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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.
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, December 16, 2011 Christopher Hitchens: Reason in Revolt
Hitch was the opposite of the opportunistic pundits who competed with him for public space. He took immense risks, not the least in offering himself for waterboarding before concluding it was unmistakably torture, or challenging the greatness of God, knowing full well that he was exposing himself as an object of wildly irrational hate.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 6, 2011 The Peasants Need Pitchforks
The lobbyists are deliberately bipartisan in their bribery, and the authors of our demise are equally marked as Democrats and Republicans. It is the enduring conceit of the top Democratic leaders that they are valiantly holding back the forces of evil when they actually have continuously been complicit.
(2 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 29, 2015 Robert Scheer Hosts Dennis Kucinich -- an Unpredictable American Original
And I got into Congress with the intention of fighting for more help for education for the people I represented, for healthcare, for retirement security, for jobs, for a cleaner environment, and on and on. And then when I got inside, what I found out is that I stepped into the belly of a beast of a war machine. And that's all it was about.
(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.
(3 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 1, 2011 Geithner and Goldman, Thick as Thieves
They survived, as the guys from Goldman always do. With the general "no banker left behind" program pursued by Geithner under both George W. Bush and Obama, the theory was that saving the banks would save the country. The first part worked out brilliantly, but the second act never occurred.
(21 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 8, 2011 How Little We Know About the Origins of 9/11
9/11 changed everything; nations were invaded, trillions of dollars were wasted, hundreds of thousands of civilian and military lives were lost, torture became acceptable and the public has come to tolerate a daily governmental assault on privacy as normal. But for all of the high drama and cost of the U.S. response, when it comes to understanding the forces behind the attack, we still do not know what we are talking about.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 25, 2020 Barbara Freese: Something's Rotten in the Corporate States of America
Beginning with the slave trade and leading all the way up to the climate crisis, author Barbara Freese's "Industrial Strength Denial" examines eight of private industries' most egregious crimes against humanity.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 2, 2012 The Democrats Who Unleashed Wall Street and Got Away With It
That Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason.
(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.
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, May 18, 2011 One Lawman With the Guts to Go After Wall Street
The financial crisis occurred only because Republicans and Democrats passed laws that Wall Street lobbyists wrote ending reasonable banking industry regulation installed in the 1930s in response to the Depression. And when the greed they enabled threatened the foundations of our economy, under Bill Clinton, George Bush and Barack Obama, it was the bankers who were assisted into lifeboats that had no room for ordinary people.
(14 comments) SHARE Friday, December 7, 2012 A Sign That Obama Will Repeat Economic Mistakes
Reports in the business press tout a prime participant in the great banking hustle as a possible candidate to be the next Treasury secretary.
(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 Thursday, December 8, 2011 Government-Sponsored Sinner
The driving faith of the GOP has become the notion that the toxic mixture of moral hypocrisy and unfettered greed is a formula for victory. Newt could be their man.
(3 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 6, 2018 Trump's Shameful Choice of "Bloody Gina"
When it comes to bullying, Gina Haspel, whose confirmation hearing begins Wednesday, is the real deal, and The Donald is a pussycat by comparison. Whom has he ever waterboarded? Haspel has done that and a lot worse. Whether or not the Senate confirms Haspel, the very fact of her nomination defines Trump as a fatally callous leader totally contemptuous of basic human rights and the rule of law.
(8 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 24, 2011 Amnesty for the Indefensible
Shifting the blame from the swindlers to the victims is the cynical rot at the core of the response of both the Bush and Obama administrations to the housing collapse. It is a response that aims to forgive and forget the crimes of Wall Street while allowing ordinary folks to sink deeper into the pit of debt and despair.
SHARE Sunday, August 25, 2019 The Latest Victim in the Crucifixion of Julian Assange
The case of Ola Bini, a Swedish data privacy activist and associate of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, has been shrouded in mystery since his arrest in Quito, Ecuador, on April 11. He was detained on the same day Assange was forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian Embassy in the United Kingdom, inevitably raising questions about whether Bini was being held because of his connection with Assange.
(13 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 17, 2011 The Villain Occupy Wall Street Has Been Waiting For
The man whose personal wealth increased by $4.5 billion the first year of this meltdown when many Americans were losing their life savings now dares shift blame away from himself and others at the center of economic power to the most vulnerable among us.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, June 8, 2019 All Americans Have Blood on Their Hands
Shortly after Truthdig columnist Danny Sjursen left the Army, where he spent 18 years on active duty and rose to the rank of major, he sat down with Editor in Chief Robert Scheer for an interview about life after the military and a discussion about the conclusions he drew throughout his military career.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 15, 2011 There Goes the Republic
What's alarming is the ease with which an otherwise deadlocked Congress that can't manage minimal funding for job creation and unemployment relief can find the money to fund at Cold War levels a massive sophisticated arsenal to defeat an enemy that no longer exists.
(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.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 20, 2018 The Disastrous "War on Terror" Has Come Home
we are very much living in a tech panopticon -- one in which our purchasing habits, individual data and even physical movements can be tracked without our knowledge. What does this mean for the future of personal privacy? How has the "war on terror" radically altered the ways we fight crime, and in what ways might the state use the increasingly sophisticated tools at its disposal to abuse its authority?
(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.
(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 Sunday, October 28, 2018 Some of Our Biggest Cheerleaders for War Are Not Who You Think
Rubin explores what it means to be a patriot with an unabashed authoritarian in the Oval Office -- one who regularly targets professional athletes for refusing to stand during the National Anthem: "Veteran friends I know, both on the left and the right ... [are all] somewhat disgusted by the way that [they're] used as political props."
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 18, 2018 The Biggest Threat to Free Speech No One Is Talking About
Since the repeal in June of Obama-era rules guaranteeing net neutrality, websites like Truthdig, Democracy Now!, Common Dreams and more risk being pushed into an internet slow lane that could severely hamper their readership, if not drive them out of business entirely. It may be the most urgent threat to the First Amendment no one is talking about.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, December 7, 2018 Wall Street's Corruption Runs Deeper Than You Can Fathom
Signed into law as the U.S.A. Banking Act of 1933, the legislation had been crucial to safeguarding the financial industry in the wake of the Great Depression. But with its repeal in 1999, the barriers separating commercial and investment banking collapsed, creating the preconditions for an economic crisis from whose shadow we have yet to emerge.
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 17, 2011 The Biggest Little Hypocrite in Texas
It is unfathomable that yet another Texas blowhard governor has emerged as a front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination. The persistent appeal of the mythology of Texas as a model for the nation defies the lessons of logic and experience, and yet here we are with Rick Perry, a George W. Bush look-alike, as a prime contender to once again run our nation into the ground.
(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.
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.
(12 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 12, 2013 If Corporations Don't Pay Taxes, Why Should You?
America's multinational corporations don't feel they should have to pay for a system of governance, even though it primarily serves their corporate interests. The U.S. government exists primarily to make the world safe for multinational corporations, but those firms feel no obligation to pay for that protection in return.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 23, 2017 Actor and Activist James Cromwell on the Consequence of "Doing Nothing"
Cromwell explains how his activism has opened his eyes to inequities in the American justice system. "It's very difficult as a white, middle-class, privileged individual to empathize with what black people go through every day," he tells Scheer. "They experience this incredible oppression."
SHARE Saturday, April 7, 2018 John Kiriakou: Torture Director Gina Haspel Wrong Woman to Break Glass Ceiling as CIA Head
Scheer and Kiriakou discuss the nomination of Gina Haspel for CIA director. Kiriakou says that "Haspel should be disqualified for her past at the top of the CIA's illegal torture program." He also says her nomination sends the message that CIA agents need not respect the law in order to advance in the agency.
(6 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 22, 2011 On to the Next "Bubble Fantasy"
At the core of Friedman's worldview is the assumption that the most brutal and contradictory applications of U.S.-supplied military power are by definition civilizing because this nation owns the brand defining freedom and democracy.
(8 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 15, 2010 After Summers Comes the Fall
Why not help the president do some damage control while he still is in office? Demand that Summers and Geithner be fired the next time you receive an appeal from the Obama fundraising machine asking for yet another contribution to the movement for change.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 2, 2016 The Convention Film on Hillary Clinton Lied to America
As they often have in the past, the Democrats offer us a hawk in dove's feathers. But super-frightening this time, the GOP candidate is not a representative of sane restraint and basic decency as was the Ike I liked. Rather, Trump is a truly dangerous boob who makes the Democrat appealing when she ought not to be viewed as such.
(12 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 13, 2011 The GOP's Sick Priorities
That the GOP-led House has gotten a supposedly progressive president to consider doing serious damage to our most vulnerable population in order to placate Republicans determined to continue massive tax breaks for the wealthy is morally obscene.
(6 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 22, 2011 Bill Clinton's Legacy of Denial
Conceding that the bailed-out banks are sitting on $2 trillion that they won't lend, Clinton offers not a word about mortgage relief for swindled homeowners. With an all-time high of 44 million Americans living below the poverty line, Clinton once again brags of his success in ending the federal welfare program.
SHARE Saturday, July 13, 2019 U.N. Report Condemns Torture of Assange
Despite the profound journalistic importance of the work Assange and whistleblower Chelsea Manning have done, the two have been smeared, persecuted and imprisoned in an effort to "shoot the messenger," which effectively distracts from their revelations and works to undermine their credibility.
(8 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 5, 2012 Arms Dealer Obama Will Win by Default
Barack Obama will be re-elected not as a vindication of his policies but because the Republicans are incapable of providing a reasonable challenge to his flawed performance.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 4, 2018 Nomi Prins on the Banks That Run the World (Audio and Transcript)
The banking meltdown happened because these banks were allowed to become too big to fail. That was the whole significance of Glass-Steagall from the Great Depression: don't ever let them be too big, don't ever let them commingle investment banking with the federally secured deposit of ordinary people; that wall -- they get rid of the wall, they become too big to fail, and then we have to bail them out.
SHARE Sunday, July 22, 2018 Seymour Hersh on America's Capacity for Fascist Brutality (Audio and Transcript)
We had Richard Nixon, but we got a revitalized press, we got Sy Hersh, who covered Watergate, among other stories. We now have Donald Trump, and the good news is, he scares a lot of people into maybe being more energetic about pursuing the truth of the matter.
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, July 13, 2018 When Resistance Becomes Capitulation: A Response to an Open Letter in The Nation
The rape of Russian resources by a new class of billionaires was an American export conflating virulent capitalism with freedom, and it proved once again to be the devil's bargain. Most ordinary Russians seem to think that Putin has played that bad hand as well as could be expected.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 20, 2011 The New Corporate World Order
It is time to admit that we are, in practice if not surface appearance, close to the Chinese communist model of state-sponsored capitalism that sacrifices the interests of ordinary workers, be they in the public or private sector, for the exorbitant profits of the super-rich.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, March 9, 2019 Liberals Are Digging Their Own Grave With Russiagate
Putin's first mission is to pull Russia back together. And you could argue he did so in too many authoritarian ways; historians will have to sort that out. But for Putin, the restoration of Russia as a stable, prosperous order at home and a great world power abroad, that was his historic mission, written on the wind, so to speak.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, August 4, 2018 Can America Ever Cure Its Obsession With Wealth?
Scheer and Greenfield discuss the decline of America's meritocracy, the impact of venerating wealth as a positive value and how our wealth obsession led to the election of Donald Trump. Greenfield also explains what she calls "the influence of affluence, the aspiration, and, in a way, the kind of aspirational hunger, kind of disease, kind of perpetual dissatisfaction, that we really see among so many people."
(7 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 15, 2011 Seven Republican Dwarfs
They assumed the stance of the Seven Dwarfs, not as a matter of physical but rather intellectual stature. Not one of the candidates for the GOP presidential nomination who debated Monday night rose to a point of seriousness in addressing the nation's grievous problems.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 31, 2011 Deceit of Shakespearean Proportions
If Dick Cheney's memoir has any enduring value, it is not as another offering of hollow excuses for an unjustifiable war but rather as a study in what the famed historian of European fascism, Hannah Arendt, termed the "banality of evil."
(9 comments) SHARE Friday, October 12, 2012 The Enemy of My Enemy Is My President
The fat cats' sense of betrayal at the hands of the Obama administration is obviously less a reflection of actual financial pain they endured these last three years than it is a mark of bankers' uncontrollable greed. The arrogance of these people, given the increased concentration of wealth in their hands during these years of profound financial crisis for most Americans, is beyond comprehension.
(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.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, July 3, 2021 Julian Assange's Father and Brother on the Public and Personal Urgency of His Case
Julian Assange's Father and Brother on the Public and Personal Urgency of His Case
On this week's "Scheer Intelligence," John and Gabriel Shipton speak to Robert Scheer about the WikiLeaks founder's grueling struggle to be freed from a London prison as the Biden administration demands his extradition.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 25, 2018 The Future of the Planet Looks Like "Wall-E"
The story has been lost in the miasma of Donald Trump's scandal-ridden presidency, but its implications for the U.S. and much of the West cannot be overstated. In April, after ending imports of 24 kinds of scrap last year, Beijing announced that it would be extending its ban to dozens of other materials.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 29, 2011 The Men We Trusted to Lead Us
Robert Rubin's acolytes have controlled the Obama administration's economic strategy of saving Wall Street by betraying Main Street, and Phil Gramm, who recently endorsed his former student at Texas A&M, Rick Perry, for president, remains the free-market-mayhem guru for Republicans. On Election Day, whoever wins, we lose.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 20, 2011 Sorry Elizabeth, Wall Street Said No
Consumers are in desperate need of protection. If Obama goes to battle for Cordray and he proves to be a strong director for the new agency, I will stand corrected, but the president's abandonment of the brilliant and dedicated Warren is hardly an auspicious beginning.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, November 27, 2013 Heroic Diplomacy: How Barack Obama Finally Earned That Peace Prize
Instead of celebrating the president's returning to his original promise as peacemaker, the warmongers of both parties in Congress, egged on by the unholy alliance of Saudi Arabia and Israel, are crying foul. Their outrage is an affront to morality and logic, as well as a stark betrayal of a legitimate public concern over the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
(2 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 10, 2016 Robert Scheer: U.S. Pledge of $90 Million to Laos Glosses U.S. History Terrorizing Civilians
You blow up a bus, there are civilians in it, that's an act of terrorism. That's what we did throughout the Laotian countryside, the Vietnamese countryside, and the Cambodian countryside. We inflicted massive terror on a basically unsuspected unknowing, civilian population that barely could have found the United States on a map if they could have found a map in their village.
(12 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 13, 2013 Restore Honor and Pardon Edward Snowden
That Obama has been forced by public opinion to come to his senses on this issue, even in a limited way, is a tribute to the courage of Snowden, who should be honored as the poster boy for the right of the citizen to protest government injustice rather than be hunted as a fugitive. Absurd as it sounds in this era of fear mongering, a presidential pardon for Snowden would bring honor to our country.
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 16, 2018 Is California About to Execute an Innocent Man?
The State of California may be about to execute an innocent man. Due to the passage of Prop. 66, which dramatically shortens the death penalty appeals process, Cooper's execution could be expedited without his ever receiving a fair hearing -- this is in one of the bluest states in the country.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 4, 2013 China Benefits From Bush's Folly
Almost half of Iraq's oil production already is shipped to China, and those once vilified commies, reincarnated as today's robber barons, are bidding for an even larger stake in Iraq's oil field production. The Cold War is indeed over, but China's red capitalists have won.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, January 19, 2016 Hillary Blames Bernie for an Old Clintonite Hustle, and That's a Rotten Shame
The repeal of Glass-Steagall, as well as preventing any regulation of the toxic mortgage packages and swaps that still hobble the world economy and wiped out the fortunes of black and brown people with particular severity, is Bill Clinton's horrid legacy, and it is one that his wife now attempts to blame on Bernie Sanders. Shame.
SHARE Tuesday, September 10, 2013 Obama Remembers He's Not George W. Bush
It may come to naught -- calls for peace so rarely still the drums of war -- but there was a moment Monday when the odds for sanity seemed to finally stand a chance of prevailing. It came when President Obama acknowledged the Russian proposal for Syria to avert war by agreeing to destroy its chemical weapons stock as "a potentially positive development."
(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.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 6, 2011 The Tea Party and Goldman Sachs: A Love Story
Corporations are sitting on more than $2 trillion in reserves, refusing to invest in this country, as increasing percentages of their profits are garnered in tax-sheltered operations abroad. And the bankers who caused the economic meltdown have turned against President Barack Obama, who saved them; instead they favor a tea-party-dominated Republican Party that seeks to limit any restraint on corporate greed.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 22, 2011 Murder Is Good Politics, Bad Justice
This case was so freighted with contradictions that a stay of execution was clearly in order. As Amnesty International spokesperson Laura Moye stated: "Today Georgia didn't just kill Troy Davis, they killed the faith and confidence that many Georgians, Americans, and Troy Davis supporters worldwide used to have in our criminal justice system."
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, November 12, 2013 The True Patriots in Congress Trying to End NSA Tyranny
George Washington warned us in his farewell address "to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism. ..." It's an alert that's been ignored in the nation's hysterical reaction to the attacks of 9/11 that culminated in the NSA's assault on our Constitution's guarantee of "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. ..."
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, October 19, 2012 Meet Romney's Economic Hit Man
"The Romney Program for Economic Recovery, Growth and Jobs" not only extends the Bush tax cuts for the super rich, but it would repeal the mild Dodd-Frank legislation holding Wall Street a bit more accountable. If Romney wins, it will be Bush reincarnated, and Hubbard's ideology, a proven failure, will prevail.
(14 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 17, 2015 Bernie Blew It: He Sold Out Instead of Confronting Clinton
Bernie Sanders pointedly ignored the Clinton family's role in deregulating Wall Street, and in doing so he allowed Hillary Clinton to cast gun regulation as the key issue that divides her from him. Forgotten was Bill Clinton's selection of Goldman Sachs honcho Robert Rubin to be his treasury secretary, an appointee who with President Clinton's complicity presided over the dismantling of New Deal limits on financial greed.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, November 2, 2012 Non-Kenyan White Men for Romney
Mitt may now be coming on as a secular moderate -- how else can you win an election in a country dominated by a liberal media owned by Rupert Murdoch? As governor of Massachusetts, Romney proved that he has the ability to reach across the aisle to heathen Democrats and get them to ban homosexuality and abortions.
SHARE Saturday, October 1, 2016 Robert Scheer Interviews Gary Tyler, Wrongly Imprisoned for Decades
After being on death row twice during his sentence, Tyler was finally freed this spring. Before his release, he directed a passion play cast only with prisoners from Angola penitentiary in Louisiana, where he was incarcerated. The experience was made into the documentary "Cast the First Stone."
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 14, 2012 See You at the Club: Fed Fat Cats Dip Into the Till
Wall Street's financial shenanigans, the banking games that made some fat cats outrageously wealthy as they turned home mortgages into toxic securities, wiped out 20 years of growth in American families' net worth.
SHARE Thursday, October 27, 2011 Thirty Years Of Unleashed Greed
Maybe justice will prevail despite the suffering that the 1 percent has inflicted on the foreclosed and the jobless. But to date those who have seized 40 percent of the nation's wealth still control the big guns in this war of classes.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, March 30, 2011 Obama's Fatal Addiction
Maximizing corporate profits at the taxpayer's expense is what top CEOs are good at, and after all it was Immelt who presided over GE when it got so heavily into the subprime mortgage business that it needed a government bailout to avoid bankruptcy. This was before Obama made him a trusted adviser.
SHARE Sunday, July 29, 2018 Are the Billionaire Owners of the L.A. Times and Washington Post Good for Journalism?
Can a major-market paper owned by even a benevolent deep-pocketed sponsor continue to cover potentially controversial stories about, say, the economy? "They are people that have benefited from a certain kind of capitalism," Scheer says of the billionaire class.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 2, 2013 America's New Cold War: Why the Allies Side With Snowden
At its best, the "metadata" aggregation, including the logs of all email traffic and telephone calls, is a paranoid assault on our right to personal space enshrined in the Fourth Amendment. At worst it is an out of control grab for worldwide power over the new information age.
(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.
(1 comments) SHARE Wednesday, June 8, 2011 The Bernanke Scandal: Full-Frontal Cluelessness
Putting the bankers first has represented pushing on a string, what Paul Volcker condemns as a "liquidity trap," a situation in which taxpayer money has been made available to major corporations that invest in job creation that benefits foreigners instead of U.S. workers. Now that's an obscenity we should be concerned about.
(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.
(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?
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, August 4, 2011 The Recovery Is Dead, Long Live the Recovery
If adults, of either party, had been watching the store, raising the debt ceiling would have been a no-brainer. Instead, the obvious obligation to pay debts that Congress had already incurred was turned into an occasion to wage ideological war on the very idea of government.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 22, 2013 What Fine? Why JPMorgan Is Laughing All the Way to the Bank
JPMorgan has been shameless and, as The New York Times reports, "At least seven federal agencies, several state regulators and two foreign countries are investigating the bank." But the betting in the business press is that Dimon will survive quite nicely, secure in his roughly $20 million pay and backed by a hand-picked board of directors focused on the bank's still buoyant stock price.
(1 comments) SHARE Friday, November 16, 2012 The Land of Milk and Honey Once More
The shifting demographics of California, forerunners of an inevitable national trend, are producing an American electoral majority that is more culturally sophisticated, socially tolerant and supportive of a robust public sector than can be accommodated by the simplistic naysayers who now dominate the Republican Party.
(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.
SHARE Thursday, April 19, 2012 For He's a Jolly Good Scoundrel
How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of U.S. homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation's economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 10, 2016 Does the WWII Internet of Japanese-Americans Provide a Model for an American Fascism Under Trump?
"What does this election mean for the country? Are we opening the doors to a kind of fascism?" Scheer asks USC Annenberg School for Communication professor Richard Reeves. "With Trump, we're in uncharted waters," Reeves says. "He's a hyperactive kid who's lived in a bubble for his whole life."
(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.
(3 comments) SHARE Friday, October 26, 2012 Romney's Cold War Ponzi Scheme
If Romney has his way, the military-industrial complex will get its beloved Cold War back despite the fact that the communist threat is now one of those conquering space on the shelves at Wal-Mart. Obama, the naive community organizer, thinks the foreign policy debate is about national security, but Romney, the quintessential vulture capitalist, knows that it's always been about maximizing profit.
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 Friday, July 6, 2012 Crime of the Century
The current Libor interest rate scandal, involving hundreds of trillions in international derivatives trade, shows how the really big boys play. And these guys will most likely not do the time because their kind rewrites the law before committing the crime.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 2, 2013 It Wasn't David Stockman Who Wrecked the Economy
What's all the outrage about? What's wrong with "putting the great Wall Street banks out in the cold to compete as at-risk free enterprises, without access to cheap Fed loans or deposit insurance"? What his critics find so disturbing is not a quaint argument about the purity of monetary policy but rather the bold assertion that the overall American system of crony capitalism is in fact wrecked.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 31, 2012 Hope Burning
Obama as the cool triggerman is an image useful to White House operatives as they buff the president's persona for the coming election. But what it reveals is the mindset of a political cynic whose seductive words cloak the moral indifference of a methodical executioner.Hope Burning
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 6, 2011 What Do They Want? Justice
With 25 million Americans unsuccessfully looking for full-time work, 50 million experiencing mortgage foreclosure and an all-time high of 46.2 percent living in poverty, including 22 percent of all children, isn't it logical that the faux populism of the tea party be confronted with a progressive alternative?
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 24, 2011 Thanks for What?
On this Thanksgiving we have been cheated of the bounty of that harvest as the stakes have been pulled up on 50 million Americans who have lost or soon will lose their homes. The housing crisis haunts a majority of Americans, even those who own their homes outright but have lost their jobs and must now sell in a downward-swirling housing market.
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.
SHARE Saturday, July 21, 2012 Goodbye, Old Friend
Alexander Cockburn always had the courage of his convictions and a well-honed contempt, informed by an elite Oxford education, for the arrogance of the powerful, as well as a deep-rooted compassion for their many victims.
(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.
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.
(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.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 16, 2013 The Return of Lawrence Summers, Mr. Spectacular Failure
The question is why Summers, the man who got it all wrong, would imagine that he could be in the running to head the Federal Reserve? Why would he ever fantasize that President Obama might turn to someone who always gets it wrong to right a still struggling economy? Maybe because he knows Obama better than we do.
(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.
(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.
SHARE Wednesday, April 13, 2011 The False Debate on the Debt
Clearly usurious rates of more than 25 percent are now the norm for those struggling to keep their families above water. No wonder consumer confidence is down, the housing market is expected to decline an additional 10 percent over the next year, and the job market is predicted by most of the experts to stagnate for years to come.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, August 10, 2011 Another Bailout Joins the Goofball Economy
Obama has agreed to effectively remove the elected federal government from the battle to restore economic health and instead left us to the tender mercies of the banker-dominated Federal Reserve, which, like the folks at S&P, condoned the reckless Wall Street policies that got us into this mess.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, July 27, 2011 Debt Madness Was Always About Killing Social Security
This phony debt crisis has now passed through the looking glass into the realm where madness reigns. What should have been an uneventful moment in which lawmakers make good on the nation's contractual obligations has instead been seized upon by Republican hypocrites as a moment to settle ideological scores that have nothing to do with the debt.
SHARE Tuesday, August 27, 2013 The Prince: Meet the Man Who Co-Opted Democracy in the Middle East
Even though many of the folks attempting to overthrow the government in Syria are sympathetic to al-Qaida, the Assad government's connection with Iran trumps that concern for U.S. hawks. The Saudis have the wherewithal to buy our very expensive war toys; need we say more? Saudi Arabia's efforts in Syria are just one sign of its broader effort to expand its regional influence.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 10, 2016 Revenge of the "Deplorables"
The Clinton era is over. The sick notion that the Democratic Party of FDR needed to find a new home in the temples of Wall Street greed has been rudely shattered by the deep anger of the very folks that the Democrats had presumed to represent. That includes working-class women, who failed to respond to the siren song of Clinton, whom the democratic hacks offered instead of a true progressive like Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 5, 2013 Whiny Billionaires in Need of Sequestration
The suddenly increased national debt is primarily the result of a deep recession caused by the top bankers and hedge fund hustlers of Wall Street, saved from their folly by massive and costly federal intervention. But instead of making the rich pay, ordinary citizens will be visited with job furloughs and a savaging of public services that often are lifesaving.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 27, 2019 What's Really Behind Julian Assange's Arrest
Assange's arrest is about national security reporting, the criminalization of source-journalist relationships involving leaking and, more broadly, an "attempt to criminalize investigative reporting," Shapiro argues. The Nation contributor also notes the courage behind Manning's decision to return to jail rather than take further part in the government investigation into Assange.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, December 29, 2011 Marginalizing Ron Paul
Paul marshaled bipartisan support to pass a bill requiring the first-ever public audit of the Federal Reserve. That audit is how readers of the Times first learned of the Fed's trillions of dollars in secret loans and aid given to the banks as a reward for screwing over the public.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 9, 2012 Elections Are for Suckers
Our own elections, the ones our government has modeled for the world, are a hoax. What other word should we use to describe this year's presidential election, whose outcome will turn on which party's super PACs gets the most generous bribes from billionaires?
(15 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 5, 2012 Obama By Default
Without a militarily sophisticated enemy anywhere on the planet, the United States, thanks to the Bush-bloated budget, now spends almost as much on defense as the rest of the world combined. Yet the GOP honchos dare claim they are for small government even as their chosen candidate chomps at the bit to go to war with Iran.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, April 27, 2011 All the WikiLeaks Fit to Print
The net effect of the publication of this material has been to let the public in on information it has every right to know. It is obvious that Manning is being punished because government officials don't like to be shown to be so deeply in the wrong.
(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.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, June 18, 2013 The Terror Con
For defense contractors, the government officials who write them mega checks, and the hawks in the media who cheer them on, the name of the game is threat inflation. And no one has been better at it than the folks at Booz Allen Hamilton, the inventors of the new boondoggle called cyberwarfare.
(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.
SHARE Tuesday, November 19, 2013 Be Thankful for the People Struggling to Limit NSA Spying
On Monday the Supreme Court, ruling on an emergency petition, declined to do the right thing and hear a case challenging the massive government surveillance of Americans, revealed by the leaks from Edward Snowden. For the time being, the court acceded to the Obama administration's argument that it has the legal right to continue its unprecedented bulk collection of American phone records without any restraint.
(10 comments) SHARE Friday, November 9, 2012 Yes We Can, We Did, and Now Obama's Second Term Is Our Responsibility
The 2012 election represents a profound mandate for change because it was a startling manifestation of the power as well as the presence of the long neglected "other" that is the face of the new America. That is the America that continued to stick with Obama, despite reservations over his actual governance, because the alternative was reactionary in the fullest sense of that word.
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.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, October 13, 2011 If a Republican Were President
No doubt many reasonable Americans will view Obama as the lesser evil come election time, and for some that will prove convincing. But I take the dreary choices to be one akin to a form of slow torture. Better to support the Occupy Wall Street protests as an inspiring alternative.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, September 10, 2012 The Great Deregulator
Bill Clinton bears as much responsibility as any politician for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and the wild applause for his disingenuous speech at the Democratic National Convention last week is a sure sign of the poverty of what passes for progressive politics.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, January 11, 2013 The Inconvenient Truth About Jack Lew
I suppose that he can't be much worse than Timothy Geithner, but that should be scant cause for cheer over the news that the president has nominated Jack Lew as Treasury secretary. Both championed the financial deregulation craze of the Clinton administration, and both are acolytes of Robert Rubin, the former Clinton Treasury secretary who unfettered Wall Street greed and then took his own considerable cut of the action.
SHARE Tuesday, September 24, 2013 Obama's Friends in Low Places
If you still require to be disabused of Obama's pretend populism, consider his decision to select William M. Daley, JPMorgan's representative in Washington, to be his White House chief of staff. It gave Dimon the key White House connection to accompany the passkey he already had at Treasury with his pal Timothy Geithner as secretary.
SHARE Saturday, December 12, 2015 AUDIO: Robert Scheer Hosts John Kiriakou -- A Whistleblower on Torture
Kiriakou served two years in prison for exposing President Bush's "lie" about the U.S. torture program. He tells Scheer how the CIA -- an organization created to recruit spies to steal secrets -- evolved into a "paramilitary force," how the U.S. drone program "creates terrorists" by killing innocent civilians, and how the Obama administration uses the Espionage Act as a political tool to threaten whistleblowers.
(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.
(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."
(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.
(4 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 29, 2013 Obama, Congress Owe Snowden Thanks, and a Pardon
If Feinstein is "totally opposed" to the surveillance of foreign leaders, why has she given a blank check for surveillance of most Americans, violating their rights under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that she has taken an oath to defend? That's a question that also ought to be answered by the president, who should welcome Snowden back to his country and give him the Medal of Freedom for his public service.
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.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 26, 2012 Obama's Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton
If Obama meant what he said in Tuesday's State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration? Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, January 18, 2013 Another Word for Propaganda
How did the Japanese-owned Sony Corporation that released Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" gain access to information on the 10-year hunt for Osama bin Laden, so highly classified that it was denied to the official 9/11 Commission that investigated the terrorist attacks? The opening frame of the movie states the crime, clearly claiming that "Zero" is "based on firsthand accounts of actual events."
SHARE Wednesday, April 24, 2013 277 Million Boston Bombings
The horror of two pressure cooker bombs in Boston that has so traumatized us should help us grasp the significance of the 1.8 million bomblets dropped in Iraq over a three-week period. Obama was right to blast the use of weapons that targeted civilians in Boston as inherent acts of terrorism, but by what standard do such weapons change their nature when they are deployed by governments against civilians?
SHARE Wednesday, May 25, 2011 Access Journalism: The Movie
The economy remains in deep trouble thanks in considerable measure to the "bankers-first" priorities that Geithner and Summers brought with them to the Barack Obama presidency.
(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.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 30, 2013 Google's Spymasters Are Now Worried About Your Secrets
Technological invasions of our privacy serve to undermine the bold assertion of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that the protection of personal, private space is essential to the freedom of the individual. Google has turned once private data into a commodity routinely exploited for profit.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 16, 2012 Apple's China Comes Home to Haunt Us
If the habits required of Apple's workforce in China are to be emulated, the U.S. military, or perhaps our outsized prison system, should become the essential schooling system for American workers to better compete with the properly disciplined assemblers of iPhones in China.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, March 20, 2016 Robert Scheer Talks With Thomas Frank About Democrats' Shift Away From Addressing Inequality (Audio)
Thomas Frank tells Robert Scheer how the party has become class-based, now representing primarily the "professional" or upper socioeconomic class. He also talks about the Clintons' role in this shift and why he believes people who might have earlier voted for Democrats are now flocking to Donald Trump. Democrats aren't who we think they are.
(2 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 29, 2010 The Big Guy's On Our Side
Volcker is right that those too-big-to-fail banks were at the heart of the problem, but the folks who pushed through the legislation allowing the creation of those unwieldy financial monsters still feign innocence.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 29, 2012 Five Hypocrites and One Bad Plan
Obama's health-care reform should have simply extended Medicare and Medicaid coverage to all who wanted and needed it -- no individual mandate -- while allowing others to opt out for private insurance coverage. That's an obvious constitutional solution that even those die-hard Republican justices would have a difficult time overturning.
SHARE Tuesday, May 28, 2013 Congress Still Puts Out for Wall Street
Not content with having swindled tens of millions of Americans out of their homes and life savings, the very bankers who caused the biggest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression are now subverting government regulations designed to prevent comparable disasters in the future.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 21, 2012 Health Care: Give the People What They Want
Obamacare is a faux reform born of opportunism, as was Romney's original version: Play ball with those who have profited most from the run-up of medical costs and expect them to make it more affordable.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, October 5, 2012 Sigh No More: Obama, Romney Leave No Room to Argue
It is absurd to depict this rhetorical stew of superficial nitpicking by two candidates with a proven record of subservience to the Wall Street bandits responsible for wrecking our economy as a meaningful exercise in democratic governance. Both would rather talk about anything but Wall Street's financing and control of both parties.
SHARE Tuesday, October 8, 2013 Racism and Cruelty Drive GOP Health Care Agenda
Why anyone who claims to be pro-life would want to deny health care to single mothers is an enduring mystery in the morally mischievous ethos of the Republican Party. But the exclusion of a working poor population that skews disproportionately black in the South is simply a continuation of the divide-and-conquer politics that have informed Republican strategy since Nixon.
SHARE Tuesday, November 5, 2013 Pay No Attention to That Imperialist Behind the Curtain
In Saudi Arabia, Kerry said that President Obama had dispatched him to assure the monarchy that the United States remained committed to protect the Royal Kingdom against external threats. That presumed threat refers to Iran, and Kerry is out to assuage Saudi, Egyptian and, most important, Israeli fears that peace might break out between Iran and the United States.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, October 25, 2015 An Idiotic GOP Is Looking at the Wrong Thing in Its Clinton Probe
The only value in disclosure of the secretary of state's private emails is to confirm that she was considerably more hawkish than President Obama, and the only question about her zeal is whether it was driven by political cynicism or ideological hubris. It may be useful in assessing whether as president she would be even more reckless than any Republican opponent.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 7, 2012 Democrats Failed in Wisconsin Because They Failed Wisconsin
The electorate in Wisconsin, and San Diego and San Jose, Calif., that voted Tuesday against public employee unions were not expressing a rational response to the crisis, but rather a tantrum stoked by the lavishly financed demagogues of the right. The voters bought their story because the opportunism of the Democratic Party leadership has left progressives without a believable alternative to the tea party's narrative.
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.
SHARE Tuesday, June 25, 2013 The Good Germans in Government
The question we should be asking is not why do folks like Ellsberg, Snowden and Bradley Manning do the right thing, but rather why aren't we bringing charges against the many others with access to such damning data of government malfeasance who remain silent?
SHARE Wednesday, October 13, 2010 Invasion of the Robot Home Snatchers
How do you foreclose on a home when you can't figure out who owns it because the original mortgage is part of a derivatives package that has been sliced and diced so many ways that its legal ownership is often unrecognizable?
SHARE Tuesday, July 9, 2013 A Gift From the United States to Mideast Zealots
In the end, the argument was not secular versus religious, but rather whether power would reside in the ballot box or the barrel of the gun. The United States, and too many of Egypt's self-proclaimed secular democrats, ended up on the wrong side of that choice.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 24, 2012 Do the Bain Hustle
Although Romney presents his activities as a form of venture capitalist investment, giving life to new enterprises, his practice has been quite the opposite. Ninety percent of Bain Capital's deals by the end of his tenure involved dismembering once-thriving enterprises and selling off the parts, along with the jobs connected to them.
SHARE Tuesday, February 26, 2013 Oscar 2013: Hollywood's CIA Celebration
This is the movie season to consider the CIA as a benign force, occasionally stumbling but in the end, driven by good intentions. The example of Iran, where the "Argo" caper is set, is instructive of the absurdity of that view. Iran for the past half century has been ravaged precisely by such CIA antics.
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 Monday, March 21, 2016 The U.S. Terrorized Cuba, Not the Other Way Around
Once again, history won't keep its mouth shut. Little by little, the truth comes out, and our policy in Cuba gets exposed for the sham it is. For almost 40 years, we have isolated Cuba on the assumption that the tiny island is a center of terrorism in the hemisphere, and year after year we gain new evidence that it is the U.S. that has terrorized Cuba and not the other way around.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 15, 2011 One Betrayal Too Many
It's getting too late to give President Barack Obama a pass on the economy. Sure, he inherited an enormous mess from George W., who whistled "Dixie" while the banking system imploded. But it's time for Democrats to admit that their guy bears considerable responsibility for not turning things around.
(2 comments) SHARE Friday, December 21, 2012 Crony Capitalism's Power Couple
Where is Phil Gramm hiding? The former Republican senator from Texas, who wrote the radical banking deregulation of the 1990s and was rewarded for his efforts to enrich the banks with a plum job at Switzerland-based UBS, has not been heard from since his bank got nailed by the G-men.
(2 comments) SHARE Tuesday, May 14, 2013 Elizabeth Warren, a Great Investment
Student loans amounting to more than $1 trillion exceed the total outstanding credit card debt in the U.S. Students actually spend their loan money on surviving as consumers in a tight economy, while learning skills needed for the economy of the future. On the other hand, the already too-big-to-fail banks have used the government's free money to become even more obscenely powerful.
SHARE Friday, February 1, 2013 It's Good to Be a Goldman
In the end, it doesn't matter whether these folks are Democrats or Republicans, nor whether they are operating at the highest levels of government or banking -- they take care of their own. It is the new model of crony capitalism that must have Adam Smith turning in his grave, for it has nothing to do with free-market performance.
SHARE Thursday, June 28, 2012 Supreme Court Leaves Romney in the Cold
By immediately committing to reverse a health-care reform based on the very program he implemented as governor of Massachusetts, Romney has gone to war with himself. Obviously, neither he nor his advisers has yet grasped that the decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts has changed the terms of the debate.
(3 comments) SHARE Saturday, December 29, 2012 Cerberus Collected Ex-Government Opportunists
The former vice president was rewarded for his gaffe-filled performance in that job with the far more lucrative position of chairman of Cerberus Global Investments LLC. In mythology, Cerberus is the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hades. How perfect a name for a company whose leaders have sold their souls.
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, May 11, 2011 What's the GOP Without bin Laden?
The death of bin Laden renders ever more ludicrous that iconic image of then-President George W. Bush strutting aboard an aircraft carrier under a banner proclaiming "Mission accomplished." What mission had this Wrong Way Corrigan accomplished except irrationally invading Iraq, a country that had banned al-Qaida, while he cozied up to a Pakistan that had long provided bin Laden and his Taliban sponsors with support?
SHARE Sunday, February 14, 2016 AUDIO: Robert Scheer Speaks With Nomi Prins About the Connection Between Washington and Wall Street
The issue is not to find just the one right candidate, but really to do something about the power imbalance in this country, in which the banks get to run everything no matter who's president. From a systemic perspective, it doesn't matter currently what party is in power; what matters is the power is a political, financial collaboration that does not benefit the majority of the population. And that is what needs to change.
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 Sunday, June 5, 2016 "Left, Right & Center": A Movement for Peace
Hillary Clinton went for the kill against Donald Trump during a foreign policy speech this week. Her words were the focus of a discussion with Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer and the other "Left, Right & Center" panelists, including special guest Joan Walsh, editor of The Nation.
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, September 9, 2010 It's the Mortgages, Stupid
There is only one course left for Obama, and it is to do now what he should have done at the start of his term: abandon the hope that banks will voluntarily aid desperate homeowners and instead push for new government regulations and changes in the bankruptcy law to force the banks to make deals to keep people in their homes.
SHARE Thursday, November 3, 2011 Too Big To Jail
Why has Robert Rubin, the one-time treasury secretary who went on to become Citigroup chairman during the time of the corporation's financial shenanigans, never been held accountable for the deep damage done to the U.S. economy on his watch?
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.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 3, 2012 Imitation Outrage: Faking Concern for the Chinese Masses
We all know that the rulers of China now have the clout to mess up our economy overnight by shedding their holdings in U.S. debt. Our leaders are no more serious about human rights in China than they are about such conditions in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, for the simple reason that we need what those nations have more than they need us.
SHARE Thursday, November 10, 2011 California Refuses to Accept Obama's Banking Sellout
Thankfully, we have a few state attorneys general, most prominently California's Kamala Harris, standing up for the American people, but it is outrageous that a president who avowedly committed to defending the public interest would now be subverting that effort rather than leading it.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 20, 2013 The Moment the U.S. Ended Iran's Brief Experiment in Democracy
The U.S. government at the time of the coup easily had manipulated Western media into denigrating Mossadegh as intemperate, unstable and an otherwise unreliable ally in the Cold War, but the real motivation for hijacking Iran's history was Mossadegh's move to nationalize Western-controlled oil assets in Iran.
SHARE Thursday, December 1, 2011 You Can Arrest an Idea
The bankers slept well. Their homes in Beverly Hills were not spotlighted by a noisy swarm of police helicopters, searchlights burning through the sanctity of the night, harassing the forlorn City Hall encampment of those who dared protest the banks' seizure of our government.
(5 comments) SHARE Wednesday, September 22, 2010 So Long, Summers
Finally! The announced departure of Lawrence Summers as the president's top economic adviser is welcome news. Obama had absolutely nothing to do with the causes of the financial meltdown, but he wasted two precious years being misled by Summers and Geithner as to how to respond to it.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 12, 2012 You're on Your Own, Kids
The death of American liberalism as a significant moral force can be traced to the point in 1996 when President Bill Clinton signed legislation that effectively ended the main federal anti-poverty program and turned the fate of welfare recipients, 70 percent of whom were children, over to the tender mercies of the states.
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.
SHARE Wednesday, May 4, 2011 A Monster of Our Own Creation
Bin Laden was another of those monsters of our creation, one of those Muslim "freedom fighters" that President Ronald Reagan celebrated for having responded to the CIA's call to kill the Soviets in Afghanistan.
SHARE Wednesday, October 20, 2010 Obama Hires a Hustler
When Donilon first entered his presidential campaign in 2008, Obama knew he had been working as a legal adviser to Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, two firms that had to depend on government bailouts to survive a housing crisis they helped create.
SHARE Tuesday, September 17, 2013 The People Win as Lawrence Summers Trades Power For Wealth
As for Summers' future, not to worry; after he left the Clinton administration and before signing up with the Obama White House, he admits to having added upward of $31 million to his wealth. Last week, with his Fed nomination still open, he had to pull back from one of his lucrative Citigroup speaking gigs, but now he is back in play.
(3 comments) SHARE Monday, November 5, 2012 Vote For the B-
Obama is the lesser evil compared to Romney, who promised to increase military spending to fight a new Cold War that might turn hot against China, Russia, the forlorn Palestinians and anyone else with whom he can pick a fight. Romney is as dangerous as he is inexperienced in such matters. To compensate for his ignorance, he has turned to the same pack of neocon ideologues that lied us into Bush's invasion of Iraq.
(4 comments) SHARE Thursday, January 12, 2012 There's Hope for Republicans Yet
The issue in this campaign is the economy, and on that, by the time of the general election, there will be no serious substantive difference between the two major parties' candidates. Both will squarely be on the side of the financiers who created this crisis.
SHARE Tuesday, May 21, 2013 Tumblr Is Worth $1.1 Billion to Yahoo for One Reason: You
Shredding privacy is the essence of Tumblr's appeal to Yahoo, and even though it has said it will retain the social networking site's founders in key positions, one way or another that very personal data will be mined and inevitably fall into what users will discover to be the wrong hands. That is truly scary.
SHARE Wednesday, June 29, 2011 Yes to Violence, No to Sex
The Supreme Court, in essence, said -- "sexually assaulting an image of a human being" is protected speech, but depicting graphic sexual activity that is nonviolent and consensual is not.
SHARE Tuesday, July 30, 2013 Gag Me With Lawrence Summers
The idea that Barack Obama would still consider appointing Lawrence Summers to head the Federal Reserve rather than order an investigation into this former White House official's Wall Street payments mocks the president's claimed concern for the disappearing middle class. Summers is in large measure responsible for that dismal outcome.
SHARE Tuesday, May 7, 2013 Obama Did It for the Money
For Pritzker, as with the confirmation of Lew, the fix is in. The Republicans don't dare push back too hard on shady business practices that their deregulation legislation endorsed, and Democrats will go along with anything the president wants.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, April 26, 2012 Halfway Through the Lost DecadeHalfway Through the Lost Decade
This enormous mess did not have to happen. It is a man-made disaster, the result of capricious Wall Street bankers who have no regard for the national interest. Perhaps that is to be expected, but what is shocking is the inability of leading politicians of either party to mount a challenge to the unfettered greed that has come to dominate our political process.
SHARE Thursday, October 20, 2011 Let Them Eat Keller
Funny, he doesn't look like Marie Antoinette. But when former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller asks his readers if they are "bored by the soggy sleep-ins and warmed-over anarchism of Occupy Wall Street," it displays the arrogance of disoriented royal privilege.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 6, 2016 Raider Fan's Loyalty Is Tested by News of Ex-Quarterback's Brain Disease
Stabler, like so many of his peers, had suffered terribly for years from the effects of concussions incurred during those glory days. The autopsy of his tortured brain, and the accounts of his longtime partner about his suffering, confirmed what the NFL and its slavish camp followers had long denied as to the barbarism of the sport.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, October 1, 2013 The Government Leakers Who Truly Endanger America Will Never Face Prosecution
Al-Qaida is hardly on the rise anywhere in the world, with much of its leadership now dead and the remaining elements barely able to communicate. But until a more vigorous enemy turns up, the overblown terrorist enemy used to justify the vastly profitable surveillance state, with selective scary news leaks, is all the military-industrial complex has got.
(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.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, August 6, 2013 A Statement of Peace, or an Epitaph
We have never been very good at challenging our nation's own reprehensible behavior, but if we don't take proper measure of the immense extermination wrought by two small and primitive nuclear weapons as compared with today's arsenals, we lose the point as to why they must be banned.
(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.
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.
SHARE Thursday, May 17, 2012 Obama Can't Knock the Hustle
The best and the brightest in this case are the bane of the nation because their genius lies in outwitting all efforts to hold them accountable. Dimon, the most recent in a parade of now-disgraced Wall Street golden boys, was nonetheless just awarded $24 million in compensation for 2011 by JPMorgan.
SHARE Friday, December 14, 2012 The Shameful Exploitation of Bradley Manning
After being interned like some wild animal in that cage in Kuwait, Bradley Manning was transferred to Quantico, Va., Marine base and further subjected to conditions that his lawyer termed "criminal." What is protected in the First Amendment is not the right of commercial enterprises to exploit the news for profit, but of citizens to become informed. That requires the courage of heroic sources, including Bradley Manning.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 19, 2013 Dumb Wars, Now and Forever
It is a staple of our widely trumpeted Judeo-Christian heritage that the acknowledgment of sin is a prelude to redemption. So how is it that there is no palpable sense of soul searching associated with the 10th anniversary of a war based on officially concocted lies and a policy of torture?
SHARE Friday, February 8, 2013 America's Global Torture Network
When it comes to torture in the post 9/11 era, the record of the United States is so appalling that one must question our claimed abhorrence of the barbarism of other nations. In fact, the essence of our rendition program has been to outsource torture to those countries most sadistic in their use of "enhanced interrogation techniques."
SHARE Tuesday, June 11, 2013 One American Who Isn't for Sale
The Carlyle Group is Big Brother. It is also the firm that owns Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., which, thanks to the revelations of one of its employees, whistle-blower Edward Snowden, we now know collects and stores much of the government's immense PRISM database spying on the lives of this nation's citizenry.
SHARE Thursday, March 22, 2012 Voters Have Two Candidates, No Choice
I can't wait for the moment in a presidential debate when Romney talks about the need for even more advanced US weaponry to counter the emerging military threat from Communist China and Obama ever so coolly points out that Bain Capital, the company that Romney co-founded, has been supplying those Red tyrants with surveillance equipment to better monitor their citizenry.
(5 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 8, 2012 Dennis Kucinich: Conscience of the Congress
Dennis early on made a choice to rise politically by faithfully representing his people rather than betraying them, as is the norm in politics. He has been a national symbol of resistance to excessive government power and waste. He also has been a champion of social justice.
SHARE Friday, February 15, 2013 Senate Republicans Take a Stand Against the Public Interest
Republicans have turned on Hagel because he dared turn on them in the 2008 election when he refused to endorse Sen. John McCain. All other objections to his nomination are just noise, and what is really at issue is the failure to consider the national interest in its most dangerous manifestation: the waging of war. Hagel, severely wounded during the Vietnam War, has long urged caution in foreign military involvement.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 1, 2012 The Ayatollah Is Right About One Thing: Nuclear Weapons Are Sinful
It is obvious, in a week when the U.S. welcomed North Korea's renewed commitment to inspections, that even the most recalcitrant of nations can be induced to reason. The treatment of Iran is complicated by this being a U.S. election season, during which the Republican candidates, with the exception of Ron Paul, have been beating the war drums over what they claim is Iran's nuclear threat.
(1 comments) SHARE Thursday, February 23, 2012 The Gang That Couldn't Bomb Straight
Republican candidates, with the exception of Ron Paul, have returned to the elixir of warmongering to once again sway the gullible masses. The shouting match over which GOP candidate most wants a war with Iran is in sync with the last Republican president's 2003 invasion.
SHARE Thursday, May 10, 2012 Hope and Hesitation in Obama's Sudden Conversion
Young voters have returned to the sanity of the nation's Founders and are unwelcoming of the government's imposing its will on their pursuit of happiness. Surely Obama was mindful that the gay marriage issue is trending sharply in that direction, and certainly his response is a reason for optimism among those fighting against second-class citizenship for gays.
SHARE Thursday, March 15, 2012 At Last, Some Decency on Wall Street
Smith's charge about Goldman "routinely ripping their clients off" resonated widely on the Internet because of prior exposures of suspect derivatives deals in which Goldman explicitly bet against the products it was selling. Slightly less than two years ago the Securities and Exchange Commission filed fraud charges against Goldman that resulted in a $550 million fine over such double-dealing.