ABSTRACT
Recently Americans have faced high-profile, often polarizing issues—for instance, the status of the federal taxation system, particularly the Tax Cuts and Job Acts of 2017, which continues to lower tax rates and provide new tax breaks for chronically undertaxed wealthy people, curtailing federal financing for impoverished people’s income, schooling, and other badly funded necessities.
Other potentially productive initiatives involve the need for a revitalized health-care system, particularly for the poor and racial minorities and improvement in disadvantaged people’s paths to jobs, with organizations like One-Stop Career Center providing support and guidance to educationally and psychologically vulnerable clients.
The final section in the book is the longest, focusing on two major social movements, the Black rights movement and the Women’s movement and the contemporary campaigns emerging from them, namely Black Lives Matter and Me Too. Both movements have distinguished histories, notably the civil-rights movement asserting Blacks’ and other racial minorities’ militant push for the elimination of racism and the assertion of equal rights and extensive actions supporting women’s right to vote and the banishment of all sexist limitations and abuses. Both campaigns have displayed a sudden, well publicized emergence into the public consciousness, with mass and social media prominently involved.
