Quotes from Robert B. Reich

Their aim is to divide and conquer: pit unionized workers against nonunionized, public sector workers against nonpublic, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don't believe these programs will be there for them, and the middle class against the poor.

Do you recall a time when the income of a single schoolteacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family?

Socialism is the epithet they have hurled at every advance the people have made," President Harry Truman observed. It was "what they called public power…bank deposit insurance…free and independent labor organizations…anything that helps all the people." Every time over the last century Americans have sought to pool their resources for the common good, the wealthy and powerful have used the bogeyman of "socialism" to try to stop them.

The rich don't create jobs. Jobs are created when the vast majority of Americans buy enough to make companies add capacity and hire more workers. But that won't happen unless the vast majority has enough money to do the buying.

people with the most to lose from genuine social change have put themselves in charge of social change.

Get out of your ideological bubble. If most of the people you talk with agree with you, you're wasting your time. You need to engage with people who may disagree or who haven't thought hard about the issues. Reach across to independents, even to Republicans and self-styled Tea Partiers. Find people who are willing to listen to the facts and are open to arguments and ideas, regardless of the label they apply to themselves. We need them.

There's no problem with borrowing from the future in order to finance investments in the future.

An Apple executive told The New York Times, "We don't have an obligation to solve America's problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.

In 1934, when the economy began emerging from the bottom of the Great Depression, it grew 7.7 percent. The next year it grew more than 8 percent. In 1936 it grew a whopping 14.1 percent.

The biggest political divide in America today is not between Republicans and Democrats. It's between democracy and oligarchy. Hearing and using the same old labels prevents most people from noticing they're being shafted.

Wall Street's shenanigans have convinced a large portion of America that the economic game is rigged. Yet capitalism depends on trust. Without trust, people avoid even sensible economic risks. They also begin trading in gray markets and black markets. They think that if the big guys cheat in big ways, they may as well begin cheating in small ways. And when they think the game is rigged, they're easy prey for political demagogues with fast tongues and dumb ideas. Wall

An economy should exist for the people who inhabit it, not the other way around. The purpose of an economy is to provide everyone with opportunities to live full, happy, and productive lives.

Borrowers can already use bankruptcy to protect their vacation homes and investment properties, so why not their primary homes?

Wall Street has blanketed America in a miasma of cynicism, and much of it is directed against Wall Street. The Street has only itself to blame.

Twenty-one of the corporations whose CEOs signed the statement paid no federal income taxes in 2018, courtesy of those lobbying efforts. One of the signers was Jeff Bezos, the multi-billionaire CEO of Amazon and of its Whole Foods subsidiary. Just weeks after the statement appeared, Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce—at a total annual savings of what Bezos himself made in two hours.

If nothing is done to counter present trends, the major fault line in American politics will no longer be between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. It will be between the "establishment"--political insiders, power brokers, the heads of American business, Wall Street, and the mainstream media--and an increasingly mad-as-hell populace determined to "take back America" from them.

The most important political competition over the next decades will not be between the right and left or between Republicans and Democrats. It will be between a majority of Americans who have been losing ground and an economic elite that refuses to recognize or respond to the majority's growing distress.

Last summer, after Groupon selected Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Credit Suisse to underwrite its initial public offering, the trio valued Groupon at a generous $30 billion. Subsequent accounting and disclosure problems showed this estimate to be absurdly high. But the banks didn't care a whit. The higher the valuation, the fatter their fees.

The meritocratic claim that people are paid what they are worth in the market is a tautology that begs the questions of how the market is organized and whether that organization is morally and economically defensible. In truth, income and wealth increasingly depend on who has the power to set the rules of the game.

The system is created by people. The question is, 'Which people?' The central issue is not more or less government. It's 'Who is government for?'. In other words, it's all a question of power — who has it and who doesn't.

If you took the greed out of Wall Street, all you'd have left is pavement.

As I noted, jobs slowly returned from the depths of the Great Recession, but in order to get them, many workers had to accept lower pay than before.

The threat to capitalism is no longer communism or fascism but a steady undermining of the trust modern societies need for growth and stability.

Socialism for the rich means the oligarchy is not held accountable. Harsh capitalism for the many means most Americans are at risk for events over which they have no control—such as the closing of factories across the Midwest or a Wall Street financial crisis—and have no safety nets to catch them if they fall.