{"product_id":"aftershockinequality-for-allmovie-tiein-edition-isbn-9780345807229","title":"Aftershock(Inequality for All--Movie Tie-in Edition)","description":"\u003cb\u003eUpdated and With a New Introduction\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen the nation’s economy foundered in 2008, blame was directed almost universally at Wall Street bankers. But Robert B. Reich, one of our most experienced and trusted voices on public policy, suggests another reason for the meltdown. Our real problem, he argues, lies in the increasing concentration of income at the top, robbing the vast middle class of the purchasing power it needs to keep the economy going. This thoughtful and detailed account of the American economy—and how we can fix it—is a practical, humane, and much-needed blueprint for rebuilding our society.\u003cb\u003ePraise for Robert B. Reich's \u003ci\u003eInequality for All\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Important and well executed. . . . Reich is fluent, fearless, even amusing.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Reich provides a thoughtful dialogue about the structural problems that led to the recent recession. . . . His ideas are worth exploring.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“[Reich] suggests a number of innovative ways to reverse the trend toward greater inequality and usher in another, more hopeful phase in American history.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Charlotte Observer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“One of the clearest explanations to date of . . . how the United States went from . . . ‘the Great Prosperity’ of 1947 to 1975 to the Great Recession.” \u003cbr\u003e—Bob Herbert, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“All Americans will benefit from reading this insightful, timely book.” \u003cbr\u003e—Bill Bradley\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Lucid and cogent.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Well argued and frighteningly plausible: without a return to the 'basic bargain' (that workers are also consumers), the 'aftershock' of the Great Recession includes a long-term high unemployment and a political backlash—a crisis, he notes with a sort of grim optimism, that just might be painful enough to encourage necessary structural reforms.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eRobert B. Reich\u003c\/b\u003e is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton, and he served as an adviser to President-elect Barack Obama. He has written twelve books, including \u003ci\u003eThe Work of Nations \u003c\/i\u003e(which has been translated into twenty-two languages), \u003ci\u003eSupercapitalism, \u003c\/i\u003eand the best sellers \u003ci\u003eThe Next American Frontier, The Future of Success, Locked in the Cabinet,\u003c\/i\u003e and, most recently, \u003ci\u003eAftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future\u003c\/i\u003e. His articles have appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, \u003c\/i\u003ethe \u003ci\u003eFinancial Times, The Washington Post, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eHe is co-founding editor of \u003ci\u003eThe American Prospect \u003c\/i\u003emagazine and chairman of Common Cause. His bi-weekly commentaries on public radio’s \u003ci\u003eMarketplace \u003c\/i\u003eare heard by nearly five million people. In 2003, Reich was awarded the prestigious Václav Havel Foundation Prize for pioneering work in economic and social thought. In 2008, \u003ci\u003eTime \u003c\/i\u003emagazine named him one of the ten most successful cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century, and \u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal \u003c\/i\u003enamed him one of the nation’s ten most influential business thought-leaders.1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEccles’s Insight\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  Federal Reserve Board, arguably the most powerful group of economic  decision-makers in the world, is housed in the Eccles Building on  Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. A long, white, mausoleum-like  structure, the building is named after Marriner Eccles, who chaired the  Board from November 1934 until April 1948. These were crucial years in  the history of the American economy, and the world’s.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile  Eccles is largely forgotten today, he offered critical insight into the  great pendulum of American capitalism. His analysis of the underlying  economic stresses of the Great Depression is extraordinarily, even  eerily, relevant to the Crash of 2008. It also offers if not a blueprint  for the future, at least a suggestion of what to expect in the coming  years.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA small, slender man with dark eyes and a pale, sharp  face, Eccles was born in Logan, Utah, in 1890. His father, David Eccles,  a poor Mormon immigrant from Glasgow, Scotland, had come to Utah,  married two women, became a businessman, and made a fortune. Young  Marriner, one of David’s twenty-one children, trudged off to Scotland at  the start of 1910 as a Mormon missionary but returned home two years  later to become a bank president. By age twenty-four he was a  millionaire; by forty he was a tycoon—director of railroad, hotel, and  insurance companies; head of a bank holding company controlling  twenty-six banks; and president of lumber, milk, sugar, and construction  companies spanning the Rockies to the Sierra Nevadas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the  Crash of 1929, his businesses were sufficiently diverse and his banks  adequately capitalized that he stayed afloat financially. But he was  deeply shaken when his assumption that the economy would quickly return  to normal was, as we know, proved incorrect. “Men I respected assured me  that the economic crisis was only temporary,” he wrote, “and that soon  all the things that had pulled the country out of previous depressions  would operate to that same end once again. But weeks turned to months.  The months turned to a year or more. Instead of easing, the economic  crisis worsened.” He himself had come to realize by late 1930 that  something was profoundly wrong, not just with the economy but with his  own understanding of it. “I awoke to find myself at the bottom of a pit  without any known means of scaling its sheer sides. . . . I saw for the  first time that though I’d been active in the world of finance and  production for seventeen years and knew its techniques, I knew less than  nothing about its economic and social effects.” Everyone who relied on  him—family, friends, business associates, the communities that depended  on the businesses he ran—expected him to find a way out of the pit. “Yet  all I could find within myself was despair.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen Eccles’s  anxious bank depositors began demanding their money, he called in loans  and reduced credit in order to shore up the banks’ reserves. But the  reduced lending caused further economic harm. Small businesses couldn’t  get the loans they needed to stay alive. In spite of his actions, Eccles  had nagging concerns that by tightening credit instead of easing it, he  and other bankers were saving their banks at the expense of  community—in “seeking individual salvation, we were contributing to  collective ruin.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEconomists and the leaders of business and Wall  Street—including financier Bernard Baruch; W. W. Atterbury, president  of the Pennsylvania Railroad; and Myron Taylor, chairman of the United  States Steel Corporation—sought to reassure the country that the market  would correct itself automatically, and that the government’s only  responsibility was to balance the federal budget. Lower prices and  interest rates, they said, would inevitably “lure ‘natural new  investments’ by men who still had money and credit and whose revived  activity would produce an upswing in the economy.” Entrepreneurs would  put their money into new technologies that would lead the way to  prosperity. But Eccles wondered why anyone would invest when the economy  was so severely disabled. Such investments, he reasoned, “take place in  a climate of high prosperity, when the purchasing power of the masses  increases their demands for a higher standard of living and enables them  to purchase more than their bare wants. In the America of the thirties  what hope was there for developments on the technological frontier when  millions of our people hadn’t enough purchasing power for even their  barest needs?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was a more elaborate and purportedly  “ethical” argument offered by those who said nothing could be done. Many  of those business leaders and economists of the day believed “a  depression was the scientific operation of economic laws that were  God-given and not man-made. They could not be interfered with.” They  said depressions were phenomena like the one described in the biblical  story of Joseph and the seven kine, in which Pharaoh dreamed of seven  bountiful years followed by seven years of famine, and that America was  now experiencing the lean years that inevitably followed the full ones.  Eccles wrote, “They further explained that we were in the lean years  because we had been spendthrifts and wastrels in the roaring twenties.  We had wasted what we earned instead of saving it. We had enormously  inflated values. But in time we would sober up and the economy would  right itself through the action of men who had been prudent and thrifty  all along, who had saved their money and at the right time would  reinvest it in new production. Then the famine would end.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEccles  thought this was nonsense. A devout Mormon, he saw that what passed for  the God-given operation of economics “was nothing more than a  determination of this or that interest, specially favored by the status  quo, to resist any new rules that might be to their disadvantage.” He  wrote, “It became apparent to me, as a capitalist, that if I lent myself  to this sort of action and resisted any change designed to benefit all  the people, I could be consumed by the poisons of social lag I had  helped create.” Eccles also saw that “men with great economic power had  an undue influence in making the rules of the economic game, in shaping  the actions of government that enforced those rules, and in conditioning  the attitude taken by people as a whole toward those rules. After I had  lost faith in my business heroes, I concluded that I and everyone else  had an equal right to share in the process by which economic rules are  made and changed.” One of the country’s most powerful economic leaders  concluded that the economic game was not being played on a level field.  It was tilted in favor of those with the most wealth and power.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEccles  made his national public debut before the Senate Finance Committee in  February 1933, just weeks before Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in as  president. The committee was holding hearings on what, if anything,  should be done to deal with the ongoing economic crisis. Others had  advised reducing the national debt and balancing the federal budget, but  Eccles had different advice. Anticipating what British economist John  Maynard Keynes would counsel three years later in his famous \u003ci\u003eGeneral Theory of Employment, Interest and Money\u003c\/i\u003e,  Eccles told the senators that the government had to go deeper into debt  in order to offset the lack of spending by consumers and businesses.  Eccles went further. He advised the senators on ways to get more money  into the hands of the beleaguered middle class. He offered a precise  program designed “to bring about, by Government action, an increase of  purchasing power on the part of all the people.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEccles arrived  at these ideas not by any temperamental or cultural affinity—he was,  after all, a banker and of Scottish descent—but by logic and experience.  He understood the economy from the ground up. He saw how average people  responded to economic downturns, and how his customers reacted to the  deep crisis at hand. He merely connected the dots. His proposed program  included relief for the unemployed, government spending on public works,  government refinancing of mortgages, a federal minimum wage, federally  supported old-age pensions, and higher income taxes and inheritance  taxes on the wealthy in order to control capital accumulations and avoid  excessive speculation. Not until these recommendations were  implemented, Eccles warned, could the economy be fully restored.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEccles  then returned to Utah, from where he watched Roosevelt hatch the first  hundred days of his presidency. To Eccles, the new president’s  initiatives seemed barely distinguishable from what his predecessor,  Herbert Hoover, had offered—a hodgepodge of ideas cooked up by Wall  Street to keep it afloat but do little for anyone else. “New York, as  usual, seems to be in the saddle, dominating fiscal and monetary  policy,” he wrote to his friend George Dern, the former governor of Utah  who had become Roosevelt’s secretary of war.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn mid-December  1933, Eccles received a telegram from Roosevelt’s Treasury secretary,  Henry Morgenthau, Jr., asking him to return to Washington at the  earliest possible date to “talk about monetary matters.” Eccles was  perplexed. The new administration had shown no interest in his ideas. He  had never met Morgenthau, who was a strong advocate for balancing the  federal budget. After their meeting, the mystery only deepened.  Morgenthau asked Eccles to write a report on monetary policy, which  Eccles could as easily have written in Utah. A few days later Morgenthau  invited Eccles to his home, where he asked about Eccles’s business  connections, his personal finances, and the condition of his businesses,  namely whether any had gone bankrupt. Finally, Morgenthau took Eccles  into his confidence. “You’ve been recommended as someone I should get to  help me in the Treasury Department,” Morgenthau said. Eccles was taken  aback, and asked for a few days to think about it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“‘Here you  are, Marriner, full of talk about what the government should and  shouldn’t do,’” Eccles told himself, as he later recounted in his  memoirs. “‘You ought to put up or shut up. . . . You’re afraid your  theory won’t work. You’re afraid you’ll be a damned fool. You want to  stick it out in Utah and wear the hair shirt of a prophet crying in the  wilderness. You can feel noble that way, and you run no risks. [But] if  you don’t come here you’ll probably regret it for the rest of your  life.’” Eccles talked himself into the job.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor many months  thereafter, Eccles steeped himself in the work of the Treasury and the  Roosevelt administration, pushing his case for why the government needed  to go deeper into debt to prop up the economy, and what it needed to do  for average people. Apparently he made progress. Roosevelt’s budget of  1934 contained many of Eccles’s ideas, violating the president’s  previous promise to balance the federal budget. The president “swallowed  the violation with considerable difficulty,” Eccles wrote.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  following summer, after the governor of the Federal Reserve Board  unexpectedly resigned, Morgenthau recommend-ed Eccles for the job.  Eccles had not thought about the Fed as a vehicle for advancing his  ideas. But a few weeks later, when the president summoned him to the  White House to ask if he’d be interested, Eccles told Roosevelt he’d  take the job if the Federal Reserve in Washington had more power over  the supply of money, and the New York Fed (dominated by Wall Street  bankers), less. Eccles knew Wall Street wanted a tight money supply and  correspondingly high interest rates, but the Main Streets of America—the  real economy—needed a loose money supply and low rates. Roosevelt  agreed to support new legislation that would tip the scales toward Main  Street. Eccles took over the Fed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor the next fourteen years,  with great vigor and continuing vigilance for the welfare of average  people, Eccles helped steer the economy through the remainder of the  Depression and through World War II. He would also become one of the  architects of the Great Prosperity that the nation and much of the rest  of the world enjoyed after the war.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301911089381,"sku":"NP9780345807229","price":22.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345807229.jpg?v=1767721115","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/aftershockinequality-for-allmovie-tiein-edition-isbn-9780345807229","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}