Scheer Intelligence

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.