The System, by Robert Reich - book review
Book review of "The System: Who rigged it, How to fix it", by Robert Reich
You have probably heard or seen Robert Reich. He has made a very well deserved name for himself as an educator, being able to simply present very complicated subjects like economic and politics. I hope you have seen a few of his youtube videos, so you can appreciate his drawings as well.
He very clearly lays out his argument that US economic/politcs is no longer about Democrat or Republican, but is instead about oligarchy. Since the 1980's economic wealth and political power have concentrated into the hands of so very few families, and those very few are every year writing laws that only increase their concentration of wealth and power, that we are right back where we were in the late 1800's with the Robber Barons. If you follow Mr Reich's statistics, we are even much farther along that path of oligarchy than before.
One of many examples is the "Business Round Table" which is a group of several dozen of the wealthiest people in America, headed by Jamie Dimon. I recall Mr Dimon's face, from the 2008 financial crises, as he sat smirking at the US Senate, knowing that no banker was going to be held responsible, that all the big banks were going to get their corporate bailout, and that tens of millions of middle class American households were going to lose all their savings & pensions while he personally went home with a $30million dollar paycheck that year. Since the 1980's, The Business Round Table has made sure that US laws were passed such that most every company represented at The Table no longer has to pay any federal tax. This has made those corporations more wealthy and powerful (the workers' pay has not increased), which allows The Table to pass more US laws, which make them even more wealthy and powerful, etc. This is a self-feeding spiral, one of many that Mr Reich details in the book.
"You can either have a democracy, or you can have wealth and power concentrated in a very small number of people, but you cannot have both," so said Justice Brandeis.
Mr Reich does have one chapter devoted to a hopeful message, but that hope rests entirely upon people like you and me becoming active in politics, something I have always found very difficult. So his one hopeful chapter did not instill much hope in me.