Thom Hartmann: And greetings my friends, patriots, lovers of democracy, truth and justice, believers in peace, freedom and the American way, Thom Hartmann here with you. And we are broadcasting live from the Take Back The American Dream conference here in Washington DC. And I am honored to have with me Robert Reich. Robert Reich is the former cabinet secretary in, or U.S. labor secretary in the cabinet of the administration of Bill Clinton, Time magazine in fact said he was one of the ten most successful cabinet secretaries in this century. He is currently a professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and the author of 13 books. His latest book, "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future". Robert Reich, it’s an honor to have you back with us, sir.
Robert Reich: Well it’s nice to see you, Thom. It’s nice to see you in person.
Thom Hartmann: It is, it really is.
Robert Reich: You look actually very handsome if I may say.
Thom Hartmann: So do you, sir.
Robert Reich: Well I wouldn’t go that far.
Thom Hartmann: Thank you. So first of all the conference. There’s a lot of great organizations here. You’ve played a major role in all of them. Do you want to give us just a couple words about what’s going on with this conference and some of the organizations that helped put this together and your role in it?
Robert Reich: I won’t talk about my role, but let me just say that the Take Back American Dream movement, and it really is not just a conference but a movement, is part of a movement that is spreading across America. People who are just fed up and outraged with the power of large corporations and the power of Wall Street. And say look, we’re 99% of the population and we have a terrible deal right now and we’ve had a terrible deal for years. But there’s got to be some change, some fundamental change in the way our society is organized around work and wages and who gets what. It’s just fundamentally unfair and amoral.
Thom Hartmann: Yeah. And you know that aspect of morality is what I think is driving the Occupy Wall Street movements and the occupy these various cities where people, as Fox News, I was watching Fox last night. It was actually the only station that was broadcasting news at the time which is kind of a tragic commentary on America. And they were talking about this and about, that it smells like urine down in the park and they look like a bunch of hippies, and most importantly they don’t have a single demand. It seems to me like we’re in one of those very pregnant moments like before Tahrir Square in, I’m mixing up my countries in the Middle East horribly, but where the young man self-immolated. Was that Yemen?
Robert Reich: You know Thom I don’t think this is going to be an American fall like the Arab Spring. But I do think that people are desperate. The latest data we have show that 37% of American families with young children are now in poverty. 37%. This is a record.
Thom Hartmann: More than a third.
Robert Reich: That’s more than one out of 3 American families with young children in poverty at the same time that the rich are richer than ever. The top 1% is taking home over 20% of national income. And…
Thom Hartmann: Of the entire nation.
Robert Reich: Of the entire nation. And has 35% of all of the wealth of the country right now. We haven’t seen this since before the great depression. And it’s not just the statistics. I could rattle off a lot of statistics for you and bore your listeners and television viewers completely silly. The point is that Americans have got to the point where they can no longer turn around and buy the things that they make. And that’s why businesses are not hiring.
Thom Hartmann: And in addition to that, they’re not making them anymore by the way.
Robert Reich: Well exactly.
Thom Hartmann: We’ve got some trade policy problems.
Robert Reich: I’m talking about, but even services. Even the services that used to provide a lot of American jobs, retail, restaurant, hotel, hospital, surface transportation, child care, elder care, teachers, everything else. I mean all of these jobs are under siege right now and that means people who have the jobs and others who depend on them are in a tighter and tighter and tighter place.
Thom Hartmann: This sounds to me like the prescription for a downward spiral which is sometimes referred to as a depression, a deflationary cycle. Do you see that and if so how do we break out of that?
Robert Reich: Well we are in a jobs depression. I don’t think there’s any question about it. And we break out of it, that is, it’s a vicious cycle, and we break out of it by first of all relying on the purchaser of last resort, as we always have, and that must be government.
Thom Hartmann: The government.
Robert Reich: It has to be. I mean put ideology aside, Thom. When consumers cannot spend, when government, when businesses are not going to invest, then government has got to. But also there is this issue of widening inequality. With so much income and so much wealth going to the very top the vast American middle class, working class, poor just doesn’t have enough purchasing power to keep the economy going. And we have got to tackle directly the issue of widening inequality.
Thom Hartmann: Not only that, I’m sure you’re familiar with The Spirit Level, the work of Richard Wilkinson and Kay Picket in the UK and The Equality Trust. We are now the most unequal society of the 34 OECD countries. And they scatter line graph them. And you know a whole bunch of social indices. Teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, drug use, both illegal and prescription drug use, abuse, homicide, suicide, crime in general, failure to complete school, infant mortality, life span. All of these things get worse and inequality grows, regardless of how rich a society is.
Robert Reich: Yes, but here’s the point. It doesn’t have to be that way. We are, the United States is the richest country in the world. We are the richest country in the history of the human race. That we have so much poverty, that we have so many people who are not in poverty but they are worried about how to pay their bills, where their next paycheck is going to come from, there’s no excuse for this.
Thom Hartmann: Right. So if we agree that inequality is disastrous, both because the people don’t, from an economic point of view, people don’t have enough money to drive the economy, from an anthropological point of view because it’s a disaster. What do we do about that?
Robert Reich: Well we start with, now I could give you a list of policies.
Thom Hartmann: Yeah my first would be roll back the Reagan tax cuts.
Robert Reich: But it’s not policy, well yes, you roll back the tax cuts, you roll back I mean you expand the Earned Income Tax Credit which is a wage subsidy, you raise taxes on the very, very top to pay for it, you invest in education and infrastructure. But behind all the policies is a bigger issue. How do you change politics to get those policies.
Thom Hartmann: Oh boy.
Robert Reich: And that’s where mobilizing, energizing, organizing the vast American 99% comes in. I mean people, nothing good happens in Washington Thom. And I know this from my experience. Nothing good happens in Washington unless people outside Washington are energized, mobilized and organized to demand that it happen. Otherwise, the special interests take over.
Thom Hartmann: So that’s us, that’s here, that’s this conference.
Robert Reich: That’s us, that’s here, that’s the mobilizations that are beginning around the country.
Thom Hartmann: That’s the people listening and viewing.
Robert Reich: And that’s a lot of people who are listening right now who are cynical, who say well nothing I do is going to make any difference. Cynicism is the greatest enemy of social change. Because if people give up then the other side wins.
Thom Hartmann: And it seems that with everything from ALEC to you know newspapers and magazines being basically subsidized and all these right wing writers, you know the books at the New York Times bestseller lists because Richard Mellon Scaife goes in or whoever and buys 40 thousand copies. Magazines like I believe the National Review is still losing money. The Washington Times has lost over a billion dollars. Fox News lost 100 million dollars a year for five years before they made any money. This incredible infrastructure seems dedicated, in the minute we have left, to demoralizing as well as to putting out the message.
Robert Reich: Well they’re dedicated to two things. One is telling big lies. Such as trickle down economics or you’ve got to shrink government to create jobs. I mean this is absurd. But big lies said often enough have the effect of big lies. People start believing them. The second goal of the radical right is to demoralize and create cynicism among everybody else, so that we do not respond. And that is what today is all about, that’s what the demonstrations around the country are all about. That’s what we have got to, all of us, dedicate ourselves to in the years ahead. It’s not going to be easy but unless we are organized, mobilized, nothing fundamentally is going to change. The right is going to prevail.
Thom Hartmann: Right. And in general, the way it works is, you know, when the parade going down the street gets big enough, the politicians start jumping in front of it with a flag saying this is my parade.
Robert Reich: Exactly. Exactly.
Thom Hartmann: And so it’s got to be us doing the parade. Robert Reich, so glad to have you with us here sir today.
Robert Reich: Thom great to see you.
Thom Hartmann: I do appreciate it. We’ll be right back here on the Thom Hartmann Program and on Free Speech TV, stick around.
Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.
