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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.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 10, 2015 Go Ahead, Back Hillary Clinton and Forget All About Her Record
It is in matters of economic policy -- driving this election -- where the failure of the Clintons is the most obvious, and where Hillary Clinton seems to be even less conflicted than her husband in serving the super rich at the expense of the middle class.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 3, 2015 Amid the Crowing of the GOP and Clinton, Sanders Is on the Rise
What voters of every racial or ethnic group should understand is that the Clinton gift -- worth billions to the banking industry -- robbed all working Americans of the opportunity to improve their lot, as shown by the astounding growth in wealth inequality since the Clinton presidency. Are we really ready for another Clinton?
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, September 25, 2015 Pope Francis: He Told Them!
What is most startling in the approach of this pope is his refusal to demonize "the other," be they of another religious, political or nationalist outlook. Francis rejects precisely the simplistic war between good and evil that has dominated U.S. foreign policy for much of the past century.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 19, 2015 Fools, Fascists and Cold Warriors: Take Your Pick
Marching to the beat of that mad drummer Donald Trump, the GOP candidates have taken to scapegoating undocumented immigrants, in particular the young, blaming them for all that ails us. Most of the GOP contenders appeared as a shrill echo of the neo-fascist European movements of late, adopting the traditional tactic of blaming the most vulnerable for economic problems the most powerful have caused.
SHARE Thursday, February 19, 2015 How the Government Outsourced Intelligence to Silicon Valley
It is clear that the company, from its inception, had made its primary function the designing of surveillance programs for the spy agencies. In fact, Palantir would not have managed to stay in existence were it not for a multimillion-dollar investment and substantial technical support provided by the CIA.
SHARE Tuesday, July 15, 2014 Citigroup: The Original Gangsta
The Justice Department Justice Department announced that Citigroup would pay $7 billion in fines, a move that will avoid a humiliating trial. The fine is paltry compared with the far greater damage Citigroup wreaked upon working Americans who lost so much but because, without a trial, there will be no public accountability of the cynicism that Citigroup's leaders visited upon unknowing consumers.
SHARE Tuesday, July 8, 2014 Hillary Clinton Flaunts Her Surveillance State Baggage
As secretary of state in an administration that has charged three times as many Americans with violations of the draconian Espionage Act as all preceding presidents combined, Clinton must know that the Obama Justice Department has effectively moved to silence whistle-blowers from stating their case in court.
SHARE Thursday, June 26, 2014 One Court, Indivisible, Votes Liberty and Justice For All
In an opinion endorsed by all factions on the court, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. summarily rejected the assertion of the Obama Justice Department and the liberal attorney general of California, defending that state's top court's view, that a warrantless search of the vast data contained on a cellphone is comparable to looking into a detainee's cigarette pack or reading a few pages tucked into his pocket.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 24, 2014 Where's Saddam Hussein When the U.S. Needs Him?
The stiff sentences meted out Monday to three Al-Jazeera journalists, all veterans of Western news organizations, have finally shocked the media establishment. They also embarrassed Kerry, who had come to Cairo to curry favor with the military dictatorship.
SHARE Wednesday, June 18, 2014 Up Close and Personal With George W. Bush's Horrifying Legacy
The Iraq disaster remains George W. Bush's enduring folly, and the Republican attempt to shift the blame to the Obama presidency is obscene nonsense. This was, and will always be, viewed properly as Bush's quagmire, a murderous killing field based on blatant lies.
SHARE Wednesday, March 12, 2014 Feinstein vs the CIA: A Moment of Truth
It was a truly historic moment Tuesday when Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to warn that the CIA's continuing cover-up of its torture program is threatening our constitutional division of power. The spy agency now acts as a power unto itself, and the agency's outrages have finally aroused the senator's umbrage.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, February 18, 2014 Honoring the "Accomplices" to Truth Who Caught Clapper in a Lie
What is threatening about the Snowden leaks is not the exposure of effective tactics employed by the U.S. in the fight against terrorism but rather the Keystone Cops-style ridicule it has brought upon America's claim of leadership in that effort.
SHARE Tuesday, February 4, 2014 The Super Bowl of War: Three Decades of Failure in Afghanistan
"The money they should have paid to the police," Karzai said, "they paid to private security firms and creating militias who caused lawlessness, corruption and highway robbery. What they did was create pockets of wealth and a vast countryside of deprivation and anger." Hey no problem, war is just another violent game we love to play. America, this Bud's for you.
(9 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 28, 2014 Who Needs the Gestapo When You Have "Angry Birds"?
The harrowing specificity about our once presumed private lives, as revealed this week in yet another devastating trove of documents from Snowden and reported in the Times and The Guardian, might one day open the floodgates to a totally regimented society.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 21, 2014 No Place to Hide: We're All Suspects in Barack Obama's America
In Barack Obama's speech Friday, his unbridled defense of the surveillance state opened the door to the new McCarthyism of Mike Rogers and Dianne Feinstein, the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees, who on Sunday talk shows were branding Edward Snowden as a possible Russian spy.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, January 8, 2014 The NSA Plays Mad King George in This Revolution
What is at issue in the information Snowden's courageous actions have revealed is our government's denial of the core principles of the enlightenment: rule by, and of, an informed and thoughtful citizenry that has come to be smothered by the omnipresent corporatized national security state.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 31, 2013 NSA, Benghazi and the Monsters of Our Own Creation
"We know everything but learn nothing" would be an honest slogan for the NSA, CIA and lesser-known spy agencies that specialize in leading us so dangerously astray. For all of their massive intrusion into the personal lives of individuals throughout the world, it is difficult to recall a time when the "intelligence" they collected provided such myopic policy insight.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, December 25, 2013 Bill O'Reilly's War on Jesus
What we stand for is a launching pad for multi-national corporations that wantonly exploit the resources and peoples of this planet with abandon. All the while, these modern plunderers are protected by the massive military power of a U.S. government that those same corporations refuse to support with the profits they have buried abroad.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, December 17, 2013 Progressives on the Take
Democrats bear as much responsibility as Republicans for allowing our once promising democracy to degenerate into a plutocracy of the irresponsible super-rich. It is they who betrayed the New Deal legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to rein in the Wall Street greed that caused so much suffering for ordinary folks. Obama is great at bemoaning a reality that his party helped establish.
SHARE Tuesday, December 3, 2013 Welcome Back, Jesus
This is a pope who in his native Argentina bothered to witness and tend to the needs of those who suffered most, and he comes to us now as a singular voice to remind us of the Occupy movement, which mostly secular liberal mayors in U.S. cities brutally silenced to suit the convenience of the superrich who own our politics.