Scheer Intelligence

Where would America be without the muckraking journalists and the publications that champion their work?

Author and University of Michigan professor Alexandra Minna Stern traces the origins of America's burgeoning white nationalist movement.

In a groundbreaking series, Shoshana Walter reveals the work camps operating all over the country under the guise of rehab centers.

Filmmakers Abby Martin and Mike Prysner discuss the war crimes being committed in Gaza and how a resolution could be reached in the Middle East.

A new investigative report uncovers rampant exploitation of caregivers at residential care homes across the nation, many of them poor immigrants who work for a pittance around the clock with no days off, often sleeping on floors, couches, or in garages while the care home owners get rich, breaking several labor laws.

A United Nations expert finds the WikiLeaks founder has been subjected to psychological torture, and media around the globe played a part.

One of the wealthiest and most liberal states in America has created a humanitarian emergency that only those who caused it can truly fix.

Languages along with the world views they contain are dying out at an alarming rate. Sadly, this is by no means an accident, argues Lena Herzog.

Journalist Will Evans exposed Tesla’s flagrant labor violations, but all the company’s founder did was shrug him off and cry "fake news."

A deep-seated denial of the racist, colonial roots of gun rights in the U.S. underlies the left’s flawed approach to domestic arms control.

In a brutally honest exit interview, recently retired U.S. Army Maj. Danny Sjursen opens up about his 18 years as a witness to the carnage of America’s forever wars.

Susie Linfield traces the history behind what she views as a leftist abandonment of Zionism by Jewish intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Hannah Arendt.

Hollywood's triumph in the global culture wars is a serious cause for concern at a time in which conglomerates and uniformity reign, argues French scholar Violaine Roussel.

In a bold statement, a leading dean of journalism argues that in abandoning Julian Assange, the mainstream media have abandoned the First Amendment.

Bill McKibben, the “world’s best green journalist” says it may be too late to save the planet, but that doesn’t seem to keep tech barons and the rest of the uber-rich up at night.

Billionaire Nicolas Berggruen’s plan to revamp democracy and put capital in the hands of the people has one glaring blindspot.

The U.S. government’s attack on the WikiLeaks founder covers up a menacing assault on the First Amendment, argues journalist Bruce Shapiro.

The great majority of Israel’s problems would be solved if the nation were able to establish lasting peace with its neighbors, says journalist and filmmaker Mariam Shahin.

After finding herself abandoned by society after leaving prison, Susan Burton became the aid she and so many others in her position needed.

The victory against “the white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative capitalists” will be won in our courtrooms, our streets and our classrooms through vigorous, relentless resistance, according to Black Lives Matter co-founder Melina Abdullah.

Mass incarceration, one of our greatest shames, was established by Republicans and Democrats who demonized large parts of American society.

Nazi Germany’s crimes and the U.S. War on Terror may not be so different in the eyes of international law.

When it comes to matters of race, the entertainment industry fails its increasingly diverse audience, time and again.

Two Russia experts discuss how the Washington establishment's virulent anti-Kremlin sentiment affects domestic and foreign policy as well as media narratives.

Los Angeles Times reporter Patt Morrison and Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer point out a surprising fact about journalism through the ages.

Tosh Berman, the son of the artist Wallace Berman, describes his childhood surrounded by the revolutionary artists of the Beat movement.

The story of Tom Catena, a doctor who risks his life daily to proffer medical care in an African war zone, is as remarkable as it is inspiring.

In conversation with Robert Scheer, Ron Kovic and Maj. Danny Sjursen examine their roles in our nation's bloody trajectory since the Vietnam War.

Life, replete with its ups and downs, goes on in U.S. and Mexican border communities despite the political calamity unfolding around them.

Was it conspiracy or idiocy that led to the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to detect and prevent the 2001 terror attacks?

University of Michigan professor and author Juan Cole explores our biggest misconceptions about the world's second-largest religion.

Writer Chris McGreal and host Robert Scheer zero in on the book American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts in this week’s episode of Scheer Intelligence. McGreal, the book’s author and a correspondent for The Guardian and other news sources, discuss how the opioid addiction crisis is largely an American epidemic.

Here’s a pop quiz: How long has corporate corruption existed? Answer: As long as corporations as we know them have been in business. Thanks to journalist David Montero’s meticulously sourced survey, Kickback: Exposing the Global Corporate Bribery Network, the consumer public now has access to a wealth of details about the astonishingly shady antics in which multinationals have been engaging since the retro-imperialist heyday of the British East India Company. And this malignant strain of corporatism is only getting worse. As Robert Scheer remarks to Montero in this week’s episode of “Scheer Intelligence,” it amounts to nothing short of a “virulent, corrosive, murderous arrangement that has only accelerated in recent years.” Some potential reasons why this global scourge hasn’t been more aggressively treated include: willful ignorance; greed; the widely supported myth that the phenomenon is ‘just’ about white-collar crime; a false sense that corporate malfeasance ranges outside of various states’ jurisdictions; and powerful companies engaging in a race to the bottom because, well, everyone else is doing it. But Montero is ready to serve notice to a host of Fortune 500 companies helpfully name-checked throughout the episode that at least two hard-nosed investigators are onto them. Not only has the extent of the damage done been vastly underestimated and underreported, but so long as it grows in the dark, it’s able to feed into the worst kinds of crises around the world. After taking in Montero’s argument, Scheer sums up the stakes powerfully as he remarks that “white-collar crimes are human rights crimes.”

The odds were stacked against the two authors of “The Kremlinologist: Llewellyn E. Thompson, America’s Man in Cold War Moscow” when it came to treating their subject with anything resembling journalistic precision or objectivity. That’s primarily because they resembled their subject a little too closely -- in addition to being the book’s co-writers, Jenny and Sherry Thompson are also Llewellyn Thompson’s daughters.

This is part two of a two-part interview. To listen to part one, click here.

In part one of a two-part interview, 33-year death row inmate Kevin Cooper—also an artist of exhibited works and a published author—describes his fight to prove his innocence of a heinous murder and asks why Gov. Brown refuses testing that could prove his innocence, identify the real killer and prove he was framed.

"Noncompliant" author Carmen Segarra sounds off on Goldman Sachs, deregulation and the dangerous ways our culture rewards bad behavior.

Digital DNA co-author Jonathan Aronson on the "hollowing out" of American workers and the elected officials that claim to represent them.

Dianna Cohen of the Plastics Pollution Coalition reveals how our dependence on the material threatens the health of future generations.

FAIR co-founder Jeff Cohen dissects the midterm elections, the failures of the mainstream media and the future of the Democratic Party.

Filmmaker Alexandria Bombach discusses her new documentary, "On Her Shoulders," and the challenges of telling Nadia Murad survivor's story and the Yazidi people.

Comedian Lee Camp explores the legacy of Lenny Bruce, big tech's capacity to strangle independent media and the freedom of working for a network like RT America.

Lyle Jeremy Rubin, a five-year marine veteran of the war in Afghanistan, member of About Face: Veterans Against the War, and PhD candidate in history has developed considerable authority and wisdom to speak on US foreign policy, truth about war veterans, and the role liberal and progressive media celebrities play as “cheerleaders” of the “forever war” the United States seems unwilling to end. Rubin and Scheer talk about the relationship of war-fighting, patriotism and the American people. About Americans’ Rubin says, “I think the veteran as this kind of patriotic object really speaks to a much deeper insecurity on the part of the populous, not just about American foreign policy, but about the state of America in general as a kind of decadent empire that's somewhat aimless and self-destructive. That's at least where I would begin the conversation.”

Has the CIA taken over local policing? Activist Jamie Garcia discusses how technologies launched by the CIA, NSA and the Pentagon to spy on terrorists are radically altering crime-fighting in Los Angeles and local communities in a “predictive policing” program that ends up targeting black and brown communities.

Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch and a 25-year veteran of congressional trade battles, discusses NAFTA 2.0, the Trump Administration’s newly negotiated trade agreement between Mexico, Canada and the United States that, improbable as it may seem, could actually give Mexican workers a living wage and end corporate control of trade courts.

Jason Stanley, Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, discusses his latest book, How Fascism Works, the Politics of Us and Them, and why the United States is especially vulnerable to certain elemental features of fascist policies. Our history with actual fake news, patriotism, racism, and the lack of a true liberal democracy has led us to the rise of Trump, Stanley asserts.

California’s only elected public defender Jeff Adachi, of the City and County of San Francisco, discusses why he opposes California’s new bail reform bill, his views on preventive detention, immigration, and how the Japanese internment camps led him to a career as a public defender.

Film veteran Susan Lacy discusses her latest documentary, Jane Fonda in Five Acts. Lacy stresses that celebrated actress and political activist Fonda has been shaped by four “acts —the four men in her life—her father and actor Henry Fonda, and husbands, film director Roger Vadim, political activist Tom Hayden and media mogul Ted Turner. The last act is Fonda’s alone, on her lifelong journey to personal liberation.

Author Anand Giridharadas discusses the distorted libertarian ideology that they use to subvert the American experiment in democracy. They have done so by denying the legitimacy of government intervention into the economy on the side of fairness and justice, including decent working conditions, fair wages, regulation of the economy, and the right to form unions to represent them and fight for their interests.

Helen Sklar, immigration attorney for more than 33 years, discusses the basis of the immigration family separation under Trump and how former President Clinton laid the groundwork for this.