The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich

In light of the news this week that the economy has been growing at a record rate (and corporate profits are also hitting record highs, the stock market notwithstanding), several of you have asked me specifically what can be done to spread the benefits of economic growth. I have a few ideas, which I’ll share with you in coming weeks. One idea is an old one that was tried with great success but is now all but forgotten. It’s called profit-sharing. It emerged from the tumultuous period when America shifted from farm to factory. In 1916, Sears, Roebuck and Co., then one of America’s largest corporations with over 30,000 employees, announced that it was embarking on a major experiment — profit-sharing. The firm gave workers shares of stock, making them part owners. Shortly thereafter, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a report on profit-sharing, suggesting it as a way to reduce the “frequent and often violent disputes” between employers and workers. Profit-sharing gave workers an incentive to be more productive since the success of the company meant higher profits would be shared. It also reduced the need for layoffs during recessions because payroll costs dropped as profits did. Profit-sharing proved a huge success. Other companies that joined the profit-sharing movement included Procter & Gamble, Pillsbury, Kodak, and U.S. Steel.By the 1950s, Sears workers had accumulated enough stock that they owned a quarter of the company. And by 1968, the typical Sears salesperson could retire with a nest egg worth well over $1 million (in today’s dollars). There was a downside. When profits went down, workers’ paychecks would shrink. And if a company went bankrupt, workers would lose all their investments in it. The best profit-sharing plans have been in the form of cash bonuses that employees can invest however they wish, on top of predictable wages. At Lincoln Electric, for instance, which has had profit-sharing since 1934, employees receive a profit-sharing cash bonus worth, on average, 40 percent of their annual base earnings.But profit-sharing with employees has all but disappeared in large corporations, which since the start of the 1980s — and the advent of corporate “raiders” (now private-equity managers) — have focused on maximizing shareholder returns. Sears phased out its profit-sharing plan in the 1970s (and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2018). Yet profit-sharing with top executives has soared — as big Wall Street banks, hedge funds, private-equity funds, and high-tech companies have doled out huge amounts of stock and stock options to their MVPs.The result? Share prices have gone into the stratosphere while wages have barely risen. Researchers have found that increases in share prices before the late 1980s could be accounted for by overall economic growth. Since then, a large portion of the dramatic increases in share prices have come out of what used to go into wages. Jeff Bezos, who now owns around 10 percent of Amazon’s shares of stock, is worth $210 billion overall. Other top Amazon executives hold hundreds of millions of dollars of Amazon shares. But most of Amazon’s employees, such as warehouse workers, haven’t shared in the bounty.Amazon used to give out stock to hundreds of thousands of its employees. But in 2018 it stopped doing so, and instead raised its minimum hourly wage to $15. The wage raise got headlines and was good PR, but Amazon’s decision to end stock awards was more significant. If Amazon’s 1.2 million employees together owned the same proportion of Amazon’s stock as Sears workers did in the 1950s — a quarter of the company — each Amazon employee would now own shares worth an average of over $350,000.America’s trend toward higher profits, higher share prices, mounting executive pay, but near stagnant wages is unsustainable, economically and politically. How to encourage profit sharing? Corporate taxes should be lower on corporations that share profits with all their workers, and higher on those that don't. Sharing profits with all workers is a logical and necessary step to making the system work for the many, not the few.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

How can it be that the U.S. economy grew at its fastest pace since 1984 last year (according to yesterday’s report from the Commerce Department) but most Americans remain gloomy about the economy, and blame Biden and the Democrats? The New York Times declares that the cause of this paradox is inflation: “Biden is suffering in the polls as high inflation saps confidence in the economy, even as growth comes in strong.”Rubbish. Americans are gloomy about the economy despite its record growth because most Americans haven’t shared in that growth. If you really want to understand this, a good place to begin is with the corporation often considered the most socially responsible in the nation — Starbucks. (A Pew survey on where Americans would like to live included the following question: “Just for fun: Would you prefer to live in a place with more McDonald’s or more Starbucks?” Among self-described liberals, Starbucks carried the day, 46 percent to 33 percent. And while McDonald’s won among adults 65 and above, Starbucks had a 13-percentage-point edge among 18-to-29-year-olds.)But in fact, Starbucks isn’t socially responsible. Its brand is built on an edifice of faux social responsibility. Starbucks is the nation’s first major retailer to backtrack on vaccine-or-test plans for its workers, since the Supreme Court’s absurd January 13 ruling that struck down the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test requirement. Starbucks is now telling its 200,000 U.S. employees they no longer have to be fully vaccinated or submit to weekly coronavirus testing. Starbucks calls its workers “partners” — but they’re not real partners. They don’t share in the profits. Between January and September of last year, Starbuck’s revenue soared to $20.9 billion (compared to $17.3 billion in the same period in 2020). Its president and chief executive officer, Kevin Johnson, raked in $14,665,575 in total compensation. But the current average hourly pay at Starbucks is $14 and hour, or $28,000 a year. And Starbucks wants to keep wages in the basement. For years it’s fought ferociously against employee efforts to unionize. Social responsibility my macchiato. Now zoom out to the economy as a whole. Could it be that Americans are gloomy despite the economy’s record growth because the super-rich are taking home an ever-larger share of those gains while most people are getting the crumbs? Is it possible they blame Biden and the Democrats for promising to change this but, after a good start, not delivering?Starbuck’s progressive branding has helped it sell lots of coffee. Yet Starbucks faces a growing dilemma — not unlike the dilemma facing Biden and the Democrats. Starbucks’s young, progressive baristas are no longer willing to tolerate Starbucks’s hypocrisy. Since two Starbucks stores voted to unionize in late August, workers in dozens of other Starbucks stores across the country have filed petitions for elections. Starbucks can’t have it both ways — promoting itself as the face of socially-responsible capitalism while treating its workers like s**t. Biden and the Democrats may be facing a similar paradox — promising a fundamental change in the power structure of America while allowing big corporations and the super-rich to continue enlarging their wealth and power. Biden and the Democrats can’t have it both ways, either. Perhaps it was too much to expect Biden and the Dems to alter a trend that’s been growing for four decades as large corporations have steadily gained bargaining power (a handful of big firms now dominate most industries), while hourly wage earners have steadily lost it (the share of private-sector workers in unions has plummeted from over 30 percent to 6.1 percent). This power shift is directly reflected in the increasing share of economic gains going to the top, and decreasing share to everyone else. But it’s important for Biden and the Democrats to avoid the trap of Starbucks-like hypocrisy. Biden and the Dems need to tell the truth about what’s happening: American workers are not losing ground due to inflation. They are losing ground because they continue to lose bargaining power. The economy grew mightily over the past year but the share going to most American workers continues to shrink. Starbucks’s workers have had enough corporate hypocrisy. They’re beginning to take power back by organizing at the grass roots. Will most Americans become so fed up with their declining share of the economy’s gains that they too decide to take power back? 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 just heard Joe Manchin say Biden should move to the “center.” Political consultant Mark Penn wrote in the New York Times that “Biden should follow the lead of Bill Clinton, and move to the center.” Duh. Who wants to be on the fringe? Political careers are imperiled by labels like “left-winger” (or “right-winger”). The public feels safer with a president who proclaims total commitment to the middle. FDR always sought to position himself as a centrist. So did Nixon (remember the “silent majority?”). Barry Goldwater’s “extremism in defense of liberty” helped cost him the White House. But this is just positioning. Visionary leaders of America have always understood that the “center” is a fictitious place lying somewhere south of thoughtless adherence to the status quo. Virtually any attempt to lead — to summon forth the energies and commitments of public — will not “centrist” be at the time. That’s the essence of leadership. Teddy Roosevelt didn’t discover the evils of industrial concentration at the political center. FDR didn’t knit a safety net for the poor and dispossessed, or take the nation into the Second World War, from the center. Kennedy and Johnson didn’t locate the cause of civil rights at the center. Nixon didn’t find support for recognizing China in the center. Nor even did Reagan find his mandate for a smaller government at the center. Leadership, by definition, does not cater to the center. If it did, there would be no need to lead. The nation is already there.A president will exert some influence on where the “center” is at any given time simply by virtue of the office and the pulpit that comes with it. If a president moves rightward in an attempt to be at the “center,” the center shifts even further to the right. When Bill Clinton succumbed to pressure from the right to seek a balanced budget, the debate over whether to balance the budget was silenced. The debate shifted to whether to balance it quickly or gradually. The new “center” moved to the right — seeking a reasonably quick balance. There’s much talk in Democratic circles these days about so-called “swing” voters in the upcoming midterms. Where is this elusive voter to be found? Where else? At the center. Not in the traditional “Democratic base,” which is assumed to be left of center, nor in the “Republican base,” to the right, but in between. And where does this “swing” voter presumably live? In the American suburbs, we’re told. Not the close-in suburbs of blue-collar, semi-detached aluminum sidings, nor the farther-out suburbs of manicured lawns and underground wires, but somewhere in between.The center? The base? The swing? The suburbs? Pollsters and political consultants like Mark Penn reap fortunes out of such amorphous b******t. The words substitute for thought. Tactics emerge from thin air. There’s a simpler way: Look at who’s losing ground in the economy. They’re the ones who are up for grabs. Lead them by giving them the means to do better — and a reason to vote for you. 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

Inflation! It’s dominating all economic news. It’s the main reason the stock market is going nuts. It’s what Fed officials are discussing in today’s meeting (they’re expected to raise interest rates several times over the next twelve months). But in all of the inflated verbiage over inflation, there’s been little or no discussion about the role that large, hugely-profitable corporations are playing. Yet inflation is intimately connected to corporate power (as I discussed on this page last month).Today I turn to the evidence, and then to what I believe should be done about corporate power and inflation. First, to recap: While most of the price increases now affecting the US and global economy have been the result of global supply chain problems limiting the availability of parts needed to make consumer goods, this doesn’t explain why big and hugely- profitable corporations are passing these cost increases on to their customers in the form of higher prices. If corporations were competing vigorously against each other, they’d swallow these cost increases in order to keep their prices as low as possible — especially when they’re making huge profits. Yet corporations have been raising prices even as they rake in record profits. That’s because they face so little competition that they can easily coordinate price increases with the handful of other big companies in their industry. That way, all of them come out ahead — while consumers and workers lose. As to the evidence, it’s all around us: 1. EnergyOnly a few entities have access to the land and pipelines that control the oil and gas still powering most of the world. They took a hit during the pandemic as most people stayed home. But they are more than making up for it now, limiting supply and ratcheting up prices. As Chevron Corp.’s top executive Mike Wirth said in September, “we could afford to invest more” in production but “the equity market is not sending a signal that says they think we ought to be doing that.” Translated: Wall Street says the way to maximize profits is to limit supply and push up prices instead, and we do whatever the Street wants. 2. Consumer staplesLast April, Procter & Gamble raised prices on consumer staples like diapers and toilet paper, citing increased costs in raw materials and transportation. But P&G has been making huge profits. After some of its price increases went into effect, it reported an almost 25 percent profit margin. Looking to buy your diapers elsewhere? Well, good luck. The market is dominated by P&G and Kimberly-Clark, which—not coincidentally—raised its prices at the same time. Another example: Last spring, PepsiCo raised its prices, blaming higher costs for ingredients, freight, and labor. It then recorded $3 billion in operating profits through September. How did it get away with this without losing customers? Simple. Pepsi has only one major competitor, Coca Cola, which promptly raised its own prices. Coca-Cola recorded $10 billion in revenues in the third quarter of 2021, up 16 percent from the previous year.3. FoodFood prices are soaring. Half of those price increases are from meat. According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, meat prices were up 16 percent in November compared with the same month last year. Why? Because the four giant meat processing corporations that dominate the industry are raising their prices and enjoying fat profits. A recent report from the White House’s National Economic Council finds that the largest meat processing companies are “using their market power to extract bigger and bigger profit margins for themselves. Businesses that face meaningful competition can’t do that, because they would lose business to a competitor that did not hike its margins.”4. Fast food Fast food giants like McDonald’s and Chipotle — incessantly complaining about higher food and labor costs — have increased their prices to consumers to cover these added costs. But they’re so profitable they could easily have absorbed these cost increases. (Wall Street analysts expect McDonald’s revenues hit a five-year high in 2021 and Chipotle’s revenues increased by over a third from two years before.) So why are they passing the cost increases on to their consumers? Because they have so much market power. (A few months ago, Chipotle’s chief financial officer admitted “our ultimate goal … is to fully protect our margins.”)5. Large retailersA handful of giant corporations — Walmart, Amazon, Kroger, Costco, and Target —dominate retail sales in America. On a recent survey, over 60 percent of large retailers say inflation has given them the ability to raise prices beyond what’s required to offset higher costs.6. Corporate concentration overallSince the mid-1980s (when the US government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement) two thirds of all American industries have become more concentrated. This includes banks, broadband, pharmaceutical companies, airlines, meatpackers, big tech, and consumer staples.C

In light of last week’s devastating senate vote on voting rights, I keep hearing “voting rights are dead.” Wrong. If voting rights are dead, American democracy is dead. And if American democracy is dead, the entire project that began (imperfectly, to be sure) in 1776 and has been a beacon for the world, is dead. I will not accept that. Nor, I assume, will you. But what can and should be done now? I’ll get to that in a moment. First, though, it’s important to acknowledge that our two major parties are now irredeemably opposed on this core issue. Democrats are the party of democracy. Republicans — who should have been willing to at least engage in last week’s debate — are not, and should not be allowed to pretend otherwise.There are two glaring exceptions. Kyrsten Sinema is now the most prominent anti-democracy Democrat; Liz Cheney, the most prominent pro-democracy Republican. On Saturday, the Arizona Democratic Party executive committee appropriately censured Sinema for her vote last week in opposition to changing filibuster rules to pass voting rights bills. The censure has no practical effect but delivers a strong message of condemnation and reflects the will of the party's most active and loyal members. That same day, the Wyoming Republican State Central committee held a straw poll of party activists in which Harriet Hageman, the Trump-endorsed challenger to Liz Cheney, won by a substantial margin. (The secret ballot awarded Hageman 59 votes and Cheney six.) Here again, no practical effect but a strong message. The vote comes eight months before Wyoming’s GOP primary.The two positions — for and against democracy — are not morally equivalent, of course. Democracy is this nation’s core moral principle. Every American who cares about this core moral principle must recommit to the task of protecting it from the growing forces seeking to destroy it. This means fighting voter suppression and election subversion with whatever tools are at hand. How? 1. Keep pressure on the 50 Republicans and two Democrats who blocked Senate action. Sinema and Manchin should face pro-democracy primary challengers when both are up for reelection in 2024 (which means organizing should start soon). Every Republican senator should be held accountable as well. If you live in one of their states, make sure you attend town meetings to voice your outrage, and organize voters against their reelection. 2. The Justice Department should announce that it will use every tool in its legal arsenal – including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution -- to enforce equal voting rights. The Voting Rights Act is not the only weapon to protect the right to vote. Congress should increase funding for the Justice Department’s civil rights division and its related work in this. 3. Democrats in Congress must seek to pass whatever pieces of the Freedom to Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act they can. (Importantly, the Senate can avoid the filibuster through the use of the reconciliation process on any issue that touches on funding for easier voting access.)4. Reforming the 1887 Electoral Count Act is no substitute for voting rights, but it’s still necessary to block states from politicizing election boards and to strengthen federal penalties against intimidating voters and election officials.5. Biden should fully implement his March executive order calling on all agencies of the federal government to help citizens register and vote.6. By executive order, Biden should also make Election Day a federal holiday for government employees, and also encourage states to declare Election Day a holiday.7. If you live in a state with a Republican legislature, you need to do everything possible to block further voter suppression and subversion. Organize and mobilize others. Where applicable, use your state’s referendum process to undo some of the damage.8. Fighting voter suppression in this fall’s midterm election calls for a voting registration drive this coming summer analogous to the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi (which I’ve recently written about). It should focus on Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Texas, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. All have important races coming up. Now as in 1964, young people could play a key role.9. We must keep the pressure on the Justice Department to indict Donald Trump and his co-conspirators for their roles in the January 6 attack on the Capitol and in attempting to sabotage the 2020 election. (This would include recent revelations about false slates of electors in seven swing states and an executive order prepared for Trump that would have directed the secretary of Defense to seize voting machines.)10. Finally, we should support the work of the House’s January 6 committee. Which brings me back to Liz Cheney. Her role as vice-chair of the House January 6 committee is critical to demonstrating the non-partisan legitimacy of that inquiry. I have never agreed with her policy choices on sp

Wall Street may be having a bad week, but top bankers are doing wonderfully well. After a blockbuster year, the five biggest Wall Street banks just paid out $142 billion in bonuses and compensation for 2021. This was $18 billion more than in 2020. JPMorgan Chase reported record profits, and Citigroup’s annual profit more than doubled. Let me remind you (as if you need reminding) that 2020 and 2021 were not exactly blockbuster years for the rest of America. In the first three decades after World War II, American companies made money by making things, selling them at a profit, and investing the profits in additional productive capacity. This helped create the largest middle class the world had ever seen. In those years, the financial sector accounted for 15 percent of U.S. corporate profits.Then something happened. By the mid-1980s, the financial sector claimed 30 percent of corporate profits. By 2001, 40 percent — more than four times the profits made in all U.S. manufacturing. Why this dramatic change? Indulge me a moment as I quote from a New York Times op-ed I wrote more than forty years ago (May 23, 1980):The paper entrepreneurs are winning out over the product entrepreneurs.Paper entrepreneurs – trained in law, finance, accountancy – manipulate complex systems of rules and numbers. They innovate by using the systems in novel ways: establishing joint ventures, consortiums, holding companies, mutual funds; finding companies to acquire, “white knights” to be acquired by, commodity futures to invest in, tax shelters to hide in; engaging in proxy fights, tender offers, antitrust suits, stock splits, spinoffs, divestitures; buying and selling notes, bonds, convertible debentures, sinking-fund debentures; obtaining government subsidies, loan guarantees, tax breaks, contracts, licenses, quotas, price supports, bailouts; going private, going public, going bankrupt.Product entrepreneurs – engineers, inventors, production managers, marketers, owners of small businesses – produce goods and services people want. They innovate by creating better products at less cost.Our economic system needs both. Paper entrepreneurs ensure that capital is allocated efficiently among product entrepreneurs. But paper entrepreneurs do not directly enlarge the economic pie. They only arrange and divide the slices. They provide nothing of tangible use. For an economy to maintain its health, entrepreneurial rewards should flow primarily to product, not paper.Yet paper entrepreneurialism is on the rise. It dominates the leadership of our largest corporations. It guides government departments, legislatures, agencies, public utilities. It stimulates platoons of lawyers and financiers.It preoccupies some of our best minds, attracts some of our most talented graduates, embodies some of our most creative and original thinking, spurs some of our most energetic wheeling and dealing. Paper entrepreneurialism also promises the best financial rewards, the highest social status.The ratio of paper entrepreneurialism to product entrepreneurialism in our economy – measured by total earnings flowing to each, or by the amount of news in business journals and newspapers typically devoted to each – is about 2 to 1.Why? Our economic system has become so complex and interdependent that capital must be allocated according to symbols of productivity rather than according to productivity itself. These symbolic rules and numbers lend themselves to profitable manipulation far more readily than do the underlying processes of production.It takes time and effort to improve product quality, exploit manufacturing efficiencies, develop distribution and sales networks. But through strategic use of accounting conventions, tax rules, stock and commodity exchanges, exchange rates, government largesse, and litigation, enormous profits are possible with relatively little effort.When paper entrepreneurs look for solutions to America’s declining productivity and international competitiveness, they come up with paper remedies to stimulate large-scale capital investment: accelerated depreciation, tax credits, government subsidies, relaxation of antitrust laws. Product entrepreneurs focus on techniques for improving output: better quality controls, improved labor-management relations, more effective incentives for managers and employees, more aggressive marketing and sales.If we are to increase the economic pie, we will need to redress the balance of entrepreneurial effort. Which strategies will stimulate more paper, and which more product? I wish I had not been as prescient. Yet the dominance of finance over much of the American economy since 1980 didn’t happen by accident. It needed the help of politicians — including presidents (both Republican and Democrat) — who changed laws and regulations to encourage it. Ronald Reagan’s Securities and Exchange Commission allowed corporate raiders to use borrowed money to buy and dismantle American companies. The raiders (now more politely

What can possibly explain Manchin’s and Sinema’s votes against voting rights this week? Why did they create a false narrative that the legislation had to be “bipartisan” when everyone -- themselves included -- knew bipartisanship was impossible? Why did they say they couldn’t support changing the filibuster rules when only last month they voted for an exception to the filibuster that allowed debt ceiling legislation to pass with only Democratic votes? Why did they co-sponsor voting rights legislation and then vote to kill the very same legislation? Why did Manchin vote for the “talking filibuster” in 2011 yet vote against it now?I’ve suggested that the answer to all these questions could be found in the giant wads of corporate cash flowing into their campaign coffers. But as I’ve watched the two senators closely and spoken about them with members of Congress as well as Hill staff, I’ve come to the conclusion this isn’t it – or at least not all of it.The corporate money explanation leaves out the single biggest factor affecting almost all national politicians I’ve dealt with: Big egos. Manchin’s and Sinema’s are now among the biggest. Before February of last year, almost no one outside West Virginia had ever heard of Joe Manchin, and almost no one outside of Arizona (and probably few within the state) had ever heard of Kyrsten Sinema. Now, they’re notorious. They’re Washington celebrities. Their photos grace every major news outlet in America.This sort of attention is addictive. Once it seeps into the bloodstream, it becomes an all-consuming force. I’ve known politicians who have become permanently and irrevocably intoxicated by it.I’m not talking simply about power, although that’s certainly part of it. I’m talking about narcissism – the primal force driving so much of modern America, but whose essence is concentrated in certain places such as Wall Street, Hollywood, and the United States Senate. Once addicted, the pathologically narcissistic politician can become petty in the extreme, taking every slight as a deep personal insult. I’m told that Manchin asked Biden’s staff not to blame him for the delay of “Build Back Better,” and was then infuriated when Biden suggested Manchin bore some of the responsibility. “You want to understand why Manchin stabbed Biden in the back on voting rights?” one House member told me this week. “It’s because he’s so pissed off at Ron Klain [Biden’s chief of staff].” I’m also told that if Biden wants to restart negotiations with Manchin on “Build Back Better,” he’s got to rename the package because Manchin is so angry he won’t vote for anything going by that name. Paradoxically, a large enough slight played out on the national stage can also enthrall a pathologically narcissistic politician. Several people on the Hill who have watched Sinema at close range since she became a senator tell me she relished all the negative attention she got when she gave her very theatrical thumbs down to increasing the minimum wage, and since then has thrilled at her burgeoning role as a spoiler. The Senate is not the world’s greatest deliberative body, but it is the world’s greatest stew of egos battling for attention. Every senator believes he or she has what it takes to be president. Most believe they’re far more competent than whoever occupies the Oval Office. Yet out of one hundred senators, only a handful are chosen for interviews on the Sunday talk shows, only one or two are lampooned on SNL, and very few get a realistic shot at the presidency. The result is intense competition for national attention. Again and again, I’ve watched worthy legislation sink because particular senators didn’t feel they were getting enough credit, or enough personal attention from a president, or insufficient press attention, or unwanted press attention, or that another senator (sometimes from the same party) was getting too much attention.Barack Obama didn’t enjoy glad-handing senators, even though he got to the presidency through that august body — which proved a huge handicap when it came to legislating. Bill Clinton would talk to senators (or, for that matter, to almost anyone else) all the time, but Clinton had too much confidence in his own charm to give individual senators the ego boosts they wanted — thereby rubbing the most narcissistic of them the wrong way (Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey voted against Clinton’s healthcare plan because he wanted more attention; New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was lukewarm on it because he felt he wasn’t adequately consulted). Some senators get so whacky in the national limelight that they can’t function without it. Trump had that effect on Republicans. Before Trump, Lindsay Graham was almost a normal human being. Then Trump directed a huge amp of national attention Graham’s way — transmogrifying Graham into a bizarro creature who’d say anything Trump wanted in order to keep the attention coming.Not all senators are egomaniacs, of course. I had the good fortune

Across America, hospitals are pushed to the limit because so many health care workers have quit just as Omicron is surging. But hospitals aren’t alone, and Omicron isn’t the only culprit. We’re witnessing one of the most profound changes in the American labor force in a half century, at least since middle-class women entered paid work in large numbers during the 1970s. Only this time, women and men aren’t entering work. Many are leaving it (or at least, the way work has been organized). For decades, work has had a total grip on most people's lives because there have been so few alternatives to either working full time (often 50 or 60 hours a week, sometimes at two or more jobs), or not working at all and worrying about making ends meet. Instead of working to live, most of us have been living to work.Yet in recent months there’s been something of a sea change. The so-called “quit rate” of workers voluntarily leaving their jobs has reached record levels. The labor-force participation rate (the percent of people of working age who are in the workforce) is remarkably low for this point in a recovery. More workers are on strike than at any comparable period in the last thirty years.As secretary of labor, I used to hear people complain that they needed more work or better pay. Now, I’m hearing lots of people say “I don’t want to work this hard any more,” or “I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend the rest of my life in this rat race,” or “They can’t pay me enough to sacrifice my life like this,” or “I want to be in control of my life.”The GenZ’s I teach are even more adamant about not devoting their lives to work. “Life is too short” — they tell me.The pandemic has surfaced many issues that have been smoldering for years -- mandatory overtime, stagnant wages, dangerous working conditions, insecure employment, employment discrimination, and lack of paid sick leave or paid family leave. It has also forced -- or allowed -- many people to reconsider what they want from work and from their lives.Donald Sull, Charles Sull, and Ben Zweig recently conducted a massive study of workplace data for the MIT Sloan Management Review, including more than a million Glassdoor reviews. What are employees complaining about at companies losing the most workers in this tsunami of resignations? Interestingly, not mainly pay. Complaints about pay ranked 16th of the issues that predict quits. The biggest predictor is a toxic culture – workplaces that fail to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; that don’t make workers feel respected and valued; and make them to feel insecure. No one likes to be underpaid. But it turns out people like disrespect and insecurity even less. When Australian researchers recently reviewed data on more than 1,000 workers, they discovered that working for a companies that “fail to reward or acknowledge their employees for hard work, impose unreasonable demands on workers, and do not give them autonomy” triples the odds that workers will suffer major depression. I’m no soothsayer, but as I look ahead I’m fairly certain we’re going to see companies and nonprofits moving toward more flexible work, autonomous work, and mandatory limits on work hours. They have no choice if they want to recruit and retain reliable employees. We’re also going to see far more self-employment, more people moving to locales around the country where housing is cheaper, and, in general, more of us seeking to simplify our lives.I also expect increasing demands for public policies that reduce the amount of time we have to spend working and give us more control of our own labor – such as a universal basic income, a ban on mandatory overtime, a shorter workweek, Medicare for all (de-coupling health insurance from work), paid sick leave and paid family leave, and more tax incentives for profit sharing and self-employment. We’re not facing the end of work, but we are facing the end of work as we know it. It’s about time.What do you think?PS: By the way, if you haven't had a chance to listen to my conversation with Michael Moore, we touched on what’s happening to work and a variety of other issues related to power and the economy. It was great to catch up (and Mike even promised to do a TikTok collaboration with me in 2022). Enjoy: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

This week may be a nadir for the Biden administration. After Krysten Sinema’s very public refusal to budge on the filibuster, voting rights legislation is stuck. Senate Democrats plan to go through the motions (due to a parliamentary maneuver, it will be the first time the Senate will actually debate voting rights) but the effort is doomed as long as the filibuster remains. Similarly, after Joe Manchin’s refusal to agree to Biden’s “Build Back Better” package, Biden’s social and climate measure is also stalled (last Friday was the first time since July that millions of American families with children didn’t receive a monthly child benefit; further payments are stymied). Meanwhile, the Omicron variant continues to surge in most of the country, increasing public anxieties about the pandemic. Yet the Supreme Court rejected Biden’s vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers. Inflation continues to accelerate due to supply bottlenecks — which are likely to worsen as China locks down to avoid Omicron — thereby eroding real (inflation-adjusted) wages. To put it bluntly, Biden is in deep trouble. So is America.How can Biden regain momentum? Here are ten steps he should take, starting this week:* Reach out to Murkowski, Collins, Romney, and any other possibly principled senate Republican, to gain support for any reasonable compromise on the filibuster (even a “talking filibuster” would be better than the current standoff).* Accompany this with a speech about how often the filibuster has been used to block popular legislation, especially over the last dozen years, why it’s fundamentally anti-democratic, and what it’s blocking now — voting rights and highly popular measures in “Build Back Better” (reducing prescription drug prices, universal pre-K, the addition of hearing and dental insurance to Medicare, subsidized childcare, the expanded child tax credit, paid leave, and measures to reduce climate change). * Urge Schumer to initiate separate votes on these popular measures. Let the public see how Republicans use the filibuster to stop them. * Urge Democrats to run next November against a Republican Party that refuses to get anything done for the working class. * Issue an executive order on drug pricing, such as requiring Medicare to obtain the lowest possible drug prices. * Issue an executive order to roll back Trump’s Medicaid work requirements and boost funding for groups helping people enroll in ACA plans.* Issue an executive order relieving former students of up to $10,000 of college loan debt owed the federal government. * As to Omicron, provide clear public health guidance around masking and testing. Explain when and where rapid tests and masks can be obtained free of charge. * Ask OSHA to immediately redraft its vaccine-or-testing mandate to focus on large employers with the highest incidence of COVID. * Meanwhile, remain upbeat but realistic. Remind the public of the economic successes so far — record job growth, new businesses forming at record rates, poverty below its pre-pandemic levels, the start of $1 trillion in infrastructure investments, the speed of your vaccination rollout, your stimulus package last spring that helped many who receive health insurance in individual marketplaces and offered enticements for states to expand Medicaid. Celebrate the recent victories of unionized workers and call for more and stronger unions. And reassure the public of your commitment to continue fighting for a democracy and an economy that works for everyone — against the resistance of the moneyed interests that have never done as well as they’re doing now.What else do you think Biden and his administration should do now? 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 convergence today of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and of the Senate’s unwillingness to protect voting rights causes me to remember my childhood friend and protector, whom I knew as Mickey.I was always very short for my age, which made me an easy target for bullies. To protect myself, I got into the habit of befriending older boys who’d watch my back. One summer when I was around 8 years old I found Mickey, a kind and gentle teenager with a ready smile who made sure I stayed safe.Years went by and I lost track of Mickey. It wasn’t until the fall of 1964, my freshman year in college, that I heard what had happened to him. Several months before, Mickey had gone to Mississippi to register Black voters during what was known as “Freedom Summer.” On August 4, Mickey – his full name was Michael Schwerner -- was found dead, along with two other civil rights workers, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. The three had been brutally tortured and murdered. Eventually I learned what had happened. On June 21, the three were stopped near Philadelphia, Mississippi by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price, for allegedly speeding. That night, after they paid their speeding ticket and left the jail, Price followed them, stopped them again, ordered them into his car, and took them down a deserted road where he turned them over to a group of his fellow Ku Klux Klan members who beat and killed them, and buried their bodies in an earthen dam then under construction. The state of Mississippi refused to bring murder charges against any of them. Price and Neshoba County Sheriff Laurence Rainey, also a Klan member, along with 16 others, were arraigned for the federal crime of conspiracy to violate the civil rights of the murdered young men. An all-white jury convicted Price and sentenced him to six years in prison (he served four) and found Rainey not guilty.Freedom Summer had brought together college students from northern schools to work with Black people from Mississippi to educate and register Black voters. Although about 40 percent of Mississippi’s population was Black, most of them had been frozen out of the polls through poll taxes, subjective literacy tests, and violence. It had been that way since 1877. The system was enforced by white supremacists who could commit crimes with impunity because the entire region had become a one-party state. Mickey Schwerner, Chaney, Goodman, and other civil rights workers had sought to reestablish the principle of equality before the law. After their murders, Freedom Summer continued. Activists were emboldened rather than intimidated by the racial terror orchestrated by Mississippi officials. Almost 1,000 white volunteers bolstered the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee’s efforts to organize Freedom Schools, literacy and civics classes, voter registration and integrated libraries.Then in 1965, with the intrepid leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. and others in the civil rights movement, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, protecting the right of Black people to vote. After that, the stranglehold of the white supremacists on the one-party South loosened.But the regressive forces of racism and violence did not disappear. On August 3, 1980, Ronald Reagan launched his presidential campaign with a rally at the Neshoba County Fair (only a few miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi), where he defended state’s rights and the unwinding of civil rights advances. On June 25, 2013, the Supreme Court, in the case of Shelby County v. Holder, gutted the Voting Rights Act by holding that its formula for deciding which jurisdictions had to get pre-clearance from the Justice Department before changing their voting laws was outdated. Now, in response to record voter turnout in the 2020 election, 19 states have passed over 30 new laws making it harder to vote. At the same time, Republican-dominated legislatures are gathering into their hands the power to negate popular votes. And the United States Senate, although nominally under Democratic control, is at this point unwilling to enact legislation to override these restrictions or restore the Voting Rights Act. We seem to be headed back to the society Michael Schwerner, James Cheney, and Andrew Goodman fought against with their lives. 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

These are hard times to keep your spirits up. Thinking you might need a bit of a boost, I’d like to introduce you to two young people who give me hope about the future of American politics. The first is Chloe Maxmin. I met her a few years ago when, still in her early-twenties and an unapologetic progressive, she had been elected to the Maine House of Representatives. She was the first Democrat ever to represent her district — Maine’s Lincoln County, the state’s most rural. The county also among the poorest, where 1 in 5 children grow up in poverty. And it’s staunchly conservative, having voted Republican by an average of 16 percentage points in the preceding three elections.When I met her, Maxmin was preparing to run for the state Senate. Several old Maine pols (I lived in Maine back in the last century and know its politics quite well) told me she didn’t stand a chance. But in 2020 she won — and in the process, knocked off the state Senate’s Republican leader, the most powerful Republican politician in Maine.How did she pull off these upsets? I’ll get to that in a moment. Maxmin exudes optimism, energy, and tenacity. She is also very smart. She says she’d always imagined running when she was in her thirties. She thought she needed a couple of graduate degrees, a settled life, and maybe a family to welcome her home. But in 2018, as the climate crisis worsened, she realized there was no need and no time to wait.The second person I’d like to introduce you to managed both her campaigns. Canyon Woodward was brought up in a rural part of Southern Appalachia. Maxmin and Woodward met each other in college and decided that the only way to begin solving the climate crisis and the injustices it was spawning was to get involved in politics from the ground up. Both had watched for years as rural America was abandoned by Democrats. They decided to buck that tide.So, how did Maxmin and Woodward do it? They developed the most grass-roots of all grass-roots strategies. Maxmin herself knocked on tens of thousands of doors. She connected with persuadable Trump voters who had never before spoken with a Democratic candidate. But she didn’t just talk to them. She had conversations with them, then followed up with more conversation. Those conversations were about “kitchen-table” issues — problems that were on the voters’ minds, as well as their thoughts and values. As she describes it, during her campaign for the Maine House she walked down a dirt road leading to a nondescript trailer. After knocking on the door, it cracked open to reveal a man who was reluctant to hear from her. She introduced herself nonetheless and asked him about the issues he cared about most in the coming election. After they talked for a time, he told her: “You’re the first person to listen to me. Everyone judges what my house looks like. They don’t bother to knock. I’m grateful that you came. I’m going to vote for you.”When I asked about her approach to politics, Maxmin told me rural communities are moral communities that respond more to personal stories and values than to specific policies. Building trusting relationships is the key. This takes time and effort and demands humility and a willingness to learn. As Maxmin and Woodward explain in their book, Dirt Road Revival: How to Rebuild Rural Politics and Why Our Future Depends On It (to be published in March):“Things move at the speed of relationship in rural America. You don’t jump straight into business and take care of things as quickly as possible. An essential part of the culture of living and organizing in rural America is slowing down and building relationships. It is the touchstone on which our future—and all hope of transforming how we relate to politics and one another—depends. And a good relationship starts with a handshake. This small gesture is about establishing a modicum of trust and human connection. To show up, look someone in the eye, and shake their hand is to plant the seeds of possibility and connection. It’s also what is lacking in today’s politics. A voter told us one day, “I don’t identify with either party. I vote for the person. I vote for whoever has the firmest handshake.” Maxmin has already got a “green new deal” bill through the legislature. She’s well on her way to being one of the nation’s most effective state legislators on climate justice.What’s the larger political picture here? The Democratic Party’s abandonment of rural America has proved a strategic mistake. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won almost every urban center, but Trump swept the vast stretches of less populated country in between. Exit polling revealed that Trump won nearly two-thirds of the rural vote, while losing by a similar margin in cities and evenly splitting the suburban vote. When the American electoral system was created, over 95 percent of Americans lived in rural communities. Now, fewer than 20 percent do. But the nation’s electoral system remains locked in the founders’ two eighteenth century inven

Capitalism and democracy are compatible only if democracy is in the driver’s seat.That’s why I took some comfort just after the attack on the Capitol when many big corporations solemnly pledged they’d no longer finance the campaigns of the 147 lawmakers who voted to overturn the election results.Well, those days are over. Turns out they were over the moment the public stopped paying attention.A report published last week by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington shows that over the last year, 717 companies and industry groups have donated more than $18 million to 143 of those seditious lawmakers. Businesses that pledged to stop or pause their donations have given nearly $2.4 million directly to their campaigns or leadership political action committees.But there’s a deeper issue here. The whole question of whether corporations do or don’t bankroll the seditionist caucus is a distraction from a much larger problem.The tsunami of money now flowing from corporations into the swamp of American politics is larger than ever. And this money – bankrolling almost all politicians and financing attacks on their opponents – is undermining American democracy as much as did the 147 seditionist members of Congress. Maybe more.Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema — whose vocal opposition to any change in the filibuster is on the verge of dooming voting rights — received almost $2 million in campaign donations in 2021 despite not being up for re-election until 2024. Most of it came from corporate donors outside Arizona, some of which have a history of donating largely to Republicans. Has the money influenced Sinema? You decide: Besides sandbagging voting rights, she voted down the $15 minimum wage increase, opposed tax increases on corporations and the wealthy, and stalled on drug price reform — policies supported by a majority of Democratic Senators as well as a majority of Arizonans. Over the last four decades, corporate PAC spending on congressional elections has more than quadrupled, even adjusting for inflation.Labor unions no longer provide a counterweight. Forty years ago, union PACs contributed about as much as corporate PACs. Now, corporations are outspending labor by more than three to one. According to a landmark study published in 2014 by Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Northwestern professor Benjamin Page, the preferences of the typical American have no influence at all on legislation emerging from Congress.Gilens and Page analyzed 1,799 policy issues in detail, determining the relative influence on them of economic elites, business groups, mass-based interest groups, and average citizens. Their conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Lawmakers mainly listen to the policy demands of big business and wealthy individuals – those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns and promote their views.It’s likely far worse now. Gilens and Page’s data came from the period 1981 to 2002 – before the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to big money in the Citizens United case, prior to SuperPACs, before “dark money,” and before the Wall Street bailout.The corporate return on this mountain of money has been significant. Over the last forty years, corporate tax rates have plunged. Regulatory protections for consumers, workers, and the environment have been defanged. Antitrust has become so ineffectual that many big corporations face little or no competition.Corporations have fought off safety nets and public investments that are common in other advanced nations (most recently, “Build Back Better”). They’ve attacked labor laws -- reducing the portion of private-sector workers belonging to a union from a third forty years ago, to just over 6 percent now. They’ve collected hundreds of billions in federal subsidies, bailouts, loan guarantees, and sole-source contracts. Corporate welfare for Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Tech, Big Ag, the largest military contractors and biggest banks now dwarfs the amount of welfare for people.The profits of big corporations just reached a 70-year high, even during a pandemic. The ratio of CEO pay in large companies to average workers has ballooned from 20-to-1 in the 1960s, to 320-to-1 now.Meanwhile, most Americans are going nowhere. The typical worker’s wage is only a bit higher today than it was forty years ago, when adjusted for inflation.But the biggest casualty is the public’s trust in democracy.In 1964, just 29 percent of voters believed that government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.” By 2013, 79 percent of Americans believed it.Corporate donations to seditious lawmakers are nothing compared to this forty-year record of corporate sedition.A large portion of the American public has become so frustrated and cynical about democracy they are willing to believe blatant lies of a self-described strongman, and will

It infuriates me when members of Congress — whether Republican or Democrat — squander the public’s trust. There’s so little of it left to squander. So when I find a conflict of interest by members of Congress for which there’s an easy remedy, I’m ready to shout it from the rooftops. And when I discover Congress won’t take action, I’m ready to scream. Today I want to talk about a very big conflict, with a very easy remedy. And I’d like your help getting the word out and putting pressure on Congress to adopt it. First, some background. Unless you have special insider information about what’s going to happen to the economy or to certain companies — information that very few other investors have — the buying and selling of individual shares of stock is a terrible investment strategy. This is why the vast majority of Americans who invest in the stock market invest in index funds that are tied to the performance of the stock market as a whole. So why do many members of Congress continue to invest in individual stocks? Could it possibly be that they learn useful things about what’s going to happen to the economy or individual companies before the rest of us do? It certainly seems so. In January 2020, a handful of senators — including Richard Burr, Dianne Feinstein, and Kelly Loeffler — made significant stock trades after receiving a classified briefing on COVID-19. This was January 2020, mind you — well before the public knew the full extent of the threat. Then in the early weeks of the pandemic, nearly 75 federal lawmakers bought stocks in COVID-19 vaccine makers Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, or Pfizer. I could give you a lot more examples, but you get the point. Even if these were innocent investments that weren’t based on inside knowledge, they certainly smell like insider trades. At the least, they create the appearance of self-dealing. They undermine public trust. A huge amount of information about the economy and individual companies courses through Congress every day. Much of it is not available to the public. Some of it indicates what’s likely to happen to a particular company’s share prices. There is no possible way to guard against the misuse of this information for personal profit. So why allow individual stock trades? There is simply no legitimate reason why members of Congress (or their families) should be trading individual shares of stock. (By the way, “Insider” has just published the most complete and detailed public accounting to date of the stock transactions of individual members of Congress — one for the Senate and one for the House. It’s eye-opening. But disclosure alone won’t solve the conflict-of-interest problem because it’s impossible to tell whether the transactions were based on inside information.)There’s an obvious solution: Bar members of Congress from trading individual stocks. The proposed Ban Conflicted Trading Act does just this. Lawmakers would have six months after being elected to sell their individual stock holdings, transfer them to a blind trust over which they have no control, or hold onto them until they leave office without trading them. (Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia just introduced legislation that would also bar family members of our representatives and senators from trading stocks.)This is an easy and appropriate fix. It doesn’t penalize members of Congress or their families. They can still invest in index funds, like most other stock market investors. They just can’t trade individual stocks. But Congress has yet to hold a vote on this bill. Why?Last April, Ron Lieber of the New York Times asked newly elected members of Congress if they would pledge not to trade individual stocks while in office. Few were willing. Most didn’t even respond.It gets worse. Last month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected the idea of banning politicians and their families from trading stocks while in office. (She was asked about it by a reporter from “Insider,” which recently published an investigation about lawmakers’ trades.)I’m a big admirer of Nancy Pelosi. But, with due respect, she’s dead wrong on this one. With distrust in government near an all-time high, even the appearance of a conflict of interest hurts our democracy. Members of Congress are elected to represent the interests of the people, not the money in their brokerage accounts. Banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks should be a no-brainer. Congress should pass the Ban Conflicted Trading Act. Now. You might suggest this to your own members of Congress. 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

Yesterday, a member of our group named Emmet Bondurant, a distinguished constitutional lawyer from Georgia, commented on this page about the filibuster: The biggest lie of all is the Senate’s claim that it “is the greatest deliberative body in the world.” The filibuster makes the Senate the least deliberative legislative and least democratic legislative body by allowing a minority of Senators to prevent the Senate from debating, much less voting on, any legislation that is opposed by the minority party.A decade ago, when Emmet and I served on the board of Common Cause, he brought a case before federal courts, arguing that the filibuster is unconstitutional. He didn’t get very far. (The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia decided against Common Cause on dubious grounds, and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.) But this was before the high court became crammed with so-called “originalists” who believe the Constitution should be interpreted to mean what the Framers thought when they drafted it. Originalism is an absurd position, of course. American society is so different today from what it was in the eighteenth century that any attempt to apply precepts from that time to this time is doomed to failure. But why not test the sincerity of the originalists sitting on today’s Supreme Court with an issue that the Framers would find a no-brainer? All evidence suggests they would agree with Emmet that the filibuster violates the Constitution. The Framers went to great lengths to ensure that a minority of senators could not thwart the wishes of the majority. After all, a major reason they convened the Constitutional Convention in 1787 was because the Articles of Confederation (the precursor to the Constitution) required a super-majority vote of nine of the thirteen states, making the government weak and ineffective. This led James Madison to argue against any super-majority requirement in the Constitution the Framers were then designing, writing that otherwise “the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed,“ and “It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority.” And it led Alexander Hamilton to note “how much good may be prevented, and how much ill may be produced” if a minority in either house of Congress had “the power of hindering the doing what may be necessary.”This is why the Framers required no more than a simple majority in both houses of Congress to pass legislation. They carved out only five specific exceptions requiring a super-majority vote only in rare, high-stakes decisions: (1) impeachments, (2) expulsion of members, (3) overriding a presidential veto, (4) ratification of treaties, and (5) amendments to the Constitution. By being explicit about these five exceptions to majority rule, the Framers underscored their commitment to majority rule for the normal business of the nation. They would have rejected the filibuster, through which a minority of senators continually obstructs the majority.So where did the filibuster come from? The Senate needed a mechanism to end debate on proposed laws and move to a vote. The Framers didn’t anticipate this problem. But in 1841, a small group of senators took advantage of this oversight to stage the first filibuster. They hoped to force their opponents to give in by prolonging debate and delaying a vote. This was what became known as the “talking filibuster” — as popularized in Frank Capra’s other great film, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (a perfect compliment to his “It’s a Wonderful Life”). But contrary to the admirable character Jimmy Stewart plays in that film, the result was hardly admirable.After the Civil War, the filibuster was used by Southern politicians to defeat Reconstruction legislation, including bills to protect the voting rights of Black Americans. Finally, in 1917, as a result of pressure from President Woodrow Wilson and the public, the Senate adopted a procedure for limiting debate and ending filibusters with a two-thirds vote of the Senate (67 votes). In the 1970s, the Senate reduced the number of votes required to end debate down to 60, and no longer required constant talking to delay a vote. 41 votes would do it.Throughout much of the 20th century, filibusters remained rare. (Southern senators mainly used them to block anti-lynching, fair employment, voting rights, and other critical civil rights bills.) But that changed in 2007, after Democrats took over the Senate. Senate Republicans, now in the minority, used the 60-vote requirement with unprecedented frequency. After Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office in 2009, the Republican minority — led by Mitch McConnell — blocked virtually every significant piece of legislation. Nothing could move without 60 votes. A record 67 filibusters occurred during the first half of the 111th Congress — double the entire 20-year period between 1950 and 1969. By the time Congress adjourned in December 2010, the filibuster cou

President Biden will go to Georgia tomorrow to give a speech on voting rights. It’s expected to be as hard-hitting as his speech last Thursday about Trump and the attack on the Capitol. Biden will push for reform of the senate filibuster to carve out voting rights from its 60-vote requirement, thereby opening the way for senate Democrats to enact the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Amendment Act. As you probably know, the Freedom to Vote Act would preempt state efforts to suppress votes and take over election machinery. The John Lewis Voting Rights Amendment Act would restore the “pre-clearance” requirement of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (before the Supreme Court gutted it in 2013) which forced states with a history of discrimination – including Georgia -- to get Justice Department approval before they changed their voting rules.But Biden will need more than a hard-hitting speech to reform the filibuster and open the door for these two critical pieces of legislation. And his most important audience isn’t in Georgia, which already has two Democratic senators who will support him. It’s in West Virginia, whose senior Democratic senator is signaling he will not. Georgia is, however, strategically important to voting rights in other ways. It has several major races this year, including Senator Raphael Warnock’s bid for reelection and Stacy Abrams’ campaign for governor against Republican incumbent Brian Kemp. (The only reason Democrats have a Senate majority right now is because they prevailed in both of Georgia’s runoff elections on January 5 of last year, electing Warnock and Senator Jon Ossoff.)Thanks for subscribing to my letter. If you’d like to support this effort (and be part of the conversation) please consider a paid or gift subscription. Georgia also typifies what’s happening in several other southern states, such as North Carolina, Texas, and Arizona. Atlanta is becoming a major global economic hub, inhabited by upwardly-mobile and well-educated professionals who tend to vote for Democrats. Rural Georgia is a challenged economic backwater inhabited by less-educated voters who have been on a downward slide for years, making them highly susceptible to Trumpian racism and xenophobia, and Fox News’s conspiracy theories. The shift toward cosmopolitan Atlanta hasn’t yet changed the composition of Georgia’s legislature, which is still dominated by Republicans. Shortly after Biden’s victory, it passed laws requiring additional ID for absentee voting, removing early voting sites, and allowing state takeovers of county elections. Georgia’s GOP lawmakers are now readying bills to nix voting touchscreen machines and expand probes into voter fraud, among other anti-democracy initiatives. Hence the importance of national voting rights legislation, and of the Democrats’ move to reform the filibuster. Senate Democrats have given up on “Build Back Better” for now and are pivoting to voting rights, and a filibuster carveout for voting rights. But Manchin, the Holdout-in-Chief, is standing in the way, just as he did on “Build Back Better.” He says the only way he’ll support a carveout from the filibuster for voting rights is if it’s “bipartisan.”This is a bizarre argument, for several reasons. First, there’s no precedent requiring that changes in the filibuster rule be bipartisan. In recent decades the rule has been changed several times -- most recently by McConnell and the Republicans, to confirm Supreme Court nominees with a bare majority – without bipartisan support.It’s also bizarre because of America’s history of racism, which has not been fought through bipartisanship. Representative Jim Clyburn from South Carolina, the third-ranking House Democrat, whose endorsement of Biden during the Democratic primaries put Biden over the top, put it bluntly:“I am, as you know, a Black person, descended of people who were given the vote by the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The 15th amendment was not a bipartisan vote, it was a single party vote that gave Black people the right to vote. Manchin and others need to stop saying that because that gives me great pain for somebody to imply that the 15th Amendment of the United States Constitution is not legitimate because it did not have bipartisan buy-in.”Third, American democracy cannot be saved with “bipartisanship” when one party is out to destroy it. The filibuster is becoming less democratic by the day. As of now, just 41 Senate Republicans, representing only 21 percent of the country, are blocking laws supported by the vast majority.Manchin (and Kyrsten Sinema, who isn’t even trying to explain her position on the filibuster or much of anything else) -- now the darlings of Republican donors -- apparently have more allegiance to the filibuster than to democracy. (By contrast, Senator Angus King, the Maine Independent who caucuses with the Democrats and had earlier rejected calls to reform the filibuster, says he has “concluded that democr

We’ve gone through the shameful first anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol and of the refusal of 147 members of Congress (all Republicans) to certify all the electors from states that voted for Biden, on the basis of no evidence of fraud. So far, no political figure has been charged with any criminal wrongdoing. We’ve seen 34 voter-suppression bills enacted by 19 Republican state legislatures; at least 8 give state legislatures the power to disregard election outcomes. More than 400 additional voter suppression measures are now being prepared. And we are now witnessing a struggle in the Senate to reform the filibuster so that voting rights legislation can be enacted. All of which raises a basic question: Is there still a common good? I was at the impressionable age of fourteen when I heard John F. Kennedy urge us not to ask what America can do for us but what we can do for America. Seven years later I took a job as a summer intern in the Senate office of his brother, Robert F. Kennedy. It was not a glamorous job, to say the least. I felt lucky when I was asked to run his signature machine. But I told myself that in a very tiny way I was doing something for the good of the country.That was more than a half century ago. I wish I could say America is a better place now than it was then. Surely our lives are more convenient. Fifty years ago there were no cash machines or smart phones, and I wrote my first book on a typewriter. As individuals, we are as kind and generous as ever. We volunteer in our communities, donate, and help one another. We pitch in during natural disasters and emergencies. We come to the aid of individuals in need. We are a more inclusive society, in that Black people, LGBTQ people, and women have legal rights they didn’t have a half century ago. Yet our civic life—as citizens in our democracy, participants in our economy, managers or employees of companies, and members or leaders of organizations—seems to have sharply deteriorated. What we have lost is a sense of our connectedness to each other and to our ideals—the America that John F. Kennedy asked that we contribute to.Starting in the late 1970s, Americans began talking less about the common good and more about self-aggrandizement. The shift is the hallmark of modern America: From the “Greatest Generation” to the “Me Generation,” from “we’re all in it together” to “you’re on your own.” In 1977, motivational speaker Robert Ringer wrote a book that reached the top of The New York Times bestseller list entitled Looking Out for # 1. It extolled the virtues of selfishness to a wide and enthusiastic audience. The 1987 film Wall Street epitomized the new ethos in the character Gordon Gekko and his signature line, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”The last five decades have also been marked by growing cynicism and distrust toward all of the basic institutions of American society. There is a wide and pervasive sense that the system as a whole is no longer working as it should. Racism, xenophobia, and religious intolerance are on the rise. A growing number of Americans feel neglected and powerless. Some are poor, or Black or Latino. Others are white and have been on a downward economic escalator for years. Some have been seduced by demagogues and conspiracy theorists. Thanks for subscribing to my letter. If you’d like to support this effort and be part of the conversation, please consider a paid or gift subscription. Is there a common good that still binds us together as Americans? Yes, and it’s not the whiteness of our skin, or our adherence to Christianity, or the fact that we were born in the United States. We’re bound together by the ideals and principles we share, and the mutual obligations those principles entail.After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare”—not for “me the selfish jerk seeking as much wealth and power as possible.” During the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II, Americans faced common perils that required us to work together for the common good. That good was echoed in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”—freedom of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear. The common good animated many of us – both white and Black Americans—to fight for civil rights and voting rights in the 1960s. It inspired America to create the largest and most comprehensive system of public education the world had ever seen. And it moved many of us to act against the injustice of the Vietnam War, and others of us to serve bravely in that besotted conflict.Americans sharply disagree about exactly what we want for America or for the world. But if we are to participate in the same society we must agree on how we deal with our disagreements, our obligations under the law, and our commitment to democracy. It’s our agreement to these principles that connects us, not agreement about where these principles lead. Some of us may want to prohibit abortions because w

I sometimes hear from people who tell me they’ve been fighting for years for the common good — for social justice, for a stronger democracy, for a sustainable environment — but they can’t do it any longer. They’re burnt out. “I’m done,” one of my former students wrote me last week. She’s been in the trenches for more than three years at a nonprofit dedicated to environmental justice, putting in 10 to 12-hour days, often six and sometimes seven days a week. “Maybe I’ve made a small difference,” she writes, “but it’s not worth it. It’s taken a terrible a toll on me. I have to get a life.” I understand. Regressive forces are huge and powerful. The moneyed interests have almost unlimited resources. The rightwing anti-social media have seemingly unlimited reach. Racism, xenophobia and outright lies seem to be growing louder. In the short term — even over three or four years — positive social change can appear an impossible task. The road is very long, and it’s filled with potholes. But almost nothing worth doing can get done in the short term. Even under the most favorable circumstances, social change never occurs quickly.One of my dearest and oldest friends, Fred Wertheimer, has been fighting for voting rights and campaign finance reform for over forty years. When I spoke to him recently, he told me that he thought there was a good chance that senate Democrats would support the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Enhancement Act, and carve out a voting-rights exception to the filibuster. Thanks for subscribing to my letter on the system. If you’d like to support this effort (and join the conversation) please consider a paid or gift subscription. I hope Fred is right, but what astonishes me about Fred is his tenacity. He keeps fighting no matter what. If senate Democrats fail, Fred will just keep fighting. Almost thirty years ago, in the months before Bill Clinton moved into the White House, Fred asked me if Clinton was committed to reforming campaign-finance laws. I assured Fred he was, because Clinton told me so. Soon after the election, when I pressed the president-elect about it, he told me to check in with the then Democratic Speaker of the House, Tom Foley. Foley’s response? “It will never happen.”I expected Fred to be dismayed. To the contrary, he said “Well, we have more work to do.” Fred didn’t see it as a defeat. He saw it for what it was — a clear message that those who wanted campaign finance reform had more work to do before it could become a reality. The history of social reform — women’s suffrage, civil rights, labor rights, LBGTQ rights, and so on — confirms the central importance of tenacity.A few years ago I spoke with Stacey Abrams, who had just lost her bid to be Georgia’s governor to Republican Brian Kemp, then Georgia’s secretary of state. Like Fred, Abrams is one of the most tenacious people I’ve ever met. She served in the Georgia legislature for ten years. She saw voter suppression first-hand. When Kemp was Georgia’s secretary of state, he oversaw the purge of hundreds of thousands of voter registrations. Yet Abram’s defeat in that election didn’t seem to faze her. She promptly turned to organizing voters. “I’m optimistic,” she said. “We’re going to win.” (Her organizing paid off in Democrats’ big wins in Georgia in 2020. Abrams recently announced she’ll be running for governor in 2022.)How do reformers maintain their strength and commitment over so many years? Continuous activism is exhausting. Burnout is a constant hazard. What’s the secret to their tenacity? I can think of three:First, they pace themselves. They don’t put in ten-hour days, six or seven days a week, as did my former student. Most put in normal working days. They take weekends and holidays off. They understand they’re in a marathon which they can’t possibly win if they go all out, continuously. They’re patient with themselves. Second, they’re part of a team or group that helps one another. They trade off the hardest work among themselves so no single member of the group has to do it continuously. They buoy each other’s spirits. They share jokes and humorous anecdotes. They watch out for each other’s mental and physical health. Third, they find opportunities to celebrate victories, no matter how small. Big victories are rare, but small ones — getting a particular city to enact a progressive measure, convincing some holdouts to join the movement, getting a favorable news story — do occur. And when they do, those who are in it for the long haul celebrate them, boosting everyone’s morale and illustrating the possibilities for larger victories. Adam Hochschild’s brilliant and inspiring book, Bury the Chains relates the true story of twelve people (a printer, a lawyer, a clergyman, and nine others united by their hatred of slavery) who in early 1787 came together in a London printing shop and began a grass-roots movement to end the British slave trade. It seemed impossible at the time. The slave trade was hug

Friends,The words “anniversary” or “commemoration” do not appropriately characterize this day. What occurred a year ago is nothing to be memorialized, nothing to glorify. What happened on January 6, 2021 was frightening and shameful. That date shall live in infamy — like December 7, 1941 and 9/11. The difference is that on those days the United States was attacked by foreign powers, whereas on this date the United States was attacked by Americans — some waving American flags, most of them loyal to the man who had lost the presidential reelection the previous November 3 but who did not concede his loss and continues to argue the presidency was stolen from him.Besides paying our respects to the families of the five people who lost their lives in the attack on the Capitol, as well as to those who still bear its psychological scars — Capitol police officers, and members of congress who remain traumatized by what occurred — it is also important to acknowledge the trauma to our nation. The trauma continues to some extent in each of us today. The perpetrators must be held accountable. Trump must be held accountable. Members of congress who conspired with him must be held accountable. The only way we as a nation can process this trauma — gain some finality and closure on what occurred a year ago today — is to ensure that those who attacked the Capitol and those who instigated the attack bear full responsibility for their actions. And we must ensure that nothing like this ever occurs again. For those of you who may be interested, I held a live event this morning on social media (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — ironically, the same anti-social media on which the attack was planned and provoked) to make a few comments and answer your questions. The recording is below. 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,With Trump’s Big Lie largely unchallenged by Republican lawmakers, the Republican Party has swung almost entirely into the Trump camp. Over 70 percent of registered Republicans believe Trump won the 2020 election. Trump has worked to purge from the state and national party anyone he considers insufficiently loyal to him. His closest supporters have become so extreme that they are openly supporting authoritarianism and talking of Democrats as “vermin.” Meanwhile, more than a third of Americans now say violent action against the government is sometimes justified — considerably more than in past polls dating back more than two decades. But a plurality of the people who feel this way are Republicans. Only 23 percent of Democrats think violence is sometimes justified, while 40 percent of Republicans say it is. Some fear a violent clash in the 2024 election if Trump runs and loses. Three former top generals recently warned in the Washington Post of their increasing concern about “the potential for lethal chaos inside our military, which would put all Americans at severe risk.” Thanks for subscribing to my letter on the system. If you’d like to support this effort (and be part of the discussion) please consider a paid or gift subscription. Talk of potential civil war can be dangerous and distracting. As Fintan O’Toole recently wrote in The Atlantic, in a critique of a new book “The Next Civil War” by the Canadian novelist and cultural critic Stephen Marche, such prophecies can be self-fulfilling and corrosive, making people more fearful of one another. They also distract attention from chronic but less spectacular problems the country faces. Even without a violent civil war, the chasm separating red and blue America has become so wide that the question arises: Can we continue to inhabit the same nation? **Let me thank all of you for your extremely thoughtful comments. I’ll offer a few thoughts of my own at this point, take your questions, and respond to your comments. First, I don’t think it will come to civil war. Our governing institutions are still strong. Most of our media is still responsible, in terms of reporting facts. Most of our political, nonprofit, and business leaders are doing their jobs as best they can. Even careless talk about civil war can be dangerous and destructive.But I do think we are in a civic crisis. Trump is the symptom. The underlying cause is that many Americans — mainly those without college degrees and living in the heartland — have been abandoned. The bottom 10 percent by income is still struggling but by-in-large are better off than they were 40 years ago. But the 40 percent just above them have been losing ground. That has made them susceptible to someone like Trump — claiming to be an anti-establishment “strongman” who can turn their despair and humiliation into hope and pride, even though he is pure bombast and narcissism. Why hasn’t the Democratic Party responded better to the needs of the working class? Even before it went on life support, “Build Back Better” had been whittled down to the point where it would do little or nothing for the bottom half. I’m old enough to remember when the Democratic Party attracted those with less education and the Republican Party attracted those with more. Today, people with less education vote for Republicans and those with more vote for Democrats. The Democratic Party has gone from being a worker party to a party of intellectual and professional elites. Since the Republican Party continues to cater to the needs and wants of business on economic policy, this has left millions of working people without any effective political voice. Hence, policies that would change the structure of power are opposed by the likes of Joe Manchin, the senior Democratic senator from West Virginia. We won’t have a civil war, but we are in imminent danger of losing our democracy to a dangerous alliance of big business oligarchs, on the one hand, and Trump-like populist-fascists on the other. To me, that’s the fight ahead of us — to foster a countervailing alliance of the poor, working class, and middle class that will make our democracy and economy work for them as well. 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 week I suggested that Trump maintains a hold on a large fraction of America because he fills a void created by a system that has left them behind. I followed with the question raised by Frank Capra’s iconic film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” in which the greedy Mr. Potter tries to take over Bedford Falls: Do we join together or let the Potters of America own and run everything?We’re well on the way to the Potterizing of America. To take one example, the expanded child tax credit payments will end next week. (Biden’s original “Build Back Better” package had extended it, but the package is on life support in the Senate.) Republican critics, including Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, claim that the child tax credit has contributed to inflation by giving people more money to spend when the supply chain is already strained. “Moderate” Democrats, like Joe Manchin, think it’s too expensive. Rubbish. The benefit is tiny compared with the economy. Yet its payments have reduced child poverty by nearly 30 percent and have helped the working class. They’ve reduced hunger and lowered financial stress, especially in rural states that received the most money per capita (such as Missouri and West Virginia). Families spent the money on essentials like groceries and stashed some away for emergency savings. Thanks for subscribing to my letter on the system. Please consider supporting this effort through a paid or gift subscription. Others (including a few prominent economists like Larry Summers) blame inflation on the government’s pandemic spending, overall. In yesterday’s New York Times, Neil Irwin wrote that because “the government tried overheating the economy” we now have “soaring prices and many goods in short supply. Inflation has reached its highest levels in four decades.”This misses the point. Expanded unemployment benefits ended in September (earlier in some states) and the last round of stimulus payments went out last spring. The spending was a great success story — keeping millions of Americans from falling into poverty. And it hasn’t been the major cause of inflation. Still others (CEOs and business groups) blame inflation on wage increases. This is pure rubbish. Price increases are now running at 6.8 percent annually but wages are growing only between 3-4 percent. So real wages (what those wages can actually purchase) are actually declining for most Americans. This is why programs like the child tax credit and other government assistance are so important. The biggest single reason prices are rising is the concentration of the American economy into the hands of a few corporate giants with the power to raise prices. To be sure, supply bottlenecks have raised the prices corporations pay for some raw materials and components. But here’s the most important thing: Instead of absorbing these costs, corporations are passing them on to customers in the form of higher prices. This is because most large corporations face little or no competition. If corporations in the same industry were competing vigorously against each other, they’d keep their prices as low as possible so as not to lose customers. They’d try to avoid passing increased costs to consumers in higher prices, for fear of losing customers to competitors that don’t raise prices. They’d absorb the costs, and their profits would fall. The opposite is occurring. Corporations are raising prices even as they rake in record profits. Profit margins at large corporations are now at a 70-year high. Take a look at the following chart (from Bloomberg):Big corporations face so little competition they can raise prices with impunity. They simply coordinate their prices increases with the handful of other big corporations in the same industry, who are happy to oblige. That way, all of them stay highly profitable. Wall Street knows exactly what’s going on. Big investors are pouring money into corporations with the power to raise prices. “What we really want to find are companies with pricing power,” Giorgio Caputo, senior portfolio manager at J O Hambro Capital Management told Bloomberg. “In an inflationary environment, that’s the gift that keeps on giving because companies can pass along their pricing on the way up, and don’t necessarily need to get it back on the way down” [emphasis added].The underlying problem isn’t inflation per se. It's lack of competition. Corporations are using the excuse of inflation to raise prices and make fatter profits. (Matt Stoller, who has an excellent Substack on monopolization, calculates that 60 percent of the increase in inflation is going to corporate profits.)Blaming the child tax credit or pandemic assistance or wage increases is a cruel ruse that disguises what’s really going on. This is what I mean when I say America has been Potterized: People at the top — top corporate executives and big investors — are doing better than ever. Everyone else is being squeezed. What should be done about all of this? For one thing, raise taxes on big corp

Before we turn to what I’m calling the "Potterizing” of America (the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few at the very top), we need to deal with one of its shameful consequences that will be front and center this week: accountability for Trump’s ongoing attempted coup and the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Thursday marks the first anniversary of that attack. Last Wednesday I discussed four truths underlying the attack: (1) Trump incited it, (2) it culminated two months of his attempted coup, (3) his attempted coup continues to this day, and (4) he and his accomplices must be held accountable -- and we must also respond to the reasons why so many Americans continue to support him and his Big Lie.As Congress returns and the anniversary of the attack comes into view, the necessity of accountability presents itself in two forms. Democrats can and must act on both. The first is voting rights. The Senate reconvenes today. Voting rights is the most important issue before it, considering that Republican-dominated states have used Trump’s Big Lie to justify a raft of measures to restrict voting and give their legislatures greater control over the administration of elections. More such measures are on the way. The Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Enhancement Act, both now before the Senate, are critical to protecting American democracy from these and other incursions. But because no senate Republican supports these bills, they can be passed only if senate Democrats change the filibuster rule. One way (which even Joe Manchin seems receptive to) would be to carve out an exception for voting rights bills so they can be enacted by a simple majority. Changing the filibuster is the first step to protecting voting rights and our democracy. Senate Democrats must take this step right away. Thanks for subscribing to my letter about the system. If you’d like to support this effort, please consider a paid or gift subscription. The other form of accountability is criminal responsibility for the attempted coup and the attack on the Capitol. The Justice Department has already charged more than 700 people with participating in the attack. Although no case has yet gone to trial, many of the defendants have pleaded guilty and received sentences from probation to 41 months in prison.Yet so far, the Department has charged no political figure, including Trump himself. To be sure, the Watergate scandal didn’t result in significant prosecutions and convictions for two years after the break-in. But if Republicans gain a majority in the House next November, you can bet they’ll close down the House’s January 6 committee now investigating the attack. The critical political actors at this point are:Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair. Cheney is focused squarely on Trump’s potential crimes. Yesterday she said of Trump: “Any man…who would provoke a violent assault on the Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes, any man who would watch television as police officers were being beaten, as his supporters were invading the Capitol of the United States is clearly unfit for future office, clearly can never be anywhere near the Oval Office ever again.” She went on to warn her Republican colleagues that they “can either be loyal to Donald Trump or we can be loyal to the Constitution, but we cannot be both.”Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff. After he failed to appear before the committee, Congress voted to hold him in contempt and referred him to the Justice Department for prosecution. As of today, the grand jury impaneled by the Department has not indicted Meadows (note that his is the same crime for which Trump adviser Steve Bannon was indicted).Former assistant attorney general Jeffrey Clark. His testimony could also implicate Trump. Recall that when top Justice Department officials told Trump that no widespread fraud contributed to President Joe Biden’s win, Trump reportedly responded, “Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me” and his allies in Congress. Clark apparently took Trump up on his request, drafting a letter giving Georgia elections officials a road map to overturn the election’s results. When Clark appeared before the House committee about this, he refused to answer questions and has since missed several appearance dates (allegedly because of unspecified health issues).Republican congressman Scott Perry. He reportedly assisted Trump in trying to install Clark as attorney general. (Perry and Meadows seem to have communicated via encrypted apps, presumably to hide what they were talking about.) Perry has refused the committee’s request for documents and testimony concerning the run-up to the attack on the Capitol, asserting that the committee is an “illegitimate entity.” (Hello? Multiple trial and appellate courts have ruled that the committee is doing precisely what it is authorized to do.)Republican congressman Jim Jordan. When the Ja

Happy new year. I hope it’s a safe and healthy one for you and your family. Over the last few days I’ve shared with you some facts and thoughts about Trump’s continuing attempted coup. I’ve also suggested that an answer to it (and to Trumpism in general) can be found in Frank Capra’s 1946 iconic movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the central question it posed: Do we join together, or let the Mr. Potters of America own and run everything?Today, the first of 2022, struck me as an appropriate one to focus on how and why America came to be Potterized.It’s not possible to change the future without understanding the past. The American system isn’t just politics or “the market” as we now experience it. It’s an evolving set of laws, rules, and norms that reflect a shifting structure of power. If we want to alter the road we’re on (and we must), we need to see how we got on it. If we want to alter the current structure of power (and we must), we have to realize how it came to be. Thank you for subscribing to this letter about the system. If you’d like to support this work, please consider a paid or a gift subscription. Most importantly, we need to see why we made a giant U-turn from the road we were on during the first three decades after World War II — when America was on the way to building a robust democracy and the biggest middle class the world had ever seen, expanding civil rights and voting rights and creating a more inclusive society — to the road that led us to Trump. If we figure out how we got from “It’s a Wonderful Life” of 1946 to the Pottersvilles that so many Americans are inhabiting in 2022, we have a fighting chance of getting back on the right road. My personal journey — and the questions that have dogged me for years — parallels this larger one. I was born in 1946, the same year “It’s a Wonderful Life” was released. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s during civil rights, voting rights, women’s rights, and a burgeoning if not wild-eyed youthful optimism about the future. I witnessed the U-turn. I saw the system change, but didn’t know why. In the 1970s, I represented the United States before the Supreme Court, and then I ran the policy team in the Federal Trade Commission. In the 1980s, I watched and chronicled what I saw happening under Reagan and Bush 1, and I taught brilliant students what I thought they needed to know about the system. In the 1990s, I advised Bill Clinton when he was a candidate for president, then headed his economic transition team and became his Secretary of Labor. Afterwards, I taught another group of terrific students. I advised Barack Obama. When Trump was elected, I became a staunch critic. Through it all, I kept asking myself: why is this happening? How did we get on the wrong road? What can be done? I have some preliminary answers that I’ll be sharing with you over the next weeks and months. For now, here’s a video that was my first attempt to answer these questions as simply as I could. Please have a look. I’m interested in your thoughts and comments. By the way, a number of you have asked for a still of “The Big Picture.” Here it is: 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 post yesterday on the real lesson of January 6 provoked a great discussion (many thanks to those of you who participated). It also prompted me to rewatch a movie that provides a hint of an answer — Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which was released 75 years ago this month. When I first saw the movie in the late 1960s, I thought it pure hokum. America was coming apart over Vietnam and the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and I remember thinking the movie could have been produced by some propaganda bureau of the government that had been told to create a white-washed (and white) version of the United States. But in more recent years I’ve come around. As America has moved closer to being an oligarchy — with staggering inequalities of income, wealth, and power not seen in over a century — and closer to Trumpian neofascism (the two moves are connected), “It’s a Wonderful Life” speaks to what’s gone wrong and what must be done to make it right. As you probably know (and if you don’t, this weekend would be a good time to watch it), the movie’s central conflict is between Mr. Potter (played by Lionel Barrymore) and George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart). Potter is a greedy and cruel banker. George is the generous and honorable head of Bedford Fall’s building-and-loan — the one entity standing in the way of Potter’s total domination of the town. When George accidentally loses some deposits that fall into the hands of Potter, Potter sees an opportunity to ruin George. This brings George to the bridge where he contemplates suicide, thinking his life has been worthless — before a guardian angel’s counsel turns him homeward.It’s two radically opposed versions of America. In Potter’s social-Darwinist view, people compete with one another for resources. Those who succeed deserve to win because they’ve outrun everyone else in that competitive race. After the death of George’s father, who founded the building-and-loan, Potter moves to dissolve it — claiming George’s father “was not a businessman. He was a man of high ideals, so-called, but ideals without common sense can ruin a town.” For Potter, common sense is not coddling the “discontented rabble.” In George’s view, Bedford Falls is a community whose members help each other. He tells Potter that the so-called “rabble … do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community.” His father helped them build homes on credit so they could afford a decent life. “People were human beings to him,” George tells Potter, “but to you, they’re cattle.”When George contemplates ending it all, his guardian angel shows him how bleak Bedford Falls would be had George never lived — poor, fearful, and dependent on Potter. The movie ends when everyone George has helped (virtually the entire town) pitch in to bail out George and his building-and-loan. It’s a cartoon, of course — but a cartoon that’s fast becoming a reality in America. Do we join together or let the Potters of America own and run everything? Soon after “It’s a Wonderful Life” was released, the FBI considered it evidence of Communist Party infiltration of the film industry. The FBI’s Los Angeles field office — using a report by an ad-hoc group that included Fountainhead writer and future Trump pin-up girl Ayn Rand — warned that the movie represented “rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture.” The movie “deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters. This … is a common trick used by Communists.” The FBI report compared “It’s a Wonderful Life” to a Soviet film, and alleged that Frank Capra was “associated with left-wing groups” and that screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett were “very close to known Communists.”This was all rubbish, of course — and a prelude to the Red Scare led by Republican Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, who launched a series of highly publicized probes into alleged Communist penetration of Hollywood, the State Department, and even the US Army. The movie was also prelude to modern Republican ideology. Since Ronald Reagan, Republicans have used Potter-like social Darwinism to justify everything tax cuts for the wealthy, union-busting, and cutbacks in social safety nets. Rand herself became a hero to many in the Trump administration. Above all, Reagan Republicans, CEOs, and Trumpers have used the strategy of “divide-and-conquer” to generate division among Americans (a kind of political social-Darwinism). That way, Americans stay angry and suspicious of one another, and don’t look upward to see where all the money and power have gone. And won’t join together to claim it back. What would Republicans say about “It’s a Wonderful Life” if it were released today? They’d probably call it socialist rather than communist, but it would make them squirm all the same — especially given

I’m sorry to intrude on your holiday week with this, but I want you to be prepared for what’s to come next week. January 6 will be the first anniversary of one of the most shameful days in American history. On that date in 2021, the United States Capitol was attacked by thousands of armed loyalists to Donald Trump, some intent on killing members of Congress. Roughly 140 officers were injured in the attack. Five people died that day. But even now, almost a year later, Americans remain confused and divided about the significance of what occurred. Let me offer four basic truths:1. Trump incited the attack on the Capitol. For weeks before the attack, Trump had been urging his supporters to come to Washington for a “Save America March” on January 6, when Congress was to ceremonially count the electoral votes of Joe Biden’s win. Without any basis in fact or law (60 federal courts as well as the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security concluded that there was no evidence of substantial fraud), Trump repeatedly asserted he had won the 2020 election and Biden had lost it. “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” Trump tweeted on December 19. Then on December 26: “See you in Washington, DC, on January 6th. Don’t miss it. Information to follow.” On December 30: “JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!” On January 1: “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C. will take place at 11:00 A.M. on January 6th. Locational details to follow. StopTheSteal!”At a rally just before the violence, Trump repeated his falsehoods about how the election was stolen. “We will never give up,” he said. “We will never concede. It will never happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.” He told the crowd that Republicans are constantly fighting like a boxer with his hands tied behind his back, respectful of everyone — “including bad people.” But, he said, “we’re going to have to fight much harder…. We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong…. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore." He then told the crowd that “different rules” applied to them. “When you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules. So I hope Mike [Pence] has the courage to do what he has to do, and I hope he doesn’t listen to the RINOs [Republicans in Name Only] and the stupid people that he’s listening to.” Then he dispatched the crowd to the Capitol as the electoral count was about to start. The attack on the Capitol came immediately after. 2. The events of January 6 capped two months during which Trump sought to reverse the outcome of the election. Shortly after the election, Trump summoned to the White House Republican lawmakers from Pennsylvania and Michigan, to inquire about how they might alter the election results. He even called two local canvassing board officials in Wayne County, Michigan’s most populous county and one that overwhelmingly favored Biden.He phoned Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes,” according to a recording of that conversation, adding “the people of Georgia are angry, the people of the country are angry. And there’s nothing wrong with saying that, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.” He suggested that Georgia’s secretary of state would be criminally prosecuted if he did not do as Trump told him. “You know what they did and you’re not reporting it. You know, that’s a criminal — that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”He pressed the acting US attorney general and deputy attorney general to declare the election fraudulent. When the deputy said the department had found no evidence of widespread fraud and warned that it had no power to change the outcome of the election, Trump replied “Just say that the election was corrupt + leave the rest to me” and to Trump’s congressional allies. Trump and his allies continued to harangue the attorney general and top Justice Department officials nearly every day until January 6. Trump plotted with an assistant attorney general to oust the acting attorney general and pressure lawmakers in Georgia to overturn the state’s election results. But Trump ultimately decided against it after top department leaders pledged to resign en masse.Presumably, more details of Trump’s attempted coup will emerge after the House Select Committee on January 6 gathers more evidence and deposes more witnesses. 3. Trump’s attempted coup continues to this day. Trump still refuses to concede the election and continues to assert it was stolen. He presides over a network of loyalists and allies who have

My father once said that at the 1939 World’s Fair he saw an exhibit about the future featuring “picture phones” that allowed people to talk and see each other. He predicted the gadgets would fail because users would find them awkward and unnerving.Well, that future is now — and it’s not awkward in the slightest. I just had FaceTime calls with my two sons and their families (including two wonderful daughters-in-law and a granddaughter) – one in New York, the other in Los Angeles. I can’t tell you how happy it made me to see and hear all of them. They looked relaxed. They’re enjoying the holidays. They’re safe and healthy.We’ve been exchanging text messages and regular phone calls during the holiday. But to see them — to watch and interact with them — is different. Not as good as being with them, of course, but the next best thing when family members live thousands of miles away and the pandemic makes travel difficult.Like my father, I’m a bit of a technophobe. I’m a late adapter of e-everything. When it comes to Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Microsoft, I harbor deep suspicions bordering on loathing. I hate the part of “connectivity” that threatens our autonomy and privacy and undermines our democracy.But I love the part that just moments ago allowed me to see their faces light up, watch them laugh and joke, and be there with them, even for a few minutes. My granddaughter is growing and changing so fast I almost can’t bear not being with her. And yet there she was on my phone, her eyes dancing directly into the eyes of her delighted grandfather!When my sons were her age and a bit younger, I went to Washington to join Bill Clinton’s cabinet. I missed the precious years when they were turning from youngsters to teenagers — separating from their parents and discovering their independent selves. Sure, I saw them on weekends and on holidays. But I was often preoccupied with the Nation’s Business. Had FaceTime existed then I doubt it would have made much difference. During the week I worked twelve-hour days. Over and over again I told myself the grandiose lie that the nation needed me. Yet deep down I knew they needed me more.I left the Clinton administration because the truth finally caught up with me. But by then we had only a few years left together before they went off into the world — first one, then the other. And now some two decades later they have their own families, their own responsibilities, their own lives. They live and work thousands of miles away. Even during this holiday week, their aging dad can’t be with them. A fierce pandemic continues to rip its way through the world. I sometimes wonder if I made the right decision years ago — spending those years in meetings, on the phone, traveling around the country, managing a vast bureaucracy, racing up and down Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and Capitol Hill — instead of with them. I tell myself not to dwell on what can never be relived or retrieved, but the question lingers. All I know right now is that I miss them and my daughters-in-law and granddaughter terribly. I’m grateful to be able to share small slices of their lives, even on FaceTime. 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

‘Tis the time to cash in gift certificates, shop for post-Christmas bargains, and fill shelves and closets with more stuff. I for one don’t want anything more, thank you. My shelves are already overflowing with books. My attic is full of old chairs and tables, chafing dishes, pictures, games, children’s toys, ski equipment, stereos, a broken easel. My closet can’t fit any more clothes, most of which I haven’t worn in years. I’m drowning in stuff. Once a year (usually around the holidays), I drop off as much stuff as I can at Goodwill Industries or the Salvation Army. To be totally honest, I don’t just off-load stuff I no longer need. I also prowl around thrift stores on the off-chance I’ll find some quirky thing I’ve been looking for (or maybe a friend or relative would love to have) — say, a vinyl recording of Leonard Cohen from the late 1960s, a funny tie, memorabilia from one of FDR’s presidential campaigns. A few months ago my neighbors began putting stuff they no longer want on the sidewalk at the end of the street, hoping others will pick it up. I’ve started putting stuff there, too. I’ve even picked up a few things there, like some exercise weights I’d been looking for.In all these ways, I’ve become a small part of a recycled economy. Maybe you have, too. At different times of our life we want different things. When kids are small, they have certain needs; as they grow up, different needs and wants. When they leave home and we downsize, lots of stuff goes into the attic. Tastes change over the years, too. Technologies alter or advance. Besides all this are the gifts that don’t suit, the clothes that no longer fit, the purchases that are later regretted. All create a need for recycling. This got me wondering: What if we were all more intentional about recycling stuff? What if there were a systematic way of donating things we no longer need and of finding stuff we’d like to have? I’m talking about something far more radical than just recycling our garbage or waste. Imagine an entire system based on continuously recycling stuff — without any of it being bought or sold. Something like this already up and running in the form of “Buy Nothing” groups. Started in 2013 as a local network in Bainbridge Island, Washington, “Buy Nothing” groups now comprise 4.3 million members in 44 countries. Members can offer or request any item or service, as long as it’s legal. (Buying, selling and bartering are prohibited.) A Buy Nothing app, launched last month, has already been downloaded more than 125,000 times. If you’re curious, you might take a look here.Economic systems tend to be divided into “capitalist” and “socialist,” with gradations in between. Under capitalism (to drastically simplify) people buy stuff with the income they get from selling stuff. Under socialism, people share stuff. To state another way: Capitalism focuses on production and consumption. Socialism focuses on distribution. But what if there’s a third model — a recycling system in which all the stuff people no longer want is continuously recirculated to people who want it? This third model could be increasingly important as we face a worsening clash between infinite wants on a planet with finite resources. Imagine how much less waste there’d be if the stuff already out there were continuously recirculated. The United States now produces more plastic waste than any other country, according to the National Academy of Sciences. The average American generates about 287 pounds each year. And think of the greenhouse gas emissions we’d avoid in a recycled economy. A 2020 paper published in Nature attributes overconsumption and the relentless pursuit of economic growth to the explosive rise in greenhouse gas emissions now threatening our planet. But wait, you might say. Consumer spending is about 70 percent of gross domestic product. Our economy depends on consumption. Remember George W. Bush telling Americans that the most patriotic thing we could do after 9/11 was to buy? If consumer spending were substantially reduced because we recycled lots more stuff, the Gross Domestic Product would take a dive. Tens of thousands of retailers and wholesalers might close. Millions could lose their jobs and livelihoods. Hell, we just lived through a pandemic-induced recession that showed how bad things can get. But that’s not the inevitable tradeoff, for one simple reason: Life in a recycled economy would be a lot cheaper. We wouldn’t need to buy nearly as much. So we wouldn’t need to work and earn nearly as much. We’d stop measuring our wellbeing by the Gross Domestic Product or even by the unemployment rate, because part of our wellbeing would be outside the production-consumption system of capitalism. Nor would we be relying on generosity or social solidarity. Most of us already have too much stuff — or we have the wrong stuff for this particular time in our lives. We just need a better system for reallocating stuff already produced that’s not wanted or not being

Friends, The reason I write this newsletter is not just to inform (and occasionally amuse) you, but also to arm you with the truth so you can fight more effectively for the common good.The forces undermining our democracy, polluting our planet, and stoking hatred and inequality have many weapons at their disposal — lobbyists, media megaphones, and money to bribe lawmakers. But their most powerful weapon is cynicism. They’re betting that if they can get us to feel like we can’t make a difference, we will give up — and then they can declare total victory.Which is why we have to keep up the fight even when feeling deeply discouraged. I’m not going to pretend. There’s a lot to be discouraged about right now — from Manchin’s torpedoing of “Build Back Better” to the surging Omicron variant of COVID-19 and the politicization of public health, from the Republicans’ assault on voting rights to environmental disasters all over the world. My message to any of you who feel overwhelmed, disappointed, or ready to drop out: I get it. I’ve been in the trenches for five decades and sometimes I despair as well. Again and again over the years I’ve seen hard-fought dreams go up in smoke. Or been sidelined. Or ridiculed. Or I’ve watched them succumb to bribery and corruption. Two of the leaders I counted on most in my lifetime were assassinated. But notwithstanding all this, we are better today than we were fifty years ago, twenty years ago, even a year ago. I can point out so many examples in our own country, or all across the world, where movements that were once small and stacked against seemingly impossible odds, ended up winning and making America and our earth a better place to live. From Martin Luther King, Jr., to Mahatma Gandhi, to more recent examples like Stacey Abrams and Greta Thunberg, people have repeatedly changed the course of history by refusing to believe that they couldn’t make a difference. It’s not only the famous leaders who are agents of change. Movements are fueled by individuals giving their time, energy, and hope. Small actions and victories lead to bigger ones, and the improbable becomes possible.Nothing strikes fear in the hearts of those who want to prevent progress more than a resistance that is undeterred. This fight, this struggle, all these big problems, can be exhausting. No one can go all in, all the time. That’s why we need to build communities and movements for action, where people can give what effort they can, and can be buoyed in solidarity with others. That’s what we’re doing in a small way in this forum. Building community. Strengthening our resolve. Sharing information and analyses. Fortifying ourselves. Over the next few years the fight will become even more intense. We are even battling for the way we tell the story of America. There are those who want to go back to a simplistic and inaccurate narrative, where we were basically perfect from our founding, where we don’t need to tell the unpleasant truths about slavery, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and all the other injustices. But there is another story of America, one of imperfection but progress. In this story, which is far more accurate, reformers have changed this nation many, many times for the better. We got labor rights, civil rights, women's rights, and LGBTQ rights. We got clean water laws and clean air laws, and health insurance for most Americans. We’ve torn down Confederate statues and expanded clean energy. We’ve got a new generation of young, progressive politicians determined to make the nation better. The list goes on and on. The outcome of the fight ahead will not be determined by force, fear, or violence. It will be decided on the basis of commitment, tenacity, and unvarnished truth.Here’s my deal. I’ll continue to give you the facts and arguments, even sprinkle in drawings and videos. I’ll do whatever I can to help strengthen your understanding and your resolve. Please use the facts, arguments, drawings and videos to continue the fight. To fight harder. To enlist others. If at any time you feel helpless or despairing, remember that the struggle is long, that progress is often hard to see in the short term, and that for every step forward regressive forces are determined to push us backwards. Also remind yourself that the fights for democracy, social justice, and a sustainable planet are necessary and noble, that the stakes could not be greater or more important, and that we will — we must — win. I wish you a restful, enjoyable, restorative Christmas holiday. PS: Here’s a video I just did with my wonderfully talented young colleagues at Inequality Media (who fuel my optimism every day). Feel free to 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

Democrats still hope they can salvage pieces of their ambitious tax agenda even after Sen. Joe Manchin blew up the legislation that included it. I’m sick of trying to fathom Manchin’s mind or motives but senate Democrats think he’s sincere about tax reform. In a Monday interview on a West Virginia radio station, Manchin pointedly said that ensuring people pay “their fair share” of taxes is the main reason he’s come this far in negotiations. “You have a chance to fix the tax code that makes it fair and equitable.” Well, if Democrats are willing to take another stab at tax reform, I’ve got just the candidate: Get rid of the “carried interest” loophole that lets private equity managers – among the wealthiest people in America – pay a tax rate lower than most Americans. The “carried interest” loophole is huge, and it’s a pure scam. Private equity managers get this tax break even though they invest other peoples’ money. They don’t risk a penny of their own. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all promised to get rid of it. They didn’t. Hell, even Donald Trump promised to get rid of it. He didn’t, either. “I don’t know what happened,” said Larry Kudlow, the conservative economist who crafted Trump’s tax plan. “I don’t know how that thing survived,” he said, adding, “I’m sure the lobbying was intense.”You’d think that the carried interest loophole would be high on the Democrats’ list of revenue-raisers. After all, closing it could raise $180 billion over the next decade from among the richest Americans. That’s $180 billion that could go toward supporting vulnerable Americans and investing in America’s future.Think again. The loophole – which treats the earnings of private equity and hedge-fund managers as capital gains, taxed at a top rate of just 20 percent, instead of personal income, whose top tax rate is 37 percent – remains as big as ever. Bigger. Astonishingly, some influential Democrats, such as House Ways and Means Committee chair Richard Neal, defend the loophole. They say closing it would hobble the private equity industry, and, by extension, the US economy. This is pure rubbish. In fact, private equity firms generate huge social costs. They buy companies they see as ripe for “turnarounds” – a polite way of saying that once they buy these companies they’ll cut wages, outsource jobs, strip assets, and then resell what’s left, often laden with debt. Look no further than the strike by Alabama’s Warrior Met Coal mineworkers that’s been underway since April 1st. Warrior Met is owned by a group of private equity firms led by New York-based Apollo Global Management. Mineworkers gave up their pension plan, retiree health care and wages to make Warrior Met’s mines mines profitable, as Apollo and other private equity investors siphoned off hundreds of millions of dollars for themselves in special cash dividends.Since the pandemic began, private equity has been using the flood of cheap money to buy companies at a record pace, and then squeeze them (and their workers) dry. 2021 has been private equity’s biggest ever — reaching a record $1.1 trillion in deals.So why are Democrats subsidizing private equity’s predatory behavior with this tax loophole? How did the loophole survive the Clinton and Obama administrations when the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress? Why isn’t it even on the current list of tax reforms Democrats went to use to pay for the Build Back Better package, if they can resurrect it in January? What’s the dirty secret? Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter. If you’d like to help support it, please consider a paid subscription or a gift subscription. “This is a loophole that absolutely should be closed,” said Biden adviser Jared Bernstein. But “when you go up to Capitol Hill and you start negotiating on taxes, there are more lobbyists in this town on taxes than there are members of Congress.”Last year 4,108 individual lobbyists formally registered to lobby Congress and the executive branch on taxes. The private equity industry alone has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to congressional campaigns – $600 million over the past decade, according to a New York Times analysis earlier this year. But here’s the thing. Most of these campaign contributions (bribes) have gone to Democrats. Nearly 60 percent of campaign donations from partners in the private equity industry during the 2020 election went to Democratic candidates for federal office. During the 2020 election, Biden’s presidential campaign received over $3 million from people working in private equity and related investment funds, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Biden was the top recipient of campaign money from this industry.The dirty secret is Democrats have depended on campaign funding from private-equity partners — hugely wealthy people who are shafting workers across the land. Back in 2010, some courageous House Democrats squeaked through a tax plan that closed the loophole, but Demo

When it comes to the surging Omicron variant of COVID, just about all I’m hearing is advice about holiday planning. Should one attend a holiday party? Travel? Meet friends at a restaurant?Much of the answer boils down to how to calculate one’s tolerance for risk when so little is known about Omicron except that it spreads easily. Experts are throwing around a lot of numbers. Columnists are sharing their own personal calculations. I understand. We’re all a bit spooked and don’t know exactly what to do. Calculations offer a degree of reassuring certitude. But why does America need to turn this latest COVID surge — as we do so much else — into a question of individual risk, personal calculation, and self-concerned choice? Personal responsibility is important, of course. But I worry that this hubbub over individual risk assessment is distracting us from what we need to do now as a society to be readier for Omicron than we were for Delta or for the first COVID surge.It also plays directly into the hands of anti-vaxxers who want to believe COVID is only about personal choice. On Friday's Fox Business, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was asked if he was getting the booster. DeSantis smirked, shook his head no, and then went into a long harangue about why people should make vaccine decisions “for themselves.”This past weekend, at Turning Point USA, the MAGA college Republican spin-off (whose founder died from COVID-19 last summer), Sarah Palin said it would be “over my dead body” that she got vaccinated (no pun intended). And Tucker Carlson (perhaps the most harmful person in America these days) railed against those who are urging vaccination, saying they just want to “punish people.” Carlson then praised the “naturally immune” who “earned it.”It’s too easy for the rest of us to respond to this rubbish by telling ourselves that anti-vaxxers will pay the price because they’re putting themselves at much higher risk of being hospitalized and even dying. But this kind of thinking reflects the same dangerous fallacy — that each of us must make such life-or-death decisions for themselves. On Friday, Jeff Zients, the White House COVID coordinator, inadvertently promoted this fallacy by telling reporters that while the administration will work to minimize Omicron disruption for the vaccinated, the unvaccinated should expect “a winter of severe illness and death for yourselves, your families....”In reality, all of us are in this together. And so far, all of us together are failing. America's rate of deaths from COVID is the highest of all advanced nations. Fewer than 62 percent of us are fully vaccinated — the lowest of all advanced nations. Those who continue to refuse to get vaccinated are endangering the rest of us — and not just because they’re increasing the risk of a “breakthrough” infection in those of us who have been fully vaccinated. As Omicron surges, the unvaccinated are likely to overwhelm hospitals throughout the land, making it harder for our entire health system to respond to all health needs and emergencies.The unvaccinated are also incubators for the next variant.Anti-vaxxers aside, the emphasis on individual risk is allowing us to forget the social needs that became exposed when the pandemic first hit in early 2020 — most of which are still unmet. Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter. If you’d like to support this work, please consider a paid or gift subscription. We’re still doing almost no contact tracing compared to other advanced nations. Rapid COVID tests are still difficult to find, and too expensive. (The free tests that the Biden administration is touting won’t be available until next month.) N95 masks are still in short supply. There’s still little or no coordination among different levels of government. Biden’s order that large businesses require employees to be vaccinated remains stuck in the federal courts. Hospitals in many places still don’t have enough Intensive Care Units. We could once again face a shortage of ventilators.In addition, too many workplaces are still unsafe. They’re still not required to test employees and report all COVID infections. They still don’t have to provide personal protective equipment. Workers still can’t stay home for fear getting the Omicron variant at work because we still don’t have a national system of paid leave (thanks to Joe Manchin and senate Republicans). They can’t quit their jobs because extended unemployment insurance has run out. I’m unable to advise you about whether you should attend that holiday party or cancel your travel plans. But I can assure you that what we’re facing is not just a matter of personal choice or individual risk tolerance. We’re facing another test of America’s capacity to respond to a public-health crisis. And the safety of every one of us depends on the nation doing better this time than we did before. What do you think? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus epi

With the Senate now adjourned for the holidays and Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” social and climate package stalled if not dead (Senator Joe Manchin went on Fox News yesterday to announce he won’t support it)*, Biden’s remaining agenda is now at the mercy of the 2022 midterm election year — a perilous time to get anything enacted. So what should be Biden’s and the Democrat’s first priority when the Senate returns in January? I’m sure Biden still wants his Build Back Better package passed. But it’s more important that the Senate now make voting rights its priority.Republican state legislatures will soon begin drawing partisan congressional maps that federal legislation could outlaw. Several states have already changed election laws in ways making it harder for people in minority communities to vote and giving Republican legislatures greater power over election outcomes.To be sure, any new national voting rights legislation depends on altering the senate filibuster so that the fifty Democratic senators (plus the Vice President) can pass it. (Senate Republicans have made it clear they won’t support any voting rights legislation.) Hence the necessity of senate Democrats agreeing to carve out voting rights from the filibuster (back to Manchin again). I want to emphasize the urgency of this. Since the 2020 election, the foundations of our democracy have been gravely weakened. Just last Saturday, three top retired generals warned of a potential civil war in 2024 unless action is taken soon. Saving American democracy requires stopping three powerful forces on the way to destroying it.The first is Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. It’s now believed by some 60 percent of Republican voters. The lie conveniently fits with the Republican Party’s insight that demographic trends work against it unless it shrinks the electorate.The second is big anger spread by the media, especially Fox News and Facebook. It’s boosting their ratings and revenues by inciting divisiveness, racism, panic, and paranoia. As a result, it’s undermining the trust that democracy depends on. The third is big money from large corporations and wealthy individuals. It’s inundating political campaigns, supporting one-sided issue ads, and bribing lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to support measures that will further enrich corporations and the wealthy and block measures that will cost them.The big lie, big anger, and big money reinforce each other because they all depend on Americans believing that democracy is rigged against them. And, to a shameful extent, it is. Urgent steps must be taken to counter all three.The first step is to set national voting-rights standards in light of Trump’s Big Lie. Senate Democrats must enact the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act as soon as possible in January, when they have a chance to prevent even more Republican state efforts to suppress votes and take over electoral machinery. If they fail to do this, they will be complicit with the Republican Party in using Trump’s big lie to shrink the electorate.Trump and his Republican co-conspirators must also be held accountable for their attempted coup in the months after the 2020 election, leading to the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Hopefully, the House committee now investigating it (with the crucial and courageous participation of Republican Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger) will report its findings early in the new year. Timing is essential. Republicans must not be allowed to delay the committee’s work. If they take control of the House next year they surely will shut the committee down. Armed with the committee’s findings, the Justice Department must take legal action against Trump and all lawmakers implicated in the attempted coup. Even before the committee reports, the Justice Department should impanel grand juries to weigh the evidence in its possession. The second step is to constrain big anger instigated by social media, Fox News, and other outlets. There are two ways to do this without undermining freedom of speech: Revoke Section 230 of the Communications Act, which now protects digital media providers from liability for the content posted by their users even if that content is harmful, hateful, or misleading. There is no continuing justification for this legal protection, particularly at a time when the largest of these providers have become vast monopolies. Create a new “fairness doctrine” requiring that all broadcasters, including cable, cover issues of public importance in ways that present opposing perspectives. This will be difficult to enforce, to be sure, but it would at least affirm the nation’s commitment to holding broadcasters to a higher standard than merely making money. The third step is to get big money out of politics. The current Supreme Court won’t reverse the Court’s shameful decision in Citizens United vs. FEC and related cases. A constitutional amendment allowi

Rumor has it that I’ll be teaching remotely again this spring because of the Omicron variant. No official word from Berkeley yet, but the variant seems to be crashing through campuses all over the nation, even where almost everyone is vaccinated. Many universities are already closing classroom doors, as they did in March 2020. I’m glad universities are being careful. But I’ve got to tell you: I hate the idea of going back to teaching remotely. Teaching students through the lens of my laptop is like teaching a wall. The class I most enjoy teaching at Berkeley has over 800 undergraduates. I love being there in person — watching my students as I speak: their eyes, their faces, their body language; noting the moments when they sit up straighter in their chairs because they’re engaged and curious, witnessing times when their eyes light up because they’ve figured out something important. I don’t really lecture at them (although it’s described as a “lecture” in the course listings). I speak to them, and see and feel their reactions. A class this large takes on a life and personality of its own. The class as a whole gives me a huge amount of information about what they’re confused by, intrigued by, want more information about, or want more context for. Their unspoken reactions guide me — telling me what to say and do next. I’ve been teaching for forty years, so by now this iterative process is automatic, subconscious, immediate. My students don’t realize that minute-by-minute they’re telling me how and what to teach them. We’re in a tacit but dynamic dialogue — all 800 of them and me. Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter. If you’d like to support it, please consider a paid or gift subscription. I don’t teach from behind a lectern. I walk around a large stage, scanning their faces. Sometimes I’ll come down into the aisles and pose a question to them. A few brave souls will raise their hands, and we’ll spend a minute or two in a back-and-forth socratic-type discussion — the purpose of which isn’t to “catch” them but to demonstrate or reveal something to all the others in the lecture hall. After a few weeks, I might roam the aisles and call on students who haven’t raised their hands — a “cold call,” it’s termed. But by then everyone knows that my intent isn’t to embarrass or corner any particular student; it’s to engage everyone in a process of critical thinking.I make it a point not to give them my opinions or values. I want them to test their own opinions and values. I want them to reconsider, think more deeply, get provoked when facts and logic don’t confirm their points of view, be open to changing their opinions or values. I play “devil’s advocate,” taking the sides of arguments they least expect me to take. I tell them that the best way to learn is to talk with people who disagree with them. That way, they have to re-examine their assumptions, test them, defend them, or change them. I suggest they get onto the habit of doing this, in their dorms or over lunches and dinners.But when I’m teaching remotely — staring at the lens in the top of my laptop computer — none of this dynamic occurs. I assume they’re watching me on their own laptops, but I get no feedback from them because I can’t see their faces or read their body language. I can’t descend into the aisles and talk to them. There’s no tacit dialogue. I simply lecture. I do everything in my power to make the lecture interesting for them, challenging, sometimes humorous. I want to keep their attention. But I can’t help but worry about how much they’re actually learning. I shouldn’t complain. I have it easy. Remote teaching is far, far more difficult for high school teachers. I have no idea how an elementary school teacher manages. Children have a hard enough time focusing and maintaining attention in real classrooms. Besides, I tell myself: if the Omicron variant continues to spread, those of us who are getting up there in years probably shouldn’t take any unnecessary risks. Still, if I can’t get back into the classroom next semester, I’m going to sorely miss the presence of my wonderful, lively, joyful, brilliant students. 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

Time magazine has named Elon Musk as its 2021 “Person of the Year,” calling him “the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit.” Oh, please. This is the man who downplayed the pandemic — predicting in March 2020 that there would be “probably close to zero new cases” in the United States by the end of April, and that “the coronavirus panic is dumb.” As infections surged, he called quarantine measures “fascist” and demanded that officials return people’s “freedom.” He then kept his Tesla plant open in defiance of public health orders, with the result that over a hundred Tesla workers contracted COVID. They said the company covered up the outbreak. Then he fired workers after telling them they could take unpaid time off if they didn’t feel safe coming to work. This is the man who, when the epidemic plunged millions of Americans into near poverty, railed against coronavirus relief packages — claiming government aid wasn’t “in the best interests of the people.” Yet he’s been benefiting from government aid for years. He got a cool $465 million low-interest loan from the Department of Energy in 2010 to help kickstart Tesla. His Nevada Gigafactory was launched with the promise of $1.3 billion in tax breaks over two decades. And so on. This is also the man who threatened to rescind his employees’ stock options if they unionized. He broke 11 other labor laws by harassing pro-union employees. A court ruled that Musk and other company executives illegally sabotaged employee efforts to form a union -- harassing workers, passing out union pamphlets in the parking lot, banning employees from wearing pro-union T-shirts and buttons, repeatedly interrogating union organizers and eventually firing one of them, and distributing anti-union messages in tweets from Musk himself. Since 2010, he’s had at least 43 workers’ rights violations filed against his company.Meanwhile, six women who worked for Musk’s Tesla are suing the carmaker for alleged sexual harassment and discrimination, adding to two similar suits filed in the past month. Meanwhile, Musk’s SpaceX employees are speaking out about what they describe as a culture of harassment at the rocket company.He’s the richest person in the world who argues billionaires shouldn’t pay more taxes. He admits to taking no salary or bonus (he lives off his shares of stock) so pays little or no income tax. When Democrats proposed a billionaire tax he warned Americans that “eventually they run out of other people’s money and then they come for you.” When Bernie Sanders said the extremely wealthy should pay their fair share, he responded “I keep forgetting that you’re still alive.” This is Time Magazine’s person of the year? Look, I get it. America worships great wealth. It loves entrepreneurs. It celebrates mavericks. It extols rule-breakers. It reveres people who don’t give a rat’s ass. And it lauds ego-manics who combine all these qualities (it has even elected one President). But was it really necessary for Time Magazine to honor one of them?So here’s this week’s question: If it were up to you, who would you select as person of the year? As usual, I’ll chime in around 10 am PT, 1 pm ET.***Chiming in now (and will as well in the comments): Time Magazine hasn’t always risen to a standard that most of us would consider “honorable” in naming their “Person of the Year,” considering that the magazine has in past years anointed Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump. As several of you point out, Time has never been interested in the definition of honor. It just wants to sell more copies and attract more eyeballs.But Time’s peculiar annual rite does at least give us an opportunity to examine the important difference between notoriety and honor by asking ourselves who really deserves to be honored in these trying times. Already today, many of you have offered some superb examples.Understandably, most of you want to honor politicians. I can tell you from personal experience that the world of politics is a hard one. The past year has been especially grueling. The honorable ones deserve our gratitude. I agree with Oscar that Liz Cheney deserves a nod (although her normal politics are to the right of Attila). With great courage and determination, she has shown her loyalty to the American system of government — in sharp contrast with most of her Republican colleagues in the House and Senate. (I’d add Adam Kinzinger here as well.) Joan and several others nominate Nancy Pelosi, who I think is hugely deserving. Pelosi is probably the most gifted politician of our era. She has navigated America’s perilous political currents with deftness and calm. Some of you have put forward Joe Biden, and I can understand why. He has demonstrated steadfastness and resilience during this Republican chaos — although in coming months I hope Biden will invest more of his time and energy in securing voting rights, and protecting American democracy (which means getting rid of the filibuster or at least carvi

I’m often asked how I keep up with the news. Obviously, I avoid the unhinged rightwing outlets pushing misinformation, disinformation, and poisonous lies.But I’ve also grown a bit wary of the mainstream media –- the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and other dominant outlets — not because they peddle “fake news” (their reporting is usually first-rate) but because of three more subtle biases.First, they often favor the status quo. Mainstream journalists wanting to appear serious about public policy rip into progressives for the costs of their proposals, but never ask self-styled “moderates” how they plan to cope with the costs of doing nothing or doing too little about the same problems.A Green New Deal might be expensive but doing nothing about the climate crisis will almost certainly cost far more. Medicare for All will cost a lot, but the price of doing nothing about America’s cruel and dysfunctional healthcare system will soon be in the stratosphere.Second, the mainstream media often fail to report critical public choices. Any day now, the Senate will approve giving $768 billion to the military for this fiscal year. That’s billions more than the Pentagon sought. It’s about four times the size of Biden’s Build Back Better bill, which would come to around $175 billion a year. But where’s the reporting on the effects of this spending on the national debt, or on inflation, or whether it’s even necessary?Third, the mainstream media indulge in false equivalences — claiming that certain Republican and Democratic lawmakers are emerging as “troublemakers” within their parties or that extremists “on both sides” are “radicalizing each other”.These reports equate Republican lawmakers who are actively promoting Donald Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election was stolen with Democratic lawmakers who are fighting to protect voting rights. Well, I’m sorry. These are not equivalent. Trump’s big lie is a direct challenge to American democracy.In the looming fight over whether to preserve the Senate filibuster, the mainstream media gives equal weight to both sides’ claims that the other side’s position is radical. But ask yourself which is more radical – abolishing the filibuster to save American democracy or destroying American democracy to save the filibuster?You see, the old labels “left” versus “right” are fast becoming outdated. Today, it’s democracy versus oligarchy. Equating them is misleading and dangerous.Why doesn’t the mainstream media see this? Not just because of its dependence on corporate money. I think the source of the bias is more subtle.Top editors and reporters, usually based in New York and Washington, want to be accepted into the circles of the powerful – not only for sources of news but also because such acceptance is psychologically seductive. It confers a degree of success. But once accepted, they can’t help but begin to see the world through the eyes of the powerful.I follow the mainstream media, but I don’t limit myself to it. And I don’t rely on it to educate the public about bold, progressive ideas that would make America and the world fairer and stronger. I read the Guardian, the American Prospect (which, full disclosure, I helped found thirty years ago), Mother Jones, and The Atlantic. I follow several blogs (Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo, for example). I listen to the always thoughtful Democracy Now. And I subscribe to a few newsletters (I hope you like this one and spread word of it). But even with news sources I trust, I still ask myself: how are choices being framed? What’s being left out? What big underlying issues are being assumed away or obscured? When our democracy is under assault from so many directions, I think we need to educate and re-educate ourselves (and our children) about how to learn what’s really going on — how to absorb the news critically. Isn’t this a minimal responsibility of democratic citizenship?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

It turns out that most of the people I deal with daily – the people I talk with, meet with, collaborate with, teach, zoom with, and have lunch and coffee with – are 50 years younger than I am. They’re in their mid-20s. I’m in my mid-70s. Most of the time I don’t think about the half-century gulf between us, but occasionally it slams me in the face. As when I catch our reflection in the window of a coffee shop and wonder, just for an instant, who that old man is hanging out with those young people. Or when I make a casual reference to someone like Humphrey Bogart or Archibald Cox and they stare back at me blankly. Or when I refer to “the Rosemary Woods stretch,” or being “Borked” or “swift-boated,” and they don’t have the slightest idea what I’m talking about.Recently we got into a conversation about clothing, and I mentioned that I’d stored my tony jacket in my valise above the chest of drawers in the den. I might as well have been talking ancient Greek.Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter on power, politics, and the real economy. If you’d like to support this week, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. But I miss lots of what they say, too. Yesterday, one of them opined that “inflation is, high-key, skyrocketing right now." I got the skyrocketing part. But high-key? Another told me, reassuringly, that the “vibe” of something I’d written was “immaculate.” I was not reassured. When one asked another if she’d seen me “clap back at Elon Musk," I didn’t know whether to feel complimented or ashamed.This morning one of my graduate students, referring to another who had driven a Mustang to someone’s weekend baby shower, exclaimed “What a flex!"A “flex?” I asked.“A flex! A flex!” she said more loudly, as if she were talking to someone hard of hearing.I am becoming hard of hearing, damnit. But that wasn’t the problem.Face it. A half-century is a chasm in the landscape of living memory. A person who tries to speak across it can seem to warp the time-space continuum. When I was a boy, I remember my father telling me that when he was a boy he watched veterans of the Civil War march in New York City. I was astonished. How could he be that old? How could the Civil War have occurred that recently? Most of my undergraduate students were born after 9/11. They don’t remember a time when the United States was united over anything. They have a hard time believing I’ve lived most of my life so far before the Internet. When I tell my undergraduates that I once advised Barack Obama, they’re somewhat impressed. Labor Secretary to Bill Clinton? Their eyes begin to glaze over. Worked for Jimmy Carter? Not particularly interested. Campaigned for Eugene McCarthy? They look puzzled, as if I’ve entered the misty expanses of ancient history. Sometimes I follow this by telling them I started my career as an assistant to Abraham Lincoln. This used to elicit a laugh. I’m beginning to fear it won’t much longer. But every day I consider myself especially blessed for having the great good fortune to spend most of my time with these wonderful people. They're going to inherit the mess my generation has bequeathed them. But instead of being bitter or angry, they have all sorts of ideas for how to clean it up, fix it, make the world better. And they have the energy and determination to succeed. They keep me optimistic and sane. They keep me young. 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

Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter on power, politics, and the real economy. If you’d like to support this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Workers in one Starbucks store, in Buffalo, New York, made history yesterday by becoming Starbuck’s first unionized workplace. It’s a watershed for the biggest coffee seller in the world, which operates 8,953 stores in the United States — and which has done everything in its power to keep its workers from forming a union. The vote itself was tiny. Nineteen baristas and shift supervisors voted in favor of unionizing, 8 voted against. But it marked a huge victory, nonetheless. Starbucks had waged a massive anti-union campaign in Buffalo — sending out-of-town managers and even executives into stores to discourage unionizing, closing down some stores, and packing remaining stores with new employees in order to dilute pro-union employees’ voting power. For years, Starbucks workers have complained about the company’s labor practices, claiming that chronic understaffing has created a chaotic work environment, erratic hours, and difficulty in taking sick days. Despite episodic commitments by Starbucks management to change, the complaints have continued. They intensified during the pandemic when overstretched Starbucks employees also had to deal with new health risks and safety protocols.The union election marks one of the highest-profile union wins in memory for U.S. restaurant workers, who are among the least unionized in the country and whose pay and benefits are among the lowest in all of corporate America. It’s certain to encourage more unionizing efforts among workers in restaurant chains.What occurred yesterday at one Starbucks store is part of a much larger pattern — a surge in strikes and labor actions across America. Kellogg’s striking workers are still holding the line and refusing to allow the company to separate employees into tiers (with newer workers getting lower pay and benefits). Today, Kellogg's said it will start hiring permanent replacements for the striking workers. Hiring permanent replacements is technically legal, but rarely done because it can poison labor-management relations for years. Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama will get another chance to unionize (the National Labor Relations Board found that Amazon used unfair labor practices in the recent election there). The United Mine Workers have been striking at the Warrior Met Coal company in Alabama for the last eight months, one of the longest strikes this century.Three thousand student workers at Columbia University have been on strike for six weeks to demand better pay and health care (on Tuesday, at least one hundred members of the Columbia faculty joined them on the picket line). What’s going on? Partly, low-wage workers have more bargaining leverage now than they’ve had in years. As the pandemic recedes (let’s hope it continues to), consumers are spending at a higher rate than they have in over twenty months. To respond to this surge in pent-up demand, employers are seeking workers. But at the same time, workers across America are taking a fresh look at their jobs. Record-high “quit” rates and near record low rates of labor-participation suggest that a significant number are asking themselves if they want to go back to their old jobs — and are answering “no.” Part of the “no” is an unwillingness to settle for their former wages and working conditions — especially in big companies (like Starbucks, Amazon, and Kelloggs) whose profits have been sky-high. (Or even in richly-endowed universities like Columbia.) That “no” is also reverberating across America in the form of strikes. Many of these workers were on the front lines in the pandemic, and now they feel (with some justification) it’s time for their efforts to be rewarded. At a deeper level, I suspect the pandemic itself has caused many people to reevaluate what they’re doing with their lives and to set different priorities for themselves (although I can’t prove this). For years, many big corporations like Starbucks have sold themselves as “socially-responsible” — offering consumers the soothing reassurance that in buying their products they’re somehow advancing the common good. That was always b******t. Corporations exist only to make money. Corporate social responsibility is a jejune form of public relations. Starbucks’s aggressively marketed “socially responsible” business model turns out to be no different. When corporations like Starbucks fight their workers’ legal right to form a union, the PR veil is lifted for all to see what’s really going on. Starbucks calls its workers “partners,” but they’re not in fact partners. They don’t share in the firm’s profits. Between January and September of this year, Starbuck’s revenue soared to $20.9 billion — compared to $17.3 billion in the same period last year. Its president and chief executive officer, Kevin Johnson, made $14,665,575 in total compensation last y

Tomorrow begins Joe Biden’s two-day “Summit for Democracy,” whose avowed goal is to rally the nations of the world against the forces of authoritarianism.Yet some of the authoritarian forces that pose the gravest threat to American democracy (and to other democracies around the world) are homegrown in the U.S. -- such as the former guy’s Big Lie and refusal to concede the 2020 election, his attempted coup, his instigation of the deadly January 6 insurrection, and his open encouragement of Republican state legislatures to suppress votes and take over state electoral machinery. And then, of course, the GOP’s willingness if not eagerness to go along with all this. My newsletter on power, politics, and the real economy is reader supported. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. If you’d like to support this work, please consider a paid subscription. And then there’s Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook — both of whose relentless and intentional promulgation of lies and paranoid fantasies have done much to poison the American mind. (Not to be outdone, the former guy is about to launch his own media company, to be headed by Devin Nunes, the crazed pro-Trump California Congressman.) American business groups have been invited to the Summit, despite their nonstop lobbying against proposed voting rights legislation in Congress and their increasing pollution of politics with corporate money.Small wonder that Freedom House’s 2021 Freedom in the World report — which scores countries on a scale of 0 to 100 — has given the United States a score of 83, a major drop from America’s score of 94 just a decade ago.With all this in mind, I thought today’s Office Hours would offer a good opportunity for us to speculate about the future of American democracy. Please answer this question: What will American democracy be like ten years from now unless … [you fill in the blank]?Eager to have your views. As usual, I’ll chime in around 10 am PT, 1 pm ET.***Your comments so far are so thoughtful that you’ve prompted me to jump in earlier than I’d planned. Many thanks for this wonderful forum! First, to summarize points that several of you have made, I see three existential threats to American democracy: (1) Big money, from large corporations and wealthy individuals, that goes into political campaigns and into issue ads. The money is essentially bribing lawmakers. There’s almost no countervailing sources of big money. Labor union contributions don’t come close. (2) Authoritarian, anti-democratic moves by Trump Republicans to rig elections in ways that suppress the votes of likely Democratic voters and give Republican legislators power over election officials – based on the Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen,” but really based on the Republican Party’s assessment that demographic trends work against it unless it shrinks the electorate. (3) A media (especially Fox News and Facebook) that lies incessantly to spread outrage, anger, panic, and paranoia in order to boost ratings and revenues. Unless these three threats are contained and reversed, I see little hope for American democracy as we know it. Ten years from now we’ll be an oligarchy. We might still call ourselves a democracy. Hopefully we’ll still maintain the rule of law. But America will a democracy in name only. What can we do? Fortunately, there are four immediate things we can do. But time is wasting. Each can be accomplished now, but each will become harder to achieve in coming months and years as anti-democratic forces gain ground. 1. Get big money out of politics. The Supreme Court is unlikely to reverse its shameful decision in Citizens United vs. FEC and related cases, especially given the current makeup of the Court. And a constitutional amendment allowing government to limit amounts of money spent on campaigns is extremely unlikely. But campaign finance reform is possible, especially reforms that provide matching public dollars for every small donation. Such a reform was in the original “For the People Act.” It can and should be added to the Freedom to Vote Act, now in the Senate. Small versions of it can and should be enacted in your state. 2. Enact the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Amendment Act. Both are necessary to set national voting rights standards. Both have been passed by the House. Almost every Democrat in the Senate supports them. But because no Republican senator supports them, to be enacted the filibuster must be abolished or at least altered to carve out voting rights. This is where Manchin and Sinema come in. If they fail to join other senate Democrats in this, history will remember them as traitors to the cause of American democracy. 3. Hold Trump and his authoritarian lawmakers accountable for their anti-democratic moves, particularly those that entailed an attempted coup in the months after the 2020 election. Hopefully, the House investigation will reveal the coup in all its disgraceful detail.

I’ve got a special place near my heart for Dan & Whit’s general store in Norwich, Vermont. It was there for me during my undergraduate years in college in nearby Hanover, New Hampshire — often on snowy evenings when I couldn’t get supplies elsewhere. Years later, when my parents moved to Vermont for their retirement, Dan & Whit’s was there for them, too. Like many places around the country, Vermont has been struggling with finding enough workers to fill jobs. But unlike most urban centers, where the obvious answer is to pay workers more, rural towns can’t always count on higher wages to elicit more job applicants because populations are thin and often declining. And unlike profitable national retail chains, mom-and-pop businesses can’t just absorb higher labor costs. And they can’t simply pass them on to customers in higher prices, because small-town customers might not have the ability to pay.So when Dan & Whit’s owner Dan Fraser recently put up a "Help Wanted" sign, the inhabitants of Norwich knew it was bad news. (I never met the younger Dan but I’m sure I met his grandfather, who passed the store on to his father, who passed it on to Dan.) After three generations, Dan would have to close the place down if he didn’t get help. So what was he to do? I heard the rest of the story on the radio. It turned out that Dan didn’t need to do anything. Word went out. Soon, Dan’s customers began applying for the jobs. Rick Ferrell, a local doctor, took on a shift at the register. A retired finance director applied for the deli counter. A nurse, a teacher, a psychology professor, a therapist, a school principal — nearly two dozen customers have stepped up to stock shelves, do the inventory, and clean up the place, so that Dan & Whit’s can remain open. (Virtually all of these new hires are donating their hourly wages to some of Dan’s favorite charities.) I’ve spent a lot of time over the years examining what happens to communities when important businesses close or abandon them — often because some bean counters back in headquarters hundreds or thousands of miles away decide it’s not worth the cost of keeping the businesses going where they are. Economists often praise capitalism’s wondrous “efficiencies” at moving assets to their “highest and best uses.” Well, there’s something to that. But what’s left out of the equation are the social costs of these moves. They can be quite high. Friends, my newsletter on power, politics, and the real economy is reader supported. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. If you’d like to support this work, please consider a paid subscription. Many thanks. When asked why the people of Norwich stepped in to help Dan & Whit’s keep going, employee Dianne Miller said it was "because Dan & Whit's is the heartbeat of this community." Others described it as the "heart of the town." That’s the best quick summary of the social benefits of a place like Dan & Whit’s I’ve ever heard. Communities do have hearts. When businesses at those hearts disappear, more is lost than an economic asset. The community loses a place that allows it to be a community — a place where people meet up, congregate, exchange gossip and information, barter, learn about common problems, sometimes decide to take action. I remember Dan & Whit’s as such a place. I can’t imagine Norwich without it. Luckily, it won’t have to be. But this isn’t just a “feel good” story about one country town coming together to save an iconic general store. It seems to me there’s an important lesson here for all of us, wherever we live. American capitalism is the harshest form of capitalism in all of the world’s advanced economies. It takes almost no account of social costs and benefits. Businesses swoop in and swoop out wherever and however profits can be maximized and losses minimized. But communities are different. They aren’t nearly as footloose as financial capital. They’re built on social capital, which often takes years to accumulate and can’t be cashed in. I think people owe something to businesses that are the hearts of our communities. Maybe we shouldn’t allow big chains or Walmarts to drain our main streets of the commerce they need to survive. (Even if Walmart’s items are cheaper, the social costs of losing the small businesses that undergird our community are often way higher.) Maybe we should donate some of our own time and labor to account for the importance of these core businesses. Maybe those of us who can afford to should buy shares in them, to give them an added financial cushion. At the very least, we owe them our patronage — rather than, say, the Waltons or Jeff Bezos. 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

Friends,You will hear lots of reports this week about whether the economy is strengthening or weakening, whether Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill will get fifty votes in the Senate, and whether the Omicron variant of Covid will rapidly spread in the United States. What you will not hear is how closely these three questions are related to each other and to the strength of our system as a whole. Economics, politics, and public health are often treated as separate topics -- each with its own reporters, editors, experts, and analysts. But if we have learned anything over the past 21 months of crisis, it is that these three are intimately connected. In many respects, they suggest we’re at an inflection point similar to the one we were at 21 months ago.It is impossible to know where the economy is heading without knowing where the Omicron variant is heading, because the pandemic continues to dictate economic activity in US and around the world. Omicron is already affecting peoples’ travel plans.It’s impossible to know where the Omicron variant is heading without assessing the strength and agility of our public health system, because that system – from the data collected by the Centers for Disease Control to the responsiveness of states public health officials and local hospitals – will determine how well we contain and survive it, and other variants to come.It’s impossible to assess the strength of our public health system without knowing the capacity of government — including the White House, governors, and our other political institutions — to rise to whatever challenge Omicron may pose, be it getting the public fully vaccinated and tested; getting people to wear masks, quarantine, and take other necessary precautions; tracing their contacts; and creating reasonable incentives for the private sector to develop ever-better vaccines, tests, and means for reducing deaths after infection. The capacity of government depends, in turn, on public trust in our institutions — on social solidarity, on the strength of the fabric of our society. In other words, our wellbeing depends on the capacity of an interlocking economic, public health, and political system. That overall system is especially weak right now because it’s riddled with distrust. Not only are we deeply split as a nation, but many of those with power and wealth have used the last 21 perilous months to siphon off whatever additional power and wealth they could from everyone else -- further eroding trust in all institutions. American large corporations have scored record profits, but instead of lowering prices they’ve been using the specter of inflation to jack up their prices. They’re also using their profits to mount one of history’s biggest lobbing campaigns against Biden’s social and climate policies. And despite promises to the contrary, they’ve resumed funding the 8 senators and 139 representatives who refused to certify Biden’s victory. Meanwhile, billionaire monopolists have increased their wealth by over $2 trillion since February 2020 and are using some of it to fight tooth-and-nail against proposals to increase their taxes (which many have managed to keep at or near zero). Wall Street’s “too-big-to-fail” banks have been using record-low interest rates and the Fed’s indirect subsidies to return to their old gambling ways.Health care has become even less efficient and more costly. Private-equity and hedge funds have used the last 21 months to buy up more hospitals and healthcare facilities, turning them into profit centers (or high-end condominiums). Big Pharma has been using its skyrocketing profits to lobby against allowing Medicare to reduce the prices of prescription drugs. The former director of the Centers for Disease Control accuses Pfizer and Moderna of “war profiteering’’ for refusing to share their technologies.Republican lawmakers have eagerly accepted all corporate bribes, as have many Democratic lawmakers. At the same time, Republican politicians have cowered before Trump’s Big Lie. And rightwing political operatives, editors, broadcasters, and media personalities have used the last 21 months to get richer by exploiting Americans’ fear, uncertainty, and paranoia.All of which have further diminished public trust and weakened the system’s capacity to achieve the common good.The reports you’ll hear this week about the economy, Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill, and the Omicron Variant, will all be slightly beside the point because they don’t address the underlying problem: that our system has become more enfeebled over the last 21 months because it has been exploited for private gain. Which could spell trouble ahead.Wars, depressions, and other national catastrophes sometimes strengthen a society by revealing and fortifying peoples’ common interest, and eliciting common sacrifice. That was America’s experience after the Great Depression and World War II. Yet the crisis we’ve been through since February 2020 seems to have debilitated us as a s

Which of these alternatives sounds more radical to you — abolishing the filibuster to save our democracy, or destroying our democracy to save the filibuster? Make no mistake. This is the choice. And whichever way it goes will be Joe Biden’s most enduring legacy.Not long after Biden assumed the Presidency, Freedom House, a democracy-watchdog group, ranked the state of democracy in the United States below that in Chile, Costa Rica, and Slovakia. Freedom House pointed to the increasing use in the United States of precise gerrymandering, the growing influence of money in American politics, and the continuing disenfranchisement of people of color.Since then, the anti-democratic tide has risen substantially in the United States. Nineteen states have enacted thirty-three laws that make it more difficult for citizens to vote. Several states have replaced nonpartisan election administrators with partisan hacks. In other states, nonpartisan election officials have been threatened and harassed by Trump supporters, causing many to leave their positions. Republican legislatures in states that have begun to swing toward the Democrats, such as North Carolina and Texas, have redrawn electoral maps to disenfranchise communities of color. Legal challenges to the new maps are likely to be unsuccessful, given the increasingly Republican composition of the federal courts.For years, Republican strategists had predicted that any enlargement of the American electorate would work against the election of Republicans. The 2020 election proved them right. Voters turned out in great numbers and sent a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress to Washington. Not surprisingly, Republicans have responded by doing everything in their power to shrink the electorate and make it harder to vote for those they assume will choose Democrats.What will be the nation’s response to this noxious anti-democratic tide? We know there will be a few speeches about America’s commitment to democracy. In the weeks ahead, Joe Biden will be hosting a virtual “Summit for Democracy.” Invitees will represent more than a hundred countries. When he announced the Summit in August, its apparent goal was to reestablish America’s moral authority in the aftermath of Trump’s squalid foreign policy.According to the State Department, the Summit will “aim to show how democracies can deliver on the issues that matter most to people: strengthening accountable governance, expanding economic opportunities, protecting human rights and fundamental freedoms, and enabling lives of dignity.” The State Department goes on to promise that “The U.S. government will announce commitments in areas such as bolstering free and independent media; fighting corruption; defending free and fair elections; strengthening civic capacity; advancing the civic and political leadership of women, girls, and marginalized community members; and harnessing technology for democratic renewal. The United States will also hold itself accountable to these commitments on a global public stage.”But how exactly will the Biden Administration be accountable to those commitments when Republicans at every level are working so hard to undermine them? As Biden said in February, “Democracy doesn’t happen by accident. We have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it.”Yet in that fight so far, Biden has been AWOL. He hasn’t used his bully pulpit to inform Americans of the clear and present dangers to democracy now underway. He hasn’t used his administration, including his Justice Department, to push back against the anti-democratic forces. He hasn’t acted forcefully in support of voting rights legislation and against the filibuster. His absence from the fight is fast becoming one of the most glaring omissions of his administration — a moral vacuum that is growing by the day. Last spring, Democrats in the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1, the For the People Act, a set of minimum national election standards intended to eliminate partisan gerrymandering, reduce the influence of money in politics, expand voting rights, and increase election security. But H.R. 1 was stymied in the Senate by Republicans who voted against bringing it to the floor for debate. Senate Republicans also sunk the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, designed to correct the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder, that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and allowed many of the state voter-suppression laws that have been passed since.In September, Democratic senators, led by a group including Amy Klobuchar and Joe Manchin (who says he is committed to preserving the filibuster) presented a new election-related bill, the Freedom to Vote Act. It contains several new provisions to protect election workers, as well as measures in the For the People Act, such as same-day voter registration, a ban on partisan gerrymandering, and a restoration of voting rights to former felons. But in October, Senate Republicans fil

My start in American politics occurred 50 years ago this month, in December 1971, when on winter break from law school I volunteered for the incipient (and ultimately doomed) presidential campaign of George McGovern. My political views then — to grossly simplify them — were that I was against the Vietnam War and the military-industrial complex, strongly supportive of civil rights and voting rights, and against the power of big corporations. At that time, compared with today, the political spectrum running from left to right was short. (See my diagram, just below.) The left was demonstrating against the Vietnam War, sometimes violently. I was committed to ending it through peaceful political means, which was why I supported McGovern. The “right” included liberal Republicans (yes, there really were some) such as Nelson Rockefeller, who would be Gerald Ford’s vice president three years later. The American political spectrum over the last 50 years and my position on it (inspired by a tweet by Colin Wright).Twenty-five years later, I was in Bill Clinton’s cabinet, and the political spectrum from left to right was much longer. The biggest change was how much further right the right had moved — due both to Ronald Reagan and to corporate and Wall Street money bankrolling right-wing candidates and messages. Bill Clinton sought to govern from the “center” (he famously “triangulated”). But the “center” had moved so far right that Clinton ended welfare, cracked down on crime, and deregulated Wall Street. All of which put me further to the left of center — although I had barely changed my political views at all. Which brings me to today, when the spectrum from left to right is the longest it’s been in my 50 years in and around politics. Despite all the howls from the right about “cancel culture” and “woke-ness” on the left, I don’t think the left has moved much from where it was a half-century ago. Nor, frankly, have I. But the right has moved far, far rightward. Donald Trump brought America about as close as we’ve ever come to fascism. He incited an attempted coup against the United States. To this day, he and most of the Republican Party continue to deny that he lost the 2020 election. And they are getting ready to suppress votes and disregard voting outcomes they disagree with. At this rate, I can’t help but wonder where the “center” will be twenty-five years from now. What do you think? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Friends, If your family and friends are anything like mine, there will be lots of talk over turkey dinner. Some of it will be gossip. Some of it will be about sports or jokes or jobs or plans. But a few of your guests (perhaps even you) may want to talk about the distressing state of the nation and the world. Your cousin Sue worries about climate change and how little was accomplished in Glasgow. Your son Jared, back from college, wants to talk about systemic racism. Your Trumpish uncle Bob can’t keep his mouth shut about Biden’s so-called failures in Afghanistan and at the border. Your friend Sid can’t stop worrying about the pandemic, or assault weapons, or hate crimes, or near-record inequality, or the opioid epidemic, or soaring homelessness, or voter suppression. Your daughter Sarah chimes in about the continuing menace of Donald Trump and Republican lawmakers too timid to stand up to him.All are reasons for real concern (except for those of your Trumpish uncle Bob). But I’d hope someone at your table also reminds the gathering that America has gone through very bad times before, and in many ways emerged better.When I graduated from college in 1968, I thought the nation would never recover. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in April. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in June. Our cities were burning. Tens of thousands of young Americans (including several friends) were being ordered to Vietnam to fight an unwinnable and unjust war that ultimately claimed over 58,000 American lives and the lives of over 3 million Vietnamese. The nation was deeply and angrily divided. Later that summer, demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention were met with tear gas. And then in November of that year, Richard Nixon was elected president. But we did recover. We enacted the Environmental Protection Act. Eventually we achieved marriage equality for gays and lesbians. We elected a Black man president of the United States. We passed the Affordable Care Act. In 2018 we elected a record number of women, people of color, and LGBTQ representatives to Congress, including the first Muslim women.​ ​Eighteen states raised their minimum wages. In 2020, Trump was sent packing, and Democrats took over the Senate and the House.COVID has been a horror, but Congress created a safety net that prevented millions from falling into deep poverty because of it. More than 70 percent of us are now vaccinated against it. We will soon be investing over $1 trillion repairing our crumbling roads and bridges and creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs. And it seems likely (although far from certain) that American families will get help with childcare and universal pre-K, and more.What about the future? Obviously no one can tell, but there are some reasons for optimism. For one thing, we are on our way toward becoming a nation of startling diversity. ​Most Americans now under 18 are people of color. ​In ten years, most under ​35​ will be. In thirty years, most of us. That diversity will be a huge source of strength — just as our growing diversity has strengthened us since our founding.For another, our young people are determined to make America and the world better. I've been teaching for more than 40 years and I've never taught a generation of students as dedicated to public service and as committed to improving the nation and the world, as the generation I'm now teaching. I should also point out that ​60 percent of today’s college students are women​, an astounding achievement. It portends more women in leadership positions – in science, politics, education, nonprofits, and in corporate suites. This will also be a great boon to America, and the world.I’m not a technophile but I can’t help being impressed by what science and technology are accomplishing, such as the COVID vaccines that have saved countless lives, and solar and wind energy sources that are rapidly replacing carbon fuels. With the right laws and incentives, science and technology could solve many more of the problems that plague the nation and the world.I don't wish to minimize our current plight. I’m deeply worried about climate change, systemic racism, and growing attacks on our democracy. I’m not going to tell any of my friends or relatives over dinner today that they’re wrong to feel angry or to despair. I have felt my share of anger and despair. But I will remind them of this nation’s resilience, and the many ways the future could be bright. And when we raise our glasses for a toast, I will ask that they never give up the fight for a more just society. Happy Thanksgiving, friends. 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

Official Washington will be quiet this week, but the fallout from the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict will continue to divide America along the Trumpian fault lines of fear, violence, and racism. Closing arguments are scheduled today in the trial of three men charged with the killing of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. Though they chased him, they are claiming self-defense because, they say, Arbery tried to get control of a shotgun one of them was carrying. As with the Rittenhouse case, the trial raises questions of how self-defense laws will hold up as guns proliferate. Regardless of how it come out, the case also illustrates America’s deepening split.Congress’s continuing investigation into the January 6 insurrection reveals the same rift, as will the Supreme Court’s expected decision on executive privilege in that investigation, and its likely move to strike down New York State’s law requiring people seeking licenses to carry handguns in public to show a “proper cause,” as violating the Second Amendment.The fault line has now extended into almost every facet of American lawmaking. When the “Build Back Better” bill passed the House late Friday night, 220 out of 221 Democrats voted for it. But all of the House’s 213 Republicans voted against it. Why? The measures in the bill are hugely popular, according to polls. The bill includes the largest expansion of federal child-care assistance in history; free, universal prekindergarten for all American children ages 3 and 4; Medicare benefits covering hearing services; government for the first time being allowed to negotiate some prescription drug prices, aiming to lower the costs that seniors pay for lifesaving medicines such as insulin; and more than $550 billion to combat climate change — promoting greener energy and providing new perks for Americans who buy electric vehicles.But policy popularity may be no match for fear, violence, and racism — which Republicans and the moneyed interests are now diligently exploiting to kill the bill in the Senate. So-called “moderate” Democrats (Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) have expressed skepticism about its cost and scope. It would be one thing if Manchin’s and Sinema’s reservations were in good faith, but how can they be? Manchin frets about the bill’s effects on inflation even though the bill lowers prices for most Americans of major expenses like childcare, drugs, and healthcare. Sinema says she prefers “legislation that is crafted in a bipartisan way,” but who is she kidding? Mitch McConnell has made clear he won’t allow a single Republican senator to vote for the bill. The votes of every Senate Democrat are needed if the bill is to pass, but Manchin and Sinema are allowing rightwing tropes — and the big money behind them — to divide Democrats. As the New York Times reported yesterday, cash has poured into Manchin’s and Sinema’s political coffers from political action committees and donors linked to Wall Street, Big Pharma, and Big Energy, which have opposed proposals in the bill that Manchin and Sinema helped scale back.The question that keeps haunting me is this: Is an America so deeply divided, and awash in political money that exploits that divide, any longer capable of doing bold things that are broadly popular? The only big thing we continue to do is feed the ravenous military-industrial complex — itself founded on fear, violence, and racism. (Efforts to whip up a new cold war with China conjure up old fears of a “yellow peril.”) Congress is on the verge of giving the Pentagon even more money than the Pentagon and the Biden administration are seeking. The nation’s military tab over the next ten years will be upwards of $8 trillion and is not paid for with expected revenue, in sharp contrast with the $2 trillion cost of the House’s “Build Back America” plan, which would be paid for with tax increases on the wealthy and big corporations.That America is becoming two separate nations is threatening everything we value. The most obvious beneficiaries (besides top executives of big corporations and Wall Street) are Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Rupert Murdoch, who appear to be doing whatever they can to divide us even further.Your thoughts? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

One of the most important consequences of an election is its effect on conventional wisdom about how the losing political party must change in order to win. After Tuesday’s Democratic loss in the Virginia gubernatorial election and near-loss in New Jersey, I’m hearing a narrative about Democrats’ failure with white working-class voters that worries me because it’s fundamentally wrong.In today’s New York Times, David Leonhardt points out that the working-class, non-college voters who are abandoning the Democratic Party “tend to be more religious, more outwardly patriotic and more culturally conservative than college graduates.” He then quotes fellow Times columnist and pollster Nate Cohn, that “college graduates have instilled increasingly liberal cultural norms while gaining the power to nudge the Democratic Party to the left. Partly as a result, large portions of the party’s traditional working-class base have defected to the Republicans.”Leonhardt adds that these defections have increased over the past decade and suggests that Democratic candidates start listening to working-class voters’ concerns about “crime and political correctness,” their “mixed feelings about immigration and abortion laws,” and their beliefs “in God and in a strong America.”This narrative worries me in two ways. First, if “cultural” messages trump (excuse me) economic ones, why shouldn’t Democrats go all the way and play the same cultural card that Republicans have used for years to inflame the white working class – racism. Make no mistake: Glenn Youngkin’s campaign in Virginia against “critical race theory” – which isn’t even taught in Virginia’s schools – comes out of the same disgraceful dog-whistle tradition.But that’s not the only thing that’s wrong with this new “culture over economics” narrative about how Democrats should woo back the working class. It disregards the shameful reality that the Democratic Party after Ronald Reagan turned its back on the working class.Democrats had control over the White House and both houses of Congress during the first terms of both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. They scored some important victories, such as the Affordable Care Act and an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit.But both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ardently pushed for free trade agreements without providing the millions of blue-collar workers who thereby lost their jobs any means of getting new ones that paid at least as well.They stood by as corporations hammered trade unions, the backbone of the working class. Clinton and Obama refused to spend their political capital on reforming labor laws to impose meaningful penalties on companies that violated them or enable workers to form unions with a simple up-or-down votes.Partly as a result, union membership sunk from 22 percent of all workers when Bill Clinton was elected president to fewer than 11 percent today, and the working class lost bargaining leverage to get a better economic deal. The Obama administration protected Wall Street from the consequences of the Street’s gambling addiction through a giant taxpayer-funded bailout but let millions of underwater homeowners drown.Both Clinton and Obama allowed antitrust enforcement to ossify – allowing big corporations to grow far larger and major industries to become more concentrated.Finally, they turned their backs on campaign finance reform. In 2008, Obama was the first presidential nominee since Richard Nixon to reject public financing in his primary and general-election campaigns. He never followed up on his reelection campaign promise to pursue a constitutional amendment overturning Citizens United v. FEC, the 2010 Supreme Court opinion opening the floodgates to big money in politics.What happens when you combine freer trade, shrinking unions, Wall Street bailouts, growing corporate market power, and the abandonment of campaign finance reform? You shift political and economic power to the wealthy and you shaft the working class.Adjusted for inflation, American workers today are earning almost as little as they did thirty years ago, when the American economy was a third its present size.What’s happened to Biden’s agenda for working people – including lower prescription drug prices, paid family leave, and free community college? All have been scrapped. Much of the rest of his agenda is endangered. Why? Because of the power of big money. Big Pharma blocked prescription drug reform. A handful of Democratic senators backed by big money refused to support paid family leave. And so on.Nothing in politics is ever final. Democrats could still win back the white working class – putting together a huge coalition of the working class and poor, of whites, blacks, and Latinos, of everyone who has been shafted by the huge shift in wealth and power to the top. This would give Democrats the political clout to restructure the economy – rather than merely enact palliatives that paper over the increasing concentration of wealth and power in America.

If you want to know what’s really going on, don’t pay attention to political speeches or news headlines. Look instead at any underlying reallocation of power — who’s gaining power and who’s losing it — and ponder what these changes mean for the future. Consider, for example, three big upcoming stories this week: The Glasgow climate summit will generate lots of verbiage. But the real question is whether Biden can convince other nations’ political leaders they can trust the United States to do its part. This will be a huge task given Trump’s abandonment of the Paris climate accord, Joe Manchin’s (and oil and coal companies’) recent influence whittling back Biden’s climate agenda, and Friday’s decision by the Supreme Court to hear a case brought by coal companies and 18 Republican-led states to rein in the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions. As to this last point, foreign leaders will note that although the Biden administration had asked the court to delay hearing the case until the EPA finished crafting new carbon emission guidelines, the court rejected the request and decided to hear it anyway. So what does this tell us about the real allocation of power in America as it affects climate change? That power still lies with coal (and oil). Hopefully, this will change, but only if we keep pressure on lawmakers and corporations to move toward a green economy. (Maybe we should also threaten to increase the number of seats on the current retrograde Supreme Court, but that’s a discussion for another day.)Tuesday’s Virginia gubernatorial election is being called a “bellwether” for the midterms. That’s simplistic. Almost no one outside Virginia and Washington, D.C. cares whether Democrat Terry McAuliffe or Republican Glenn Youngkin prevails. Its real significance lies in its effects on two groups of people who will have disproportionate power over the midterm elections: (1) campaign advisors for midterm candidates, especially in “purple” states, who are watching to see whether McAuliffe’s attempts to tie Youngkin to Trump are more effective than Youngkin’s attempts to tie McAuliffe to Biden, and will tailor their messages accordingly; and (2) corporate political operatives, who will channel somewhat more money to Republican candidates in the midterms if Youngkin wins and vice versa if McAuliffe is victorious. (Note that they channeled record amounts of money to Biden and Democrats in the 2020 general election relative to Trump and the GOP, so they’re almost inevitably recalibrating anyway.) A power shift? Too early to tell, but keep your eyes fixed on the message machines in both parties. And keep following the big money. Biden’s social-climate package is the third issue I’m watching this week. The media has fashioned this as a showdown between progressive Democrats and moderates. Rubbish. It’s Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema versus every other Democratic senator and most House Democrats. What’s the endgame? Democrats will come to some agreement — if not this week then soon — because the political costs of failing to do so are just too high given next year’s the midterm elections. But the final result will almost certainly disappoint the progressive wing of the party, which will have to accept far less than it wanted. What does this mean for power in the Democratic Party? The danger is that progressives — who have emerged as the most activist part of party — could feel discouraged from making as strong a grass-roots effort in 2022 as they did in 2020, weakening the Party’s prospects while strengthening the hand of the establishment wing (CEOs, big-money operatives, and the wealthy). What will Biden do to avoid this? He could try making it up to progressives by pushing mightily for voting rights. But to do this, he’ll need to get all Democratic senators to agree to carve out voting rights from the filibuster. Once again, Manchin and Sinema will be critical. Hope you find this helpful. 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 often tell my students that if they strive to achieve full and meaningful lives they should expect failures and disappointments. We learn to walk by falling down again and again. We learn to ride a bicycle by crashing into things. We learn to make good friends by being disappointed in friendship. Failure and disappointment are necessary prerequisites to growth. The real test of character comes after failures and disappointments. It is resilience — how easily you take failures, what you learn from them, how you bounce back. This is a hard lesson to learn for high-achievers who are used to jumping over every hoop put in front of them. It’s also a hard lesson for people who haven’t had all the support and love they might have needed when growing up. In fact, it’s a hard lesson for almost everyone in a culture such as ours that worships success and is embarrassed by failure, and is inherently impatient.Why am I telling you this now? Because we have gone through a few very difficult years — Donald Trump’s racist nationalism and his attacks on our democracy, a painful reckoning with systemic racism, angry political divisions, a deadly pandemic accompanied by a recession, and climate hazards such as floods and wildfires. We assumed everything would be fine again once these were behind us. But we now find ourselves in a disorienting limbo. There is no clearly-demarcated “behind us.” The pandemic still lurks. The economy is still worrisome. Americans continue to be deeply angry with each other. Trump and other insurrectionists have not yet been brought to justice. Democracy is still threatened. And Biden and the Democrats have been unable to achieve the scale of changes many of us wanted and expected. If you’re not at least a bit disappointed, you’re not human. To some of you, it feels like America is failing. But bear with me. I’ve learned a few things in my half-century in and around politics, and my many years teaching young people. One is that things often look worse than they really are. The media (including social media) sells subscriptions and advertising with stories that generate anger and disappointment. The same goes for the views of pundits and commentators: Pessimists always appear wiser than optimists. Another thing I’ve learned is that expectations for a new president and administration are always much higher than they can possibly deliver. Our political system was designed to make it difficult to get much done, at least in the short run. So the elation that comes with the election of someone we admire almost inevitably gives way to disappointment. A third thing: In addition to normal political constraints, positive social change comes painfully slowly. It can take years, decades, sometimes a century or longer for a society to become more inclusive, more just, more democratic, more aware of its shortcomings and more determined to remedy them. And such positive changes are often punctuated by lurches backward. I believe in progress because I’ve seen so much of it in my lifetime, but I’m also aware of the regressive forces that constantly threaten it. The lesson here is tenacity — playing the long game.Which brings me back to resilience. We have been through a difficult time. We wanted and expected it to be over — challenges overcome, perpetrators brought to justice, pandemic ended, nation healed, politics transformed. But none of it is over. The larger goals we are fighting for continue to elude us. Yet we must continue the fight. If we allow ourselves to fall into fatalism, or wallow in disappointment, or become resigned to what is rather than what should be, we will lose the long game. The greatest enemy of positive social change is cynicism about what can be changed. 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,At a time when the six Republican appointees on the Supreme Court — prodded by Texas, Mississippi, and several other red states — seem ready to reverse Roe v. Wade, it’s important to see the even larger context of what’s at stake. For years, rightwing Republicans have focused their ire on private morality – on the most intimate aspects of peoples’ lives — including abortion, contraception, gay marriage, and which bathrooms and sports teams trans young people choose.But the real moral crisis in America today has nothing to do with private morality. The real crisis involves public morality. Consider, for example:— Several Republican members of the House of Representatives appear to have helped plan the January 6 insurrection. — Top executives of Facebook have knowingly fomented divisiveness and hate in order to sell more ads.— Top executives of Big Pharma are buying off lawmakers to prevent Medicare from using its bargaining leverage to get lower drug prices for all Americans. — Most Republican lawmakers continue to put their party and their careers ahead of American democracy by accepting Donald Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.— A handful of extraordinarily wealthy people are spending unprecedented sums bribing legislators to stop their taxes from increasing and preserve their tax loopholes. They’re also parking their money in secret tax havens.— State lawmakers are passing laws to suppress the votes of likely Democratic voters, and forbidding teachers to tell their students about America’s history of racism.— CEOs of large corporations who now earn 300 times the wages of average workers (up from 60 times forty years ago) are refusing to raise the wages or benefits of hourly workers (whose pay has barely increased in four decades, adjusted for inflation). Meanwhile, they’re off-loading jobs onto so-called “independent contractors” who are cheaper because they get no labor protections. They’re also bribing legislators to give them and their corporations special favors and tax breaks.If these don’t spell a moral crisis, I don’t know what does.I understand why some of you may be reluctant to talk about morality. The right has hijacked the term. And the subject seems uncomfortably close to matters of personal faith and religion. Private moral choices are matters of personal faith and religion — and should stay that way. But public morality is entirely different. I urge you to speak out about it, make a ruckus about it, and loudly condemn corporate executives, Wall Street bankers, and lawmakers who are defying the common good. Take morality back from the radical right — in a way that’s profoundly relevant to the challenges we face today. America’s real moral crisis has nothing to do with people deciding to end their pregnancies, or consenting adults choosing to use contraceptives, or trans young people choosing one bathroom or sports team over another. It has to do with the actions of people in boardrooms and legislative cloakrooms, and the failures of so many who occupy positions of power and public trust to honor the public good. 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

Friends, This week, Democrats either reach agreement on Biden’s social and climate agenda or the agenda may shrink into meaninglessness. The climate measures in particular need to be settled before Biden heads to Scotland for the U.N. climate summit this weekend, so other nations will see our commitment to reduce carbon emissions. Yesterday, Biden met with key Democrats to work out spending and tax provisions. Yet as far as I know, every senate Republican and at least two senate Democrats continue to assert that Biden’s agenda is too costly. This is insane. Compare its current compromise tab of $2 trillion (spread out over the next 10 years) with:--- The $1.9 trillion Trump Republican tax cut that went mostly to the wealthy and large corporations. Americans were promised that its benefits would “trickle down” to average workers. They didn’t. Corporations used them to finance more stock buybacks. The wealthy used them to buy more shares of stock (and shares of private-equity and hedge funds). Clearly, the Trump Republican tax cut should be repealed to pay for Biden’s social and climate package. But no senate Republican will vote for its repeal, nor will Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema (not coincidentally, recipient of huge amounts of corporate campaign cash).--- The $2.1 trillion that America’s 775 billionaires have raked in just since the start of the pandemic. You’d think that at least a portion of this gigantic sum should help pay for Biden’s agenda since much of it has been the result of monopoly power (eg, Amazon). Kudos to Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, for proposing a “billionaires’ tax” (to be paid by people with $1 billion in assets or $100 million in income for three consecutive years). If Sinema has any principles, she’ll support it. --- The nearly $8 trillion we’ll be spending on the military over the next 10 years. The United States already spends more on our military than the next ten biggest military spenders in the world combined. Talk about bloat and waste: That military budget includes eighty-five F-35 fighters costing a total of $1.5 trillion. The F-35 is so plagued with problems that the current chairman of House Armed Service Committee calls it a “rathole,” and the Pentagon’s own official who’s responsible for the acquisition of weapons systems says spending more on it is “acquisition malpractice.” But you don’t hear about this in the media because Democrats routinely join Republicans to vote for bloated military budgets (181 House Dems approved this year’s authorization just last month) — and the media only reports controversy.Yet senate Republicans, along with Sinema and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, say we can’t afford to spend what’s needed for childcare, education, or paid leave, and we can’t afford to reduce climate change? My friends, this is truly nuts. Please let me have your views: What do you think will happen to Biden’s social and climate agenda? And what do you think the consequences will be? 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 single most important thing that keeps me optimistic about the future? To put it simply: my students. I’ve been teaching on and off for the last forty years. Teaching is one of the most gratifying and joyful professions I can imagine. And in all my years of teaching I’ve never taught a generation of students more diverse, more intelligent, and more committed to the public good than the generation I’m now teaching. This isn’t just at Berkeley. In the years leading up to the pandemic I often guest lectured around the country, typically at colleges known as “conservative” (in fact, I’ve made it a practice of accepting invitations from universities in red states). And you know what? I’ve found the same qualities in those students I’ve found in my students at Berkeley. Not only are there more students of color. Also more women (today, 60 percent of undergraduates are women!). More who are the first in their families to attend college. And a profound sense that they want to improve the nation and the world. I consider myself privileged because I find it impossible to be downbeat or pessimistic about what’s to come because of these young people. They know they’ll be inheriting huge problems – structural racism, widening inequality, threats to democracy, public health crises, deep distrust toward all institutions. But they are determined to remedy them. Not all, mind you. But even if a small percentage dedicate their lives to improving our society and healing the world, they will make a stunning difference.May I ask: What makes you optimistic about the future? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

This 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

Let me share with you in this short podcast some of the things I’ve heard from people in the last few months, which may suggest the first stirrings of fundamental social change. Very interested in your reactions. 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