Scheer Intelligence

*This episode originally aired on December 21, 2018.This is part two of a two-part interview. To listen to part one, click here.In part two of this two-part interview, Death Row inmate Kevin Cooper, once coming within four hours of execution, details how he copes with the daily torment of impending death as his legal team fights to prove his innocence with new exonerating evidence Gov. Jerry Brown has refused to allow to be examined. For the past 33 Christmas holidays, Kevin Cooper has inhabited an 11-by-4 ½-foot cell in California's San Quentin State Prison, the last eight waiting for Brown to grant him a new hearing and advanced DNA testing that would support what federal Appellate Judge William C. Fletcher has said: “Kevin Cooper is on Death Row because the San Bernardino sheriff’s department framed him.” Cooper, at the top of the list to be killed when the state resumes executions, talks to Robert Scheer in the latest installment of "Scheer Intelligence" about the unfairness of the justice system and the difficulty of proving one’s innocence once convicted: “”Whenever you have a judge that comes forward and stands up and says no, this person innocent…this person was framed, we need to take that serious as a society.” He discusses his ongoing struggle to preserve his basic humanity: "I’ve been blessed, in a sick sense of the word. I’ve been cursed by putting me here, but while I’m in here, I’ve been blessed, because there are a lot of death row inmates who commit suicide every time you turn around. They took a guy past this cage last night on a gurney, ‘cause he was ‘man down’...Don’t know if he lived or died. But they’ve been committing suicide up here, they’ve been killing each other up here. All types of craziness has been going on up in here." Cooper explains how he has kept hope alive when he could so easily succumb to desperation and despair. He paints, writes and reads voraciously but is most passionate when speaking out against the death penalty: "When you find yourself in a fight that is bigger than you—[capital punishment] affects the lives of many people—and you can do something to help in that fight, you can’t give up...You can’t stop, you can’t quit. You just can’t do it...I did not choose this, to speak out against the death penalty; I didn’t. This [struggle] chose me."

Much needed attention has been brought upon the for-profit health insurance industry in the wake of the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Personal stories about people’s tragic experiences involving not only UnitedHealthcare but many other insurance companies have spelled out a deeper issue that resonates across the American political spectrum. Sean Morrow, a journalist and writer for More Perfect Union—a nonprofit newsroom that focuses on working class issues—has gained significant attention lately as a result of the shooting. Morrow joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to further elaborate on the issues millions of Americans are facing and why Brian Thompson’s assassination led to such a widespread public reaction. Morrow dives into some of his reporting, which has dealt with the internal processes behind the health insurance system. Among insurance companies, there is a consolidation process in the form of vertical integration. Companies like UnitedHealthcare can own multiple parts of the healthcare process and thus set up toll booths along each route people can expect to take. “They'll have pharmacy benefit manager companies, they'll have data companies, and then they kind of own this entire system, so that they're always routing you through there,” Morrow says. “If you have a health issue, you could theoretically be giving UnitedHealthcare a little bit of money from every step of the process. And they're their own vendors in all of that,” he explains. “The system's not broken. The system's working as it's intended,” Morrow tells Scheer. The system, Morrow says, is intended “to funnel more and more money to a certain handful of people at the cost of all others.” Despite the legality of this system, the rigging of it against the interests of the working class is what enables their suffering as well as their anger against it.

The assassination of Brian Thompson, the former CEO of UnitedHealthcare insurance company, has prompted a national reckoning of how corporate entities commit crimes on a daily basis and are not only not punished but rewarded for their profit-making prowess. Many point to Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin, as an example of vigilante justice, murdering someone who is responsible for the deaths of thousands who are denied medical care. Joining host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence is Anthony Grasso, professor of political science at Rutgers University and author of the new book, “Dual Justice: America’s Divergent Approaches to Street and Corporate Crime.” The book, published a day before the assassination, dives into how the justice system is really set up in two separate ways which Grasso describes as “poor people, people of color, we want to crack down on them.” But as Donald Trump puts it, when he doesn’t pay his taxes, he’s not a criminal, he’s smart. The criminal justice system fails ordinary people by bypassing the criminal activity occurring in corporate boardrooms. “A lot of corporate actions that are legalized or regulated, things like denials of life saving medical care that companies make in pursuit of profit maximization,” Grasso says. “We don't understand these things as crimes. We say these are byproducts of business decision making. It comes down to the U.S. being rooted in the principles of capitalism and how those with the wealth and power to be in positions that affect the lives of thousands can harm them as long as they follow the rules. “You can prioritize profit maximization over human life. You can deny people coverage because it increases shareholder value maximization,” Grasso tells Scheer. “Those things are okay, as long as you're doing it within the regulatory confines we give you."

Though one can debate the reasons, statistics and precedent of nuclear war, what is often left out of the conversation is the reality of it: destruction of the world as a whole. In her new immersive art experience titled, “Any War, Any Enemy,” immersive artist Lena Herzog throws this reality literally right in the faces of viewers. The film can uniquely be experienced via virtual reality as well as a traditional screen and it plainly shows what nuclear war looks like. Herzog begins the film with a quote stating nuclear war is not war. She tells host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence that she begins with this because “the word ‘war’ is disorienting, because in war, you can have a battle, you can lose a battle, you can win a war. You cannot win a nuclear exchange. It's omnicide. It's not war.” Part of a trilogy which tries to invoke art in a novel form, the film follows "Last Whispers," another piece of immersive art that focuses on the destruction of language. For “Any War, Any Enemy,” Herzog wants people to “experience [nuclear war] inside the frame, to feel it in the fiber of your being.” For Scheer, the film’s power comes from viscerally showing the reality most people have no idea will happen in the event of a nuclear war. “You are forced to be immersed into an environment where your voice means nothing, your brain means nothing, your eyes mean nothing, because this weapon has destroyed any means of sustaining life,” Scheer says. “So you are these figures floating around in the water dead.” Foreign policy discussions centering around the U.S., Russia, China, Israel and others become moot points as Herzog points out, “This is a question of existence versus nonexistence.” Scheer and Herzog agree that the time for nuclear disarmament is now. As opposed to the middle of the 20th century with the Cuban Missile Crisis, where leaders had hours and days to talk about any provocations and would actually speak to one another. Nowadays, leaders avoid each other and the response time to any kind of strike, Herzog says, “it's 90 seconds. It's four minutes.”