Leid Stories – 09.15.15

Living In Limbo: The European Refugee Crisis Explained
Alan M. Kraut, professor of history at American University, affiliate faculty member of its School of International Service and a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute, discusses what the United Nations is calling the worst refugee crisis to hit Europe since World War II.
Bernie Sanders, the Independent junior U.S. senator from Vermont seeking the Democratic nomination in the 2016 presidential election, yesterday addressed a packed arena at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., the largest Christian university in the world. Sanders sought common ground on what he called America’s “immorality” of poverty, inequity and injustice.

With No Other Choice, This Student Resorted to Prostitution to Meet NYU’s Soaring Price

Last Tuesday, September 1 — the day before classes started at New York University — there was an extraordinary rally in Washington Square Park to protest Wall Street’s stranglehold on U.S. higher education. In several ways, this rally was unprecedented. First, it was a massing of communities not only from one threatened university, but several institutions starkly misdirected by their …

Glenn Greenwald – Two Short Paragraphs That Summarize the US Approach to Human Rights Advocacy

n his excellent article on the unique guilt-by-association standard being imposed on newly elected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, my colleague Jon Schwarz references a passage from a 2013 Washington Post article that I want to highlight because of how illuminating it is. That Post article describes the Obama administration’s growing alliance with human-rights-abusing regimes in Africa, which allow the U.S. …

Alternative Visions – “Is the ‘Labor for Bernie’ Campaign Catching Fire?’ – 09.11.15

Jack Rasmus interviews Rand Wilson, a lead organizing for ‘Labor For Bernie Sanders’ campaign on the east coast. Rand describes the latest events to build union support for the Sanders campaign, currently being organized by the core 7500 public endorsers who comprise the ‘Labor for Bernie’ group. A conference call last week by the group included 26,000 supporters, according to Rand, who called in to listen to Sanders explain why he’s the best pro-labor candidate in the upcoming 2016 election. Already receiving significant support from white supporters nationwide in his round of speaking tours, Sanders may now be receiving notable support from at least certain segments of the unions, including Nurses, Postal, and Transport workers. Rand describes what’s going on currently in union circles to build support and endorsements for Sanders, how Sanders’ positions differ from Hillary Clinton’s, and how Sanders, unlike Clinton, refuses to take corporate money. Also unlike Clinton, Rand explains, Sanders wants to build a grass roots movement, a ‘political revolution’ in Sanders’ own words, from the bottom up. Jack raises the question whether this grass roots movement and ‘revolution’ is just a ‘Sanders election’ effort, or whether it is viewed by the ‘Labor for Bernie’ group and its organizers as the start of something longer term, beyond the upcoming Democratic party primaries, that intends to unify not only local unions but other single issue community based protest movements.”

Listeners interested in finding out more about the ‘Labor for Bernie’ organization and efforts, go to www.laborforbernie.org and to the Sanders website for his positions on workers rights atwww.berniesanders.com.

Rand Wilson is a member of SEIU 888 representing higher education workers, and has a long union activist history working for the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers, SEIU, Teamsters, Jobs for Justice organizing, and the AFLCIO campaign to defend against the Bush attacks on Social Security in the previous decade.

Glenn Greenwald – Hillary Clinton Goes to Militaristic, Hawkish Think Tank, Gives Militaristic, Hawkish Speech

Leading Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton this morning delivered a foreign policy speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington. By itself, the choice of the venue was revealing. Brookings served as Ground Zero for centrist think tank advocacy of the Iraq War, which Clinton (along with potential rival Joe Biden) notoriously and vehemently advocated. Brookings’ two leading “scholar”-stars — Kenneth Pollack …

Private Prison Corporations Stand With Hillary Clinton

Hillary Clinton has called, tepidly, for an end to mass incarceration, in vague terms, without policy details: “There is something profoundly wrong when African-American men are far more likely to be stopped by the police and charged with crimes and given longer prison terms than their white counterparts,” Clinton said. “There is something wrong when trust between law enforcement and …

William Kaufman – The Sanders Paradox: a Brief for Bernie

In this presidential summer of our discontent, the radical left has been fighting hard—not chiefly against capitalism and its galloping calamities, it seems, but against . . . Bernie Sanders. Scarcely a day passes without an ominous recitation of Sanders’s manifold political shortcomings—Sanders exposés seem to have become a thriving cottage industry for the far-left commentariat. It should come as …

David A. Graham – A Quick Guide to the Questions About Clinton Cash

Après Schweizer, le déluge. At the start of the week, The New York Times revealed that Peter Schweizer, a Republican researcher, was close to publishing a book delving into the financial dealings of the Clinton Foundation. The book focuses on how donations from foreign governments to the Clinton Foundation correlated with favorable decisions from the State Department while Hillary Clinton …

Leid Stories – 09.04.15

We Have Our Own Debates on “Free Your Mind Friday!”

Waiting for the next round of televised, lip-flapping, corporate-media Q&A sessions they’re calling “debates?” Fuggeddaboudit!

Get your own points of view heard on Leid Stories’ “Free Your Mind Friday.” The program is devoted to listeners’ points of view about any subject they choose, and fellow listeners are encouraged to engage the subject(s) further or take the conversation on an entirely different course.

We’re a well-mannered, well-adjusted lot, and though we have strong opinions, we’re all about respectfully sounding each other’s ideas out.

Leave the pols and their media acolytes to their prating. Join a group of people who actually say what they mean and mean what they say!

Solartopia Green Power and Wellness Hour – 09.03.15

PETER MATHEWS graces Solartopia with his DOLLAR DEMOCRACY. Prof. Mathews lays out the exciting realities of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the desperate need for the American public to get money out of our politics.

Peter has known the late great Paul Wellstone, whose pioneer campaign for the US Senate in Minnesota brought a corporate-free reality into our mainstream. Sen. Sanders is now doing the same thing, Prof. Mathews beautifully illustrates the reality of how this can happen.

Peter also explains for us the need for corporations to be banned from shoving GMO crops down our throats, from maintaining a thousand military bases around the world, from gouging students for high-interest loans and much much more.

Don’t miss this hard core exploration of the desperate need for getting free of the money power from one of America’s great experts….