Category : Robert Scheer

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. On the central issue of our time — reining in the greed of the multinational corporations, led by the financial sector and the defense industry — a Republican [...]

It is official now. The Ron Paul campaign, despite surging in the Iowa polls, is not worthy of serious consideration. According to a New York Times editorial, “Ron Paul long ago disqualified himself for the presidency by peddling claptrap proposals like abolishing the Federal Reserve, returning to the gold standard, cutting a third of the [...]

Few journalists have greater influence on U.S. foreign policy, particularly regarding the Middle East, than the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. But his tortured obit of a column this week on the official end of the neocolonialist disaster that has been the Iraq occupation reminds one that the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner often gets [...]

Once again, the gods of war have united our Congress like nothing else. Unable to agree on the minimal spending necessary to save our economy, schools, medical system or infrastructure, the cowards who mislead us have retreated to the irrationalities of what George Washington in his farewell address condemned as “pretended patriotism.” The defense authorization [...]

Hitch is dead. Not, obviously, his brilliant body of work, or the stunning examples of a grand and unfettered intellect that will forever survive him, as will the indelible record of his immense wit and passion. But, sadly, a life force that I had assumed as an indissoluble part of our political and literary landscape, [...]

In the pantheon of shameless billionaires, Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street banker-turned-business-press-lord-turned-mayor, is now secure at the top. What’s so offensive is that someone who abetted Wall Street greed and benefited as much as anyone from it has no compunction about ruthlessly repressing those who dare exercise their constitutional “right of the people peaceably to [...]

There’s no three-strikes law for crooked bankers. There’s not even a law for a fifth strike, as The New York Times reported in the case of Citigroup, cited last month in a $1 billion fraud case. Unlike the California third-striker I once wrote about whom a district attorney wanted banished forever to state prison for [...]

Can we all agree that a $1 billion swindle represents a lot of money? Can we also agree that the fact that Citigroup last week conceded to pay a $285 million fine to settle SEC charges for “misleading investors” demonstrates a damning admission of culpability? So why has Robert Rubin, the onetime treasury secretary who [...]

It is class warfare. It was not begun, however, by the tear-gassed, rain-soaked protesters asserting their constitutionally guaranteed right of peaceful assembly. Rather, this war was sparked by the financial overlords who control all of the major levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is they who subverted the American ideal of [...]