EYE ON THE MEDIA / LIBERAL BETRAYALS
By peddling this trash Alternet again proves that it is well nigh useless as a political education resource.
Reich—as a professional economist and social observer— should know by now that all “these” lies and sins are typical of capitalist apologists. Yet he is unable to draw the obvious conclusion, that capitalism will always generate this kind of mendacious, antidemocratic culture. Why save it, then?
Robert Reich is proof of the liberal aptitude to sound erudite and persuasive in their descriptions and in proclaiming their pseudo-solutions to the crisis of the moment, or to the perennial crises inherent in the capitalist system’s class relations. He, Paul Krugman, and others like them, form part of that famous gallery of pundits who still try to have it both ways: denouncing capitalism’s inherent evils while defending the monster as a reformable entity.
Besides being a rather notorious Clinton courtier intellectual, Reich (who played Labor secretarey in that administration) gained notoriety among serious thinkers for his noisy crusade to advance education as a cure to unemployment. While his “solution” sounds viable and sensible to many, it is not. The topic deserves some probing.
First, education is a good, per se, and its acquisition should have no utilitarian value in a civilized setting, except to facilitate the realization of the good. The purpose of all early universities going back thousands of years (not to mention the greek academy) was to prepare people to get at the truth of things, become better moral agents and facilitate their mental and “spiritual” development to better integrate them into society. The professions, as we know them today, except for the law, were regarded as lower vocational or trade occupations.
Unfortunately, in a crass society like the one we now inhabit, most if not all education is perceived by the public as a simple tool to guarantee a good job, gain access to a lucrative profession, or as key to future affluence and power.
Regarding the supposed riddle of unemployment under the rules of capitalism, no amount of education can guarantee anyone a job (connections and status can, of course, but that’s another story) although more education can never hurt. If education alone could cure the problem from a broad social perspective, we probably would have cured this scourge a long time ago—or maybe not—because an obstinate level of unemployment is actually beneficial to capitalists, who are, after all, still the ruling class. In fact, lacking any form of seriously organized political resistance and agitation among the masses, why would they want to cut off this benefit? Unemployment—it has been known for almost 200 years— makes workers more docile and keeps wages down. In any case, if education were the cure-all that Reich trumpets, we would not see today millions of young indebted Americans with college degrees —some even with advanced degrees—working on fast food restaurants, as taxi drivers, as cashiers in local banks, or simply unemployed.
Reich rubbing elbows wth Democrat party royalty.
Under the social and political constraints and perversities of capitalism, automation, which frees human beings from the tasks of production, and causes productivity to rise per worker is not a blessing, as it could be in a regime of fair distribution of the pie. For as productivity increases most workers could maintain or even expand their consumption standard by receiving higher income while working fewer hours. But no, under capitalism, the national pie is distributed so lopsidedly that a tiny privileged minority receive the lion’s share of the total pie (including the gains society obtains through automation), while the overwhelming majority live in squalid circumstances, watch their incomes freeze for generations, or are simply tossed out of the labor market, becoming unemployed: social pariahs.
In 2011, while reviewing a book on economics I wrote the following:
Capitalism has always drowned and faltered on its unjust social relations. The outrageously lopsided way it distributes income, the product of society, continually augmented by advances in technology, is a contradiction that has no economic answers because it is really a question of power, a question of politics. The constant elimination of jobs by automation, and their hemorrhage toward cheap-labor zones cannot be “cured” by job training programs or even better education for all (as Clinton cabinet member Robert Reich, the main evangelist for this pseudo-solution, used to preach). An advanced degree is no guarantee of employment in a job market that has no need for 100,000 applicants with such uber-credentials. The drift toward authoritarianism cannot be arrested, only slowed down or momentarily interrupted given the essentially undemocratic nature of the system. As we said earlier, living with capitalism is like living with a sociopath in the room, a maniac who bears constant watching.
In a recent article, my colleague Susan Rosenthal wrote:
By 2000, U.S. workers took half the time to produce all the goods and services they produced in 1973. If the benefits of this rise in productivity had been shared, most Americans could be enjoying a four-hour work day, or a six-month work year, or they could be taking off every other year from work with no loss of pay. (See,Globalization: Theirs or Ours?)
These are the central questions that “economics” should be debating, that students should be pondering. But Samuelson, Friedman, Von Hayek and their numerous descendants throughout academia (and media) are silent on these issues, as they know only too well that to analyze them with scientific honesty would be to prepare an indictment of capitalism. (Understanding American Capitalism, The Greanville Post, Jul i8, 2011.)
In any case, here’s Reich playing Hamelin, leading the naive into the forest…never to be seen again, assisted by a rather sycophantic interviewer. To his eternal shame, he is not only delaying the inevitable, but joining, as a liberal, the libertarians’ wrongheaded and ahistorical notion that what we have today is not really normal capitalism as capitalism goes, but only a corrupt version of it, and that there’s a way to return “the economy” (code for capitalism and corporate rule) to a supposed golden and virtuous era of plenitude for all.
Now read the article below and draw your own conclusions.
—Patrice Greanville
ECONOMY
Robert Reich’s Hilarious Crusade to Save Capitalism and America’s Middle Class (Part 2)
The former U.S. labor secretary’s latest book is ‘Saving Capitalism.’
By Danny Feingold / Capital and Main | Alternet January 21, 2016
Robert Reich: ‘When Americans think of how the economic rules are stacked against them, they naturally think of Wall Street.’
Reich at the San Francisco Film Society festival.
This is part 2 of a two-part interview
Robert Reich stepped down from his post as Labor Secretary in 1996 to spend more time with his teenage sons, Adam, now a sociology professor at Columbia University, and Sam, a writer and director who heads the video department at the popular comedy site CollegeHumor.com. (Reich and Clare Dalton divorced in 2012; he has since remarried.) Resuming the academic career he had embarked on in 1980 as a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, he took a position at Brandeis University and published a well-received serio-comic memoir about his years in the Clinton administration, Locked in the Cabinet.
Other than an unsuccessful run for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, he has spent most of the past two decades as a de facto Economic Educator in Chief for millions of Americans. Reich, who co-founded the American Prospect magazine, and has written seven of his 16 books since 2000, excels at translating the arcana of economics into language that is both accessible and inviting, all the while making the case for greater equality in the distribution of income and wealth. His success as a communicator is all the more notable given the steady decline of unions and their ability to shape the national dialogue.
I asked Fred Ross Jr., a prominent labor activist with Local 1245 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, to describe his friend’s role. “He’s our teacher,” Ross said simply. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is also friends with Reich and shares many of his views, described him in an email as “smart, thoughtful and utterly fearless. Our economy is rigged to work great for those with money and power, while everyone else gets left behind — and Bob is doing everything he can to change that.”
Reich’s embrace of the latest communications tools has greatly extended his reach. Several years ago, he began working with Jacob Kornbluth, a Bay Area filmmaker. Reich already had a national following based on his books, his regular radio commentaries for Marketplace and three decades as a public figure. But the medium of online video was a game-changer.
“The videos are more successful than I ever expected in terms of reaching people,” Reich said. Kornbluth was equally surprised at the response. “I went to his office and made a video and I put it on my own Facebook page, and hundreds of thousands of people watched it,” he told me, recounting his first project with Reich. “I had never had an experience like it.”
Reich and Kornbluth soon formed a nonprofit organization, Inequality Media. In 2015 alone, they produced 25 videos that were viewed more than 25 million times. Most present sober topics in a light-hearted style — how the sharing economy is hurting workers, why deficit hawks are wrong. One, set during a family holiday meal (see below), even features Reich playing two characters: himself, and a Scrooge-like conservative, dubbed “Uncle Bob,” who fires off straw man lines like, “I’m paying too much in taxes to support poor people who are sitting on their duffs.” Reich, framed by a snowflake, then coaches viewers on how to respond to the Uncle Bob in their clans.
The two also made Inequality for All, which according to the Inequality Media website is the highest-grossing issue-based documentary since 2010’s Waiting for Superman. In the documentary, Reich presents many of the ideas that he has been hammering away at for years. The difference now is the size of the audience. “I think his decades of work are paying off,” Ross said. “He was a prophetic voice, and now he’s really part of the national debate.” The film was seen by President Obama and much of Congress, according to Kornbluth, who along with Reich took the movie on a national tour that included all 50 state capitals.
While Inequality for All is a thoroughly current film, packed with infographics and animation, it is also an engaging history lesson, reflecting Reich’s fascination with how the past informs the present. Any encounter with Reich — via video, book, lecture or interview — will likely reveal his desire to take on America’s notorious amnesia, not merely to set the record straight but to lay the foundation for a reasoned discussion of how we can shape the future.
“I have a basic faith that people are rational,” Reich told me. “If you explain something in ways that are not threatening and lace that explanation with enough illustration, example and humor, people at some point can relax and take it in.”
The Silicon Valley speech in November was a master class in the art of political communication. Aware that the audience included not only liberal Democrats but also wealthy businesspeople and libertarians, Reich steered clear of any wholesale indictment of tech billionaires – or glorification of government. Instead he offered a measured, non-ideological analysis of how the concentration of economic and political power was endangering everyone’s interests. And, of course, he kept the crowd laughing with lines like, “Economic forecasters exist to make astrologers look good.”
After the event I spoke to Jessica and Victor (who declined to give their last names), a married couple in their twenties for whom Reich’s lament about the loss of the American Dream struck a chord. “It’s definitely changed since when I was growing up,” said Jessica, who works at a company that makes medical devices. “My father was an engineer, so we lived a middle-class life, but the kind of wealth that my parents were able to accumulate — I don’t see that happening for my generation anymore.”
Victor, who works for a tech firm, talked about the huge disparity he sees between the company executives and low-wage workers like the security officers who guard his building: “People at the top really do not hear the people at the bottom. I see it every day where I work and we need people like Robert going out there and talking about this and making it an issue that everybody’s aware of.”
Those who attended the Silicon Valley event were less homogenous in their views than the capacity audience that turned out the next night at First Congregational Church in Berkeley to hear Reich. It was a home crowd in every way, and Reich, though exhausted at the end of his two-month book tour, clearly was enjoying himself. Speaking without notes, he offered a whirlwind tour of other turbulent periods in American history that spurred momentous change — the Jacksonian era of democratic renewal in the mid-1800s, the early 20th century progressive reform movement, the labor-left social justice crusades of the 1930s.
Among those in attendance that evening was Rhiannon Salter, a 28-year-old teacher at Mercy High School, a Catholic girls’ school in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame. While an undergrad at U.C. Berkeley, Salter took one of Reich’s courses. Now, five years later, she brought with her a dozen students from her economics and advanced placement government and history class.
A few weeks later I asked Salter how her students had reacted to Reich’s talk. They loved it, she said, while adding that one of their primary takeaways was that they wouldn’t be able to buy a home in the Bay Area.
“One of them turned to me afterward and said, ‘All right, whatever I do, I have to earn a lot of money,’” Salter recalled. “In some ways she’s right, but in another way it’s sad that they have to lose some of their idealism to succeed in this system.”
Reich, however, believes there is ample precedent for the country pulling itself back from the brink when capitalism gets out of hand, (sic) which is why he presented the Berkeley audience with a highlight reel of American reform movements. This is a major theme of Saving Capitalism, one that was reinforced for Reich during his red state book tour last fall. To his surprise, many of those he met shared his views on the economy, including conservative Republicans and Tea Party members. It turns out they are as fed up with crony capitalism, big banks, hedge fund managers and the influence of corporate money on politics as he and many progressives are.
“They call themselves Republicans, but many of the inhabitants of America’s heartland are populists in the tradition of William Jennings Bryan,” wrote Reich in a November blog post.
In that same light he views Donald Trump’s popularity as rooted not only in immigrant bashing but in what he believes is a misguided perception that Trump is standing up to the overwhelming economic force of Wall Street in a way that no one else could or would. In doing so, Trump represents to his supporters what Reich calls a “countervailing power” — a person or movement capable of challenging the dominant political structure.
Saving Capitalism posits the rise of a new countervailing power (though Trump is not what Reich has in mind) as the way in which our economy, and our country, will ultimately get back on the right track. Reich does not predict what form this will take, though he sees potential in the new variations of labor organizing that have arisen in the last few years, including the national campaign to raise the minimum wage, Fight for 15, and the worker-led organization OUR Walmart. But he is hopeful that what he experienced during his red state travels could portend a political realignment in which liberals and conservatives start to unite around core economic issues.
However it occurs, Reich is adamant that a fundamental repositioning can and must occur — not to forestall some apocalyptic endgame but to prevent a slow fragmenting of the nation’s social fabric.
“I don’t see a revolution or a kind of political upheaval,” Reich told me. “But I do see capitalism as a political economic system [that] is going to come under increasing strain. I mention in the book that trust begins to disintegrate, that our system depends upon people feeling that it’s fair, that there’s something about the system that works for everybody. The more people begin to think that the game is rigged, the more they are likely to act in ways that undermine the system.”
Reich’s response to this possibility is to focus on projects he believes can shift the balance of political power. He has ramped up his longstanding partnership with MoveOn.org, the progressive online advocacy group. This year he and the director Kornbluth made a series of 12 videos called “The Big Picture,” in which Reich presents a set of economic principles and policy ideas (old habits die hard). The videos have been seen by millions of people, according to MoveOn.org campaign director Jo Comerford, who in an interview described Reich as “one of the most prolific people on the planet.”
While Reich’s high-volume production won’t convert everyone to his views, Kornbluth said there’s no doubting his motivation. “The integrity of his passion is one of the most inspiring things that I’ve ever been around. It’s genuine. It’s really infectious, too. Very rarely have I seen anybody who is this successful in public who’s also this good of a guy.”
Reich would likely disagree with that assessment. There’s a scene in Inequality for All in which he says, “Sometimes I feel like my life has been a complete failure.” During our interview, I asked him if he ever marvels at his own American journey — how the son of a Jewish shopkeeper went on to advise presidents and become the preeminent voice on one of the defining issues of our time. He wasn’t having any of it.
“I honestly don’t see it that way,” Reich, who was awarded the Vaclav Havel Vision Foundation Prize in 2003 by the former Czech president for his contributions to world economic and social thought, said in a quiet voice. “I’m more aware of what I haven’t done and haven’t achieved and the very small amount that I’ve contributed to advancing the ball. I say that not out of false modesty. I don’t see a great deal of achievement.”
Last month he delivered the winter commencement address at U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Pavilion. The speech was, as usual, sprinkled with humor, but toward the end Reich eschewed levity and left graduates with this advice: “If you’re going to change the world for the better, you’re going to need patience. It is not easy to do. There are going to be setbacks. Change doesn’t come easily. You’ll need to accept what you cannot change, at least right away, and dedicate yourself again and again to changing what you cannot accept.”
