Author: Robert Reich

It is natural to believe that President Biden and the Democratic party leadership would do everything in their power to stop Republicans from undermining democracy. So far this year, the Republican party has passed roughly 30 laws in states across the country that will make voting harder, especially in Black and Latino communities. With Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, Republicans are stoking White people’s fears that a growing non-White population is usurping their dominance. Yet while Biden and Democratic leaders are openly negotiating with holdout senators for Biden’s stimulus and infrastructure proposals, they are not...

The story you have heard about immigration, from politicians and the mainstream media alike, is not close to the full picture. Here is the truth about how we got here and what we must do to fix it. A desperate combination of factors are driving migrants and asylum seekers to our southern border, from Central America in particular: deep economic inequality, corruption, and high rates of poverty — all worsened by COVID-19. Many are also fleeing violence and instability, much of it tied to historic U.S. support for brutal authoritarian regimes, right-wing paramilitary groups, and corporate interests in Latin...

Policymakers and the media are paying too much attention to how quickly the United States economy will emerge from the pandemic-induced recession, and not nearly enough to the nation’s deeper structural problem, the huge imbalance of wealth that could enfeeble the economy for years. Seventy per cent of the U.S. economy depends on consumer spending. But wealthy people, who now own more of the economy than at any time since the 1920s, spend only a small percentage of their incomes. Lower-income people, who were in trouble even before the pandemic, spend whatever they have – which has become very...

Donald Trump formally anointed himself head of the Republican Party at the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 28. The Grand Old Party, founded in 1854 in Ripon, Wisconsin, is now dead. What is left is a dwindling number of elected officials who have stood up to Trump but are now being purged. Even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s popularity has dropped 29 points among Kentucky Republicans since he broke with Trump. In its place is the Trump Party, whose major goal is to advance Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Its agenda is...