Robert Reich
Robert Reich, the ubiquitous economist and Living New Deal Advisory Board member, is taking his message of economic inequality to the masses. Reich, a UC Berkeley professor and a prolific author, is also an accidental movie star. His documentary “Inequality for All” sounds the alarm about the country’s widening economic gap– its causes, implications, and what we can do about it.
“Inequality for All” opened on September 27 and is showing in theaters nationwide. Like Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film about global warming, Reich’s film offers an engaging lecture. This time the “inconvenient truth” is the evaporating prosperity of the American middle class. Reich answers why since the 1980s Americans that have jobs are working more and earning less.
Reich was U.S. Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration, during which time unemployment in the U.S. dropped to the lowest level in thirty years.
Reich and Bill Clinton met when they were Rhodes scholars at Oxford University. Today Reich is a road warrior, traveling nearly non-stop and drawing crowds and media attention wherever “Inequality for All” is playing.
The film created a buzz when it premiered at the star-studded Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Since then, Reich has left no media stone unturned. He writes a daily blog, maintains a popular website, uploads his talks to YouTube, and has a vast Facebook following. He has recently published op-eds in The New York Times
and Salon.
“Inequality for All” has been reviewed in such divergent publications as the Huffington Post, the Hollywood Reporter, and the Salt Lake City Tribune. Reich has appeared on the PBS News Hour, CNN, The Daily Show, Bill Moyers, and Democracy Now. You can watch him in action on The Colbert Report, for example. Conservative talk show hosts like Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly regularly rail against Reich, but refuse to debate him.
Either way, Reich is reaching the choir and beyond. His message: Inequality is bad for everyone. Let’s change it.
For more information: inequalityforall.com