This week's guest on REPORT FROM SANTA FE is Robert Scheer, editor in chief of Truthdig, who has built a reputation for strong social and political writing over his 30 years as a journalist. His columns appear in newspapers across the country, and his in-depth interviews have made headlines. He conducted the famous Playboy magazine interview in which Jimmy Carter confessed to the lust in his heart and he went on to do many interviews for the Los Angeles Times with Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and many other prominent political and cultural figures. Scheer can be heard on the political radio program “Left, Right and Center” on National Public Radio. He is currently a clinical professor of communications at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His political web site Truthdig has received 4 Webby Awards for the best Political Blog on the Internet. In 2011 Ithaca College awarded him the Izzy Award for outstanding achievement in independent media. Scheer’s latest book, “The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street,” uncovers the hidden story behind one of the greatest financial crimes of our time: the Wall Street financial crash of 2008 and the consequent global recession. Instead of going where other journalists have gone in search of this story—the board rooms and trading floors of the big Wall Street firms—Scheer goes back to Washington, D.C., a veritable crime scene, beginning in the 1980s, where the captains of the finance industry, their lobbyists and allies among leading politicians destroyed an American regulatory system that had been functioning effectively since the era of the New Deal. Scheer's non-partisan account of the financial meltdown clearly lays out the relationship between Washington and Big Business and its impact on Main Street. Quotes: “This economic meltdown did not have to happen. It happened because there was a scam.” “The fact is by the time they are going to be president they are pretty much bought....they all started out as pretty good people and they all started out as pretty smart people. They get caught up in a process where money talks, where special interest dominates, and then you get your handlers and you get all of your advisers and they tell you how to frame the issues so you will not offend the big money people and how you will con the public. And the mass media goes along with it because the mass media is basically owned by those same people.”