Aug 26, 2026 | Earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly attacked the former labor secretary under President Clinton, Robert Reich.
Reich wrote in a post online that “Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said this week the K-shaped economy — the widening economic gap between the rich and the poor — is 'dead.'
Hogwash. Not only is the K-shaped economy very much alive, even CEOs are admitting it’s a problem.” The treasury secretary went on to suggest the University of California, Berkeley should fire Reich.
“There’s something in this administration,” says Reich. “It’s almost a kind of testosterone poisoning in which everybody has to be really nasty, put down everybody else.”
Reich goes on to discuss economic inequality, pointing out that while inflation is on the rise, “most Americans are finding that their wages are stagnant … which means that most Americans are getting poorer.”
August 24, 2026 | The US-Canada trade war is deepening after talks collapsed without a deal on Friday. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney accused the Trump administration of issuing demands that would compromise Canada’s sovereignty and undermine key industries.
On Saturday, the United States slapped 50% tariffs on around $20 billion worth of imports from Canada, and Carney announced retaliatory tariffs on $20 billion of US products set to go into effect on September 8.
Aug 17, 2026 | A new book by longtime Bay Area journalist Gil Durán investigates “tech fascism” and its mounting influence on U.S. politics. The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy follows the rise of Vice President JD Vance, the former venture capitalist whose “outsider” campaign for Senate was bankrolled by the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel. Durán traces the ideological lineage of the current Trump administration back from Vance to Thiel and the far-right-wing monarchist Curtis Yarvin, whose “right-libertarian” political theory has long made the rounds among Silicon Valley elite. “These guys were never libertarians,” says Durán. “Now that they are the government, we see their true face: They’re fascists, and they’re authoritarians.”
The Nerd Reich YouTube channel can be found here »