Saving Capitalism with Robert Reich

I'm Henry Brady I'm the Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy I'm very happy to welcome you here tonight is the seventh annual Michael nacht Distinguished Lecture in politics and public policy Michael doct was the Dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy before I became Dean he was a distinguished Dean did great work really made the school a great place and I'm really proud that I was able to follow him and and build upon his extraordinary achievements he went on to be assistant secretary of defense for global strategic affairs in the Obama administration and then he came back to us about five years ago and resumed teaching so we're really lucky to have Michael he's an extraordinary figure in terms of his public service which is an important thing for the Goldman School and for our nation and also extraordinary in terms of his teaching and his service to this University so we're really happy to be able to have this lecture series named in his honor now it's my tremendously great pleasure to be able to introduce Robert rice who's Chancellor's professor of public policy he's written 13 books translating into many many different languages he teaches of course the largest course here on the Berkeley campus we should have gotten wheeler Hall in fact tonight it looks like knowing Bob Bob Rice's drawing power but he teaches 700 students in that course and it's an extraordinary experience for everyone it's documented actually to some extent in a movie in equality for all which is a wonderful movie which touches on the themes of tonight's talk sort of sets the predicate for it that increasingly we have tremendous inequality in America and it's a problem and we need to do something about it so Bob does it all he was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration today he writes he tweets by the way as Secretary of Labor time Maggie in 2008 said that he was one of the top ten cabinet secretaries in the 20th century so that's pretty extraordinary so robert rice has written books he tweets he writes opinion pieces he teaches and he lectures his most recent book is saving capitalism and he's going to talk about that tonight so please give a warm welcome to Robert rice well Henry Brady Dean Brady thank you very very much I have the pleasure the pleasure of teaching at the Goldman School of Public Policy which is the one of the crown jewels in the starry firmament of the University of California Berkeley which is itself the crown jewel of higher education in the world so this is as true and being a Dean or being a administrator of any University I have a test with regard to the difficulty of any job and it has to do with the ratio between the level of responsibility that one has in a job and the actual amount of authority one has and if you have huge amounts if that ratio gets out of whack and you've got a huge amount of responsibility and very little Authority you're called the Dean if you have a gigantic amount of responsibility and almost no authority you're called a Chancellor and if you are you have boundless responsibilities I mean I absolutely responsibly that does not end and almost an infinitesimally small amount of authority you're called a cabinet secretary thank you for coming tonight I want to talk to you about a book that I've written called saving capitalism for the many not the few that the title actually turns out to be the worst possible title like of ever chosen not the subtitle but the title saving capitalism I just came from a book tour and I spent a lot of time in the south and the Midwest in red states so-called and red cities I asked my publisher because I didn't want to just go to the normal cities I go to or the normal places I asked my publisher if I could please given that I'm trying to do something in the book that I will explain in a moment if I could go to places that I normally am NOT sent on a book tour which are again the south and the Midwest and states and cities that are normally vote Republican and are very conservative and the publisher accommodated my wish and I've just returned from three or four weeks of being in red state red city America and a lot of people did not like the title of the book because they felt that it implied that there was something wrong with capitalism saving capitalism sounds like I mean the capitalism needs saving now the irony is that I got back to the west coast I got to see a ttle and and then I was in Portland and and then down the west coast and nobody liked the title of my book because they said why should we save capitalism so it was a title that managed him antagonized an alien aid everybody who might possibly read the book but the subtitle of the book is actually the important thing it's for the many not the few and I entitled the book saving capitalism for the many not the few because there is it seems to me and I'm not the first to note this a serious set of problems having to do with capitalism and who is benefiting from it and who the burdens are on and we need to talk about it and when I say we need to talk about I don't mean merely people inside a red state bubble or people inside a blue state bubble or a blue city bubble or blue university bubble I mean we've got to get out of our bubbles and talk across bubbles and reach some common understanding of what the nature of the problem is and what can be done about it and so I set out to write a book that might hopefully begin that kind of a dialogue I was motivated actually by two things one a conviction that if we really did get out of our bubbles and started to talk with one another across the country in a in a slightly non-ideological way I say slightly because you can't ever completely divorce yourself from ideology and values and and frameworks but certainly if you talk facts and and you were clear about your values and we talked about how to create a kind of system that worked for most of us we could it seemed to me make some progress so that was conviction number one and the second thing that I was concerned about and I was led to write the book because I for years have been talking about widening inequality in the United States and it seemed to me that I had not put to paper the things that were not said that hadn't been said about the centrality of power in explaining some of that binding and equality now let me at the risk of revealing too quickly the plot of the book I'm going to talk about three central mythologies that have in my view made it difficult for us to speak across those ideological boundaries and have stopped discussion there kind of discussion Stoppers and I I was revealed these were revealed to me because in many many different kinds of venues I've had the opportunity of debating people who I disagree with who are very often called or call themselves conservatives or Republicans or whatever and we get stuck at the following points one point where we get stuck is where the discussions seem to be about a choice that must be made between the market and government now usually it's about four minutes into whatever the topic is we could be talking about a global climate change we took could be talking about peanut farmers in Georgia we took I'd be talking about about anything it doesn't doesn't matter oh about four minutes into a debate somehow the debate kind of degenerates into this question of which do you trust more the government or the free market and it struck me that we needed to explode that mythology that that was the central choice because it's not a central choice you can't have government and you can't have market separately a market cannot exist without government making rules there is no free market in a state of nature I mean a state of nature I experienced when I was four years old on the playground and it was cruel and nasty and brutish and and short i I didn't want to be there I wanted to be in a civilized society and I that's why I grew up and what we want well grew up somewhat and what we wants all of us is a market that is that is rule driven rule bound we don't even know what property is you can't enforce contracts you can't even have any idea of the details of what happens when somebody doesn't pay up their promises if you don't have rules and those rules change over time different cultures and different societies have different market rules and unless we understand what those rules are and more importantly unless we understand who has the most influence over making those rules we don't really have much of a discussion we just have a kind of an ideological discussion about markets versus governments that means nothing and so the first mythology that I have tried in this book and I tried on the book tour and talking to an awful lot of people who call themselves conservatives tea partiers and Republicans to shatter is this notion of a choice between market and government again the central question is not market or government it is who is government for who is the market working for who has the most influence over the rules that are designed to create and sustain and enforce that market and I'll come back to that first point in a moment but this is myth number one that I tried to deal with in the book and Shatter in the book myth number two that I tried to deal with in the book is and you've heard it over and over again you get paid for what you're worth what you're earn depends on what you are worth if you everybody have anybody heard that before it's a very central idea it's a very central to the American meritocracy the idea that people are paid what they're worth but you see if you understand the first principle that you can't separate market from government and the central question is really who has the most influence over those rules then the central the second issue of whether people are paid what they're worth is either a tautology I mean obviously you're paid for what you're worth in the market because that's what you earn in the market that's not very interesting it's either that tautology or it's a false statement about morality that you are paid what you are somehow morally worth but that can't be right because the markets may not be morally just in other words if the market principle number one is really a function of who has the most power to influence the rules to create the market then it may be principle number two that you are paid what you are worth in a tautological sense but not in a socially meaningful or moral sense because the market has not socially meaningful or market or or or moral in any meaningful sense are you following me I'm looking your faces and some of you are have a blank stare and then we get to the third mythology that the book and I've tried to deal with and it follows from the first two is that the most important issue we can possibly discuss when we discuss widening inequality the most important issue we can discuss is how much we tax the people who are wealthy and redistribute to the people who are not now that's an important issue and it's a very very central public policy issue I don't mean to suggest it's not but if you follow the logic of the first two points you might come to the conclusion that there are a lot of issues short of the final taxing and redistributing that need examination issues having to do with internal what I call it the book pre distributions upward from a lot of average working people to people who have a lot of market power enough power to as I said before change the rules so that they gain even more I mean for example this is all this all sounds very kind of philosophical and and and unpractical but I want to make it very very concrete in the United States we Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals than any other citizens of any other advanced country now why do we pay more for the pharmaceuticals we use than the citizens of any other advanced country well there are a lot of reasons for that but one reason has to do with how the market in the United States for pharmaceuticals is organized for example if you are a proprietary drug manufacturer you're making brand-name drugs well you are permitted in the United States you're not permitted in most other advanced industrial societies but you're permitted in the United States to pay the makers of generic versions of those brand-name drugs who would otherwise produce them much more cheaply your pay your you are legally entitled to pay them to delay their introduction of their generic version of your drug after the patent has been as expired now again this is not normal this is not what is permitted in most other countries why is it permitted here class well you know as well as I do it's because the pharmaceutical manufacturers have extraordinary political power in the United States not only enough political power to be exempt from the possibility that the government under Medicare Medicaid veterans would use its negotiating power to get low drug prices but also from the very pedestrians issues of as I just said pay-for-delay it is permissible you can't even get your drugs from another country if you're an American and you want to get your pharmaceuticals from it where they're more cheaper there they're produced more cheaply like in Canada you couldn't do do it up until a few years ago you can't do it any longer but let's not just pick on the drug companies the pharmaceutical big pharma is easy how about internet service now you may know this but but you and I are paying more for the Internet service that we are getting and it is a first service than almost any citizens of any other advanced industrial country and why is that class again it does have something to do with how the market is organized and which in turn has something to do with who has the most influence over that market and the big cable companies have a great deal political clout or take food for example we are paying a lot of food food that the prices are going up faster than inflation crop prices actually are going down in fact they're at a six-year low right now crop prices but food prices keep going up why is that food prices up crop prices low i doing the book tour i met with a whole group of farmers in central missouri family farmers they were they were furious at the big food processors who were had so much power over them in terms of the prices that they would actually buy their goods the the farm produce from and they also were very upset about what they call factory farms the kind of farms that were corporate farms they were not family farmers but they because they were factory farms they they disregarded all of the environmental issues they they treated and they didn't even produce high-quality farm agricultural produce the farmers were were apathetic they were they were angry they were organizing against these big food processors and the factory farms now why did the big food processors have so much market power why does Monsanto have so much market power well it because it has political power in the Monsanto's case it has political power actually to prevent antitrust authorities and there are antitrust laws still on the books believe me they are still there but they have enough power to basically stop the antitrust authorities we could go on and I could go on and I could talk about Airlines somebody asked me the other day why is it that airline prices ticket prices haven't really gone down even though fuel costs which are the major cost of Airlines have plummeted over the past five years and the answer may have something to do with the fact that fifteen years ago we had nine major airlines and today there are four major airline carriers and through some cities there is only one or two and we only get one or two what do you have you have collusion have you noticed sometimes that it's the same price Wall Street is another interesting case before the bailout of Wall Street's before Wall Street overextended itself shall we say gently the five largest Wall Street banks together had 25% of all banking assets in the United States and that made them too big to fail well now the five biggest banks on Wall Street have 44 percent of all banking assets in the United States they are far too big to fail or curtail or jail or nail so what has happened in all of these instances and we could go throughout the industrial landscape of America what we see is in all these instances we are paying more you and I are paying more than we need to pay because there's not very much competition on Wall Street for example particularly among the big banks that trickles out to the entire banking system and we probably most of you Bank at a big bank and you are probably paying more than you might otherwise know you are paying in terms of if you have an overcharge on your credit card for example so in every one of these respects there is a pre distribution upward to big corporations to Wall Street to the major shareholders but we don't talk about these pre distributions upward all we talk about is taxing the wealthy maybe or taxing the big corporations maybe and redistributing downward but the pre distributions arguably are growing the pre distributions upward so what my hope was is that I could begin to talk with conservatives about these issues because they affect all of us in fact it is not just middle class people and poor people who are paying more but the kind of capitalism we are aiming toward or not aiming to are literally but moving toward is a kind of capitalism a kind of oligarchy capitalism that is not even necessarily good for the people at the top it's not good for the people at the top for a number of reasons number one and most obviously it's not good for them because if all or most of the economic gains to go to the top there's not enough aggregate demand and not enough purchasing power in the middle class and the poor to keep the economy going full-tilt which is one reason this recovery has been so anemic and you also are prone when so much economic gain goes to the very top you are prone to a degree of economic instability because people in the middle and below they have to go deeper and deeper into debt to maintain their lifestyles and what happens then you have debt bubbles that explode in fact over the blast past hundred years there two years where the top 1% took home more than twenty three and a half percent of total income those two years were 1928 and 2007 now is there anything about those two years that strikes you as interesting or maybe the year that follows each of those two years so if I am somebody who is very very wealthy and looking at not only the lack of aggregate demand the lack of purchasing power in the economy but also the instability in the economy I might say to myself this is not something that I want I would do better with a smaller share of a more a rapidly growing economy that was more stable than I am doing right now with a bigger share of an economy that is not growing very fast and is very unstable but I also might look at political instability as well if I am very wealthy I might look at what is happening in America and I might be very sensitive to the degree of anger that I see in America now where is that anger coming from well I conduct a kind of free-floating focus group that bears a remarkable similarity to the actual national polls gallup and other polls that show americans are increasingly frustrated and angry and anxious and they don't trust many institutions they don't trust government they don't trust the economy they don't trust big corporations they don't trust Wall Street they certainly don't trust politicians they don't trust politics my free-floating focus group occurs in airports usually I'm walking along in an airport innocently and somebody I don't know comes up to me it happened again just a few weeks ago somebody who is a complete stranger to me comes up to me and I think they come up to me because I am somewhat conspicuous and they see things lies if we've been in a conversation for a long time they say so what are we going to do somebody came up to me actually in Auckland recently and I didn't know the person they said can you believe it put yourself in my place so what are we gonna do I said I don't know I don't know what we're gonna do I wrote this book before the political season season the the 2016 election cycle got underway here in the United States but I said in the book that it seemed to me that given the degree of not only inequality but also insecurity and the sense of arbitrariness and unfairness that so many people were feeling and that in the future the biggest political divide would not necessarily be between Democrats and Republicans it would be between the establishment and the anti-establishment now that was before Bernie Sanders declared that he was running for president and it was also before and I paused before I used this name in the same sentence as Bernie Sanders but before Donald Trump declared he was running for president or for that matter a number of other people who are styling themselves as populist now what is populism there is no strict definition of populism but we know that populism historically has come out of a great deal of anger public anger I mean the Prarie populist William Jennings Bryan came to the fore because farmers were very angry about using a gold standard and and they felt that they couldn't pay their debts that the Easterners were were kind of loading the dice they were rigging the system whenever people feel like the system is being rigde they get angry and there is a kind of populist upsurge before that there was a sort of a populist upsurge in the 1830s of the Jacksonians who were very upset about the Bank of the United States they were upset about the requirement that in order to vote you had to own property they were concerned about legislators that there were corrupt that were giving out grants and charters to form companies they wanted anybody to be able to form a company and they wanted anybody at least within limits to be able to vote and property was not going to be a determinate determinative for the Jacksonians they were terrible people in many ways I'm not suggesting that we go back to the Jacksonian era nor am i suggesting we go back to the Prairie populist s' of the 1880s 1890s but it's interesting to me that most populist eras do have after them a period of reform the great Progressive Era that started in 1901 probably could not have happened without people like William Jennings Bryan or Robert La Follette the Governor of Wisconsin fighting Bob LaFollette and in 1901 almost by accident Teddy Roosevelt became a president and then you had ushered in a period of reform but the interesting thing about that period of reform that by certain analysis extends right through to 1916 Taft and Wilson the interesting thing about that Progressive Era is that many of those ideas had been bubbling up for years but they needed that populist anger to push them into national circulation as if it were and then the fifth cousin to Teddy Roosevelt years later became president when the entire nation was in an economic crisis one out of four working people was unemployed and many of the ideas that Teddy Roosevelt put forward in the election of 1912 actually were put into effect by his fifth cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt and then you had another reform and preceded by a populist era one could argue in the 1960s judging from how some of you look some of you remember the 60s I was there I had longer hair I was taller but in the sixties the Civil Rights Act the Voting Rights Act Medicare Medicaid many reforms could not have happened without an upsurge without a lot of anger but the anger was channeled in a positive direction and that's really the issue because populism can go in one of two directions it can go in a reformed direction as we saw some of Jacksonian populism go and and certainly some of the Progressive Era and then the New Deal and much of the 60s not all of the 60s but populism and the anger that propels populism can also go in a different direction that anger can be channeled unfortunately and we've seen this historically there is not a great tradition or much of a tradition of angry right-wing let's call it authoritarian populism in the United States but there is some father Charles Coughlin the radio personality of the late 1930s it was an Nazi sympathiser anti-semitic some would say that also in the category of right-wing or authoritarian populist s' would be Joe McCarthy Senator Joseph McCarthy of the 1950's the communist witch hunts of the 1950's you see authoritarian populism very often scapegoats people it finds an enemy it aggregates power through hates through channeling the anger toward resentment and hate of other people of other groups and it also is not grounded in democracy very much it's grounded in power the authoritarian populist sis toric Li not only the United States but around the world Mussolini and Franco and Hitler and others what they do is they say follow me I am strong enough I'm powerful enough I will rescue you from whatever the problems you have don't even ask me any questions they use anger resentment hate and also they create an illusion of strongman power that uses the anger to build their own political base so it seems to me and I can't make any predictions about 2016 but certainly we are seeing in America right now the growth of an upsurge in populism and anger that could go in either one of those directions how do we make sure it goes in a reformist Democratic direction well I think that's where we get into the question and the issue of getting out of our bubbles talking with people across the bubble I tell my students every year I say the best way to learn anything is to talk to people who disagree with you because in talking to people who disagree with me you your own assumptions your own views will be clarified will be questioned and theirs will be as well ten years ago I was living and teaching in Cambridge Massachusetts that's a blue city in a blue state in a blue part of the country and I decided to leave I got a lovely offer from a place called the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California Berkeley in fact Michael not for who this lecture is named called me one day and he said you know would you like to be a visiting lecturer a visiting professor here at Berkeley I said yes that sounds good I'd like to do that so I I got in my Mini Cooper and I drove from Cambridge Massachusetts I don't know how many of you have driven across the country it's it's a marvelous thing to do I drove all the way from Cambridge Massachusetts to University of California Berkeley and I discovered that I was 3,000 miles away but I had actually traveled to the same bubble better climate but the same bubble along the way I I stopped in I was stopped in in Oklahoma I was in a gas line waiting for gas in Oklahoma made my Mini Cooper I had noticed that there were no Mini Coopers in Oklahoma there none there were known I don't I don't think there was maybe there are now there was certainly none there were none then and I was waiting in line for gas and these two very large truckers they came up to my window they knocked on the window I lowered my window in my Mini Cooper and they stood there for a second I said can I help you they said what is this I said this is a Mini Cooper and there was a long silence and then they said how does anybody fit in there well I thought for a long instance that well why not and I got out of the car and I said look there's no problem at all they looked puzzled and I said I'm from Massachusetts were all under five feet tall they were in their own bubble their own trucker bubble their own Midwest truck bubble talking to people who disagree with you talking across boundaries is critically important it's not easy it is harder than ever it's harder than ever because geographically we are segmenting by political values but also in terms of the news we get we are able to insulate ourselves from anybody we disagree with and actually only get feedback and news and views that confirm our own views and our own predicates and premises and looking out on your lovely faces and seeing how many of you are nodding your heads in agreement with everything I say I I say to myself I'm in the wrong place I want to get back to read America no I don't but here's what was very interesting to me in those conversations because I they and I I don't want to generalize too much but again many of them called themselves Republicans and conservatives and tea partiers when the question came up of do you trust government they said no but why don't you trust government why because it's guilty of crony capitalism they use the term crony capitalism over and over and over again what do you mean I said by crony capitalism they said big companies and wall street and very wealthy individuals run everything they run the game they've taken over our government and I said we'll give me examples and they gave me example and they they used the term corporate welfare I was so surprised I suddenly found myself in a Bernie Sanders rally but they were all Republicans and the term corporate welfare I was surprised that they even were using that term I you know I have to just pause for a moment I'd our clock is running out and I want to make sure there's time for your questions but the term corporate welfare who came into public use do you know when it came into public use does anybody know that it's a little factoid well it came into public use in 1994 it may have been used before then but it became popularized in 1994 and even remember who popularized the term in a in a speech that got a lot of attention at the time the Secretary of Labor of the United States now this is what happened it was actually it was a very it was a it was a it was a difficult moment for me a difficult couple of days because there was the Republicans were all demanding a very draconian welfare reform very draconian forms of welfare reform and Bill Clinton was was wavering a little bit and we were trying to give him a little bit more backbone to reject some of the Republican proposals but he had just been defeated I mean he hadn't been met but Democrats were out Newt Gingrich was coming into town leading the posse of a big Republican takeover of Congress and but it was also fairly apparent that corporations were getting a lot of special tax breaks and a lot of special subsidies and so that I had the temerity to say in a speech that maybe what we ought to do is get rid of corporate welfare and use the proceeds to help people get better jobs and you'd have thought that I'd have called for a return to some form of communism or early Paleolithic hunting-and-gathering because the the outrage was was so palpable that i was called by the president's chief of staff into the White House and he said did you just give a speech using the term corporate welfare I said yes I did he said that was not a good thing to do we're having a lot of complaints I said good he said no no no we're having complaints not only from corporations and CEOs and Wall Street but we're having complaints right here in the cabinet at which point one of my colleagues in the cabinet said that he would resign if I didn't stop using the term and I said go ahead so here we are and I'm you know in fast-forward and I'm I'm in I'm in Cincinnati and these all these conservative Republicans all want to talk about corporate welfare I was delighted and then they what did what else did they draw they also said they were opposed I asked them about the trans-pacific partnership they said they don't like it it's a bad deal because was all crafted by big corporations and it's gonna mean a huge job losses don't get me wrong there were a lot of differences particularly on cultural and religious issues and social issues but when it came to economic power there was extraordinary overlap which makes me think that there is something here something important going on and makes me think when I hear Ted Cruz as I heard Ted Cruz today I don't know ever he said he used the term crony capitalism this afternoon in a negative way now you may the sincerity of that remark may be doubted but that's not the point a lot of these candidates on the Democrats and Republicans would not be using these terms if they didn't believe that the people they were talking to really were wanting to hear these kinds of criticisms and that itself is a big deal so am i optimistic about the future I am cautiously optimistic I'm worried about authoritarian populism but I'm cautiously optimistic I'm also cautiously optimistic because I teach people between the ages of 18 to 25 and in all my 35 years of teaching I have never encountered a generation of young people between the ages of 18 and 25 who are more idealistic or publicly spirited and dedicated to public service as the current 18 to 25 year old generation so we have a long way to go this is not going to be easy but reform and reform of our system our political economic system I believe is inevitable for all the reasons I have suggested thank you all very much try the series of questions here run together which presidential candidate do you currently see yourself voting for and why have you ever met Bernie Sanders if so what was he like would you accept an invitation to be Bernie's running mate Bernie 2016 this crowd seems to be interested in Bernie Sanders by the way Rolling Stone just reported that a copy of your book is on his coffee table must be true III know Bernie very well and I like him enormous Lee and I think his uh I admire particularly not only the positions he's taken which I think are correct and true but also his tenacity and his his ability to maintain his passion over all these years and he hasn't wavered I've also known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old in fact if you keep it in this room I will tell you that I once dated Hillary before she met bill that is do you want to know anymore what kind of ice cream did she like well in 2008 a reporter for The New York Times called me she was running for president you remember and and he called me and said that they had they and they had discovered a collection of her letters from college from Wellesley and in one of the letters it had mentioned that she had gone out on a date with me and and he asked me this New York Times reporter asked me is that if there's anything that I can recall from that date that might shed light on how she would perform as a president and I could barely remember I did in fact I didn't remember the debate I thought that would be that would be that wouldn't be very nice if I didn't remember the debate date so I said I said with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek that we went to a movie and she wanted an inordinate amount of butter on her popcorn after which there was complete silence I thought he had hung up I said are you still there he said yes I'm just writing this all down so I think I think she would be a very I think notwithstanding I think she'd be very competent and very good president I think Bernie would also would be a terrific president and but I am NOT going to endorse anybody and I'm not going to tell you who I'm voting for and I I run I'm chair when I'm not working for Henry I'm chair of a wonderful and important organization that you should all join if you're not members of right now and that is common cause for 40 years it's tried to get money out of politics not all that successfully but it was one of the driving forces behind the mccain-feingold act and it's still doing wonderful work around the country but as the chairman we can't it's very nonpartisan I can't take a partisan position so I have two final questions and you can choose to answer both or just one of them the first one is how do we prevent corporate interests from taking advantage of marijuana farmers that's choice number one please give potential activists in the audience examples of activities they could do to change the established power structure that's number two so I have to choose you choose one or two they're both similar well let me let me just say this I I said before that the students that I teach between the ages of eighteen twenty-five twenty-six are the most dedicated and idealistic and also dedicated the public service students I've come across in my teaching career but there's one thing that they're very cynical about more cynical than other students and that is politics and that is dangerous cynicism about politics to me is our greatest obstacle with regard to positive change if we are cynical about politics we are cynical about our democracy and if we give up on our democracy we basically see everything to the muddied interests they would love it if we became cynical and so cynical that we no longer participated so my answer to the question of what can you do is to get even more involved than you already are more engaged in politics and that means not just voting and serving on juries and paying your taxes that's not citizenship citizenship is active engagement maybe getting involved in a local political race maybe running yourself for school board maybe getting involved in somebody else's race supporting a candidate you believe in it doesn't necessarily have to be a presidential race maybe joining with others in a political movement to achieve a higher minimum wage or to achieve something else that you believe in people say to me very often well I don't have the time I how can I possibly have the time I don't have the time well you do have the time just spend a couple of hours less then you're now spending watching television or on your internet or doing email you have the time you just don't want to take more time and I understand that it seems like a daunting task but unless we all get on with it we're not going to have anything for our children and grandchildren to show thank you Robert Weiss saving capitalism you you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 35,500

Keywords: Goldman School, UC Berkeley, income inequality, Robert Reich

Id: qbQEPjH5XFE

Length: 53min 30sec (3210 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2016