By all accounts Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods, if it indeed goes through, is a very big deal. No one denies it will have many consequences, whether those consequences are good or bad. What will precisely be the nature of those consequences, though, is not so agreed upon. Of course it may depend on how far into the future one looks. In the near term it is said it will change the food industry, the habits of customers for whom ordering on line may well be easier, the delivery of goods, the nature of retail, the competition to be the largest retailer and for what’s would be left of the retail industry. Amazon which went public in 1997 was then worth $438million with a stock price of (more…)
June 2017
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War Babies and Bi-Racial Children
After the Viet Nam war there were countless children fathered by American GIs, children who belonged nowhere because they were only half Asians, children the US did not particularly want. That was not a new phenomenon. It has happened in every war, and the racism that accompanies these occurrences is far from new. Still when I read a recent BBC Magazine article about the children of black WWII GIs in the UK, I was struck anew with compassion on the one hand as well as with anger on the other. There were 100,000 black GIs in the UK during WWII, obviously and inevitably inviting love affairs. US law however made it difficult for GIs to marry and for black GIs race complicated the issue even further. Inter-racial marriages were illegal and miscegenation laws were on the (more…)