More recently he proposed an ill-conceived soda ban. I criticized his maniacal attempt to force New Yorkers to eat right a few weeks ago. Although his goal for better health among the urban poor is a pandemic issue in every US City; his solutions will hurt minority businesses, increase government expenditures, along with many other intrusions into personal freedoms. Surprisingly, in this article, I am highlighting one of Bloomberg’s better, less invasive policy concepts. Let me explain!

We’ve all heard the startling statistics about obesity in America: over one third of American adults are obese (almost 36%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention). Obesity puts us at risk for all kinds of health problems, including heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and certain cancers. And it doesn’t afflict everyone equally: nearly 50% of blacks are obese, and lower income Americans in general are more likely to be obese than others.

Did you know that there was a time in our country, after the Civil War, when white unemployment was higher than black unemployment? It seems almost unfathomable now, but that was the case in the early decades of the 20^th Century. This was intentionally changed after Congress enacted the first federal minimum wage law: the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931.

The typical response to how college tuition has been regularly outpaced inflation is to call for increasing available financial aid. Leaving aside well-founded concerns that increased aid actually fuels rising tuition, there are other problems with this approach. Chief among them is the fact that most financial aid comes in the form of federally subsidized loans. Increased financial aid does not usually mean decreasing the cost of college; it means increasing the debt incurred by students.

According to a 2009 study, American students rank 25^th in math, 17^th in science and 14^th in reading among other nations. More disturbing however, is the widening gulf between higher and lower achieving American students. A 2011 Stanford University study shows the achievement gap between lower and upper income students is 40% greater than it was 25 years ago. Some American students may be on pace to compete but those who are behind have little chance of catching up.

The history of gun control in the United States is steeped in racism. Unsurprisingly, state laws in the Antebellum South prohibited slaves from owning or carrying weapons. But some states forbade free blacks from owning firearms as well; Tennessee actually amended their state constitution to clarify that “That the free white men of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence.”

In some parts of the nation, the media is trying to paint minority problems as essentially well-coordinated, monochromic cultural issues. Unfortunately this paradigm is producing an unsettling clash. Black and Latino problems are not the same!

In Part One of this editorial, I wrote about my father and my uncle’s experiences with the Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) laws of the 60s and early 70s. Those laws worked well temporarily! The question for our generation is: have we reached the limits of what changing the law can actually do to correct such inequalities?

A perennial question for me is: “What steps must be taken to eradicate the specter of racism from our nation?” Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) laws were deemed very important as the ‘60s unfolded and the ‘70s paved the way for enormous economic gains for blacks.

From the very beginning, homosexual “marriage” activists have sought to hijack not only the moral authority of the Civil Rights Movement, but also the legal arguments which liberated minorities from centuries of legalized oppression and discrimination.