Browse Month

February 2019

Income inequality in 2019

Bill gates and the truck driver       
By Dr. Larry Fedewa (February 23, 2019)
The first Americans were workers. They cut down the trees, plowed the fields, built the buildings, milked the cows, prepared the food, sewed the clothes, and spent most of their time doing the tasks that were necessary for survival in a hostile land. Thus the main thrust of American technology has always remained labor-saving devices.
The effort to replace the drudgery and difficulties of human labor has produced unheard-of efficiencies — from Eli Whitney’s cotton gin and gun assembly lines to the invention of tin cans and sewing machines to the succession of ever-increasing machines and techniques in America’s march through time. These technologies have also provided an extension of human powers. They have made it possible for humans to lift huge weights, see new sights faraway as well as infinitesimally tiny, travel at astonishing speeds to astonishing places, and think thoughts never before conceived.

Democratic Capitalism and World Peace

“Blessed are the peacemakers. . . . “ 
By Dr. Larry Fedewa (February 16, 2019)
It is a wholesome and uplifting exercise to dream occasionally about what an ideal world might look like. Clearly, such ideas are far from the messy realities of the world as we know it today but lifting our gaze to the clouds can give us courage as well as direction. So, what would a world look like if democratic capitalism were universally practiced instead of restricted to our own country and a few of our friends? First, we have to describe what we mean by “democratic capitalism”.

Politics is NOT a game            

  Everybody wins something!
By Dr. Larry Fedewa (February 10, 2019)
The soaring rhetoric with which President Donald J. Trump concluded his 2019 State of the Union address was totally unexpected, but as uplifting in its own way as that of Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy. And we need to be lifted up – from the pettiness and willful blindness which have characterized much of our political discourse as our loyalties and pronouncements have descended into a caldron of partisan gamesmanship.
As author John Daly observed on “The Dr. Larry Show” last week, the American public has taken to looking at politics as a competitive sport where there must be winners and losers. This perspective has been both led and followed by the news media. Smaller and ever smaller incidents, actions and words are being analyzed in terms of who won and who lost. Fox News has even scheduled an end-of-week quiz every Friday night called “Winners and Losers”.

What should Virginia Governor Northam Do?

Trial by twitter?
By Dr. Larry Fedewa (February 3, 2019)
By now everyone has heard about Governor Northam’s week from Hell. First, he makes headlines in a video which records his cold-blooded description of how the execution of a new-born baby would proceed according to a proposed law (later defeated by the Virginia legislature). Then, his page in the 1984-yearbook of his medical school surfaces showing his picture along side two other pictures, one of a Ku Klux Klansman and one of a black face performer. At first, he waits for nearly a day before issuing an apology for the pictures, where he seems to admit that one of them is him. Then he has a press conference the next day in which he denies that he is either of the figures represented.
In the meantime, the apparently unchallenged fact surfaces that his nickname in medical school was “Coon Man”. Never late to the hanging, both Democrat Senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, both former Virginia Governors, denounce Northam and call for his resignation, along with nearly every other politician in Virginia and Washington.