By John Lawrence
This is Robert Reich’s latest venture in an attempt to inform the American public about what’s really going on with the economy in this society. He’s tried everything else: Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley in which he teaches a course on Wealth and Poverty, a blog, where he had as many as 300 comments after each post until he shut down the comments due to a persistent vile and threatening commenter who stooped to anti-semitic comments, 13 books, the latest being “Beyond Outrage,” Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, radio and TV appearances, lectures.
He also worked in the Ford and Carter administrations. Reich has always been concerned about those who are struggling to keep their heads above water, and in today’s world that includes almost all of the former members of the middle class.
The major metaphor in the film is a suspension bridge which fits perfectly over a graph of the concentration of wealth that occurred at two points in American history, the first being in 1928 and the second being in 2008. These are the two high points of the suspension bridge and correspond to the two points of peak inequality in American society after which there was a crash: the Great Depression and the Great Recession. [Read more…]