The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich

When I was in kindergarten in 1951, I was the shortest kid in all of Lewisboro Elementary School, Public School #1. Not surprisingly, perhaps, I was cast as Baby Jesus in the annual school Christmas pageant. My role didn’t require much preparation or talent. I just had to lie on some straw strewn on the stage and look at children playing Mary and Joseph, the three Wise Men, and assorted angels, an...

Friends, Like many of you, I found it a difficult weekend. As Friday’s decision by the six Republican nominees on the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade sank in — along with Clarence Thomas’s threat to use the same logic to put a whole range of other rights on the chopping block, including marriage equality and full access to contraception — I became aware once again just how fragile are the ri...

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action, and my former student), discussing the past week. Today we talk about three things giving Heather a headache and making Bob’s blood boil — the Supreme Court become so radically rightwing that even John Roberts has lost control over it, a Republican Party become so nuts that it’s impervious to the...

If there’s any doubt about the extremism of the Supreme Court’s six Republican appointees, it was on full display today with their opinion in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , which overrules Roe v. Wade, establishing the right to an abortion. Roe had been the law of the land for almost fifty years. Even more ominous is Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion, in which he argues that th...

Yesterday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell, testifying before the Senate Banking Committee, said outright that the Fed’s higher interest rates won’t lower the prices of gas or groceries. Hello? Gas and food prices are the two items hitting families the hardest, and the Fed is openly admitting that raising interest rates will do nothing to ease the burden? What rate hikes will do is force millions of Ameri...

Yesterday, the Supreme Court knocked down part of the wall between church and state with a ruling that’s likely to force taxpayers to fund religious indoctrination at Christian schools. So, today’s questions: (1) How much do you think the same conservatives championing this decision would freak out if they thought their tax dollars were being used to fund Islamic madrasas? And (2) if religious ins...

Today’s fourth hearing focused on how Trump corruptly pressured state legislators and election officials to change election results — leaning on state officials to alter the vote and to create slates of fake electors pledged to Trump — and their unwillingness to go along with Trump. But under the surface of today’s hearing and its revelations lurks the civil war that Trump has created within the R...

Friends, As Congress prepares for summer recess, average working Americans are facing increasingly hard economic times — including a likely recession (see here ). Yet Congress has so far failed to provide most Americans with what they need to weather the storm — subsidies for childcare and eldercare, paid sick leave, an increase in the federal minimum wage, lower pharmaceutical costs, additional h...

We fool ourselves if we believe that the televised hearings of the January 6 committee are changing the direction of the Republican Party, or that the hearings will end the attempted coup that Trump launched immediately after the 2020 election. The G.O.P. is becoming ever more divorced from reality. Trump’s attempted coup continues unabated. The first three hearings of the House January 6 committe...

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action, and my former student), discussing the past week. Today we cover the third hearing of the January 6 select committee, why the committee isn’t turning over its transcripts to the Justice Department, what’s the connection between Ginni Thomas (wife of Justice Clarence Thomas) and John Eastman, the...

Today marks the end of the school year for many public schools. Every year about this time I think of Alice Camp. I arrived in her third-grade classroom in Lewisboro Elementary School, in South Salem, New York, as an extremely short, shy, insecure 8-year-old who was often bullied and mocked on the bus and made to feel like a loser on the playground, and had no particular interest in school. But sh...

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol held its third public hearing today — focused on Trump's efforts to pressure Vice President Pence to refuse to count lawful electoral votes on January 6: the gonzo plan that lawyer John Eastman came up with. But where did John Eastman come from? And how did he ever reach Trump in the first place? The committee didn’t to...

Last Sunday night, as cryptocurrency prices plummeted, Celsius Network — an experimental cryptocurrency bank with more than one million customers that has emerged as a leader in the murky world of decentralized finance, or DeFi — announced it was freezing withdrawals “due to extreme market conditions.” Earlier this week, Bitcoin dropped 15 percent over 24 hours to its lowest value since December 2...

Friends, Bennie Thompson, chair of the January 6th Committee, has told reporters that the committee has no plans to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department. This strikes me as absurd. The major purpose of the committee’s carefully constructed prosecutorial brief is to clear the runway for indictments. The pushback on Thompson’s statement was instant, beginning with vice chair Liz Cheney...

Last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its May Consumer Price Index (CPI) report, which showed inflation worsening. Yet the bigger story — and bigger worry — is not inflation. It’s the distinct possibility of recession. Or perhaps both (what’s termed “stagflation.”) Here are the questions I’m getting asked most often, and my answers. 1. Are we heading for a recession? Many signs poin...

Friends, I trust Joe Biden’s steadiness and judgment, and if he runs again, I’ll probably back him in 2024. But today I want to suggest someone who isn’t even a Democrat, and whose positions on many issues I (and I suspect you) strongly disagree with — but who could possibly be the best president of the United States for the perilous time we’re entering. I’m referring to Liz Cheney. Before you rej...

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action, and my former student), discussing the past week. Today we cover how to measure the success of the hearings of the House January 6 committee, which began Thursday night; inflation (the Consumer Price Index came out yesterday, showing that inflation continues to increase) and its impact on the mid...

What’s the use of the hearings by the House committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection —hearings that began last night and will run for the next several weeks — unless they lead to criminal prosecution of Donald Trump for his patently criminal actions? In a word: History. We tend to underestimate the importance of an historic record. But it is vastly important. It charts the course of the...

Tonight, we learned several things from the first hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol: 1. After the riot began on January 6, many White House officials, including members of Trump’s own family, urged him to call off the rioters. He did not. Presumably the committee will provide detailed evidence of this. 2. When told that the rioters wanted...

My friends, I’m going to press the pause button on today’s news — including the House January 6 hearings that start this evening — and try to answer a big question that hangs over American politics right now like a sword of Damocles: Does Joe Biden have a snowball’s chance of being re-elected in 2024? With his current approval rate in the cellar, most pundits assume no (at age 81, he’d also be the...

Last Friday — after Elon Musk said he planned to cut thousands of jobs at Tesla and also expressed worry over the economy — Joe Biden dismissed him with a zinger: “Lots of luck on his trip to the moon.” There’s no love lost between them. The fiercely anti-union Musk has been livid ever since pro-union Biden pushed a provision in a bill that would benefit electric-car makers that are unionized at t...

The televised hearings of the House Select Committee on the January 6 insurrection, which begin Thursday, mark an historic milestone in the battle between democracy and autocracy. The events that culminated in the attack on the Capitol constitute the first attempted presidential coup in our nation’s 233-year history. The Select Committee’s inquiry is the most important congressional investigation...

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (the executive director of Inequality Media Civic Action, and my former student), discussing the past week. In this morning’s klatch we discuss whether Congress will do anything to restrict gun purchases (Biden’s passionate plea notwithstanding), how long America will be willing to supply weapons to Ukraine, the likely outcome from next week’s heari...

I was an intern in Bobby Kennedy’s Senate office during the summer of 1967. The civil rights movement was still gaining ground, and Kennedy was crusading for economic and political justice. My job that summer had nothing to do civil rights or justice, though. And it required only half a brain. I was in charge of Kennedy’s signature machine. The machine’s pen mechanically scrawled “Robert F. Kenned...

After a mass shooting in Parkland, Florida in February 2018, that left 17 people dead, JPMorgan Chase — America’s largest bank — publicly distanced itself from the firearm industry. Its chief financial officer reassured the media that the bank’s relationships with gunmakers “ have come down significantly and are pretty limited. ” That was then. This past September, a new Texas law went into effect...