Robert Reich has written and spoken extensively about wealth inequality and ways in which the rich have been concentrating political and economic power and influence. Several recent posts:
The Low Down, Columbia University, 2017. Earlier this year, Columbia hosted a conversation between two iconic public figures—billionaire investor Warren Buffett '51BUS and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. For that conversation, Buffett and Gates sat down with PBS and Bloomberg TV host Charlie Rose to discuss their friendship, philanthropy, business, innovation, and leadership. (An audio with a shorter segment of highlights is also available.)
Fresh Air, March 22, 2017 Host Dave Davies interviews Jane Mayer, who writes in the New Yorker about Robert Mercer and his daughter, Rebekah, who have poured millions of dollars into Breitbart News, and who pushed to have Bannon run Trump's campaign.
Eli Saslow, Washington Post, Jan. 30, 2022
After the best year in history to be among the super-rich, one of America’s 745 billionaires wonders: ‘What’s enough? What’s the answer?’
Alan Ehrenhalt, Jan 19, 2016 In 1980. Republicans hadn’t controlled either chamber of Congress, or a majority in state legislatures, for a quarter-century. Most governors were Democrats, as had been true since 1970. Those with the strongest ideological convictions — “movement conservatives” — were a faint voice even within Republican ranks.But at the end of that year two things happened. Ronald Reagan won the presidency, and Charles and David Koch decided that they would spend huge amounts of money to elect conservatives at all levels of American government. Thirty years later, the midterm elections of 2010 ushered in the political system that the Kochs had spent so many years plotting to bring about. Republicans domination of state legislatures and control of a clear majority of governorships and the House of Representatives. Many of those elected were antigovernment libertarians of the Kochs’ own political stripe. The Koch brothers had helped to finance and organize an interlocking network of think tanks, academic programs and news media outlets that far exceeded anything the liberal opposition could put together. It is this conservative ascendancy that Jane Mayer chronicles in “Dark Money.”