The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich

Hello friends,Welcome back to my Saturday coffee klatch with my colleague Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action — and my former student). Today we discuss: * Biden’s speech to the nation — and why the media ignored it, or treated it as just another “political” event. * Ron DeSantis — and why he (and Mitch McConnell and much of the right-wing establishment) is just waiting for Trump to falter. * Merrick Garland — and why he’s reluctant to prosecute Trump, but why he must. * Friday’s jobs report — and why it left out the most important information about jobs, wages, and the economy. * Sarah Palin — and how she lost in Alaska. * And wishes for a happy Labor Day weekend — remembering what Labor Day represents, and what we celebrate. Thank you to to Bob Chartier and Dave Mancuso who composed (and sang) the latest tunes we use as today’s coffee klatch theme songs. Happy Labor Day weekend! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

One week after a team of F.B.I. agents descended on his private club and residence in Florida, Trump warned that things could get out of hand if the Justice Department kept the heat on him. “People are so angry at what is taking place,” Trump told Fox News, predicting that if the “temperature” isn’t brought down, “terrible things are going to happen.”But Trump and his allies are doing all they can to increase the temperature. Last Sunday, one of Trump’s closest allies, Senator Lindsey Graham, warned of “riots in the streets” if Trump is prosecuted.On Tuesday, Trump spent much of the morning reposting messages from known purveyors of the QAnon conspiracy theory and from 4chan, an anonymous message platform where threats of violence often bloom. Some of Trump’s reposts were direct provocations, such as a photograph of President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker Nancy Pelosi with their faces obscured by the words, “Your enemy is not in Russia.”Online threats are escalating against public servants. Bruce E. Reinhart, the federal magistrate judge who approved the warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, has been targeted with messages threatening him and his family.How to respond to this lawlessness? With bold and unwavering law enforcement. If Trump has broken the law – by attempting a coup, by instigating an assault on the U.S. Capitol, by making off with troves of top-secret documents -- he must be prosecuted, and if found guilty he must be imprisoned. Yes, such prosecutions might increase tensions and divisions in the short term. They might provoke additional violence.But a failure to uphold the laws of the United States would be far more damaging in the longer term. It would undermine our system of government and the credibility of that system -- more directly and irreparably than Trump has done.Not holding a former president accountable for gross acts of criminality will invite ever more criminality from future presidents and lawmakers. It is also important for all those in public life who believe in democracy to call out what the Republican Party is doing and what it has become: not just its embrace of Trump’s Big Lie but its moves toward voter suppression, takeovers of the machinery of elections, ending of reproductive rights, book bans, restrictions on what can be taught in classrooms, racism, and assaults on LGBTQ people. Last week, Biden condemned “ultra-MAGA Republicans” for a philosophy he described as “semi-fascism.” Today he will deliver a rare prime-time speech outside the old Independence Hall where the Framers of the Constitution met 235 years ago to establish the basic rules of our democratic form of government. The speech is will focus on what the White House describes as the “battle for the soul of the nation” – the fight to protect that democracy.President Biden's earlier conciliatory tone and talk of uniting Americans and “healing” the nation from the ravages of Trump has obviously not worked on most of the Republican Party. With the notable and noble exceptions of Liz Cheney and a few other courageous Republicans — most of whom have been or are being purged from the GOP — the Republican Party is rapidly morphing into an anti-democracy movement. With each passing week, it becomes more rabid in its opposition to the rule of law. Republican lawmakers who took an oath of allegiance to the Constitution are repudiating it in word and deed. Republican candidates are lying about the 2020 election and whipping up our fellow countrymen into angry mobs. And as Republican lawmakers and candidates exchange their political integrity for power, Fox News and other rightwing outlets continue to exchange their journalistic integrity for money. The essential political choice in America, therefore, is no longer Republican or Democrat, right or left, conservative or liberal. It is democracy or authoritarian fascism. There can be no compromise between these two — no halfway point, no “moderate middle,” no “balance.” To come down squarely on the side of democracy is not to be “partisan.” It is to be patriotic.As Adam Wilkins suggested on this page yesterday, while today’s Republican party does not have its own paramilitary, such as the Nazi’s Brownshirts, the GOP is effectively outsourcing these activities to violent fringe groups such as the “Proud Boys," "Oathkeepers," and others who descended on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and who continue to threaten violence.Yet Democrats cannot and must not take on this battle alone. They must seek common ground with Independents and whatever reasonable Republicans remain. As Eric T noted on this page, we must continue to appeal to truth, facts, logic, and common sense. We must be unwavering in our commitment to the Constitution and the rule of law. We must be clear and courageous in exposing the authoritarian fascist direction the Republican Party has now chosen, and the dangers this poses to America and the world. It is also important for Democrats to recognize -

Billionaire GOP mega-donor Steve Wynn has some free messaging advice for Republicans, which he proffered in a conference call last Wednesday with Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and Newt Gingrich (the audio was obtained by Politico): He urged the GOP to run TV ads telling average working people that Democrats have funded the IRS to hammer them. Wynn even offered a script: “Tell them the IRS is ‘coming after you if you’re a waiter, if you’re a bartender, if you’re anybody with a cash business … they’re coming after you.’”Unfortunately for Wynn, the funding for the IRS in the Inflation Reduction Act targets the very wealthiest Americans — such as Steve Wynn — whose complicated businesses dealings and small armies of accountants and tax attorneys require lots of IRS resources if they’re to be audited.Over the past decade, Republican lawmakers cut the IRS budget by roughly 20 percent — with the result that just 2 percent of the richest Americans had their taxes audited in 2019, down from 16 percent in 2010. Not surprisingly, the richest 1 percent of Americans are estimated to be hiding more than 20 percent of their earnings from the IRS, accounting for more than a third of all unpaid federal taxes. The newly-added IRS funding is projected to raise some $100 billion in net tax revenue over the decade, mostly from the very rich.Wynn isn’t the first to dream up the bogus story about the IRS going after average working people. Senator Ted Cruz warns of a “shadow army of 87,000 IRS agents,” threatening Americans, and Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for Arizona governor, ties the increase in IRS agents to the FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago and concludes that, “Not a single one of us is safe.” Many other GOP candidates are telling the same lie. This lie isn’t even consistent with the older GOP lie that the rich pay most income taxes and almost half of Americans pay none (remember Mitt Romney’s 47 percent?), which isn’t true when you include Social Security taxes, state and local income taxes, sales taxes, and property taxes. But the billionaire class will do anything to avoid paying taxes. Why do you suppose Wynn and others like him bankroll Republicans in the first place? (Hint: Republicans cut their taxes.)During that same conference call last Wednesday, Wynn asked RNC chair Ronna McDaniel to recommend dark-money nonprofits to which he and other wealthy contributors can donate without their names being revealed. Some donors, Wynn said, “are self-conscious for reasons that are personal to them, business people and folks like that,” and would rather give to the GOP anonymously. (Wynn should know. His big campaign donations became embarrassingly toxic in 2018 after The Wall Street Journal detailed rape, assault, and harassment allegations against him.)Recall that the Supreme Court’s shameful 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision allows unlimited political spending by such nonprofits, to which billionaires like Wynn can secretly funnel unlimited donations. Meanwhile, The New York Times reported last week that electronics mogul Barre Seid gave 100 percent of the shares of his surge protector and data-center equipment manufacturer Tripp Lite to a dark-money nonprofit called the Marble Freedom Trust. The gift is worth a jaw-dropping $1.6 billion. The Marble Freedom Trust is controlled by Leonard Leo, a former chairman of the Federalist Society, known for his decades-long campaign to fill the federal courts with conservative judges and for his legal challenges to abortion rights, voting rights, and measures to ameliorate climate change. Seid’s $1.6 billion gift is the largest single donation ever made to a nonprofit political group. It would have been secret had an insider not tipped off the Times.Dark money nonprofits also enable super-wealthy political donors to avoid taxes. Had Seid sold his company outright, he would have had to pay about $400 million in capital gains taxes on the increased value of Tripp Lite’s shares. But because nonprofits like the Marble Freedom Trust are exempt from paying taxes, handing his shares over to the Trust enabled Seid to transfer the entire $1.6 billion to Leo — thereby having average taxpayers effectively subsidize Leo’s political influence-peddling to the tune of $400 million.What to do? At the very least, Congress should enact the Disclose Act, which would reveal to voters who’s trying to buy their votes. The Act has been blocked in Congress for more than a decade by Republican filibusters.Which brings me back to Steve Wynn’s advice to the Republican Party to tell working-class Americans that Democrats are unleashing the IRS on them.In truth, the Republican Party has been going all out to help its major backers avoid paying taxes. Those backers are among the wealthiest people in America — such as Steve Wynn — who have in recent years become far wealthier than ever before. Much of this is in secret. But as a result, most other Americans

I like to tweet. Not as much as I like to write here on Substack where I get to share my thoughts at some length. On Twitter it’s a different kind of conversation, and pace — like speed chess.Last Tuesday I tweeted: I was surprised at the outrage my little tweet provoked. The Washington Examiner, for example: Ultra left-wing elitist and former secretary of labor during the Clinton administration Robert Reich tweeted earlier this week, “Just wondering if ‘DeSantis’ is now officially a synonym for ‘fascist.’” This insulting slur has no basis, of course. This is just what left-wing ideologues do when they discuss Republican politicians who pose any threat to the existence of their political ideology. It's not grounded in any reality and is a sham. Yet, it never stops any of them from repeating the lie. Anyone the Democrats don’t like or disagree with is a fascist…. Any person using such hyperbolic, unhinged name-calling is not a serious person, and anything they say should not be deemed credible.Fox News’s digital outlet took umbrage as did many others, with rightwing rage at my tweet ricocheting through the echo-chambers of Republican social media.Don’t worry about me. After a half-century in and around politics, I’ve got a thick skin. But the size of the blowback on my little tweet makes me think I struck a nerve. DeSantis has become a favorite of the GOP’s Fox News-viewing base, and the most likely rival to Trump for the Republican nomination in 2024. The Harvard and Yale educated DeSantis (what do they teach at Harvard and Yale?) has been called “Trump with a brain.” Lately DeSantis has been campaigning on behalf of Republican election-deniers around the country, including gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and US Senate candidate JD Vance in Ohio.DeSantis is the nation’s consummate culture warrior. Consider what he has wrought in Florida: * Discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity are now barred in Florida schools. * Math textbooks have been rejected for what Florida officials call “indoctrination.” * Abortions are banned in Florida after 15 weeks. (DeSantis recently suspended an elected prosecutor who said he would refuse to enforce the anti-abortion law.) * A new state office has been created to investigate “election crimes.” * Florida teachers are limited in what they can teach about racism and other tragic aspects of American history. DeSantis has got personally involved in local school board races, endorsed and campaigning for 30 board candidates who agree with him (so far, 20 have won outright, five are going to runoffs). * Claiming tenured professors in Florida’s public universities are “indoctrinating” students, DeSantis spearheaded a law requiring them to be reviewed every five years. * Florida’s Medicaid regulator is considering a rule to block state-subsidized health care from paying for treatments of transgender people. Florida’s medical board recently began the process of banning gender-affirming medical treatment for youths. * Disney (Florida’s largest employer) has been stripped of the ability to govern itself for the first time in more than half a century, in retaliation for the company’s opposition to the crackdown on L.G.B.T.Q. conversations with schoolchildren. * Florida’s congressional map has been redrawn to give Republicans an even bigger advantage.How much of a reactionary bully is DeSantis? Don't take my word for it. Here’s a smattering of some of his pearls of (dare I say, fascist) rhetoric: “We are not going to surrender to woke,” DeSantis said last Tuesday. “Florida is the state where woke goes to die.” He has described an America under assault by left-wing elites, who “want to delegitimize our founding institutions.” DeSantis envisions his job as governor as fighting critical race theory, “Faucian dystopia,” uncontrolled immigration, Big Tech, “left-wing oligarchs,” “Soros-funded prosecutors,” transgender athletes, and the “corporate media.” The state of Florida, DeSantis says, has become a “citadel of freedom.” He charges — using a standard racist dog whistle — that “We’re not letting Florida cities burn down … In Florida, you’re not going to get a slap on the wrist. You are getting the inside of a jail cell.” So, back to my tweet: Is it useful to characterize DeSantis’s combination of homophobia, transphobia, racism, and misogyny, along with his efforts to control the public schools and universities and to intimidate the private sector (e.g., Disney), as redolent of fascism? America’s mainstream media is by now comfortable talking and writing about “authoritarianism.” Maybe it should also begin using the term “fascism,” where appropriate. (Even Joe Biden, who has never been known as a rhetorical bomb-thrower, last Thursday accused the GOP of “semi-fascism.” A spokesperson for the Republican National Committee called Biden’s comment “despicable.”)Authoritarianism implies the absence of democracy, a dictatorship. Fascism (the word comes from the

When Robert Draper of the New York Times recently asked Rose Sperry, a state committeewoman for Arizona’s G.O.P., to name the first Republican leader she ever admired, she immediately mentioned former Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy. “I grew up during the time that Joe McCarthy was doing his talking,” Sperry said. “I was young, but I was listening. If he were here today, I would say, ‘Get him in there as president!’”I also grew up during the time Joe McCarthy was “doing his talking,” and I was young and listening, too. But I would not want Joe McCarthy to be president. Neither, let me add, did my father. Ed Reich called himself a liberal Republican, in the days when such creatures still existed. He voted for Thomas Dewey in 1948 (cancelling my mother’s vote for Harry Truman), and then for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 (cancelling my mother’s votes for Adlai Stevenson), and he thought highly of New York State’s Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller, and its Republican senator, Jacob Javits — neither of whom would last a second in today’s G.O.P.But Ed Reich could not abide bullies and he detested Joe McCarthy. My father thought that anyone who had to bully someone else to feel good about himself was despicable. Bullying led to antisemitism and antisemitism had led to the holocaust. In 1947, Ed Reich moved us from Scranton to a little village in the country some sixty miles north of New York City, called South Salem, so as to be within equal driving distance of his two women’s clothing stores, in Norwalk, Connecticut, and Peekskill, New York. Soon after we arrived, a delegation of older men from the village came by to inform us that South Salem was a “Christian community” and we were not welcome there. That was the day my father decided we’d stay put in South Salem. “I’ll show those b******s,” he said. Senator Joseph McCarthy had a special place in Ed Reich’s pantheon of evil bullies. McCarthy didn’t just attack those he claimed were members of the Communist Party. He did it with malice. McCarthy’s crusade against “subversives” extended into the mainstream of America and American politics, as he ridiculed the “pitiful squealing” of “those egg-sucking phony liberals” who “would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers.” Every time McCarthy’s image came across the six-inch screen on the Magnavox television in our living room, my father would shout “son of a B***H” so loudly it made me shudder. In Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, historian Ellen Wolf Schrecker describes a movement that “punished thousands of law-abiding Americans and scared millions more into silence, destroying much of the left and seriously narrowing the political spectrum.” McCarthyism was the byproduct of the Republican Party’s postwar effort to eradicate the New Deal by linking it to communism. The G.O.P. portrayed the midterm election of 1946 as a “battle between Republicanism and communism.” The Republican National Committee chairman claimed that the federal bureaucracy was filled with “pink puppets.” According to John Nichols, in The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party, Southern segregationist Democrats joined the red-baiting rhetoric. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, a Klansman who had filibustered to block anti-lynching legislation, described multiracial labor unions’ advocacy for civil rights as the work of “northern communists.” Representative John Elliott Rankin, a fiercely racist and antisemitic Mississippi Democrat who helped establish the House Un-American Activities Committee as a standing congressional committee, called the CIO’s Southern organizing campaign “a communist plot” and charged that it would lead to more Black voting rights. “We’re asleep at the switch,” he warned. “They’re taking over this country; we’ve got to stop them if we want this country.”The backlash was successful. In the 1946 midterms, Democrats lost control of both the Senate and the House. Wisconsin ended its era of progressive Republican La Follettes and sent Joe McCarthy to the Senate. California replaced New Dealer Jerry Voorhis with a young Republican lawyer who had already figured out how to use red-baiting as a political tool. His name was Richard Nixon. In December 1946, at the founding convention of the Progressive Citizens of America, FDR’s former vice president, Henry Wallace, saw the red scare for what it was — a tool of the most powerful economic forces in America. “We shall … repel all the attacks of the plutocrats and monopolists who will brand us as Reds,” he said. If it is traitorous to believe in peace — we are traitors. If it is communistic to believe in prosperity for all — we are communists. If it is unAmerican to believe in freedom from monopolistic dictation — we are unAmerican. We are more American than the neo-Fascists who attack us. The more we are attacked the more likely we are to succeed, provided we are ready and willing to counterattack.But there was no counterattack. The red scare continued to

Among the many ironies and hypocrisies leading up to the 2022 midterms, one deserving special mention is Trump’s and the GOP’s unremitting claim that America has become more violent and dangerous under Biden and the Democrats.“Our country is now a cesspool of crime,” Trump said in a recent speech to the America First Policy Institute. “We have blood, death, and suffering on a scale once unthinkable because of the Democrat Party’s effort to destroy and dismantle law enforcement all throughout America.”The truth is that although Americans experience far more gun violence than the inhabitants of other advanced nations, that’s largely because of widespread gun ownership — championed, encouraged, and defended by Republican lawmakers. As to recent violence, shootings are down 4 percent this year compared to the same time last year. In big cities, murders are down 3 percent. If the decrease in murders continues for the rest of 2022, it will be the first year since 2018 in which they fell in the U.S.The larger threat of violence is coming from Trump Republicans whose incendiary statements are fueling violence and threats of violence across America. In the year and a half since a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, such threats and attacks have escalated.Yesterday, a federal jury found Barry Croft and Adam Fox guilty in a plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer at her summer home and to blow up a bridge that would stop rescuers from reaching her. They hoped to spark a second American Revolution. The Trump Republican violence machine is affecting — and sometimes intimidating — election workers, flight attendants, school board officials, librarians, members of the Biden administration, and members of Congress.In Houston, a former Marine stepped down as the grand marshal of a July 4 parade after a deluge of threats that focused on her support of transgender rights. A few weeks later, the gay mayor of an Oklahoma city quit his job after what he described as a series of “threats and attacks bordering on violence.” His tires were slashed, he was harassed by residents at a council meeting, and followed near his home. “I was afraid what would they do next if I don’t step down.”As I mentioned yesterday, Dr. Anthony Fauci and his family have received credible death threats and required a security detail. In December, authorities in Iowa arrested a California man with an assault rifle and ammunition, and a “hit list” that named Dr. Fauci and Joe Biden, among others. Congresswoman Liz Cheney has also received credible death threats, and also has a security detail. Threats have been issued against the federal judge who authorized the warrant to search for classified material at Mar-a-Lago, and against his family. (In that search, F.B.I. agents carted away boxes of highly sensitive documents.)During that search — from which F.B.I. agents carted away boxes of highly sensitive material — Trump described his home as “under siege.” In the wake of the search, Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social, erupted in calls for violence. Twitter saw a tenfold increase in posts mentioning “civil war” (according to Dataminr, a tool that analyzes Twitter data). There was also a spike in social media users calling for “violence toward law enforcement,” as Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney, chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee, and Stephen Lynch, chairman of its National Security Subcommittee, noted in a letter last week to eight social media companies.Republican lawmakers have fueled the fire. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader, has accused the Justice Department of being “weaponized” against Trump. Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, and Representative Lauren Boebert, Republican of Colorado, have drawn comparisons between the F.B.I. and the Nazi secret police. Joe Kent, a Trump-endorsed House candidate in Washington State, charged (on a podcast run by Stephen Bannon) that “we’re at war.” Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona, declared: “These tyrants will stop at nothing to silence the patriots who are working hard to save America,” adding that, “if we accept it, America is dead.”The incendiary talk has led to violence. On August 11, a Trump supporter identified as Ricky W. Shiffer mounted an armed attack on an F.B.I. office in Ohio, and was killed. According to a subsequent review of his social media posts, Shiffer was incensed about the search at Mar-a-Lago and wanted revenge.Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies political violence, has conducted half a dozen nationwide polls since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and repeatedly found that between 15 million and 20 million American adults believe that violence would be justified to return Trump to office.Trump’s claim that America has become more violent and dangerous over the last year and a half is true. But this is not because of Biden and the Democrats. It is largely because of Trump — and th

For several years, Brian Stelter’s Sunday CNN show, “Reliable Sources,” has been a reliable source of intelligent criticism of Fox News, rightwing media in general, Trumpism, and the increasingly authoritarian lurch of the Republican Party.Last week, CNN abruptly canceled the show and effectively fired Stelter and his staff. Why? The show had good ratings and was commercially successful. (More people watched it than MSNBC.)The show was cancelled by Chris Licht, CNN’s new chairman and CEO, who has said he wants less criticism of Trump and the Republican right. Licht has told staff they should stop referring to Trump’s “Big Lie” because the phrase sounds like a Democratic Party talking point. Licht also wants more conservative guests.What’s motivating Licht? Follow the money. CNN’s new corporate overseer is Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc., which now owns what used to be Time Warner, including CNN. The CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery is David Zaslav. Zaslav has been prodding Licht to reposition CNN to have more “straight news reporting” and fewer “opinionated” views from hosts. Zaslav says he wants CNN to be for “everybody … Republicans, Democrats.”But CNN is never going to be a network preferred by Republicans. Fox News has that sewn up. As Republicans move further rightward into the netherworld of authoritarianism, there’s even less possibility that CNN’s news coverage will be able to satisfy them, nor should CNN even try. If we’ve learned anything from Trump and his lapdogs at Fox News, it’s that facts, data, and logic are no longer relevant to the Republican base.Even “straight news reporting” depends on what stories are featured, which facts are highlighted, and the context surrounding the news. How is it possible to report on Trump or Rudy Giuliani or any number of today’s Republican leaders and not speak of the Big Lie, or say they’ve broken norms if not laws?The anti-democracy movement in America (as elsewhere) is among the biggest issues confronting us today. Is reporting on it considered “straight news” or “opinion?” Wouldn’t failing to report on it in a way that sounded alarms be a gross dereliction of duty?So what’s motivating Zaslav? Keep following the money. The leading shareholder in Warner Bros. Discovery is John Malone, a multi-billionaire cable magnate. (Malone was a chief architect in the merger of Discovery and CNN.) Malone describes himself as a “libertarian” although he travels in rightwing Republican circles. In 2005, he held 32 percent of the shares of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. He is on the board of directors of the Cato Institute. In 2017, he donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration.Malone has said he wants CNN to be more like Fox News because, in his view, Fox News has “actual journalism.” Malone also wants the ‘news’ portion of CNN to be “more centrist.” Early last spring, Brian Stelter wrote in his newsletter that Malone’s comments “stoked fears that Discovery might stifle CNN journalists and steer away from calling out indecency and injustice.” (A source told Deadline’s Dominic Patten and Ted Johnson that even if Malone didn’t order Stelter’s ouster, “it sure represents his thinking.”)When you follow the money behind deeply irresponsible decisions at the power centers of America today, the road often leads to rightwing billionaires. On Sunday, his last show, Stelter said:It’s not partisan to stand up for decency and democracy and dialogue. It’s not partisan to stand up to demagogues. It’s required. It’s patriotic. We must make sure we don’t give platforms to those who are lying to our faces.Precisely. Sadly, there are still many in America — and not just billionaires like Malone — who believe that holding Trump accountable for what he has done (and continues to do) to this country is a form of partisanship, and that such partisanship has no place in so-called “balanced journalism.” This view is itself dangerous. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

As the saying goes, in America everyone is entitled to a second chance — especially con artists. Herewith the 6 rules for getting a second (or third or fourth) chance to sell a giant con:1. Market a mundane idea as “disruptive.” Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork, hyped his office-sharing startup as the first “physical social network.” In reality it was nothing more than what you’d find in any coffee shop with customers at their laptops, but Neumann made it sound so revolutionary — “disruptive,” to use the high falutin con word — that JPMorgan, SoftBank, and other investors sank hundreds of millions into his company. At its height it was valued at some $47 billion.2. Pocket the money. Neumann used some of his investors’ money to buy buildings that he then leased back to WeWork. He also borrowed against his own stake in the company. And he was going to charge WeWork almost $6 million to use his trademark of the word “We” after the company rebranded itself the “We Company.” He lived like a mogul, with his own jet and penthouse apartments. WeWork never made a nickel of profit. The prospectus for its initial public offering was widely ridiculed as incoherent. After Neumann was forced to disclose his personal conflicts of interest, the IPO fell apart and the company’s estimated value plummeted from $47 billion to about $4 billion (after being rescued by SoftBank).3. Make sure your investors have their own investors, so they’ll want to salvage whatever they can and won’t sue you. Neumann wasn’t convicted of criminal fraud. His early investors didn’t want to sue him because they wanted to salvage whatever of their investment they could, and didn’t want to admit to their own investors that they’d been conned. In fact, they paid Neumann over $1 billion to exit the board and give up his voting rights. Neumann collected another $185 million in consulting fees from WeWork. Meanwhile, other WeWork employees were left holding near-worthless stock options and thousands were laid off.4. Do the same thing again. Neumann has just launched a new company called Flow, which he says will “transform” the residential rental real estate market with reliable services and “community” features (he used the term “community” a lot with WeWork, too). What about Neumann’s previous con? It’s been forgotten. “Flow” has already attracted $350 million of financing from the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz — the largest check it’s ever written in a round of funding a company. Andreesen values Flow at more than $1 billion before Neumann has even opened its doors. Last week, Marc Andreesen explained in a blog post on his firm’s website that the rental real estate market is “ripe for disruption,” especially now that so many people are working from home and “will experience much less, if any, of the in-office social bonding and friendships that local workers enjoy.” If this sounds a lot like the language Neumann employed to hype WeWork, that’s no accident. It worked once, so why not again? As Andreesen wrote, “we love seeing repeat-founders build on past successes by growing from lessons learned,” and that for Neumann “the successes and lessons are plenty.”5. Never admit fault or defeat. Adam Neumann’s con is small change compared to Donald Trump’s — who has also managed to fail upward but far more spectacularly. The master con artist has defrauded customers, renters, students, hoteliers, contractors, and, finally, American voters. He never admits defeat. Trump has leveraged every fraud into an even bigger fraud. As he infamously claimed, he could shoot someone in the center of Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Trump “disrupted” American democracy with his Big Lie and attempted coup. Now, it seems, he’s about to seek a second chance at the presidency.6. Don’t be poor or Black or brown. Not everyone in America gets a second chance. This is especially true of people who are poor or of color, particularly those convicted of crimes without jury trials through plea-bargains with prosecutors (who threaten worse penalties if they won’t plead guilty). An estimated 5.2 million Americans couldn’t vote in the last presidential election because of felony “convictions,” including one in every 13 Black adults, according to the Sentencing Project. Last Thursday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis touted the arrests of 20 people on charges of “voter fraud,” who had voted in 2020 but had been convicted of crimes for which Florida made them ineligible to vote. (Many said they would not have voted had they known they were ineligible.)Many millions more can’t get jobs because employers don’t want to consider people who have broken the law. (Unlike Marc Andreesen, most employers don’t “love seeing people grow from lessons learned.”) Although some states and localities now prohibit employers and landlords from considering conviction or arrest records in their initial screening of applicants, it’s still the case that one big mistake on the part of someone who’s poor

Hello friends,On Saturdays I have a cup of coffee with my colleague Heather Lofthouse and we invite you to join us and chime in with comments. She asks questions that many of you also want to discuss. Heather is the Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action, and my former student. We cover both the highlights and lowlights, and aim to provide a larger context for the news. I’m somewhat on vacation this week but we did our best to record at a distance, cups of joe in hand. (Please forgive the sound quality.)In today’s coffee klatch we cover: * The Inflation Reduction Act victory lap. Will the wind at Biden and the Democrats’ back last? * The anti-democracy GOP. It’s no longer right versus left, it’s democracy versus authoritarianism. What’s the difference between authoritarianism and fascism? What’s the difference between a republic and a democracy? * Nearly half of teenagers say they use the internet “almost constantly.” How are young people consuming information, and what does it mean for our democracy?* How to remain upbeat. It can be easy to despair, but I find hope in the vibrant pro-democracy forces (many led by young people) that are gaining ground in this country.And more Coffee Klatch theme songs: Over 30 of you talented, generous Substack listeners have composed original tunes for us to play for these weekly recordings. What a treat, including during these trying times. Today we feature two more of the melodious results from this “contest.” Thank you, Dwight and Barry.Here is today’s theme song #1 by Dwight Stone:Here is today’s song #2 by Barry Hillman:And here’s an actual shot of us recording:Looking at the poll results this morning, I’m delighted how optimistic so many of you are about the fight we’re in — especially the midterms, some 90 days from now. I’m also feeling better about the possibility of Dems retaining control over the Senate (I’ve even let myself dream that Dems will have enough of a margin that they won’t have to be dependent on Manchin and Sinema.) But I don’t feel nearly as optimistic as most of you do about the House. Redistricting, retirements, voter suppression, and difficulties in getting out the vote (especially of young people) worry me. And then, of course, there are all the worries about state races, and the Trump Republican efforts to take over election machinery. But that’s for another day. Enjoy your Saturday! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

I was born on June 24 in 1946 to Mildred Freshman Reich and Edwin Saul Reich at the Mercy Hospital in Scranton, Pennsylvania.That was ten days after Donald John Trump was born to Fred Trump and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump at the Jamaica hospital in the borough of Queens, New York.It was 12 days before George Walker Bush was born to Barbara Pierce Bush and George Herbert Walker Bush at Grace-New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut.And 56 days before William Jefferson Blythe III, whose name was changed to Bill Clinton, was born to Virginia Cassidy and William Jefferson Blythe, Jr., at the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, Arkansas.I did not become President. But my grandmother, Minnie Reich — with whom I spent a great deal of time as an infant and toddler when Mildred was helping Ed at the store — told me repeatedly that I would be the first Jewish president. (In hindsight, I think she was seeking to reassure herself that despite my being a runt — a full head shorter than others my age — I would one day make her proud.) All of us — little Donald, George W., Billy, and I — were conceived in the weeks following America’s victory over Hitler’s Germany and Hirohito’s Japan, the previous September.Ed Reich had been a medic during the war. Fred Trump had built barracks for Navy personnel. George H.W. had been a Navy pilot. Bill Blythe had repaired ships and tanks. At the end of the war, Ed, Fred, George, and Bill returned to Mildred, Mary Anne, Barbara, and Virginia, respectively — to stoke what would be known as the post-war baby boom. (More babies were born in 1946 than ever before — 3.4 million of us little darlings, 20 percent more than the year before.)We were born into an America that felt proud of its war victories but was also exhausted by war. Surprising almost everyone, the nation emerged economically stronger than it had been before the war. During the war, almost everyone had been put to work and almost every factory run at full capacity — thus ending the Great Depression more effectively than any of the many programs FDR had tried. We were born to men and women whose futures were suddenly filled with more possibility than they had been for almost a decade and a half — for most of their young lives — but who were also shaken by the Depression and war, and by the brutality they had witnessed or heard about or would soon learn of. They had survived an economic cataclysm. They had fought fascism. They saw the results of genocide.Because of the challenges they had faced together, this generation of young Americans felt more connected to other Americans than any generation before them. Black Americans and women were still second-class citizens, to be sure. But the nation emerged from World War II far more certain of the virtues of American democracy and more confident about the American system than it would be seventy-six years hence, and more determined to overcome its faults. The two world wars and Depression decade between had also obliterated the entrenched fortunes of the Gilded Age — thereby leveling the playing field of the American economy and opening the way to the largest middle class the world had ever seen. When I was a toddler, Ed had saved just enough money to rent a store on Lakawanna Avenue in Scranton and buy the only things he had learned how to sell during a job before the war — women’s dresses and blouses. He called it the Beverly Shop, named after his sister. When Donald was a toddler, Fred was a real-estate developer in the Bronx who had acquired a mortgage-servicing company with access to the titles of many properties nearing foreclosure, which he bought cheaply and sold at a profit.When little George was a toddler, George H.W. was in the oil business in Texas. Bill’s father had been a traveling salesman who died in an automobile accident three months before Bill was born. Four years after Bill’s birth, Virginia married Roger Clinton, co-owner of an automobile dealership.So what did Donald, George, Bill, I, and millions of other boomers do for the next 76 years? Did we make America better, more inclusive, more tolerant? Did we strengthen American democracy? What’s the legacy we are leaving to future generations? As you might imagine, I have lots to say about this. More to come. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

The Clean Air Act of 1970 authorized the government to regulate air pollution. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Joe Biden just signed into law, allocates more than $300 billion to energy and climate reform, including $30 billion in subsidies for manufacturers of solar panels and components, wind turbines, inverters, and batteries for electric vehicles and the power grid. Notice the difference?The Inflation Reduction Act is a large and important step toward slowing or reversing climate change. It also illustrates the nation’s shift away from regulating businesses to subsidizing businesses. From 1932 through the late 1970s, the government mainly regulated businesses. This was the era of the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies begun under Franklin D. Roosevelt (the SEC, ICC, FCC, CAB, and so on), culminating in the EPA of 1970.The government still regulates businesses, of course, but the biggest thing the federal government now does with businesses is subsidize them. Consider Joe Biden’s biggest first-term accomplishments:— the CHIPS and Science Act (with $52 billion of subsidies to semiconductor firms, plus another $24 billion in manufacturing tax credits); — the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act ($550 billion of new spending on railroads, broadband, and the electric grid, among other things);— and now the Inflation Reduction Act (including, as I noted, $30 billion specifically for solar and wind manufacturers). This shift from regulation to subsidy isn’t just a central feature of the Biden administration. It has characterized every recent administration. Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” delivered $10 billion of subsidies to Covid vaccine manufacturers. Obama’s Affordable Care Act subsidized the health care and pharmaceutical industries (indirectly, through massive subsidies to the purchasers of health care and pharmaceuticals). And Obama spent some $489 billion bailing out the financial industry (and, notably, never fully restored financial regulations that previous administrations had repealed), as well as GM and Chrysler. Before the 1980s, America would have done all this differently. Instead of subsidizing broadband, semiconductors, energy companies, vaccine manufacturers, health care and pharmaceutical businesses, and the financial sector, we would have regulated them. Corporations would have had to produce public goods (or avoid the public “bads” like, say, pollution or a financial meltdown) as conditions for staying in business. If this regulatory alternative seems far-fetched today, that’s because of how far we’ve come from the regulatory state of the 1930s to the 1970s, to the subsidy state beginning in the 1980s. Why this big shift? Because of the change in the balance of power between large corporations and government. Today it’s politically difficult, if not impossible, for government to demand that corporations (and their shareholders) bear the costs of public goods. For one thing, corporations now have more clout in Washington than any other political player. Spending by corporations on lobbying increased from $1.44 billion in 1999 to $3.77 billion in 2021 and is on track to exceed $4 billion this year, according to OpenSecrets.org, a nonprofit that tracks lobbying spending. Industries that have spent the most on lobbying and campaign contributions are those that have been engaged in the most dramatic shift from regulation to subsidy: the healthcare industry (which, between 1998 and June 2022 has spent $10.8 billion); finance ($10.2 billion); communications and electronics ($8.4 billion); and energy ($6.9 billion). I saw this first-hand. Bill Clinton’s healthcare plan was blocked by the pharmaceutical and health care industries, which would have had to sacrifice some profits. By contrast, Obama got the Affordable Care Act by paying off these industries — all but guaranteeing them larger profits from a massive inflow of newly subsidized customers. A second thing: This tidal wave of corporate money has occurred at the same time large American corporations have globalized, to the point where many are able to play off the United States against other nations — demanding government bribes in return for creating jobs and doing their cutting-edge research in America. The new CHIPS Act is a flagrant example of how powerful and highly-profitable semiconductor manufacturers, such as American-based Intel, can extract billions of dollars in a global shakedown for where they’ll make semiconductor chips.Many of the subsidies now being handed out to corporate America come in the form of tax credits. (Note that in economic terms, a dollar of tax credit is exactly the same as a dollar of government spending.) These credits — plus the rising political power of corporations and their ability to play off countries against each other — explain the dramatic decline in corporate income tax revenue as a share of GDP over the last thirty years. (Not even the 15 percent minimum corporate tax built into the Inflation

Tomorrow, Wyoming Republicans will determine the fate of Representative Liz Cheney — whom Trump has targeted for revenge ever since she criticized him for inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Six days after that attack — when no other Republican in the House or Senate was willing to rebuke Trump — she said on the House floor: “The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”The very next day, on January 13, Cheney joined nine other House Republicans and 222 Democrats in voting to impeach Trump. So far, three of these ten principled Republican lawmakers have lost their primaries. Two have won them. The remaining four are retiring.As vice-chair of the House of Representatives’ January 6 committee investigating the causes of that attack, Cheney has ceaselessly and tirelessly helped lay out the case against Trump during eight public hearings held in June and July, with more to come. In response, Trump has done everything possible to end Cheney’s career. He made sure House Republicans revoked her status as the third-highest-ranking leader of the Republican caucus and that Wyoming Republicans censured her. Her life has been threatened and she has a security detail. But she has not wavered. Trump also selected Cheney’s opponent in the Republican primary, Harriet Hageman — who has rallied behind Trump and amplified his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Hageman has a commanding double-digit lead over Cheney. (According to some reports, Cheney has been reluctant even to venture into Wyoming to campaign, due to death threats.) If Liz Cheney loses her House seat, as seems likely, I hope she doesn’t disappear from public life. Although her views on countless substantive issues are the opposite of mine, I salute her. She has displayed more courage and integrity than almost any other member of her party — indeed, given the pressure she was under, perhaps more than any lawmaker now alive. The role Cheney has played raises larger issues about the meaning of representative democracy. Is it the responsibility of elected officials to represent the views of their constituents or their own principles? How far should they compromise their principles to get and retain power? These questions aren’t limited to Republicans. As the midterms draw closer, some Democratic operatives and pundits argue that Biden and the Democrats must move to the “center” in order to win. But where is the center? Halfway between democracy and fascism? Midpoint between social justice and oligarchy? And if Democrats have to go either of these places in order to win, what’s the point of winning? A personal note. In 2002, I ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts — the first time I’d run for elected office. (I don’t remember ever sleeping. I gained weight because I went to too many goddamn receptions and ate too many meatballs, pretzels, crackers and cheese. I talked so much I had to binge on throat lozenges. I smiled so much my cheeks ached. I got carsick from bouncing around Massachusetts in a cheap camper whose air conditioning continuously went out and whose springs were shot. I had to kiss the derrieres of too many rich liberals in order to finance the campaign.)During my campaign I was asked lots of questions. Should Cardinal Bernard Law resign over allegations that he allowed priests to molest children? I said yes. My campaign manager had a fit. “This is a Catholic state. You’re Jewish. You can’t just say that!” What would I do about Massachusetts’s yawning budget deficit? My answer: Raise capital gains taxes. My campaign manager was apoplectic. “People hate tax increases. The rich especially hate capital gains tax increases!” Did I support gay marriage? I said yes. My campaign manager went ballistic. “You might as well end the campaign right here. You’ve just lost!” On these and many other issues throughout the interminable nine months of that campaign, I gave my unfiltered views. As I repeatedly told my campaign manager, “If I don’t say what I believe, I won’t have any mandate from the public to act on those beliefs once I’m elected.” His retort: “You keep saying what you believe, you won’t get elected.”I was not elected. Five other candidates were seeking the nomination. I came in a respectable second. (This robbed me of the opportunity to take on the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, who rocketed into the state with piles of money. Had I won the Democratic nomination, I would have whipped Romney’s assets.)So, was I wrong to stick to my principles? I call this the Dick Morris paradox. You’d be forgiven if you didn’t remember: In early

On Saturdays I have a cup of coffee with my colleague Heather Lofthouse, and we press record on my laptop so you can listen and chime in with any comments. Heather is the Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action, and my former student. She asks me about the economic and political happenings of the past week (this past one was a doozy). We cover both the highlights and lowlights, and aim to provide a larger context around what we’re all being presented with (or not) in the news. We often address our generational divide. And we always work to avoid being too cynical.In today’s coffee klatch we cover: * The FBI search of Mar-a-Lago.* Democrats’ successes. How much is a subsidy of business?* What does the GOP stand for other than Trump?* Back to school already? * And more Coffee Klatch theme songs: Over 30 of you talented, generous Substack listeners have sent us original tunes for us to play as an intro (and outro!) for these weekly recordings. What a treat, including during these trying times. Today we feature a few more of the results from this “contest.” Special thanks to Syliva B., Anahata I., Corey K. & Deirdre B., and Peter L. Grab a cup and pull up a chair. Thanks for listening. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Notably, the Inflation Reduction Act didn’t attract a single Republican vote in the Senate. (And at least one Democratic senator — Kyrsten Sinema — made sure its tax provisions wouldn’t raise tax rates on rich individuals.) Why? We talk a lot about money in politics, but there’s a huge and growing difference between the big money (campaign donations of $1 million or more), most of it pouring into Republican coffers and small money (individual donations of $200 or less), mainly pouring into the Democrats. (Corporations have been giving to both sides, in roughly equal measure.)The significance of this difference is growing. With the midterms elections looming, the gap between the two sources is larger than ever. Democrats are far outpacing Republicans in small-dollar donations. The most recent reports (through June 30) show, for example, that: — In Georgia, incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock has raised $14 million in small donations; Republican senate candidate Herschel Walker has raised only about $8 million in small donations. — In Florida, Val Demings, the Democratic challenger to Senator Marco Rubio, has raised more than $24 million in small donations; Rubio himself has reported $12.7 million in small donations. — In Arizona, Democratic Senator Mark Kelly's re-election campaign has raised nearly $23 million from small-dollar donors. His GOP challenger, Blake Masters, less than $2 million from small donors. But the GOP’s big money donors are making up the difference.— Billionaire Peter Thiel has so far poured over $25 million into the races of Blake Masters in Arizona and J.D. Vance in Ohio. — Kenneth C. Griffin, the CEO of giant hedge fund Citadel, is bankrolling Republican super PACs to the tune of nearly $50 million. — Stephen A. Schwarzman, chairman of giant hedge fund Blackstone, has so far contributed a combined $20 million to the main House and Senate Republican super PAC. — Banking heir Timothy Mellon (descendant of the robber baron Andrew Mellon) has so far contributed $10 million to the main House GOP super PAC.— Ditto billionaire Patrick R. Ryan. — Miriam Adelson (whose husband, Sheldon Adelson, was one of the GOP’s most generous contributors until his death last year) just made her first $5 million donation. The list goes on. — And, of course, Rupert Murdoch, Charles Koch, et al. Small donors are ramping up their giving to Democrats because they’re aware of how nuts the Republican Party has become on issues ranging from abortion to democracy. Trump has pulled into the GOP white supremacists, Christian nationalists, QAnon paranoids, xenophobic cultists, antisemites, misogynists, and rightwing militias. Plus a StarWars cantina of grifters, crackpots, and thugs who — as the January 6 attack showed — pose a clear and present danger to American democracy. Big donors are ramping up their giving to Republicans because they now have so much money that any Democratic-led tax increase on them (or Republican-led tax cut for them) will invariably have large financial consequences. The Inflation Reduction Act reveals just how much damage Democrats could do to the bottom lines of the rich.Many big donor billionaires (e.g., Peter Thiel) are trying to justify their donations as “libertarian,” but they know damn well the current Republican Party has nothing to do with personal freedom. It’s busy intruding on reproductive rights, pushing book bans in libraries and classrooms, barring young transgender people from playing on certain sports teams or using certain bathrooms, refusing to allow teachers to talk about aspects of American history they don’t want young people to know, and actively suppressing votes. Liberty my foot. No, the billionaires aren’t libertarian. They want only one thing: more tax cuts.The extraordinary growth of small donors to Democrats is all about justifiable fears of what Republicans will do with more power. The growth in big dollars to Republicans is all about greed. What do you think? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Senator Joe Manchin has been Congress’s largest recipient of money from natural gas pipeline companies. He just reciprocated by gaining Senate support for the Mountain Valley pipeline in West Virginia and expedited approval for pipelines nationwide. Senator Krysten Sinema is among Congress’s largest recipients of money from the private-equity industry. She just reciprocated by preserving private-equity’s tax loophole in the Inflation Reduction Act. We almost take for granted big corporate money in American politics. But it started with the Powell memo. In 1971, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked Lewis Powell, then an attorney in Richmond, Virginia (and future Supreme Court justice) to report on the political activities of the Left. Richard Nixon was still president, but the Chamber (along with some prominent Republicans like Powell) worried about the Left’s effects on “free enterprise.” Powell’s memo — distributed widely to Chamber members — argued that the American economic system was “under broad attack” from consumer, labor, and environmental groups. In reality, these groups were doing nothing more than enforcing the implicit social contract that had emerged at the end of World War II — ensuring that corporations were responsive to all their stakeholders, not just their shareholders but also their workers, their consumers, and the environment on which everyone depends. But Powell and the Chamber saw it differently. Powell urged businesses to mobilize for political combat.Business must learn the lesson . . . that political power is necessary; that such power must be assiduously cultivated; and that when necessary, it must be used aggressively and with determination—without embarrassment and without the reluctance which has been so characteristic of American business.He stressed that the critical ingredients for success were organization and funding. Strength lies in … the scale of financing available only through joint effort, and in the political power available only through united action and national organizations.On August 23, 1971, the Chamber distributed Powell’s memo to leading CEOs, large businesses, and trade associations. It had exactly the impact the Chamber sought — galvanizing corporate American into action and releasing a tidal wave of corporate money into American politics. An entire corporate-political industry was born — including tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists, lawyers, political operatives, and public relations flaks. Within a few decades, big corporations would become the largest political force in Washington and most state capitals. Washington went from being a rather sleepy if not seedy town to the glittering center of corporate America — replete with elegant office buildings, fancy restaurants, pricy bistros, five-star hotels, conference centers, beautiful townhouses, and a booming real estate market that pushed Washington’s poor out to the margins of the district and made two of Washington’s surrounding counties among the wealthiest in the nation. I saw it and lived it. In 1976, I began working at the Federal Trade Commission. Jimmy Carter had appointed consumer advocates to some regulatory positions (several of them influenced by Ralph Nader). My boss at the FTC was Michael Pertschuk, an energetic and charismatic chairman. Joan Claybrook chaired the National Highway Traffic Safety Commission. Other Naderites were spread throughout the Carter administration. All were ready to battle big corporations that for years had been deluding or injuring consumers. Yet almost everything we initiated at the FTC, and just about everything undertaken by these activists elsewhere in the administration, was met by unexpectedly fierce political resistance from Congress. At one point, when the FTC began examining advertising directed at children, Congress stopped funding the FTC altogether, shutting it down for weeks. I was dumbfounded. What had happened? In two words, the Powell memo. The number of corporations with public affairs offices in Washington had ballooned from one hundred in 1968 to over five hundred by the time I joined the FTC in 1976. In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in the nation’s capital. By 1982, nearly 2,500 had them. The number of corporate Political Action Committees mushroomed from under three hundred in 1976 to over 1,200 by 1980. Between 1974 and 1980, the Chamber of Commerce doubled its membership. (And remember, this was still thirty years before the Supreme Court’s infamous Citizen’s United decision.) It didn’t matter whether a Democrat or Republican occupied the White House. Even after George H.W. Bush became president, the corporate-political industry continued to balloon. By the 1990s, when I was secretary of labor, corporations employed some 61,000 people to lobby for them, including registered lobbyists and lawyers. That came to more than 100 lobbyists for each member of Congress. Corporate money also supported platoons of lawyers who represe

Republican candidates for Senate, House and governorships in the upcoming midterms have been filling the airwaves today with baseless assertions that the FBI search of Mar-a-lago shows the politicization of the Justice Department and undermines the rule of law. Republicans ranging from third-ranking House Republican Elise Stefanik to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy have issued statements brimming with outrage and accusation. Last night, the RNC sent out a fundraising text: “THIS IS NOT A DRILL: UNPRECEDENTED move Biden’s FBI RAIDS Pres. Trump’s home. Time to take back Congress.”Rubbish. There’s no evidence that the FBI search was motivated by anything other than concerns (and, under a court order, probable cause) that Trump made off with documents rightfully belonging to the United States. That’s a criminal offense. If anyone has been undermining the rule of law, it’s Trump. Recall that Trump himself appointed the current director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, after firing former director James Comey for investigating the ties of Trump’s 2016 campaign to Russia. But any allegation of Trump wrongdoing is automatically treated by the Trump Republican base as a loyalty test — triggering demands that Republican lawmakers and GOP hopefuls defend Trump and attack Democrats for going after him. This is putting Republican candidates in a terrible bind. As Biden and the Democrats take victory laps for legislation they’ve been passing – the CHIPs and Science Act, which President Biden today signed into law, and, very soon, the Inflation Reduction Act – the Republican Party wallows in Trumpist grievance and accusation. GOP candidates know that their best chance of prevailing in November with independent voters depends on distancing themselves from Trump and focusing on hot-button issues like inflation, crime, and immigration. But today’s reaction to the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search shows how difficult that will be. September and October are likely to be all about Trump, and Republican candidates will have to go to the mat for him. Consider: The January 6 committee will resume its hearings in early September. Those hearings will almost certainly provide more evidence of Trump’s attempted coup of 2020. The Justice Department’s investigation into Trump’s role in pushing fake electors and in removing documents from the White House appears to be heating up. The D.C. Court of Appeals has just cleared the way for the House Ways and Means Committee to obtain Trump’s long-hidden tax returns.Prosecutors in Georgia continue their investigation into Trump’s demand that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger "find" the votes Trump needed to win an election that three separate courts confirmed he lost. Rudy Giuliani has just been ordered to testify before the grand jury in that case. Trump himself will likely declare his candidacy for president in September or October. All of which means Republican candidates will be under increasing pressure from Trump’s base to defend Trump, to rage against his accusers, and to re-litigate the 2020 election – tasks that will be increasingly difficult as further evidence emerges of Trump’s criminality.Meanwhile, Democrats will be able to boast about what they’ve done for the American people — reduce drug prices, cut the costs of healthcare, clean the environment, maintain America’s competitive edge, and modernize the nation’s roads, bridges, and water and sewage systems. As Joe Biden put it today when he signed into law the CHIPs and Science Act, America has met the moment: “a moment when we bet on ourselves, believed in ourselves and recaptured the story, the spirit and the soul of this nation.”Which do you think will be the more attractive message to the independent voters who will largely determine the outcome of the midterms — defending Trump or “recapturing the can-do spirit” of America? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

The Labor Department reported Friday that U.S. employers added 528,000 jobs in July, more than twice the number analysts had expected. And the rate of unemployment dipped to just 3.5 percent. Undeniably good news.But this good news also means the Federal Reserve will almost certainly keep raising interest rates, believing the job market is now too “tight.” This is not good news.The Fed is wrong: The job market is not too tight. In fact, the share of Americans working or actively looking for work fell in July to its lowest level of the year — presumably because fewer people believe it worthwhile to work. This is because of (1) the rising costs (and hassles) of childcare and eldercare, and (2) the continuing drop in inflation-adjusted wages. Wages are rising at an annual rate of 5.2 percent but inflation is rising at over 9 percent. Which means that, in terms of real purchasing power, the pay of most workers continues to plummet.You’d think that the stall in the size of the workforce and the decline in inflation-adjusted wages might cause the Fed to hit the pause button on further interest-rate increases. But the Fed is still wedded to the anachronistic view that a “tight” jobs market is pushing prices upward. Rubbish. The real inflationary culprits are global supply constraints and big corporations with the power to raise prices. So beware. The Fed is likely to continue to raise interest rates when it meets in September. This means middle and lower-income Americans will be hit with two simultaneous shocks: not just shrinking paychecks they’re now enduring, but also a slowing economy in which they are the first to lose hours and jobs.Lower-income workers have little room reduce their spending because a large portion of their family budgets already goes to the necessities of food and housing — both of whose prices are soaring. Many are coping by taking on more credit card debt, which is also becoming more expensive as the Fed raises interest rates. So don’t be misled by the headlines. Yes, overall consumer spending is still going gangbusters. But most of it is coming from the upper middle class. The top 40 percent of the income distribution now accounts for around 60 percent of spending; the bottom 40 percent, about 22 percent. As the Fed slows the economy, the bottom 40 percent are getting squeezed even more. Yes, job growth is booming as well. But the sheer number of jobs is not a sufficient measure of the strength of the economy, especially when the real wages attached to so many of them are dropping. It is no great feat to create an abundance of low-wage jobs. The Fed is poised to make all this worse for lower-income Americans. Inequality in America is already horrific. Why worsen it? In the first three decades after World War II, America produced the largest middle class the world had ever seen. Most jobs continued to pay more and more. Almost all Americans were on an upward escalator. But for the last three decades, the middle class has been shrinking, and only the classes surrounding them have been growing — the “have-mores” and the “have-lesses.” The have-lesses — most of whom don’t have college degrees and are paid in hourly wages and — have been in a slow-motion recession. If they’re white and without college degrees, they’ve been losing ground fastest of all. Adjusted for inflation, their pay and benefits today are lower than they were in 1990. They also have less job security. In 2016, they formed the core of Trump’s base, and are still among his most ardent supporters. The biggest threat to our economy and society is no longer inflation or recession, per se. The biggest threat is a large and growing class of have-lesses — slammed by the double-whammy of a slowing economy and declining real wages. The Fed must not harm them further by taming inflation on their backs. Please consider a paid or gift subscription to help sustain this newsletter. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

The original justification for elite higher education in the United States was to train the future leaders of American democracy. As Charles W. Eliot, who became president of Harvard in 1869, noted, Harvard existed to inculcate the ideals of “service and stewardship.”Since then, Harvard has produced eight US presidents; Yale, five. (Stanford can boast Herbert Hoover, if it feels compelled to do so.)Elite universities have also produced a disproportionate number of senators and representatives from both parties. In fact, Republicans elected to the Senate over the last decade are more likely than their Democratic counterparts to have attended Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or Stanford.So how to explain Elise Stefanik, Harvard class of 2006, now the third-ranking House Republican, who recently called the January 6 hearings a “partisan witch hunt,” voted to invalidate the 2020 election, and has repeated Trump’s Big Lie of election fraud?Or Josh Hawley, Stanford class of 2002 and Yale Law class of 2006, now senator from Missouri, who in December 2020 became the first US senator to announce plans to object to the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, then led Senate efforts to overturn the Electoral College vote count, and fist-bumped the rioters on January 6?Or Ted Cruz, Princeton class of 1992 and Harvard Law class of 1995, now senator from Texas, who in late 2020 joined in John Eastman’s and Trump’s plot to object to the election results in six swing states and delay accepting the Electoral College results on January 6, potentially enabling Republican state legislatures to overturn them?And how to explain a new crop of Republican senate candidates?JD Vance, Yale Law class of 2013, now Republican candidate for the Senate from Ohio, has claimed that there “were certainly people voting illegally on a large-scale basis” in the 2020 election. When asked earlier this year if the 2020 election was “stolen,” he said, “Yeah, I do.”Blake Masters, Stanford class of 2008 and Stanford Law class of 2012, now the Republican candidate for the Senate from Arizona, has declared in campaign ads that “Trump won.” He promotes rightwing “replacement theory” – that Democrats favor illegal immigration “so that someday they can ‘amnesty’ these people and make them voters who they expect to vote Democrat.”These alumni of America’s finest institutions of higher education haven’t adhered to their alma maters’ ideals of service and stewardship of American democracy. In fact, they’re actively wrecking American democracy.Nor can these elite graduates claim they don’t know any better. Most third-graders can distinguish a lie from the truth.No, these scions of the most prestigious halls of American academe are knowingly and intentionally abetting the most dangerous attack on American democracy since the Civil War.Whatever did they learn from their rarified education? Obviously, zilch.The core of a good liberal arts education is ethics. The central question is the meaning of a good society. This has been the case since the eighteenth century, when most of America’s prestigious institutions of higher education were founded.Adam Smith, the progenitor of modern economics, didn’t call his field economics. He called it “moral philosophy,” and thought his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments more important than his The Wealth of Nations.Edmund Burke – Irish statesman and philosopher, and godfather of modern conservatism – didn’t advise that people in public life seek power above all else. He argued that they owe the public their “judgment and conscience.”There is no single answer to the meaning of a good society, of course. It is the pursuit of it that draws on one’s judgment and conscience. This is why higher education has advanced the role of reason in human affairs and stood for the Enlightenment values of democracy and the rule of law.But this new crop of Republican pretenders hasn’t learned anything of the kind. They are practitioners of a much earlier and more cynical set of ideas: that might makes right, that the purpose of human endeavor is to gain power, and that ambition and treachery trump (excuse the verb) all other values.I can’t help wondering: What do they see when they look into the mirror each morning? And what do they tell themselves after a day of deceit?Any of them who tries to justify the despicable means they are employing by telling themselves they can do more good by gaining or keeping power is under a dangerous illusion. As the great civil rights leader Bayard Rustin once said, “If we desire a society that is democratic, then democracy must become a means as well as an end.”These products of the best education America has to offer are betraying the core values of America.They deserve only shame. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Each Saturday I grab coffee with my colleague Heather Lofthouse, and we turn on my laptop mic so you can listen in and then provide your two cents in the comments. Heather is the Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action, and my former student. She asks me questions about the economic and political happenings of the past week. We cover both the highlights and lowlights, and aim to provide a larger context around what we’re all being presented with (or not!) in the news. She’s Gen X and I’m, um, older than that; we often address our generational divide. Sometimes we veer off into stories about family or what shows we’re watching, but we try to stay on task. And we always work to avoid being too cynical. Like you, I imagine, I find conversations with others — on the phone, in person, or even just online typing back and forth asynchronously — to be an important way of processing information, including during trying times. In today’s coffee klatch we cover: * Friday’s jobs report: The large number of jobs added is great, but what will the Fed do with this data?* Sinema’s last stand: Why exactly was she holding out on signing off on the Inflation Reduction Act?* The good people of Kansas: Kansans beat back abortion restrictions at the ballot box on Tuesday. What might this mean for democracy, and the midterms?* The awful Alex Jones: Holy karma, Batman. What will be made of his years of unintentionally shared text messages? And what is the role of defamation lawsuits in the (dis)information age?* A Coffee Klatch theme song: Last week we asked for anyone who might be interested and willing to send in a non-copyrighted tune for us to use as an intro for these weekly recordings. You lovely, talented listeners came through in spades! We’ve been overwhelmed with your outpouring of original songs and kind emails. Thank you to all of you who took the time to compose music for this community to hear. Today we feature some early results from this “contest.”Please pull up a chair. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Yesterday, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban addressed a crowd of thousands of American admirers in Dallas, Texas, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Orban described Hungary and America as “twin fronts” in a struggle against globalists, progressives, communists, and “fake news.”To fully comprehend Orban’s influence on the Trump Republican Party, you need to understand the Orban has stripped Hungary of its democratic institutions and demonized immigrants. But that’s not all. He has also embraced a form of eugenics, in which he claims that the future of the West is threatened by the “racial mixing” of white Christian Europeans with others. On July 23, Orban put it bluntly in a speech at the 31st Bálványos Summer Free University and Student Camp:The internationalist left employs a feint, an ideological ruse: the claim – their claim – that Europe by its very nature is populated by peoples of mixed race. … [We] do not want to become peoples of mixed-race. This is why we fought at Nándorfehérvár/Belgrade, this is why we stopped the Turks at Vienna, and – if I am not mistaken – this is why, in still older times – the French stopped the Arabs at Poitiers.Today the situation is that Islamic civilization, which is constantly moving towards Europe, has realized – precisely because of the traditions of Belgrade/Nándorfehérvár – that the route through Hungary is an unsuitable one along which to send its people up into Europe. This is why Poitiers has been replayed; now the incursion’s origins are not in the East, but in the South, from where they are occupying and flooding the West. Orban’s words and phrases were familiar to anyone who lived through the Nazi holocaust. After the speech, one of Orban’s closest advisers resigned, calling it “pure Nazi.” Prominent American Republicans have rushed to Orban’s defense. On Wednesday, when Orban stopped off at Trump’s (Saudi-sponsored) golf tournament on the way to the CPAC conference, Trump called him a “friend,” adding “few people know as much about what is going on in the world today.” That evening, Tucker Carlson smirked on his Fox television show, “So Viktor Orban is now a Nazi because he wants national borders?” (Last year, Carlson did a special broadcast from Budapest during which he praised Orban’s Hungary as a model for America.) And, of course, Orban gave yesterday’s keynote at CPAC. Eugenics was popular at the turn of the last century. Developed largely by Sir Francis Galton — supposedly as a method to improve the human race — it called for arranging reproduction within the human population to increase characteristics regarded as desirable and minimize the undesirable. After the adoption of eugenics by the Nazis to justify their treatment of Jews, disabled people, and other minority groups, eugenics was discredited as unscientific and racially motivated. But eugenics has been reborn under another guise — that of white Christian nationalism. It is now presented as the scourge of “racial mixing” between white Christians of European descent, and others. It is a small leap from the invasions of Europe by Turks and Arabs centuries ago to the present generation of immigrants swarming over borders and “invading” white Christian nations. In Republican primary races this year, few issues have come up more frequently in TV ads than immigration — all featuring the word “invasion.” It’s pure Orban. "We're gonna end this invasion," says Blake Masters, the Republican candidate for the Senate from Arizona, in one ad. “Invasion” is featured in ads for Gov. Brian Kemp in Georgia, Senator Rick Scott in Florida, and Kari Lake (now in a close race in the Republican primary for governor in Arizona). And, of course, for the past six years Trump has warned that America is being “invaded” by immigrants.The word “invasion” has a long history among white nationalists. It has been widely used by supporters of the "replacement theory" — the baseless conspiracy theory that Jews or elites are intentionally replacing white Americans with immigrants and people of color. Both Blake Masters and J.D. Vance, the Republican candidate for the Senate from Ohio (each the beneficiary of $15 million in campaign funding from far-right billionaire Peter Thiel and of a Trump endorsement) claim that Democrats are deliberately trying to “import” immigrants in an attempt to “replace Americans who were born here.”The racist tropes of “invasion” and “replacement” are intended to stoke fear and drive votes. They also fuel violence. Three years ago, a white gunman opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, killing 23 people, most of them Latino. The suspect was motivated by what he called a "Hispanic invasion" of people coming to the U.S. illegally. The man suspected of killing 10 Black people earlier this year in Buffalo was also motivated by the replacement theory.The bogus science of eugenics, popular at the turn of the last century but since disgraced and forgotten, has now morphed into white Ch

Today, I want to talk about Kansas. Not about its corn as high as an elephant’s eye, nor about Dorothy and Toto trying to find their way home, but about Kansas as the geographic and Republican center of America, Kansas as the vintage Norman Rockwell core of America, Kansas as what the Republican Party was before being hijacked by Newt Gingrich and then mugged by a New York real estate con artist. I’m moved to do so because on Tuesday the good people of Kansas voted against a ballot measure that would have stripped from their state constitution a woman’s right to choose, and they did it by a whopping 18-point margin.For decades, the Republican Party has exploited social fissures in America – from immigration to race – as its means of deflecting attention from the immutable fact that most Americans, especially those without college degrees and depending on an hourly wage, have been on a long downward escalator, and an ever-larger portion of the economic gains have been going to the top. Republicans have had no economic response to this except to promote the gonzo fiction that tax cuts for the rich somehow trickle down.For much of this time, Democrats have unwittingly aided this Republican strategy by eschewing the populist-progressive economic policies that attracted downwardly mobile voters in the 1930s and 1940s, and before that, in the 1880s and 1890s. Instead, modern Democrats have substituted a neoliberal stew of free trade, privatization, and deregulation (until big banks or corporations need to be bailed out). The stew has helped corporate Democrats to prosper but, as I’ve argued elsewhere, has left the working class in the dust.But something has now happened that few predicted. The Republicans’ culture war has come back to bite the Republicans in their incidentals. The GOP has ventured into territory that even Kansans apparently decided was a dangerous overreach. A woman’s right to choose tipped the scales but the scales were already tipping as the GOP began to encroach on many aspects of private life: contraception, same-sex marriage, transgender bathroom rights, books, and religion.Kansans, like most Americans, know the difference between what should be left to personal choice and what should be public. But in its ardor to fuel the culture war, the GOP forgot.In addition, prairie populism lies just under the surface of the Kansas topsoil, as it does in much of the Midwest. Over the last several decades the giant corporations that supply Kansans with seed and fertilizer, and that turn the livestock and crops Kansans produce into food products, have grown much larger and more powerful. They are now among America’s biggest monopolies, siphoning off money from farmers as well as from consumers. If there’s one thing Kansans dislike as much as government intruding on their freedom, it’s big predatory corporations intruding on their meager profit.Perhaps Kansas, as well as much of the rest of America, is ready for a dose of economic populism. If so, the Democrats’ pending “Inflation Reduction Act” – with its healthcare subsidies, declining pharmaceutical costs, and boosts for solar and wind power -- may prove more popular in the hinterlands than anyone expected. As William Allen White, the famed progressive editor of the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette in the first half of the twentieth century, once wrote: Democracy is an experiment, and the right of the majority to rule is no more inherent than the right of the minority to rule; and unless the majority represents sane, righteous, unselfish public sentiment, it has no inherent right. (White also wrote: “My advice to the women of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias.”) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Defamation law may turn out to be America’s most important weapon against rightwing media lies.On Friday, Infowars star Alex Jones’ parent media company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy in the midst of a defamation damages trial underway in Austin, Texas. Jones, you may recall, had portrayed the Sandy Hook school shooting massacre as a hoax involving actors, aimed at increasing gun control. Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse Lewis, was among the 20 children and six educators killed, have sued Jones and his media company for $150 million. Courts in Texas and Connecticut have already found Jones liable for defamation.To win a defamation lawsuit, a plaintiff must show four things: the defendant made a false statement purporting to be fact; the statement was published or communicated; the defendant failed to exercise reasonable care or, worse, knew the statement was incorrect and hurtful but made it anyway; and the plaintiff suffered harm as a result.By these criteria, it’s no wonder Jones will soon be paying out a fortune in damages. Declaring bankruptcy won’t save him. Defamation litigation is slow and expensive and, like all litigation, it enriches lawyers. It can also be abused. Anyone remember what happened to Gawker after its tech blog published a post under the headline, “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people”? Billionaire Thiel quietly bankrolled Hulk Hogan, the professional wrestler, to sue Gawker for defaming Hogan in a totally unrelated story — and Hogan’s nine-figure defamation award bankrupted Gawker Media.But at a time when social media can’t be trusted to police itself against weaponized lies, and when much of the public doesn’t trust government to regulate social media, defamation lawsuits may be the best we can hope for.One America News (OAN), a right-wing media organization that pushed conspiracy theories about the election, is facing so many defamation lawsuits from those injured by the network’s lies that its future is now in doubt.Five years ago, Trump was ecstatic about OAN’s flattering coverage of him. By the summer of 2020 -- dissatisfied with what he considered insufficient gushing by Fox News – Trump was urging his followers to switch to OAN and Newsmax, calling them “much better” than Fox. He did the same after the election, when OAN’s journalists were more willing than many Fox correspondents to continue pushing Trump’s Big Lie. Last December, Ruby Freeman and Wandrea Moss, Georgia election workers, sued OAN hosts and guests, including Rudy Giuliani, for baselessly accusing them of committing election fraud and engaging in a criminal conspiracy. Freeman and Moss said OAN’s lies subjected them to an onslaught of harassment and racist threats, leading one of them to leave her home for months at the recommendation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. OAN ultimately settled the case for an undisclosed sum. Apparently as part of the settlement agreement, OAN admitted on air that Freeman and Miss “did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct.”Meanwhile, Dominion Voting Systems, which provided voting machines to 28 states in the 2020 election, has accused OAN of defaming the company and its products by airing false reports that its machines switched votes from Donald Trump to President Biden, thereby hurting its business and putting its employees in danger. (One of those employees, Eric Coomer, received death threats after OAN named him in a report as an alleged collaborator of the far-left movement, antifa. Coomer is now suing OAN, too.) The litigation has not gone well for OAN. Judges have rejected its motions to dismiss the case. In one ruling, a judge concluded that OAN acted “maliciously and consciously” in perpetuating falsehoods about Dominion, and that its chief White House correspondent, Chanel Rion, failed to exercise even minimal journalistic standards.In April, OAN was dropped by AT&T’s DirecTV, which has about 15 million subscribers. Verizon just announced it would stop carrying OAN on its Fios television service. OAN will soon be available to no more than a few hundred thousand people.Dominion isn’t stopping with OAN. It’s seeking a total of $1.6 billion in damages extending to Newsmax as well as to Fox News and Fox News’s parent, the News Corp. And it’s seeking an additional $1.3 billion in damages from each of Trump’s most whacko conspirators — Sydney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.As to the News Corp, Dominion alleges that Rupert Murdoch and his son, Lachlan, acted with “actual malice” because they knew that the lie Fox News was touting was false.Defamation lawsuits aren’t sure things, and they pose potential threats to the free press. But if the press is alert to errors and corrects them quickly, defamation shouldn’t be a problem.Sarah Palin recently lost her defamation suit against The New York Times, in which she alleged that the Times defamed her when it erroneously linked her campaign rhetoric to a mass s

TONIGHT I’m talking with Stephanie Ruhle, on MSNBC’s 11th Hour, about the biggest difference between Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — the so-called “carried interest loophole” that rewards big bucks to private equity managers. This week, the spotlight once again will be on Manchin and Sinema (dubbed “Manchinema” by the Washington press corps as the two blocked much of Biden’s agenda) because it’s the Democrats’ last chance for a large package — Manchin has agreed to $790 billion — on the climate and healthcare, financed by a tax increase on the rich and big corporations. But will Sinema go along?It has been said that the word “politics” is derived from the Latin “poli,” meaning “many,” and “tics,” small blood-sucking insects. I don’t hold such a cynical view. But I do know, from fifty year’s experience in and around Washington, that most of the people who serve in our nation’s capital have very, very large — shall we say? — ego’s. Yesterday, Manchin made the rounds of every Sunday talk show — doing what’s known as a “full Ginsburg” (named after William Ginsburg, the lawyer for Monica Lewinsky, who first appeared on all five Sunday morning talk shows on February 1, 1998). Record-keepers note that Manchin is only the 31st newsmaker to have accomplished this feat, but purists dispute his accomplishment because Manchin appeared remotely. Manchin treated it as a victory lap. He took credit for his newly-named “Inflation Reduction Act” (he refused to allow it to be named “Build Back Better” because he’s still smarting over what he viewed as the Biden administration’s criticism of him for blocking the original BBB). One interesting sidebar: When Manchin was asked by “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd whether he wanted Democrats to keep control of the House and Senate after the midterms, Manchin declined to answer. (Does he want to hold out the possibility of becoming a Republican kingmaker if the Dems lose?) Tellingly, Manchin wouldn’t even use the pronoun “we” when talking about the Democrats. I’ve always made it a point to listen to the pronouns politicians use. The use of pronouns tells you a lot about where a politician’s loyalties lie. Manchin almost never uses “we” when he refers to Democrats. Sometimes, it’s “they.” When Trump was president, he used “we” to refer to the people who voted for him, and “they” for everyone else. Which brings me to Kristyn Sinema — who uses the pronoun “I” perhaps more frequently than any other contemporary politician. (“I’m always surprised when people say, ‘Oh, she’s an enigma,’” said Sinema in an interview with the Washington Post. “I’m, like, not at all, actually. I’m very straightforward about what I believe in and why I’m doing what I do.”)“What good would politics be,” Thomas Mann wrote in The Magic Mountain, “if it didn't give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises?” Sinema seems to relish that opportunity. Although not up for reelection until 2024, she is one of the senate’s major recipients of Wall Street cash (the finance industry has donated $2.2 million to her since she took office in 2017). She has obliged by, among other things, refusing to close the so-called “carried interest” tax loophole that mostly benefits private-equity investors and hedge fund managers by treating their pay as capital gains (at a tax rate of 20 percent) rather than as ordinary income (36 percent) — even though their pay is ordinary income, since they risk none of their own capital. By contrast, Manchin wants to close the loophole — or nearly so. (Manchin’s bill would lengthen the amount of time private-equity and hedge-fund managers must hold their investments to qualify them for capital gains.) "The only thing I was adamant about was the carried interest," he told reporters last Thursday. Manchin’s aversion to the loophole isn’t new. Last year he joined two other Senate Democrats in sponsoring a bill to close it. Closing the carried-interest loophole is the only tax increase on rich individuals in Manchin’s compromise bill. The rest of the tax hikes are on corporations. The carried-interest loophole is a blatant giveaway to the super-rich. It has no redeeming social value. Even Trump promised to eliminate it. So did Barack Obama. So has Joe Biden. Yet it’s still there, in the tax code. Why? Because lobbyists for the private-equity and hedge fund industries care about little else, and pour lots of money into the campaigns of both Democratic and Republican members of Congress to maintain it. (Democratic House Ways and Means Committee Chair Richard Neal is a powerful supporter of the loophole. I don’t believe it a coincidence that the private equity industry is one of Neal’s biggest donors.)Sinema's office says she’s still reviewing Manchin’s bill. How long will Democrats have to wait until she breaks her silence on it? If there’s one thing Sinema loves more than Wall Street dollars, it’s national media attention. So it could be a while. Please consider a paid or gift subscription

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action and my former student), discussing the past week: The Fed’s decision to raise interest rates yet again — wrong medicine? Recession — should we be worried? Joe Manchin’s change of heart — will it stick? Merrick Garland’s inevitable decision of whether to prosecute Trump — by when? Plus a special request from Heather — if you're willing to take a stab at composing a very short theme song for this klatch please send it to Heather and me at: [email protected] pull up a chair. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Has Joe Manchin really, finally seen the light? Word is that President (sorry) Senator Manchin has agreed to roughly $433 billion in new spending, much of it focused on lowering energy costs, increasing clean energy production, and reducing carbon emissions.Part of the Manchin-approved deal would raise $739 billion in taxes over the next decade — including a new minimum tax on corporations and additional funding to help the Internal Revenue Service pursue tax cheats. 1. A few grounds for skepticismIf this deal happens, great. But by my count this is the third time Manchin has agreed to support something Democrats desperately want, only to reverse himself a bit later. There’s also the inconvenient reality of the ever-elusive, often bizarre Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, who has made opposition to tax increases on the wealthy one of the cornerstones of her short, regressive time in the Senate. (Remember, Dems need 50 votes.)Putting all the blame on Manchin and Sinema for stopping Dems from raising taxes on big corporations and the wealthy lets too many other Democratic lawmakers off the hook.Democratic senators and representatives from New York, New Jersey, and California have insisted that any tax bill must raise or eliminate the $10,000 cap on the state and local tax deduction, which has hit higher-income taxpayers in these states. (It was the only slightly progressive feature of the Trump tax cut, thrown in to penalize these anti-Trump jurisdictions.) Will they go along with the Manchin-supported tax increase? Many Democratic lawmakers cried foul recently when Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee considered imposing Social Security payroll taxes on wages and self-employment earnings above $400,000, to help fortify Social Security. Will they go along with the Manchin tax increase? Meanwhile, Democrats such as Senator Jon Tester of Montana blocked Biden’s plan to tax unrealized capital gains at death, expressing concerns about what it would mean for family-owned farms and businesses. Translated: They’ve been bought by Big Ag. Will Big Ag go along with the Manchin tax increase? House Democrats shot down a plan to require banks to report annual account flows to the Internal Revenue Service, saying it was too intrusive. Why should Democrats object to giving the IRS the data it needs to collect taxes that are due? Will they go along with the Manchin tax increase, some of whose revenue will beef up IRS enforcement? The record isn’t encouraging. Democrats have so far failed to increase taxes on big corporations or the wealthy, even though a Democratic president now occupies the White House and Democrats control both houses of Congress. 2. The Manchin-approved tax is still small potatoesEven if the Manchin-approved $739 billion tax increase over ten years gets enacted, it would still be small potatoes considering that large corporations have been enjoying record profits (even with the current economic turmoil, they’re sufficiently flush to be buying back their own stock at near-record levels); that the ratio between the pay of CEOs in large corporations and the pay of average workers has never been as large as it is today; and that the richest Americans have by now accumulated the largest share of the nation’s wealth since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century. And it’s small potatoes considering that tax revenue collected from corporations is at a record low as a share of the economy, and that the super-rich are paying a lower effective tax rate than the average tax rate paid by workers in the bottom half of the income distribution.3. What’s behind the Democrat’s failure to raise taxes so far?Part of the Democrat’s problem is that the party has become such a big tent that it’s no longer a tent at all. It’s more like a leaky tarp — and what’s been leaking in is big money. As I’ve noted here, the Democratic base has steadily shifted to include more high-income suburban voters while drifting away from its working class roots. So when it comes to raising taxes on the rich, Democrats increasingly find themselves facing their own most active constituents. Another part of the Democrat’s dilemma is their dependence on big corporations and the wealthy to fund their political campaigns. Many big American corporations are equal-opportunity bribers whose executives and PACs give generously to both parties. Meanwhile, rich liberals who fund Democrats tend to be almost as unwilling to part with their money as the rich conservatives who fund Republicans. The result is a reluctance among legislators, Democrats almost as much as Republicans, to bite the hands that feed them. There is also the inconvenient fact that nearly half of retiring Democratic lawmakers are ending up as lobbyists for big corporations and the wealthy, as are Republican lawmakers. (It’s not that they’re greedier than former generations of retired lawmakers; it’s that lobbying has become far more lucrative.) And what do Washington lobbyists

Today, Donald Trump returns to Washington — his first visit since leaving in disgrace after January 6 — to deliver the keynote address for the America First Policy Institute’s “America First Agenda Summit.”The purpose of this confab is to give Trump some policy creds as he prepares to announce a 2024 run for re-election. Brooke Rollins, one of the organizers of the Institute and the Summit (who was domestic policy adviser in Trump’s White House) says “having worked next to him for almost three years in the White House, a lot of people didn’t give him enough credit for his policy vision.”Sane people don’t give Trump credit for having a policy vision at all. In the annals of political oxymorons, a “Trump policy vision” must rank very high. To have a policy vision, it is first necessary to have some capacity for thinking about policy. Trump never did and never will. To think about policy is to contemplate something beyond oneself. Trump can only think about how something will reflect on his own reflection. The only policies he’s ever cared about are those that advance Trump.Policy entails a degree of deliberation, of assessment based on logic and fact. That’s not the Trump we’ve known, either. When president, Trump never read memos. He never looked at graphs or charts. He hated numbers. He is contemptuous of data, analysis, science, reality.To have a vision is to be forward-looking. But Trump always looks backwards – to vindicate himself, retaliate, take revenge, exact retribution, settle scores, counterattack, return fire.“It’s an opportunity for President Trump to come to Washington and give a visionary speech about why the future would be better with his leadership — and to the degree he focuses on that it could be a very important speech,” says Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker who remains close to Trump, about tonight’s address. But Trump can’t get over the past. Especially now — after weeks of the Jan. 6 committee hearings exposing his conduct before and during the insurrection at the Capitol — does anyone seriously expect him to stay on message about the future?Maybe if they drug him and administer an electric shock every time he diverges from the teleprompter text his policy advisers have prepared for him, he may surprise. But the outtakes from the remarks he was supposed to give on January 7 suggest even this will pose a challenge.On the rare occasion Trump has offered a vision about the future, it’s been a weather prediction. Remember when he warned the public that Alabama was going to be hit by Hurricane Dorian — long after Dorian was already heading toward the Carolinas, leaving Alabama back in the sunshine? Rather than admit error, Trump had his White House policy staff release a 225-word statement defending his erroneous warning, and spent the next four days defending himself with a doctored and outdated hurricane map that looped in Alabama with a black marker, followed by assertions that his prediction was accurate at the time he issued the warning (it wasn’t), a week-old map that showed a low probability of tropical-storm winds in a small corner of Alabama, and incessant tweets culminating with “What I said was accurate! All Fake News in order to demean!” and “I accept the Fake News apologies!”It's been the same with all his bogus claims – starting with the crowd size at his inaugural, to voter fraud in 2016 and again in 2020, to “unknown Middle Easterners” streaming across the southern border in migrant caravans. He lies, then defends his lies with more lies, then rips into those who tell the truth. That’s always been his MO.The worst job I can imagine is to be a Trump policy adviser. It would be like running behind an elephant with a giant pooper-scooper.In addition to Rollins, the America First Policy Institute -- described gingerly as a “White House in waiting” -- is run by Larry Kudlow, Trump’s top economic adviser, and Robert O’Brien, Trump’s national security adviser. It has a staff of 150 and an operating budget of $25 million.I have no idea if they’re doing serious policy analysis. Trump’s former trade adviser Peter Navarro, appearing on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast Friday, called the organization “a dumping ground and haven for a lot of the failed people from the first administration, the RINOs, and the disloyalists who let Trump down.”It’s the nicest compliment I’ve heard anyone give the Institute’s personnel, but I still doubt they’ll get Trump to be a policy visionary. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Friends,On June 30, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case called Moore v. Harper. With all the controversial decisions handed down by the Court this term, its decision to take up this case slid under most radar detectors. But it could be the most dangerous case on the Court’s upcoming docket. You need to know about it. Here’s the background: Last February, the North Carolina Supreme Court blocked the state’s Republican controlled general assembly from instituting a newly drawn congressional district map, holding that the map violated the state constitutional ban on partisan gerrymandering. The Republican Speaker of the North Carolina House appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, advancing what’s called the “independent state legislature” theory. It’s a theory that’s been circulating for years in right-wing circles. It holds that the U.S. Constitution gives state legislatures alone the power to regulate federal elections in their states.We’ve already had a preview of what this theory could mean. It underpins a major legal strategy in Trump’s attempted coup: the argument that state legislatures can substitute their own judgment of who should be president in place of the person chosen by a majority of voters. This was the core of the so-called “Eastman memo” that Trump relied on (and continues to rely on) in seeking to decertify Biden’s election. The U.S. Constitution does grant state legislatures the authority to prescribe “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections.” But it does not give state legislatures total power over our democracy. In fact, for the last century, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the independent state legislature theory.Yet if we know anything about the conservative majority now controlling the Supreme Court, it’s that they will rule on just about anything that suits the far-right’s agenda. Conservatives on the Court have already paved the way for this bonkers idea. Then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist was an early proponent. In his concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore, the 2000 case that halted the recount in Florida in the presidential election, Rehnquist (in an opinion joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas) asserted that because the state court’s recount conflicted with deadlines set by the state legislature for the election, the court’s recount could not stand. The issue returned to the Supreme Court in 2020, when the justices turned down a request by Pennsylvania Republicans to fast-track their challenge to a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that required state election officials to count mail-in ballots received within three days of Election Day. In an opinion that accompanied the court’s order, Justice Alito (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch) suggested that the state supreme court’s decision to extend the deadline for counting ballots likely violated the U.S. Constitution because it intruded on the state legislature’s decision making. Make no mistake. The independent state legislature theory would make it easier for state legislatures to pull all sorts of additional election chicanery, without any oversight from state courts: ever more voter suppression laws, gerrymandered maps, and laws eliminating the power of election commissions and secretaries of state to protect elections. If the Supreme Court adopts the independent state legislature theory, it wouldn't just be throwing out a century of its own precedent. It would be rejecting the lessons that inspired the Framers to write the Constitution in the first place: that it’s dangerous to give state legislatures unchecked power, as they had under the Articles of Confederation.The Republican Party and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court call themselves “originalists” who find the meaning of the Constitution in the intent of the Farmers. But they really don’t give a damn what the Framers thought. They care only about imposing their own retrograde and anti-democracy ideology on the United States. But we can fight back. First, Congress must expand the Supreme Court to add balance to a branch of government that has been stolen by radicalized Republicans. This is not a far-fetched idea. The Constitution doesn’t specify how many justices there should be – and we’ve already changed the size of the Court seven times in American history.Second, Congress must impose term limits on Supreme Court justices, and have them rotate with judges on the U.S. courts of appeals. Third, Congress must restore federal voting rights protections and expand access to the ballot box. We need national minimum standards for voting in our democracy. Obviously, these reforms can happen only if Democrats retain control of the House in the midterm elections and add at least two more Democratic senators — willing to reform or abolish the filibuster.So your vote is critical, and not just in federal elections. Make sure you also vote for state legislators who understand what’s at stake to preserve o

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action and my former student), discussing the past week: The just-finished series of January 6 hearings. Why more Republicans still want Trump to run in 2024 than Democrats want Biden to run in 2024. Why 195 House Republicans voted against a bill to protect contraception (and why every American male over the age of 40 now needs a vasectomy). Trump’s outtakes on January 7, 2021. The Hawley Trot. Please pull up a chair. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Friends, One final point about the Select Committee on January 6 as it concludes this series of hearings. Its members and staff deserve our heartfelt thanks for a job (although not over) extraordinarily well done.So much has gone so wrong with so many aspects of our government and other institutions we rely on that I think it’s important to recognize and salute this sort of excellence. And courage.Liz Cheney alone deserves a medal. Bennie Thompson handled the committee with grace and thoughtfulness. Adam Kinzinger did his job beautifully. Jamie Raskin was eloquent. Other members deserve kudos for their powerful presentations.The committee’s format has remained disciplined and consistent since the committee aired its first televised hearing last month. Each hearing has dispensed with the usual awful aspects of congressional hearings -- bloated running times, grandstanding, endless speeches, badgering, cheap shots – while creating a coherent narrative across separate sessions. The hearings have constituted the most compelling televised hearings in history, Watergate included.You’ll remember that Congressional Republicans initially stymied the formation of an independent commission to investigate January 6, then tried to appoint bad-faith wreckers to the House committee formed in lieu of the commission. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blocked those appointments, which prompted Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to declare that Republicans would boycott the panel altogether. Many pundits criticized Pelosi at the time, arguing that the committee’s work would be perceived as purely partisan and therefore lack credibility. (“Those hoping that the committee might help us understand what happened on January 6,” CNN’s Chris Cillizza wrote, “should give up on those hopes now.”) The fact that two Republican representatives, Cheney and Kinzinger, independently joined the committee, despite McCarthy’s wishes, apparently didn’t count as “bipartisanship” in the eyes of these critics. But Pelosi has been proven correct. America owes a deep debt of gratitude to the members of Congress and staff who have given us the most powerful and memorable depiction of the near-death of American democracy ever presented. Now it’s up to the rest of us – including Merrick Garland and the Justice Department – to display the same degree of excellence and courage, and ensure that American democracy endures. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

On Tuesday, in a House Democratic primary contest to represent a predominantly Black middle-class district north and east of Washington, DC., Glenn Ivey, a former state’s attorney for Prince George’s County, defeated Donna Edwards, the first Black woman elected to the House from Maryland. (Edwards left the seat to run unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2016 and had hoped to return.) Progressive groups backed Edwards, but television and radio were saturated with ads questioning her willingness to perform basic services for her constituents and to make the kinds of compromises necessary for legislative success. The argument was horse manure. Where did the money for those ads come from? The American-Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its new super PAC, the United Democracy Project (along with another group, the Democratic Majority for Israel). Together they spent almost $7 million to defeat Edwards. That’s a staggering sum for a single Democratic primary. What did Edwards do to deserve this degree of AIPAC enmity? Could it have been because she was an early supporter of a nuclear deal between Iran and five industrial countries, including the United States? Probably not, because that hardly distinguished her from most other Democrats. Besides, the Obama administration supported the deal. Was it because Edwards took a number of votes that expressed support for Palestinian rights and the resumption of a meaningful peace process? These were hardly outside of the mainstream.So what was it? Dig deeper. Remember, AIPAC never used to endorse candidates. Until this election cycle, it didn’t even have a super PAC. But it’s on the way to spending nearly $20 million in the 2022 Democratic primaries alone. That makes it the single most influential political group in Democratic electoral politics. And what’s the criterion for whom AIPAC supports in Democratic primaries? If AIPAC were simply aiming to promote Israel or deter antisemitism, presumably it would be as active in Republican primaries as it is in Democratic ones. But it has barely spent a dime in Republican primaries — not even against Republican candidates who have been widely criticized for antisemitic comments. And its United Democracy Project super-PAC hasn’t spent a penny. AIPAC hasn’t supported a Republican primary challenger to Marjorie Taylor Greene (who claimed that Jewish space lasers were behind California’s 2018 wildfires), for example. But AIPAC has endorsed Republican Scott Perry, who compared Democrats to Nazis.The real criterion for AIPAC’s support or enmity in Democratic primaries seems to have more to do with which candidate is friendlier toward America’s moneyed interests and the Republican agenda. When Edwards was last a member of Congress, she backed single-payer health care and was one of the early champions of sweeping campaign finance reforms. Both irked big money. In the pending race between Haley Stevens and Andy Levin in Michigan’s 11th Congressional District, AIPAC is supporting Stevens (who has a history of fighting worker protections) against Levin (who is a labor champion). AIPAC is on the way to becoming a Republican front group. Much of AIPAC’s trove is coming from Republican donors. In May, Republican billionaires Paul Singer and Bernie Marcus donated $1 million each to AIPAC’s super PAC. Marcus famously gave $7 million to President Trump’s campaign in 2016.So far in this election cycle, AIPAC has endorsed over 100 Republican candidates who refused to certify the 2020 election results.What to do about this?First, Democrats must stop allowing AIPAC to be a Democratic kingmaker. The Democratic leadership in Congress must openly criticize AIPAC’s role in Democratic primaries. Democratic candidates should cease taking money from AIPAC in primaries and condemn candidates who do.Second, all of us need to get behind campaign finance reforms that prevent big money from whatever source from corrupting our elections. Such reforms are possible notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s horrific Citizens United decision. The House has already passed legislation that would encourage small-dollar donations by matching them dollar-for-dollar with public financing. Like most other reforms, it’s been stalled in the Senate. We must elect Democrats to the Senate who will pass this. Finally, if you’re concerned about Israel’s future or about antisemitism in America, I’d recommend you not give another penny to AIPAC and urge others to cease funding AIPAC, too. Instead, consider supporting “J Street,” the pro-Israel nonprofit group that advocates diplomacy-based solutions and supports progressive candidates, or If Not Now.What do you think? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Tonight is the eighth and last of the scheduled public hearings of the House Select Committee on the January 6 attack (the committee is still gathering evidence and may schedule additional hearings). So this is a good time to press the pause button and examine what the committee is accomplishing. The committee is clearly building a criminal case against Trump and his closest enablers of seditious conspiracy, a crime defined as “conspiring to overthrow, put down, or destroy by force the government of the United States or to oppose by force the authority thereof.” I expect the committee will make a criminal referral to the Justice Department, handing over all its evidence. Ideally, Trump, along with Giuliani, Powell, Stone, Flynn, Navarro, Bannon, Meadows, and other co-conspirators, will be convicted and end up in jail. But the Committee has a second purpose — one that has received too little attention: to stop Trump’s continuing attack on American democracy. Even as the committee reveals Trump’s attempted coup in the months leading up to and during the January 6 attack, the attempted coup continues. Trump hasn’t stopped giving speeches to stir up angry mobs with his Big Lie — he’ll be giving another tomorrow in Arizona. Trump hasn’t stopped pushing states to alter the outcomes of the 2020 election — last week he urged Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to support a resolution that would retract Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes cast for Biden. Trump is actively backing candidates who propound the Lie. Several prominent Republican candidates for the Senate and for governor — such as JD Vance in Ohio, Blake Masters in Arizona, and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — are running on it. Republican candidates across America are using increasingly violent language. Republicans lawmakers in several states are enacting legislation to take over election machinery and ignore the popular vote. Meanwhile, the lives of committee members and their families have been threatened. Witnesses are receiving gangster-style warnings not to cooperate. The committee’s message to all of America, including Republicans: Stop supporting this treachery. In other words, the committee’s work is not just backward-looking — revealing Trump’s attempted coup. It is also forward-looking, appealing to Americans to reject his continuing attempted coup. In order to accomplish this, the committee is doing six important things:First, it’s making crystal clear that the continuing attempted coup is based on a lie — which is why the committee has repeatedly shown Trump’s Attorney General William Barr, saying:I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations [of voter fraud], but they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people, members of the public, that there was this systemic corruption in the system and that their votes didn't count and that these machines controlled by somebody else were actually determining it, which was complete nonsense. And it was being laid out there, and I told them that it was — that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that. And it was doing a grave disservice to the country. Second, the committee is showing that the battle between democracy and authoritarian is non-partisan. Not only are the committee’s vice-chairman Liz Cheney and committee member Adam Kinzinger, Republican representatives, but most of the committee’s witnesses are Republicans who worked in the Trump White House or as Republican-elected state officials, or they staffed Republican legislators or served as judges appointed by Republican presidents. All appear before the committee as American citizens who are disgusted by and worried about Trump’s attempted coup. When Cheney displayed a message Trump tweeted after the assault on the Capitol began, in which he claimed Vice President Pence "didn't have the courage to do what should have been done," Cheney asked former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson for her reaction. Hutchinson responded:As a staffer that works to always represent the administration to the best of my ability, and to showcase the good things that he had done for the country, I remember feeling frustrated, disappointed, it felt personal, I was really sad. As an American, I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic, it was un-American. We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.Third, the committee is appealing to Republican lawmakers to stop supporting Trump’s continuing attempted coup. During the first televised hearing, Liz Cheney issued an explicit warning: We take our oath to defend the United States constitution. And that oath must mean something. Tonight. I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain. Fourth, the committee wants the public to see that average Americans have fallen for Trump’s treachery, with disastrous results. Witness Stephen Ayres, who d

Friends, Today I want to connect some dots. What do congressional Republicans, Joe Manchin, and Hungary’s Viktor Orban have in common? They all oppose the Biden administration’s proposed global minimum corporate tax — designed to stop corporations from playing one country against another in a worldwide race to the tax bottom. The reason for Manchin’s opposition? As he told a West Virginia radio host on Friday, other countries have yet to adopt the tax and he doesn’t want to put American companies at a competitive disadvantage.This, my friends, is utter baloney. More than 100 other countries have already agreed to the global minimum tax, including all European Union members except Hungary. It’s the United States that’s the laggard. The reason for Hungary’s opposition? As Hungary recently revealed, Republicans in Congress secretly asked Hungary to block it. (Each country in the European Union has veto power over the bloc’s tax agreements.) Top Republicans in the House Ways and Means Committee even sent a letter to the Hungarian ambassador to the U.S., thanking him for Hungary’s help.Think about it. One of America’s two political parties has been in cahoots with Europe’s most authoritarian government, to allow global corporations based in the United States to avoid paying ever more of what they owe the United States.It’s jaw-dropping. Republicans who march under the banner of nationalism — “American first,” “control our borders,” “Make America Great Again” — eagerly conspire with foreign governments to make America’s borders even more porous to global capital and deprive America of needed tax revenue. While they criticize supposed “global elites” that have “hollowed out” America’s heartland, they connive with global elites to make them even richer. Missouri Republican Senator Josh HawIey — who fist-bumped January 6 rioters at the Capitol — relishes attacking what he calls “the cosmopolitan economy” of global corporations that “move jobs and assets overseas to chase the cheapest wages and pay the lowest taxes.” Yet Hawley opposes the global minimum tax. “I don't know that it’ll really work,” he says, “so I'm skeptical about it.”We’re way beyond hypocrisy here. We’re in a realm of duplicity that should make even a Trump blush. Follow the money. Big corporations want to to shift ever more of their profits to low-tax nations. So they’re using a small portion of their humongous profits to bribe Republican lawmakers and a few Democrats like Manchin to vote against the global minimum. What’s Hungary’s interest? Start with the fact that Viktor Orban and his government don’t believe in democracy. They’re pushing white Christian nationalism instead. It’s the same culture war advanced by the likes of Trump, Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert, and Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, among others. White Christian nationalism is the perfect foil for the rising tide of global corporate predation. This way, sovereignty becomes a matter of race and ethnicity rather than economics. Focusing on immigrants “replacing” the white race diverts attention from how much tax revenue global corporations are forcing average people to replace. A similar coalition between global capitalists and nationalist cultural warriors in the 1920s set the stage for the horrors of the 1930s and the ravages of World War II. Beware. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

On Friday, after putting a final spear through the heart of what remained of Biden’s and the Democrat’s domestic agenda, West Virginia’s Democratic Senator Joe Manchin also rejected any tax increases on big corporations or the wealthy — until inflation is no longer a problem.This is rich, in every sense of the word. Raising taxes on big American corporations and the wealthy would not fuel inflation. It would slow inflation by reducing demand — and do it in a way that wouldn’t hurt lower-income Americans (such as those living in, say, West Virginia).Manchin’s state is one of the poorest in America. West Virginia ranks 45th in education, 47th in health care, 48th in overall prosperity, and 50th in infrastructure. Tax revenue from corporations and billionaires could be used to rebuild West Virginia, among other places that need investment around America.But Manchin doesn’t seem to give a cluck. After all, the Democrat’s agenda — which Manchin just obliterated — included pre-K education, free community college, child subsidies, Medicare dental and vision benefits, paid family leave, elder care, and much else — all of enormous value to West Virginia. (On a per-person basis, West Virginians would have benefitted more than the residents of all but two other states.)It’s not as if Manchin has championed anything else Democrats have sought. Remember Manchin’s “bipartisan compromise” on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act? Nothing came of it, of course. Nothing has come of any of the fig leafs Manchin has conjured to cover his unrelenting opposition to every other Democratic goal. What’s going on here? It’s spelled m-o-n-e-y. Few if any American-based global corporations or billionaires reside in West Virginia, but lots of money flows to Manchin from corporations and billionaires residing elsewhere. Manchin has not only taken more campaign contributions from oil, gas and coal companies than any other senator (as well as dividends from his own coal company), he has one of the largest war chests from all big American corporations. If the Democratic Party had any capacity to discipline its lawmakers or hold them accountable (if pigs could fly), it would at least revoke Manchin’s chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. To continue to allow this key position to be occupied by the man who has single-handedly blocked one of the last opportunities to save the Earth is an insult to the universe.I’m told the Democrats don’t dare take this step for fear Manchin would leave the Democratic Party and switch his allegiance to the Republicans. Why exactly would this be so terrible? Manchin already acts like a Republican. Oh, no! they tell me. If Manchin switches parties, Democrats would lose control over the Senate. Well, I have news for Democrats. They already lost control over the Senate. In fact, the way things are right now, Biden and the Democrats have the worst of both worlds. They look like they control the Senate, as well as the House and the presidency. But they can’t get a damn thing done because Manchin (and his intermittent sidekick Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema) won’t let them. So after almost two years of appearing to run the entire government, Democrats have accomplished almost nothing of what they came to Washington to do. America is burning and flooding but Democrats won’t enact climate measures. Voting rights and reproductive rights are being pulverized but Democrats won’t protect them. Gun violence is out of control but Democrats come up with a miniature response. Billionaires and big corporations are siphoning off more national wealth and income than in living memory and paying a lower tax rate (often zero), but Democrats won’t raise taxes on big corporations and the wealthy. Which means that in November’s midterm elections, Democrats will have to go back to voters and say “we promised a lot but we delivered squat, so please vote for us again.” This does not strike me as a compelling message. By kicking Manchin out of the party, Democrats could at least go into the midterms with a more realistic pitch: “It looked like we had control of the Senate, but we didn’t. Now that you know who the real Democrats are, give us the power and we will get it done.” Maybe this way they’ll pick up more real Democratic senators, and do it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action and my former student), discussing the past week. Today we talk about Joe Manchin’s final destruction of Biden’s domestic agenda, Schumer’s and Biden’s inability to hold him accountable, this week’s terrifying inflation number and its potential effect on the midterms, appreciation for the House January 6 committee, Heather’s inability to tell a joke, and my aging irritability. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Friends,A while back, I shared with you my love of Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” — the essential American fable about the generosity and goodness of Americans toward one another, as opposed to the greedy oligarchs at the top (such as Mr. Potter) who care only about building their own wealth and power. In light of Putin’s war and the rise of authoritarianism around the world, including the United States, I’ve been thinking about another favorite of mine — Michael Kurtiz’s fabulous 1942 classic, “Casablanca.” Even now, 70 years after its release, it feels relevant and poignant.In the first six decades after World War II, the number of countries considered democratic grew. But researchers have found that, starting five or six years ago, the number of democracies in the world began to shrink, and existing democracies have become less democratic. Consider the rise of strongman rule in Hungary, the Philippines, and Russia, attacks on the courts in Poland, Hindu extremism in India, fears of a power grab in Brazil, and, of course, Trump’s continuing attempted coup. Which brings me back to Casablanca. Few movies have ever produced as many quotes — “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and “We’ll always have Paris,” and the song “As Time Goes By.” And can you think of any more enduring characters than those played by Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart? But the core of Casablanca is a defense of democracy in the face of the rising specter of fascism. One of the most moving scenes to me is the dueling anthems — when the German occupants sing “Die Wacht am Rhein,” only to be drowned out by the French refugees singing “La Marseillaise.” I’m told that the tears in the eyes of several of the French actors and singers in this scene were unplanned and unrehearsed. Remember, this was filmed in 1942.I’m curious about your take: What is it that makes this scene so powerful? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

At 79, Joe Biden is the oldest president in American history. Concerns about his age top the list for why Democratic voters want the party to find an alternative for 2024.I don’t think this reflects an “ageist” prejudice against those who have reached such withering heights so much as an understanding that people in their late 70s and 80s wither.I speak with some authority. I’m now a spritely 76 — lightyears younger than our president. I feel fit, I swing dance and salsa, and can do 20 pushups in a row. Yet I confess to a certain loss of, shall we say, fizz. Joe Biden could easily make it until 86, when he’d conclude his second term. After all, it’s now thought a bit disappointing if a person dies before 85. My mother passed at 86, my father two weeks before his 102nd birthday (so I’m hoping for the best, genetically speaking). Three score and ten is the number of years of life set out in the Bible. Modern technology and Big Pharma should add at least a decade and a half. Beyond this is an extra helping. “After 80, it’s gravy,” my father used to say. Joe will be on the cusp of the gravy train. Where will it end? There’s only one possibility, and that reality occurs to me with increasing frequency. I find myself reading the obituary pages with ever greater interest, curious about how long they lasted and what brought them down. I remember a New Yorker cartoon in which an older reader of the obituaries sees headlines that read only “Older Than Me” or “Younger Than Me.”Yet most of the time I forget my age. The other day, after lunch with some of my graduate students, I caught our reflection in a store window and for an instant wondered about the identity of the short old man in our midst.It’s not death that’s the worrying thing about a second Biden term. It’s the dwindling capacities that go with aging. "Bodily decrepitude," said Yeats, "is wisdom." I have accumulated somewhat more of the former than the latter, but our president seems fairly spry (why do I feel I have to add “for someone his age?”). I still have my teeth, in contrast to my grandfather whom I vividly recall storing his choppers in a glass next to his bed, and have so far steered clear of heart attack or stroke (I pray I’m not tempting fate by my stating this fact). But I’ve lived through several kidney stones and a few unexplained fits of epilepsy in my late thirties. I’ve had both hips replaced. And my hearing is crap. Even with hearing aids, I have a hard time understanding someone talking to me in a noisy restaurant. You’d think that the sheer market power of 60 million boomers losing their hearing would be enough to generate at least one chain of quiet restaurants.When I get together with old friends, our first ritual is an “organ recital” — how’s your back? knee? heart? hip? shoulder? eyesight? hearing? prostate? hemorrhoids? digestion? The recital can run (and ruin) an entire lunch. The question my friends and I jokingly (and brutishly) asked one other in college—"getting much?"—now refers not to sex but to sleep. I don’t know anyone over 75 who sleeps through the night. When he was president, Bill Clinton prided himself on getting only about four hours. But he was in his forties then. (I also recall cabinet meetings where he dozed off.) How does Biden manage?My memory for names is horrible. (I once asked Ted Kennedy how he recalled names and he advised that if a man is over 50, just ask “how’s the back?” and he'll think you know him.) I often can’t remember where I put my wallet and keys or why I’ve entered a room. And certain proper nouns have disappeared altogether. Even when rediscovered, they have a diabolical way of disappearing again. Biden’s secret service detail can worry about his wallet and he’s got a teleprompter for wayward nouns, but I’m sure he’s experiencing some diminution in the memory department. I have lost much of my enthusiasm for travel and feel, as did Philip Larkin, that I would like to visit China, but only on the condition that I could return home that night. Air Force One makes this possible under most circumstances. If not, it has a first-class bedroom and personal bathroom, so I don’t expect Biden’s trips are overly taxing. I’m told that after the age of 60, one loses half an inch of height every five years. This doesn’t appear to be a problem for Biden but it presents a challenge for me, considering that at my zenith I didn’t quite make it to five feet. If I live as long as my father did, I may vanish.Another diminution I’ve noticed is tact. A few days ago, I gave the finger to a driver who passed me recklessly. These days, giving the finger to a stranger is itself a reckless act. I’m also noticing I have less patience, perhaps because of an unconscious “use by” timer that’s now clicking away. Increasingly I wonder why I’m wasting time with this or that buffoon. I’m less tolerant of long waiting lines, automated phone menus, and Republicans. Cicero claimed "older people who are reasonable, good-tempered, an

Uber’s then-chief executive Travis Kalanick texted fellow executives that “violence guarantees success” when clashes with taxi drivers broke out in 2016 in Paris, a key market for the company. Uber leveraged the violence against its drivers to win sympathy from regulators and the public, as it also did in South Africa where Uber drivers were burned when their cars were set on fire. (This look inside Uber’s internal deliberations came from records Uber lobbyist Mark MacGann turned over to the Guardian.)I’ve been thinking about Uber’s capitalist thuggery in light of the corporations underwriting Trump’s thuggery, which includes violent groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers that led the attack on the U.S. Capitol. “All hell is going to break loose tomorrow,” Trump former aide Steve Bannon predicted on his radio show on January 5, 2021.Trump’s thuggery continues to this day. A phone message received by White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson just before she testified before the January 6 committee warned that someone “let me know you have your deposition tomorrow. He wants me to let you know he’s thinking about you. He knows you’re loyal. And you’re going to do the right thing when you go in for your deposition.”If this sounds like a gangster threat, that’s the point. During Hutchinson’s earlier depositions before the committee, her legal counsel was paid for by Trump’s “Save America PAC” (the PAC paid the legal expenses of other panel witnesses, too. When she realized “she couldn’t call her attorney to say ‘Hey, I’ve got more information’” because the attorney “was there to insulate the big guy,” according to a friend, she secured free counsel who would not inhibit her. Now, after testifying in public, Hutchinson is in hiding. Meanwhile, the “big guy” continues to stir up his mob with lies about stolen elections and secret plots — fueling a new wave of threats against committee members. Several have increased their personal security. Committee Chair Bennie Thompson, co-chair Rep. Liz Cheney, and Rep. Adam Kinzinger have security details; other members have requested them. Kinzinger, one of the panel’s two Republican members alongside Cheney, says he’s received “constant” death threats. “There is violence in the future, I’m going to tell you,” Kinzinger told ABC. “And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can’t expect any differently.” Kinzinger has announced he will not be seeking re-election. Cheney has paused participating in public events in part because of safety concerns.Does any of this remind you of Hitler’s Brown Shirts or Mussolini’s Blackshirts?At the least, it should raise questions about the wealthy individuals and corporations that continue to bankroll this thuggery – among them, billionaires Peter Thiel, Rebecca Mercer, Charles Koch, Home Depot cofounder Bernie Marcus, ex-casino mogul Steve Wynn, and shipping magnate Richard Uihlein.Funding is also coming from Boeing, Koch Industries, Home Depot, FedEx, General Dynamics, Toyota, AT&T, Valero Energy, Lockheed Martin, UPS, Raytheon, Marathon Petroleum, General Motors and FedEx. In April alone (the most recent month for which data is available) Fortune 500 companies and trade organizations gave more than $1.4 million to members of Congress who voted not to certify the election results. AT&T led the pack, giving $95,000 to election objectors.Toyota is even funding Trump ally Congressman Andrew Biggs, a fervent devotee of the Big Lie who refuses to comply with a congressional subpoena to testify before the committee. Six congressmen who have refused to testify have raked in more than $826,000 from corporate donors since the assault on the Capitol.Why are these wealthy individuals and corporations doing this? Presumably because they want to pay as little in taxes as possible and believe Trump and his Republicans will deliver even more tax cuts than they did before. But how is this capitalist thuggery in pursuit of profits different from Uber’s thuggery? And is it more excusable than the political thuggery it’s enabling? To state the question in historical terms, how different is their behavior from the wealthy European industrialists who quietly backed the fascists in the 1920s and 1930s? These billionaire and corporate funders are as complicit as are the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers in threatening American democracy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

This morning, I heard a commentator allude to “Mitch McConnell and other conservative senators.” Yesterday, a news report described the upcoming Alaska Republican primary as pitting Trump’s “conservative wing against Murkowski’s more moderate base.” I keep seeing references to the “conservative majority” on the Supreme Court.Can we get real? There is nothing conservative about these so-called “conservatives.” They don’t want to preserve or protect our governing institutions — the core idea of conservatism extending from Edmund Burke to William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater. They are radicals, intent on wrecking these institutions to impose their ideology on everyone else.The Supreme Court’s Republican appointees have all but obliterated stare decisis — the conservative principle that the Court must follow its precedents and not change or reverse them unless clearly necessary, and with near unanimity. Recent decisions reversing Roe v. Wade, elevating religious expression over the Constitution’s bar on established religion, questioning Congress’s ability to delegate rule making to the executive branch, and barring states from regulating handguns, all call into question the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as an institution.Meanwhile, Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, are abusing the filibuster and undermining the legitimacy of the Senate.Throughout much of the 20th century, filibusters remained rare. But after Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office in 2009, McConnell and his Republican senate minority blocked virtually every significant piece of legislation. Between 2010 and 2020, there were as many cloture motions as during the entire 60-year period from 1947 to 2006. Now McConnell and his Republicans are stopping almost everything in its tracks. Just 41 Senate Republicans, representing only 21 percent of the country, are blocking laws supported by the vast majority of Americans.At the same time, Trump and his Republican enablers in Congress and in the states have upended the centerpiece of American democracy, the peaceful transition of power, and undermined the legitimacy of our elections. They continue to assert without any basis in fact that the 2020 election was stolen. Trump encouraged an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and threatened the life of the Vice President. Republican state legislatures are enacting legislation to suppress votes and take over election machinery.Make no mistake: Republican appointees to the Supreme Court, most Republicans in Congress, and Trump Republican lawmakers across America are not conservative. They are radicals. They have embarked on a radical agenda of repudiating our governing institutions and taking over American democracy. It is time to stop using the term “conservative” to describe them and their agenda. And it is time it to fight back: Enlarge the size of the Supreme Court and limit the terms of justices. Abolish the filibuster and then pass laws most Americans want — protecting voting rights and reproductive rights, and controlling guns. Criminally prosecute Trump and his insurgents. These are conservative measures. They are necessary to conserve and protect our governing institutions from the radicals now bent on destroying them. Please consider a paid or gift subscription. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action and my former student), discussing the past week. Today we talk about the impending midterms, whether Biden should run again in 2024, Boris Johnson’s resignation, the failure of Democratic messaging, and the limits of hype in Silicon Valley. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Friends,Much of today’s Republican Party is treacherous and treasonous. So why are Democrats facing midterm elections that, according to most political observers, they’re likely to lose? Having been a loyal Democrat for some seventy years (my father liked Ike but my mother and I were for Adlai), including a stint as a cabinet secretary, it pains me to say this, but the Democratic Party has lost its way. How? Some commentators think Democrats have moved too far to the left — too far from the so-called “center.” This is utter rubbish. Where’s the center between democracy and authoritarianism and why would Democrats want to be there? Others think Biden hasn’t been sufficiently angry or outraged. Please. What good would that do? And after four years of Trump, why would anyone want more anger and outrage?The biggest failure of the Democratic Party — a disease that threatens the very life of the party — has been its loss of the American working class. As Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg concluded after the 2016 election, “Democrats don’t have a ‘white working-class’ problem. They have a ‘working class problem’ which progressives have been reluctant to address honestly or boldly. The fact is that Democrats have lost support with all working-class voters across the electorate.”The working class used to be the bedrock of the Democratic Party. What happened? Before Trump’s election, Democrats had occupied the White House for 16 of 24 years. Democrats controlled both houses of Congress during the first two years of the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations. During those years, Democrats scored some important victories for working families: the Affordable Care Act, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, for example. I take pride in being part of a Democratic administration during that time. But I’d be lying to you if I didn’t also share my anger and frustration from those years — battles inside the White House with Wall Street Democrats and battles with corporate Democrats in Congress, all refusing to do more for the working class, all failing to see (or quietly encouraging) the rise of authoritarianism if the middle class continued to shrink. (I offer the following video clip not in the spirit of “I told you so” but as a way of sharing my frustrations and fears at the time.)The tragic reality is that even when they’ve been in charge, Democrats have not altered the vicious cycle that has shifted wealth and power to the top, rigging the economy for the affluent and undermining the working class. Clinton used his political capital to pass free trade agreements, without providing millions of blue-collar workers who consequently lost their jobs the means of getting new ones that paid at least as well. His North American Free Trade Agreement and plan for China to join the World Trade Organization undermined the wages and economic security of manufacturing workers across America, hollowing out vast swaths of the Rust Belt. Clinton also deregulated Wall Street. This indirectly led to the financial crisis of 2008 — in which Obama bailed out the biggest banks and bankers but did nothing for homeowners, many of whom owed more on their homes than their homes were worth. Obama didn’t demand as a condition for being bailed out that the banks refrain from foreclosing on underwater homeowners. Nor did Obama demand an overhaul of the banking system. Instead, he allowed Wall Street to water down attempts at re-regulation. Both Clinton and Obama stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the working class. They failed to reform labor laws to allow workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down majority vote, or even to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated labor protections. Biden has supported labor law reform but hasn’t fought for it, leaving the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act to die inside the ill-fated Build Back Better Act. At the same time, Clinton and Obama allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify, enabling large corporations to grow far larger and major industries to become more concentrated. Biden is trying to revive antitrust enforcement but hasn’t made it a centerpiece of his administration. Both Clinton and Obama depended on big money from corporations and the wealthy. Both turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general election campaigns, and he never followed up on his re-election promise to pursue a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United vs FEC, the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics. Throughout these years, Democrats drank from the same campaign funding trough as the Republicans – big corporations, Wall Street, and the very wealthy. “Business has to deal with us whether they like it or not, because we’re the majority,” crowed Democratic representative

The link is tightening between America’s move toward theocracy and its slide toward autocracy.It is important to understand these connections. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe, its expanded reading of the Second Amendment, and its eagerness to elevate religious freedom over the Constitution’s guarantee against established religion come from the same cloth as Republican state legislative attacks on democracy, the GOP’s fealty to Trump’s Big Lie, and white supremacy.At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference in Nashville last month, speakers explicitly embraced the theology of “Dominionism” -- the idea that “right-thinking” Christians have a biblically derived mandate to take control of all aspects of government and society. Trump’s keynote at the conference made the connections explicit. He warned that the “radical Left” is “trying to destroy organized religion” and “trying to shred our Constitution,” and continued: “The greatest danger to America is not our enemies from the outside, as powerful as they may be. The greatest danger to America is the destruction of our nation from the people from within. And you know the people I’m talking about.” Other speakers labeled Democrats “evil,” “tyrannical” and “the enemy within,” and charged that Democrats were engaged in “a war against the truth.” Senator Rick Scott of Florida predicted “the backlash is coming. Just mount up and ride to the sounds of the guns, and they are all over this country. It is time to take this country back.” Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina (the state’s first Black lieutenant governor and a virulent critic of so-called “critical race theory”) said he expected “a pitched battle to literally save this nation.” Referencing a passage from Ephesians that Christian nationalists often use to signal their militancy, Robinson added, “I don’t know about you, but I got my pack on, I got my boots on, I got my helmet on, I’ve got on the whole armor.”The connections between these strands of rightwing ideology are growing clearer and louder — theocratic Christianity, gun violence, the subjugation of women through forced birth, and strongman authoritarianism. Christian nationalism now taking over the Republican Party envisions vigilante justice -- “good guys with guns,” neighbors eavesdropping on neighbors, and action to stop what they call “abortion trafficking” — women crossing state lines to access legal abortions. Widespread access to guns is essential to keep everyone under control, suppress protests, and fuel fear. To call this a “culture” war is to understate its true meaning and potential danger. Those of us who still believe in separating church and state, guarding reproductive rights, ensuring racial equality, ending gun violence, and protecting democracy must understand that much of the Republican Party now stands for the exact opposite of these values.The funders and kingmakers of the Republican Party see all this for what it is: an effort to hold on to power in the face of massive demographic shifts: toward women (who now constitute 60 percent of all university enrollees, and therefore the future power structure) and people of color, and away from formal religion. Over the longer term, the Republican Party is doomed. In the meantime, with a rightwing majority on the Supreme Court, legislative majorities in states determined to suppress votes and dominate election machinery, an authoritarian strongman president waiting in the wings, and an ideology of Christian nationalism, the GOP will do what it can to hold on. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

On Saturday, President Biden demanded on Twitter that Big Oil “bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product.” This prompted Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the second richest man in the world, to call Biden’s statement either “straight ahead misdirection or a deep misunderstanding of basic market dynamics.”That’s rich. Bezos of all people should know that a major reason prices are rising is hugely profitable corporations like his Amazon have been using inflation as cover to raise price even further. Last year, corporate profits overall reached a 70-year high. In the fourth quarter, Amazon's profit nearly doubled — and it announced it would raise the price of its popular Prime membership.Yes, corporations are facing rising costs for everything from materials to labor. But they’re raising their prices even higher than those costs. In a new paper, researchers Mike Konczal and Niko Lusiani of the Roosevelt Institute find that markups — the difference between what corporations pay for labor and materials and the prices they charge their customers — have been rising dramatically. They find the same when they compare corporate costs with their sales. Corporations have been raising their prices because they have market power to do so (two-thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated over the last four decades). And their customers believe the price hikes are justified because the corporations have higher costs. Let’s be clear. The corporate price hikes have come on top of a worldwide surge in pent-up demand following the worst of the pandemic, global shortages of goods and services seeking to meet that demand, China’s lockdowns, and Putin’s war in Ukraine (which has put upward pressure on energy and food prices). But the corporate price hikes often exceed these higher costs. As gas prices at the pump reach their highest point in 14 years, Big Oil is enjoying a gusher. In the first quarter of 2022, Chevron’s profits more than quadrupled from the year before. ExxonMobil’s profits more than doubled. In the past month alone, even though the price of crude oil has fallen approximately $15 a barrel, prices at gas pumps have barely dropped.Big corporations aren’t pouring these windfall profits back into production. Instead, they’ve embarked on the largest program of stock buybacks in history. ExxonMobil alone plans to buy back $30 billion of stock this year (up from the $10 billion it announced earlier). If it hadn’t been for the buybacks, the stock market would look even worse.The Fed’s efforts to slow the economy will not remedy these causes of inflation. Hiking interest rates to reduce inflation is like trying to reduce someone’s fever by putting them in a freezer — it doesn’t deal with the cause and may be quite harmful. Rate hikes increase the costs of borrowing to individuals and consumers, which causes them to cut back on purchases of everything. This, in turn, causes the economy to slow — resulting in higher unemployment. How much higher? Lawrence Summers, Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, says containing inflation will require five years of 6 percent unemployment, or two years of unemployment at 7.5 percent or one year at 10 percent. The harm inflicted by this alleged cure would be worse than the disease. The first fired (and last hired back) are typically the lowest-skilled and lowest paid. Other than Fed rate hikes, four moves could help — and the Biden administration should embark on them immediately and loudly:1. Vigorous antitrust enforcement that reduces the pricing power of big corporations. (Even the threat of such enforcement will make them more reluctant to raise prices.)2. A windfall profits tax that takes away a portion of their recent profits and redistributes them to consumers (as the Conservative government in Britain is doing on Big Oil).3. A ban on stock buybacks. Before 1982, the Securities and Exchange Commission viewed buybacks as illegal stock manipulation, and didn’t allow them. The SEC should return to its former position. 4. Publicity. The government should reveal the names of highly profitable corporations that are flagrantly raising prices (not just Big Oil, but a host of other companies ranging from Tyson Foods to Starbucks). This would have an immediate effect. Corporations pay fortunes to burnish their brands.Mr. President, don’t just tweet that Big Oil should reduce its prices. Initiate an antitrust lawsuit against the major oil companies, threaten a windfall profits tax on them, get your SEC to ban stock buybacks, and name the names of big corporations that are unnecessarily raising prices — not just Exxon-Mobil and Chevron but also Tyson Foods, Starbucks, and Amazon. Thanks for subscribing. To sustain this effort, please consider a paid or gift subscription. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

I have no patience for all the handwringing by Democratic lawmakers in Washington over the Supreme Court’s regressive decisions on abortion and the climate. “This MAGA, regressive, extremist Supreme Court is intent on setting America back decades, if not centuries,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said last Thursday after the Court dumped its final opinions for the term. Well, yes. So what are you going to do about it, Chuck? Last I looked Democrats were still in control of the Senate and House and the presidency. Which means Democrats still have the power to effectively overrule the Supreme Court on reproductive rights and the environment. They must now pass a national abortion rights act which will preempt state laws banning abortions, and a Clean Power Plan that will eliminate the Supreme Court’s argument that Congress never authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to do this.These moves are not only crucial to the nation. They’re also critical for Democrats facing midterm elections four months from now. Reproductive rights and the environment are hugely galvanizing issues for Democrats and Independents.Some Democrats I talk to expect to lose control over both houses of Congress in the midterms, regardless. Rubbish. Defeatism is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Midterm elections are all about turnout. Young people and college-educated voters made all the difference in the last midterms in 2018 — giving Democrats control of the House by a wide margin. While young people usually don’t pay much attention to midterm elections, a record 36 percent of them voted in 2018, in contrast to 20 percent in 2014.Turnout of college-educated voters — another critical voting constituency to the Democratic Party, and also a majority of Independents who vote in midterms — also spiked in the 2018 midterms. True, Trump was a driving force for both groups in 2018. But it’s not as if Trump has disappeared. His attempted coup continues to this day. Nor would the Supreme Court’s extraordinary rightward lurch on reproductive rights and the environment have occurred but for Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees. It’s also true that Democrats have to cope with a filibuster in the Senate. But they need only fifty votes (plus the Vice President) to carve out exceptions to the filibuster for reproductive rights and for environment. Carve-outs from the filibuster are not uncommon. There have been some 160 of them, including one for confirming Supreme Court nominees (courtesy of Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans). If Republicans regain control of the Senate, you can bet they’ll carve out exceptions to the filibuster for whatever they want to do. They may abolish the filibuster altogether. But can Senate Democrats even muster 50 votes for such carve-outs? Joe Manchin and Kyrstin Sinema have signaled before they they won’t go along. Even if Manchin and Sinema were reluctant to agree to such carve-outs before, the situation has changed dramatically now that the Supreme Court has reversed Roe and stopped the Clean Power Plan. If reproductive rights are going to be preserved and the planet protected, Democrats must unite, and Manchin and Sinema must join them. If they won’t, let the nation see. Don’t let Republicans off the hook here, either. Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski is up for reelection this fall. She talks a good game about reproductive rights and about the environment. Last February, she and Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins introduced the Reproductive Choice Act, to prevent women’s reproductive choices from being weakened or eliminated. And she co-authored with Joe Manchin an oped in the Washington Post about the importance of ending climate change. Hell, Utah’s Mitt Romney just published a piece in the Atlantic entitled “America is in denial,” warning about climate catastrophe. Okay, Mitt: Unless you’re in total denial that the Supreme Court just gutted the Clean Power Plan, you have to join with Democrats to carve out an exception to the filibuster for the environment and then vote for the Plan. It’s time for Democratic lawmakers and anyone else who cares about reproductive rights and the environment to act. Now. At least hold votes and put lawmakers from both chambers on record. Paint a clear contrast ahead of the November midterms. Give voters a reason to turn out. Please consider a paid or gift subscription to help sustain this work. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

On this Fourth of July, it's worth pondering the true meaning of American patriotism. It is not the meaning propounded by the “America First” crowd, who define it as securing our borders. For most of its existence America has been open to people from the rest of the world fleeing tyranny and violence. Nor is the meaning of patriotism found in the ravings of those who want America to be a white Christian nation. America's moral mission has been to widen inclusion -- providing equal rights to women, Black people, Native American, Latinx, LGBTQ, Muslim, Jewish, atheist, agnostic. True patriots don't fuel racist, religious, or ethnic divisions. Patriots aren't homophobic or sexist. Patriots seek to confirm and strengthen and celebrate the "we" in "we the people of the United States."Nor are patriots blind to social injustices. They don’t ban books or prevent teaching about the sins of our past. They combine a loving devotion to America with a demand for justice.This land is your land, this land is my land, sang Woody Guthrie.Langston Hughes pleaded:Let America be America again,The land that never has been yet—And yet must be—the land where every man is free.The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—.Nor is the meaning of patriotism is found in symbolic displays of loyalty like standing for the national anthem and waving the American flag. Patriotism’s true meaning lies in taking a fair share of the burdens of keeping the nation going — sacrificing for the common good. Paying taxes in full rather than lobbying for lower taxes or seeking tax loopholes or squirreling away money abroad. Refraining from political contributions that corrupt our politics. Blowing the whistle on abuses of power even at the risk of losing one's job. Volunteering time and energy to improving the community and country.Real patriotism involves strengthening our democracy—defending the right to vote and ensuring more Americans are heard. Not claiming without evidence that millions of people voted fraudulently. Not pushing for laws that make it harder for people to vote based on this Big Lie. Not running for office on the Big Lie.True patriots don’t put loyalty to their political party above their love of America. True patriots don’t support an attempted coup. They expose it — even when it was enabled by people they once worked for or engineered by a president who headed their own party.When serving in public office, true patriots don’t try to hold on to power after voters have chosen not to reelect them. They don’t make money off their offices. When serving as judges, they recuse themselves from cases where they may appear to have a conflict of interest. When serving in the Senate, they don’t use the filibuster to stop all legislation they disagree with. When serving in state legislatures, they don’t try to suppress the votes of people unlikely to support them. When serving on the Supreme Court, they don’t disregard precedent to impose their own ideology.Patriots understand that when they serve the public, one of their major responsibilities is to maintain and build public trust in the offices and institutions they occupy. America is in trouble. But that’s not because too many foreigners are crossing our borders, or we’re losing our whiteness or our dominant religion, or we’re not standing for the national anthem or celebrating our history. We’re not in trouble because of voter fraud. We’re in trouble because we are losing the true understanding of what patriotism requires from all of us. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action and my former student), discussing the past week. Today we talk about the rogue Supreme Court and what Democrats can — and must — do. In particular, Senate Dems still have the power to carve out filibuster exceptions for reproductive rights, voting rights, and the climate — and then enact national legislation protecting reproductive rights and voting rights, and authorizing the EPA to move forward with the Clean Power Plan rule. Why don’t they do so? We also discuss Cassidy Hutchinson’s powerful testimony before the House January 6 committee, and what it might mean for prosecuting Trump. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Friends,I recently gave a lecture to students who were considering careers in public service, either in the public sector or in nonprofits. My lecture was about why so many public problems have worsened over the last decades — climate change, economic inequality, gun violence, access to healthcare, public education, child poverty, homelessness, even democracy itself.When I finished, one of them asked, “given everything you’ve told us, why should any of us want to enter public service now?” The question elicited nervous laughter from the class. It had hit a nerve. I responded, “but this is the very best time to enter public service!” They looked puzzled. I continued: “You wouldn’t want to enter public service when there were no major public problems. You’re desperately needed now. Think of all the good you can do! You’re young and energetic and idealistic. You have most of your lives in front of you. The challenges are huge. It’s your time!”They laughed. Some applauded. But I wondered how many of them understood what I was trying to say.I’m getting to be an old man. I’ve spent most of my life working on public problems, much of the time in public service of one kind or another. Yet over my lifetime, so many public problems have worsened. Occasionally I’m haunted by an overwhelming sense of failure — not just my own failure but my entire generation’s failure. I’ll continue to do what I can, but it’s now up to the next generation. Yes, there’s still Biden and Pelosi and Bernie (and Trump), and a few other aging boomers. But we’re all in our last acts. The real fate of the world is in the hands of these young people. It’s their time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Today the Supreme Court — again, with the 6 Republican appointees on one side and the 3 Democratic appointees on the other — limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. This ruling deals a major blow to America’s (and the world’s) efforts to address climate change. Also — as with its decision reversing Roe v. Wade — today’s ruling has far larger implications than the EPA and the environment. West Virginia v. EPA is the latest battle pitting America’s big businesses (in this case Big Oil) against the needs of average Americans. In this Supreme Court — containing three Trump appointees, two George W. Bush appointees, and one George H.W. Bush appointee – big business is winning big time. The financial backers of the Republican Party are getting exactly what they paid for.Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts admitted that “capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day.’” But then came the kicker: “But it is not plausible,” he wrote, “that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme.”Not plausible? Congress enacted the Clean Air Act in 1970. As with all laws, Congress left it to an administrative agency — in this case, the EPA — to decide how that Act was to be implemented and applied. That’s what regulations do: They implement laws.For the Supreme Court to give itself the authority to say whether Congress intended to delegate this much regulatory authority to the EPA is a truly radical act — more radical than any Supreme Court in modern history. If Congress has been unhappy with decades of EPA regulation, Congress surely has had the power to pull that authority back. But it has not.As Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the dissenters, countered: “The Court appoints itself — instead of Congress or the expert agency — the decision maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”The implications of the ruling extend to all administrative agencies in the federal government – to the Securities and Exchange Commission implementing the Securities Acts of 1933 and 1934, to the Federal Trade Commission applying the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, to the Department of Labor implementing the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and so on, across the entire range of government – and the entire range of regulations designed to protect consumers, investors, workers, and the environment. (This same Supreme Court has ruled that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was not authorized to impose a moratorium on evictions and that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration was powerless to tell large employers to have their workers be vaccinated or undergo frequent testing.)In passing laws to protect the public, Congress cannot possibly foresee all ways in which those laws might be implemented and all circumstances in which the public might need the protections such laws accord. Starting today, though, all federal regulations will be under a cloud of uncertainty – and potential litigation.A final implication of today’s ruling is that the filibuster has to go. If the Supreme Court is going to require that Congress be more active and specific in protecting the environment or anything else, such a goal is implausible when 60 senators are necessary to enact it. Senate Democrats now have it in their power to abolish the filibuster. Today’s case should convince them they must.Thanks for subscribing. Please consider a paid or gift subscription to help sustain this effort. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

After today’s explosive testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson — who served as chief assistant to Mark Meadows and was literally and figuratively in the middle of Trump’s White House — I don’t see how Attorney General Merrick Garland can avoid prosecuting Trump, as well as Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani.If you didn’t hear or see her testimony, Hutchinson portrayed a plot, in which Trump was directly involved, to stop the counting of electoral ballots on January 6. Meadows, Giuliani, Mike Flynn, and Roger Stone were also directly involved. Trump knew rioters were coming to Washington with weapons, and knew they had weapons on January 6. He knew they were threatening the life of Mike Pence. He knew they were dangerous. He wanted to be on Capitol Hill when they stormed the Capitol. He could have stopped them at any point, but he chose not to.It was the most chilling depiction yet of a president in charge of an attempted coup. Trump knew exactly what was happening and what he was doing. He knew he was acting in violation of his oath of office and inciting violence in order to stay in office. He repeatedly refused to listen to reason, or to change course.More than any other hearing to date, the audience for today’s hearing was not just the American public but also the Attorney General. Time and again, Hutchinson gave testimony about serious federal crimes. Hutchinson testified that (in rough chronological order):1. As early as December, a plan was emerging that was considered “potentially dangerous for our democracy” and with “dangerous repercussions,” John Ratcliffe, Trump’s director of national intelligence, told Hutchinson at the time.2. When Attorney General Barr said publicly that the Justice Department hadn’t found evidence of election fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the election, Trump exploded – throwing lunch against the wall of the dining room off the Oval Office, breaking plates. When she attempted to help the valet clean up, the valet warned Hutchinson to stay clear of him.3. On the evening of January 2, Giuliani asked Hutchinson, “Cass, are you excited for the 6th? It’s going to be a great day. We’re going to the Capitol. Talk to the Chief about it.” When she spoke with Meadows, he said “there’s a lot going on Cass … things may get real, real bad on January 6.”4. On January 4, Trump’s national security advisor Robert O’Brien asked if he could speak with Meadows about potential violence on January 6. Tony Ornato, Deputy Chief of Staff in charge of all security, also had reports of potential violence on January 6.5. On January 5, Trump asked Meadows to speak with Roger Stone and Mike Flynn; Hutchinson believes they talked. Flynn had set up a “war room” at the Willard Hotel. Meadows wanted to join their meeting but Hutchinson advised against it. He dialed into the meeting instead.6. On the morning of January 6, Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, asked Hutchinson to “please make sure we don’t go up to the Capitol, we’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable.” He was “concerned we were obstructing justice or obstructing the electoral count” and “look like we were inciting a riot.”7. Moments before his January 6 rally on the ellipse, Trump was angry because he wanted the area to be filled with his supporters and worried that camera shots would show it sparsely filled. When told that Secret Service wasn’t letting people with dangerous weapons through the metal detectors (magnetometers), Trump said: “I don’t f*****g care they have weapons. Let my people in. They aren’t here to hurt me. Take the magnetometers away” and “they can march to the Capitol after the rally is over.”8. Later, when Trump was finishing his speech and rioters were on the way to the Capitol, Ornato asked Hutchinson to let Meadows know of the danger. But Meadows didn’t want to hear it. Sitting in a secure vehicle near the ellipse, Meadows repeatedly shut the door on her. Almost a half hour later, when she was finally able to tell him of the danger, he said “Alright, how much longer does the president have left in his speech?”9. When Trump was back in his limousine (“the beast”) after the rally, he wanted to go to the Capitol but the Secret Service wouldn’t let him. When chief Secret Service agent Bobby Engle refused, Trump tried to grab the steering wheel and then lunged at Engle. 10. When the riot began, and they were back in the White House. Hutchinson heard Meadows tell Cipillone, “The President doesn’t want to do anything about it.” Moments later, when Cipillone and Meadows met with Trump, Hutchinson heard them talking about the “hang Mike Pence chants.” A few minutes later, when Cipillone told Meadows, “Mark we need to do something more, they’re literally calling for VP to be hung,” Meadows said, “you heard him, he doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong, and Mike deserves it.”11. As rioters stormed the Capitol, many people phoned Meadows, urging that Trump tell rioters to stop. He could easily have walked down

Donald Trump’s legacy — a proto-fascist movement we might call Trumpism — includes a Supreme Court rapidly taking America backwards, state legislatures suppressing votes and taking over election machinery, and an emboldened oligarchy taking over the economy. While the January 6 committee is doing a fine job exposing Trump’s attempted coup that culminated in the attack on the Capitol, it is not part of the committee’s charge to reveal why so many Americans were willing — and continue to be willing — to go along with Trump. Yet if America fails to address the causes of Trumpism, the attempted coup he began will continue, and at some point it will succeed. My purpose in today’s post (and others to come) is to begin to expose the roots of Trumpism , and suggest what must be done. Let me start with some personal history. In the fall of 2015, I visited Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Missouri, and North Carolina. I was doing research on the changing nature of work in America. During my visits I spoke with many of the same people I had met twenty years before when I was secretary of labor, as well as with some of their grown children. I asked them about their jobs, their views about America, and their thoughts on a variety of issues. What I was really seeking was their sense of the system as a whole and how they were faring in it.What I heard surprised me. Twenty years before, many had expressed frustration that they weren’t doing better. Now they were angry – at their employers, the government, and Wall Street; angry that they hadn’t been able to save for their retirement; angry that their children weren’t doing any better than they did at their children’s age. They were angry at those at the top who they felt had rigged the system against them, and for their own benefit. Several had lost jobs, savings, or homes in the Great Recession following the financial crisis. By the time I spoke with them, most were back in jobs, but the jobs paid no more than they had two decades before in terms of purchasing power. I heard the term “rigged system” so often that I began asking people what they meant by it. They spoke about the bailout of Wall Street, political payoffs, insider deals, CEO pay, and “crony capitalism.” These complaints came from people who identified themselves as Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. A few had joined the Tea Party. Some others had briefly been involved in the Occupy movement. Yet most of them didn’t consider themselves political. They were white, Black, and Latino, from union households and non-union. The only characteristic they had in common apart from the states and regions where I found them was their positions on the income ladder. All were middle class and below. All were struggling. They no longer felt they had a fair chance to make it. With the 2016 political primaries looming, I asked them which candidates they found most attractive. At that time, the leaders of both parties favored Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush to be the Democratic and Republican candidates, respectively. Yet no one I spoke with mentioned either Clinton or Bush. They talked about Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. When I asked why, they said Sanders or Trump would “shake things up,” or “make the system work again,” or “stop the corruption,” or “end the rigging.”The following year, Sanders — a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont who described himself as a democratic socialist and who wasn’t even a Democrat until the 2016 presidential primary — came within a whisker of beating Hillary Clinton in the Iowa caucus, routed her in the New Hampshire primary, garnered over 47 percent of the caucus-goers in Nevada, and ended up with 46 percent of the pledged delegates from Democratic primaries and caucuses. Had the Democratic National Committee not tipped the scales against him, I’m convinced Sanders would have been the Democratic Party’s nominee. Trump — a sixty-nine-year-old egomaniacal billionaire reality TV star who had never held elective office or had anything to do with the Republican Party, and who lied compulsively about almost everything — won the Republican primaries and then went on to beat Clinton, one of the most experienced and well-connected politicians in modern America (granted, he didn’t win the popular vote, and had some help from the Kremlin).Something very big had happened, and it wasn’t due to Sanders’s magnetism or Trump’s likability. It was a rebellion against the establishment. That rebellion — or, if you will, revolution — continues to this day. Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush had all the advantages — deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisors, all the name recognition you could want — but neither of them could credibly convince voters they weren’t part of the system, and therefore part of the problem. When I interviewed these people, the overall economy was doing well in terms of the standard economic indicators of employment a

When I was in kindergarten in 1951, I was the shortest kid in all of Lewisboro Elementary School, Public School #1. Not surprisingly, perhaps, I was cast as Baby Jesus in the annual school Christmas pageant. My role didn’t require much preparation or talent. I just had to lie on some straw strewn on the stage and look at children playing Mary and Joseph, the three Wise Men, and assorted angels, and then sit up and join the rest of the school in prayer and carols. The problem for me was that even at the tender age of five, I felt that what I was doing was profoundly wrong. I knew Jesus was Jewish, but my family did not celebrate Christmas and did not believe Jesus was the Messiah. Yet here I was, playing Jesus on stage before the entire school, and praying and singing songs praising him. I felt vulnerable and guilty. What was I to do? I did the only thing my five-year-old brain could come up with: I apologized to God. I did it quietly as I lay on the straw on the stage, under my breath so no one else would hear, and then apologized again during the prayers and Christmas carols. I whispered, “God, I didn’t have a choice. I was cast as Baby Jesus. I don’t celebrate Christmas. It’s against my religion. Please forgive me. Thank you.”In the intervening years since that Christmas pageant, the Supreme Court fortified the wall separating church and state. For years, no public school would have had me play Baby Jesus or pray and sing carols — at least not until today. Today the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a former high school football coach who repeatedly led his players in postgame prayers at midfield. There were also prayers in the locker room. (At the homecoming game, the coach was joined in the postgame prayer by members of the public, a state legislator and the media.)Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, writing for his fellow Republican appointees in the 6-to-3 decision, ruled that the coach’s prayers were protected by the Constitution’s guarantees of free speech and free religious exercise.Writing for the dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said: “Official-led prayer strikes at the core of our constitutional protections for the religious liberty of students and their parents … The Court now charts a different path.”Today, I thought of myself at the age of five, and felt as vulnerable as I did then. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe