Quotes from Robert B. Reich

he is awash in self-delusion, a condition especially dangerous in people who have significant power over others. Dimon doesn't see how he has contributed to the mess we're in. He doesn't acknowledge the inconsistencies between his preferred self-image as "patriot first" and his roles as CEO of America's largest bank and chair of the Business Roundtable. He doesn't understand how he has hijacked the system.

A few years ago the Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann remarked that if the minimum wage were repealed, "we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level." If you accept her logic, why stop there? After all, slavery was a full-employment system.

2018, the stock market posted its worst annual performance since the financial crisis. The median shareholder return for the largest five hundred corporations was a negative 5.8 percent. But their top executives got raises of 5 percent or more, with the typical CEO pay reaching a record $12.4 million, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal.

over the last 16 years, we have spent trillions of dollars on wars when we could have been investing that money productively.

President Woodrow Wilson explained the dangerous connection between excessive economic and political power in similar terms, in his 1913 book, The New Freedom: "I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.

On introducing his antitrust bill in 1890, Republican senator John Sherman of Ohio thundered, "If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life." Sherman's

protect biodiversity. It has used its political muscle in Washington to fight moves in other nations to ban

Being rich now means having enough money that you don't have to encounter anyone who isn't.

Coca-Cola's former president William Robinson, who in 1959 told an audience at Fordham Law School that executives should not put stockholders first. They should "balance the interests of the stockholder, the community, the customer, and the employee.

Capitalism's role is to enlarge the economic pie. How the slices are divided and whether they are applied to private goods like personal computers or public goods like clean air is up to society to decide. This is the role we assign to democracy.

Capitalism has become more responsive to what we want as individual purchasers of goods, but democracy has grown less responsive to what we want together as citizens

William H. Davis, then director of the government's Office of Economic Stabilization, estimated that industry was so profitable it could raise wages as much as 40 to 50 percent without raising prices. President Harry S. Truman, who felt he had enough on his plate without getting involved in management-labor disputes, repudiated Davis's calculation and announced Davis was out of a job.

Commitments to social responsibility are also conveniently reassuring to talented or privileged young people who want to do good while also doing well, and who don't want to acknowledge the cruel joke that, as Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All, has pointed out, people with the most to lose from genuine social change have put themselves in charge of social change.

The 400 richest Americans now have more wealth than the entire bottom half of earners—150 million Americans—put together.

Romney is right: free enterprise is on trial. But he's wrong about the question at issue in that trial. It's not whether America will continue to reward risk taking. It's whether an economic system can survive when those at the top get giant rewards no matter how badly they screw up while the rest of us get screwed no matter how hard we work.

We're not in trouble because gays want to marry or women want to have some control over when they have babies. We're in trouble because CEOs are collecting exorbitant pay while slicing the pay of average workers, because the titans of Wall Street demand short-term results over long-term jobs, and because of a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign "donations.

What's truly immoral is not what adults choose to do with other consenting adults but what those with great power have chosen to do to the rest of us. America's problems have nothing to do with private morality. The breakdown is in public morality—abuses of public trust that undermine the integrity of our economy and democracy

Citizenship entails more than voting on election days. It requires ongoing engagement—knowing what needs to be done, getting the facts and understanding the arguments, and then making enough of a ruckus, and organizing and mobilizing others to join you, to do what needs to be done.

Homeowners can't use bankruptcy to reorganize their mortgage loans, because the banks have engineered the bankruptcy laws to prohibit this. Young people can't use bankruptcy to reorganize their student loans, because the banks have barred it. But big businesses now routinely use bankruptcy to renege on contracts with their workers.

A society where one set of religious views is imposed on a large number of citizens who disagree with them is not a democracy. It's a theocracy. Yet

I recently debated a conservative Republican who insisted the best way to revive the American economy was to shrink government. When I asked him to explain his logic, he said, simply, "Government is the source of all our problems." When I noted government spending had brought the economy out of the Great Depression, he disagreed. "The Depression ended because of World War II," he pronounced, as if government had played no part in World War II.

The idea of a "free market" separate and distinct from government has functioned as a useful cover for those who do not want the market mechanism fully exposed. They

In 1914, Henry Ford announced he was paying workers on his Model T assembly line $5 a day—three times what the typical factory employee earned at the time. The Wall Street Journal termed his action "an economic crime," but Ford knew it was a cunning business move. The higher wage turned Ford's autoworkers into customers who could afford to buy Model Ts. In two years Ford's profits more than doubled.

the underlying issue has nothing to do with a hypothetical choice between the "free market" and government. Decisions must be made about whether a particular company or group of companies has "excessive" market power.