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Robert Scheer is editor in chief of the progressive Internet site Truthdig. He has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter confessed to the lust in his heart and he went on to do many interviews for the Los Angeles Times with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and many other prominent political and cultural figures. He is currently a clinical professor of communications at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Scheer has written nine books, and his latest, "The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street" (Nation Books), was released on September 7, 2010. Scheer was raised in the Bronx, where he attended public schools and graduated from City College of New York. He studied as a Maxwell Fellow at Syracuse University and was a fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he did graduate work in economics. Scheer is a contributing editor for The Nation as well as a Nation Fellow, and is a former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. He has also been a Poynter Fellow at Yale, and was a fellow in arms control at Stanford.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 23, 2011 Be Consistent -- Invade Saudi Arabia
In the glaring light of the democratic currents sweeping through the Mideast, the contradictions in supporting one set of dictators while toppling others may prove impossible for the U.S. and its allies to effectively manage.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 16, 2011 No Nukes Is Good Nukes
An important lesson that should be reinforced by the ongoing disaster in Japan is to worry more about the elimination of those nuclear weapons designed to explode, and another is to be concerned about the prospect of sabotage of nuclear power plants.
(28 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 9, 2011 Still in the Dark About 9/11
The significance of a fair and public trial would be to reveal to the world the motives and makeup of those we must defeat, and yet the very people in this country who claim to be the most militant in combating terrorism have been the most energetic and effective in stifling that inquiry.
SHARE Wednesday, February 23, 2011 Betting on Arianna
With their limited resources, sites like ours are hardly a full-throated substitute for the failing print and broadcast journalism of yore. My hope is that with the more substantial funding that Huffington acquires from AOL she will vastly expand her pool of paid writers and editors and begin to fill the void.
SHARE Thursday, February 17, 2011 Home Sweet Wall Street
Instead of punishing the banks that sabotaged the American ideal of a nation of stakeholders by "securitizing" our homesteads into poker chips to be gambled away in the Wall Street casino, Barack Obama now proposes to turn over the entire mortgage industry to those same banks.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, February 9, 2011 Hey Obama, Read WikiLeaks
After a good start, the Obama administration's response to the democratic revolution in Egypt has begun to exude the odor of betrayal. Now distancing itself from the essential demand of the protesters that the dictator must go, the administration has fallen back on the sordid option of backing a new and improved dictatorship.
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 26, 2011 Hogwash, Mr. President
The speech was a distraction from what seriously ails us: an unabated mortgage crisis, stubbornly high unemployment and a debt that spiraled out of control while the government wasted trillions making the bankers whole. Instead the president conveyed the insular optimism of his fat-cat associates: "We are poised for progress.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 19, 2011 Obama Pulls a Clinton
This is a case of corporate blackmail pure and simple. The economy is sluggish because of a housing crisis that shows no sign of improvement. It stands history on its head to blame government financial regulations that had worked splendidly for six decades for the meltdown or the failure to fix a housing market that is the key to improved consumer spending.
SHARE Wednesday, January 12, 2011 Perps in the White House
With 50 million Americans holding "underwater" mortgages, there can be no solution to the housing crisis unless the banks that got us into this wreck are forced to accept cramp-downs and other painful adjustments to help folks stay in their homes.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 5, 2011 Lanny Davis Puts Dems to Shame
Today Davis makes a big point of blasting those on the Democratic Party's left, like calling Rachel Maddow "sanctimonious and intolerant" when she dared criticize Bill Clinton's record as president.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 29, 2010 In Money-Changers We Trust
The failure to provide serious regulation of the financial industry to avoid future downturns is documented in devastating detail in the Dec. 28 Bloomberg report. "Lawmakers spurned changes that would wall off deposit-taking banks from riskier trading. They declined to limit the size of lenders or ban any form of derivatives."
(4 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 22, 2010 Speaking Ill of "the Best and the Brightest"
Throughout Holbrooke's career, and this is the persistent theme in his fawning obituaries, there was the apologia that whatever he did, his motives could not be questioned, for after all his was a life largely of public service. But here too the elite notion of public service is on sordid display if one follows Holbrooke through the revolving platinum door from public power to business greed.
SHARE Wednesday, December 15, 2010 Return of the Great Triangulator
The bottom line on the Clinton legacy is that the census now finds an all-time high of 44 million Americans living under the poverty line, bringing us back, as a percentage of the population, to Bill Clinton's first two years in office. There is no longer a significant federal anti-poverty program, and the plight of the poor is now a problem for the state governments which are also impoverished.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 8, 2010 From Jefferson to Assange
Jefferson warned: "The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted to be freely expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." Abandon Assange and you abandon the bedrock of our republic: the public's right to know.
(9 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 1, 2010 Hillary Gets Wiki-Served
Instead of disparaging the motives of the leakers, Hillary Clinton should offer a forthright explanation of why she continued the practice of Condoleezza Rice, her predecessor as secretary of state, of using American diplomats to spy on their colleagues working at the United Nations.
SHARE Wednesday, November 24, 2010 Fail and Grow Rich on Wall Street
The financial benefits are not trickling down. Throwing money at the banks has been as effective as pushing on a string, and the result has been what former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker has excoriated as a "liquidity trap." No serious government pressure has been brought to bear on the banks to help homeowners stay in their homes through mortgage payment adjustments.
(11 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 17, 2010 The Man Who Shattered Our Economy
Some guys have all the luck, particularly when they supply the dice. There would be no housing crisis were it not for radical financial deregulation legislation that Weill and other Wall Street hotshots got Clinton to approve.
SHARE Wednesday, November 10, 2010 The Life and Times of Bush the Clueless
the Harvard MBA is the degree that George W. Bush and his last treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, had in common, and their shared ignorance as they presided over the collapse of the U.S. economy is on full display in the former president's newly published memoir.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 3, 2010 Payback at the Polls
The tea party is now in the awkward position previously occupied by the Obama hope crusade of having to deliver and will suffer a similar political fate if it fails to deal with the economic crisis. Republicans who will control the House must come up with proposals to solve the housing crisis or they will stand exposed as political opportunists who intend to exploit rather than deal with the economic problem.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, October 27, 2010 The High Price of Patriotism
Fighting terrorists who are armed with box cutters does not require sophisticated weaponry; instead effective international police work. But there's not much money to be made off that sort of gumshoe detective work, and that's why we have two hot wars going even though the al-Qaida enemy has left the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.