Matt1970: Yes pal, you are childish.
Mo: This means that you have been humiliated by being called a child and it hurt your feelings and now you wish me to feel that pain. Too late, I was also made to feel that pain too. But because the damage was already done there is nothing more that you can do. You are trying to make me feel pain that I would only feel you cause me to feel if I didn't know what happened long ago. So we are only different in what we know, not what happened to us, but that difference is very important. Your insults mean nothing to me because I remember my real pain. It is this pain that you do everything to hide from.
Ma: You do nothing but insult people because they have a different opinion that you.
Mo: I do much more than that. And in this thread I didn't even have an opinion. I offered the opinion of somebody with real understanding of the subject, a brilliant and accomplished expert in the field, not the opinion of a pimple faced kid.
Ma: Rather than debate actual issues you just resort to calling people brain dead. You do exactly what you accuse others of doing.
Mo: I have no problem doing what you do because I do what you do because you do it without even knowing that you do. Instead of debating Reich's points, for example, you attack him as a Socialists not worthy of discussion, see below, and you call me childish. I call you brain dead because you are so brain dead you don't even see you don't debate anything. You pronounce your opinion as if it were worth something when in fact you never make any case at all for them. You have an opinion so it has to be right. Brain dead, you see? You have no idea what debate is or how to do it. All you do is regurgitate your programming by vomiting yesterday's meal.
Ma: As far as Reich goes I give no credibility to someone who thinks you can tax people at a MUCH higher rate at they will still make the same amount of money.
Mo: Think about a gambling casino where the house takes a certain cut and business stabilizes around the pay out. Then the owner has an idea to increase the house percentage and invest in more glitz and bigger jack pots. The house makes more and so do the winners because more people come to play. The house is the country and Reich owns it. He makes everybody happier because he has the money to do so. The house provides the table where big winners come go compete against each other. A huge gambling table means lots of bets and big winnings. You have no credibility so you have none to give. Some things can't be understood without a brain or education. You have no self respect and no modesty. You actually think you know things you have no capacity to understand. You aren't brain dead, but you might as well be.
Ma: He fails at basic math. His opinions are worthless. But I can see how you like him.
Mo:
Robert Bernard Reich (pron.: /ˈraɪʃ/;[3] born June 24, 1946) is an American political economist, professor, author, and political commentator. He served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and was Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997.
Reich is currently Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He was formerly a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government[4] and professor of social and economic policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University. He has also been a contributing editor of The New Republic, The American Prospect (also chairman and founding editor), Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
Reich is a political commentator on programs including Hardball with Chris Matthews, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, CNBC's Kudlow & Company, and APM's Marketplace. In 2008, Time Magazine named him one of the Ten Best Cabinet Members of the century,[5] and The Wall Street Journal in 2008 placed him sixth on its list of the "Most Influential Business Thinkers".[6] He was appointed a member of President-elect Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board.[7]
He has published 14 books, including the best-sellers, The Work of Nations, Reason, Supercapitalism, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future, and a best-selling e-book, "Beyond Outrage". He is also chairman of Common Cause and writes his own blog about the political economy at robertreich.org. The Robert Reich - Jacob Kornbluth film "Inequality for All" won a U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Achievement in Filmmaking at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival in Utah.[8][9]
Contents
[hide] 1 Early life and career
2 After the Clinton administration 2.1 Social media
3 Political and philosophical stances
4 Books
5 See also
6 References
7 External links
[edit] Early life and career
Reich was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of Mildred Dorf (née Freshman) and Edwin Saul Reich, who owned a women's clothing store.[10] He attended John Jay High School in Cross River, New York. He attended Dartmouth College, graduating with an A.B. summa cum laude in 1968 and winning a Rhodes Scholarship to study Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford University.[11] Reich subsequently earned a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal. At Yale, he was classmates with Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Richard Blumenthal. He first met Bill Clinton when they both were Rhodes Scholars at Oxford.[12] Before Hillary and Bill met each other, he allegedly went on a date with Hillary Clinton.[13]
From 1973 to 1974 he served as law clerk to Judge Frank M. Coffin, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and from 1974 to 1976 was Assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General, Robert Bork. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter appointed him Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the Federal Trade Commission.
From 1980 until 1992, Reich taught at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he wrote a series of influential books and articles, including The Next American Frontier and The Work of Nations. In The Next American Frontier he blamed the nation's lagging economic growth on "paper entrepreneurialism"financial and legal gamesmanship that drained the economy of resources needed for better products and services.
In The Work of Nations he argued that a nation's competitiveness depends on the education and skills of its people and on the infrastructure connecting them with one another, rather than on the profitability of companies headquartered within it. Private capital, he said, was increasingly global and footloose, while a nation's peopleits human capitalconstituted the one resource on which the future standard of living of a nation uniquely depended. He urged policy makers to make such public investments the cornerstone of economic policy.
Bill Clinton incorporated Reich's thinking into his 1992 campaign platform, "Putting People First," and after being elected invited Reich to head his economic transition team. Reich later joined the administration as Secretary of Labor. During his tenure, he implemented the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), successfully promoted increasing the minimum wage, successfully lobbied to pass the School-to-Work Jobs Act, and launched a number of job training programs.
In addition, Reich used the office as a platform for focusing the nation's attention on the need for American workers to adapt to the new economy. He advocated that the country provide more opportunities for workers to learn more technology.
Reich was born with multiple epiphyseal dysplasia, also known as Fairbanks disease, and as a result is 4 feet 10.5 inches (148.6 cm) tall. He has at times frankly discussed this fact about himself, often with a twist of humor. He once appeared with the 6 ft 4 in (193 cm) Conan O'Brien in a sketch on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.[14][15]
[edit] After the Clinton administration
In 1996, between Clinton's re-election and second inauguration, Reich decided to leave the department to spend more time with his sons, then in their teen years. He published his experiences working for the Clinton administration in Locked in the Cabinet. After publication of the book, Reich received criticism for embellishing events with invented dialogue. The paperback release of the memoir revised or omitted the inventions.[16]
Reich became a professor at Brandeis University, teaching courses for undergraduates as well as in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. In 2003, he was elected the Professor of the Year by the undergraduate student body.
In 2002, he ran for Governor of Massachusetts. He also published an associated campaign book, I'll Be Short. Reich was the first Democratic candidate for a major political office to support same-sex marriage. He also pledged support for abortion rights and strongly condemned capital punishment. His campaign staff was largely made up of his Brandeis students. Although his campaign had little funding, he surprised many and came in a close second out of six candidates in the Democratic primary with 25% of the vote.
In 2003, he was awarded the prestigious Václav Havel Foundation VIZE 97 Prize, by the former Czech president, for his writings in economics and politics.[17]
In 2004, he published Reason, a book on how liberals can forcefully argue for their position in a country increasingly dominated by what he calls "radcons", or radical conservatives.
In addition to his professorial role, he is a weekly contributor to the American Public Media public radio program Marketplace, and a regular columnist for the American Prospect, which he co-founded in 1990.[18] He is also a frequent contributor to CNBC's Kudlow & Company and On the Money.
In early 2005, there was speculation that Reich would once again seek the Democratic nomination for Governor of Massachusetts. He instead endorsed the then-little-known candidacy of Deval Patrick, who had previously served as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Clinton Administration. Patrick won the party's endorsement, a three-way primary with nearly 50% of the vote, and the general election in November 2006.
In September 2005 Reich testified against John Roberts at his confirmation hearings for Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
On January 1, 2006 Reich joined the faculty of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Policy. Since then, he has taught a popular course called Wealth and Poverty.[19] In addition to his professorship, Reich is also a Member of the Board of Trustees for the Blum Center for Developing Economies at the University of California, Berkeley.[20] The Center is focused on finding solutions to address the crisis of extreme poverty and disease in the developing world.[21]
Two years later his book Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life was published. In it he argued turbo-charged corporate competition, fueled by consumers and investors seeking the best possible deals from anywhere in the world, was generating severe social problems. But governments were failing to address them because big corporations and Wall Street firms were also seeking competitive advantage over one another through politics, thereby drowning out the voices of ordinary citizens. The answer was to keep corporations focused on making better products and services and keep them out of politics. "Corporate Social Responsibility" is essentially forbearance from activities that undermine democracy.
During the 2008 primaries, Reich published an article that was extremely critical of the Clintons, referring to Bill Clinton's attacks on Barack Obama as "ill-tempered and ill-founded," and accusing the Clintons of waging "a smear campaign against Obama that employs some of the worst aspects of the old politics."[22]
On April 18, 2008 Reich endorsed Barack Obama for President of the United States.[23]
On April 3, 2009, Reich commented that published U6 employment figures indicate that the United States is in a depression.[24]
In September, 2010, his book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future was published. In it, Reich explained how America's widening inequality had contributed to the great recession and made it difficult for the economy to recover, by undermining the purchasing power of the middle class relative to the nation's productive capacity. In April, 2012, his book Beyond Outrage was published as an e-book. In Beyond Outrage Reich focused on why an increasing portion of the public felt the game was rigged in favor of those with wealth and power, why the "regressive right" was nonetheless able to persuade many that taxes should be lowered even further on corporations and the wealthy while many public services should be cut, and what average people could do to take back the economy and reclaim democracy.
[edit] Social media
Reich has been an active user of social media. He has personally maintained a presence on Tumblr and Blogspot. In September 2011 he created an account on the internet forum reddit and opened an 'ask me anything' thread.[25]
[edit] Political and philosophical stances
Official Department of Labor portrait of Robert Reich
In an interview with The New York Times, he explained that "I don't believe in redistribution of wealth for the sake of redistributing wealth. But I am concerned about how we can afford to pay for what we as a nation need to do...[Taxes should pay] for what we need in order to be safe and productive. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society."[26]
In response to a question as to what to recommend to the incoming president regarding a fair and sustainable income and wealth distribution, Reich said, "Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit a wage supplement for lower-income people, and finance it with a higher marginal income tax on the top five percent. For the longer term, invest in education for lower income communities, starting with early-childhood education and extending all the way up to better access to post-secondary education."[26]
Reich is pro-union, saying "Unionization is not just good for workers in unions, unionization is very, very important for the economy overall, and would create broad benefits for the United States."[27][28]
[edit] Books
2012: Beyond Outrage: What has gone wrong with our economy and our democracy and how to fix it ISBN 978-0345804372
2010: Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future ISBN 978-0-307-59281-1
2007: Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life ISBN 0-307-26561-7
2004: Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America ISBN 1-4000-7660-9
2002: I'll Be Short: Essentials for a Decent Working Society ISBN 0-8070-4340-0
2000: The Future of Success: Working and Living in the New Economy ISBN 0-375-72512-1
1997: Locked in the Cabinet ISBN 0-375-70061-7
1991: The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism ISBN 0-679-73615-8
1990: Public Management in a Democratic Society ISBN 0-13-738881-0
1990: The Power of Public Ideas (editor) ISBN 0-674-69590-9
1989: The Resurgent Liberal: And Other Unfashionable Prophecies ISBN 0-8129-1833-9
1987: Tales of a New America: The Anxious Liberal's Guide to the Future ISBN 0-394-75706-8
1985: New Deals: The Chrysler Revival and the American System (with John Donahue) ISBN 0-14-008983-7
1983: The Next American Frontier ISBN 0-8129-1067-2
1982: Minding America's Business: The Decline and Rise of the American Economy (with Ira Magaziner) ISBN 0-394-71538-1
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