Quotes from Robert B. Reich

How else can you explain why the Street was bailed out with no strings attached? Or why taxpayers didn't get equity in the banks we bailed out—as Warren Buffett got when he bailed out Goldman Sachs—so when the banks became profitable again, we didn't get any of the upside gains?

Current patterns of economic segregation make a self-fulfilling prophecy of the claim that the poor are not like the rest of us.

Yet neither the regressives' stop-at-nothing tactics nor their social Darwinist message would have gained much traction were it not for the stunning failure of Democrats to make the case for a strong and effective government that responds to the needs of average people.

I believe that if we dispense with mythologies that have distracted us from the reality we find ourselves in, we can make capitalism work for most of us rather than for only a relative handful.

They used the façade of Bork's pinched academic analysis to justify killing off antitrust.

There are no longer moderates. There's no longer a center. There's either authoritarian populism (Trump) or democratic populism (represented in 2016 by Bernie's "political revolution").

I give money to everybody, even the Clintons, because that's how the system works," Trump said in 2016. Those might have been the most honest words ever to come out of his mouth.

Markets need rules for determining the degree to which economic power can be concentrated without damaging the system.

Social work, teaching, nursing, and caring for the elderly or for children are among the lowest-paid professions, yet evidence suggests that talented and dedicated people in these positions generate societal benefits far out of proportion to their pay. One such study found that good teachers increase the average present value of their students' lifetime income by $250,000 per classroom

more than one in three young families with children (headed by someone thirty or under) were living in poverty in 2010, according to an analysis of census data by Northeastern University's

The threat to capitalism is no longer communism or fascism but a steady undermining of the trust modern societies need for growth and stability. When most people stop believing they and their children have a fair chance to make it, the tacit social contract societies rely on for voluntary cooperation begins to unravel. In its place comes subversion, small and large—petty theft, cheating, fraud, kickbacks, corruption. Economic resources gradually shift from production to protection.

for small donors to participate, but large donors continue to dominate.) Even before the Supreme Court's grotesque 2010 decision

Listen carefully to today's Republican right and you hear the same social Darwinism that was used more than a century ago to justify the brazen inequality of the Gilded Age: survival of the fittest. Don't help the poor or the unemployed or anyone who's fallen on bad times, they say, because this only encourages laziness. America will be strong only if we reward the rich and punish the needy.

One of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy," observed economist John Kenneth Galbraith, "is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Most tellingly, it was a time when the ideas of William Graham Sumner, a professor of political and social science at Yale, dominated American social thought. Sumner brought Charles Darwin's thinking to America and twisted it into a theory to fit the times. Few Americans living today have read any of Sumner's writings, but they had an electrifying effect on America during the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

History will show that the CEOs of America's largest corporations had the power to constrain the most dangerous, divisive, and anti-democratic president ever to occupy the Oval Office, but they chose not to use that power.

Listen to today's Republicans and you hear a continuous regurgitation of Sumner. "Civilization has a simple choice," Sumner wrote in the 1880s. It's either "liberty, inequality, survival of the fittest" or "not-liberty, equality, survival of the unfittest. The former carries society forward and favors all its best members; the latter carries society downwards and favors all its worst members." Sound familiar?

A market—any market—requires that government make and enforce the rules of the game. In most modern democracies, such rules emanate from legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. Government doesn't "intrude" on the "free market." It creates the market. The

Edward G. Ryan, the chief justice of Wisconsin's Supreme Court, warned the graduating class of the state university in 1873. "The question will arise, and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, 'Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?

Wall Street is a casino in which high-stakes wagers are placed within a limited number of betting houses that keep a percentage of the wins for themselves and fob off losses on others, including taxpayers.

Moreover, people who believe the game is rigged are easy prey for political demagogues with fast tongues and dumb ideas.

truth, income and wealth increasingly depend on who has the power to set the rules of the game.

Economic bullying takes many forms but almost always preys on individuals and families that have little or no power and are at the mercy of those who do.

Don't separate race from class. Racial discrimination is aggravating class divides, and wider inequality is worsening racial divides.