The former Secretary of Labor on the Great Recession, class warfare, and why President Obama must challenge right-wing distortions with a counter-narrative.
Photograph by Michael Collopy
This week’s edition of “On the Fly” features Professor of Public Policy at UC-Berkeley and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich (as well as a frequent contributor to our magazine). His most recent book, Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future, addresses the recent recession and increasing income inequality in the United States and the long-term damage it’s causing our economy. Reich argues that “at the very least, the people who are at the very top will come to understand that they have a tremendous amount to lose from factious, negative, xenophobic politics, and they’d also do better with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy than a large share of an economy that like today is still in the gravitational pull of the Great Recession.” Perhaps the recession will scare enough people to encourage necessary structural reforms.
Part One:
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Part Two:
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Part Three:
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Mark Dowie is an editor-at-large at Guernica, an investigative historian and the author of seven books, including Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century, American Foundations: An Investigative History, and, most recently, Conservation Refugees: The Hundred-Year Conflict between Global Conservation and Native Peoples. During his thirty-five years in journalism, Dowie has won nineteen journalism awards and been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
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