Scheer Intelligence

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

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.