Just as coronavirus infection and death rates have highlighted race and income disparities in American healthcare, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said the distribution of federal aid during the pandemic has shone a light on disparities in political power, too.
“If you have a lot of power in Washington, if you have lobbyists and all sorts of [political action committees] and lawyers who are working for you, chances are you get first in line. And that’s exactly what’s happened,” Reich told Jim Braude on WGBH News’ Greater Boston Wednesday.
Just 12 percent of black and Latino entrepreneurs who applied for aid have received what they asked for, according to a recent survey from the Global Strategy Group, on behalf of the organizations Color of Change and UnidosUS.
Reich also pointed to bailouts for large companies and access to unemployment benefits as evidence that the well-connected are faring better during the pandemic.
“Average workers and particularly people of color, they are not getting what they need,” he said. “They don’t have those connections, they don’t have that power in Washington, they don’t have the lobbyists, they don’t have the PACs and it’s business as usual, sadly.”
In fact, Reich argued, some major corporations are actually faring better during the pandemic.
“For years we have not used anti-trust laws to prevent companies like Amazon from accumulating huge power and all of the laws and all of the laws and all of the mechanisms of our market are tilted more and more in the direction of the big and profitable and against average workers,” he explained. “The result is you have a pandemic that not only hurts the poor, and hurts the middle class and the working class, but ends up rewarding America’s billionaires.”
Reich, who led the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) within the Labor Department before he became secretary under President Bill Clinton, argued regulators weren’t doing enough to protect workers at those large companies, either.
“OSHA in those days was concerned about the safety and health of workers, that was the job of OSHA. These days, OSHA just basically couldn’t care less,” he said. “They’re not getting the protective equipment; they’re not getting the kind of safety and health regulations that they deserve in order to protect themselves and their families.”
But Reich warned that, while the systemic disparities may seem daunting, it’s dangerous to write off the possibility of reform.
“The problem with that attitude is then the other side really wins. The American oligarchy, the richest, the biggest companies, the Amazons of the world, the Jeff Bezos of the world, and the Donald Trumps of the world, they win,” he said. “They want us to give up, they want us to say, ‘There’s nothing we can do about it.’ But I refuse to accept that. We can reform and we’ve done it before in our history.”
Reich — who recently released his latest book, “The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It” — offered up what he thinks should be the first step towards a solution to the corruption he described.
“We have to get big money out of politics,” he said. “That’s really what a lot of this is all about.”
The former labor secretary also said he would “end the revolving door” between jobs in the business sector and jobs regulating those businesses and make every effort to expand access to voting.
“We can talk policy until we’re blue in the face,” said Reich. “But if we don’t rescue our democracy from big money, then we’re just talking into the wind.”
