Robert Reich has had a long and honored career of government service, activism, and teaching. Of late he’s been addressing economic matters and the way the economy does not work for too many people.
Reich also likes to draw, and if anyone has been following his videos at Inequality Media, he has developed a style to illustrate his messages that is very accessible.
This latest effort comes out of something he’s been thinking about for a while: How we got into this mess and how we get out of it. He’s broken up recent history into 5 eras, starting in 1946. As he draws each era, he narrates what it’s about. Here’s a description from his email about it:
...Part 1 on the far left — representing 1946 to 1979. This was the time when America’s middle class grew, upward mobility was the norm, and America became more equal.
Part 2, the second column on my wall, depicts 1980 to 2000 — the era when neoliberalism, deregulation, privatization, globalization, Wall Street, and Ronald Reagan conspired to reverse the path we’d been on. The result was widening inequality, a shrinking middle class, and stalled mobility.
Part 3, in the middle column on my wall, represents 2008 to 2010, when the financial economy nearly collapsed, exposing the underlying rigging of the system. Banks were bailed out, but millions of people lost their homes, jobs, and savings.
Part 4, the second-to-last column, shows what happened between 2010 and 2016, when the losers of the rigged game expressed their anger through the “Tea Party” movement, the “Occupy” movement, and the sudden appearance of two populists — Bernie Sanders on the progressive left and Donald Trump on the authoritarian right.
Part 5, the final column, represents 2016 to 2050 — an era when I believe America will come to a basic decision about whether it wants authoritarian neofascism to run the country from the top down, or a robust democracy in which the gains from growth are widely shared.
The Youtube video of this presentation has a briefer description:
I’ve been in or around politics for over a half-century now. I’ve watched as corporations ransacked our system. In 1952, the corporate share of federal tax revenue was 32%. In 2020, it was down to 7%.
Here’s how we break the corporate oligarchy and return power to the people.
Here it is.
I would love to get a poster-sized version of the Big Picture, and I’d pay extra for a signed copy. (I’d love to see it show up in classrooms too, but I expect it would drive the right wing nuts.) You can sign up to subscribe to Reich’s efforts at Inequality Media and make donations.