political operation.

To avoid the appearance of donors receiving political favors, the foundation said it would shut down its Clinton by Global Initiative by April 15 this year, letting go 22 staff, and concentrate instead on its philanthropic projects.

Charles Ortel, who has been investigating the Clinton Foundation for more than two years and has been reporting his findings on Leid Stories, returns with his latest report. Ortel blew the whistle on Wall Street fraud in 2007-2008, when he proved that many companies—GE, GM and AIG among them—had overvalued their stocks by hundreds of billions of dollars. An expert on charities, Ortel says the Clinton foundation is “the largest unprosecuted charity fraud in history.”

It’s “Free Your Mind Friday” on Leid Stories, and listeners’ opinions about current issues and events—or any subject of their choosing, for that matter--are the “star” of the show.

Call 888-874-4888, and then call it as you see it! 

DNC Chairman Tom Perez’s “new” Democratic Party didn’t “come together and fight back” for Jon Ossoff, a first-time candidate who, with some party backing, would have won Georgia’s 6th Congressional District seat outright in a special election. The seat became vacant when Republican Tom Price became President Trump’s secretary of health and human services. Ossoff stunned the political establishment with 48.1 percent of the vote, just shy of the 50 percent needed to avoid a June runoff.

Capturing this Republican congressional seat—and the more than 1,000 others the Democrats lost at the local, state and federal levels in the 2016 Trump tidal wave—should have been a No. 1 priority for the Democratic Party. One would think that helping candidates win near-certain victories would be a great way to “come together and fight back.”

Multiple, substantiated sexual-harassment complaints against him brought commentator Bill O’Reilly’s association with Fox News officially to an end yesterday. But was he fired? The language being used to describe why O’Reilly is no longer at Fox News is both imprecise and interesting.

Recently elected Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez and Bernie Sanders, the Independent senator and former presidential candidate from Vermont, with great, campaign-style fanfare yesterday launched a series of rallies aimed at shoring up the Democratic Party’s political fortunes, building grassroots support for a wide-ranging progressive agenda, and resisting the policies of President Donald Trump and his administration.

The first two rallies were held in Main and Kentucky. Others will follow in Florida, Nebraska, Utah, Montana, Arizona and Nevada.

Leid Stories discusses the significance of the rallies and, specifically, the role of Bernie Sanders.

The White House has said that President Donald Trump’s April 6 cruise-missile airstrikes on a Syrian airbase and other military installations was in retaliation for a chemical-weapons attack by President Bashar al-Assad on his own people in Khan Sheikhoun, a town under the control of rebels battling his regime. Ninety people were killed and 500 injured in the Khan Sheikhoun chemical-weapons attack.

But the U.S. attack was a “false flag” operation, based on military intelligence that was “obviously false,” says noted Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Theodore Postol, who has joined a growing group of highly credentialed experts questioning Trump’s explanation for his military attack on Syria.

After almost 13 years, a multinational military force sent by the United Nations to “stabilize” Haiti is being phased out. Both inside of the country and in the Haitian diaspora, there is great concern about what happens after the troops are gone and, even before they go, how will a number of lingering issues that had caused great tension between nationals and troops be resolved.

Kim Ives, cofounder of the international weekly newspaper Haïti Liberté, discusses the tenuous transition.

President Donald Trump’s unleashing “the mother of all bombs” last Thursday in Afghanistan exponentially broadened and deepened U.S. concurrent involvement in several theaters of war. Add ISIS to Trump’s active-enemies list—which also includes Syria and North Korea.

Leid Stories asks: How and why did war become such a vital part of Trump’s agenda?

President Chaos and his war-inducing military actions this week no doubt will dominate discussions on Leid Stories’ open forum, “Free Your Mind Friday.” But you certainly are welcome to raise other issues that merit broader discussion and debate.

Put your thoughts and opinions on the record. Call 888-874-4888 to join the forum.