Scheer Intelligence

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.