# Robert Reich Robert B. Reich (b. 1946), **U.S. Secretary of Labor under [[Bill Clinton]] from 1993 to 1997**, afterward a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and one of the most widely read popular critics of American economic inequality. Reich matters to this KB for one specific reason: in **November 1994**, in a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council, he described the political consequences of a hollowed-out middle class in terms that read as a direct forecast of the coalition Trump assembled twenty-one years later at the [[Trump Escalator Announcement]]. See [[Robert Reich - two-tiered society]] for the quote and its sourcing. The forecast's content is the useful part, not its accuracy as prophecy. Reich's claim was structural: that a two-tier economy generates a surplus of manipulable resentment, and that the *targets* of that resentment are set by whoever is doing the manipulating. He named the 1994 targets — immigrants, welfare recipients, government officials, gay people, a vague counterculture — and then asked who the targets would be next. That is a mechanism, not a prediction, and it is why the quote recurs in 2026 commentary. He was, by his own later account, told off by the Clinton White House for the speech. > [!warning] Stub > Created 2026-10-03 to carry [[Robert Reich - two-tiered society]], which needed a speaker page. Reich's actual tenure at Labor — the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, the failed 1994 striker-replacement push, his break with the Clinton administration over [[NAFTA]] and welfare reform — is unwritten, as is his post-1997 career as a commentator. His relationship to [[Neoliberalism]] is contested in both directions and should be written from his own texts rather than from secondary characterizations. ## See also - [[Robert Reich - two-tiered society]] — the 1994 warning - [[Bill Clinton]] — the president he served - [[Trump Escalator Announcement]] — the 2015 campaign launch his 1994 warning is routinely read against - [[Plutocracy]] — the structural condition he described