Robert Reich with "Coming Up Short: A Memoir of my America" 1:05
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THE FIRST PARISH IN CAMBRIDGE, UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST
Join former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and Harvard Kennedy School professor Richard Parker for a powerful and personal conversation on democracy, inequality, and the moral foundations of a good society. In this talk, Reich reflects on his memoir Coming Up Short, shares lessons from decades in public service, and explores the roots of political disillusionment in America.
From the rise of authoritarianism to the erosion of democratic institutions, Reich and Parker examine the forces shaping our political landscape—and offer hope through civic engagement, progressive values, and the next generation of leaders.
π Coming Up Short is Reich’s most personal book yet, praised by Senator Bernie Sanders as “important and galvanizing.”
π Recorded live at Cambridge First Parish Church on September 2, 2025.
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Transcript
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underlying everything, I think has got to be that moral question. What is a good society?
What is our definition of a good society? The kind of society that
Donald Trump wants is not my definition of a good society.
Now it's a privilege to introduce tonight's speakers. Robert Reich is the former Secretary of Labor under Bill
Clinton, has served in three presidential administrations, written 19 books, spent 40 years as a beloved professor of public policy,
and is an ambassador of progressive economics. His highly anticipated memoir, Coming Up Short, is his only book
that covers his entire life, including his parents, his own failures, disappointment, aging, lost friends while offering practical solutions
to build a better America based on lessons from half a century and political involvement. Senator Bernie Sanders has called it important and galvanizing.
Joining Reich on stage tonight is his longtime friend of 60 years, Richard Parker. Award winning biography,
who has taught for over 30 years at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Parker is also the co-founder of the magazine Mother Jones
and former advisor to Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou. Now, please join me in welcoming Robert Reich and Richard Parker.
All right. Why don't we get started? Bob and I have known each other since we were 17 years old.
We come from a different world than exists today. And we like this one a lot better for a lot of reasons.
Although we have a few complaints, which we'll be talking about in the course of the evening.
Bob and I went to college and graduate school, had only white male professors in the years that we were students, and we had only male classmates.
As best I can recollect in those years, because that was what elite education was 60 or 70 years ago.
The joy of teaching for me, and I think for Bob as well, too, although he can speak to it, is that for 30 years I walked into classrooms that were a U.N.
general Assembly of experiences, and I have continued to learn and treasure my teaching for what
those students have taught me and hope that the work that Bob and I
and others like us of our generation, are trying to do will give them the grounding and the confidence to keep moving forward.
I especially want to say how much I enjoyed this book of Bob's. Bob's written a dozen and a half books.
I think that's about right. And I've read at least half of them. I won't say which ones I've missed.
I laughed my way through locked in the closet, which, if you haven't read, I really locked in the cabinet. Locked of the cabinet?
Sorry.
If I remember his name at the end of this, I'll be having a good evening.
So just bear with us. But this book accomplishes something that I think
is both really a testimony to Bob, but also what exactly is needed right now?
Because those earlier books that Bob wrote were classic studies in issues of policy and institutional politics.
And what Bob has created here is an examination of underlying values
that underpin those institutions, and moreover, has narrated it in the context of his own life.
He's put himself up front in the book in a way that I think makes it an incredibly human book,
and I understand how much, when I read that last chapter of finishing teaching at Berkeley
after all those years, why a tear came to his eye. And what I'm hoping is that tonight he's going to leave you inspired
to make sure that the values that he has tried to teach all these years are carried forward by you.
So thank you for coming out to hear Bob speak.
Let me open this in a way that you do, Bob, because you framed the book
from the beginning about the experience of being young and being bullied,
and it becomes a metaphor that you're able to then transfer to the politics of the present.
That also underlined the values of democracy societies in the process.
A lot of people feel bullied. Many people have been bullied.
And we have now, as president, a bully in chief
who doesn't necessarily take pleasure in bullying.
But maybe he does, the entire program that he is pushing on America
has to do with imposing a certain order and brutality on everyone else,
on demanding submission to. Now putting those ideas together.
That is the bullying, the vulnerability, the powerlessness. And somebody demanding submission.
I think that and what I'll try to do, Richard, in the book is suggest
that Donald Trump is not the source of many of the problems we are now experiencing
and the tensions and stresses that we are now witnessing. Donald Trump is the consequence, the culmination of decades
in which many people in this country felt bullied by the system.
They felt that they were voiceless, that they were vulnerable, powerless. They were angry,
and they many of them decided to elect their own bully.
I think that the real problem that Donald Trump represents, and the problem we've got to address
as a society, and we could not have, in my view, my humble view is we couldn't have continued down the road.
We were going in terms of inequality widening year by year.
And with that inequality also a kind of, corruption increasing year by year,
we called it campaign contributions and public relations and other things, but large corporations
and wealthy individuals abusing their wealth and their power, year by year, in a greater and greater way, polluting our system with money
in ways that I think inevitably caused a great deal of
demoralization, caused a lot of people to feel that the system was not worth it, that the system was rigged against them.
And that is really where we are today. You've lived a life in public service. And,
nowadays, so many young people are coming out of schools like Harvard and choosing to go to tech and Silicon Valley
or go to Wall Street in finance, or go to McKinsey for corporate consulting.
You've chosen a different path. You chose to work in government. You've chosen to teach about government.
You've chosen to commit your life to writing about what it means to be in public service.
Talk a little bit for me about where that comes from in you, and what it is that you tried to communicate to your students.
Well, it comes from the fact that I was born when you were. How many of you were born?
On in or around 1946. And they baby boomers and.
Okay, well, let me just say, all of you hold up your Medicare cards together and let's just wave.
I mean, George W Bush and, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton,
were all born in 1946. I was born in 1946. Richard, you were born in 46.
Was born on election day in 1946. So there's no excuse for that.
And, I'm a Cher. Dolly Parton. Anybody who's anybody was born in 1946.
And there. And demographers wondering why the baby boom. What was very simple.
My father was in World War two, and he came home
and there was my mother. Well, if you don't have to really be. There's not a complicated issue.
Like what? But. But what was, I think very important is that
we all the the people that received the legacy of the so-called greatest generation,
the greatest generation went through the depression and World War two.
They made extraordinary sacrifices and worked extraordinarily hard, create
did, and opportunity for the largest middle class the world had ever seen.
America certainly had never seen. And we I mean, I didn't know it at the time.
I was a little boy, but we were facing, a society that really provided
opportunities and possibilities of a sort that, was extraordinary in world history.
Extraordinary. And the question I try to address here, Richard, is why we that is,
those of us born boomers and others who were near boomers,
Hillary Clinton, Clarence Thomas, other people who I, I know
I dated Hillary Clinton, but not Clarence Thomas, but not Clarence Herman.
And I dated her before she was Clinton. Let me make that very clear.
But but we we all failed in a way. I think we took for granted,
much of what was given to us. We we didn't fight,
the battles hard enough, and only I include myself in that. I, in writing this book, it's what forced me to do
is to go back over the battles I fought and lost.
And, relive them. And it was painful, but we've won a number of them, too.
I mean, the change in what the academic experience that you and I had 60 years ago
and the academic experience today is a measure of just how much has changed. And it seems to me that they're
we're losing our nerve and telling proudly what our successes have been. Well, undoubtedly, and I'm very proud of what we quote, unquote.
We it's hard to generalize about an entire generation, but we did in terms of civil rights and voting rights, and,
the rights, equal marriage rights. And, the, the changes
that we helped usher through, and you and I both,
were demonstrated, against Vietnam, the Vietnam War. We were both, I was clean for Jane.
Were you? Did you were you in the. I read McCarthy Jane person to you? Yeah. Well, I mean, there was a sense of efficacy
that I remember having when I went to college, with civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movement.
I think we had agency. We felt like our generation could actually do things.
And the surprise, was the I think it occurred in the years
that the Carter and the Reagan years and I and I focus on those here, because those were the years in which there was a great U-turn.
The country really did revert, especially under Ronald Reagan,
to a, a very different country up. And, the the promise of upward mobility,
started to be a sham. The median wage, as you know, the median wage started to stagnate.
More and more of the national wealth and income went to the top.
People became and certainly by 2008 and the financial crisis, when the banks got bailed out,
and millions of homeowners, and, people lost their jobs and their savings,
and they, they were not helped. And I think that that, that disillusionment that came out of that especially,
helped create the predicate for what we are now seeing.
Talk a little bit about how the parties changed in those periods, because the nature of the Democratic Republican binary has changed
in our lifetime in dramatic ways, and arguably has been either
emblematic of or causal in some ways of that change. And you have worked inside and outside at the edge
of the Democratic Party now for half a century. What have you seen change about it?
Well, both parties have changed from a dramatically, both parties. Ten years ago, 15 years ago were nothing more
than giant financial machines, designed to raise as much money as possible, for candidates
who were especially targeted at these so-called swing votes. Now, the Republican Party is a bunch of zombies.
I mean, they, I mean, they they really, are marching only to what Donald Trump says.
They're afraid of being primaried. If they even vary a little bit
from, the Trump line, and some of them have confessed to me that they're afraid of being,
violently attacked where their families. This is not child's play.
The Democratic Party, I think, is in complete and total disarray.
Now, I've said that for the past 40 years. But I will. Rogers.
I'm not a member of this political party. You're right. I'm a Democrat. But, but it's in. But it's.
But the disarray now is, to me, unforgivable.
Because what what Republicans under Trump have done is create
a set of cultural populist targets, scapegoats
to explain away why so many people are angry, why so many people feel that they can't get ahead
despite working as hard as they are doing? And those cultural scapegoats have to do with what we know.
Know what? They. They're immigrants. They're the so-called deep state. They're, transgender people.
There are all kinds of, kind of boogeyman that Donald Trump and the Republicans around him have created.
And they it's a cynical exercise. What the what the Democrats need to do, what they should have done, in 2016
and certainly 2020 or 2024, what they should have done is said no.
The reason so many people are not getting ahead. The reason the whole system feels rigged against you
is because it is rigged against you. And.
And it's real. And it's rigged against you because of the large corporations,
the financial companies, Wall Street, and the, the people who are the wealthy, extraordinarily wealthy people
who are putting a great deal of money into politics in 2024. We know now that ten people,
ten people contributed $3 billion to the Republican Party.
One person contributed a a quarter of $1 billion to Donald Trump.
We know him. We can even know his name. Some of us drive his cars.
You know. But but you get my point.
This a few years ago, this would have been outrageous. We would have been up in arms.
We have now normalized this kind of. And it is corruption.
It is corruption. Let's not kid ourselves. And, you know, in Congress, too many Democrats march to where the money is.
They are afraid to bite the hands that feed their political coffers.
And as long as they are in that position and they've been in that position for quite some time, we are not going to have a loyal opposition that is capable of
taking on the Republicans. Do you draw hope, though, as I certainly do, from the number
of organizations like Swing Left or Move On or, any of dozens out there now that are not attached to the party
but that are progressive, and attempting to influence the party, including influencing the outcome of elections.
There's a lot of money that's been raised from small donors. It may not be the 3 billion from 100 donors.
It may be a billion from 300,000 donors. But isn't there some way to see hope?
Oh. Richard, I'm very hopeful. Okay. I really don't I don't know how important that they.
We're getting discussion. We're going to we should get to the hopeful part, right? But I think part of hope, is that the Democrats
and the Republicans are beginning to see they don't need the gigantic contributions
they can actually do as well, if not better from smaller, small donors, a lot of small donors, great numbers of small donors.
So but, it's been it's very hard to get them to see that, it's a struggle.
I think you're right. I think that's cause for hope. Good. Talk a little bit about
what you see as the key offensives of the Trump administration today.
I mean, I want to give you a softball that you can know that is that is the just your your three favorite.
Well, I think that we are really, moving from authoritarianism.
And let me let me just be clear with everybody about this. I have been in government.
I've studied government. I've looked historically, at, in the United States and elsewhere at
what has happened with different regimes and different governments. We are very close to
what might be termed neo fascism right now. And I say that and I use that term advisedly.
Because it's not authoritarianism, authoritarian authoritarianism, rests on a bureaucracy that marches to
what a an authoritarian leader wants. This is much more centralized in one person.
This is a strongman. This is more analogous to Mussolini or Hitler or Stalin.
This is one person who is calling all the shots. And it's not only the all the shots
politically and all the shots in terms of, the people around him, like Stephen Miller, or Russell Voigt, deciding what's going to happen tomorrow.
What this week's, events are going to be. What what executive orders are going to be signed,
but it's also, starting to leech out into the economy.
More and more of what Trump is doing as a strongman, quote unquote,
has to do with individual decisions about individual corporations
and individual tariffs, which should be called actually, instead of tariffs, they should be called, imports taxes,
and individual deals with particular countries and people.
So we have an economy that is becoming less and less about supply and demand
and more and more about these kinds of arbitrary and capricious decisions
by this one strongman. Now.
The one advantage, the one possibly, you know, again, I, I'm, I'm seeking, positive, positive things to say.
There is something very positive here because this cannot go on. Somebody who fires everybody around him.
Who anybody who questions his authority, anybody who disagrees with what he wants
to do does not, by definition, have any feedback about what he's doing,
does not, by definition, have any critical judgment
because all the credit for critical judgment has been purged. And somebody like that is heading for a huge fall.
And that could happen any time. What worries me is the collateral damage
to a lot of innocent people. You know, I've got a daughter in law who finished with a PhD in climate science last June
and landed her dream job at the EPA. And you can just imagine. I'm very sorry.
Yeah. So is the EPA is. I'm sorry. No, I'm sorry for all of it. Yeah. Because the talents, the losses are personal.
Making sure there are plenty of those stories here. Well, these are both personal tragedies, but they're also huge
tragedies for the country in terms of the loss of talent in, that has been accumulated over decades in many of these positions.
I mean, the Justice Department, the IRS, the Treasury, the State Department,
you go through what we have been losing.
The National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the USAID.
I mean, wherever you look, you see talent and capacity lost.
You know. You have both in this book, but for quite some time
made the argument that inequality primarily first economic inequality
in terms of income and wealth, but other forms of inequality are at both the heart of your analysis and also at the heart of your prescription
for how to escape the situation that we found ourselves in. Talk a little bit about how inequality
has changed in the United States in our lifetimes. You and I were beneficiaries of a 30 year long run
as we grew up, a declining inequality across the board. And then shortly after we left the the,
our college studies and entered the real world, that turned and it became a V-shape and which now we have nothing but rising inequality.
Year after year after year, with that break here. There was what I was trying to get up before. Yeah.
When I talked about the great U-turn. Yeah. That is something that occurred, starting in 78.
But extending to a much greater extent in the 80s, where inequality widened.
And the dynamic here is a ratchet effect that is, as more and more resources
of the nation's income and wealth begin to concentrate at the top, the people at the top and the institutions, the corporations
at the top have more and more political power. If,
there is no constraint on spending that money for political purposes.
And when I say political purposes, I don't just mean, campaigns. It's also being spent on public relations.
It's being spent on, armies of litigators, to change families, to change the rules.
And we could go on and on, but but the point is, as wealth and income go to the top,
and as this, these these this capacity
turns into, kind of a political power. You get more and more distortion,
of, a political economic system. And that distortion itself feeds on itself.
Because the next round you get obviously more power and more wealth going to the top.
In our lifetimes, we've additionally seen the US economy more deeply integrated into a global economy than we had ever imagined possible.
I think the sum of imports and exports when you and I were in college was maybe 10% of GDP.
It's well together over a third of GDP now. And what
doesn't perplex me, the challenges me, is to try to think about what the instruments are that we could use
to lessen American inequality in a world in which there is so much leakage going out of the economy,
out of the American economy, and into foreign economies. And you also have an enormous amount of corporate gaming,
of tax liabilities and labor rules and everything else. What what are your thoughts on what the challenges are
that globalization brings to our recovering a domestic democracy? Well,
you know, globalization is one of those words that has gone from obscurity to meaninglessness
quickly to without any intervening period of coherence.
I mean, we've always been in a globalized economy. And, the
when I first began exploring and inquiring into inequality, why inequality was widening,
the standard explanations were globalization and technological change.
Everybody, said, well, it's globalization, because obviously, things will be
done, in the cheapest place to do it. And that's going to put a burden on low
skilled people in the United States or in every advanced country. And at the same time, technology
is going to take away the jobs of low skilled people. And they are going to have to move into the low paid service sector.
And that was going to be every advanced country was going to. Well, the interesting thing happened, and that is not every advanced company,
countries suffered the same inequality. In fact, many advanced countries,
found that they there were things that they could do politically, to reduce inequality and to reduce the possibility
of this kind of ratchets that I'm talking about. And what we have now is many,
so-called advanced countries. That they have more inequality than they did, 20 or 30 years ago.
They have as much globalization, if not more than the United States. They have as much technological change as the,
if not more than the United States. But they don't have as much inequality. And why not?
Because they have stronger laws, against
the abuse of wealth in terms of
political, political corruption. I'm going to use that word,
I, I hesitate to use the word corruption, but I am I think it's the best way of describing it.
They do not allow the degree of legalized bribery we do in this country.
It's also the case that there are stronger social democratic parties in most of those countries as well too.
Isn't that true? And also stronger trade unions that act as countervailing forces politically
in this struggle for distribution, or do not think that's that's important? No, I think that those are important.
But they beg the question. That is in the 50s. In 1955, 35%
of the workers in the United States, in the private sector, were unionized. Now, today, it's now down to 6%.
And there's no serious. And when John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about countervailing power,
he was writing in the 50s, he thought that the union portion of the workforce would continue to expand, actually,
because of the forces that were the political forces that were unleashed, in the late 70s and early 80s.
Corporations felt less and less bound to respect unions.
And they started to bash unions. They started to move their corporate,
factories and also operations to non-unionized states. They began to very aggressively fire workers
who had every legal right, to organize unions. This did not happen in other countries.
And again, what you're underscoring is the political nature of economic change, which I think
is really one of your contributions to just keep banging that drum again and again and again that Richard it's the right drum.
I because, because, because I mean, politics underlies all of this.
You can't separate economics from politics. Thank you. Well you're welcome
Harvey. Harvey Cox wrote a wonderful essay some 35 years ago
in which he made, I thought, a persuasive argument that with the collapse of traditional religion,
the void had been filled by the idea of the market. Because what else was omission omnipotent and omnipresent,
if not the market in American political life? And I think that we need to tip our hat at the deity even as we struggle against,
well, I'm all for heresy, but but this is, you know, this this is this is fairly new. In the 19th century, there was no separate discipline called economics,
until Alfred Marshall came along in 1890. It was all political economy.
And everybody, I mean, most of the people studying it did not try to differentiate between politics and economics.
If you go back to the 18th century, it was not even political economy. Adam Smith did not call himself a political economist.
He called himself a moral philosopher. It was all about what is a good society.
And underlying everything, I think has got to be that moral question. What is a good society?
What is our definition of a good society? The kind of society that
Donald Trump wants is not my definition of a good society.
I mean, I know it's easy here in this bubble of Cambridge. Bubble of Cambridge.
I don't know. You know, years ago, I moved to Berkeley, from to get out of the bubble.
Yeah. Oh, great. And I just afterwards, I discovered I was still in the same bubble,
but the weather was better. But but
but but truly, we're talking about values. We're talking about morals.
You know, diversity, equity and inclusion are good things.
I don't know how.
I mean, how how one. And I'm going to use again the term strongmen.
Authoritarian can convince so many people, that they are not.
Isn't their claim that it has been a set of rights that have been asymmetrically distributed?
Isn't that sort of what they're arguing? We can argue back with it, but isn't that sort of their claim?
Well, I, I think the claim is to the extent that there's any moral claim here,
is a claim of white privilege, a claim that, you know, white people ought to be somehow dominant.
You know, behind a lot of this is social Darwinism. You know, the, the, the old doctrine that,
there is survival of the fittest. But this is not new.
Nothing of this is new, but it's been dressed up, in a new package
that I think, is very attractive to. Again, going back to what I started to say initially, very attractive
to people who feel that they've been bullied, the feel that they're not getting ahead,
no matter how hard they work, feel that the entire system has been rigged against them, and it has so.
It's not that these ideas are new that Trump is peddling.
It's that they are finding a an audience, a, a
a terrain that makes them very, very popular.
Do you think that the Democratic Party is capable of differentiating itself enough from
whether we call it neoliberalism or we call it a centrism that isn't addressing your issues or are issues
that it can find an identity that that, gives it back political power,
because we can talk about values all we want, but they have to be exercised and defended in the context of real political power.
Well, this is where the silver lining comes, and this is where my optimism comes in, because I, I think that
where we are now, not only in terms of widening inequality and corruption, legalized corruption,
but something we haven't even talked about, but closely aligned to all of this,
is the destruction of the environment, the destruction of the Earth. And we
could not again, let me emphasize, go down the road, continue to go down the road where we that we were on.
Inevitably. In economics and politics, in corruption,
in pollution and climate change, we were coming to the end of that road.
Unfortunately, the Democrats did not lead the revolution.
The Democrats missed a huge an important opportunity. If this were the 1930s and we had a president
named Franklin D Roosevelt, the Democrats would have it. It is easier to say, okay, it would have been the Democrats would have,
found their voice. But now there is the possibility.
I see Democrats, backbenchers or young people,
all around the country who are coming up and are, are, are telling the truth, as we've talked about it, and our are telling it in terms of a lens
that is moral, about the values, about the society we want.
And I find it very encouraging. I'm not sure that, they could have found their voice. Honestly, Richard, if we hadn't come to this terrible,
terrible, calamitous tragedy. I've got four former students running for Congress.
And I must tell you.
And I must tell you, I feel the same way, Bob. I mean, their ability to combine serious
political and policy viewpoints with a sense of being human and of wanting to build a human community,
not of having vengeance wreaked on my enemies, not about how to transfer more money to fewer people.
These these are the next generation. It's really very hopeful for I.
I've been teaching for 44 years. I retired, just the year before last.
But my most recent generations of students are the most committed.
The smartest, and the most determined to change the society.
And that gives me an enormous hope. I'm going to give you.
Before we turn to question and answer, you and I exchanged a few words about despair and blaming, which we are hearing too much of these days.
Would you share a thought on why it is that neither despair nor blaming right now
are the ways to go about reconstructing the world. Well, it's easy
to fall into despair. Right. Yeah.
And it's also easy for many people, to get angry and blame them
or them or them or them. It's also easy for some people to deny that we are in the predicament we are.
And I believe it or not, if you get outside some of the bubbles that I live Brookline, Watertown.
Yeah. There's there are, there are people who are still denying, that we are in a terrible state.
But, when I tell my students and what I tell others
is that the most important thing right now is to get out of denial and despair and blame.
And ask yourself what you can do. And don't wait to be rescued.
There is nobody who is going to rescue us. There's an old saying, you know, we are the leaders we've been waiting for.
Well, this is the time that that saying really becomes very significant.
You know, I, people ask me all the time, Bob, why are you writing so much?
Why are you doing these videos? And why are you. You know, I have,
writing books and, you know, you're pushing 80. Why are you doing all this?
And I say the president of the United States is also pushing 80.
And if a sociopath can cause as much mayhem. Me, I can do a little bit.
We could be good trouble.
Of causing good trouble. Let's turn to the audience. Bob, Something that you mentioned or didn't mention
is that there's this pimple, Donald Trump who will burst. But I wonder,
he is a strong man. But behind him are 50 years of racist,
Republican capitalist kinds of things
which are embodied in project 2025. So if Trump were to disappear,
would that plan still unfold? If Trump were to disappear,
would we still be in the trouble we are in? Would project 2025 and the people around it,
still be causing as much mayhem? Well, the answer is
yes for a while, because they have the power. We're talking about power.
Hello, people. This is just this is again, this is a matter of how things get done.
And if the Republican Party, has turned into a cult, and I think it's fair to say it has turned into a cult,
and the congressional Republicans don't dare do anything that could cause
that cult to be alarmed or angry. And if the Democrats are still remain
relatively silent, then we are. And if the Supreme Court stays where it is,
we've got a perfect storm. But none of that is likely to stay put.
I mean, none of nothing. Nothing that I've just said is likely to stay exactly as it is.
This is where our work comes in. All of us.
This is where, we have to work to change the leadership of Congress. Change Congress in 2026.
This is where we've got to work at the state level to make sure that we have state governments that are willing to,
as several states are now willing to stop, or at least put up a fight
with regard to what Trump and Washington are doing. We've got to make sure that this country
gets the facts and people get the knowledge that they need.
And that's where a lot of us come in in terms of spreading the truth.
You can't get anywhere if the truth is not being spread up. So defeatism, denial, despair.
As we were just talking about does get it absolutely nowhere. I am optimistic about the longer term future.
I'm worried about the short term future. I hi, Bob, my name is already. I'm from Indonesia.
I'm not foreign. I'm an American. But your words resonate with me in my country right now.
People are very sad, very angry. If you watch the news. People died on the streets, against the police.
And I feel what you feel, Americans. We also feel deep inequality. So it is not an issue that is unique to America alone.
And your words have inspired me, Bob. And I'm now a student in Harvard, and I want to do something for my country.
So I wanted to thank you first on that. And I want to ask you, reflecting on your long life,
what would be the thing that you would do differently or you would do much more earlier, especially maybe as an advice for young
people like me who wants to do something in for our country. Thank you so much. I think that I assumed
that the institutions of our democracy were stronger than they actually are.
This is connected to my I don't want to say complacency,
but in retrospect, I think it was a certain complacency, a certain assumption that everything would
remain a hope that the center would hold,
not political center, but the center would hold in the sense of,
the institutions that are needed by democracy,
the media, science, the universities,
I assumed, for example, that the universities, could not be cowed by,
a, a dictator. That power was decentralized enough.
Now, let me just say something. It's it's delicate to talk about this issue.
Just a few feet from. Where decisions are being made.
These would be Harvard University. But I want to commend Harvard to the extent
that Harvard is standing up against this tyranny.
But I also just want to say something else. And this is really
about what other universities need to understand. In my view, and what law firms
and what the media and everybody else needs to understand. Number one, it is not possible to appease a tyrant.
You cannot appease in encourage.
Any attempt to appease a tyrant invites more tyranny.
That's number one. Number two, the really the only way to deal with a tyrant is to join with others.
That is, if I were advising Harvard. And that's not going to happen.
I don't think. But if I were advising Harvard, I'd say use your position
as the preeminent university and the wealthiest university by far
as an umbrella for the entire university System of America, for the all the research universities of America.
Use your umbrella to join everybody together to make the case
that our research universities are essential for our competitiveness
as a nation. They are essential for our future, for our innovation as a nation
that you, Donald Trump, cannot destroy the research universities of America, that he would be shooting us.
It is shooting us in the feet. Make that case Harvard.
And I would say the same thing with.
And the same thing, the same thing with, with law firms. I mean, the idea that you can divide and conquer,
these law firms, in particularly big law firms, Washington, in New York, or big media companies, you know, you sue ABC and CBS
and and make them, so, sort of models of intimidation.
Well, no, what has to happen is that these institutions need to work collaboratively.
They need to work together, to be a common front against against this tyranny.
A couple of weeks ago, I was on, A show, on television,
and, What's his name? Late night, Stephen Colbert, Stephen Colbert.
There we go. Between the two of us, we can pull up most names.
You know that. That is one thing that happens with age. The memory.
But Stephen Colbert, I do remember, I, I, I talked with Stephen Colbert,
and he's he's terrific, and he's terrific in person, and he's very funny. And he, he walked into the green room beforehand.
We had a little discussion before I went on, about what was happening to, the network, to CBS.
And it was not all that different from a discussion I had had, some weeks before to somebody from CBS news.
Now, I remember I'm old enough to remember the great days of CBS.
You know, Walter Cronkite and Word Hour. Murrow. I mean, we we looked to CBS news, as the beacon light.
And we also looked to late night comedy, in a funny way, as a, as a way of,
of, of satirizing what was happening in the news and bringing the mighty down, to at least a level of, of where,
where we could, we could laugh at them and maybe they could laugh at themselves. But what has happened now
is that CBS is intimidated, and everybody in CBS is worried about that intimidation.
And I can also say just about the same for ABC.
Again, you cannot appease a tyrant.
And we've got to find ways for these institutions to come together
and create a common front.
The Supreme Court was set up to be theoretically independent and less influenced by the population
and by politics, but as I see the lower court decisions coming out,
our only hope, I think, to save our democracy is the Supreme Court. And I just wondered what you think about, you know, it's particularly insular.
The public feels like it has even less influence over that. Nobody's elected there. The terms are too long, etc..
And so in the balance has changed there. So I'm just wondering, is there any way the public can influence
the Supreme Court? And I'm not naive about that. I just see that a lot of these decisions are going to surface up to the John Roberts court.
And if they don't feel any pressure from anybody, or at least that public opinion really wants, you know, that Hill will be known as the
the Supreme Court judge that gave away our democracy. Whether there's anything we can do effective to to counter that,
the answer is no. Well, nothing nothing easily. Look, the
the Supreme Court, particularly with, with Trump's,
appointees and Alito and Thomas, I mean, Alito and Thomas were bad enough,
in, the Supreme, the, the nominees, the appointees of Trump,
and also the late chief Justice John Roberts, who doesn't seem to have,
a I was going to say moral compass. I think he does have a moral compass. I think he doesn't understand institutionally, what he is doing.
He does not understand the the danger the Supreme Court is in as an institution.
Because as most of you know, the court has no power other than public opinion.
And if it, for example, uses the shadow docket, that is,
it doesn't even it issues opinions that are very important opinions, but doesn't even explain itself
any longer on those critical opinions. Then it loses public confidence.
It loses legitimacy. So I, I would like to say,
that public opinion matters. I think, letters that appear in the New York Times,
for example, criticizing the court, are not irrelevant,
but we if we ever get and I'm telling we that is, the people, the progressive people.
But Democrats but a lot of liberal Republicans, a lot of Republicans who care about, the country
ever get back in power. We do have to consider
the possibility of limiting the terms of Supreme Court justices.
And just a quick note on that. We can do that consistent with article three,
which keeps these people in in place forever.
We can do that by simply rotating them out of the Supreme Court and putting them into the courts of appeals.
So there's nothing in the Constitution that says these supreme Court justice has got to be there
for life. And that I think is is almost a necessity.
Mr.. Right. I wanted to join the chorus of thanking you for being so outspoken and,
and can and, assure you that many, many people are listening to you and you give them hope.
I wanted to ask you a question about, like, political strategy and how to act, in the political realm
to counteract this feeling of powerlessness. And, you know, we heard many times
the Obama administration or leaders say when they go low, we go high.
And, within the context of like a real politic,
do you think what Gavin Newsom, is doing in California
and, you know, fighting fire with fire and taking some risks with perhaps
rigging the system to bring it back into balance? How should we think about that?
Do you think that's a right path, a good pathway that we should support? And do you think all, all blue states need to
to kind of take strategies that are that severe?
Well, first of all, let me say, that what Gavin Newsom is doing
is not simply, responding to Texas
by saying we are going to out gerrymander even Texas. No, Gavin Newsom is saying Texas.
If you gerrymander this way and get five more Republican seats,
we are going to gerrymander only that much. We are going to get five more Democratic seats.
In other words, what he's saying to all the blue state governors is we need to make it
such that there is no advantage by red state governors in trying to gerrymander.
We're taking away all of the incentive. It's like mutually assured destruction. In terms of nuclear weapons, it's not a race to the bottom.
In fact, this is a way of preserving the system, not
creating a race to the bottom. I think he's doing exactly the right thing.
I want to thank you. Mr. Secretary, I run a, nonprofit in the founding, president of a nonprofit that supports commercial fishermen here in Massachusetts.
And it started, with the Fishing Families Assistance centers, under your, reign as, labor secretary.
So your work still echoes here in Massachusetts, at least. The follow up question I have is that, in the last
30 years, the fishermen here have done an amazing job of of two things. One is working with, the public Health Department of Massachusetts to define
a group of workers that have been left behind, by the 21st century.
These are workers. We call them workers without a net, workers who have high rates of pain and injury on the job. But don't have access to paid leave and don't have job security.
So when you group workers like that, you're talking about fishermen, farmers, loggers, construction workers. If you want to look at more urban,
workers, you're talking about, food service workers, home health workers. And these workers are among the workers in the country who are most likely to die
on the job, most likely to die by suicide, mostly, most likely die by an opioid overdose, most likely to be uninsured.
And the fishermen of Massachusetts have come up with an awesome plan. They've gathered together community health workers.
They provide safety training. They have essentially become, a human resources department for commercial fishermen.
My question to you is this I want to say some positive things about your generation, which is,
who I came up under. And, you know, it was President Clinton famously or city or a sweetie, your sweatshirt,
Senator Kennedy, Congressman Frank, the fisherman that I knew who,
who voted for them, are voting for, senator, I mean, President Trump now, and
I guess my question to you is, are there is there anyone that you can suggest to get the word out,
to, to to who these days are,
promoting programs like this on either side? It feels like there just,
isn't a serious effort to support workers outside of the union movement.
And, you know, we literally can't find, politicians, influencers,
just to carry this conversation, forward. Alternatively, if you have an idea of any billionaires, we take that to,
as I understood the question, it was that there are lots of workers in sectors that are not unionized, that are extremely vulnerable
to unemployment, to occupational harm, etc., etc. where can those people find political support
within the electoral system for their concerns, as they're essentially non-unionized?
Workforce for the most part, is that did I good?
Well, let's first of all, let's let's be very clear about something.
The the segment of the workforce in the United States that is
not only not unionized, but has no job security, that are contract workers
that may have before been doing the same thing that they are now doing as contract workers, but that are now contract workers.
And as contract workers have no labor law protections at all.
We're talking about 35 to 40% of the entire workforce of the United States.
Now, this is a big deal, and it's not being talked about. And it's one of the things that the Democratic Party,
if the Democratic Party were the party of the working people, as it should be,
would be talking about and screaming about, because a lot of employers are putting are making people contract workers
who should not be contract workers, that is, they are legally entitled to all the labor protections.
But above and beyond that, what we want to do is expand labor law and labor protections to include all contract workers.
You know, Bob, there's one datum that I've used in this regard, which is that according to the Treasury,
35% of American workers lack $400 as an emergency fund.
Should they run into any kind of economic challenge. That's over a third of American workers
don't have $400 in hand if an emergency should arise. Well, yes.
And the other statistic, I mean, we could we could drown in the kinds of statistics,
but, over 74% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck,
which is pretty much what you are saying. Now, when you have that many people who are that close
to economic calamity. You have a society that is
inherently insecure. If anything should happen suddenly, I mean, let's say the bottom falls
out of the stock market or we have, God forbid, another pandemic or anything. We are not prepared.
And our workforce is very vulnerable.
The economy, therefore, is vulnerable because you can't run an economy if people don't have the money
they need to buy all of the things that the economy can produce. And so there is a kind of a vicious
underlying cycle here at work. And again, if the Democrats knew
what they were doing and had a vision, a moral clarity about what they should be, they would be talking about this.
Thank you. Please forgive the open ended question, but I wonder if you might say a few words. Doctor Lisa Cook. So.
So the question is Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve president firing a member of the Federal Reserve.
Is that so? This question is about the Federal Reserve. Well, look,
most of the public doesn't know what the Federal Reserve does.
And most people therefore don't know that it's being imperiled in the way it is.
They the danger here is and let me put this as, as
as simply as I possibly can, everybody in the world who lends money to the United States
and everybody who indirectly or directly lends money to people
who want to buy a home through a mortgage or anybody who lends money,
in terms of commercial lending to a small business, all those people who are lenders,
they no longer have reason to believe that the United States is committed
to fighting inflation. And the more
that Donald Trump says, I want to reduce interest rates, I'm going to put people on the fed who are going to reduce interest rates.
All the lenders of the world are going to ask for a higher and higher risk premium
on long term lending, because they don't know that there's a cop on the beat
to prevent inflation. To say this another way,
Donald Trump doesn't know what he's doing.
And on that note that Donald Trump doesn't know what he's doing.
I want to. Richard, first of all, I want to thank you. I want to thank all of you.
