Week Four: Economic Inequality
This current Our American Values series focuses on four perennial threats that surface whenever American Democracy is most at risk: 1) Political polarization, 2) Conflict over who belongs as a member of the political community, 3) High and growing economic inequality, and 4) Excessive executive power.
In this fourth week of the new series, former-US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich discusses the extent, origins, and negative impact on American democracy of our nation’s high and growing level of economic inequality. Reich is the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center. For this March 2020 talk, Prof. Reich drew on his most recent book THE SYSTEM: Who Rigged It, How To Fix It (Vintage, 2021). This video runs slightly less than 12 minutes.
“Forget politics as you’ve come to see it—as contests between Democrats and Republicans. The real divide is between democracy and oligarchy.”