PBS Newshour: Robert Reich responds to Obama admin's outreach to business community

[alp227]

Run time: 12:25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvSGWoqjx6E   Posted on YouTube: January 22, 2011 By YouTube Member: PBSNewsHour Views on YouTube: 393   Posted on DU: January 25, 2011 By DU Member: alp227 Views on DU: 395

 
Jeffrey Brown interviewed Reich, the Clinton admin Secretary of Labor, alongside John Makin, former consultant to the Treasury and Congressional Budget Office and current resident scholar of the American Enterprise Institute. Highlights from Reich's interview on Friday's PBS Newshour, taken from the transcript of segment "Obama Presses for an Economy in 'Overdrive': Will Jobs Soon Follow?":

...it is very important that the president not be seduced into thinking that the interests of big business are the same as the interests of the American economy, or, for that matter, the interests of American workers.

Big companies like General Electric and others have made profits recently, indeed, for the last 30 years, but more intensively over the last 10 years, by actually cutting their payrolls, by laying people off, by reducing wages and benefits. That is not going to be helpful to the American work force.

...the biggest reason we are having such a problem right now is the vast majority of Americans don't have the wages, the salaries, the wherewithal to spend in the economy, to keep the economy going.

And one reason they don't is, after 30 years of outsourcing, of shaving payrolls, of putting pressure on unions to provide wage concessions and benefit concessions, and also doing all sorts of things that reduce, automate, that use the technologies to get rid of jobs, most Americans just simply are not part of the global economy in terms of American prosperity any longer.

But I do want to emphasize that we are now experiencing in this country a degree of concentration of income and wealth at the top that we have not seen since 1928. Trickle-down economics has not worked. The median wage, the average wage for the typical American worker, has gone absolutely nowhere.

[QC]

1. The American Enterprise Institute {hearts} Obama! n/t