Worth watching:
The Big Picture: How We Got Into This Mess, And How We Get Out...
Here's the big picture of how we got into this mess and how to get out of it.
Posted by Robert Reich on Donnerstag, 21. Dezember 2017
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His blogs are archived on his website – robertreich.org They cover a wide range of political and economic topics and go back some years. I have been reading since about 2011. Well worth a read.
Thank you. I’ll have a good browse between Xmas and the new year.
What a perfect gift to lead us into 2018.
Thank you Richard Murphy for sharing and Robert Reich for this fantastic reminder of from whence we come and about choices of where to go.
I love your blogs.
I like the fact that you make me think.
I like that the attainment and maintenance of good values matter.
We are all flawed but we can still work to make a better, fairer world.
Happy Christmas and 2018
Noe of us can afford to be unaware of the solid opinions that Robert Reich has to express, leaving us much wiser and more thoughtful as well. I would like to say also that you are due many thanks for the sterling ( no pun intended) work that you do and achieve through this great blog. Keep up the good work, and all best wishes for the season and the New Year, which, I think , promises to be very interesting indeed!
Thanks for this – and for all the work you do for all of us.
Merry Christmas and a peaceful, happy 2018 to all your family – and to everyone.
Warning, party pooping remark coming up!
Reich is a good entertainer ( I grew up with Jewish humour!) and he is doing some good stuff by speaking out -BUT I think of him as another poacher turned gamekeeper similar to Adair Turner; in other words, people that were part of the problem ( Reich was a Clinton adviser -remember the surpluses?) and then decided, when the proverbial hit the fan, to make a late career change by critiquing the system and selling more books.
It’s good that he is saying these things ( mostly bloody obvious!) but I can’t help feeling uncomfortable about people who feathered their nest nicely then feathered a second nest disavowing the first.
Perhaps I’m wrong and just in a bah, humbug mood!
I can be accused of that Simon
People can change their minds
I think you need to allow for that
I don’t think you were riding the neo-liberal wave in the way some of these ‘poachers becoming gamekeepers did’ -and I’m pretty sure you weren’t a ‘poacher’.
But I agree and perhaps I shouldn’t be so harsh – but I can’t help sniffing the scent of opportunism with some.
I didn’t start ‘waking up’ to the neo-lib scam myself until I was in my early 40’s and hit by the housing issue so I suppose i was something of a sleepwalker before then but I still feel that these individuals who had prominent roles should come clean on their collusion ( maybe Reich does but I haven’t heard it)
In your case, Richard, you weren’t economic advisory to Blair or anything like that ( unless you have interesting skeletons in the closet!).
I should still tip my hat to you as your website played a significant role in my education!
Simon
No skeletons of that sort.
Best
Richard
I had similar thoughts to Simon. Did you notice the little bubble exonerating the Clinton Admin from the U-turn? Some say that’s where the crash started with repeal of Glass-Steagall which gave the green light to the big banks to run the economy.
Clinton got that emphatically wrong
Simon
It’s Christmas Simon and you are being very hard on decent man.
In a plea of mitigation, please watch Reich’s film ‘Inequality for All’. Clinton and Reich go back a long way it transpires as they both studied in the UK when young men (Oxford I think or was in The Other Place?).
Reich left Clinton’s administration in obvious frustration as he felt that his ideas as Labour Secretary which were part of Clinton’s original plan were forced to one side. Reich even goes as far as admonishing himself on camera for not winning the arguments. He sees himself as a failure.
Why did Reich fail to influence Clinton – a Democrat?
Well the story goes that a certain Mr Alan Greenspan ( Chair of the Fed who numbered Ayn Rand as a personal friend) and a certain Robert Rubin (ex Goldman Sachs and US Treasury Secretary) convinced Clinton that his plans would bankrupt the nation (I believe that the US Government at the time was quite flush). They even successfully encouraged Clinton to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 which was the ‘firewall’ set up between commercial and investment banking after The Great Depression. The removal of which in 1999 is seen as an acerbating factor in the crash of 2008.
It is in my view Simon that Robert Reich should not be held accountable: it is Clinton – the more stupid one – the male. Reich left as he knew he was not making progress. A mark of a principled man.
Bill Clinton sums up to me everything that is wrong with modern politicians today. He believes in things but seems to know very little and relied on ‘advisors’ and ‘speech writers’ to portray himself to the public.
I’m sick of his kind and I always ask the question now of any politician:
“I don’t give a damn about what you believe about a decent society: tell me of what you KNOW about running one.”
Any politician who cannot write a speech from the heart for themselves or who cannot make his or her mind up without having a phalanx of ‘advisors’ (lobbyists) on hand will never get my support. I can’t commend them to any one else either.
Merry Christmas, PSR, (only eleven more days to survive) but I’m going to disagree, or at the very least question your thinking.
Of politicians you say :
“I don’t give a damn about what you believe about a decent society: tell me of what you KNOW about running one.”
I’m prepared to give a lot of credit to a politician with good intent. They will always fall short of our hopes and expectations unless they are in the majority. But I would rather have politicians who are trying to do the right things for the right reasons and not succeeding, than have those in charge who are highly successful in doing the wrong things.
“Any politician who cannot write a speech from the heart for themselves or who cannot make his or her mind up without having a phalanx of ‘advisors’ (lobbyists) on hand will never get my support. I can’t commend them to any one else either.”
We need politicians to be listening constantly to advisors. Not a phalanx (military unit, I think) of ‘advisors’ in inverted commas. I’m fairly sure that for the most part Tony Blair’s advisors function was to say ‘Yes, Tony. No Tony. Three bags full Tony.
The most important quality that we require of politicians is that they can tell the difference between good advice and bullshit.
Hilary Benn famously made a speech(ostensibly) from the heart about sending bombers into Syria.. It was hailed as an example of fine oratory, but it was emotive bullshit.
Politicians who speak from the heart and rely on ‘gut’ instincts can be very dangerous animals. hearts are for pumping blood; guts are for digesting food.
Brains are for thinking with and coming to rational decisions. They are highly fallible because they function on an underlying structure that works in images and emotions. But they are the best thinking tool we have.
One of the factors that got Donald Trump into the White House was that enough voters believe/d that a man who can run a business empire would be good at running a country because he ‘knows how…’
Given the structure of our house of commons, with its party system, (if that is the way we wish to run the legislative process) what is required is a democratic upper house genuinely reflective of the mix in society and with power to simply reject bad , unsuitable or partisan proposals.
Our ‘Mother of Parliaments’ is no longer fit for purpose I suggest. It is much too easily lobbied and controlled by vested interests.
Either the functioning of the Commons has to change radically or the Upper house has to be reconstituted to keep it in check. And I think that would include the power to veto bad legislation.
That’s a very eloquent response, PSR. Richard, I realise a blog is not like journalism in that the owner doesn’t have to offer a right of reply if they don’t want to, but a guest post from Robert Reich responding to Simon would be worth reading. Happy Christmas and best wishes for 2018.
I admit he’s not someone I know
Anyone got an email address?
Best
Richard
Thanks for sharing, Richard. In the same vein as the RSA Animate that you used to feature from time to time many moons ago (there was a very good one on the financial crisis if I recall).
Anyway, Reich is right – there’s much to play for in 2018 both here (with Brexit) and in the US with that disgrace for a President. In the meantime, have a great Xmas and New Year. There’ll be no shortage of material to blog on in 2018 that’s for sure.
Best wishes.
Happy Christmas Ivan
What an absolutely brilliant piece. We talk about having a ‘narrative’ that people can understand and engage with. Reich shows just what that might look like.
I’ve read the above “pro’s and con'” about Robert Reich’s political record and can only endorse both pro’s and con’s, but with two reservations.
The first is to applaud Robin Stafford’s view: Reich is a quite brilliant communicator, and more fool Bill Clinton for losing him, not just for Reich’s skill, but for his perception, given that Bill Clinton was also a brilliant communicator, but had the misfortune to adopt a poor script.
It’s hard to utter the word “triangulation” without hawking and spitting, given that it was a euphemism for a tactical retreat to the Right Wing of the battlefield, made all the worse by the fact that a courageous defence of the centre and Left was not only required but possible.
Blair, for example, could easily have stood on the steps of Downing Street in1997, and announced “Thatcherism is dead” to near universal acclaim, just as Clinton could have said “Reaganism is dead”. Instead, both leaders pushed things yet further up the Thatcherite cul de sac that contributed powerfully to the 2007/8 GFC.
The second reservation to the “con’s” answers what was I think PSR’s point, namely that Reich is commonly identified as easily the most competent Cabinet Minister in either Party in the last 50 years, one who had both the theoretical and philosophical capabilities to envision change, allied to the practical skills and awareness of how to bring about change – a very rare combinatimes3 Aneurin Bevan on one side, and Sir Edward (Edmund?) Boyle on the other, spring to mind as UK examples.
So, more fool Bill Clinton to lose the brains AND the driving engine offered by Reich, opting instead for neoliberal mythology (I believe the Monica Lewinsky scandal stopped Clinton from introducing a welfare “deform” of almost Trumpian shape and scope), and also knocking at least one wheel of his wagon, causing it to be unbalanced, and lead to Hillary’s 2016 crash. Sure she won the popular vote, but she SHOULD have been able to beat Trump 60/40, if she’d reconnected her Party to it’d real roots, rather than relied on the neoliberal creepers and suckers then feeding the Wall Street Democrats. And I fear the establishment Democrats have still not read “the signs of the times” that have led to 35+/- States having a Republican “trifecta” of Governor, State Senate and State House.