Tag: America

The global supply chain crisis is daunting. Congestion and bottlenecks across the West Coast have left large cargo vessels stranded at anchor for weeks on end. Across the country, our supply chain has faced major disruptions, driving up costs for consumers and inevitably causing major delays on delivery of essential goods.

The forever war between America’s pharmaceutical industry and America’s public interest is approaching a climactic moment. At stake is whether Big Pharma and its allies will keep drug prices zooming upward, or whether the federal government can slow that rise by negotiating prices for some expensive drugs taken by Medicare beneficiaries. The U.S. House of Representatives is poised to vote on legislation requiring such negotiations in the next few days as a crucial element of the $3.5 trillion budget plan, and the drug industry is in overdrive to make sure that doesn’t happen.

One thing that I had always admired about America was its sense of right and wrong. That’s what made us culturally superior. We were the good guys, who always had the high principles, always favored following one’s conscience, and always took the right actions. We always fought the just wars, even if we ended up losing one or two, and we always stood for the rights of the downtrodden. A superpower with moral high ground, that’s what defined America, as I have said before. We were willing to go to any length to see that justice was carried out.

All my life, I’ve heard the phrase: “America the Beautiful.” America has wonderful landscapes, beautiful and majestic mountains, and amazing and diverse metropolitan areas. As the famous poem goes, “From sea to shining sea,” America embodies the true definition of beauty. It has been the number one answer on the Family Feud game show, when they asked 100 people which country is the most beautiful. The answer was a resounding yes to the USA. By the way, the number one answer for the most beautiful people was California. Go figure!

White historians once taught that Reconstruction and equal legal rights and voting rights for Black people corrupted democracy. Textbooks ignored the Tulsa race massacre and others like it. Few historians write like that anymore. We include all sides of the American story and examine racism and injustice as evolving systems of power as well as manifestations of individual prejudice.