The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich

My friends,As I mentioned last night, I thought Biden’s second State of the Union address was superb. It was one of the best State of the Union speeches I’ve witnessed — and I’ve witnessed many. Biden’s record so far has also been impressive — even though for the first two years of his presidency, the Democrats held a razor-thin congressional majority, and the Republican Party has become more traitorous and treacherous than at any time in modern American history. Yet despite Biden’s impressive record, only 42 percent of Americans approve of his presidency. That’s barely above the 41 percent at his last State of the Union address, and a lower approval rating at this point in his presidency than any president in 75 years of polling except for Trump and Reagan (who at this point was hobbled by a deep recession).Despite Biden’s significant achievements, fully 62 percent think he has accomplished “not very much” or “little or nothing” during his presidency. Majorities believe he has made no progress on his signature initiatives — from improving the country’s infrastructure to making electric vehicles more affordable to creating jobs.And even though jobs are being created at an almost unprecedented rate, unemployment is at its lowest since 1969, and inflation is dropping, Americans are deeply pessimistic about the economy.So what gives? Why the discrepancy between what Biden is achieving and what Americans think? Please share your thoughts. I’ll give you my take later today. Also, please take our poll:Let me add a few thoughts of my own. First, let me stress my belief that Joe Biden has been an exceptionally good president. The only reason I bring up his low ratings is to try to understand why, despite his achievements, most of the public doesn’t seem to share my view. Opinion polls are notoriously inaccurate, as we’ve all witnessed in the last major elections. Yet Biden’s consistently low ratings across almost all polls — and the bizarre fact that he’s polling no better than Trump did at this point in Trump’s presidency — can’t be blamed simply on inadequate polling methods.Many of you blame the media — both Fox News and its radical right imitators, as well as the mainstream — for minimizing Biden’s achievements and exaggerating his inadequacies. I largely agree. Fox News and other rightwing outlets continue to poison America. As to the mainstream media, as to anyone who reads this letter knows, I’ve been deeply concerned about its “two-sides” ism and absurd attempts to draw moral equivalence between Republicans and Democrats. That said, only a small fraction of the public is exposed to Fox News or to the New York Times or the Washington Post. The media alone can’t account for Biden’s low ratings. I want to suggest to you three other culprits that to my mind are playing a larger role. First is the legacy of Trump, along with the deeply cynical and angry divide he has spawned in America. Even if George Washington were president right now, some 40 percent of the public would likely despise him. Second is social media, which has become a cauldron of ever more extremist rage. Under Elon Musk, for example, Twitter has become less of a “public square” than a hell-hole of hate. No national leader is immune to such relentless battering.Third and perhaps most importantly is the continuing crises that most Americans find themselves in. Some two-thirds of us are living paycheck to paycheck. Almost no one has job security. Adjusted for inflation, the median wage continues to drop. COVID is receding but “long” COVID is taking a devastating toll. Fentanyl and related drug poisonings continue to rise. Joe Biden and his administration have made important progress. Their legislative victories are important. The American Rescue Act helped millions survive the pandemic. But most Americans are still hurting. Hopefully, by the fall of 2024, the hurt won’t be nearly as bad. RR This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome back to my Saturday coffee klatch with Heather Lofthouse, executive director of Inequality Media Civic Action (and my former student), when we review the highs and lows of the week. Today we look at:— Friday’s extraordinary labor report, showing that 517,000 new jobs were created in January, almost double the number in December. How is the Fed likely to react?— Kevin McCarthy’s moves on the debt ceiling and on committee assignments in the Republican House. Why is he putting Marjorie Taylor Greene on key committees but excluding Ilhan Omar? — Waiting for other shoes to drop — Ukraine, Trump, and the economy. What can we foresee? Please grab a cup and pull up a chair. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Friends,Speaker Kevin McCarthy said this week that Republicans will not call for cuts in Social Security or Medicare as they wheel and deal over the debt ceiling. He has promised to take Social Security and Medicare cuts “off the table.”Here are 10 reasons why you shouldn’t believe him:1. It’s incredibly difficult to cut federal spending without touching Social Security and Medicare. Social Security and Medicare together comprise over a third of the federal budget. Everything else (except defense, which is a sixth of the budget) is tiny by comparison.2. Republicans don’t want to cut defense, but they haven’t said what they’d cut other than Social Security, Medicare, and defense. 3.  A number of senior Republicans in the House — including Reps. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), Jodey Arrington (R-Texas), Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), and Lloyd Smucker (R-Pa.) —have said they view the debt ceiling as a “leverage point” to extract concessions from Democrats, including potentially raising the retirement age and reducing Social Security benefits.4.  Several Republicans who will serve on the House Budget Committee have explicitly said they plan to take aim at Social Security and Medicare. (Georgia’s Buddy Carter said, “Our main focus has got to be on nondiscretionary — it’s got to be on entitlements.”)5.  In an appearance on Fox News, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) defended his party’s plans for “shoring up” Medicare and Social Security — using the false talking point that they are in a “crisis.” (I used to be a trustee of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds and still keep up with the reports, and I can assure you they’re not in danger of running out of money.)6.  The Republican Study Committee released a proposal last year calling for the retirement age to be raised to 70, for means-testing Social Security benefits, and for partially privatizing Social Security.7.  Last April, Senator Rick Scott (R-Fla.), chair of the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, issued a multipoint manifesto calling for ending funding for Social Security, Medicare, and other so-called “nondiscretionary” programs every five years, unless a congressional majority explicitly voted to renew them. Scott’s plan would also “force Congress to issue a report every year telling the public what they plan to do when Social Security and Medicare go bankrupt,” a reference to the assumed (and inaccurate) depletion of its trust funds in a few years.8.  Prominent Republicans continue to devise plans to burden Social Security. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) recently proposed financing parental leave by having working parents borrow payments from their future Social Security benefits. If a parent died before “paying back” their benefits, their heirs would be forced to pay it from what remained of the parent’s estate.9.  Republicans have hated Social Security since its inception in 1935 and Medicare since it began in 1965. They called FDR a “socialist” for passing Social Security. They called Lyndon Johnson a “socialist” for passing Medicare. Before Medicare was created, Ronald Reagan warned of the existential dangers of “socialized medicine.” 10. Their opposition to these programs has not been merely ideological. They have been horrified at how popular these programs are with the public and how much the public relies on them — thereby justifying government activism for the benefit of average working people. Which is why former Speaker Newt Gingrich wanted Medicare “to wither on the vine,” why former President George W. Bush privatized parts of Medicare and sought to privatize Social Security, and why former Speaker Paul Ryan proposed annual budgets to turn Medicare into a voucher program and privatize Social Security.Be warned. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Friends,Good morning, and welcome back to another Saturday morning coffee klatch with my guest Heather Lofthouse, who runs Inequality Media Civic Action and was also my student long ago. (I recently did a back-of-the-envelope estimate on how many of my former students are out there after 42 years of teaching, and it came to 28,000!) Each Saturday we talk about the highs and lows of the previous week. This week it was mostly lows:Mass killings. Why can’t we seem to be able to do anything about this?Why is Kevin McCarthy putting bottom feeders like Marjorie Taylor Greene and George Santos on key House committees while kicking off dedicated public servants like Adam Schiff? Trump redux. Why are Twitter and Facebook allowing him back on, and should we be concerned? Please grab a cup and pull up a chair. And before you go, take our poll. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Friends, Weeks after Elon Musk’s decision to reinstate Donald Trump on Twitter, Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) yesterday announced it will allow Trump back on its platforms, too. “The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying — the good, the bad and the ugly — so that they can make informed choices at the ballot box,” wrote Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs and the U.K.’s former deputy prime minister, in a blog post announcing the decision.With due respect to Nick Clegg, this is rubbish. Trump is far worse than an ugly politician. He’s a dangerous traitor to American democracy. You know this, of course. You and I have lived it. We were there when Trump refused to concede the 2020 presidential election, based on no evidence. We saw how he used Facebook and Twitter to mount an attempted coup, which included an attack on the U.S. Capitol that left five dead.We’ve watched him continue to push his big lie. We’ve witnessed the ongoing violence his big lie provokes, even without the giant megaphones of Twitter and Facebook.Facebook says it has a “policy” of not fact-checking political candidates. This means it will make no effort to correct Trump’s future lies on its platform, because Trump has declared himself a candidate for president in 2024.So, the most dangerous traitor in recent American history gets back his giant megaphones because a corporate behemoth decides it’s time to have him back?This doesn’t seem right to me. America is still struggling with the damage Trump did to our democracy. We must not normalize it by calling it “free speech” or characterizing additional access to him as “hearing what our politicians are saying.”The deeper question is how the issue of whether Trump should get back his giant megaphones — a question with such important consequences for our democracy — should be decided.Meta’s and Twitter’s size and reach make them major players in our system of self-government. Trump’s “Truth Social” reaches only 4.8 million followers. That’s peanuts compared to his 34 million followers on Facebook when the attack on the Capitol occurred, his 23 million on Instagram, and his 88.9 million on Twitter. These platforms had significant political power by the time Trump attempted his coup — power they are now exercising in allowing him back. But how can such private power be reconciled with their lack of public accountability? It cannot. Even though Meta has made a former deputy prime minister its president of global affairs and calls its decisions “policies” (such as Facebook’s “policy” of not fact-checking political candidates), it is not publicly accountable. Its policies are not public policies. They don’t emerge from our democratic process. They are private, arbitrary, corporate. America has been shut out of the decisions to give back to Trump the loudest megaphones in the land and to let him to spout his lies unchecked — although we witnessed the public havoc he created just over two years ago when he used these same megaphones, unchecked. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t believe our democracy should depend on the decisions of capricious billionaires or a former U.K. official to allow a traitorous demagogue back on their giant platforms. And I don’t see why Twitter and Facebook should be allowed to exercise such extraordinary power over our democracy. What’s the alternative? Antitrust laws were enacted more than a century ago to protect our democracy from being undermined by giant corporations. Yet this what Twitter and Meta are now doing. In my view, we should reduce the size and reach of these huge corporate megaphones by using antitrust laws to break them up.What do you think? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Friends,Welcome back to my Saturday coffee klatch with Heather Lofthouse, executive director of Inequality Media Civic Action (and my former student). This morning we take a look at the past week, in particular:— The debt ceiling scare, and the House Republicans’ attempt to hold the full faith and credit of the U.S. hostage to their demands.— George Santos, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and other luminaries of the new Republican House.— Supreme Court leaks, who Sherlock Holmes would name as the probable leaker, and why the Court doesn’t have a code of ethics.Grab a cup and pull up a chair, and also take our poll. And per our discussion, a photo of me teaching eons ago: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Friends,My good wishes to you on this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I live in California, near the coast. Since the week after Christmas, we have been pummeled by eight “atmospheric rivers,” a weather phenomenon that summons moisture into a powerful band and then unleashes intense blasts of precipitation.The stream next to my house has become a river and some of the roads I rely on are impassible. I’m one of the lucky ones. At least 19 people have died as storms continue to cause widespread flooding, mudslides and power outages. Another storm is hitting today. Millions of Californians are under a flood watch. Among the most vulnerable are low-income people who live in fragile structures or are homeless, disproportionately people of color. We don’t talk nearly enough about the consequences of climate change for the most vulnerable among us. If Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today, I’m sure he would be. Why is the media so tentative about attributing the devastation here in California to climate change at all? Or the climate havoc all over America, and the world?Saturday’s New York Times front-page story about what’s happening now in California didn’t even mention the words “climate change” until the 26th paragraph, the third from the last. Even then it didn’t blame man-made climate change but referred obliquely to climate scientists who “say” climate change “amplifies normal extremes” of drought and flooding. A review of coverage by national TV news in the weeks after the storms began found that (with one exception) cable news and national broadcast networks failed to link California’s devastating storms to the global climate crisis. It’s as if we’re living in two worlds carrying separate stories — in one, stories about the devastation occurring all around us; in another, stories about the findings and solemn warnings of climate scientists. Why aren’t they the same story, including the perils suffered by the most vulnerable? To be sure, it's difficult to directly attribute specific storms to climate change. Meteorology isn’t precise when it comes to causes and effects. But is there any doubt that the Earth is warming due to human causes, resulting in more extreme weather exactly of the sort we’ve been experiencing on the West Coast? Climate change did not directly produce the raging water that pulled a five-year-old boy from his mother’s arms as he was on his way to school in San Luis Obispo County last Monday, of course, but climate change was obviously behind this tragedy — as it’s been behind so many other tragedies that have been faithfully reported but whose underlying cause is being ignored or reported in the 26th or so paragraph. I understood years ago why editors, publishers, and TV producers were reluctant to wade into the political fight over climate change. It was too charged, too partisan, too many facts were in dispute, and Republicans were adamant in their refusal to concede that human-created climate change posed a clear and present danger. The media were content to report on climate catastrophes and leave the debate up to the politicians.But now? There’s no longer any legitimate dispute. News outlets have no excuse for temerity in connecting tragic weather events to the undeniable, violent changes in the Earth’s weather. It’s like journalists who report on the high rate of homicides in America without mentioning how easy it is to get guns in this country, or the reporters during the early stages of Trump’s presidency who didn’t want to come right out and say he lied. A failure to make such clear connections is itself misleading. Each climate calamity we endure is another learning opportunity for the nation to understand the existential threat of climate change and why we must take the lead in reversing it. For the media to avoid talking about it is a loss for democracy. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome back to my Saturday coffee klatch with Heather Lofthouse, executive director of Inequality Media Civic Action (and my former student). In response to our discussion last week about work and family — and our New Year’s resolutions for how to better balance them — many of you asked how we actually spend our days. So that’s the topic of today’s klatch. (We’ll return to politics, economics, and all the other big topics next week.)Please grab a cup and pull up a chair. And also take our poll. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome back to my Saturday coffee klatch with Heather Lofthouse, executive director of Inequality Media Civic Action (and my former student), where we usually talk about the highs and low of the prior week. But with the new year just beginning and House Republicans tied up in knots, we thought we’d make today’s klatch a bit more personal: How we and others we know are trying to both do our work and still have a life. Grab a cup and pull up a chair. And please be sure to take our poll and add your comments. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe

Friends,Welcome to the challenges of 2023. Today I want to talk about one of the first. When the 118th Congress is sworn in tomorrow, Republicans will hold very narrow control of the House — 222 seats to the Democrat’s 213. The first thing they’ll do is vote for the next Speaker (who’ll determine the agenda for the House, what bills make it to the floor, the fate of critical legislation such as spending bills, and the House’s negotiating positions with Senate leaders and the White House).The most likely is the current Republican House Leader, Kevin McCarthy. He could squeak by with 218 votes, a bare majority of House members. But if just 5 Republicans vote against him, he won’t make it. (Technically, he could be elected with fewer than 218 votes if he persuades Republican lawmakers who don’t want to vote for him to instead vote “present” or to miss the vote entirely.)To get the votes he needs, McCarthy will have to cozy up to the MAGA “Freedom Caucus,” which includes bizarro extremists like South Carolina's Ralph Norman (who as late as January 17, 2021 urged Trump to invoke martial law), Andy Biggs of Arizona, Ohio's Jim Jordan, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Georgia's Marjorie Taylor Greene, Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, and some 30 others, none of whom you’d want to invite to dinner. For their support, the Freedom Caucus is demanding that any member be able to call a vote at any time to oust McCarthy (a “motion to vacate the chair”) if he strays from their hard MAGA line. (Under current rules, only party leaders can bring such a motion.)Which would put McCarthy on a very short leash controlled by the Freedom Caucus (with Trump indirectly controlling them). In effect, Trump and the Freedom Caucus would call many of the shots — on committee assignments, investigations (Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, the FBI), and key issues like raising the debt ceiling (they’ll demand that McCarthy refuse — imperiling the credit of the United States and catapulting the nation into an economic crisis). Does this mean the rest of us have to sit back and allow a tiny minority of extreme rightwing MAGA House Republicans controlled by Donald Trump to hijack congressional Republicans, who in turn will hijack the entire House, and thereby much of Congress?No. There’s an alternative, and I urge House Democrats and the few remaining “moderate” Republicans to take it: Make Ohio’s Republican Rep. David Joyce the Speaker of the House. House Dems and moderate Republicans could come up with the 218 votes to put Joyce over the top. Why Joyce? He’s the new chairman of the Republican Conference Group, a group you probably never heard of (years ago it was called the “Tuesday Group”) because it flies under the radar. It’s a collection of the remaining 40 or so Republican moderates. I say “moderate” only in comparison to the rest of the Republican House. The Conference Group at least wants the government to function. Joyce would be acceptable to most current Republican representatives, even though the Freedom Caucus won’t want anything to do with him. During Trump’s presidency, he voted in line with Trump's stated position 91.8% of the time. And he voted against impeaching Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. In other words, But Joyce is not a MAGA Republican. He refused to sign the Texas amicus brief that tried to overturn the results of the presidential election. He was also one of the few Republican House members who did not object to the counting of electoral college votes on January 6, 2021. Since Biden became president, Joyce has voted in line with Biden’s positions over 30 percent of the time. He was one of 35 Republicans who joined all Democrats in approving legislation to establish the January 6 commission to investigate the storming of the US Capitol. He and 46 other Republicans voted for the Respect for Marriage Act, codifying the right to same-sex marriage in federal law. Overall, Joyce’s politics are similar to Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s. “Everybody’s a Joe Manchin,” Joyce said a few weeks ago. Joyce wants to keep swing-district Republicans out of the harm’s way coming from the Freedom Caucus and other MAGA conservatives. He saw what happened to Ohio Republican candidates viewed as too close to Trump’s MAGA wing: The state’s House delegation shrank from an eight-member edge for Republicans to just five because voters rejected several MAGA GOP candidates. “There’s some exotics that like chaos, they thrive in chaos because that’s how they get the media,” Joyce told the Washington Post. Given that the likeliest alternative will be a Speaker McCarthy beholden to the Freedom Caucus, Joyce should be Speaker — and he could be if House Democrats support him. I urge them to do so. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit robertreich.substack.com/subscribe