- At the end of the first Gilded Age, justice Louis Brandeis, one of the great philosophers really of that time, is repeated to have said, America has a choice.

We can either have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy, but we can't have both.

And I think that that is exactly what we face right now.

- Welcome to Forum, I'm Alexis Madrigal.

These are disorienting times.

For the last 10 years, Donald Trump has scrambled American politics, channeling some longtime tendencies of the electorate with a new style of right wing messaging, but as we'll hear today from Robert Reich, the Trump era sits atop 40 years of growing inequality in this country.

And these divisions between the rich and the poor have reached a level that they threaten democracy itself.

In these times, we need a teacher, and Robert Reich has spent his career doing just that.

His methods are shown in a new documentary, "The Last Class," which captures his final emotional term at Berkeley.

He also has a new memoir out, "Coming Up Short," and he writes a newsletter nearly every day, sometimes twice a day honestly, that has over 1 million subscribers.

Welcome to Forum, Robert Reich.

- Thank you, Alexis.

Thank you for asking me.

- Yeah.

So you've lived through, participated in some of the big movements of American history over these last decades, and we are in this strange and difficult part of our history right now.

I wanted to ask you, when you think this kind of current era really began, was it Trump coming down the escalator?

9/11, China entering the WTO, like even before?

- I view Donald Trump as very much the consequence, the culmination of 40 or 50 years of America getting off track, stopping thinking about and appreciating our democracy, allowing huge amount of legalized bribery in the form of campaign donations and corporate public relations investments.

I think Donald Trump is a in my view, is a menace.

But the menace really began years ago, and I could, in fact, in the book I go through step by step my own life and also what I experienced over the last 40, 50 years that I believe led to Trump.

- Hmm.

And if you were to say it's a style, or would you say it is a structural factors of which he's just an expression?

Is it, I know that one answer in the book is that we is bullying, that we are in a culture of bullying.

- Yes.

I, I think that he is the bully in chief, but the bullying that that is the brutalization, the use of power to put down and take advantage of and exploit others, really is something that began to, well, it's deeply embedded in American culture, but in the post-war era, it began to take off in the late seventies and early 1980s.

That's when really, if you look at just the, just the data, you see that the median wage began to stagnate at that time, and more and more of the nation's income and wealth began to go to the top.

And as inequality widened, there became more and more opportunities for bullying because those who had the income and those that had the wealth, were able to use that income and wealth in all sorts of political ways to rig the game against everybody else and other ways to entrench their own power and their own wealth.

- You know, this, you've taught a class at Berkeley for many years in until 2023, in which you kind of looked at this relationship between wealth, poverty, democracy.

Do you think that students responded to that differently or the same over time?

Like how did this message change in its reception?

- Well, it's a good question.

I, over the past 44 years of teaching did see a change in students, and in terms of my understanding and my values and my appreciation of my students, I thought the change was positive.

My more recent students generation cohorts, they are more dedicated, more committed to, to making the world better.

And we can talk about what that means, than any generation, any cohort I had ever taught before, not to dismiss my earlier generations of students, but this group is really, I think, up to the task of taking the mess that we, my generation, the boomers and, and subsequent generations have created and starting to clean it up, starting to make a stronger democracy, a stronger society, an economy in which more people can enjoy the fruits of their labors.

- Hmm.

You know, I wonder, what do you think the roots of that change are?

I mean, I'm just thinking about my own youth, growing up in the 1990s.

I had more of a sense of an intact American dream.

And when I, you know, that this just this packet of ideas that if you worked hard, you'd get ahead largest middle class in the history of the world, like a lot of these kinds of ideas.

And I think kids who've come up in more recent times maybe don't have that same mythology intact.

- I think you're right.

In fact, that mythology, that notion that if you worked hard, played by the rules, if you worked hard as a parent, as somebody in your community, that you would do better and better during your working life and your children would do even better than you.

I think that that social contract, if you will, began to come apart actually in the late seventies, early 1980s.

Ronald Reagan, in a way, marks the division point.

I saw it.

I lived it.

Alexis, I mean, one of the, one of the problems of these kinds of discussions is I, you know, there is a kind of theoretical, historical level, but I keep on falling back on the reality.

- Like, no, I was there.

Right?

- I saw not only was I there, but I was in many ways in the middle of it.

I, I, you know, as, as Secretary of Labor in the, in the early nineties, I really did see these changes in the American workforce.

For example, I went out and talked with thousands and thousands of American workers in the Rust Belt, as we called it, or in the south or everywhere, who were being affected by everything from globalization to technological change.

But more importantly, they were being affected by a change in power and the relationship of, of who had it and what they did with it, and the erosion of the social contract that came as a result of that power relationship.

- How would you describe that change?

Like what are the components of a change in power?

- Well, one big change was the amount of money coming into our political system from very wealthy people and big corporations.

I mean, politics, you know, I'm old enough to remember a time when American politics really was not about campaign donations and wasn't about public relations plans, and wasn't about litigation, armies of litigators paid by corporations to to storm the courts.

It all is rather recent.

1971, you have, you have a fellow who, Lewis Powell, an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, who was asked by the Chamber of Commerce to write a memo to American business about what American business should do over the next decades.

And Powell felt, as did the United States Chamber of Commerce, that the biggest danger to American business was the special interests, as he called them, the environmentalists, the labor union people, the people who were concerned about product safety, the Naderites, the consumerists.

All of these were, were starting to encroach, he felt on American business profits.

And so his, his solution was pour money into politics, pour money into campaigns, create trade associations, change the nature of what business did in politics.

And that memo was the start of, I think, the erosion that we're all now talking about.

And we're all now feeling, yeah, - Yeah.

We're talking with political economist, educator, author, former labor secretary Robert Reich.

He's the author of 19 books.

His latest is "Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America."

We also wanna hear from you, perhaps you are a student of Robert Reich.

He's had 40,000 of them over the years, give or take a few thousand.

So share a memory with us or something you learned from Professor Reich.

Maybe you've just got a general question about the world we're living in.

We'll take those two.

The number is 8 6 6 7 3 3 6 7 8 6.

That's 8 6 6 7 3, 3, 6, 7, 8, 6.

The email's forum@kqed.org.

I'm Alexis Madrigal, stay tuned.

Welcome back to Forum, Alexis Madrigal here We are joined by Robert Reich, of course, who, former labor secretary under President Bill Clinton, longtime educator, political economist.

Before the break, we were talking about the way that corporate power has changed over the decades, and it's created a quite difficult situation for American workers.

Like how would you, how does that show up in the numbers?

Is it just sort of like minimum wage has not kept pace with inflation, or what are the other ways that you see that before we sort of turn to today's job market?

- Well, for one thing, it's very much harder to form a labor union today, Alexis, than it was 40 years ago.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, about a third of private sector workers in the United States were unionized.

Now it's down to 6%.

I mean, there's, you can, there's no bargaining leverage any longer if you are a member of a union.

And it, it, it really has changed the entire complexion of the political economy.

There's no longer any, what John Kenneth Galbraith used to call countervailing power, corporate power, also monopolization, a much, much bigger corporations, a much bigger kind of market power, larger market power, and also political power.

Now, antitrusts, apart from the, you know, we had a little flowering in the last, but we didn't really have over the last 5, 6, 7 administrations very much interest in antitrust, and therefore, monopolization took off.

Beyond that, you also have many, many ways in which consumers average working people have been shafted.

Taxes have been cut dramatically on people at the top and on big corporations.

It's not just Donald Trump's two tax cuts, it's also Ronald Reagan's huge tax cut, mostly went to, again, the wealthy and big corporations, followed by George W. Bush's big tax cut again, mostly to the wealthy and big corporations.

Take those four tax cuts, including Trump's two tax cuts together, put them together.

And you see, you know, if we hadn't had them, we wouldn't have the big problem with the budget deficit and our debt overall.

Alexis, there's so many ways, and I try to touch on them in the book without causing eyes to glaze over.

But we're really talking about, and I want to emphasize a shift in power.

And at the end of the first Gilded Age, justice Louis Brandeis, one of the great philosophers really of that time is repeated to have said, America has a choice.

We can either have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy, but we can't have both.

And I think that that is exactly what we face right now.

We really are losing our democracy.

We were already losing it even before Trump, given all of the money, given the inequality, given the corruption that that money represented.

- Yeah.

For me, one of the kinda hallmarks of this is this chart that I've seen of sort of the consolidation of banks over time.

You know, you start over on the left side, back in the 1970s, and there's tons of banks, all these regional banks, different kinds of things.

And as you move forward in time along the right of the chart, by the time you get to the end, there's basically like five banks left in America.

And so now, you know, if you don't like, it's, if you don't like the dominant bank in your area, you don't really have a lot of choices.

You know, it's not - No choice.

That's, that's exactly the point.

And, and the same thing is, well, let's take food.

Everybody's complaining about food prices these days.

Well, with good reason, food costs and prices have soared over the last several months.

Part of it is Trump's tariffs, which are essentially import taxes, but also these food companies are gigantic.

They're much, much larger than they ever were before.

I'm old enough again, to remember when there was a lot of competition among companies that were food processors and who were companies that were involved in developing and marketing and, and all of the aspects of, of getting food from farm to table.

And now it's consolidated.

You go into a supermarket, it may look like you have a choice of all these labels, but actually the labels are fronts for just a handful, maybe two or three giant companies.

They're not competing with each other.

They are actually increasing prices to the extent that they possibly can, which maybe makes sense from their standpoint.

I mean, after all, they're in the business of making profits.

But that begs the more fundamental question, what is the purpose of big corporations?

What's the purpose of our economy, if not to improve the wellbeing of everybody associated with it?

- Yeah.

Not only that, those big, you know, the big grocers say they also are now vertically integrated.

So they not only are a big grocery store, they also, you know, at least contract with people to, to put the stuff on the, the shelves.

And they do, they control the supply chains and they control all the things that go into corporation.

- So when, when you look at all of this, that is monopolization, and also the difficulty of forming a union, and also the tax reductions on people at the top and big corporations, and the tax increases on many average people, they don't even see it or know it.

But a tariff, for example, is a very regressive tax because who's paying the import tax, which is the tariff, obviously more of the wallets of the average working per people are being affected than the wallets of the rich.

So we could go on and on about how this system is itself ratcheting out of control, worse and worse and worse, more money into the system from big corporations and wealthy individuals.

And that rigs the system more and more in favor of those big corporations and wealthy individuals until so many people are so angry and so basically desperate and so cynical that comes along a, well, a, a strong man who is really a stalking horse for the oligarchy, but he says to average working people, I'm gonna be on your side.

You have been bullied.

I'm gonna be your bully.

And they believe him.

- Hmm.

Let's talk about how that's actually working out.

You know, the labor market has seemed, at least, you know, to us, taking calls from people quite weak.

But the job market numbers until quite recently, were seeming stronger than expected.

There was recently, actually just this morning, a sort of planned annual revision of these job numbers, which sort of went back in time and made better, higher quality estimates is my assumption saying that actually, you know, there were fewer jobs added than were thought at the time.

Where are we in this labor market right now, particularly just for, for working people, many of whom did vote for Donald Trump?

- Well, you wanna look at the number of jobs, and you also wanna look at the wages.

Those are the two most important factors.

And the number of jobs, undoubtedly job growth is slowing.

I think part of that is that major employers are scared.

They don't know, they can't predict the future.

They don't know what this person in the Oval office is going to do next in terms of tariffs or in terms of taxes or in terms of anything else.

And when you have that degree of uncertainty, obviously businesses don't want to hire, they don't want, they don't want to plan, they can't plan for the future.

But on top of that, you also have, due to the tariffs and monopolization, let's not forget that, that's a big one.

You have increases in prices.

Prices are not going down, prices are, and again, there we have a lot of data on this industry by industry, but prices are trending upward.

Now, when you have those two happening simultaneously, that is jobs slowing down, looking, kind of smelling like a recession, and you have prices going up, that's a very dangerous economy.

That's called potentially stagflation.

Stagflation.

Yeah, stagflation - Ever think you'd hear that term again after the 1970s?

- I hoped I never would.

The problem with stagflation is this very difficult, it's difficult to do anything about it because the Federal Reserve Board, and I don't wanna bore you or your listeners with a, with a discussion about the Fed right now, but bear in mind, the Fed is really basically our only vehicle for controlling inflation and also controlling and avoiding recession.

A stagflation puts the Fed in a very, very difficult position.

- Yeah.

Let's, let's go to some callers here.

Let's bring in Hector in Oakland.

Welcome.

- Hello.

Is that me?

- Yes.

Yes, go ahead.

- Oh, okay.

So on the subject of the decline of labor as a countervailing power, I wonder what you would think of not so much on account of decline of strikes, but of consciousness of 1946 as a turning point.

I, I realize, you know, that there are massive strike waves or strikes in, in 1952 and 1959, et cetera.

But it kind of feels like to me that 1946 was kind of the last time that it was really palpable in the working class of, of the class constituting an independent power and poised to be politically independent as well.

And, and, and as far as the - Hector, let's take 1946 to Professor Reich here as a possible turning point.

Big, big in Oakland.

I know that, that year and the, the post-war period, immediate post-war period, big time in Oakland politics, what do you think - It was a big deal.

1946 was indeed a turning point with regard to labor and politics in general.

The Democrats lost the midterms and the Republicans were resurgent in 1946.

I, I think partly because we had so many years of Democrats through the Depression, through the second World War.

It was the period of Franklin D. Roosevelt while the Republicans were hankering to get back, but they used the boogeyman of socialism and communism and then came Joe McCarthy's really horrible kind of red baiting.

And, and that really did begin an erosion of what was the, the Roosevelt politics, the kind of coalition that we relied on as a nation to strengthen the working class.

1946, not incidentally, is the year that I was born.

Bill Clinton was born.

George W. Bush was born, and Donald Trump was born.

And, and, and the, my book is very much about, about this year and this generation and the fact that we were the recipients, the beneficiaries of what the greatest generation, my parents, my and, and Bill Clinton's parents, and, and Donald Trump's parents, and George Bush's parents all contributed, all of our parents contributed to not only getting us out of the Depression, but also the second World war, and giving us as a generation the largest middle class the world had ever seen, peace and prosperity.

And the question is, what did we do with that?

Hmm.

And my conclusion is that we, we did some things.

I mean, I, I don't want to take away from the extraordinary successes of the Civil Rights Movement and the Voting Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Many of your listeners will remember all of this and participated in all of it, but, and the, and the gay rights equal marriage movement and, and so on.

But we failed fundamentally to avoid the undermining of our entire system through widening inequality and the corruption that followed that widening inequality.

- What role do you think, I mean, I know that you played a role in the Clinton administration and the passage of NAFTA and had, you know, was, were in the discussions around, you know, China's entrance into the WTO kind of two big kind of hallmark policies and global trade that, you know, some people across the political spectrum have pointed to as sort of eroding workers' power.

What was your thinking around, you know, supporting NAFTA and also having reservations about, you know, China entering the WTO, and what role do you think that played in these, these last decades - Undoubtedly, both have had a, a rule that is NAFTA and even more importantly, China, Chinese accession to the World Trade Organization allowed a, a kind of tsunami of low cost goods to come into the United States.

Now that was good from the standpoint of consumers, we had that benefit, but the cost of all of this centered and was born by the working class who lost good jobs, unionized jobs, and whose communities and, and entire regions of the country were hollowed out.

Now, economists have studied this for years, and the general conclusion is that we lost about five to 10 million manufacturing jobs.

About half of those were lost because of China's accession to the World Trade Organization.

Maybe some from NAFTA and about half due to technological change.

But most of these economic analyses don't really grapple with the change in power that also occurred.

And what I witnessed, and I think is a much bigger fundamental issue in America right now.

I mean, we, the culmination we are dealing with now every single day is this power shift that occurred at the same time.

- Hmm.

That's really, and you know, it's important you say in The Last Class documentary, to know that these fights don't end, you know, all the different fights.

You know, trying to close the gap between, as you say, our ideal and and reality.

When you look out at the landscape of American politics, like who do you think is in the fight carrying the torch of the fight that you've been in all these years?

- Well, Bernie Sanders is, is, is one of my heroes.

I, I love Bernie.

I have a chapter in the book about, about loving Bernie.

He, he's a dear friend and I love how grouchy he is and how determined he's, and well, I, I talk about him at length, but there are many other young people in American politics today.

They don't get very much attention yet.

They will, I think there is an entire wave of, of young progressives in American politics who will, I believe do wonderful things if we get through this terrible dark period we're in right now.

And Alexis, what I do to cheer myself up, I don't know what you do, but what I do to cheer myself up after reading the, the headlines of the day or hearing the news, I think about my students, for one, I think about how determined they are, and they're all out there now.

Many of them are, are, are working the their tails off to try to make this country better.

But I also think about what is happening across the country as people begin to understand.

As somebody came up to me just three days ago and said, you know, I, I really didn't understand what democracy meant until I was, until we were in danger of losing it.

I never appreciated it.

And somebody else said to me a couple of weeks ago when I was on this book tour, they said, you know, the rule of law, it was an abstraction.

And now after, after eight months of Trump, I know what the rule of law is and I know how important it is, and somebody says to me, due process, it used to be just an abstraction, now due process You have people being taken off the streets and, and basically being, being thrown into, into prisons or into, into prison camps or or thrown out of the country without due process.

I now understand how important it is.

All of these concepts and many, many more are now being brought into such sharp relief by the administration in Washington.

- Yeah.

- And I can't help but think that that is a good thing in terms of national learning.

- Yeah.

We're talking with Robert Reich, longtime Berkeley professor, of course, former Labor Secretary of the United States.

We'll be back with more right after the break.

Welcome back to Forum, Alexis Madrigal Here.

We've got Robert Reich, an icon of American politics here in the country, longtime Berkeley professor, author of 19 books, including his most recent, "Coming up Short: A Memoir of My America."

Also look out for the documentary, the Last Class, which is really a beautiful reflection on what it is to teach and learn in this country.

We would love to hear from you.

We're gonna get to a bunch more calls and comments in this segment of the show.

What are your questions for Robert Reich right now?

What do you wanna know about the current labor market or the world right now?

The number is 8 6 6 7 3 3 6 7 8 6.

That's 8 6 6 7 3 3 6 7 8 6.

The email address is form@kqd.org and of course on social media, blue Sky, Instagram, discord.

We're KQED Forum.

Here's probably a good place to start.

Joe asks, what's the first thing we should be addressing as a nation, - Joe, right this minute, I think we need to be addressing the disappearance of many people without due process.

I mean, the vulnerability of, of many of our compatriots, of many people who have worked here for years, who are our neighbors, our friends, is, well, it's a moral quandary, but it's also a horror.

And we've got to protect them.

And California is doing what it can.

I was just last week in Boston talking with some officials in Boston.

Every city and every state that can possibly do it, every community must do what it can.

This is, you know, this is too much like what happened in Germany in the late 1930s.

Beyond that, I think the longer term goal has got to be to get big money outta politics, to make sure our democracy is working for most people instead of for the big corporations and for the richest members of society.

We've gotta raise taxes on the wealthy to, to finance a, a whole slew of things that we need in this country.

This is absurd paid family leave.

We ought to have everybody else, every other rich nation has it.

The we ought to have, you know, there's no question about universal healthcare.

I mean, why should 20 million people not have any kind of health insurance in this country?

The richest country in the world?

We've been through this already.

There should be no doubt about any of these things.

Elder care, childcare, people need assistance.

They need help.

And as artificial intelligence, as AI starts attacking our labor market, we're going to find that even a lot of professionals who feel that they're very insulated from the the vagaries of the labor market are suddenly going to be vulnerable too.

And they may be more susceptible than they think.

And I think that therefore their, their policies like universal basic income that may become necessary as AI takes more and more of our, of our jobs.

- I mean, the mechanism to do all that, is it basically a wealth tax to sort of realign sort of power and money towards a greater number of people in this country?

Is that at least part of the answer?

- Well, that's part of the answer, absolutely.

I was talking to somebody yesterday about social security.

Social security.

I used to be a trustee of the Social Security Trust fund.

It's the most popular program in the government.

t's running out of money.

People think it's running out of money because the baby boomers are all taking money and retiring.

No, it's running out of money because the social security system never anticipated how much of the total income of the country would be at the top and therefore not subject to social security taxes.

We have to raise the cap on income subject to social security taxes.

There, there's so many things that need to be done, Alexis, and we haven't even begun to talk about climate change, which is, which is intimately related to everything else that we have been talking about.

The administration, Washington is moving on so many levels in the opposite direction.

We need to move in that it, it becomes, you know, they're flooding the zone.

I, I can't tell you how many people are run into who say, I don't know what to do next.

I, I don't know what to do.

I, I'm, I I'm essentially immobilized out of, out of outrage and, and sadness and despair and fear.

What do you tell 'em?

I tell them that that's what they want.

They want to immobilize us.

They want us to be despairing.

That, that then we, they want us to stop fighting because if we stop fighting, then they get everything.

Then we turn into a totally authoritarian neofascist state, run by a handful of oligarchs at the top.

That's what they are, that's what they've been seeking.

We don't want to become immobilized.

We must keep fighting, not only because we can't let them take over, but also because our, our very existence, the future of our children and our grandchildren and their children.

Our, our understanding of ourselves, our own integrity depends on continuing to fight.

- Hmm.

Let's run through some comments here.

There's some questions embedded in most of these, Robert, and you can just sort of take the one you want here.

Carl on the Discord asks, you've established that there are large groups of vulnerable people vulnerable to the power of large corporations, individuals, et cetera.

How do disadvantaged groups bridge the gaps in their ideologies to defend and advance their values?

I'm thinking of divisive issues like the war and Gaza.

Is it possible to disagree on deeply held beliefs, but still have solidarity against the massive inequities in wealth?

Mike asks, thank you for all you're doing.

In my world you're bigger than the Beatles.

That's pretty big.

Can you give us your thoughts on the post-Trump era?

Will he walk away from the White House with enormous wealth?

Can and will any of it be clawed back?

Ron asks, is big oil the big power hiding behind much of the change that Mr.

Reich describes?

Mike asks, did Mr.

Reich see any way for public media to survive in the era of corporate media like Fox News, which is fueled by fear, anger, and what seems like increasingly low cost AI generated content?

How does goodwill and generosity, such as donations to KQED?

Thanks Mike, survive in this environment.

- Well, those were all wonderful questions, and let me try to pull them together a little bit.

Carl, one of the techniques being used by, it used to be right and left, I'm not even gonna call it right anymore.

It's the, it's the, the authoritarians.

The oligarchs, one of their techniques is to divide and conquer.

They want Americans to be so angry at each other over every issue.

You can imagine that we don't look upward and see where all the money and power has actually gone.

In other words, the more we can kind of fulminate against each other, the easier it is for the oligarchs to take over and, and be free of our, of our, both our, our our understanding of what's happening, but also our, our, our fight against what is occurring.

So you are right, Carl.

We, we have to come together and we have to see that beyond and, you know, any individual fight, we have much more in common than we have the issues that divide us,.

Mike, in terms of the media and what we have in a post-Trump era, I would say my, on the mornings I wake up positive, and this was actually a positive morning for me.

I think that this, we can't help but come out stronger, as I alluded to before.

So many people now understand much more dramatically what we have taken for granted for decades in terms of our democracy and politics and rule of law, but also programs that now are being seriously threatened or eroded, like Medicaid or - SNAP.

- Right?

- Oh yes, absolutely.

Food stamps, social security and, and, and even vaccines.

I mean, everybody took for granted.

I, I, you know, I'm the product of a postwar baby boom.

And when I was at school, polio was a big deal.

And I've, I remember how frightened so many parents were.

My parents were about the possibility that we would end up, I would end up, you know, in an iron lung.

And the polio vaccine was a godsend.

And then all of the other vaccines, I mean, vaccines were our way of surviving.

And now, you know, suddenly we're in this world in which, which we're questioning the utility of vaccines.

And you know, there, there's an absurdity here, but the silver lining is there's a learning process.

We learn that we had assumed needs to be actually appreciated - And defended and strengthened and - Defended.

Absolutely.

And, and, and in fact, to defend something, you know, appreciation is the first step behind defending it.

Ron, you talk about big oil.

Yes, I think big oil is one of the major problems here.

It's big oil, but also big finance.

And it is also kind of big tech because these, these big, whatever you want to call them, industries really are dominating our politics in ways that 40 years ago, 30 years ago, we couldn't possibly have dreamt about.

Hmm.

Washington is a cesspool of special interests dominating everything that is going on there.

And of course, the big kahuna is, is Donald Trump himself.

But Donald Trump is there because he made deals with many of these industries, big oil for is, is the classic example he said to big oil, you know, you give me a billion dollars for my campaign in 2024, and I will rule back environmental regulations and I'll make everything wonderful for big oil and yield profits will soar.

I don't know what the deal was.

I was not in that room.

We know only that that approach was made by Trump to big oil, but it looks like that was the deal.

- Hmm.

We are talking with political economists, educator, author, former labor secretary Robert Reich, about the lessons he's learned and taught about America over the years.

Of course, the author of many books, I I just want to personally recommend Super Capitalism, which I read back in 2007, ended up really deeply shaping my life and really appreciate that.

His latest book is "Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America."

Doris writes in to say, I was very taken by the excellent documentary Last Class.

I took my granddaughter, who was very inspired.

You're such an inspiring, positive influence to every generation.

Thank you so much for that comment, Doris.

You know, this is a fundraising time for KQED.

This is Forum, I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Let's go back to the phones.

Robert, let's go to Dasa in Fremont.

Welcome.

- Yes.

Hi, Dr.

Reich, and thank you for putting me on.

I, I wanna say thank you for speaking out about these issues.

My, my question was around what you think the role of the stock market has played and, and actually if it's even been a force for, for good because I, I mean, should it even exist?

Because I get that's kind of like the most blasphemous kind of statement that could be made in a society such as ours, but it seems like the stock market has been an accelerant on all these companies where they've gotten access to capital that in a, in a society without a stock market, they, they would have to grow much more judiciously, solely wouldn't be able to pool the capital and, and things like a high frequency trading and a stock buybacks.

All these sort of things wouldn't occur in a society without a stock market.

I mean, I know my, you know, my generation loves to trade stocks and, you know, tools like financial tools that, you know, we'd like to do.

But yeah, that's my question.

- So you, you did change the name to stonks, which I do appreciate, Dasa, thank you so much, Robert Reich?

- Well, the stock market is part of our economy, obviously, but it has become a central part.

Finance is now dominating every other aspect of the American economy, and that is not necessary.

That has some downsides as well as upsides and Dasa had talked about the upsides.

The downside is that 90% of the stock market, in terms of ownership by Americans, is owned by the top 10%.

And really the top 1% owns more than 50% of all the shares of stock owned by the United States.

It is a vehicle by which inequality is widening because as companies try to increase their stock values by buying back their shares of stock, you see that accentuates and accelerates inequality.

And we're, we're sort of in a, a little bit of a doom loop with regard to how this operates.

Before 1983, when John Shad was the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, companies were not allowed under the securities and exchange acts of 1933 and 1934, they were not allowed to buy back their shares of stock.

Here again, we take for granted what we are given, but there is nothing that is absolutely given an economy is organized, an economy is a, a matter of huge number of micro choices made.

And the question is, are those choices made in the direction of helping everybody get ahead, widening the circle of prosperity, or are they made really in the direction of helping a narrower and narrower group of individuals and corporations do better and better?

- Mm mm You know, I, I just wanted to return to "The Last Class" and there were some beautiful reflections that you had on aging, one of which I'll think about for a long time.

You said the surprise is not what you see in the photo of yourself as a young person.

It's what you see in the mirror as a, as a bald guy, totally understand that.

The other thing that you said was about the sort of this stage of your life being the sort of generative stage calling on the psychologist Erik Erikson.

What do you think this stage of life has meant for you, against the context of, you know, an incredibly generative and productive rest of your career?

- Well, first of all, as to the film, The Last Class, let me just hasten to say that it was directed by Elliot Kirschner, a very, very talented director.

Beautiful, beautiful, and produced by Heather Lofthouse, who's the executive director of Inequality Media Civic Action.

They get all the credit, but in terms of the movie itself and what I say in the movie, yes, it is very much a, a contemplation about life and, and death and the movement of time, but also it's a celebration and a love letter to my students.

- Hmm.

- It's about education and the critical relationship between education and democracy.

Yes.

Elliot, we're all getting up there.

I'm way up there.

I'm pushing 80 now.

I mean, that's, that's, that's a shock.

I came to Berkeley for the first time in 1967 just to be a, a research assistant to a, a professor of architecture.

Hmm.

And I still can't believe that I'm not in 1967, but my point is that that Erik Erikson's notion that in the last stages of life, our tendency and our responsibility is to be generative, to give what we can to the next generation.

I think as an insight that is very powerful and, and accurate, and I feel it every single day.

Yeah.

I mean, what can I do?

I don't have much time left, I don't think, I mean relative to the time I had before, but, well, how are we, how are all of us going to spend the time we have left?

Yeah.

What are we going to do to make our communities and our country and our world better?

That's the question that is on many people's minds.

Yeah.

- Robert Reich, Bay Area treasure, national treasure, political economist, former labor secretary.

Thank you so much for joining us this morning.

- Alexis, thank you so much for having me.

Yeah.

- His latest book is "Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America."

I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Stay tuned for another hour of Forum ahead with Mina Kim.