Robert Scheer from Creators Syndicate

Do the Bain Hustle for 05/25/2012

Fri, 25 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Obviously, Barack Obama was right in criticizing Mitt Romney's stewardship of Bain Capital. How else to evaluate the business experience that Romney has made a central tenet of his campaign?

As Obama put it all too accurately: "My opponent, Governor Romney — his main calling card for why he thinks he should be president is his business experience. He's not going out there tout ...

Updated: Fri May 25, 2012

Obama Can't Knock the Hustle for 05/18/2012

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

How did we end up with such smart scoundrels? Even after it was known that Jamie Dimon's bank blew more than $2 billion on the same suspect derivatives trading that has bankrupted the world's economy, Barack Obama still had praise for the intellect of his political backer and the integrity of the bank he heads: "JPMorgan is one of the best-managed banks there is," the president told t ...

Updated: Fri May 18, 2012

Hope and Hesitation in Obama's Sudden Conversion for 05/11/2012

Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Once again, President Barack Obama has come tantalizingly close to being terrific. But his failure of courage on the gay marriage issue, in the end, undermined the point he hoped to make Wednesday. As with his prior rhetorical flashes of principle in denouncing torture, commiserating with the victims of Wall Street fraud and resolving to end unjustifiable wars, he quickly waffled and the result ...

Updated: Fri May 11, 2012

Imitation Outrage: Faking Concern for the Chinese Masses for 05/03/2012

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Let's stop jacking the Chinese around. We do not care a whit now — nor have we ever cared — about their human rights or any other aspect of their lives as long as they satiate our unbridled appetites. To pretend otherwise is to deny centuries of exploitative history in which the West drugged the Middle Kingdom and plundered it for its resources and cheap labor while obliterating any ...

Updated: Thu May 03, 2012

Halfway Through the Lost Decade for 04/27/2012

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Does anyone care that the economy is floundering and that we are not getting out of this crisis anytime soon? Housing values are in the cellar, the Fed foresees unemployment remaining unacceptably high for the next three years, and national economic growth is predicted to be, at best, anemic.

Even the substantial rise of stock averages during recent years has been based in large part on ...

Updated: Fri Apr 27, 2012

For He's a Jolly Good Scoundrel for 04/20/2012

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

How evil is this? At a time when two-thirds of U.S. homeowners are drowning in mortgage debt and the American dream has crashed for tens of millions more, Sanford Weill, the banker most responsible for the nation's economic collapse, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

So much for the academy's proclaimed "230-plus year history of recognizing some of the ...

Updated: Fri Apr 20, 2012

You're on Your Own, Kids for 04/12/2012

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Who will speak for the rights of the unborn now that Rick Santorum is gone from the race? Let me give it a whirl from the perspective of one whose own unwed mother had several abortions before yours truly was permitted to emerge.

My arrival came during the U.S. economy's previous great crash, back in 1936. My father, who was already supporting an earlier family with two teenage children, ...

Updated: Thu Apr 12, 2012

Obama By Default for 04/05/2012

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Republicans are a sick joke, and their narrow ideological stupidity has left rational voters no choice in the coming presidential election but Barack Obama. With Ron Paul out of it and warmongering hedge fund hustler Mitt Romney the likely Republican nominee, the GOP has defined itself indelibly as the party of moneyed greed and unfettered imperialism.

It is with chilling certainty t ...

Updated: Thu Apr 05, 2012

Five Hypocrites and One Bad Plan for 03/28/2012

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Supreme Court is so full of it. The entire institution, as well as its sanctimonious judges themselves, reeks of a time-honored hypocrisy steeped in the arrogance that justice is served by unaccountable elitism.

My problem is not with the Republicans who dominate the court questioning the obviously flawed individual mandate for the purchasing of private-sector health insurance, but r ...

Updated: Wed Mar 28, 2012

Voters Have Two Candidates, No Choice for 03/21/2012

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

With Mitt Romney's super PAC limo now on cruise control to victory at the GOP convention, voters are left with only two reasons to vote against Barack Obama: either they are desperate to return a white man to the White House or they feel strongly that it is time to break the glass ceiling denying Mormons the presidency.

Out of a sense of tolerance, I could cotton to the latter — he ...

Updated: Wed Mar 21, 2012

At Last, Some Decency on Wall Street for 03/14/2012

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

By the time you read this, the PR hacks of Goldman Sachs will be vigorously pressing their efforts to destroy the reputation of whistle-blower Greg Smith, a former Goldman executive director whose expose in Wednesday's New York Times op-ed page was so devastating that the 143-year-old firm might actually, finally, be held accountable.

Smith, a wunderkind who spent the 12 years after he g ...

Updated: Wed Mar 14, 2012

Kucinich Will Stick Around for 03/07/2012

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

"Dennis will be back; you can count on it; he's on the right side of things." I recall those words from a printer in Cleveland who had rented Dennis Kucinich a room in the back of her plant when that city's former "boy mayor" was living in suddenly reduced circumstances.

He was as sanguine then as he was Tuesday night when I spoke with him by phone about his gerrymand ...

Updated: Wed Mar 07, 2012

The Ayatollah Is Right About One Thing: Nuclear Weapons Are Sinful for 03/01/2012

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Given my own deep prejudice toward religious zealotry, it has not been difficult for me to accept the conventional American view that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme theocratic ruler of Iran, is a dangerous madman never to be trusted with a nuclear weapon. How then to explain his recent seemingly logical and humane religious proclamations on the immorality of nuclear weapons? His statement ...

Updated: Thu Mar 01, 2012

The Gang That Couldn't Bomb Straight for 02/23/2012

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Here we go again. With the economy showing faint signs of life and their positions on the social issues alienating most moderates, the leading Republican candidates, with the exception of Ron Paul, have returned to the elixir of warmongering to once again sway the gullible masses.

The race to the bottom has been set by Newt Gingrich, the most desperate of the lot, who on Tuesday charged ...

Updated: Thu Feb 23, 2012

Apple's China Comes Home to Haunt Us for 02/16/2012

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Four decades ago, Richard Nixon, a once famously hawkish Republican president, cut a deal with the Communist overlords of China to reshape the world. The result was a transformation of the global economy in ways that we are only now, with the sharp critiques of Apple's China operation, beginning to fully comprehend.

At the heart of the deal was a rejection of the basic moral claim of bot ...

Updated: Thu Feb 16, 2012

Elections Are for Suckers for 02/09/2012

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Elections are for suckers. Let's just dip our fingers in purple ink and pose for photos now that voting has the same significance for us as it had for those Iraqis who got conned into thinking they were participating in some grand democratic experiment.

Our own elections — the ones our government has modeled for the world — are a hoax. What other word should we use to describ ...

Updated: Thu Feb 09, 2012

The Democrats Who Unleashed Wall Street and Got Away With It for 02/02/2012

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

That Lawrence Summers, a president emeritus of Harvard, is a consummate distorter of fact and logic is not a revelation. That he and Bill Clinton, the president he served as Treasury secretary, can still get away with disclaiming responsibility for our financial meltdown is an insult to reason.

Yet, there they go again. Clinton is presented, in a fawning cover story in the current editio ...

Updated: Thu Feb 02, 2012

Obama's Faux Populism Sounds Like Bill Clinton for 01/26/2012

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

I'll admit it: Listening to Barack Obama, I am ready to enlist in his campaign against the feed-the-rich Republicans ... until I recall that I once responded in the same way to Bill Clinton's faux populism. And then I get angry because betrayal by the "good guys" for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm.

Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday's ...

Updated: Thu Jan 26, 2012

There's Hope for Republicans Yet for 01/12/2012

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

There is a full-blown debate going on in, of all places, the Republican Party about the failings of the governing, corporate-sponsored kleptocracy. Not so on the Democratic side. Spared a primary battle, the incumbent president need not defend his economic record, which is basically a redo of the save-Wall-Street-first stance initiated by his Republican predecessor.

That bipartisan estab ...

Updated: Thu Jan 12, 2012

Arms Dealer Obama Will Win by Default for 01/05/2012

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

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 presidential victor, with the possible exception of ...

Updated: Thu Jan 05, 2012