Author: Robert Reich

Republican leaders have mastered the art of manufacturing crises to divert the public’s attention from the real crisis of our era, the siphoning of income, wealth, and power from most Americans by a small group at the top. Consider the fake fears they have been whipping up. Wokeness Florida’s governor (and now Republican presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis has declared a “war on woke.” Immediately after the mangled launch of his presidential campaign, DeSantis claimed on Fox News that “the woke mind virus is basically a form of cultural Marxism.” What exactly is “woke?” The term gained popularity at the...

The real significance of Ron DeSantis’s presidential announcement on Twitter had little to do with DeSantis but everything to do with Elon Musk. It was that Twitter, under Musk, has fully embraced the political right. Why is Musk doing this? He acts as if he wants to be the darling of libertarian bros. But he is really aiming to lead democracy’s foes. Musk wants to crush unions and declare the United States a free-to-make-as-much-as-you-can-on-the-backs-of-working-stiffs zone. He calls himself a “free speech absolutist”, but that is utter nonsense. He wants to elevate the speech of people like DeSantis but suppress...

I hate to say this, but America no longer has two parties devoted to a democratic system of self-government. We have a Democratic Party, which is still largely committed to democracy. And we have a Republican Party, which is careening at high-velocity toward authoritarianism. Okay, fascism. What occurred in Nashville in April is a frightening reminder of the fragility of American democracy when Republicans obtain supermajorities and no longer need to work with Democratic lawmakers. The two Tennessee Democrats expelled from the Tennessee House were not accused of criminal wrongdoing or even immoral conduct. Their putative offense was to...

An artificial intelligence boom is taking over Silicon Valley, with high-tech firms racing to develop everything from self-driving cars to chatbots capable of writing poetry. Yet AI could also spread conspiracy theories and lies even more quickly than the internet already does – fueling political polarization, hate, violence and mental illness in young people. It could undermine national security with deepfakes. In recent weeks, members of Congress have sounded the alarm over the dangers of AI but no bill has been proposed to protect individuals or stop the development of AI’s most threatening aspects. Most lawmakers don’t even know...

If 2022 presented any single lesson, it was the social costs of greed. Capitalism is premised on greed but also on guardrails — laws and norms — that prevent greed from becoming so excessive that it threatens the system as a whole. Yet the guardrails cannot hold when avarice becomes the defining trait of an era, as it is now. Laws and norms are no match for the possibility of raking in billions if you’re sufficiently ruthless and unprincipled. Donald Trump’s tax returns, just made public, reveal that he took bogus deductions to reduce his tax liability all the...