"Our moral authority is as important, if not more important, than our troop strength or our high-tech weapons. We are rapidly losing that moral authority, not only in the Arab world but all over the world." -- Robert Reich
Robert Bernard Reich (; born June 24, 1946) is an American politician, academic, writer, and political commentator. He served as the 22nd United States 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, a former Harvard University professor and the former Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University.
Reich is an occasional political commentator on programs including Hardball with Chris Matthews, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, CNBC's Kudlow & Company, and APM's Marketplace. In 2008, Time Magazine named him one of the Ten Most Successful Cabinet Members of the century, and The Wall Street Journal placed him among America's Top Ten Business Thinkers. On November 7, 2008, he was selected by President-elect Barack Obama to be a member of the President-elect's economic transition advisory board.
"A leader is someone who steps back from the entire system and tries to build a more collaborative, more innovative system that will work over the long term.""A lot of attention has been going to social values - abortion, gay rights, other divisive issues - but economic values are equally important.""Centrism is bogus.""Globalization and free trade do spur economic growth, and they lead to lower prices on many goods.""I wish it were simply a nightmare, but I think that any reasonable person watching American politics would come to the conclusion that a second Bush administration would in fact incorporate a more radicalized version of what we've seen in the first administration.""It's not government's business what people do in their private bedrooms.""Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.""Median wages of production workers, who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, haven't risen in 30 years, adjusted for inflation.""Radical conservatives want to police bedrooms.""The largest party in America, by the way, is neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. It's the party of non-voters.""The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality of result. It's equality of opportunity. There's a fundamental difference.""The silent majority really is a liberal majority, even though the word liberal has taken a real beating over the last 20 years by radical conservatives.""There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms.""There will always be a business cycle, and white-collar workers will get hit in the next recession like they always do in recessions.""True patriotism isn't cheap. It's about taking on a fair share of the burden of keeping America going.""We do not want to live in a theocracy. We should maintain that barrier and government has no business telling someone what they ought to believe or how they should conduct their private lives.""You can't create a political movement out of pabulum.""You can't inspire people if you are going to be uninspiring.""Your most precious possession is not your financial assets. Your most precious possession is the people you have working there, and what they carry around in their heads, and their ability to work together."
Reich, was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and attended John Jay High School in Cross River, New York. He attended Dartmouth College, graduating summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in 1968 and winning a Rhodes Scholarship to study Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford. Reich subsequently earned a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.
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 1976, President Carter appointed him Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the Federal Trade Commission.
From 1980 until 1992, Reich taught at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, 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 people -- its human capital -- constituted 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. At the same time, he lobbied Clinton to address bigger societal issues, countered Robert Rubin and others in the administration who wanted Clinton to pare his investment agenda, and pushed for improvement of conditions for those in poverty.
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, and predicted the shrinkage of the middle class due to a gap between unskilled and highly skilled workers.
Reich is tall. His height is a result of multiple epiphyseal dysplasia, also known as Fairbanks disease. This genetic condition has also affected Reich's hips; he had double hip replacement surgery in 1992. Reich has used his height as a source of humor, once appearing with the Conan O'Brien in a sketch on Late Night with Conan O'Brien.
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.
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. Foundation VIZE 97 - Laureates
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. 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.
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." Robert Reich's Blog: Bill Clinton's Old Politics
On April 18, 2008 Reich endorsed Barack Obama for President of the United States. Robert Reich's Blog: Obama for President
On April 3, 2009, Reich commented that published U6 employment figures indicate that the United States is in a depression.
In September, 2010, his book "Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future" was published.
He currently blogs about politics at www.robertreich.org.[1]
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."
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."
