Showing posts with label Robert Reich. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Reich. Show all posts

Saturday, December 14, 2024

The Democratic Party And Economic Inequality

Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor, is one of the most prolific communicators of the truth about the source of economic inequality in the USA. Click on the links below for a 2-part in-depth expose of such, and how the Democratic Party has not been aggressive enough in challenging the lies of Republicans regarding who is responsible for it:

America's Four Stories (Part 1)

America's Four Stories (Part 2)

A summary:

"The Democrats’ weakest story has been the Rot at the Top. Democrats have been reluctant to condemn economic elites who have grown richer than ever and who have used their affluence to corrupt the political system.

"This should not be surprising. Since the 1980s, Democrats have been drinking at the same funding troughs as Republicans — big corporations, Wall Street, and wealthy individuals. And as the Supreme Court opened the spigots of big money into politics, those troughs have become far larger, for both parties."
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"Bernie Sanders told this story about the real Rot at the Top, but other leading Democrats have been reluctant to tell it.

"The Democrats’ failure to tell this story has enabled Republican cultural populism to fill the void, offering Americans who were growing distrustful of the system an explanation for what had gone wrong and a set of villains to blame — immigrants, '“coastal elites,' 'woke'ism, the 'deep state,' transgendered people, 'communists,' 'socialists,' the 'Left,' Critical Race Theory, 'cat ladies,' and other bogeymen.

"But none of these is the real explanation. The real explanation, the real Rot at the Top, has been a new record concentration of wealth and power at the top — enough to corrupt our system of self-government."

Thursday, October 31, 2024

What Bezos and Musk really want from Trump - Robert Reich Oct 31

Elon Musk (worth $271 billion) and Jeff Bezos (worth $262 billion) — the richest and second-richest people on the planet — are now showing America why it’s dangerous to have great wealth concentrated in so few hands.

In August 2013, Bezos purchased The Washington Post for $250 million. On Friday, just as the Post was preparing to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president, Bezos stopped the paper from doing so.

Partly as a result, the Post has already lost 250,000 subscribers, or 10 percent of its subscriber base.

In October 2022, Elon Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billon, turned it into X, and became its biggest user, with 202 million followers.

Musk has endorsed Trump — and weaponized the platform into a supporter of Trump, smeared Harris, and amplified rumors and conspiracy theories.

Independent analysts such as Edison Research said in March that X’s usage in the United States dropped 30 percent since last year. Fidelity this month estimated that X’s value has plunged by about 80 percent since Musk’s takeover.

Why have these two oligarchs been willing to take actions that cause so many of their customers to jump ship? What’s the connection between Bezos’s preventing the Post from endorsing Harris and Musk’s weaponizing X for Trump?

Here’s a hint:

Just hours after Bezos stopped the Post from endorsing Harris, executives of Blue Origin, Bezos’s private rocket company, met with Trump in Austin.

Although Blue Origin is running far behind Musk’s SpaceX, Bezos is the most likely serious challenger to Musk’s dominance in space because of his personal fortune and his billions of dollars in government contracts with NASA and the Department of Defense.

For years, Bezos has focused on beating Musk for the multibillion-dollar contracts to launch payloads and rockets. “Elon’s real superpower is getting government money,” Bezos said in 2016, according to the Post. “From now on, we go after everything that SpaceX bids on.”

Musk’s company appears so far ahead in the competition that it won a contract to rescue astronauts stuck at the International Space Station.

But that could change. Boeing and Lockheed Martin have been looking to unload their own joint-venture rocket company, United Launch Alliance (ULA), which has billions of dollars in government contracts, extensive infrastructure, and an experienced team.

Bezos’s Blue Origin is reportedly the favorite to take over ULA. Even the head of the U.S. Space Force’s purchases seems to be pushing for the two rocket companies to merge, telling an industry audience that “they need to scale” in order to meet an aggressive launch schedule.

ULA is still a major force in the space industry, competing for dozens of launches over the next four years, which can bring in billions more revenue. Combining with Blue Origin would make a lot of sense. The Wall Street Journal reports that Blue Origin has already submitted a bid to buy ULA.

If that’s the goal, Bezos’s biggest obstacle would be Trump, should Trump get back in the White House.

Trump has been out to get Bezos since 2017, when Trump first started blaming Bezos for poor coverage in The Washington Post — a grievance that has hurt Blue Origin.

In April 2019, then-Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff alerted Blue Origin officials to Bezos’s poor reputation in the White House, telling them that they have a “Washington Post problem.”

Trump also said he wanted to “screw Amazon” out of a $10 billion deal to provide cloud computing to the Pentagon, according to a memoir by his Defense Secretary James Mattis. (It’s since been reported that Oracle, led by Larry Ellison — Trump donor, Musk mentor, and Oracle founder, who ranks just behind Musk and Bezos as the third-richest person in America with an estimated $211.2 billion in wealth — had sought to sabotage the deal.)

So Bezos has been courting Trump. After Trump’s ear was grazed by a bullet during an attempted assassination at a July campaign rally, prompting a Musk endorsement of the former president, Bezos called Trump to say how impressed he was that the candidate had raised his fist after coming under fire, according to a person familiar with that conversation.

Soon after Trump formally secured the Republican nomination, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy phoned Trump, introducing himself and outlining the company’s plans for the future. The call concluded with Trump suggesting that the company cut a large check for his presidential efforts, according to two people familiar with the conversation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount the private discussion. Trump told Jassy that he was going to win the election and that Amazon should help him because it would be in the company’s best interests.

In this sense, then, both Bezos’s refusal to allow The Washington Post to endorse Harris and Musk’s weaponizing X for Trump can be seen as moves in a proxy war for dominance in government contracting of spaceflight, where the ultimate prize will be hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars — thereby distending the fortunes of either Bezos or Musk.

But the casualty in this war is American democracy, for which neither Bezos nor Musk apparently has a scintilla of concern.

America is now in its second Gilded Age, in which a handful of supremely wealthy men are determining the nation’s future. We must not let them. Bezos should never have been able to purchase The Washington Post in the first place; his conflicting business interests should have prevented it.

Nor should Musk have been able to buy Twitter. Antitrust laws should have been used to break Twitter up, or the platform should be deemed a public utility.

Both Bezos and Musk are poster boys for the importance of a wealth tax, which must be enacted to prevent the grotesque accumulations of wealth that have allowed them to wield such extraordinary power.

When the smoke clears from this rancorous presidential campaign and Kamala Harris is president, she must rescue democracy from these and other oligarchs.

As the eminent jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said near the end of America’s first Gilded Age, “America has a choice. We can have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy. But we cannot have both.”

Friday, October 6, 2023

Robert Reich's Final Essay On The Common Good

"Truth is the most basic of common goods. As the late senator and professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts.

"When we accept lies as facts, or illogic as logic, we lose the shared reality necessary to tackle our common problems. We become powerless."


Sunday, August 20, 2023

"Effective Altruism": Is It Against The "Common Good"?

"Effective altruism is an end-run around the common good — a perversion of the civic virtue that the common good requires.

"Bankman-Fried’s rise and fall — and the disconnect between his ends and the means — raises two questions at the heart of our quest to understand what has happened to the common good: What is the role and meaning of civic virtue? And is it possible to be virtuous if our goals are virtuous but the means we choose to achieve them harm others?"

Click on the link below for an essay on how to best "- - -  promote the general welfare:"

Samuel Bankman-Fried and the Perversion of Civic Virtue

Monday, April 25, 2022

Taxing The Rich 101

There's a great deal of smoke screening by the Republicans regarding the effects of taxing the rich more than they are now. Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, is one of the top experts on economics and government policy. Click on the link below for an 8-minute video presenting the truth about taxing the rich:


Wednesday, January 6, 2021

The Truth About "Taxing The Rich"

 Robert Reich, economics professor, former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, and with experience under both Republican and Democratic administrations, is my go-to guy on economics. The video linked to below clarifies the wide gap between progressives and conservatives regarding economic truth:

12 Myths About Taxing the Rich

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SCIENCE JUSTIFIES ITSELF

SCIENCE JUSTIFIES ITSELF
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