Robert Reich, who served as the secretary of labor under the Clinton administration and is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, has recently moved to Inverness. On Sunday he spoke at the Dance Palace about the importance of sustained economic growth and the buying power of the middle-class in the face of massive budget deficits; he argued that “the rich would be better off with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy than a big share of an economy that’s going nowhere,” and said in order to get beyond outrage we must personally become engaged—“mobilizing, activating, talking with people who disagree with us—but also by keeping our eye focused on the big is- sues… we’ve got to take democracy back and take the economy back for average people.” He ended on an optimistic, even a patriotic, note. “There is an insistence in this country—like no place else on earth—an insistence on getting on with the fundamental job and direction of this country, which is and has always been progressive,” he said. “The problem is we often don’t recognize the specific problems that have to be tackled. We get distracted by ideology, we get distracted by slogans. We don’t know right now as much as we should know about the ways in which we should deal with some of the tremendous and obvious things that are beginning to require our attention, such as climate change, such as widening inequality, such as money in politics. But I can guarantee you that we will. The question is how and when.”
Robert Reich speaks at the Dance Palace
