Professor Lynne Weikart, PhD

 January 25, 2025 " Atul Gawande, a former professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and former United States Agency for International Development official, took to social media over the weekend to sound the alarm.  "I ran USAID health programs for the last 3 years. Trump’s 90 day Stop Work Order on foreign assistance does serious damage to the world and the US," Gawande said. "Citing some purported "examples," Gawande said the stop work order "stops work battling a deadly Marburg outbreak in Tanzania and a wide outbreak of a mpox variant killing children in west Africa before it spreads further," "stops monitoring of bird flu in 49 countries, a disease which already killed an American on home soil," "stops critical work to eradicate polio," and even "stops >$1B in corporate drug donations and coordination eradicating tropical diseases like river blindness, elephantiasis, and others on the verge of elimination ...

In this article, a corporation is defined as a legal entity describing the large " Anglo-American publicly traded business corporation as opposed to small, incorporated businesses...." Over time the Supreme Court legitimated this type of capitalist institution. In Dodge v. Ford  (1919), the Supreme Court created the principle, "the best interests of the corporation; that is, the managers and directors of the corporation must put the interests of the shareholders above all other interests. This means that if a CEO or board wished to give donations to a charity, other shareholders can sue and claim that such an action is not in "the best interests of the corporation." The Supreme Court opened the door to a very greedy corporate culture. Over time, corporations grew into large monopolies sometimes gaining 90 percent of an industry's market. Part of their success relates to our federalist system in which every corporation chooses in which state it wishes to i...

 Voting is a form of speech . And this country has had trouble with free speech since its inception. America was split ideologically at its beginning. When John Adams won the presidency in 1797 following eight years of George Washington's two terms of office, he demonstrated the split in our countrty., He proceeded to weaken the First Amendment - freedom of speech and press - by jailing those who criticized his administration. Since his party, the Federalist Pary, had taken the legislature and the presidency, he had the legislative support to get the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1797 passed by Congress to charge all those who opposed him with sedition. It was an ugly time. Fortunately, the Alien and Sedition Acts had a sunset provision so that those legislative acts evaported at the end of his one presidential term in office. But it set the precedent for the First Admendment to be under attack and not so sacroscant as you might have been taught in your education   Since th...