Press Releases

I have a pretty simple explanation for Robert Reich’s endorsement of Laurie Capitelli. Robert Reich worked for the Bill Clinton administration. So did Loni Hancock. Might they not have crossed paths at that time? If so, the Hancock-Bates crowd may be the crowd (or at least a crowd) that Reich hangs with now that he is in Berkeley. Dinner parties and all that. 

By the way, in Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal, which I highly recommend, Frank explains that in the early 1990s, long before Reich became our most progressive mainstream economist, the guy who worries out loud about inequality, he wrote a book, The Work of Nations, that envisioned us Americans becoming knowledge workers, “symbolic analysts,” in a world in which mere labor would be outsourced to the poor in Mexico, China, Vietnam, etc. This was the world that the Clintons, with Reich as labor secretary, implemented, setting off the very processes that have gotten us to where we are today (including in Bates/Capitelli Berkeley, where homeless people beg in front of all those construction sites where million dollar condos for the rich are rising). Scratch Robert Reich and I suspect one finds under the surface a guy who’s happiest in the company of the comfortably well-off new Dems, whether Clintons or Bateses.