Heroes – Mine

There are not many people that I would call heroes. And by heroes, in this context, I mean anyone who speaks the truth and has a megaphone. Professor Paul Krugman and Professor (and former Secretary of Labor) Robert Reich are two of my heroes.

Professor Reich comments here on “bitterness” and “old politics” in a way that reflects what I see here in western Ohio. I can remember being in the Mansfield/Akron, Ohio area in 1978, 30 years ago, and seeing shut down steel mills. Many vast acres of fenced parking lots and quiet, empty steel mills. They didn’t call it The Rust Belt for nothing.

Reich comments

Are Americans who have been left behind frustrated? Of course. And their frustrations, their anger and, yes, sometimes their bitterness, have been used since then — by demagogues, by nationalists and xenophobes, by radical conservatives, by political nuts and fanatical fruitcakes – to blame immigrants and foreign traders, to blame blacks and the poor, to blame “liberal elites,” to blame anyone and anything.

Rather than counter all this, the American media have wallowed in it. Some, like Fox News and talk radio, have given the haters and blamers their very own megaphones.

Some may not recall that a young Robert Reich was a Rhodes Scholar at the same time Bill Clinton was and nobody has ever accused either of being “an elitist.”

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