The Quotable Reich

Robert Reich
12 mins ·
This morning, Amazon.com announced plans to buy Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion.

This means Amazon is now going to compete head on with Walmart, as well as Target, Costco, and Kroger (all of whose stock prices tumbled on the news). Within 10 years, they'll all be gone. Amazon is on the verge of owning American retailing.

Heads up: At the rate they’re going, within 20 years Amazon, Google, and Apple (possibly along with Microsoft and Facebook) will dominate the American economy. Watch as they begin to take over finance and the media.

Will this be good for consumers? No. With that kind of economic power, they'll be able to raise prices. Good for American democracy? No. With that kind of power, they'll basically run the government -- as did railroads and oil in the Gilded Age. What's the answer? Revive antitrust.

Robert Reich
55 mins ·
A Father's Day essay by Jay Z: "For Father's Day, I'm Taking On the Exploitative Bail Industry"
"Seventeen years ago I made a song, 'Guilty Until Proven Innocent.' I flipped the Latin phrase that is considered the bedrock principle of our criminal justice system, ei incumbit probatio qui dicit (the burden of proof is on the one who declares, not on one who denies).
If you're from neighborhoods like the Brooklyn one I grew up in, if you're unable to afford a private attorney, then you can be disappeared into our jail system simply because you can't afford bail. Millions of people are separated from their families for months at a time — not because they are convicted of committing a crime, but because they are accused of committing a crime.
Scholars like Ruthie Gilmore, filmmakers like Ava Duvernay, and formerly incarcerated people like Glenn Martin have all done work to expose the many injustices of the industry of our prison system. Gilmore's pioneering book, The Golden Gulag, Duvernay's documentary 13th and Martin's campaign to close Rikers focus on the socioeconomic, constitutional and racially driven practices and polices that make the U.S. the most incarcerated nation in the world.
But when I helped produce this year's docuseries, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story," I became obsessed with the injustice of the profitable bail bond industry. Kalief's family was too poor to post bond when he was accused of stealing a backpack. He was sentenced to a kind of purgatory before he ever went to trial. The three years he spent in solitary confinement on Rikers ultimately created irreversible damage that lead to his death at 22.
Sandra Bland was also forced to post bail after her minor traffic infraction in Prairie View, Texas, led to a false charge of assaulting a public servant (the officer who arrested her was later charged with perjury regarding the arrest). She was placed in a local jail in a pre-incarcerated state. Again, she was never convicted of a crime.
On any given day over 400,000 people, convicted of no crime, are held in jail because they cannot afford to buy their freedom.
When black and brown people are over-policed and arrested and accused of crimes at higher rates than others, and then forced to pay for their freedom before they ever see trial, big bail companies prosper.
This pre-incarceration conundrum is devastating to families. One in 9 black children has an incarcerated parent. Families are forced to take on more debt, often in predatory lending schemes created by bail bond insurers. Or their loved ones linger in jails, sometimes for months—a consequence of nationwide backlogs.
Every year $9 billion dollars are wasted incarcerating people who've not been convicted of a crime, and insurance companies, who have taken over our bail system, go to the bank.
Last month for Mother's Day, organizations like Southerners on New Ground and Color of Change did a major fundraising drive to bail out 100 mothers for Mother's Day. Color of Change's exposè on the for-profit bail industry provides deeper strategy behind this smart and inspiring action.
This Father's Day, I'm supporting those same organizations to bail out fathers who can't afford the due process our democracy promises. As a father with a growing family, it's the least I can do, but philanthropy is not a long fix, we have to get rid of these inhumane practices altogether. We can't fix our broken criminal justice system until we take on the exploitative bail industry."

Did you watch the DOJ hearings? You couldn't have.

NO ONE, not even her own mother could have watched those hearings and still believe that this woman should be President. No way.

Regardless of her guilt or innocence, her disrespect for The People was blatantly evident. She didn't attempt to disguise it at all.

The fact that Clinton does not deserve the presidency in no way makes Trump a worthy choice. He is the bottom of the barrel. I thought we could not lower the bar more once Bush became president. Trump proves we could.

I find it fascinating that Trump with his limited vocabulary (of a 6th grader) has accomplished what he has in our politics.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/03/18/trumps-grammar-in-speeches-just-below-6th-grade-level-study-finds/?utm_term=.89af5d263795

Gallup 06/20-22/2017
% Approve.......% Disapprove
......42%...............54%

Wapo: As of Trump’s 100th day, we counted 492 false or misleading claims.

Is Trump the all time leading liar US president or are they all in the same class?

Robert Reich
·
While he deflects our attention with endless lies and chaos, Trump is quietly taking America deeper into war:
1. The U.S. just fired 23 cruise missiles at a Syrian air base in retaliation for alleged Syrian use of chemical weapons against civilians.
2. U.S. forces are bombing Iranian-supported militia forces moving forward in southern Syria, and shot down a Syrian jet flying over Syrian airspace.
3. The administration will dispatch 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan, plus 400 to Syria.
4. Russia has ended coordination with the U.S. to avoid air collisions, and announced that U.S. planes flying west of the Euphrates would be targeted.
5. Meanwhile, Trump is escalating support for the Saudi air assault on Yemen. Already 17 million Yemenis suffer lack of food, while a cholera epidemic there infects another child every 35 seconds.
6. And Trump has declared that China has failed to influence North Korea. His next move is anyone's guess.
Congress has given over foreign policy to Trump, and Trump has given it over to the generals -- a deadly and dangerous gamble.

I don't recall you RR or you being this upset over Obama expanding his bombing campaign for 2 countries to 7. All you people interested in peace were quiet while the man who received a Nobel Peace Prize started bombing more countries than the Administration before them.

I did more than one thread castigating Obama for his Bush foreign policy as well as his domestic activities. But even if I hadn't Trump is more screwed up than Obama and Bush combined.

Let me fix that wording for you...



I did more than one thread castigating Obama for his OWN foreign policy as well as his domestic activities. You can't blame Obama for his own choices, you only mention Bush in this comment to remove the blame from Obama and push it on Bush. Obama on his own supported his own foreign policy, Bush was out of office and Obama was in charge. Nothing Obama did had anything to do with what Bush did. Obama campaigned on being the anti-Bush, then changed his mind and took what Bush did and took it to another level. 7 countries were being bombed and drone striked when Obama left office, only 2 when he took office.

Yes, it did. Obama continued Bush's war crimes and terrorism.

You are so full of ****. Obama carried on as though Bush never left office, instead of seeking to correct the Bush mistakes that destabilized the entire region, making him and Bush equally to blame for the mess we are in. Trump is blundering about like a blind elephant in a teashop. No telling where it will have us by his term's end.

Always with the "us" ****, Edgar, such incredible conceit!

Nothing about the millions of innocents you all have helped slaughter! The hundreds of millions of ruined lives spread over the whole phucking world that you all have supported.

Robert Reich
14 mins ·
At his campaign-style rally in Iowa last week, Trump said he doesn't "want a poor person" advising him on the economy. "I just don't want a poor person," he said. "Does that make sense?" He even gloated about filling his cabinet with Wall Street insiders and Goldman Sachs executives. Does he think we've forgotten what happened the last time the big banks gambled with our economy?
Trump's team of banksters are already hard at work dismantling financial reforms designed to protect Americans from another Great Recession. They oppose increasing the minimum wage, basic workers' rights, and affordable health care for all. Meanwhile, they're pursuing tax cuts for the top 1% that would explode the budget and devastate programs for the poor and working class.
So to answer his question, "does that make sense?" to only have rich people advising you? Yes. If your only goal is to serve them.

So much for ole Abe's bullshit "government of the people, by the ... "

God you all are such dupes!

Robert Reich

The New York subway system is falling apart. So is Washington D.C.’s. So are public transportation systems all over the country. Tens of millions of people depend on these systems every day -- and are being subject to long delays, overcrowding, and dangerous conditions. If nothing else, these wasted hours are a drain on the nation’s productivity.
Trump and his Republican enablers -- both in Congress and at the state level -- talk endlessly about the importance of economic growth and productivity. But they refuse to invest in the nation’s infrastructure, just as they refuse to invest in the education of our children. They say we can’t afford it.
Absolute rubbish. Their economics is upside-down. We can’t afford not to make these investments. As long as the returns on public investments exceed the costs of borrowing to fund them, they should be made. And borrowing costs are now at rock-bottom. So it’s insane not to invest like mad.
This isn’t a question of ideology. It’s a matter of good economics and common sense.

As long as govt subsidies exceed the amount generated by public transit, there will never be a "rate of return" for public transit systems.

Says the boy who lapped up all the communist benefits of the US military. Do they pay their way other than helping US business rape and pillage, steal the wealth of the world's poor?

You once again prove you know nothing about the US Military except what your anti-US handlers have told you. I tried to have a logical discussion about the military from a soldiers point of view, what goes on in training and in a normal day, but you refused to hold a rational discussion and insisted you already knew it all. Your posts prove otherwise.

Care to try again? Without all the anti-US/anti-Military rhetoric?