Scheer Intelligence

The election came and went, and despite Democrats’ heavy emphasis on abortion rights, the election of Donald Trump makes it clear that the rights of women across the country are in grave danger. Joining host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to spell out this danger and talk about his new book, “Abortion in the Age of Unreason: A Doctor's Account of Caring for Women Before and After Roe v. Wade” is “America's Abortion Doctor” Dr. Warren Hern.

Hern possesses vast experience with abortion and abortion rights, from his days at the first private nonprofit abortion clinic in Colorado in 1973 to his having to shield himself behind bulletproof windows today as a response to the violent right-wing anti-abortion protests in America. 

“There's no debate in abortion. It's a civil war. The anti-abortion people have assassinated five of my medical colleagues, including one of my best friends, Dr. George Tiller, and I'm on all the hit lists,” Hern tells Scheer.

Abortion goes beyond politics, Hern argues. He states plainly that politicians have no right to be involved in the decision-making process behind abortions: “This is a medical issue. Politicians should get the hell out of this, and we should have a constitutional right to a safe abortion.”

Hern likens abortion to a medical condition, and women should always have the fundamental right to choose how to treat themselves. “What my point has been since 1970 [is] that the treatment of choice for pregnancy is abortion unless the woman wants to have a baby,” Hern says. “There is no justification for any law or any restriction on access to safe abortion services as part of medical care. Safe abortion is a fundamental and essential component of medical care for women.”

Reporting on the election often involves being glued to computer screens dictating the polling numbers around the country and using statistics revolving around race and gender to make assumptions about how the country is politically swaying. Journalist and online host Michael Tracey actually went out to many prominent swing states throughout the election and spoke to various swaths of voters, engaging in what their vote really means and how ordinary Americans view newly appointed Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Tracey joins Scheer Intelligence host Robert Scheer to discuss the election, why Trump won and what his second term holds for the future of the country and the globe. On the side of foreign policy, Tracey says people ought to be wary of Trump’s peace rhetoric and look at his record as president. “Although Trump was seen as in conflict with the so-called neocons in 2016, he then undertook a foreign policy in which he escalated virtually every conflict that he inherited,” Tracey tells Scheer.

Tracey cites regime change in Venezuela, trouble with Iran and bolstering NATO. When it comes to domestic issues and why the US went for Trump in such a grand way, Tracey points to the failures of the Democrats to appeal to common voters, pay attention to the issues they truly care about and allowed them to succumb to Trump’s everyman rhetoric, despite what he might actually do once in office.

“What is deficient about [the Democrats’] own messaging, it has alienated such wide swaths of people who, in earlier eras, would have been considered squarely within their coalition,” Tracey asserts. 

In the end, the Democrats parading around people like Liz Cheney and ignoring crucial issues like the genocide in Palestine hurt them, as was proven through the popular vote. Tracey indicts their strategy: “Liberalism is so oriented itself around the personage of Trump that it's kind of been given a free pass from defining itself on its own terms.”

Amidst the hype, excitement and nervousness of the election, the bigger picture of what the United States is and how it operates often gets lost on people. Many think that choosing one or another candidate will significantly alter their future to better represent their values, but in reality there is only one group of people that matter the most: those who Dr. Peter Phillips, professor emeritus at Sonoma State University, calls the “titans of capital.”

In his new book by the same name, Phillips studies the economic trends following the COVID-19 pandemic and how the wealth concentration in the world took a dramatic turn towards the already ultra-wealthy. He joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to further analyze these trends and how dire inequality is becoming.

The main problem is simple to understand: the ultra-wealthy “doubled their wealth concentration.” That means, according to Phillips, that “the upper one half of 1% of the people got richer and basically, the rest of the world got poorer.”

Phillips names the top 10 capital investment companies, such as BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Morgan Stanley and others as the main culprits. Over $50 trillion are controlled by 117 people across these 10 companies, according to Phillips.

This immense concentration of wealth inevitably renders any semblance of democracy almost useless, as the main decision makers are those who hold the biggest bag. “Whoever we elect as President is not going to make any difference because they're managed by capital,” Phillips tells Scheer. 

“They're there to protect global capital. That's what the American political system is about. That's what the political systems in the West are about. They see capital as a vital interest of the West, and that's why we have military bases all over the world to protect capital and to ensure that debts get repaid and that this capital continues to grow and expand.”

Fewer people in the world had access to the personal moments experienced by Steve Wasserman, Heyday Books publisher, former LA Times Book Review editor and former editor at several of the nation’s most prominent book publishing houses. In his latest book, “Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It's a Lie,” he details his close encounters with a handful of some of the most significant people in the 20th century, including Jackie Kennedy, Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, Barbra Streisand, Huey Newton and others.

Wasserman describes these accounts, or portraits, as focusing on people who “inspired me to do what I could, however modestly, to live a life of passionate engagement.”

From the intimate details of a lunch with Jackie O to a deathbed conversation with writer and journalist Hitchens, Wasserman features a multitude of essays that cover a range of issues from politics to literature to culture and life. One memory of Wasserman included how he “never experienced Susan Sontag as a hostage to nostalgia.” Wasserman found inspiration in that and thought “it was a great, great lesson not to become pickled in your own prejudices such that you couldn't be open to the world.”

Scheer attests that these portraits are brilliant, especially when dealing with controversial figures. He tells Wasserman, “These are famous intellectuals, but you humanize them, and you involve your own criticism.”

Any urban street in America is guaranteed to be lined with popular fast food chains, the readily available nature of their products being the main attraction, with people barely giving a thought to the process behind getting the food from the farm to the table — or more likely, the take-out box. 

Joining host Robert Scheer on this week’s Scheer Intelligence are two people who dedicated their recent film, “Food and Country,” to understanding this process behind food in the United States and how big business, as usual, has almost complete control of the system. Renowned former food critic for the La Times and New York Times, former editor of Gourmet magazine, author of cookbooks and memoirs and PBS food guru, Ruth Reichl and film director Laura Gabbert discuss some of the key takeaways from the film.

Gabbert asserts that big agriculture’s firm grasp on the industry is where the problems begin. Its lobby is amongst the biggest and Gabbert explains that there is no incentive to try and remedy the problems that come from this monopolization of an industry so essential to human survival. “I think that is really the crux of the whole problem, is money in politics,” Gabbert says.

Reichl takes it back to what happened after World War II and how the U.S. government made an attempt to fight communism by cheapening the food making process, which turned farms into factories. “Almost everything that's wrong with America comes from that policy. We've destroyed our health, our environment, our communities,” Reichl tells Scheer.

The heart of their story lies with the farmers themselves, and how, despite being in charge of the most important aspect of human survival, they still tend to struggle the most in society. Reichl explains their significance in the film, stating, “I just wanted for us to be able to listen to their stories that they tell themselves about what has happened to them and what the American system has done to them.”

Check out the film’s website here for screening information.

In the 365 days following the events of Oct. 7, the situation in the Middle East is as complicated as ever. Israel’s genocide in Gaza agonizingly continues, and its invasion of Lebanon and subsequent retaliation at the hands of Hezbollah and Iran has added more fuel to the fire. Tensions are escalating and Middle East expert and writer Juan Cole joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast to explain its precedent and what the future may hold.

The extremism of the Netanyahu cabinet in Israel, Cole explains, is the basis for the sharp increase in violence and tension in the region. While the Israeli government justifies their actions as necessary for the protection of Jews in the region, Cole argues their actions do the opposite. “The extreme goals of Netanyahu to completely control the lives of people in Gaza and the West Bank and Lebanon are endangering the lives of ordinary Jews. They're not making them safer,” he says.

The attempted expansion into Lebanon, which has brought global attention to the country, is something seen before in the recent history of Israel, Cole says. “It's 1982 all over again. 1982 was an enormous failure, and it produced more radicalization and more headaches in the long term for Israel,” he tells Scheer.

Despite their claims of self-defense against “terrorist” organizations like Hezbollah, Cole explains that much like Hamas, Hezbollah’s rise was a direct consequence of Israeli policies. “The Israelis occupied 10% of Lebanese soil, southern Lebanon, for 18 years. And the Lebanese wanted them right back out of their country,” he explains.

“The Shiites of southern Lebanon, who nobody ever heard of… before Israel occupied that area, threw up these resistance movements like Hezbollah. It was Israel that radicalized the Shiites of southern Lebanon,” Cole states.

At a time of book bans and the withholding of critically important struggles in our history, our education system has increasingly failed to provide our young with the tools to become engaged citizens in our much celebrated experiment in democracy. This miseducation of the young has been vastly accelerated by the shocking erosion of civic education in the standardized testing that separates winners and losers in the ranking of our meritocracy.

This reality has been made painfully obvious to Lindsey Cormack, a parent of two young children and a professor of political science at the prestigious Stevens Institute of Technology, teaching a generation of young engineering students in the diminished art of civics education. Sadly, Cormack tells host Robert Scheer that many of her students don’t understand the basics of our government: “They think they're going to do this big adult thing, participate in democracy, but then they're crestfallen and they're a little heartbroken because someone didn't explain the rules to them.”

Scheer responds that the failure to educate all students in civics is built into the design of national tests that omit the tools needed for participation in a vibrant democracy, and Cormack agrees: “You brought up ACT and SAT scores ... . When we have this obsession with making higher scores for all of our students and higher aggregate scores for our schools, neither one of these tests has a civics component. So in a compressed classroom day, you're going to have things that get squeezed out. And when we were interviewing teachers, we know that the things that get squeezed out are the things that aren't tested. So civics gets to the side.”

In her despair at the failure of our national education system at every level to fulfill the basic condition for an informed public, Professor Cormack turned to providing parents with a comprehensive and yet highly accessible civics primer: “How to Raise a Citizen (And Why It's Up to You to Do It).”

Scheer and Cormack agree that schools often gloss over topics like slavery, women’s right to vote, the Vietnam war and Native American genocide, among other topics. Cormack agrees that “governments are less accountable when their people do not understand what's happening.” She defends her book as encouragement for parents to fill the educational void.

Scheer praises the book as an important effort in civics education but questions it’s dependence on those parents who have the time and knowledge to perform this educational task that should be guaranteed to all children by a responsibly functioning public education system: “It's admirable that you would write this book and get parents to do the right thing by their children and by their society. But in order for a society to be healthy, its main structures, certainly of education, have to be healthy.

Cormack accepts that better parenting is not the full answer but defends her efforts as the beginning of a needed solution: “I think it is an injustice and a disservice to put a child through a K through 12 schooling environment, especially in a public taxpayer funded schooling environment and not let them know with certainty the government that they are graduating into and how they can influence it ... Do parents solve everything? No. But do enough parents ... see that there is a problem ... want schools to get involved ... have the power to lobby for school boards or to be in state legislatures to change this? I think the answer is yes. But it's not clear how we get that ball rolling unless we point out the problem, which is our kids are not learning this.”

In the midst of election season, conversations revolving around the levers of power become more frequent, and in the case of a U.S. presidential election, that often includes debates around the so-called “deep state”. Joining host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence, Professors Charles Derber and Yale Magrass discuss their new book, “Who Owns Democracy?: The Real Deep State and the Struggle Over Class and Caste in America.”

There are many interpretations of what the 'deep state' actually represents in government, but Magrass offers a clear definition, breaking it down into two parts: the official state and the deep state. The official state, according to Magrass, consists of the elected officials people know very well, who are always in the media spotlight and soak in the blame for the issues that arise from their perceived rule. Meanwhile, the deep state operates largely unnoticed, with the official state serving as cover.  “It gives free reign to corporations, free reign to the very rich, and they can more or less do whatever they want, with the official state carrying almost all the blame for what happens,” Magrass says.

The two professors dive into the history of the deep state concept, as Derber describes, “when you look carefully at American history, you see a whole evolution of American fascism, which came at the very beginning of the country and went through evolutionary stages.”

Derber and Magrass argue that the deep state has always been embedded in the power dynamics of the U.S., tracing its roots from the Magna Carta—which they contend was designed to expand the freedoms of the English noble elites. They also invoke the Civil War, which they see as a divorce between “northern capitalism, the capitalist Deep State and the southern proto-fascist deep state.” Today, each of the U.S. political parties represent a further expansion of this subversive ruling elite and Derber and Magrass argue that only an expanded public awareness of this hidden power structure will bring accountability to those who operate behind the scenes.

Scheer summarizes the importance of understanding how real power works in the U.S.: “There's a reason why we don't talk about class and caste in America, because the illusion of this egalitarian society is the main cover up of how the system works.”

The genocide in Gaza has brought the issue of Israel — and what it represents for Jewish people — into the forefront of Jewish communities worldwide. The powerful influence of the Israel lobby on Israel’s image in the United States makes this issue highly contentious and deeply complex.

In this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast, host Robert Scheer and Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP), a nonprofit dedicated to fostering peace between Israel and Palestine, explain — as two Jewish individuals — how they navigate these complex issues, both in their professional work and personal lives.

Drawing on her experience working with the U.S. Foreign Service in Jerusalem around the time of the Oslo Accords, Friedman offers a complex view of the politics of the situation. Friedman discusses not only the evolving Jewish relationship to Israel but also the plight of the Palestinians who are often subjected to displacement, violence and death.

Friedman highlights a critical distinction when discussing the Oslo Accords: unlike most treaties, which are based on a balance of interests, the Israel-Palestine agreement is rooted in a balance of power. This dynamic, which heavily favors Israel, was recognized by Friedman: “I think that became very clear as the underlying dynamic of Oslo very, very quickly.”

When it comes to interpreting Israel, Friedman points out the difficulty in engaging with its defenders. “The entirety of Israel's existence has been grounded in a series of narratives, and it's almost a pick a long menu for which narrative best suits you at what moment,” she tells Scheer.

The narrative turning Hamas’ recent attack on Israel into a justification of the genocidal attack on Gaza has made it very difficult for anti-Zionist or non-Zionist Jews to express themselves. Friedman conveys her frustration:

“I'm now living in a world where it doesn't matter what your level of faith is, it doesn't matter what your genealogy is, it doesn't matter your self identification. If you're not deeply Zionist in your political outlook, then you're not really a Jew.”

Israel and its lobby today try to conflate the state with Jews around the world, that it speaks for Jews and encompasses the entire diaspora. Richard Silverstein, author and journalist of the Tikun Olam blog, says that this couldn’t be further from the truth. As the genocide in Gaza rages on, along with the killing of Israeli citizens and the mass torture of Palestinians, the support for Israel among Jews, particularly the younger generation, will continue to falter as the state itself plunges deeper into despair.

Silverstein speaks to host Robert Scheer on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast to detail his relationship with Israel and Zionism and how his views have evolved over time, ultimately leading to a complete disconnection from the state, especially in light of the ongoing genocide, and now calling himself an anti-Zionist.

Being raised Jewish and earning degrees from Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University, as well as studying Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University in Israel, Silverstein makes clear: “[F]or you and for me and for most American Jews, Judaism is not genocide in Gaza, is not $20 billion or $80 billion in arms being sent by the US to Israel to kill Palestinians. That's not the kind of Judaism that I represent.”

Not only is the genocide a driving force behind the alienation of the Israel state but also the way it treats its own citizens, looking at them as expendable in its objective to kill Hamas operators. Silverstein refers to the Hannibal Directive, a procedure used by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to prevent the capture of soldiers by killing them and their captors. “[Y]ou now have a code that is expanded to also killing your own civilians. And that's, I think, what is even more profoundly upsetting, disturbing about the way in which Hannibal is being used right now,” Silverstein tells Scheer.

Torture and rape of Palestinian prisoners is also something that has emerged from Israel’s onslaught on Gaza and the West Bank, according to Silverstein. “We have Palestinians in Gaza who were swept up in detention raids and brought to concentration camps, really, in Israel, and there they're tortured,” he states.

Silverstein insists that what is happening in Gaza does not represent Judaism worldwide like Israel claims, and that “American Judaism needs to stand on its own.” American Jews, Silverstein says, “really have to separate [themselves] from the hostility, the anger, the violence that Israel represents.”