The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich

Friends,Like many of you, I found it a difficult weekend. As Friday’s decision by the six Republican nominees on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade sank in — along with Clarence Thomas’s threat to use the same logic to put a whole range of other rights on the chopping block, including marriage equality and full access to contraception — I became aware once again just how fragile are the rights we assumed we had. In just two days last week, the court deferred to the states on reproductive rights but struck down reasonable efforts by states to prevent gun violence. There is no logic here — just ideology. This has been the pattern for a decade or more. Even before Trump’s nominees were confirmed, the court’s conservatives had expanded the rights of corporations to flood our democracy with money while gutting the Voting Rights Act. What to do? Like many of you, I vacillate from outrage to despair. We have lost control of the Supreme Court. Many believe we’re about to lose control of Congress. Children are being gunned down by assault weapons. States are banning books about racism. Having gutted the Voting Rights Act, conservatives are leveraging every form of voter suppression they can, while the Senate — nominally under Democratic control — cannot pass a bill to protect the vote. Climate disaster looms yet we are doing little to stop it. Meanwhile, the man who engineered an attempted coup is still free to run for reelection and the Republican Party is slouching toward fascism. We can protest all we want, but everything we believe in depends on politics and power. Which is why the most important thing we can do now is to mobilize like mad for the midterm elections. We need enough Democrats in the House and Senate to carve out exemptions from the filibuster and pass national laws that guard reproductive rights, sexual rights, marriage rights, voting rights, and the planet. I know, I know. Democrats already have majorities in the House and Senate, yet that hasn’t been enough. The only answer is larger majorities — with Democrats who are not afraid to be Democrats, who have spines and care about the country, protect the Constitution, and preserve the world. All of this is on the ballot in November. My small contribution is found on these pages and in the videos I make with my young colleagues at Inequality Media — such as the one we just did, below, on the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe and the threat it poses to other rights. I keep telling the young people I work with and in the classes I teach that I grew up in an America that expanded constitutional rights, battled racism and protected voting rights, and enlarged the middle class. I tell them that if we did it then, we can do so again. They hear me but I’m not sure they believe me. Their young lives have been marked mostly by public failure. Many were motivated to vote for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2016, and against Trump in 2020, but their patience is wearing thin. My scribbles on this page along with the videos are means of fighting back — spreading the word, educating people about what’s at stake and why we must take action, and arming people with arguments they need to make the case to those not yet convinced. So when I ask you to please share, I ask in the spirit of a political act. Sharing as a means of edifying, organizing, and mobilizing. Sharing to make our voices heard. Sharing for ideals that still burn bright. 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 three things giving Heather a headache and making Bob’s blood boil — the Supreme Court become so radically rightwing that even John Roberts has lost control over it, a Republican Party become so nuts that it’s impervious to the January 6 committee hearings, and economists and policymakers at the Fed become such apologists for corporations that they’re blaming inflation on wage increases rather than on corporate profits. Heather also gives old Bob the nicest compliment he’s ever received. 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

If there’s any doubt about the extremism of the Supreme Court’s six Republican appointees, it was on full display today with their opinion in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overrules Roe v. Wade, establishing the right to an abortion. Roe had been the law of the land for almost fifty years.Even more ominous is Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion, in which he argues that the same rationale the court used to overrule Roe should be used to overturn cases establishing rights to contraception, same-sex consensual relations and same-sex marriage. Thomas is pointing the way for the radicals on the court to take in the future.If the due process clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution doesn’t protect abortion, says Thomas, the court “should reconsider” other cases that rely on the same clause: Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 decision that declared married couples have a right to contraception; Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 case invalidating sodomy laws and making same-sex sexual activity legal across the country; and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case establishing the right of gay couples to marry. Thomas says the court has a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents. That’s not all. After “overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions” protected the rights they established, says Thomas. I was in law school in 1973 when the Supreme Court decided Roe v Wade. Also in my class at the time was Clarence Thomas, along with Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Clinton) and Bill Clinton.As I’ve noted before, our law professors used the “Socratic method” – asking hard questions about the cases they were discussing and waiting for students to raise their hands in response, and then criticizing the responses. It was a hair-raising but effective way to learn the law.One of the principles guiding those discussions is called stare decisis — Latin for “to stand by things decided.” It’s the doctrine of judicial precedent. If a court has already ruled on an issue (say, on reproductive rights or gay marriage), future courts should decide similar cases the same way. The Supreme Court can change its mind and rule differently than before, but it needs good reasons to do so, and it helps if the justice’s opinion is unanimous or nearly so. Otherwise, the rulings appear (and are) arbitrary — even, shall we say? — political.In those classroom discussions almost fifty years ago, Hillary’s hand was always first in the air. When she was called upon, she gave perfect answers – whole paragraphs, precisely phrased. She distinguished one case from another, using precedents and stare decisis to guide her thinking. I was awed.My hand was in the air about half the time, and when called on, my answers were meh.Clarence’s hand was never in the air. I don’t recall him saying anything, ever.Bill was never in class.Only one of us now sits on the Supreme Court. He and five of his colleagues — all appointed by Republican presidents, five by presidents who lost the popular vote, three by a president who instigated a coup against the United States — are now violating stare decisis. They have not given a clear and convincing argument for why. Thomas wants the court to reverse more than a half century of rights.The Supreme Court is now firmly in the hands of radicals, eager to throw stare decisis out the window. They are part of the anti-democracy movement now threatening 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

Yesterday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell, testifying before the Senate Banking Committee, said outright that the Fed’s higher interest rates won’t lower the prices of gas or groceries. Hello? Gas and food prices are the two items hitting families the hardest, and the Fed is openly admitting that raising interest rates will do nothing to ease the burden? What rate hikes will do is force millions of Americans into joblessness and make families poorer. As Senator Elizabeth Warren said during her questioning of Powell, “You know what’s worse than high inflation and low unemployment? It’s high inflation with a recession and millions of people out of work.”Earlier this week, Larry Summers argued that 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. If that’s the case, the cure is worse than the disease. Let’s be clear: Workers aren’t to blame for inflation. Wages aren’t pushing up prices. Real wages have dropped 3.5 percent over the last 12 months. Corporate profits are pushing up prices. The goal of policymakers should not be to restrain wages, but to restrain monopoly profits. Powell’s and Summers’s remarks remind me of a debate I had with Summers’s predecessor at the Treasury, Lloyd Bentsen, more than two decades ago. (From my memoir “Locked in the Cabinet”): May 11, 1994, Washington[Fed Chair Alan] Greenspan has been raising interest rates. He started three months ago and is about to do so again. My colleagues seem intent on egging him on. Lloyd Bentsen argues that the administration should publicly state that the economy is approaching its “natural” rate of unemployment—the lowest rate achievable without igniting inflation. This, he reasons, will reassure Wall Street that we won’t object if the Fed tightens the reins. And that reassurance should maintain Wall Street’s confidence that we’re committed to the inflation fight, which, in turn, will keep long-term rates well under control. I’m flabbergasted. “How can we be near the natural rate of unemployment when eight and a half million people can’t find jobs?” I ask. Bentsen stares at me like I’m a Texas toad. Others around the table explain to me that the last time unemployment was about to dip below six percent—at the end of the 1980s—wages started to rise, pushing up prices. “We can’t let Wall Street lose confidence.” The familiar chorus. But the economy is different than it was then. Workers aren’t about to demand wage increases this time around. The 1991–92 recession was a watershed. Most people who lost their jobs weren’t rehired by their former employers. In fact, job insecurity is now endemic. Big companies are downsizing. Medium-sized ones are outsourcing and subcontracting. Out of concern that Lloyd’s proposal will carry, I inject a political note. “Has anybody forgotten?” I ask, far too condescendingly. “We’re Democrats. Even if we are approaching the danger zone where low unemployment might trigger inflation, we should err on the side of more jobs, not higher bond prices. That’s why we’re sitting here, and not the economic advisers to a Republican president.” One or two heads nod in agreement, encouraging me on. “So here’s my proposal: The President should warn the Fed against any further increases in interest rates.” My idea is rejected out of hand. But, happily, so is Lloyd’s. A standoff is better than the likely alternative.Lloyd does have a point, and it’s a conversation I wish we had. There’s some level of unemployment that will trigger inflation, and whatever that magic level might be, it will still leave millions of people out of work. A seeming paradox: Millions of people unemployed or underemployed, and yet wages begin to creep upward because employers can’t fill jobs. Paradox explained: They can’t fill the jobs with these people. These people are walled off from the economy because they lack the education, or have the wrong skills, or don’t know what’s required, or are assumed to be too old to make the change. So whatever the “natural” rate of unemployment, we don’t have to assume it’s fixed there. It can be reduced by helping these people scale the wall. We keep having these goddamn arid debates about deficits and interest rates, as if they were the only variables, as if we were dealing with immutable laws of physics. But economics isn’t a physical science. Its “laws” are subject to change. And the softer variables—ignorance, isolation, prejudice—make all the difference. I wish I could show them Father Cunningham’s project in Detroit, or the East Los Angeles Skills Center, or the community colleges brimming with adults trying to make something more of themselves, or exceptional companies—like L-S Electro-Galvanizing in Cleveland—that are building loyalty and teamwork while they upgrade employee skills. We should be puzzling over how we can help more Americans become productive citizens rather than how we can help more bond traders stay confident. This

Yesterday, the Supreme Court knocked down part of the wall between church and state with a ruling that’s likely to force taxpayers to fund religious indoctrination at Christian schools. So, today’s questions: (1) How much do you think the same conservatives championing this decision would freak out if they thought their tax dollars were being used to fund Islamic madrasas? And (2) if religious institutions can receive tax dollars and make partisan political endorsements, while receiving billions in income, shouldn’t they be stripped of their tax exempt status?What do you think? Please comment below. (I’ll chime in as well.)Excellent discussion. I’ve responded to many of your comments but let me add one of my own here: The First Amendment to the Constitution says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." That should be enough for a Supreme Court justice claiming to read only the plain words of the text. A Justice claiming to be an "originalist," seeking to know what was in the minds of the Framers, can view their writings, which repeatedly warned against an official religion or any dependence of a religion on government or dependence of government on any religion. The Framers knew English history and the damage wrought by wars and social upheavals over religion there; they were also aware of the religious intolerance of the Puritan era. They wanted to encourage a multiplicity of denominations, which meant erecting a wall between Church and State.Yet the conservative majority on the current Supreme Court seems intent on taking a wrecking ball to the Establishment Clause by using the phrase that comes right after it --"… or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" against it. The Maine law in question in no way prohibits the free exercise of religion. It simply denies public money to religious schools, a far cry from a prohibition on the exercise of religion. Besides, if there's any tension between the two phrases — “make no law respecting the establishment” or “prohibiting the free exercise thereof” — shouldn't the justices defer to lawmakers on how to resolve the tension rather than substituting their own judgment? And if the law and the constitutional provision in question originate in a state, shouldn’t there be even more reason to defer?I need a new word to describe the conservative majority rather than simply calling them "conservative." They're not conservative. They're the most activist court since the Warren court -- but instead of being activist to protect rights, they're activist to destroy rights. 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’s fourth hearing focused on how Trump corruptly pressured state legislators and election officials to change election results — leaning on state officials to alter the vote and to create slates of fake electors pledged to Trump — and their unwillingness to go along with Trump. But under the surface of today’s hearing and its revelations lurks the civil war that Trump has created within the Republican Party — between the dwindling number of Republican officials who maintain their oaths to the Constitution, and Republican officials who were (and still are ) willing to bend — and the committee’s attempt to fortify the former.1. The committee highlighted Republicans who maintained their oaths of office and did not just refuse Trump’s demands but also stood up to mobs unleashed by Trump. Rusty Bowers, speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, testified that in phone calls with both Trump and Giuliani after the election, Giuliani asserted that hundreds of thousands of undocumented people had voted, and that many ballots were from people who had died. Bowers asked for evidence to back this claim but never received it. Trump asked Bowers to hold a hearing at the Arizona State Capitol to investigate allegations of election fraud, but Bowers did not believe that the evidence “merited a hearing” and “did not want to be used as a pawn.” Bowers later told Trump, “You are asking me to do something against my oath, and I will not break my oath.” Bowers’s emotional testimony described the threats he endured as a result.Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, testified that President Biden carried the state of Georgia by approximately 12,000 votes. All ballots were twice recounted by hand, with no difference in the result. The committee played the recording of Trump trying to push Raffensperger to “find” just as many votes as he needed to beat Biden. “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Trump said. “Give me a break.” But Raffensperger testified that “there were no votes to find. It was an accurate count that had been certified.” When Raffensperger refused Trump, Trump threatened him with a “criminal offense.” Raffensperger subsequently received threats to himself and his family, as did his wife and widowed daughter-in-law.Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, also testified today. He had publicly disputed Trump’s false claims of election fraud in the 2020 election. Weeks after the election, Sterling warned the public that unless Trump stopped making false claims, “someone is going to get killed.” Trump dismissed Sterling’s warning in a tweet, reiterating — again, without evidence — that “thousands of votes” in Georgia were fraudulent. Shaye Moss, an election worker in Georgia was the last to testify. After Giuliani likened Moss, a Black woman, to a low-level drug dealer, she and her mother were subject to a wave of online threats and harassment — including death threats, some racist in nature. Shaye’s mother's house was invaded by election deniers. She and her mother continue to live in fear. Moss’s testimony was a powerful illustration of what Trump has wrought: Regular Americans doing public service jobs being subject to threats and intimidation from Trump followers. Today’s hearings also added to the list of traitors in the Republican Party, willing to break their oaths of office. They include Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. It was revealed today that an aide to Johnson wrote to a Pence aide that Johnson wanted to hand-deliver to Pence a slate of fake electors from Wisconsin. Pence’s aide responded: “Do not give that to him. Today’s testimony also added evidence of the traitorous behavior of Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona. Bowers testified that Biggs called him on the morning of Jan. 6 and asked him to support the effort to overturn the election. Bowers says he told Biggs he would not.2. The committee made much of the fact that its witnesses are Republicans who wanted Trump to win. Raffensperger, for example, described himself today as a conservative Republican who wanted Trump to win in 2020. He said he had to “follow the law and follow the Constitution.”Clearly, one of the purposes of the committee hearings is to fortify those remaining Republican officials and lawmakers around the country who continue to honor their oaths of office. The committee’s strategy underscores the stark reality that, no matter how much Democrats revile Trump, it is Republicans who will ultimately decide his fate — and whether Trump remains a force in American politics.3. A third revelation today is that the attempted coup continues — to this day. I was struck by the fact that even this morning, before the committee hearing began, Trump issued a statement claiming that Bowers had told him after the the 2020 election that the election in Arizona was rigged. Bowers denied under oath that he had said this to Trump. Clearly, Trump wants the entire committee hearings to be seen as his word v

Friends,As Congress prepares for summer recess, average working Americans are facing increasingly hard economic times — including a likely recession (see here). Yet Congress has so far failed to provide most Americans with what they need to weather the storm — subsidies for childcare and eldercare, paid sick leave, an increase in the federal minimum wage, lower pharmaceutical costs, additional help with the next strain of COVID, and so on. At the very same time, American corporations are lining up with their hands outstretched, seeking all sorts of special benefits. And there’s bipartisan support for giving them what they want.Today I want to explain why corporations so often get what they want while average Americans don’t. It’s not simply that corporations bribe legislators with campaign donations, although that’s a big part of it. There’s another phenomenon at work that you need to know about. Consider semiconductor chips. They’re the brains of modern electronics — embedded in everything from smartphones, radios, TVs, computers, video games, and advanced medical diagnostic equipment, to automobiles. As the world supply of almost everything tries to catch up with roaring post-lockdown demand, chips inevitably are in short supply. This week, Congress is putting final touches on the CHIPS Act, which will provide more than $52 billion to companies that design and make semiconductor chips. The subsidy is demanded by the biggest chip makers as a condition for making more chips here. It’s pure extortion. You see, the world’s biggest chip maker (in terms of sales) is already an American corporation — Intel, based in Santa Clara, California. Intel hardly needs the money. Its revenue rose to $79 billion last year. Its CEO, Pat Gelsinger, got a total compensation package of $179 million (which was 1,711-times larger than the average Intel employee). From the perspective of the United States, the problem is that Intel is not dealing with the current American shortage of chips by giving preference to producers in the United States, and it’s not keeping America on the cutting edge of new chip technologies. In addition to its facilities in the United States, Intel designs, assembles, and tests its chips in China, Israel, Ireland, Malaysia, Costa Rica, and Vietnam. And it sells them just about everywhere. (To add another layer of complication, many of Intel’s “American” customers don’t actually make their products in the United States. They’re headquartered in the United States but, like Intel, they design and make stuff all over the world.)Obviously, Intel would like some of the $52 billion Congress is about to throw at the semiconductor chip industry — but why exactly should Intel get the money? Among the other likely beneficiaries of the CHIPS Act will be GlobalFoundries. GlobalFoundries currently makes chips in New York and Vermont, but in many other places around the world as well. GlobalFoundries isn’t even an American corporation. It’s a wholly owned subsidiary of Mubadala Investment Co. — the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates. The point is, the nation where a chipmaker (or any other global corporation) is headquartered has less and less to do with where it designs and makes things or where its customers are located. Every industry that can possibly be considered “critical” is now lobbying the U.S. government for subsidies, tax cuts, and regulatory exemptions, in return for designing and making stuff in America. But they’re lobbying in other nations, too. It’s a giant global shakedown. India, Japan and South Korea have all recently passed tax credits, subsidies and other incentives amounting to tens of billions of dollars for the semiconductor industry, and the European Union is finalizing its own chips act with $30 billion to $50 billion in subsidies. Even China has extended tax and tariff exemptions and other measures aimed at upgrading chip design and production there. “Other countries around the globe … are making major investment in innovation and chip production,” says Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “If we don’t act quickly, we could lose tens of thousands of good-paying jobs to Europe [emphasis added].”Who is “we,” Senator? John Neuffer, the chief executive of the Semiconductor Industry Association (the Washington D.C. lobbying arm of the semiconductor industry) says the industry has been under “withering pressure” to build new manufacturing facilities to respond to the explosion of demand for chips, but he warns that chipmaking facilities are often 25 to 50 percent cheaper to build in foreign countries than in the United States. Why are they so much cheaper to build abroad? As he admits, it’s largely because of the incentives foreign countries have offered.As capital becomes ever more global and footloose, it can play nation against nation to get the best deals in return for where it agrees to do what. Most people, by contrast, are rooted within particular nations, which gives them

We fool ourselves if we believe that the televised hearings of the January 6 committee are changing the direction of the Republican Party, or that the hearings will end the attempted coup that Trump launched immediately after the 2020 election. The G.O.P. is becoming ever more divorced from reality. Trump’s attempted coup continues unabated. The first three hearings of the House January 6 committee demolished the myths of voter fraud repeated incessantly by Trump and his supporters and amplified by Republicans in Congress. A parade of Republican witnesses — including his attorney general William Barr, Ivanka Trump, and his own campaign lawyers — testified that they knew Trump lost the election, and told him so. Trump was also informed that the demands he was making of his Vice President Mike Pence to block his defeat were illegal.Yet the Republican response to those hearings has ranged from indifference to hostility. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader of the House, wrote on Twitter that the members of the committee “will not stop lying about their political opponents,” and he calls the committee “despicable.”On Friday, speaking at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Nashville, Trump repeated his Big Lie — as if the hearings never happened — and once again berated Pence, charging that his former Vice President “did not have the courage to act” in trying to unilaterally reject the Electoral College votes that were being cast for Joseph R. Biden Jr.Why aren’t the hearings slowing the Big Lie or Trump’s continuing attempted coup?First, the Lie is now fully entrenched in the Republican Party, a central tenet of G.O.P. dogma. It has become the vehicle by which Republican candidates signal their fealty both to Trump and to a broad range of grievances — some imaginary, some derived from the so-called “culture wars” — that now constitute the Republican brand. So far, at least 108 Republican candidates who embrace the Big Lie have won their nominations or advanced to runoffs, and there is no sign that the hearings have reduced the intensity of their demagoguery. Voters have chosen eight Big Lie candidates for the U.S. Senate, 86 Big Lie candidates for the House, five Big Lie candidates for governor, four for state attorney general and one for secretary of state. In Michigan, the Republican race to challenge Governor Gretchen Whitmer is led by Ryan Kelley, a real estate broker who was arrested this month and charged with participating in the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Republican nominee for Michigan attorney general Matthew DePerno led a November 2020 lawsuit over an election night tabulation error in Antrim County that Trump supporters have seized on in their efforts to perpetuate unfounded claims of fraud. (DePerno has promised to lead criminal investigations of alleged fraud in 2020 despite the conclusion by Republican state senators that his allegations are “demonstrably false.”) Secretary of state nominee Kristina Karamo served as an observer in Detroit during the 2020 absentee ballot count and claimed, without evidence, that she had witnessed fraud.In Arizona, the leading Republican candidate for governor, Kari Lake, has made the stolen election claims central to her campaign. Mark Finchem, a candidate for secretary of state, was at the front steps of the Capitol on January 6. And Blake Masters, who aims to challenge incumbent Democrat Senator Mark Kelly, says without evidence that “one-third of the people outside the Capitol complex on January 6 were actual F.B.I. agents.”In Pennsylvania, Republican senate candidate Mehmet Oz has embraced the Big Lie. Gubernatorial nominee Doug Mastriano also asserts it, and has said that the Republican-controlled legislature should have the right to take control of the all-important choice over which presidential electors to send to Washington. Big Lie nominees for statewide office in swing states also include Herschel Walker for Senate in Georgia and Burt Jones for Georgia lieutenant governor.Secondly, the hearings have not affected the Republican Party (and are unlikely to) because Big Lie candidates are under no pressure to respond to the findings of the committee. Their districts or states already lean Republican, and most of voters in them have dismissed or aren’t paying attention to the committee hearings. Recall that the 2020 election was mainly about Trump. You were either for him or against him. Voters in districts and states that voted largely for him in 2020 will not easily change their minds. The cognitive dissonance required to shift from believing Trump’s alleged conspiracy to accepting the reality of what occurred is simply too formidable. In addition, few of their sources of news — Fox News, rightwing radio, and rightwing social media — have questioned the Big Lie. Because these districts or states lean Republican, these Big Lie candidates are likely to win the offices they are seeking, notwithstanding. In an open primary in a

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action, and my former student), discussing the past week. Today we cover the third hearing of the January 6 select committee, why the committee isn’t turning over its transcripts to the Justice Department, what’s the connection between Ginni Thomas (wife of Justice Clarence Thomas) and John Eastman, the Fed’s dangerous decision to raise interests rates by another 0.75 percent, and celebrating the summer solstice. 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 marks the end of the school year for many public schools. Every year about this time I think of Alice Camp. I arrived in her third-grade classroom in Lewisboro Elementary School, in South Salem, New York, as an extremely short, shy, insecure 8-year-old who was often bullied and mocked on the bus and made to feel like a loser on the playground, and had no particular interest in school. But she saw in me something I didn’t see. She fed me books, projects, ideas. She challenged me and praised me. She made me feel special. Her slightly whacky sense of humor connected with mine. Her curiosity fueled mine (she didn’t mind if I stayed in at recess and barraged her with questions). Her enjoyment of literature made it okay for me to love books. She made me understand that I wasn’t a freak, that I might even be talented, that the drawings and writings I did (up until then alone at my small desk in my bedroom) were okay — perhaps even good. And there was no reason for me to be so sad and ashamed, so fearful, so alone in the world. I think of Mrs. Camp when I see America’s teachers blamed these days for almost everything imaginable — yelled at by parents over masks, reprimanded by school boards about books they assign or let their students read, vilified by politicians for teaching about America’s history of racism, even told to arm themselves against the possibility that their classrooms will be invaded by murderous young men with semi-automatics. Instead of berating them, we should honor them. Rather than impose ludicrous demands on them we should free them to teach and inspire. Instead of demeaning them, we should express our gratitude to them — every day. And we should pay them twice a much as they’re earning, or three times. Why in hell should investment bankers get paid fortunes for moving money from one set of pockets to another, when our teachers can barely afford to live on what they make? Bankers watch over our financial capital. Teachers watch over our human capital — and therefore our future. I never saw Alice Camp again after third grade ended for me that June of 1954. I never had a chance to thank her (although I do remember sitting cross-legged on the floor at the end-of-year school assembly, quietly crying about leaving her and trying desperately not to show it). She passed away long ago. I had the great fortune to have other wonderful teachers over the rest of my years of public elementary and high school, and then in college and graduate school. I don’t recall thanking any of them, either. Most are gone by now. But I think of them often. And I am forever in their debt. I suppose one way I’ve managed to pay back a small portion of that debt is to teach — which I’ve done for most of the last forty years. I love teaching. I love my students. I can’t imagine a more rewarding or noble profession. 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 House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol held its third public hearing today — focused on Trump's efforts to pressure Vice President Pence to refuse to count lawful electoral votes on January 6: the gonzo plan that lawyer John Eastman came up with. But where did John Eastman come from? And how did he ever reach Trump in the first place? The committee didn’t touch on this today. (When Eastman appeared before the committee he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 146 times.)Spoiler alert: The connection seems to be through Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas. Eastman was a law clerk for Clarence Thomas in the early 1990s. (As a former law clerk to a federal judge myself, I can attest that it’s an intimate working relationship. At the time Eastman clerked for Thomas, he was one of only four such law clerks.)In the days and weeks after the 2020 election, Ginni Thomas actively sought to overturn the election. She pressed 29 Republican state lawmakers in Arizona to set aside Joe Biden’s popular vote victory and “choose” presidential electors (according to emails obtained by The Washington Post) — urging lawmakers to “stand strong in the face of political and media pressure.” On Dec. 13, the day before members of the electoral college were slated to cast their votes and seal Biden’s victory, she emailed 22 House members and one senator, saying “Before you choose your state’s Electors … consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you don’t stand up and lead.” She also sent messages to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, repeatedly pressing him to overturn the outcome of the election, according to text messages obtained by The Post and CBS News. (After Jan. 6, she told Meadows in a text that she was “disgusted” with Pence, who had refused to help block the certification of Biden’s electoral college victory.)Ginni Thomas also corresponded by email with John Eastman (per The Post). Eastman must have presented his bonkers plan to her, which she related to Meadows (and therefore Trump).Soon thereafter, Eastman was working closely with Trump. He met the Oval Office with Trump and Pence. In a late-night court filing on May 19, 2022, Eastman disclosed he routinely communicated with Trump directly or via "six conduits" regarding legal strategy leading up to January 6, detailing "two hand-written notes from former President Trump about information that he thought might be useful for the anticipated litigation." (Eastman made the disclosure to claim attorney-client privilege to prevent the January 6 committee from obtaining 600 of his emails. On June 7, Judge David O. Carter ruled that Eastman had to disclose 159 sensitive documents to the committee, ten of which related to December 2020 meetings by a secretive group strategizing about how to overturn the election, which included what Judge Carter characterized as a "high-profile" leader. Carter noted one email in particular contained what he found was likely evidence of a crime and ordered it disclosed under the crime-fraud exception of attorney-client privilege. The email in question contained a comment by an unidentified attorney that litigating a case regarding the January 6 session in Congress might "tank the January 6 strategy" and so the Trump legal team should avoid the courts.) Did Eastman communicate with Justice Thomas, too? Eastman knew things about the Supreme Court at the time that no one else outside the Court knew. According to the New York Times, Eastman told an ally on Dec. 24, 2020, that there was a “heated fight” among Supreme Court justices about whether to take up election-related lawsuits. Recall that the Supreme Court rejected an 11th-hour effort by Trump allies to have it step in during the legal fight over the election results, during which dozens of lower court cases were almost all decided against Trump. Justice Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito disagreed with that decision. Then in January 2021, the Supreme Court rejected a request by Trump to block the release of his White House records to the House committee investigating Jan. 6. Clarence Thomas was the only justice to dissent, siding with Trump.According to committee testimony from Pence’s then-chief counsel Greg Jacob, Eastman told Jacob he was confident Justice Thomas would have backed his strategy to have Pence reject some Biden electors on Jan. 6. The leaders of the House Jan. 6 committee say they plan to invite Ginni Thomas to speak to the committee (it’s unclear if the committee will first ask for a voluntary appearance or a closed door deposition, or send a subpoena). Ginni Thomas told the right-wing news site The Daily Caller in an interview today that she would "look forward" to speaking with the committee. Thomas has worked with the Daily Caller in the past, including producing an interview with her husband. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers

Last Sunday night, as cryptocurrency prices plummeted, Celsius Network — an experimental cryptocurrency bank with more than one million customers that has emerged as a leader in the murky world of decentralized finance, or DeFi — announced it was freezing withdrawals “due to extreme market conditions.”Earlier this week, Bitcoin dropped 15 percent over 24 hours to its lowest value since December 2020, and Ether, the second-most valuable cryptocurrency, fell about 16 percent. Last month, TerraUSD, a stablecoin — a system that was supposed to perform a lot like a conventional bank account but was backed only by a cryptocurrency called Luna — collapsed, losing 97 percent of its value in just 24 hours, apparently destroying some investors’ life savings. The implosion helped trigger a crypto meltdown that erased $300 billion in value across the market. These crypto crashes have fueled worries that the complex and murky crypto banking and lending projects known as DeFi are on the brink of ruin.Eighty nine years ago today the Banking Act of 1933 — also known as the Glass-Steagall Act — was signed into law by Franklin D. Roosevelt. It separated commercial banking from investment banking — Main Street from Wall Street — in order to protect people who entrusted their savings to commercial banks from having their money gambled away. Glass-Steagall’s larger purpose was to put an end to the giant Ponzi scheme that had overtaken the American economy in the 1920s and led to the Great Crash of 1929. Americans had been getting rich by speculating on shares of stock and various sorts of exotica (roughly analogous to crypto) as other investors followed them into these risky assets — pushing their values ever upwards. But at some point Ponzi schemes topple of their own weight. When the toppling occurred in 1929, it plunged the nation and the world into a Great Depression. The Glass-Steagall Act was a means of restoring stability.It takes a full generation to forget a financial trauma and allow forces that caused it to repeat their havoc. By the mid-1980s, as the stock market soared, speculators noticed they could make lots more money if they could gamble with other people’s money, as speculators did in the 1920s. They pushed Congress to deregulate Wall Street, arguing that the United States financial sector would otherwise lose its competitive standing relative to other financial centers around the world. In 1999, after Sandy Weill’s Travelers Insurance Company merged with with Citicorp, and Weill personally lobbied Clinton (and Clinton’s Treasury secretary Robert Rubin), Clinton and Congress agreed to ditch what remained of Glass-Steagall. Supporters hailed the move as a long-overdue demise of a Depression-era relic. Critics (including yours truly) predicted it would release a monster. The critics were proven correct. With Glass-Steagall’s repeal, the American economy once again became a betting parlor. (Not incidentally, shortly after Glass-Steagall was repealed, Sandy Weill recruited Robert Rubin to be chair of Citigroup’s executive committee and, briefly, chair of its board of directors.) Inevitably, Wall Street suffered another near-death experience from excessive gambling. Its Ponzi schemes began toppling in 2008, just as they had in 1929. The difference was that the U.S. government bailed out the biggest banks and financial institutions, with the result that the Great Recession of 2008-09 wasn’t nearly as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s. Still, millions of Americans lost their jobs, their savings, and their homes (and not a single banking executive went to jail). In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a new but watered-down version of Glass-Steagall was enacted — the Dodd-Frank Act — which has been further diluted and defanged by Wall Street lobbyists.Which brings us — 89 years to the day after Glass-Steagall was enacted — to the crypto crash. The current chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, has described cryptocurrency investments as “rife with fraud, scams, and abuse.” Yet in the murky world of crypto DeFi, it’s hard to understand who provides money for loans, where the money flows, or how easy it is to trigger currency meltdowns. There are no standards for issues of custody, risk management, or capital reserves. There are no transparency requirements. Investors often don’t know how their money is being handled or who the counter-parties are. Deposits are not insured. We’re back to the Wild West finances of the 1920s. In the past, cryptocurrencies kept rising by attracting an ever-growing range of investors and some big Wall Street money, along with celebrity endorsements. But, as I said, all Ponzi schemes topple eventually. And it looks like crypto is now toppling. So why isn’t this market regulated? Mainly because of intensive lobbying by the crypto industry, whose kingpins want the Ponzi scheme to continue. The industry is pouring huge money into political campaigns. And it has

Friends,Bennie Thompson, chair of the January 6th Committee, has told reporters that the committee has no plans to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department. This strikes me as absurd. The major purpose of the committee’s carefully constructed prosecutorial brief is to clear the runway for indictments. The pushback on Thompson’s statement was instant, beginning with vice chair Liz Cheney, who put out a statement flatly contradicting Thompson: “The January 6th Select Committee has not issued a conclusion regarding potential criminal referrals. We will announce a decision on that at an appropriate time.”Thompson’s statement won’t influence the Justice Department. As every constitutional lawyer knows, it doesn’t take a criminal referral from Congress for the attorney general to proceed with an indictment. But what will it take? After watching the second day of hearings, Susan (from our substack community) wrote on this page: Let's hope AG Garland is paying very close attention. Whereas Ford's pardon put Nixons criminality to rest for the nation, he opened the door for the likes of Trump. It's time to prosecute, we can never allow this to happen again.Susan raises the key issue, which is this week’s Office Hours question: What levers do we have to get Attorney General Merrick Garland to prosecute Trump? Please comment below. (I’ll chime in as well.)Friends, here are my two cents:There's no way to push an attorney general to prosecute a case, and in our legal system there should not be. But I believe -- contrary to the view of the chair of the January 6 select committee -- that when the committee completes its work it should make a formal criminal referral to the Justice Department that spells out its findings in the clearest possible terms. If the facts lead the committee to conclude that Trump likely committed crimes against the United States, the committee should say so explicitly. It is traditional for congressional committees to make criminal referrals when they think a crime may have been committed. Although the Justice Department is under no obligation to pursue these referrals, a criminal referral signals that the legislative branch of government finds or suspects a crime – an important symbolic act. There are three arguments against the committee making such a criminal referral:(1) It could backfire. Decisions about whether to prosecute must be made independently of politics: Garland and the Justice Department won’t want to be seen as doing the committee’s bidding. And the district and appellate courts that would handle Trump’s prosecution might take a dim view of any intermingling of the work of the political branch with the work of federal prosecutors. (2) It’s unnecessary. Attorney General Merrick Garland has repeatedly pledged to follow the evidence wherever it leads, and he has said that he and his Jan. 6 prosecutors are closely watching the committee hearings.(3) The committee has already, in effect, made a criminal referral to the Justice Department – arguing in a legal filing last fall (over whether it should be able to access emails from John Eastman, Trump’s attorney) that Trump broke multiple laws. In response, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter issued an opinion that said Trump “more likely than not” committed crimes to stay in power.Notwithstanding these considerations, public opinion is crucial. Trump attempted a coup while president of the United States. As many Americans as possible should understand how dangerous and vile this act was. Yet at this point, a third of Americans (including some two-thirds of Republicans) still believe Trump’s big lie. For a bipartisan committee of Congress to conclude that Trump has likely committed such a crime would be significant. A criminal referral would garner big headlines. Even if it did not change the minds of die-hard Trumpers, it would be an important part of the historic record. And it would almost certainly increase public pressure on Garland to prosecute Trump -- or at least make public his reasons for not doing so. 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

Last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its May Consumer Price Index (CPI) report, which showed inflation worsening. Yet the bigger story — and bigger worry — is not inflation. It’s the distinct possibility of recession. Or perhaps both (what’s termed “stagflation.”) Here are the questions I’m getting asked most often, and my answers.1. Are we heading for a recession? Many signs point in that direction. New home construction slowed in April. Mortgage demand continues to decline. Some of the country’s largest and most influential retailers are reporting disappointing sales and profits. The stock market is in bear territory. Futures markets are signaling trouble ahead. 2. What exactly is a recession? “Recession” is a technical term, defined as two consecutive quarters of shrinking gross domestic product. The National Bureau of Economic Research is the authority that declares recessions in the U.S., and its own definition is “significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and that lasts more than a few months.” As a practical matter, recessions mean fewer jobs and lower wages. 3. When is a recession likely to happen — and should I panic? Don’t panic! If it occurs, it won’t happen immediately. I’d guess some time over the next six months. It’s a possibility that you ought to be aware of. 4. Who gets hurt most by a recession? Lower-income Americans are especially vulnerable because they tend to be the first fired when the economy slows (and the last hired when it rebounds). Recessions also hurt younger people trying to get their footing in the job market. And they can be hard on retirees whose IRAs or 401(k) accounts get clobbered. 5. Why are we heading toward a recession? Partly because of continued uncertainty from the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the main cause is interest-rate hikes by the Federal Reserve. The Fed has raised interest rates by 0.75 percentage points so far this year, and Fed officials are signaling more aggressive increases ahead. When it meets Wednesday it will discuss raising its benchmark rate by as much as another 0.75 percentage points. That would be the largest single interest rate increase since 1994. 6. What’s the connection between Fed rate hikes and a recession? Rate hikes increase the costs of borrowing to individuals and consumers — which causes them to cut back on purchases of everything, including homes. This, in turn, causes the economy to slow.7. Do Fed rate hikes always lead to recession? No. It’s possible we could have a “soft landing” that lowers inflation without causing a recession. But Fed rate hikes often over-shoot, resulting in recession — especially when they’re on the scale the Fed is contemplating. In 1981, for example, the Fed under Paul Volcker raised interest rates so high (to reverse double-digit inflation) it plunged the economy into deep recession. 8. Why is the Fed doing this now? Because it believes it must slow the economy in order to slow inflation, which is at a 40-year high. 9. Is the Fed correct? Slowing the economy will reduce inflationary pressures somewhat, but the Fed is operating under an old model of the economy — at a time when inflation was driven largely by wage increases. The way to slow inflation then was to take the steam out of wage increases by reducing employment. Essentially, the Fed drafted a certain number of workers into the fight against inflation by pulling them out of the labor force. That was when American workers had strong unions and it was difficult for companies to increase capacity by outsourcing abroad. These conditions no longer apply. Workers now have very little bargaining power relative to what they had thirty or forty years ago. Just look at the data: although wages are rising, they aren’t rising nearly as fast as prices. 10. But if raising interest rates will reduce inflationary pressures somewhat, why shouldn’t the Fed at least try? Because raising rates as much as the Fed seems likely to do will cause more harm than good. Current inflationary forces are worldwide — coming from huge global pent-up demand following the worst of the pandemic, coupled with supply shortages around the world, which have been aggravated by Putin’s war. In fact, inflation in the U.S. isn’t nearly as bad as in most other advanced economies. Slowing the U.S. economy may put a dent in these forces, but not much of one. Yet the cost here — in terms of a recession or near recession, and loss of jobs and wages — is likely to be huge. 11. Are there unique factors driving inflation in the United States? Yes. One of the biggest is coming from hugely-profitable corporations with significant market power, that are using inflation as a cover for raising their prices. (See my analyses here, here, and here.) Oil and gas giants, for example, are raking in record profits. In the first quarter of 2022, Chevron’s profits more than quadrupled from the first quarter of 2021, and ExxonMobil’

Friends, I trust Joe Biden’s steadiness and judgment, and if he runs again, I’ll probably back him in 2024. But today I want to suggest someone who isn’t even a Democrat, and whose positions on many issues I (and I suspect you) strongly disagree with — but who could possibly be the best president of the United States for the perilous time we’re entering.I’m referring to Liz Cheney.Before you reject this idea out of hand, please bear with me. Even if you still end up thinking it’s a ludicrous notion, let me take you through the argument. I’ve been in and around American politics for well over a half century. I’ve never seen this nation as bitterly divided as it is now — not during the Civil Rights movement, not during the Vietnam War, not during Watergate. And it looks as if the current division is growing deeper and even more dangerous. Donald Trump didn’t just attempt a coup. He attempted to push America into a civil war. And he’s still at it — endorsing candidates who will repeat his Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him, encouraging states to change their election laws so Republican lawmakers can disregard the popular vote, and pushing them to install secretaries of state and other election officials who will count votes in ways favorable to Republicans — especially him, should he run for president again in 2024. In short, Trump wants a civil war centered on himself — on his Big Lie, and on the racist nationalism he fueled to build his political base. Trump’s narcissism is so poisonous that he is committed to splitting the nation over its commitment to him. As president, Trump never understood that he was president of America as a whole. He considered himself to be president only of his supporters, whom he called “my people.” Those who didn’t support him were his enemies. Since the 2020 election, he has done everything possible to stoke war between his supporters and his perceived enemies. Clearly, that’s his aim in 2024. It will be impossible to reunite this nation without a leader who is the exact opposite of Trump — driven not by narcissism but by a passion for the rule of law and the Constitution — someone who has staked everything on opposing Trump’s demagogic authoritarianism, someone with huge stores of courage and integrity. Since the attack on the Capitol, Liz Cheney has demonstrated more courage and integrity than any other politician in America. Democratic lawmakers have opposed Trump’s Big Lie, to be sure, but most knew they wouldn’t pay a price for their opposition. Cheney knew she would pay a price — and she has. Six days after the attack on the Capitol — when no other Republican in the House or Senate was willing to rebuke Trump — she said this on the House floor:Much more will become clear in the coming days and weeks, but what we know now is enough. 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 following day, on January 13, Cheney joined nine House Republicans and 222 Democrats in voting to impeach Trump. She subsequently agreed to be vice-chairman of the committee investigating the January 6 insurrection. As a result of these actions, Trump and House G.O.P. leaders have sought to drive Cheney out of the party. House Republicans revoked her status as the third-highest-ranking leader of the Republican caucus. Wyoming Republicans have censured her. Trump and the Republican Party are backing her primary challenger in Wyoming, Harriet Hageman, whose campaign has received huge amounts of funding from rightwing groups. Polling shows Cheney faces an uphill battle to keep her seat.But she has not wavered.Last Thursday evening, at the start of the televised hearings of the committee, Cheney laid out the case against Trump, whom, she argued, had thrown the republic into “a moment of maximum danger” not seen before. “The sacred obligation to defend this peaceful transfer of power has been honored by every American president — except one,” she said. She told members of her own party who continued to support Trump’s Big Lie that they were “defending the indefensible” and “there will come a day when President Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”As I said, Cheney is a firm conservative and I have opposed many of her positions. But we are at an inflection point in this nation over a set of principles that transcend any particular positions or policies. If we cannot agree on the sanctity of the Constitution and the rule of law, we are no longer capable of self government. The real battle in 2024 will not be between Democrats and Republicans. It will be between forces supporting democracy in America and those

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action, and my former student), discussing the past week. Today we cover how to measure the success of the hearings of the House January 6 committee, which began Thursday night; inflation (the Consumer Price Index came out yesterday, showing that inflation continues to increase) and its impact on the midterm elections and on the rest of the economy; and — in the midst of all this — Salsa dancing and spinning class during Pride Month. Know someone who might want to join us for coffee? Please share. 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

What’s the use of the hearings by the House committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection —hearings that began last night and will run for the next several weeks — unless they lead to criminal prosecution of Donald Trump for his patently criminal actions? In a word: History. We tend to underestimate the importance of an historic record. But it is vastly important. It charts the course of the future by illuminating the course of the past. It is literally the final word. I don’t know whether Trump will be prosecuted. He deserves to be. He has violated his oath to the Constitution; he has violated America. But even if he is not prosecuted, the hearings will provide a full, detailed account of what Trump did in the weeks and months after the 2020 election — and therefore of what he did to our nation. In other words, even if he avoids prosecution, even if he is never formally deemed a criminal under the law, Trump will be accountable to history. That is not as satisfying a form of accountability as a criminal judgment, to be sure. But it is a form of accountability that is inescapable. If the committee does its work properly — and I have every confidence it will — it will create a clear record. Which means that for our children and our children’s children — for as far as future generations will know of our recorded history — Donald Trump will live in infamy. 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, we learned several things from the first hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol:1. After the riot began on January 6, many White House officials, including members of Trump’s own family, urged him to call off the rioters. He did not. Presumably the committee will provide detailed evidence of this. 2. When told that the rioters wanted to lynch Vice President Pence for being unwilling to stop the certification by electors, Trump said "maybe our supporters have the right idea" and he "deserves it." Here, too, I’m looking forward to detailed evidence. 3. When the riot was underway, Pence called for extra help from the Defense Department. 4. Also when the riot was underway, minority Leader McCarthy called Trump, family members, and chief of staff Mark Meadows, to get Trump to issue a statement to tell the rioters to stop. Yet Meadows wanted only to “control the narrative” so that it didn’t look as if Pence was in charge.5. The riot was the culmination of months of a carefully-constructed plot by Trump and his cronies to advance the big lie that the election was stolen. According to Cheney, Trump personally coordinated a sophisticated 7-part plan to overturn the result of the election.6. Yet Trump knew — because he was repeatedly told by his own staff, including his attorney general — that there was no evidence that the outcome of the election was the result of fraud. “I told the president it was b******t,” then Attorney General Barr told the committee, referring to Mr. Trump’s claims of election fraud. “I didn’t want to be a part of it.”There is much more, which presumably will be detailed over the next several weeks. The star of tonight’s hearing was Republican vice-chair of the committee, Liz Cheney, who said at the end of her opening remarks, referring to her Republican colleagues who continue to lie on behalf of Trump: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone. But your dishonor will remain.”But I’ve got two key questions about these proceedings: — At the start of this post I used the terms “we learned” several things. But will anyone who has fallen for Trump’s Big Lie learn anything from these hearings? Fox News decided not to air them. Rightwing social media has discounted them, or charged them with being part of a conspiracy against Trump. The mainstream media continues to frame the hearings in partisan terms — asking, for example, whether they will help or hinder Democrats in the midterms.— Will the hearings have any bearing on whether Attorney General Merrick Garland prosecutes Trump for criminal acts — such as violating 18 U.S.C. § 371, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and 18 U.S.C. § 1512, obstruction of Congress? So far, at least 862 people have been arrested and charged with crimes. But the window of opportunity for prosecuting Trump is closing. Once he declares his intention to run for president, prosecuting him will become far more directly entangled in partisan politics. We must not allow these hearings to become — like the Mueller report and the two impeachment proceedings against Trump — another dead letter, which I fear would only embolden Trump further. Trump must be held accountable. The future of our democracy hangs in the balance. 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 friends, I’m going to press the pause button on today’s news — including the House January 6 hearings that start this evening — and try to answer a big question that hangs over American politics right now like a sword of Damocles: Does Joe Biden have a snowball’s chance of being re-elected in 2024? With his current approval rate in the cellar, most pundits assume no (at age 81, he’d also be the oldest person ever elected president, slightly exceeding the typical American’s lifespan). The conventional thinking goes that if he gets the Democratic nomination for 2024 (a big if), Biden will be demolished by Trump (or a Trump surrogate like Florida governor Ron DeSantis) — putting America at the mercy of an even crazier authoritarian than Trump version 1.0.That’s way too simplistic. Biden’s approval rating is now at around 40 per cent. Ronald Reagan was polling at about the same at this point in his presidency when he was grappling with inflation and the inevitable buyer’s remorse that voters feel a year and a half into a presidency. Two and a half years later, Reagan won 49 states in his re-election bid against Walter Mondale. (Reagan was then 73, just short of the typical American’s lifespan at the time.)As for Trump, his popularity has plummeted since the 2020 election – a casualty not just of most Americans’ outrage at his big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him and his role in the January 6th insurrection, but also of the poor showing (and terrifying characteristics) of many of his endorsees in recent Republican primaries The televised hearings by Congress’s select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection are unlikely to improve Trump’s standing with most voters.Besides, much can happen between now and the next presidential election to alter the odds – not the least, the composition of Congress after the midterm elections, the outcome of the war in Ukraine, and the economy.It’s true that many Democratic voters are unhappy with Biden — especially many of the young voters who surged into the 2020 election. They had expected Biden to pass more ambitious legislation on a range of issues -- slowing climate change, subsidizing childcare and eldercare, lowering the prices of prescription drugs, expanding healthcare, and raising taxes on the rich to pay for all this. In some ways, Biden has had the worst of both worlds: The 2020 elections that gave Democrats control over both houses of Congress raised expectations that Biden’s proposals would be enacted, but senate Republicans torpedoed almost all of them (apart from benefits to tide people over during the second COVID wave and a deal on infrastructure). Biden also has had to cope with two Democratic senators – West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Krysten Sinema -- who vote like Republicans. Even if Manchin and Sinema were willing to support Biden’s proposals, they won't join other senate Democrats in eliminating the filibuster. That means, under current Senate rules, at least 10 Republicans would have to agree with all fifty Democrats to limit debate and move to a vote – a nearly insurmountable obstacle.An even more basic problem for Biden is that the Democratic Party he knew when he was elected to the Senate fifty years ago from blue-collar Delaware is not the Democratic Party that elected him in 2020. It’s now largely composed of young adults, college-educated voters, and people of color. In the intervening years, many working-class white voters who were once loyal Democrats joined the Republican Party. As their wages stagnated and their jobs grew insecure, the Republican Party channeled their economic frustrations into animus toward immigrants, global trade, Black people and Latinos, LGBTQ people, and “coastal elites” who want to control guns and permit abortions.These so-called “culture wars” have served to distract such voters from the brute fact that the Republican Party has zero ideas to reverse the economic trends that left the working class behind. The culture wars have also distracted attention from the near-record shares of national income and wealth that have shifted to the top. As well as from the Republican’s role in pushing even more to the top through tax cuts and subsidies, attacks on labor unions, and refusals to support social benefits that have become standard in most other advanced nations (such as paid sick and family leave, universal healthcare, and generous unemployment insurance).During his 36 years in the Senate, followed by eight as Obama’s vice president, I’m sure Biden became aware of the loss of these working-class voters. And he must have known of the Democrat’s failure to regain their loyalty.The Obama administration expanded public health insurance, to be sure. But Democratic administrations also embraced global trade and financial deregulation, took a hands-off approach to corporate mergers and growing industrial concentration, bailed out Wall Street, and gave corporations free rein to bash labor union

Last Friday — after Elon Musk said he planned to cut thousands of jobs at Tesla and also expressed worry over the economy — Joe Biden dismissed him with a zinger: “Lots of luck on his trip to the moon.”There’s no love lost between them. The fiercely anti-union Musk has been livid ever since pro-union Biden pushed a provision in a bill that would benefit electric-car makers that are unionized at the expense of those that are not (namely Tesla). In recent weeks Musk has said he has become a Republican because the Democratic Party has grown too radical. (On which planet has he been living?)Musk may be an innovator, but he’s a lousy boss — with a long record of punishing his workers for exercising their rights under the labor laws and exposing them to unsafe working conditions. He reopened his Tesla factory in California over the explicit objections of county officials who deemed it unsafe from COVID, resulting in hundreds of infections. And he’s brazenly disregarded securities and related laws in order to generate even more wealth for himself. Yet in yesterday’s New York Times’s DealBook, Andrew Ross Sorkin warns Biden against further mockery or criticism of Musk because of the “power of [Musk’s] voice and potential political potency,” noting that Musk “has a loyal almost religious following. Some of his fans have even tattooed his name, his face and the Tesla logo on their bodies. And he can often control the news cycle with a single tweet.”Rubbish. If the president of the United States isn’t willing to stand up to the richest person in America — a modern-day robber baron who treats his workers like horse manure and gives his middle finger to public servants — who is? Sorkin even urges that Biden cozy up to Musk — lavishing praise on him and arranging a soiree at the White House. Why? Because, Sorkin argues, Biden needs Musk’s support more than Biden needs the support of unionized workers. Sorkin notes that while only about 14 million Americans belong to unions, Musk has nearly 100 million followers on Twitter.Hello? Have we really come to a point where a president should check how many Twitter followers a mogul has before deciding how to treat him? In the United States today, notoriety and money can command so much public adulation that an establishment organ like the Times unabashedly advises a president to make nice to a childlike business thug. Forget the older badges of honor — bravery in war, great artistry or insight, superb public service, years of government experience, extensive philanthropy. Now all you need are tens of millions of Twitter followers, the biggest bank account in human history, and an attitude. This past weekend, MAGA-extremist Senate candidate “Dr. Oz” clinched the Republican nomination for the senate seat in Pennsylvania. Oz has no history of public service or qualifications relevant to holding one of the highest offices in the land. His embrace of junk science has been repeatedly condemned by respected members of the medical community. It’s not even clear that he lives in the state he’s running to represent. He is a proponent of the Big Lie who wants to ban abortion and implied in at least one ad that conservatives should use guns to intimidate lawmakers (or worse). Like Donald Trump in 2015, Oz is politically viable only because skilled TV producers and editors spent years crafting an illusion that he is wise, competent, and caring. The production teams on The Apprentice and Dr. Oz could not have anticipated that the illusions they created might one day pose real-life political dangers to the nation (any more than Spielberg would have worried the mechanical shark in Jaws might run for office).But we are living in an age of distrust toward all major institutions of society. The old badges of honor — which emanated from and depended on such institutions — no longer apply. Public acclaim today, and the power that accompanies it, come by way of image and hype ricocheting through Twitter and other social media, thereby creating the illusion of wisdom and strength. That illusion can get someone who has no qualifications whatsoever nominated to the United States Senate. It can elicit a recommendation from the New York Times that a president refrain from criticizing someone who deserves public censure. It could even result in another presidential term of office for someone who staged an attempted coup. 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 televised hearings of the House Select Committee on the January 6 insurrection, which begin Thursday, mark an historic milestone in the battle between democracy and autocracy. The events that culminated in the attack on the Capitol constitute the first attempted presidential coup in our nation’s 233-year history. The Select Committee’s inquiry is the most important congressional investigation of presidential wrongdoing since the Senate investigation of the Watergate scandals in the 1970s.To a large degree, the success of those hearings will depend on the Wyoming Republican congresswoman and vice-chair of the committee, Liz Cheney. Although I have disagreed with almost every substantive position she has ever taken, I salute her courage and her patriotism. And I wish her success. I vividly recall the televised hearings of the Senate Watergate committee, which began nearly a half-century ago, on May 17, 1973. More than a year later, on August 8, 1974 —knowing that he would be impeached in the House and convicted in the Senate — Nixon resigned.I was just finishing law school when the Watergate hearings began. I was supposed to study for final exams but remained glued to my television. I remember the entire cast of characters as if the hearings occurred yesterday, and I’m sure many of you do, too — people such as North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin, a Democrat, who served as the committee’s co-chair; John Dean, the White House counsel who told the committee about Nixon’s attempted coverup; and Alexander Butterfield, Nixon’s deputy assistant, who revealed that Nixon had taped all conversations in the White House. But to my young eyes, the hero of the Watergate hearings was the committee’s Republican co-chair, Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, Jr. Baker had deep ties to the Republican Party. His father was a Republican Congress­man and his father-in-law was Senate minor­ity leader for a decade. Notwithstanding those ties, Baker put his loyalty to the Constitution and rule of law ahead of his loyalty to his party or the president. His steadiness and care, and the tenacity with which he questioned witnesses, helped America view the Watergate hearings as a search for truth rather than a partisan “witch hunt,” as Nixon described them. It was Baker who famously asked Dean, “what did the president know and when did he know it?” And it was Baker who led all the other Republicans on the committee to join with Democrats in voting to subpoena the White House tapes — the first time a congres­sional commit­tee had ever issued a subpoena to a Pres­id­ent, and only the second time since 1807 that anyone had subpoenaed the chief exec­ut­ive. Fast forward 49 years. This week, Baker’s role will be played by Cheney. Her Republican pedigree is no less impressive than Baker’s was: She is the elder daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and Second Lady Lynne Cheney. She held several positions in the George W. Bush administration. She is a staunch conservative. And, before House Republicans ousted her, she chaired the House Republican Conference, the third-highest position in the House Republican leadership. Cheney’s responsibility this week will be similar to Baker’s 49 years ago — to be the steady voice of non-partisan common sense, helping the nation view the hearings as a search for truth rather than a “witch hunt,” as Trump has characterized them. In many ways, though, Cheney’s role will be far more challenging than Baker’s. Forty-nine years ago, American politics was a tame affair compared to the viciousness of today’s political culture. Republican senators didn’t threaten to take away Howard Baker’s seniority or his leadership position. The Tennessee Republican Party didn’t oust him. Nixon didn’t make threatening speeches about him. Baker received no death threats, as far as anyone knows. It will be necessary for Cheney to show — as did Baker — more loyalty to the Constitution and the rule of law than to her party or the former president. But she also will have to cope with a nation more bitterly divided over Trump’s big lie than it ever was over Nixon and his coverup of the Watergate burglary. She will have to face a Republican Party that has largely caved in to Trump’s lie — enabling and encouraging it. Baker’s Republican Party never aligned itself with Nixon’s lies. Meanwhile, Cheney’s career has suffered and her life and the lives of her family have been threatened. The criminal acts for which Richard Nixon was responsible — while serious enough to undermine the integrity of the White House and compromise our system of government — pale relative to Trump’s. Nixon tried to cover up a third-rate burglary. Trump tried to overthrow our system of government. The January 6 insurrection was not an isolated event. It was part of a concerted effort by Trump to use his lie that the 2020 election was stolen as a means to engineer a coup, while whipping up anger and distrust among his supporters toward our system of government. Ye

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (the executive director of Inequality Media Civic Action, and my former student), discussing the past week.In this morning’s klatch we discuss whether Congress will do anything to restrict gun purchases (Biden’s passionate plea notwithstanding), how long America will be willing to supply weapons to Ukraine, the likely outcome from next week’s hearings by the House’s special committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, the winner of the national spelling bee, and the importance of drinking coffee. Know someone who might want to listen to this conversation over coffee? Please share. 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 an intern in Bobby Kennedy’s Senate office during the summer of 1967. The civil rights movement was still gaining ground, and Kennedy was crusading for economic and political justice.My job that summer had nothing to do civil rights or justice, though. And it required only half a brain. I was in charge of Kennedy’s signature machine. The machine’s pen mechanically scrawled “Robert F. Kennedy” on thousands of photographs and constituent letters each day. I had to make sure the photos and letters were lined up properly so the “Robert F. Kennedy” signature would appear at the right place.Halfway through the summer I was deathly bored — so bored that I started composing mock letters to friends (“Congratulations, Mr. Dworkin, on possessing the largest nose in the entire Hudson Valley. Yours sincerely, Robert F. Kennedy”). One day, though, I was standing in front of an elevator in the Senate office building when it opened to reveal the man himself. Bobby Kennedy stepped out — surrounded by supercharged aides, all of whom were talking to him simultaneously. As Kennedy moved into the corridor, he saw me and took half a step in my direction. “How are ya, Bob? How’s the summer going?” he asked, and gave me a toothy grin. Before I had a chance to respond, he was whisked away. No matter. That he actually knew my name was more than enough to keep me going through the rest of the summer — and for years to come. It doesn’t take much to inspire; sometimes a smile and a hello, and remembering someone’s name will do. It didn’t take much to inspire a twenty-one-year-old in 1967, even if that twenty-one-year-old was spending his time running a signature machine. It was an era when America was moving forward. It didn’t require much to instill values that stayed with that twenty-one-year-old for the rest of his life; interning for Bobby Kennedy was enough. Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Bobby Kennedy:“Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge the United States of America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”Sometimes I wonder where America would be today had Bobby Kennedy not been murdered the following June — the evening after winning California’s Democratic primary. I believe he would have been nominated for president that summer and elected president the following November, instead of Richard Nixon. Had that happened, I tell myself, America would be in a far better place now. But am I fooling myself? And what purpose is to be served with an “if only” memory, anyway? 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 a mass shooting in Parkland, Florida in February 2018, that left 17 people dead, JPMorgan Chase — America’s largest bank — publicly distanced itself from the firearm industry. Its chief financial officer reassured the media that the bank’s relationships with gunmakers “have come down significantly and are pretty limited.” That was then. This past September, a new Texas law went into effect that bans state agencies from working with any firm that “discriminates” against companies or individuals in the gun industry. The law requires banks and other professional service firms submit written affirmations to the Texas attorney general that they comply with the law. What was JPMorgan to do? Sticking with its high-minded policy of “significantly” reducing business with gun manufacturers would result in exclusion from Texas’s lucrative bond market. Texas sold more than $58 billion of bonds in 2020, and is currently the second largest bond market after California. (I’ll come back to California in a moment.)JPMorgan Chase had been among the top bond underwriters for Texas. Between 2015 and 2020, the bank underwrote 138 Texas bond deals, raising $19 billion for the state, and generating nearly $80 million in fees for JPMorgan, according to Bloomberg. Yet since the new Texas law went into effect in September, the bank has been shut out of working for the state. JPMorgan’s dilemma since Texas enacted its law has been particularly delicate because its chairman and CEO, Jamie Dimon, has been preaching the doctrine of corporate social responsibility — repeatedly telling the media that big banks like JPMorgan Chase have social duties to the communities they serve. So what did JPMorgan decide to do about financing gun manufacturers, in light of the new Texas law? It caved to Texas. (Never mind that last year, the bank’s board granted Dimon a special $52.6-million award — which is almost three-quarters of the fees the bank received from underwriting Texas bonds between 2015 and 2020.) On May 13 — one day before the Buffalo mass shooting and less than two weeks before the Texas shooting — JPMorgan sent a letter to the attorney general of Texas, declaring that the bank’s policy “does not discriminate against or prevent” it from doing business “with any firearm entity or firearm trade association based solely on its status as a firearm entity or firearm trade association,” adding that “these commercial relationships are important and valuable.”The Texas law barring the state from doing business with any firm that discriminates against the gun industry is the first of its kind in the country. But similar laws — described by gun industry lobbyists as “FIND” laws, or firearm industry nondiscriminatory legislation — are now working their way through at least 10 statehouses, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. This year, Wyoming passed a law that allows gun companies to sue banks and other firms that refuse to do business with them.The lesson here is twofold. First, pay no attention to assertions by big banks or any other large corporations about their “social responsibilities” to their communities. When social responsibility requires sacrificing profits, it magically disappears — even when it entails financing gunmakers.But secondly, no firm should be penalized by pro-gun states like Texas for trying to be socially responsible. How to counter Texas’s law? Lawmakers in progressive states like California (whose bond market is even larger than Texas’s) should immediately enact legislation that bars the state from dealing with any firm that finances the gun industry. In other words: Big banks like JPMorgan should have to choose: either finance gunmakers and get access to the Texas bond market, or don’t finance them and gain access to the even larger California bond market.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

We have been through at least two years of social trauma (if you include all the Trump years, almost six). They include a pandemic that has taken the lives of over a million Americans. Wildfires, floods, and other climate disasters. Police brutality. Trump’s attempted coup and continued attacks on our democracy. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The Supreme Court’s pending reversal of reproductive rights. A mass killing of Black people in Buffalo followed by a mass killing of children in Texas.Other than those directly affected, the pain has been felt most acutely by those of us who are most empathic with the suffering of others.Empathy varies from person to person. I know someone who feels others’ pain so deeply and personally that she has difficulty getting through a day without sobbing. The past several years have been a continuous nightmare for her.At the other extreme, I know someone so narcissistic that he’s unmoved by the pain of others. He often blames the victims, saying in effect they deserve what they got. Or he’ll talk about risks and odds, and attribute their plight to bad luck. Sometimes he even seems to express a kind of schadenfreude – as if their pain somehow reduces the chances he will be stricken, or their sorrow makes him feel better by comparison.Most of us fall between these extremes. We read about or see photos or videos of the suffering of others -- such as parents of the children murdered last week in Uvalde, Texas – and feel deep sadness for them. We might imagine what it would be like to be in their place, but we don’t feel their pain as if we were them. Nor do we distance ourselves so far from their pain that we are unmoved by it.Taking action to reduce the suffering of others depends both on one’s degree of empathy and one’s sense of efficacy. Should we contribute to a fund to help them? Call members of Congress to demand action on their behalf? Organize and mobilize others to join us in doing these? Perhaps even go to the scene of the suffering and help directly? Too much social trauma can overwhelm all these responses. My friend who feels other’s pain as if it were her own has become so flooded over the past two years that she is almost immobilized. She can’t sleep. She has stopped listening to the news.Others I know say they’re experiencing a kind of numbness. They remain interested in what’s happening but have distanced themselves emotionally. They’re taking care of themselves and their loved ones as best they can, but tell themselves they have no power to affect what has befallen others, so why try?Or they are now engaging in a kind of selective “that could be me or my loved ones” empathy. They get riled up about harms to others that they imagine might harm themselves and their families in the future (such as gun violence or climate disaster) but not about harms that seem unlikely to affect them directly, such as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, or (if they’re white) police brutality.My wish for you in these trying times is that you not become immobilized or numb or selectively empathic -- that you continue to respond to the suffering of others with concern and activism. In my experience, taking action – even a small effort to alleviate the suffering of others -- is one of the most important means of remaining fully human at a time when the world’s pain can otherwise be overwhelming. 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

Hello, friends. I hope you’re having a restful and safe Memorial Day. Today, I want to ask: Can anything positive come from last week’s tragedy? Or the mass shooting ten days before, in Buffalo? Can anything positive come from the Supreme Court’s imminent decision to reverse Roe v. Wade?Making your own decision about whether to have a child, and keeping any child you do have out of harm’s way, are surely two of the most basic of all human needs. Yet both are fiercely resisted — the first by evangelical Christians, the second by the gun lobby. And Republican lawmakers are in the pockets of both. The American people are not at all evenly divided on these issues. According to nearly every poll, wide majorities (including many G.O.P. voters) support requiring universal background checks for would-be gun purchasers, and most support “red flag” laws, bans on high-capacity magazines, and bans on sales of assault weapons. Meanwhile, the vast majority of Americans wants to maintain access to abortions before the first trimester of pregnancy, which has been the rule since the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973. What does it matter? Nothing will happen to restrict the sale of guns, or maintain access to abortions — or will it? In the wake of last week’s massacre of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, Congress is once again about to vote on gun control. Because of the filibuster, gun control proposals need 60 votes to pass the Senate -- requiring that 10 Republicans join the 50-person Democratic caucus to approve any legislation. Almost no one believes 10 Republican senators will come around, even after last week’s horror. Weeks ago, after the leak of a draft opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, written by Samuel Alito and evidently joined by four other G.O.P.-appointed Justices -- which argues that no right to abortion can be found in the Constitution or read into the Fourteenth Amendment, and that, therefore, no such right exists –- Senate Democrats tried to codify a national right to abortion. But on May 11, the Women’s Health Protection Act failed in the Senate, 49-51. That was short not only of a simple majority but, more importantly, of the super-majority of 60 votes required to overcome the inevitable filibuster. (Only the West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin crossed party lines.)Meanwhile, while steadfastly refusing all attempts to control guns and maintain access to abortion, Republican lawmakers at the federal and state levels remain opposed to government funding for child care, parental leave, sex education, and contraception, and for reproductive, maternal, neonatal and pediatric health services.It takes a great deal to awaken the slumbering giant of America. Most voters do not belong to either major political party. In the typical midterm election, fewer than half who are eligible to cast a ballot do so. In most presidential elections, slightly more than a third do so. (The 2018 midterms, 53 percent of eligible voters went to the polls.) Yet every so often the slumbering giant awakens — and with a swoop of its huge arm at the ballot box puts an end to a growing disconnect between what voters want and what politicians do (or fail to do). It happened in 1932. It also happened in 2020, when about 158 million Americans voted -- 81 million for Joe Biden and 74 million for Donald Trump. (Even then, one-third of eligible voters, approximately 77 million Americans, failed to vote.) Midterm elections tend to be quieter affairs. In the 2014 midterms, only 20 percent of young people between the ages of 18 and 29 went to the polls, for example. But in the 2018 midterms, the giant stirred: 36 percent of young people voted — giving control of the House to the Democrats. The disconnection between the majority of Americans and Republican lawmakers on guns and abortion may well awaken the slumbering giant for this fall’s midterm elections.Most pundits are convinced that the Democrats are doomed to lose the House and Senate in the upcoming midterms, as well as the presidency in 2024. They point to the fact that after fifteen months in office, Biden is polling badly, at around 40 per cent But the punditocracy is ignoring guns and abortion, and failing to see the stirrings of the great slumbering giant of the American people that these two issues are provoking. (The pundits also forget that at the same point in his presidency, Ronald Reagan was polling at around 40 percent. But as inflation declined, Reagan ran for re-election against Walter Mondale and won 49 states.)If the slumbering giant does awaken — and I believe that to be more likely than not — a mobilization such as America has rarely seen will propel Democrats to even larger majorities in the House and Senate this coming November, and consign Republicans to a near permanent minority (as they already are on guns and abortion). What do you think? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscrib

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (the executive director of Inequality Media Civic Action, and my former student), discussing this past —especially tough — week. As usual, pull up a chair and bring your morning cup. Today’s conversation touches on talking to young children about mass shootings, what we can learn from the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban, Trump losing credibility in the primaries, how we confront fatalism, if we should worry about Biden’s ratings, and the fact that many people will mobilize for the midterm elections like never before given that women’s right to choose and children’s right to safety hang in the balance.Have a safe Memorial Day weekend. If you know someone who might like to listen to this conversation over coffee, please share 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

I think about those 19 children who were murdered in their classroom on Tuesday, and feel the need to go back to basics — to the common good. Given the the difficulty of enacting sensible laws to reduce gun violence — which reflects in part the deepening split between Americans who believe in democracy and those who are throwing in their lot with Trump authoritarians — the question I keep coming back to is: what can we can do to rekindle a sense of common good? One of the most important initiatives would be to restart civic education in our schools. I know, I know: Public schools are under attack from the right. Political battles have left school boards, educators, and students in the crosshairs of culture warriors. Which is why, paradoxically, this might be exactly the right time to push for civic education. If you’re as old as I am, you may remember courses in civic education. They were required in most high schools during the 1950s and early 1960s. Mine weren’t terribly inspiring (my teacher in 9th grade civics was so obsessed by the “menace of communism,” as she called it, that she repeatedly showed us maps on which the U.S.S.R. and China — covering most of the land mass of Eastern Europe and Asia — were colored bright red, and she warned that the rest of the world was next). But merely having a time and place to consider the duties of citizenship was itself useful and important. Three decades later, after the Vietnam War had torn the nation apart, most high school courses in civic education were abandoned in favor of curricula emphasizing the skills necessary to “get ahead.” When I was secretary of labor, Bill Clinton and I often appeared at schools and community colleges, telling students that “what you earn depends on what you learn.” It was a catchy phrase designed to convince young people they should stay in school so they could get higher wages afterward. Today, most people view education as a personal (or family) investment in future earnings. That’s one reason so much of the cost of college is now put on students and their families, and why so many young people graduate with crippling college loans. (When education is seen as a personal investment yielding private returns, there’s no reason why anyone other than the “investor” should pay for it.) But education is not just a personal investment. It’s a public good. It builds the capacity of the nation to govern itself. At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a woman was said to have asked Benjamin Franklin what sort of government the delegates had created for the people. He replied, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” Franklin and America’s other founders knew how easily emperors and kings could mislead the public. The survival of the new republic required citizens imbued, in the language of the time, with civic virtue. “Ignorance and despotism seem made for each other,” Jefferson warned. But if the new nation could “enlighten the people generally . . . tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day.” Some towns during the colonial era ran public grammar schools, but only for a few weeks in the winter when family farms didn’t require their children’s labor. After the Revolution, many reformers advocated free public education as a means to protect democracy. Jedediah Peck of upstate New York typified the reform movement. “In all countries where education is confined to a few people,” he warned, “we always find arbitrary governments and abject slavery.” Peck convinced the New York legislature to create a comprehensive system of public education.The person most credited with founding American public schooling, Massachusetts educator Horace Mann, directly linked public education to democracy. “A republican form of government, without intelligence in the people,” he wrote, “must be, on a vast scale, what a mad-house, without superintendent or keepers, would be on a small one.” Mann believed it important that public schools educate all children together, “in common.” The mix of ethnicities, races, and social classes in the same schools would help children learn the habits and attitudes of citizenship. The goal extended through higher education as well. Charles W. Eliot, who became president of Harvard in 1869, believed “the best solution to the problem of national order lay in the education of individuals to the ideals of service, stewardship, and cooperation.”If the common good is ever to be restored in America, education must ground people in responsible citizenship. This requires that schools focus not just on building personal skills but also on inculcating civic obligations. I see such a curriculum as having six elements: 1. For starters, every child should gain an understanding of our political system, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism. They must understand the meaning and importance of the rule of law and why no one s

Yesterday, the Game Workers Alliance (a union of quality assurance workers at Activism subsidiary studio Raven Software) won their vote to form a union. This may not seem like such a big deal, but it is. The games industry is large and growing. Quality assurance testers do the grunt work of rooting out bugs and potential problems in the weeks and months before games are released publicly. These jobs are typically among the lowest in the game industry, with demanding workloads finding and cataloging issues within a project’s timeframe. That these workers are unionizing marks a major turning point in worker organizing of the new economy. Meanwhile, Starbucks Workers United has now unionized more than 80 Starbucks stores across the United States, and filed over 100 cases of unfair labor practices against the Seattle-based coffee giant. Howard Schultz, who returned to head the company in April, has a union busting record that goes back to the origins of the company, and is vowing to stop the drive toward unionization. But he can’t stop it. Workers at a Trader Joe’s branch in Hadley, Massachusetts have begun organizing at the upscale supermarket chain. It would be the first unionized Trader Joe’s store out of more than 530 locations in the US. “We organized ourselves. With the same instinctive teamwork we use every day to break pallets, work the load, bag groceries, and care for our customers, we joined together to look out for each other and improve our workplace together,” workers wrote in an announcement letter to Trader Joe’s CEO, Dan Bane.Workers at Amazon warehouses continue to organize, against fierce anti-union headwinds coming from Jeff Bezos and other Amazon executives. Unions are coming to the new economy of grunt jobs in high-end corporations. Between October 1, 2021 and March 30, 2022, the National Labor Relations Board recorded a 57 percent increase in workers filing for the petitions to allow union elections. What’s going on?1. Part of the reason for the upsurge is the so-called “labor shortage” which — as I’ve stressed — is actually a shortage of jobs paying living wages. At least for now, workers have bargaining leverage to demand better pay. 2. Another part is related to the pandemic and its psychological effect on many workers who have begun asking themselves why they’ve settled for lousy jobs and often unsafe working conditions, especially when corporations are scoring record profits and CEOs of big firms are taking home record multiples of the typical workers’ wages. More than at any other time in the last three decades, workers are telling employers “you can take this job and shove it.” 3. A third part of the revival of unions relates to America’s retreat from globalization. Four decades ago, when corporations began to move (or threaten to move) their operations offshore to hire lower-wage workers, American blue-collar workers lost their bargaining clout. Unions went into retreat. But starting with Trump and continuing with Biden — along with global supply bottlenecks that are now convincing corporations to bring suppliers home — outsourcing is in sharp decline. (Yesterday, Biden announced an agreement that he hopes represents the future of trade policy, known as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, which focuses on increased cooperation in areas like clean energy and internet policy rather than opening markets.)4. A fourth reason: More college graduates are now in blue-collar jobs, many leading unionizing efforts. 5. A fifth reason is a new appreciation of the importance of power in driving wages, and the fraudulence of the economic idea that “you’re paid what you’re worth.”The old economic mainstay that people are paid what they are “worth” is finally revealing itself to be an ideology grounded in nothing but power. Let me pause here to spend a bit of time on this one, because it’s important. According to this old mythology, minimum wage workers aren’t “worth” more than the $7.25 an hour federal minimum many now receive. If they were worth more, they’d earn more. Any attempt to force employers to pay them more will only kill jobs. According to this same ideology, CEOs of big companies are “worth” their giant compensation packages, now averaging 350 times pay of the typical American worker. They must be worth it or they wouldn’t be paid so much. Any attempt to limit their pay is fruitless because their pay will only take some other form. Fifty years ago, General Motors was the largest employer in America. The typical GM worker then received over $35 an hour (in today’s dollars) — which came to over $70,000 a year (in today’s dollars). By contrast, America’s largest employers are now Walmart (whose typical worker earns about $15 an hour, or $30,000 a year for a full-time employee) and Amazon ($17 an hour, or $35,000 a year).Does this mean GM employees a half-century ago were “worth” more than twice what today’s Walmart and Amazon employees are worth? Hardly. Those GM workers weren’t better

The richest person in America tweeted last week that Democrats have “become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.”Hello? Democrats are the party of division and hate? What planet has Elon been living on? Meanwhile, the second-richest person in America (Jeff Bezos) tweeted that the Democrats’ proposed tax hikes on the rich will not tame inflation and their proposed spending would worsen it (he’s wrong, and I’ll explain why in another post).In addition to last week’s billionaire tweetstorm, it was reported that Oracle’s Larry Ellison (#7 on Forbes’ list of richest Americans) in November 2020 joined Sean Hannity, Lindsay Graham, and Trump’s attorney to discuss strategies for contesting the presidential election results.Oh, and Ellison has dumped some $25 million into a Super PAC supporting South Carolina Republican senator Tim Scott, a Trump endorsee. As I noted last week, another billionaire, Peter Thiel, has donated at least as much to Trump-endorsed Republicans in senate primaries.Not to mention Trump-diehards Charles Koch (#16 on the Forbes list), Rupert Murdoch (#31), and Carl Icahn (#43).This is the same crew, not incidentally, that’s been fighting unions and flooding Congress and statehouses with cash to support Trump election deniers, prevent tax hikes on themselves, and kill off Biden’s and the Democrats’ agenda (more on this in a moment). This billionaire bombardment gives Biden and the Democrats an opportunity to tell America whose side they’re on and whose side they’re not on — in effect, to declare class war on the class warriors. Will they take it?Not in over a century has so much of the nation’s wealth been concentrated at the very top — in the richest one-tenth of one percent of the richest one-tenth of one percent. Not in seventy years have corporations been as flush with cash, notwithstanding the stock market’s recent selloff. Not since the 1890s have CEOs raked in as much pay relative to average workers. Not since the creation of the income tax have the super-rich paid as low a rate as they do now relative to tax rate paid by most other Americans.Isn’t it time for Biden and the Democrats to tell this to America? Wealth isn’t a zero-sum game in which more at the top necessarily means less below, but wealth is tied to power — and power is a zero-sum game.Many of America’s wealthiest and most powerful are now gathering for their annual gabfest in Davos, Switzerland, just as the annual get-together of America’s right (CPAC) is coming to a close in Budapest, Hungary. The two conferences are beginning to converge. Although the CEOs and hedge fund managers at Davos profess to worry about America’s record inequality and tout “corporate social responsibility,” their own corporate political action committees are doing everything possible to squelch tax increases on them, and to prevent additional spending on health care, child care, and other needs of average working people. Meanwhile, not even the Republicans’ billionaire backers can disguise the total absence of a Republican agenda to help average working people.The reason Democrats haven’t been able to get their agenda through the Senate and raise taxes on billionaires or on big corporations to pay for it — or even repeal the Trump tax cuts that went mostly to the top — is because Democrats have only 48 senate votes (all fifty Senate Republicans are against these measures, and the other two senate Democrats are major beneficiaries of campaign donations from corporations and the rich).Isn’t it time for Biden and the Democrats tell this to the American people, and offer them a clear choice in the upcoming midterms and beyond?Billionaires are mounting a class war. Republican lawmakers are mounting a culture war to deflect attention from it.On October 31, 1936, in New York’s Madison Square Garden, Franklin D. Roosevelt, facing a bruising re-election bid, defined the stakes much as they are today. He explained that America was in a struggle against “business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering” and that a wealthy elite “had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs.”He continued: “We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”Then FDR said, in words similar to what Joe Biden and Democrats should be using against the billionaires and bigots who are now arrayed against them:Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.Isn’t it time Biden and the Democrats came out clearly against the billionaires abusing their wealth and power by suppressing the wages of average working people and flooding our democracy with their money? And against the culture warriors who are covering up for them? Isn’t it time for Bide

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (my former student and executive director of Inequality Media Civic Action), exploring the lows and few highs of the week. As usual, pull up a chair and bring your morning cup.Today our conversation touches on the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) being held in Budapest, why Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have it out for President Biden and the Dems, what Doug Mastriano’s Pennsylvania primary win could mean for the 2024 election, what’s happening with the stock market (which, as we know, is not the economy), and why I’m hopeful about the state of worker power, the increasing diversity of America, and a new progressive era. We close with a plug for something I still can’t quite believe is happening. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that The Simpsons wanted to tackle the topic of economic inequality this season. And I was really surprised when they asked me to sing about it with Hugh Jackman for the season finale. You’re welcome to tune in to the episode tomorrow, Sunday, May 22 at 8 p.m. ET / 8 p.m. PT / 7 p.m. CT on Fox. I also plan to post the main musical number — a duet about the demise of the middle class — here on Substack in the coming days. If you somebody who might enjoy a conversation over coffee, please share. 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

Decades ago, America’s wealthy backed a Republican establishment that believed in fiscal conservatism, anti-communism, and constitutional democracy. But today’s billionaire class is pushing a radically anti-democratic agenda for America — backing Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, calling for restrictions on voting, and even questioning the value of democracy.Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier who is among those leading the charge, writes “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”Thiel is using his fortune to squelch democracy. He donated $15 million to the successful Republican Ohio senatorial primary campaign of J.D. Vance, who alleges that the 2020 election was stolen and that Biden’s immigration policy has meant “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” And Thiel has donated at least $10 million to the Arizona Republican primary race of Blake Masters, who also claims Trump won the 2020 election and admires Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of modern Singapore.The former generation of wealthy conservatives backed candidates like Barry Goldwater, who wanted to conserve American institutions. Thiel and his fellow billionaires in the anti-democracy movement don’t want to conserve much of anything — at least not anything that occurred after the 1920s, including Social Security, civil rights, and even women’s right to vote. As Thiel wrote:The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.Rubbish. If “capitalist democracy” is becoming an oxymoron, it’s not because of public assistance or because women got the right to vote. It’s because billionaire capitalists like Thiel are drowning democracy in giant campaign donations to authoritarian candidates who repeat Trump’s big lie. Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s rich ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced. When that debt bubble burst in 1929, we got the Great Depression.It was also the decade when Benito Mussolini and Adolph Hitler emerged to create the worst threats to freedom and democracy the modern world had ever witnessed.If freedom is not compatible with democracy, what is it compatible with? On Tuesday night, Doug Mastriano, a January 6 insurrectionist and Trump-backed Big Lie conspiracy theorist, won the Republican nomination for governor of Pennsylvania (the fourth largest state in the country, and the biggest state that flipped from 2016 to 2020). Mastriano was directly involved in a scheme to overturn the 2020 election by sending an “alternate” slate of pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College — despite the fact that Trump lost Pennsylvania by more than 80,000 votes. If Mastriano wins in November, he will appoint Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, who will oversee the 2024 election results in one of the most important battleground states in the country.Meanwhile, the major annual event of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) — the premier convening organization of the American political right — starts today in Budapest. That’s no accident. The Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban and his ruling Fidesz party have become a prominent source of inspiration for America’s anti-democracy movement. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former adviser, describes Orban’s agenda as that of a “Trump before Trump.”Orban has used his opposition to immigration, LGBTQ rights, abortion, and religions other than Christianity as cover for his move toward autocracy — rigging Hungary’s election laws so his party stays in power, capturing independent agencies, controlling the judiciary, and muzzling the press. He remains on such good terms with Vladimir Putin that he’s refused to agree to Europe’s proposed embargo of Russian oil. Tucker Carlson — Fox News’s progenitor of white replacement theory — will be speaking at CPAC and broadcasting his show from Budapest. Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows will also be speaking (although he refuses to speak to the House committee investigating the January 6 assault on American democracy).If America and the world should have learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that began growing like a cancer in the 1920s, it’s that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel gross inequalities of political power — which in turn lead to strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom.Peter Thiel may define freedom as the capacity to amass extraordinary wealth without paying taxes on it, but most of us define it as living under the rule of law with rights agai

Hello friends,In 2017, Donald Trump repeatedly lied that between 3 and 5 million unauthorized immigrants had voted for Hillary Clinton. In the last few weeks, Trump has resurrected his lie during campaign rallies for the Republican primary candidates he has endorsed — whipping up fears of “open borders and horrible elections,” and calling for stricter voter ID laws and proof of citizenship at the ballot box.Trump endorsees have been amplifying the lie. J.D. Vance, the Trump-backed winner of last week’s Ohio Republican Senate primary, claimed that President Biden’s immigration policy has resulted in “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”In fact, voter fraud is exceptionally rare, and claims that widespread numbers of undocumented immigrants are voting have been repeatedly discredited.There is a problem of foreigners influencing American elections, however — a problem that has nothing to do with immigrants or fraudulent voting. The problem is foreign money flowing into U.S. campaigns.Some of the flow is illegal. Last October, Lev Parnas, a Florida businessman who helped Rudy Giuliani’s effort to dig up dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine, was convicted of funneling a Russian entrepreneur’s money to U.S. politicians.The real scandal is how much foreign money flows into U.S. elections legally.The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission opened the gates. It allows foreigners to influence U.S. elections through their investments in politically active American corporations. The (then) five-justice conservative majority said that when it comes to political speech, the identity of the speaker is irrelevant, and that more speech is always better. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the logic of the Court’s ruling would allow foreign spending on American elections, threatening American interests. Stevens was right. If the identity of the speaker doesn’t matter and more speech is always better, what’s to stop foreign spending on U.S. elections?Non-Americans whose money is now flowing into American campaigns — mostly into those of Republican candidates — include Russian oligarchs, the Saudi royal family, European financiers, Chinese corporate conglomerates, and many other people and organizations that owe their allegiance to powers other than the United States. This growing problem emerges from three realities:First, foreign investors now own a whopping 40 percent of the shares of American corporations. That’s up from just 5 percent in 1982.Second, American corporations are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence elections — not counting their separate corporate political action committees or personal donations by executives and employees. Much of this spending is through dark money channels that opened after the Citizens United decision.Third, by law, corporate directors and managers are accountable to their shareholders, including foreign shareholders — not to America. As the then-CEO of U.S.-based Exxon Mobil Corp. unabashedly stated, “I’m not a U.S. company and I don’t make decisions based on what’s good for the U.S.”The second and third of these points pose substantial threats to American democracy on their own. Add in the first, and you’ve got a sieve through which non-Americans — whose interests don’t necessarily correspond to the interests of the United States — assert growing influence over American politics.Follow the money. In recent years, Russian billionaire oligarchs have owned significant amounts of Facebook, Twitter, and Airbnb. Saudi Arabia owns about 10 percent of U.S.-based Uber and has a seat on its board. Many of America’s largest corporations with substantial foreign ownership (including AT&T, Comcast, and Citigroup) have contributed millions of dollars to the Republican Attorney Generals Association, which in turn bankrolled the pro-Trump rally on the morning of the January 6 insurrection. What to do about this? The Center for American Progress has a sensible proposal: It recommends that no U.S. corporation with 5 percent or more of its stock under foreign ownership or 1 percent or more controlled by a single foreign owner be allowed to spend money to sway the outcomes of U.S. elections or ballot measures. Corporate governance experts and regulators agree that these thresholds capture the level of ownership necessary to influence corporate decision-making.Okay, but how to get this proposal enacted, when big American-based corporations with significant foreign investment have so much influence over Congress?Democrats should make this an issue in the run-up to the 2022 midterms. While Republicans rail against the utterly fake danger to the United States of undocumented immigrants voting in American elections, Democrats should rail against the real danger to American democracy of foreign money affecting American elections through foreign investments in American corporations.What do you think? This is a public episode. If you'd li

In a comment on this past Saturday’s post, Paula OH said: “It’s a very tough time. We need a hope machine! Anyone know how to build one?”My answer to Paula is a resounding: “yes!” And in a moment I’ll give Paula and you some hammers, nails, and solar panels to build one.First, though, I want to validate your discouragement. We expected COVID to be gone by now. We thought the minimum wage would be raised by now, that bold measures to slow climate change would be enacted by now, that pharmaceuticals would be cheaper and childcare widely available by now. We never thought we’d be back in a Cold War with Russia, that racist “replacement” theory would lead to a massacre by a crazed gunman, that Trump would be back stirring up nationalist racism, that a single Democratic senator named Joe Manchin would destroy a progressive agenda most Americans favor, that inflation would rip through the economy, or that Roe v. Wade would be repealed. And now we face the serious possibility that the next Congress will be under the control of crazy right-wingers. Don’t kick yourself for feeling lousy. You have every right to feel that way. But let me say something else as clearly as I can. I’ve been at this fight a very long time, and right now I find lots of reasons for hope. Ten, to be exact. (Here’s where the hammers, nails, and solar panels for Paula’s hope machine come in.)1. First, unions are stronger today — and more workers want to join a union — than at any time in the last four decades. Between October 1, 2021 and March 30, 2022, the National Labor Relations Board recorded a 57 percent increase in workers filing for the petitions to allow union elections. That’s a good thing. Unions give workers a voice. They lead to higher wages and better working conditions. 2. A second reason for hope: Many issues now on table — with serious odds of being enacted within the next five or six years — would have seemed leftwing fantasies a decade ago. We haven’t achieved them yet, but most Americans have come around to supporting them. A majority is in favor of Medicare for All. There’s also a surge of support for Universal Basic Income. Also for free public higher education. And for a wealth tax on billionaires. 3. The more America sees of Trump, the more most people are reminded of how disastrous he was for the nation and why we need stable and thoughtful individuals in positions of power. If Trump gets back on Twitter, his divisive and racist drivel will be harmful, of course. But it will also pull many Democrats, Independents and young people back into the fight against Trumpist racist nationalism. Ditto for all the Trump wannabes who have been advancing in Republican primaries. 4. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority is a horror show — but it’s also another reminder to most people of why we need a Democrat in the Oval Office and a Democratic senate. The imminent reversal of Roe is galvanizing a new and even stronger wave of activism.5. The young people I teach and work with are some of the most committed, talented, and progressive people I’ve ever had the privilege of teaching and working with. I’m not talking only about Berkeley, or even the coasts. I’m finding such young people across America. Many are entering politics. AOC is the leading edge of a generational wave that is transforming American politics for the common good. 6. Speaking of waves: Tucker Carlson may bemoan it, and his older and whiter Fox News viewers may hate it, but the demographic forces now reshaping America cannot and will not be reversed. We’re a more diverse society than ever before. This diversity will be a huge strength in the future. And it will be an additional bulwark against racist nationalism. 7. The myth of the decline of the West and the rise of the East — propounded by China and Russia — is proving itself bankrupt. Putin’s war on Ukraine is showing the world that totalitarian systems can’t even execute a war efficiently. Because dissent is stifled, accurate information doesn’t get back to headquarters. Because oligarchs have ravaged government funds, weapons systems don’t work. Because hierarchies are rigid and education in short supply, armies lack the training they need. Putin’s war is also revealing how fragile the Russian economy is, as is any economy whose strength turns on raw materials. 8. But the pandemic has revealed the unnecessary harshness of American capitalism. The horror of COVID has built public support for paid family leave, universal childcare, and universal access to healthcare. The pandemic has also shown us how essential our “essential” workers really are — fueling measures to raise state minimum wages (even if the federal minimum lags behind). 9. At the local and community level, the pandemic has shown most Americans just how kind we can be to one another, how much we depend on each other, and — as Tocqueville noted almost 180 years ago — how rich this nation continues to be in grass-roots voluntary efforts for the comm

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (my former student and executive director of Inequality Media Civic Action), exploring the lows and few highs of the week. As usual, pull up a chair and bring your morning cup. If you somebody who might enjoy a conversation over coffee, please share. 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

Hello again, friends. After pro-choice protesters showed up outside the homes of Justice Samuel Alito and two other justices — peacefully chanting while walking in the street that lacked sidewalks — the editorial board of the Washington Post described such protests as “problematic” because they “bring direct public pressure to bear on a decision-making process that must be controlled, evidence-based and rational if there is to be any hope of an independent judiciary.” I’m sympathetic to this view. It’s one thing to picket the Supreme Court as an institution; it’s quite another to demonstrate in front of the homes of individual justices. But surely the pro-choice protesters have a First Amendment right to be heard. I’m reminded of a 1994 case (Madsen v. Women’s Health Center, Inc.) in which the Supreme Court upheld the First Amendment rights of anti-abortion protesters to picket the residences of employees of an abortion clinic, saying the ordinance barring such protests within 300 feet of such residences was too broad. The underlying question is how to weigh the First Amendment rights of protesters against the privacy rights of individual justices. The irony, of course, is that Justice Alito’s leaked opinion finds no right to privacy in the Constitution. Please consider a paid or paid gift subscription to sustain this newsletter***Alito’s leaked decision has led me to reflect back on my years briefing and arguing cases before the Supreme Court almost fifty years ago. The Court I argued before understood that its role was to balance the scales of justice in favor of the powerless. The two political branches of government (Congress and the executive branch) could not be relied on to do this. Republican appointees to the Supreme Court understood this role as did Democratic appointees. Even Richard Nixon’s appointees — Harry Blackmun, Lewis Powell, and Warren Burger — exemplified this. It was Blackmun who wrote the Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, and Powell and Burger joined him, as did four Democratic appointees to the Court — William O. Douglas, Thurgood Marshall, William Brennan, and Potter Stewart.The cases I argued were insignificant. I was a rookie in the Justice Department who was given either sure winners or sure losers to argue because the Department didn’t want to take a risk on a rookie — a wise move. (At my first argument, I mistakenly referred to Justice Stewart as Justice Brennan, which caused the two of them to guffaw and me to be mortified.)But I was in awe of that Court. I especially recall Douglas, who had recently suffered a stroke and was in obvious discomfort, looking sharply at me as I made my arguments. Here was the justice who wrote the 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, finding that a constitutional right to privacy forbids states from banning contraception — a right that would be jeopardized by Samuel Alito’s current analysis because, again, Alito doesn’t recognize a privacy right in the Constitution.Douglas was also the man who decided that the Vietnam war was illegal and issued an order that temporarily blocked sending Army reservists to Vietnam. He was the justice who wrote in the 1972 case Sierra Club v. Morton that any part of nature feeling the destructive pressure of modern technology should have standing to sue in court — including rivers, lakes, trees, and even the air — because if corporations (which are legal fictions) have standing, shouldn’t the natural world?Sitting not far away from him on the bench was Thurgood Marshall — who two decades before had succeeded in having the Supreme Court declare segregated public schools unconstitutional, in the 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education. Marshall did more than any person then alive to break down the shameful legal edifice of Jim Crow.Douglas, Marshall, and Blackmun were the intellectual leaders of that Supreme Court. Their opinions gave the Court its moral heft. They drew not only from the Constitution as written but also from the nation as it had evolved. They understood the moral leadership America needed to protect the rights of the voiceless and the powerless. Today’s Supreme Court majority doesn’t have a clue about the Court’s moral authority, and couldn’t care less. They are political hacks, rigid ideologues, and small minds intent on entrenching the power of the already powerful, comforting the already comfortable, and inflicting pain on the already inflicted. (Five were nominated by presidents who lost the popular vote. Three were nominated by a president who instigated a coup against the United States; they were confirmed because a rogue Republican Party mounted scorched-earth campaigns to put them on the Court.) The intellectual leader of today’s majority (if “intellectual” is the appropriate adjective) is Samuel Alito, perhaps the most conceptually rigid and cognitively dishonest justice since Chief Justice Roger Taney (who authored Dred Scott v. Sanford in 1857, finding that Congress had no power

Hello friends. I hope you’re reasonably well, under the circumstances. Today I want to talk to you about leaks. I’ve had a lot of experience with them. I spent almost half my adult life in Washington. Justice Samuel Alito’s first draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade — which was leaked to Politico — was dated February 10. It is probably obsolete by now, as other justices have had time to offer critiques, dissents, and revisions. But according to another leak from the Supreme Court — this one occurring last week — the five-member majority to overturn Roe remains intact. (This second leak came to the Washington Post from “three conservatives close to the court who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.”)Thanks for subscribing. Please consider sustaining this effort with a paid or paid gift subscription.These Supreme Court leaks aren’t the only ones shaking official Washington right now. Last Wednesday the New York Times — citing “senior American officials” — disclosed that the United States is providing Ukrainian officials with locational details of Russian movements that Ukrainians have used to target and kill Russian generals. Then on Thursday, NBC reported — again citing American “officials” — that U.S. intelligence helped Ukraine locate the Moskva, Russia’s flagship in the Black Sea, which Ukraine subsequently sank.President Biden was so livid about these leaks (according to Times columnist Tom Friedman, who received a leak about Biden’s reaction to the leaks) that Biden called the director of national intelligence, the director of the C.I.A. and the secretary of defense to make clear in the “strongest and most colorful language” that this kind of loose talk is reckless and has got to stop immediately, before the U.S. ends up in an unintended war with Russia.Supreme Court drafts don’t normally leak (insiders tell me the Alito draft isn’t the first, though) because the stakes aren’t normally as high as they are with the Court’s decision to abandon Roe. The machinations of American foreign policy do tend to leak quite a lot. Richard Nixon’s Watergate “plumbers” were, after all, trying to discover who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. (Nixon couldn’t plug the leaks. Every time he tried, they grew leakier. They ultimately drove him out of office.)Years ago, when I was Secretary of Labor, I sent a memo marked “confidential” to Bill Clinton, about why and how the minimum wage should be raised. I took pains to make sure only his eyes saw the memo. The next day it was in the Wall Street Journal.People in power always want to plug up leaks. I felt that way when I saw my memo in the Journal. But the goal is often misguided. In my experience, people in power pay too little attention to why they want to withhold information in the first place. Much of it stems from not wanting to be embarrassed. (I didn’t want my minimum-wage memo publicized because I didn’t want to embarrass Clinton, or embarrass myself by looking like I was trying to pressure Clinton.)Besides, most leaks can’t be plugged up. Some people in Washington leak information to the media to make themselves feel important. Others, to kill initiatives they don’t like. Others, to fuel initiatives they want. A few (journalists, spies, inside traders) make money by buying and selling leaks.But the biggest reason Washington is so leaky has to do with the way the city is organized. Washington is a one-company town. Just about everyone who works in the upper reaches of government has a spouse, best friend, or lover who works in another part of the upper reaches of government, or in a firm that’s lobbying the government, or in the media that’s reporting on the government. In a one-company town like this, personal intimacies are indistinguishable from public gossip. Everyone knows someone extremely well who knows someone else extremely well who knows someone who has a delicious secret.Every city has its public gossip — the juiciest tidbits of which no one else yet knows but everyone will be talking about as soon as the tidbits are circulated. In Boston, it’s about sports and coaches. In San Francisco, it’s restaurants and chefs. In New York, it’s money and insider financial deals. In Washington, it’s politics and power. Possessing and leaking confidential political information confirms that the leaker has power. And in leaking the information, the leaker confers some of that power on the leakee. Leaks thereby move swiftly from one dear ear to the next — shared over breakfast, brunch, lunch, coffee, cocktails, receptions, dinners, late drinks, wee-hour assignations, early-hour get-togethers, early coffees — all in a slightly lowered voice or a behind-the-hand whisper, typically with a knowing smirk. These conversations and handoffs cement personal relationships in the nation’s capital.When it comes to secrets, the size of a city depends not on the number of people inhabiting it but on the velocity with which s

My informal weekly morning coffee with Heather Lofthouse (my former student and Executive Director of Inequality Media), exploring the lows of the week. As usual, pull up a chair and bring your morning cup. If you know others who might enjoy a conversation over coffee, please share. 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 Supreme Court’s upcoming decision to reverse Roe v. Wade (an early draft of which was leaked Monday) doesn’t ban abortions; it leaves the issue to the states. As a result, it will put another large brick in the growing wall separating Blue and Red America. Some say we’re on the verge of a civil war, but that’s not right. It won’t be a formal secession (we tried that once), but a kind of benign separation analogous to unhappily married people who don’t want to go through the trauma of a formal divorce. We are already quietly splitting into two Americas — one largely urban, racially and ethnically diverse, and young; the other largely rural or exurban, white, and older — each running according to different laws and with different sources of revenue. The split is accelerating. Red ZIP codes are getting redder and blue ZIP codes, bluer. Of the nation's total 3,143 counties, the number of super landslide counties — where a presidential candidate won at least 80 percent of the vote — jumped from 6 percent in 2004 to 22 percent in 2020.Surveys show Americans find it increasingly important to live around people who share their political values. Animosity toward those in the opposing party is higher than at any time in living memory. 42 percent of registered voters believe Americans in the other party are “downright evil.” Almost 40 percent would be upset at the prospect of their child marrying someone from the opposite party. Even before the 2020 election, when asked if violence would be justified if the other party won the election, 18.3 percent of Democrats and 13.8 percent of Republicans responded in the affirmative. Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber, please consider a paid or paid gift subscription. While Red states make it nearly impossible to get abortions, they’re making it easier than ever to buy guns — even easier to carry concealed guns without a permit. They’re suppressing votes. (In Florida and Texas, teams of “election police” have been created to crack down on the rare crime of voter fraud, another fallout from Trump’s Big Lie.) They’re banning the teaching of America’s history of racism. They’re requiring transgender students to use bathrooms and join sports teams that reflect their gender at birth. They’re making it harder to protest; more difficult to qualify for unemployment benefits or other forms of public assistance; and almost impossible to form labor unions. And they’re passing “bounty” laws — enforced not by governments, which can be sued in federal court, but by rewards to private citizens for filing lawsuits — on issues ranging from classroom speech to abortions to vaccinations.Blue states are moving in the opposite direction. Several, including Colorado and Vermont, are codifying a right to abortion. Some are helping cover abortion expenses for out-of-staters. When Idaho proposed a ban on abortions that empowers relatives to sue anyone who helps terminate a pregnancy after six weeks, nearby Oregon approved $15 million to help cover the abortion expenses of patients from other states. Maryland and Washington have expanded access and legal protections to out-of-state abortion patients. One package of pending California bills would expand access to California abortions and protect abortion providers from out-of-state legal action. After the governor of Texas ordered state agencies to investigate parents for child abuse if they provide certain medical treatments to their transgender children, California lawmakers proposed making the state a refuge for transgender youths and their families. Another California proposal would thwart enforcement of out-of-state court judgments removing children from the custody of parents who get them gender-affirming health services. California is also about to enforce a ban on ghost guns and assault weapons with a California version of Texas’ recent six-week ban on abortion, featuring $10,000 bounties to encourage lawsuits from private citizens against anyone who sells, distributes or manufactures those types of firearms.Please remember to join me for tomorrow’s Wealth and Poverty class The new separation extends even to government revenue. A little-noticed trend is toward a growing share of total government taxing and spending occurring in the states — thereby making Blue states (which are overall wealthier than Red states) more financially autonomous. For years, the inhabitants of Blue states have been sending more tax dollars to the federal government than they get back (in the form of federal assistance to the poor, education, social services, and infrastructure), while Red states have been sending Washington fewer dollars than they receive back. But the significance of this Blue state subsidy to Red states is declining as an ever-larger percentage of total federal and state taxes paid by the inhabitants of Blue states are being spent in such Blue States. (A record half of all government revenue is now raised a

The beginning of May before midterm elections marks the start of primary season and six months of fall campaigning. The conventional view this year is Democrats will be clobbered in November. Why? Because midterms are usually referendums on a president’s performance, and Biden’s approval ratings are in the cellar.But the conventional view could be wrong because it doesn’t account for the Democrats’ secret sauce, which gives them a fighting chance of keeping one or both chambers: Trump Sauce. According to recent polls, Trump’s popularity continues to sink. He is liked by only 38 percent of Americans and disliked by 46 percent. (12 percent are neutral.) And this isn’t your normal “sort of like, sort of dislike” polling. Feelings are intense, as they’ve always been about Trump. Among voters 45 to 64 years old — a group Trump won in 2020, 50 percent to 49 percent, according to exit polls — just 39 percent now view him favorably and 57 percent, unfavorably. Among voters 65 and older (52 percent of whom voted for him in 2020 to Biden's 47 percent) only 44 percent now see him favorably and more than half (54 percent) unfavorably. Perhaps most importantly, independents hold him in even lower regard. Just 26 percent view him favorably; 68 percent unfavorably.Republican lawmakers had hoped — and assumed — Trump would have faded from the scene by now, allowing them to engage in full-throttled attacks on Democrats in the lead-up to the midterms. No such luck. In fact, Trump’s visibility is growing daily.Not a paid subscriber yet? Consider joining to help sustain this work.The media is framing this month’s big Republican primaries as all about Trump — which is exactly as Trump wants them framed. But this framing is disastrous for the GOP. Today’s Republican Ohio primary, for example, has become a giant proxy battle over who’s the Trumpiest candidate. The candidates have been outdoing each other trying to imitate him -- railing against undocumented immigrants, coastal elites, “socialism,” and “wokeness,” all the while regurgitating the Big Lie.Trump’s April 15 endorsement of JD Vance could make the difference today — as could Trump’s backing of Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania’s May 17th primary and of Hershel Walker in Georgia’s May 24 primary. But whether Trump’s endorsements pay off in wins for these candidates is beside the point. By making these races all about him, the media is casting the midterms as a whole as a referendum on Trump’s continuing power and influence. This is exactly what the Democrats need. June’s televised hearings of the House January 6 committee will likely show in detail how Trump and his White House orchestrated the attack on the U.S. Capitol, and rekindle memories of Trump’s threat to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless Ukrainian president Zelensky came up with dirt on Biden. But the real significance of the hearings won’t show up in Trump’s approval ratings. It will be in the heightened reminders of Trump’s reign in Washington, as well as Trump’s closeness to Putin. The result is an almost certain shift in marginal voters’ preferences toward the Democrats in November.The leaked decision by the Supreme Court to uphold Mississippi’s ban on abortions after fifteen weeks and reverse Roe v. Wade — courtesy of Trump’s three Court nominees — will green-light other Republican states to enact similar or even tighter bans, and spur Republicans in Congress to push for national legislation to bar abortions across the country. Republicans believe this will ignite their base, but it’s more likely to ignite a firestorm among the vast majority of Americans who believe abortion should be legal. Score more Democratic votes.There is also the possibility of criminal trials over Trump’s business and electoral frauds (such as his brazen attempt to change the Georgia vote tally) — whose significance will be less about whether Trump is found guilty than additional reminders, in the months before the midterms, of Trump’s brazen lawlessness. Meanwhile, Trump will treat America to more rallies, interviews, and barnstorming to convince voters the 2020 election was stolen from him, along with incessant demands that Republican candidates reiterate his Big Lie. More help to Democrats. Somewhere along the line, and also before the midterms, Elon Musk is likely to allow Trump back on Twitter. The move will be bad for America — fueling more racism, xenophobia, and division. But it will serve as another memento of how dangerously incendiary Trump and Trumpism continue to be.Accompanying all of this will be the ongoing antics of Trump’s whacky surrogates — Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Steven Bannon, Madison Cawthorn, Trump Junior, et al — who mimic Trump’s bravado, bigotry, divisiveness, and disdain for the law. All are walking billboards for Trumpism’s heinous impact on American life. All will push wavering voters toward Democrats in November.I’m not suggesting Democrats seeking election or reelection cent

Consider the larger pattern. Putin invades Ukraine. Trump refuses to concede and promotes his Big Lie. Rightwing politicians in America and Europe fuel white Christian nationalism. Rightwing television pundits encourage racism and spur bigotry toward immigrants. Police kill innocent Black people with impunity. Powerful men sexually harass and abuse women. Politicians target LGBTQ youth. CEOs who are raking in record profits and pay give workers meager wages and fire them for unionizing. The richest men in the world own the most influential media platforms. Billionaires make large campaign donations (bribes) so lawmakers won’t raise their taxes.All are abuses of power. All are occurring at a time when power is concentrated in fewer hands. Throughout history, the central struggle of civilization has been against brutality. The state of nature is a continuous war in which only the fittest survive — where lives are “nasty, brutish, and short,” in the words of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Without norms, rules, and laws preventing the stronger from attacking or exploiting the weaker, none of us is safe. We all live in fear. Even the most powerful live in fear of being attacked or deposed.Civilization is the opposite of this state of nature. A civil society doesn’t allow the strong to brutalize the weak. Our job — the responsibility of all who seek a decent society — is to move as far from a state of nature as possible. Certain inequalities of power are expected, even in a civil society. Some people are bigger and stronger than others. Some are quicker of mind and body. Some have more forceful personalities. Some have fewer scruples. Some inequalities of income and wealth may be necessary to encourage hard work and inventiveness, from which everyone benefits.But when inequalities become too wide, they invite abuses. Without laws and norms that protect the weaker, the stronger will abuse their positions of power. Such abuses invite further abuses, until society degenerates into a Hobbesian survival of the most powerful. People with great wealth or celebrity; people who occupy high positions in government, business, the media, or the church; people whose race, ethnicity, religion, or gender is dominant; people who command vast armies — such people may be tempted to use their power to demean, harm, or even annihilate weaker people. Unless they are stopped, an entire society — even the world — can descend into chaos. Every time the stronger bully the weaker, the social fabric is tested. If bullying is not contained, the fabric unwinds.Some posit a moral equivalence between those who seek social justice and those who want to protect individual liberty, between “left” and “right.” But there is no moral equivalence between bullies and the bullied, between tyranny and democracy, between brutality and decency — no “balance” between social justice and individual liberty. It is a false equivalence and a false choice. No individual can be free in a society devoid of justice. There can be no liberty where brutality reigns. The struggle for social justice is the most basic struggle of all because it defines how far a civilization has come from a Hobbesian survival of the most powerful. Defending voting rights or LGBTQ rights or women’s rights is not the moral equivalent of attacking them. Coming to the assistance of refugee children is not morally equivalent to putting them in cages. Prosecuting police who kill innocent Black people is not one side of an equally respectable stance defending the freedom of police to kill innocent Black people. Fighting racism is not of equal moral value to fueling racism. Seeking stronger safety nets for those in need is not on an equal moral footing with seeking to unravel safety nets. Championing stronger unions is not just the other side of pushing for weaker unions. Demanding higher taxes on billionaires is not morally equivalent to demanding lower taxes on them.We inhabit a society and a world growing more unequal, in which political and economic power is becoming ever more concentrated. To claim that “both sides” — both the more powerful and the weaker — have the same moral standing is to avert one’s eyes to this reality. Lobbyists for large corporations, publicists for the wealthy, lawmakers for the privileged, pundits for the powerful, celebrity peddlers of racism and xenophobia — none deserves equal space in the public square to those fighting against abuses of the powerful. The powerful already have the largest megaphones and the deepest pockets. To allow the richest to own the means by which we receive the truth is to enable oligarchy. To allow the worst demagogues free rein is to open wide the gates to tyranny. Our duty is to stop brutality. Our responsibility is to hold the powerful accountable. Our moral obligation is to protect the vulnerable. Putin must be stopped. Trump must be held accountable. Rightwing politicians who encourage white Christian nationalism must be condem

My informal weekly coffee klatch with Heather Lofthouse (my former student and Executive Director of Inequality Media) exploring the highs and lows of the week. As usual, pull up a chair and bring your morning cup. If you know others who might enjoy a good conversation over coffee, please share. 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

Guardrails against dangerous lies on Twitter? Now that Elon has total control over one of the major ways Americans find out what’s happening (I know, I know -- Twitter is vapid and filled with smears and jeers, but it has a hugely important role in shaping the news), what can be done to establish guardrails against dangerous lies? It seems likely that Musk will take down the few guardrails that remain on Twitter — but some guardrails are surely needed to prevent malicious harassment or dangerous instigation of violence. Twitter (like Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Instagram) is more like a public utility than a private company. It has public functions and no direct competitors. What to do?Much of the answer boils down to making Twitter (and Facebook and Instagram) more responsible for what users say on its platform – just as any other publisher is responsible. In every other dimension of public life, tort laws allow people who are defamed, harassed, or otherwise injured by malicious or hateful speech to sue. There’s a high bar: plaintiffs must establish that the publisher knew or had reason to know that the published material was false and injurious. But the mere possibility of being sued causes publishers to take at least a modicum of responsibility.In 1996, Congress enacted Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — shielding website owners from liability by decreeing that they shouldn’t be treated as a “publisher.” But back then Congress could not possibly have foreseen what would happen over the next quarter century: giant firms like Twitter and Facebook making huge amounts of money by posting incendiary content that attracts lots of eyeballs and gives them mountains of user data that they then monetize — even if the content encourages political violence, riots, or gang shootings.I’ve been talking for some time about the various ways the rich and powerful in our society shield themselves from accountability. I’m well aware of arguments on the other side of this issue (and will share them with you), but I’ve come to the conclusion that Congress should repeal Section 230. Doing so would be one step toward restoring accountability.**How to stop inflation without a recession? The mainstream media, meanwhile, continues to mislead the American public about inflation. (Ideological blinders are not — and should never be — subject to liable laws. But they need to be called out.) A lead article in this week’s New York Times, by Jeanna Smialek and Ben Casselman, is a case in point. It attributes inflation largely to a “red-hot labor market.” The authors write that “America’s heady pay gains could mean that the Fed has to react more aggressively to slow down the economy,” and quote Mary C. Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, as saying that higher wages can be a “feeder for inflation,” and Fed Chair Jerome Powell, that the job market is “unsustainably hot” and that it’s the Fed’s job “to get to a better place where supply and demand are closer together.” Rubbish. Labor costs aren’t pushing inflation. Corporate profits are. If the Fed keeps raising interest rates to prevent labor costs from rising, we’ll be in a recession before you know it. According to a new report by Josh Bivens at the Economic Policy Institute, over half of price inflation since March 2020 (he estimates 53.9 percent) is attributable to fatter profit margins, while labor costs account for less than 8 percent. As the chart below shows, from 1979 to 2019, profits contributed only a bit over 11 percent to price growth, and labor costs over 60 percent. Corporate power has built up over the last forty years, and the pandemic-driven demand surge has given firms even more pricing power vis-à-vis their customers. Powerful firms have also been free to pass on cost increases to their customers because they don’t face strong competition, and have been using the cover of “inflation” to add even more to their profit margins. Bivens suggests that a temporary excess profits tax could provide some countervailing weight to the pricing power firms currently have vis-à-vis their customers. I agree. (Pity that the Times doesn’t report any of this.)***How to win a war? Notwithstanding Putin’s efforts to persuade the Russian people that his war is going well (and Putin’s generals’ efforts to convince Putin that it’s going well), all available evidence suggests it’s going terribly badly for Putin. I’m in awe of Ukraine’s ability to take on the Russian Goliath and push it back. When the history of this horror is written, NATO and Joe Biden will get enormous credit as well. Their steady hands and steadfast strategy appear to be working. Patience, tenacity, and careful use of every tool available to them — short of putting NATO or American troops into Ukraine — is turning the tide. We have no way of knowing how this will turn out (and I continue to fear what a cornered Putin may resort to), but the courage and intelligence of Ukraine, NATO, and Bi

As Trump’s big lie of a stolen election began ricocheting across America in November 2020, Arizona’s Republican attorney general Mark Brnovich (pronounced “Burn-O-Vich”) spoke out forcefully on national television. He told the public that Donald Trump was projected to lose the swing state, and “no facts” suggested otherwise. (At the time I thought to myself “good for him. Maybe more Republican attorneys general will show some spine.”) That was then. Recently, Brnovich — now running for Senate in Arizona — came onto Stephen Bannon’s far-right podcast with the opposite message: Brnovich said he was “investigating” the 2020 vote and had “serious concerns.” He went on: “It’s frustrating for all of us, because I think we all know what happened in 2020,” without explaining what he meant by “what happened.” (Bannon titled the podcast segment “AZ AG On Interim Report On Stealing The 2020 Election.”)It would be bad enough were Brnovich the exception. But he exemplifies what’s happened to the GOP over the last 19 months. Republican politicians who initially told the truth have since then embraced Trump’s big lie in order to gain Trump’s favor (or avoid his wrath) in their 2022 races. (Brnovich launched his “review” of the 2020 vote in Arizona in response to a widely-ridiculed “audit” commissioned by Arizona GOP lawmakers.)It’s the same story with J.D. Vance, Republican candidate for the Senate from Ohio, who initially told the truth about the 2020 election but then pushed Trump’s lie to curry favor with Trump — and was rewarded last week with Trump’s endorsement and $10 million in campaign funds from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel. It’s the same with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who held on to his scruples for a few minutes after the January 6 insurrection — when he publicly criticized Trump and told House colleagues he’d urge Trump to resign — but then promptly did a one-hundred-eighty and traveled to Mar-a-Lago to display his total loyalty to Trump, even bestowing on his madness a jar of his favorite pink- and red-flavored Starbursts. (McCarthy has denied ever telling his colleagues he’d urge Trump to resign but was caught doing just this). And the same for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who initially condemned Trump and now won’t utter a negative word. Up and down the ranks of the Republican Party, the new litmus test for gaining dollars, votes, and the coveted Trump Endorsement is to embrace the big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. For the rest of us — and for posterity — it should be a negative litmus test for politicians who place ambition over principle, narcissism over duty, and cowardice over conscience. How are Republican voters ever to know the truth when these toadies, sycophants, and unprincipled pawns repeat and amplify Trump’s big lie? Fully 85 percent of Republicans now believe it (35 percent of Americans overall believe it). The Republican Party now stands for little more than the big lie — not for fiscal prudence or smaller government or stronger defense, not for state’s rights or religious freedom or even anti-abortion, but for a pernicious deception. How can what was once a noble party — the party of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt — descend to such putrid depths, sowing distrust in our electoral system and in the peaceful transition of power that’s at the heart of democracy? The real question — more in the realm of social psychology than political science — is how one profoundly sick, pathologically narcissistic man, who is obsessed with never losing, has been able to impose his narcissistic obsession on one of America’s two political parties? Which raises an even more troubling question: How can our democracy ever function when almost all Republican politicians are willing to sell out their oaths to the United States Constitution in order to kiss the derrière of this demented man? Why are no more than a handful of Republican politicians, such as Rep. Liz Cheney, willing stand up to this monstrosity? This is how fascism begins. 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

Elon Musk struck a deal today to buy Twitter for roughly $44 billion, in a victory by the world’s richest man. Twitter agreed to sell itself to Musk for $54.20 a share, a 38 percent premium over the company’s share price this month before he revealed he was the firm’s single largest shareholder. Twitter’s founder and top managers had offered Musk a seat on the board but he didn't take it because he'd have to be responsible to all other shareholders. Now, he doesn’t have to be accountable to anyone. Hey, it’s a free market, right?Musk says no one should object to what he wants to do with Twitter because he’s a “free speech absolutist,” and who can be against free speech? Besides (he and his apologists say) if consumers don’t like what he does with Twitter, they can go elsewhere. Freedom to choose.Free market? Free speech? Free choice? When billionaires like Elon Musk justify their motives by using “freedom,” beware. They actually seek freedom from accountability. They want to use their vast fortunes to do whatever they please — unconstrained by laws or regulations, shareholders, even consumers. The “free market” increasingly reflects the demands of big money. Unfriendly takeovers, such as Musk threatens to mount at Twitter, weren’t part of the “free market” until the late 1970s and early 1980s. Before then, laws and regulations constrained them. Then came corporate raiders like Carl Icahn and Michael Milken. Their MO was to find corporations whose assets were worth more than their stock value, borrow against them, acquire enough shares to force them to cut costs (such as laying off workers, abandoning their communities, busting unions, and taking on crushing debt), and cash in. But the raiders’ antics often imposed huge social costs. They pushed America from stakeholder capitalism (where workers and communities had a say in what corporations did) to shareholder capitalism (where the sole corporate goal is to maximize shareholder value). Inequality skyrocketed, insecurity soared, vast swaths of America were abandoned, and millions of good jobs vanished.The raiders altered the “free market” to allow them to do this. That’s what the super-rich do. There’s no “free market” in nature. The “free market” depends on laws and rules. If you have enough money, you can lobby (bribe) legislators to make changes in those laws and rules that make you even more money. (You can also get the government to subsidize you — Musk has received a reported $4.9 billion so far.)"Free speech" is another freedom that turns on wealth. As a practical matter, your ability to be heard turns on the size of the megaphone you can buy. If you’re extremely rich you can purchase the Washington Post or own Fox News. If you’re the wealthiest person in the world you can buy one of the biggest megaphones in the world called Twitter — and then decide who can use it, what its algorithms are going to be, and how it either invites or filters out big lies.Musk said last week that he doesn’t care about the economics of the deal and is pursuing it because it is "extremely important to the future of civilization." Fine, but who anointed Musk to decide the future of civilization?Consumers of social don’t have much freedom of choice. If consumers don’t like what Musk does with Twitter, they cannot simply switch to another Twitter-like platform. There aren’t any. The largest social media platforms have grown gigantic because anyone who wants to participate in them and influence debate has to join them. After they reach a certain size, they’re the only megaphone in town. Where else would consumers go to post short messages that can reach tens of millions of people other than Twitter?With social media, the ordinary rules of competition don’t apply. Once a platform is dominant it becomes even more dominant. As Donald Trump discovered with his "Truth Social" fiasco, upstarts don’t stand much chance.Musk's real goal has nothing to do with the freedom of others. His goal is his own unconstrained freedom -- the freedom to wield enormous power without having to be accountable to laws and regulations, to shareholders, or to market competition — which is why he's dead set on owning Twitter.Unlike his ambitions to upend transportation and interstellar flight, this one is dangerous. It might well upend democracy.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

Another weekly informal conversation with Heather Lofthouse (my former student and now executive director of Inequality Media) on the news of the week. Please pull up a chair and a hot mug. 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

We recoil in horror as Putin and his forces wreak havoc and death on Ukraine — before our eyes and in real time. Both Putin and Ukraine President Zelensky repeatedly invoke “nationalism” and “patriotism,” but Putin’s nationalism and patriotism are manufactured to justify this brutal and unprovoked aggression while Zelensky’s words explain astonishing sacrifices now being made by ordinary Ukrainians to protect their freedom, democracy, and homeland. Donald Trump uses the same words, too — as do his acolytes in the Republican Party. His version of national patriotism is closer to Putin’s than to Zeleneky’s. Trump-Republican patriotism is about triumphing and dominating. Although America is a nation of immigrants, Trump’s goal is to keep immigrants out. “A nation 'without borders' is not a nation at all,” he has said. It is also about keeping America first. “The American People will come first once again,” he says. Trump-Republican patriotism is zero-sum, just as is Putin’s when it comes to Ukraine (or any other nation that was once part of the Soviet “empire”) — either we win or they win. And who or what is America for Trump Republicans? Essentially, white and Christian. Trump Republicans demand symbolic gestures of patriotism, such as standing for the national anthem and saluting the flag. But they don’t ask for personal sacrifice because they reject any notion of the common good. They view the nation as a site for self-centered transactions with no deeper and more enduring meaning than immediate self-gratification — a zone of self-promotion and narcissistic extravagance, where individuals can extend their ambition through iPhones and selfies and other technologies of instant gratification. Zelensky patriotism is the opposite. It isn’t founded on zero-sum superiority or exclusion, or on symbolic gestures, or on exaggerated notions of personal ambition. It’s based on common sacrifice for the common good. At times in our history America has come close to Zelensky patriotism. We have understood the need for mutual sacrifice — of everyone taking on a fair share of the burden of keeping America going. That includes volunteering for local school boards and city councils, blowing the whistle on abuses of power, and paying taxes in full rather than seeking loopholes or squirreling money abroad. Sometimes it has required the supreme sacrifice. (We are, after all, the descendants of Nathan Hale — soldier and spy for the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, who famously declared just before being executed by the British in 1776 that his only regret was having “but one life to lose for my country.”)America’s form of Zelensky patriotism does not pander to divisiveness. It confirms and strengthens the “we” in “we the people of the United States.” It celebrates our diversity, and fights to uplift the voices of America — Black people, women, gay and trans people, younger Americans. It believes that America should welcome refugees and others fleeing from violence or seeking a better life, as memorialized in Emma Lazarus’ famous lines on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” America’s form of Zelensky patriotism doesn’t hate our government. It recognizes that government is the means by which we come together to solve our common problems. We don’t like everything our government does but we work to improve it rather than attack or undermine it. We have never fully lived up to these patriotic ideals, of course, but they have fueled our commitment to social justice. The films of Frank Capra, the poems of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, and the songs of Woodie Guthrie, express loving devotion to America while turning that love into a demand for justice. “This land is your land, this land is my land,” sang Guthrie. 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 —.Human beings flourish through their attachments to communities and societies, and their dedication to fairness and social justice — not through selfish acquisition or domination of others. In the years ahead, America will choose which national patriotism we practice — the exclusionary and boastful version peddled by Trump with its shallow displays of national pride and narcissism, or the type we’re now witnessing by Ukrainians, forged in a profound sense of common good. I may be wildly optimistic but I believe we will choose Zelensky patriotism over its odious alternatives. 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

On Friday, Trump endorsed J.D. Vance in the Ohio Senate Republican primary. This follows his endorsement of Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania’s Senate Republican primary and Herschel Walker in the Georgia Senate race. The press has framed these endorsements as long-shot bets that “could put [Trump’s] desired image as a kingmaker at risk.” But this misses the point. What’s really at stake for Trump is the selling of Trump and his big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. To be endorsed by Trump, candidates apparently must fulfill three prerequisites: 1) They have to be running in swing states whose primaries and general elections will attract lots of media attention. 2) They must be totally committed to Trump and his big lie. And 3) they must have shown themselves capable of promoting Trump and his lie with the kind of celebrity pizzaz that sells well on television. Vance — celebrity author of “Hillbilly Elegy” — was originally appalled by Trump and his lie, and said so. But now that he’s running for the Senate, Vance has become one of the most forceful promoters of Trump and articulate peddlers of his big lie. As Trump noted about Vance, “he gets it now.”Oz is a celebrity television doctor who has over the years come under fire for bogus on-air medical advice, which makes him perfect for promoting Trump and his big lie, too. Trump admires Oz’s television bona fides: “They liked him for a long time,” Trump said of Oz at a rally in Pennsylvania last week. “That’s like a poll. You know, when you’re in television for 18 years, that’s like a poll. That means people like you.”Walker fits the criteria, as well. He was both a college and NFL star.Trump couldn’t care less whether he’s viewed as a “kingmaker” by the press and politicians inside the Beltway. He cares only about his narcissistic need to delegitimize the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. And he has a knack for recognizing ambitious, unprincipled, television-savvy hucksters who will help him.Let me pause here to emphasize two things that are too easily forgotten. First, no one to this day has produced even a shred of evidence that fraud affected the results of the 2020 election. Sixty federal judges, along with Trump’s own departments of justice and homeland security, have concluded that Biden won fair and square. Second, the lynchpin of democracy is the peaceful transition of power from those who lose elections to those who win them. Yet it’s been over a year and half since Trump has refused to concede — continuously spreading his big lie that the election was stolen, pushing public officials at all levels of government to overturn the election, and instigating an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on the day Congress was to certify the election results. As Federal District Court Judge David Carter stated in a recent opinion, “[T]he Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.” Trump is already well on the way to rebuilding the Republican Party around his big lie. He is purging the GOP of his critics and installing loyalists in key state positions. And he is inspiring GOP-state legislatures to enact election sabotage laws that will give Trump and his supporters opportunities to rig congressional election results. The upcoming 2022 congressional elections will serve as proving grounds for his attempt to steal the 2024 presidential election.Trump is a growing menace to our system of self-government. The longer he goes without being held accountable for what he has done, the more danger he poses.The critical question, then, is whether Attorney General Merrick Garland will bring criminal charges against him — and when. The window of opportunity is closing fast. The House Select Committee on January 6 will be holding public hearings in a few weeks and report its findings thereafter. (The committee has already collected nearly 10,000 documents and conducted more than 860 depositions and interviews, including with Trump family members and his close associates.) If Republicans take over the House in the midterm elections, they are sure to close down the inquiry. Moreover, immediately after the midterm elections, America will be in the gravitational pull of the 2024 presidential primaries — in which Trump will almost certainly play a leading role, unless he is indicted and convicted. He has already amassed a campaign chest of more than $120 million, more than double that of the Republican National Committee. During the last six months of 2021, his PAC raised more money online than the GOP every day but two. And once he is a declared candidate, it will be impossible for Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms to stop him from engulfing them with his lies. Some say Garland should not bring criminal charges against Trump because criminal charges have never before been brought against a former president. This is a specious argument because no former pre

Heather and I had coffee this morning. As before, please pull up a chair. If you know other people who might enjoy a good conversation over coffee, please share. 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 hope you’re as well as can be expected in these difficult times. A few days ago I focused on Elon Musk and his designs on Twitter. (Here’s my post.) This morning, as I predicted, Musk put in a bid to buy the rest of Twitter and take it private. Musk’s bid of $54.20 per share is going to be hard for Twitter to resist, given Twitter’s duty to its shareholders: It’s nearly 40 percent higher than Twitter’s stock price in January, before Musk started buying. Musk says he has lost confidence in Twitter’s management to fulfill the company’s “social imperative” as a platform for “free speech” and he’d “unlock” Twitter’s potential. (He can start with unblocking me from his Twitter feed.) As I said, the problem with social media is lack of mediation. If he owns Twitter, Musk is likely to put Trump back on.But enough about Musk. Today I want to continue to probe the issue of power over how Americans get their news. I’ve spent enough time in and around politics to see how decisions made by the media — what issues to focus on, how those issues are framed, and who presents them — are central to our democracy. The media isn’t just the “fourth branch” of government, as it’s been called. It’s not a branch at all. It’s the trunk. Which is why I find it troubling that CBS News has hired Mick Mulvaney as an on-air contributor. You’ll recall that Mulvaney served as acting chief of staff under Trump and led Trump’s Office of Management and Budget. But as I’ll talk about in a moment, Mulvaney wasn’t just a high official in the Trump administration. He was an active enabler of Trump’s deceit and attempted coup. First, some background: An “on-air contributor” on a major network is quite different from a mere “guest.” I’ve been in both roles. Guests appear from time to time when a particular program’s producer invites them, and are unpaid. “On-air contributors,” on the other hand, appear regularly. They’re paid contractors. And they’re introduced as “contributors” — which gives them the cachet and authority of being part of a network’s news division. Mulvaney’s first appearance as a paid contributor for CBS News occurred several days ago on a “MoneyWatch” segment in which he was asked to explain Biden’s plan for taxing the super-rich. The anchor, Anne-Marie Green, introduced Mulvaney as “a former OMB director” and “the guy to ask about this.” But she said nothing about whose OMB he directed, suggesting that Mulvaney was simply a budget expert offering an expert analysis rather than a fierce Trump partisan.Then she asked him whether a “regular working-class American” should care about Biden’s tax proposal. Mulvaney’s answer: “It’s easy to look at it and say, ‘Don’t worry, you’re not going to pay this,’” but regular working Americans would have to “prove that they don’t have to pay it,” and such a burden “could be troublesome: every single year proving that you’re not worth a hundred million dollars.” This is as misleading as it gets in broadcast media (with the possible exception of Fox News). Nothing in Biden’s proposal to tax the super-rich requires that people prove they’re not super-rich. Mulvaney’s claim was pure demagoguery.But that’s what we should expect from Mulvaney. Recall that Mulvaney was complicit in Trump’s attempted extortion of Ukraine President Zelensky in 2019 — threatening to withhold U.S. aid to fight Russian aggression unless Zelensky came up with dirt on Hunter Biden. (This was the call in which Zelensky’s request “we need more Javelins” — anti-tank missiles that have proved crucial in Ukraine's defense against Russia's invasion — was met with Trump’s “I would like you to do us a favor though.”) When the quid pro quo came to light, Mulvaney brushed it off: “I have news for everybody: Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.” After Trump withheld the aid, Mulvaney asked White House budget officials for legal justification to withhold it until Zelensky did what Trump wanted him to do —announce an investigation of Hunter Biden. Oh, and there was the time Mulvaney called COVID a “media hoax” designed to bring down Trump. And the time he predicted that if Trump lost in 2020 he would “concede gracefully.” I should add that Mulvaney is now a high-powered lobbyist for corporate interests — another fact that CBS somehow failed to mention in its announcement of his position and when it introduced him on air. When I was growing up, CBS News was the home of news legends like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite — pioneers who set the standards for broadcast news. So why is CBS News now reaching into the cesspool of Trump conspirators and enablers to hire Mulvaney? Neeraj Khemlani, co-head of CBS News, explained to the CBS News staff at a meeting last month that when it comes to contributor hires, “getting access to both sides of the aisle is a priority because we know the Republicans are going to take over, most likely, in the midterms.”“Getting access?” Access to what? To the big