Family Insured Quotes

She's the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother is so important to science, why can't we get health insurance?

Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?

In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else's mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one's own place and economy. In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less and less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, and shares. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers... Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else's legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make. What would be the point, for example, if a majority of our people decided to be self-employed? The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth - that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community - and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.

A NATION'S GREATNESS DEPENDS ON ITS LEADER To vastly improve your country and truly make it great again, start by choosing a better leader. Do not let the media or the establishment make you pick from the people they choose, but instead choose from those they do not pick. Pick a leader from among the people who is heart-driven, one who identifies with the common man on the street and understands what the country needs on every level. Do not pick a leader who is only money-driven and does not understand or identify with the common man, but only what corporations need on every level. Pick a peacemaker. One who unites, not divides. A cultured leader who supports the arts and true freedom of speech, not censorship. Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist. Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies. Most importantly, a great leader must serve the best interests of the people first, not those of multinational corporations. Human life should never be sacrificed for monetary profit. There are no exceptions. In addition, a leader should always be open to criticism, not silencing dissent. Any leader who does not tolerate criticism from the public is afraid of their dirty hands to be revealed under heavy light. And such a leader is dangerous, because they only feel secure in the darkness. Only a leader who is free from corruption welcomes scrutiny; for scrutiny allows a good leader to be an even greater leader. And lastly, pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.

Why did her family think pachinko was so terrible? Her father, a traveling salesman, had sold expensive life insurance policies to isolated housewives who couldn't afford them, and Mozasu created spaces where grown men and women could play pinball for money. Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness. Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes--there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way--she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.

Because doctors can’t name the illness, everyone—the patient's family, friends, health insurance, and in many cases the patient—comes to think of the patient as not really sick and not really suffering. What the patient comes to require in these circumstances, in the absence of help, are facts—tests and studies that show that they might “in fact” have something.

You know, nothing is stronger than blood bonds. What else is the reason for the success of life insurance policies? Why bother with what happens to your blood relatives after your death? After all, you stop existing. Why then bother about what is happening to your kids, and why be concerned about what is happening on Earth even? Well, it’s because, after one’s final exit, one lives through one’s children.

Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.

Hopkins say they gave them cells away,” Lawrence yelled, “but they made millions! It’s not fair! She’s the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that?

Change was a privilege reserved for people whose families didn’t rely on them for food, shelter, and health insurance. I thought she’d know that by now.

She’s the most important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?

health, social life, job, house, partners, finances; leisure use, leisure amount; working time, education, income, children; food, water, shelter, clothing, sex, health care; mobility; physical safety, social safety, job security, savings account, insurance, disability protection, family leave, vacation; place tenure, a commons; access to wilderness, mountains, ocean; peace, political stability, political input, political satisfaction; air, water, esteem; status, recognition; home, community, neighbors, civil society, sports, the arts; longevity treatments, gender choice; the opportunity to become more what you are that's all you need

All too soon the garden of childhood is paved cold with the asphalt roads of adulthood. And while it is not within her power to halt this unrelenting progression, a mother can diligently guard this most precious garden and insure that the roads become gentle paths that wind through it instead of byways that kill it.

Soul is not even that Crackerjack prize that God and Satan scuffle over after the worms have all licked our bones. That's why, when we ponder--as sooner or later each of us must--exactly what we ought to be doing about our soul, religion is the wrong, if conventional, place to turn. Religion is little more than a transaction in which troubled people trade their souls for temporary and wholly illusionary psychological comfort--the old give-it-up-in-order-to-save-it routine. Religions lead us to believe that the soul is the ultimate family jewel and that in return for our mindless obedience, they can secure it for us in their vaults, or at least insure it against fire theft. They are mistaken.

Let the workers in these plants get the same wages -- all the workers, all presidents, all executives, all directors, all managers, all bankers -- yes, and all generals and all admirals and all officers and all politicians and all government office holders -- everyone in the nation be restricted to a total monthly income not to exceed that paid to the soldier in the trenches!   Let all these kings and tycoons and masters of business and all those workers in industry and all our senators and governors and majors pay half of their monthly $30 wage to their families and pay war risk insurance and buy Liberty Bonds.   Why shouldn't they?   They aren't running any risk of being killed or of having their bodies mangled or their minds shattered. They aren't sleeping in muddy trenches. They aren't hungry. The soldiers are!   Give capital and industry and labor thirty days to think it over and you will find, by that time, there will be no war. That will smash the war racket -- that and nothing else.   Maybe

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain intact, and say: “This is not just.” It will look across the oceans and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing to prevent us from paying adequate wages to schoolteachers, social workers and other servants of the public to insure that we have the best available personnel in these positions which are charged with the responsibility of guiding our future generations. There is nothing but a lack of social vision to prevent us from paying an adequate wage to every American citizen whether he be a hospital worker, laundry worker, maid or day laborer. There is nothing except shortsightedness to prevent us from guaranteeing an annual minimum—and livable—income for every American family. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from remolding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

My Father, the Age I Am Now Time, which diminishes all things, increases understanding for the aging. —PLUTARCH My mother was the star: Smart and funny and warm, A patient listener and an easy laugher. My father was . . . an accountant: Not one to look up to, Ask advice from, Confide in. A man of few words. We faulted him—my mother, my sister, and I, For being this dutiful, uninspiring guy Who never missed a day of work, Or wondered what our dreams were. Just . . . an accountant. Decades later, My mother dead, my sister dead, My father, the age I am now, Planning ahead in his so-accountant way, Sent me, for my records, Copies of his will, his insurance policies, And assorted other documents, including The paid receipt for his cemetery plot, The paid receipt for his tombstone, And the words that he had chosen for his stone. And for the first time, shame on me, I saw my father: Our family’s prime provider, only provider. A barely-out-of-boyhood married man Working without a safety net through the Depression years That marked him forever, Terrified that maybe he wouldn’t make it, Terrified he would fall and drag us down with him, His only goal, his life-consuming goal, To put bread on our table, a roof over our head. With no time for anyone’s secrets, With no time for anyone’s dreams, He quietly earned the words that made me weep, The words that were carved, the following year, On his tombstone: HE TOOK CARE OF HIS FAMILY.

We deem it opportune to remind our children of their duty to take an active part in public life and to contribute toward the attainment of the common good of the entire human family as well as to that of their own political community. They should endeavor, therefore, in the light of their Christian faith and led by love, to insure that the various institutions—whether economic, social, cultural or political in purpose—should be such as not to create obstacles, but rather to facilitate or render less arduous man’s perfecting of himself in both the natural order and the supernatural.... Every believer in this world of ours must be a spark of light, a center of love, a vivifying leaven amidst his fellow men. And he will be this all the more perfectly, the more closely he lives in communion with God in the intimacy of his own soul

Don't underestimate the value of your life insurance. That's the value of your life to your family. If you need to increase your coverage, do it now, while you are still healthy.

Bigger tomatoes with a longer growing season," Dick said sagely, and then went back to showing me how I could help my family most efficiently by dying young.

mad at me. For Dad, parenting has become just like shooting one of his stupid insurance ads-some makeup to cover the blemishes, a flashy smile, and wham! He's got himself a regular picture-perfect family.

And a young man with every reason to work—a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way—carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here—a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America. It’s

She described her new treatment with a topical chemotherapy that came in the form of a potent cream that she applied, wearing gloves, to burn off the cancerous areas—then she produced a package of the stuff from the bathroom so I could see how mundane this lifesaving medication looked. I blinked in disbelief as she held up what resembled a tube of toothpaste, and explained that each one cost over two thousand dollars. Or that’s what it would cost, if not for the insurance she had purchased through the health insurance exchanges that had been set up as part of Obamacare. I thought—and spoke—of that moment often, later, as I talked about why health policy was not a theoretical question for our family.

Like with so many people, even doctors (maybe especially doctors), there was the constant implication that I'd done something wrong, as if the situation Abel and I were in was the result of bad decisions we'd made, a chain of selfish and foolish mistakes that had dropped us here. If this had happened to them, well, surely they would have found a way out. They'd find a cure, have better insurance, have a real family, and, most of all, never be so stupid as to get sick to begin with. Or marry a sick person.

Where there were once several competing approaches to medicine, there is now only one that matters to most hospitals, insurers, and the vast majority of the public. One that has been shaped to a great degree by the successful development of potent cures that followed the discovery of sulfa drugs. Aspiring caregivers today are chosen as much (or more) for their scientific abilities, their talent for mastering these manifold technological and pharmaceutical advances as for their interpersonal skills. A century ago most physicians were careful, conservative observers who provided comfort to patients and their families. Today they act: They prescribe, they treat, they cure. They routinely perform what were once considered miracles. The result, in the view of some, has been a shift in the profession from caregiver to technician. The powerful new drugs changed how care was given as well as who gave it.

There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world—or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world—I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.

Uh, hello? Hello, hello! Uh, this is just to inform all employees, that due to current restrictions, the previously mentioned safe rooms, are being sealed at most locations. Including this one. Work crews will be here most of the day today, constructing a false wall over the old door bay. Nothing is being taken out before hand, so if you left anything inside, then it's your own fault. Management also requests, that this room not be mentioned to family, friends or insurance representatives. Thanks again, and remember to smile. You are the face of Freddy Fazbear's Pizza.

I don’t think most people realize—and there’s no reason they should—the amount of demeaning garbage you have to take if you want a career in the arts. I mean, going off to med school is something you can say with your head high. Or being a banker or going into insurance or the family business—no problem. But the conversations I had with grown-ups after college… “So you’re done with school now, Bill.” “That’s right.” “So what’s next on the agenda?” Pause. Finally I would say it: “I want to be a writer.” And then they would pause. “A writer.” “I’d like to try.” Third and final pause. And then one of two inevitable replies: either “What are you going to do next?” or “What are you really going to do?” That dread double litany… What are you going to do next?… What are you really going to do?… What are you going to do next?… What are you really going to do…?

What gives modern society a superficial appearance of individualism, independence, and self-reliance is the vanishing of the ties that formerly linked individuals into small-scale communities. Today, nuclear families commonly have little connection to their next-door neighbors or even to their cousins. Most people have friends, but friends nowadays tend to use each other only for entertainment. They do not usually cooperate in economic or other serious, practical activities, nor do they offer each other much physical or economic security. If you become disabled, you don’t expect your friends to support you. You depend on insurance or on the welfare department.

I've never understood America,"said the king. "Neither do we, sir. You might say we have two governments, kind of overlapping. First we have the elected government. It's Democratic or Republican, doesn't make much difference, and then there's corporation government." "They get along together, these governments?" "Sometimes," said Tod. "I don't understand it myself. You see, the elected government pretends to be democratic, and actually it is autocratic. The corporation governments pretend to be autocratic and they're all the time accusing the others of socialism. They hate socialism." "So I have heard," said Pippin. "Well, here's the funny thing, sir. You take a big corporation in America, say like General Motors or Du Pont or U.S. Steel. The thing they're most afraid of is socialism, and at the same time they themselves are socialist states." The king sat bolt upright. "Please?" he said. "Well, just look at it, sir. They've got medical care for employees and their families and accident insurance and retirement pensions, paid vacations -- even vacation places -- and they're beginning to get guaranteed pay over the year. The employees have representation in pretty nearly everything, even the color they paint the factories. As a matter of fact, they've got socialism that makes the USSR look silly. Our corporations make the U.S. Government seem like an absolute monarchy. Why, if the U.S. government tried to do one-tenth of what General Motors does, General Motors would go into armed revolt. It's what you might call a paradox sir.

In a matter of minutes, I went from being a potential terrorist to being a caveman selling insurance.

Either the Silverstein family is clairvoyant, or they knew exactly what was planned that day.

People were so desperate for health insurance they were willing to take jobs that made others sick.

All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can be refuted by science: mankind has become so much one family that we cannot insure our own prosperity except by insuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.

By 1850, fifteen Boston families called the “Associates” controlled 20 percent of the cotton spindleage in the United States, 39 percent of insurance capital in Massachusetts, 40 percent of banking resources in Boston.

As Ba Ga and Banareng, our bond as a family is our insurance for the future. The key of brotherhood and sisterhood is that brothers and sisters carry the same genetic code. Together, united, they carry the legacy of their forefathers.

The family was also the welfare system, the health system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police.

It is especially unlucky to be born female, because many Indian parents express a strong “son preference.” Only 10 percent of Indian families with two sons want another child, whereas nearly 40 percent of families with two daughters want to try

Into the 1960s and even the ’70s, players held offseason jobs not to fill the time but to feed their families. Yogi Berra worked at a Sears, Roebuck. Lou Brock became a florist. Players sold real estate and insurance, worked in mines and on ranches.

Why did her family think pachinko was so terrible? Her father, a traveling salesman, had sold expensive life insurance policies to isolated housewives who couldn’t afford them, and Mozasu created spaces where grown men and women could play pinball for money. Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness. Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes—there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way—she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.

Over time, some ideas do cross the repugnance barrier to become reality. Charging interest on loans. Selling human sperm and eggs. Profiting from a loved one’s premature death. This last example of course describes how life insurance works. Today it is standard practice to wager on your own death in order to provide for your family. Until the mid-nineteenth century, life insurance was considered “a profanation,” as the sociologist Viviana Zelizer writes, “which transformed the sacred event of death into a vulgar commodity.

After the New Deal, economists began referring to America’s retirement-finance model as a “three-legged stool.” This sturdy tripod was composed of Social Security, private pensions, and combined investments and savings. In recent years, of course, two of those legs have been kicked out. Many Americans saw their assets destroyed by the Great Recession; even before the economic collapse, many had been saving less and less. And since the 1980s, employers have been replacing defined-benefit pensions that are funded by employers and guarantee a monthly sum in perpetuity with 401(k) plans, which often rely on employee contributions and can run dry before death. Marketed as instruments of financial liberation that would allow workers to make their own investment choices, 401(k)s were part of a larger cultural drift in America away from shared responsibilities toward a more precarious individualism. Translation: 401(k)s are vastly cheaper for companies than pension plans. “Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families,” Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker writes in his book The Great Risk Shift. The overarching message: “You are on your own.

It might be instructive to try seeing things from the perspective of, say, a God-fearing hard-working rural-Midwestern military vet. It's not that hard. Imaging gazing through his eyes at the world of MTV and the content of video games, at the gross sexualization of children's fashions, at Janet Jackson flashing her aureole on what's supposed to be a holy day. Imagine you're him having to explain to your youngest what oral sex is and what it's got to do with a US president. Ads for penis enlargers and HOT WET SLUTS are popping up out of nowhere on your family's computer. Your kids' school is teaching them WWII and Vietnam in terms of Japanese internment and the horrors of My Lai. Homosexuals are demanding holy matrimony; your doctor's moving away because he can't afford the lawsuit insurance; illegal aliens want driver's licenses; Hollywood elites are bashing America and making millions from it; the president's ridiculed for reading his Bible; priests are diddling kids left and right. Shit, the country's been directly attacked, and people aren't supporting our commander in chief.

The first big step is to repair the safety net so that workers and families are no longer at perpetual risk of falling through and drowning, as millions have in the pandemic. This means essentially extending the New Deal to more Americans in more areas of their lives: universal health care, child care, paid family and sick leave, stronger workplace safety protections, unemployment insurance that doesn’t fail in a crisis, a living minimum wage. These are the basis for any decent life, for any American to do more than survive just below the misery line.

In the three years after Obamacare was signed into law in 2010, the costs did not go down $2,500 per family as promised. They went up $2,581 a family. Yes, inflation would have pushed the costs of insurance coverage up regardless of Obamacare, but not that much, nor that quickly.

And I saw just the other day, in Mentor, Ohio, where a father told the story of his 8-year-old daughter, whose long battle with leukemia nearly cost their family everything had it not been for the health care reform passing just a few months before the insurance company was about to stop paying for her care. I had an opportunity to not just talk to the father, but meet this incredible daughter of his. And when he spoke to the crowd listening to that father's story, every parent in that room had tears in their eyes, because we knew that little girl could be our own.

Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines. These medications often are used to make abused and neglected children more tractable. In 2008 19,045 children age five and under were prescribed antipsychotics through Medicaid.

Another example is the modern political order. Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The entire political history of the world since 1789 can be seen as a series of attempts to reconcile this contradiction. Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism’s egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life. Contemporary American politics also revolve around this contradiction. Democrats want a more equitable society, even if it means raising taxes to fund programmes to help the poor, elderly and infirm. But that infringes on the freedom of individuals to spend their money as they wish. Why should the government force me to buy health insurance if I prefer using the money to put my kids through college? Republicans, on the other hand, want to maximise individual freedom, even if it means that the income gap between rich and poor will grow wider and that many Americans will not be able to afford health care. Just as medieval culture did not manage to square chivalry with Christianity, so the modern world fails to square liberty with equality. But this is no defect. Such contradictions are an inseparable part of every human culture. In fact, they are culture’s engines, responsible for the creativity and dynamism of our species. Just

He doesn’t see private health insurance rebates or support for private school education as middle-class welfare. He sees it as backing family aspiration, sound public policy encouraging people to do more for themselves. And help should not be cut off simply because a family is earning a hundred thousand dollars or more a year.

For this equality belongs to the post-Renaissance world of ideology-of political magic and the alchemical science” of politics. Envy is the basis of its broad appeal. And rampant envy, the besetting virus of modern society, is the most predictable result of insistence upon its realization. Furthermore, hue and cry over equality of opportunity and equal rights leads, a fortiori, to a final demand for equality of condition. Under its pressure self respect gives way in the large majority of men who have not reached the level of their expectation, who have no support from an inclusive identity, and who hunger for “revenge” on those who occupy a higher station and will (they expect) continue to enjoy that advantage. The end result is visible in the spiritual proletarians of the “lonely crowd.” Bertrand de Jouvenel has described the process which produces such non-persons in his memorable study, On Power. They are the natural pawns of an impersonal and omnicompetent Leviathan. And to insure their docility such a state is certain to recruit a large “new class” of men, persons superior in “ability” and authority, both to their ostensible “masters” among the people and to such anachronisms as stand in their progressive way. Such is the evidence of the recent past and particularly of American history. Arrant individualism, fracturing and then destroying the hope of amity and confederation, the communal bond and the ancient vision of the good society as an extrapolation from family, is one villain in this tale. Another is rationalized cowardice, shame, and ingratitude hidden behind the disguise of self-sufficiency or the mask of injured merit. Interdependence, which secures dignity and makes of equality a mere irrelevance, is the principal victim.

Yet here I am, edging even closer to the abyss, throwing away the secure underpinnings of my life by leaving my secure job. In daylight, I can make an account of the stress that made the decision to leave a sensible one—the slow encroachment that ate into my family life. But that’s in the daytime, when I value such things as calm and freedom. In the dark, I am struck by a dyspeptic bout of conservatism. I should have a savings account containing a year’s salary. I should have proper life insurance. I have squandered something, somehow. I am not sure what or when, but I despise myself for it. The precariousness of my life bites me hard. I can feel its teeth in my gut. I am nothing, I am no one, I have failed.

As we stood on our doorsteps and clanged our pans, politicians were handing out billion-pound contracts to their mates. As we put rainbows in our windows, nursing home residents were being all but murdered by their idiotic policies. And throughout, as NHS staff put their lives at risk, as they worked double and triple shifts, as the PPE cut into their faces, as they moved out of their family homes for months on end, the ghouls in charge seemed far more concerned with their own appearances and legacies. And there’s still nothing approaching an assurance that the NHS won’t be sold off in five years’ time, plunging us into an unfair insurance-based system that mostly benefits the former politicians who stuff the boardrooms of private medicine.

Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, social security steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins. Not only adult men, but also women and children, are recognised as individuals. Throughout most of history, women were often seen as the property of family or community. Modern states, on the other hand, see women as individuals, enjoying economic and legal rights independently of their family and community. They may hold their own bank accounts, decide whom to marry, and even choose to divorce or live on their own. But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives. States and markets composed of alienated individuals can intervene in the lives of their members much more easily than states and markets composed of strong families and communities. When neighbours in a high-rise apartment building cannot even agree on how much to pay their janitor, how can we expect them to resist the state? The deal between states, markets and individuals is an uneasy one. The state and the market disagree about their mutual rights and obligations, and individuals complain that both demand too much and provide too little. In many cases individuals are exploited by markets, and states employ their armies, police forces and bureaucracies to persecute individuals instead of defending them. Yet it is amazing that this deal works at all – however imperfectly. For it breaches countless generations of human social arrangements. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture.

The historian Stephanie Coontz, a debunker of 1950s nostalgia, puts some numbers to the depictions: A full 25 percent of Americans, 40 to 50 million people, were poor in the mid-1950s, and in the absence of food stamps and housing programs, this poverty was searing. Even at the end of the 1950s, a third of American children were poor. Sixty percent of Americans over sixty-five had incomes below $ 1,000 in 1958, considerably below the $ 3,000 to $ 10,000 level considered to represent middle-class status. A majority of elders also lacked medical insurance. Only half the population had savings in 1959; one-quarter of the population had no liquid assets at all. Even when we consider only native-born, white families, one-third could not get by on the income of the household head. 45

And so, it seems to me, there is a critical problem indicated here, which parents and families have to face squarely: that, namely, of insuring that the signals which they are imprinting on their young are such as will attune them to, and not alienate them from, the world in which they are going to have to live; unless, of course, one is dead set on bequeathing to one’s heirs one’s own paranoia. More

Mr. Leon S. Utter, a former dean of the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science, has written, “Your selling plan should go into operation as soon as the telephone rings and you are requested to serve a bereaved family.… Never preconceive as to what any family will purchase. You cannot possibly measure the intensity of their emotions, undisclosed insurance, or funds that may have been set aside for funeral expenses.

The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. Too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man with every reason to work—a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way—carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him.

Winfree came from a family in which no one had gone to college. He got started, he would say, by not having proper education. His father, rising from the bottom of the life insurance business to the level of vice president, moved family almost yearly up and down the East Coast, and Winfree attended than a dozen schools before finishing high school. He developed a feeling that the interesting things in the world had to do with biology and mathematics and a companion feeling that no standard combination of the two subjects did justice to what was interesting. So he decided not to take a standard approach. He took a five-year course in engineering physics at Cornell University, learning applied mathematics and a full range of hands-on laboratory styles. Prepared to be hired into military-industrial complex, he got a doctorate in biology, striving to combine experiment with theory in new ways.

The desires of an individual can be collected into groups, each group constituting what some psychologists call a ‘sentiment’. There will be—to take politically important sentiments—love of home, of family, of country, love of power, love of enjoyment, and so on; there will also be sentiments of aversion, such as fear of pain, laziness, dislike of foreigners, hatred of alien creeds, and so on. A man's sentiments at any given moment are a complicated product of his nature, his past history, and his present circumstances. Each sentiment, in so far as it is one which many men can gratify cooperatively better than singly, will, given opportunity, generate one or more organisations designed for its gratification. Take, for example, family sentiment. This has given rise, or has helped to give rise, to organisations for housing, education, and life insurance, which are matters in which the interests of different families are in harmony.

I was recently pulled over by the police in the wee hours of the morning on my way to vacation in Alabama. I was traveling with my family, and my wife and kids were asleep. I was on the phone with my brother Al, trying to get directions to our beach house. There was no one else on the road as I was driving through a small town. All of a sudden, flashing lights appeared out of nowhere and I pulled over. The lights woke up everybody in the car, and one of my kids said, “Maybe the policeman watches Duck Dynasty.” The officer came up to my window and asked for my driver’s license and insurance card. When I began to speak to the policeman, he put his hand on his holstered gun. My wife said, “Guess he’s not a fan.” The cop gave me a speeding ticket for driving forty-four miles per hour in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone, which was fine. Hey, I broke the law! But what made me a bit uncomfortable was that every time I opened my mouth he put his hand on his gun!

About the time that I reentered the Bruce family, an event occurred of disastrous import to the colored people. The slave Hamlin, the first fugitive that came under the new law, was given up by the blood-hounds of the north to the bloodhounds of the south. It was the beginning of a reign of terror to the colored population. The great city rushed on its whirl of excitement, taking no note of the "short and simple annals of the Poor." But while fashionables were listening to the thrilling voice of Jenny Lind in Metropolitan Hall, the thrilling voices of poor hunted colored people went up, in an agony of supplication, to the Lord, from Zion's church. Many families, who had lived in the city for twenty years, fled from it now. Many a poor washerwoman, who, by hard labor, had made herself a comfortable home, was obliged to sacrifice her furniture, bid a hurried farewell to friends, and seek her fortune among strangers in Canada. Many a wife discovered a secret she had never known before—that her husband was a fugitive, and must leave her to insure his own safety. Worse still, many a husband discovered that his wife had fled from slavery years ago, and as "the child follows the condition of its mother," the children of his love were liable to be seized and carried into slavery. Every where, in those humble homes, there was consternation and anguish. But what cared the legislators of the "dominant race" for the blood they were crushing out of trampled hearts?

Here’s the bottom line: The most recent data compiling spending on social insurance, means-tested programs, tax benefits, and financial aid for higher education show that the average household in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution receives roughly $25,733 in government benefits a year, while the average household in the top 20 percent receives about $35,363.[36] Every year, the richest American families receive almost 40 percent more in government subsidies than the poorest American families.

Fifteen years ago, a business manager from the United States came to Plum Village to visit me. His conscience was troubled because he was the head of a firm that designed atomic bombs. I listened as he expressed his concerns. I knew if I advised him to quit his job, another person would only replace him. If he were to quit, he might help himself, but he would not help his company, society, or country. I urged him to remain the director of his firm, to bring mindfulness into his daily work, and to use his position to communicate his concerns and doubts about the production of atomic bombs. In the Sutra on Happiness, the Buddha says it is great fortune to have an occupation that allows us to be happy, to help others, and to generate compassion and understanding in this world. Those in the helping professions have occupations that give them this wonderful opportunity. Yet many social workers, physicians, and therapists work in a way that does not cultivate their compassion, instead doing their job only to earn money. If the bomb designer practises and does his work with mindfulness, his job can still nourish his compassion and in some way allow him to help others. He can still influence his government and fellow citizens by bringing greater awareness to the situation. He can give the whole nation an opportunity to question the necessity of bomb production. Many people who are wealthy, powerful, and important in business, politics, and entertainment are not happy. They are seeking empty things - wealth, fame, power, sex - and in the process they are destroying themselves and those around them. In Plum Village, we have organised retreats for businesspeople. We see that they have many problems and suffer just as others do, sometimes even more. We see that their wealth allows them to live in comfortable conditions, yet they still suffer a great deal. Some businesspeople, even those who have persuaded themselves that their work is very important, feel empty in their occupation. They provide employment to many people in their factories, newspapers, insurance firms, and supermarket chains, yet their financial success is an empty happiness because it is not motivated by understanding or compassion. Caught up in their small world of profit and loss, they are unaware of the suffering and poverty in the world. When we are not int ouch with this larger reality, we will lack the compassion we need to nourish and guide us to happiness. Once you begin to realise your interconnectedness with others, your interbeing, you begin to see how your actions affect you and all other life. You begin to question your way of living, to look with new eyes at the quality of your relationships and the way you work. You begin to see, 'I have to earn a living, yes, but I want to earn a living mindfully. I want to try to select a vocation not harmful to others and to the natural world, one that does not misuse resources.' Entire companies can also adopt this way of thinking. Companies have the right to pursue economic growth, but not at the expense of other life. They should respect the life and integrity of people, animals, plants and minerals. Do not invest your time or money in companies that deprive others of their lives, that operate in a way that exploits people or animals, and destroys nature. Businesspeople who visit Plum Village often find that getting in touch with the suffering of others and cultivating understanding brings them happiness. They practise like Anathapindika, a successful businessman who lived at the time of the Buddha, who with the practise of mindfulness throughout his life did everything he could to help the poor and sick people in his homeland.

The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said. ‘Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead. We will provide food, shelter, education, health, welfare and employment. We will provide pensions, insurance and protection.

The key of brotherhood and sisterhood is that brothers and sisters carry the same genetic code. Together, united, they carry the legacy of their forefathers. Our bond (through our shared blood/DNA) as Ba Ga Mohlala family/clan is our insurance for the future. As Ba Ga Mohlala we can have our own Law firms, Auditing Firms, Doctors's Medical Surgeries, Private School, Private Clinics or Private Hospital, farms and lot of small to medium manufacturing, service, retail and wholesale companies and become self relient. All it takes to achieve that is unity, willpower and commitment.

Before all else, men are expected to be good providers. Our parent's generation expects it of us, the family courts expect it of us, women on first dates often expect it, and in the event of an early death, our life insurance policies pre-suppose it. The simple mechanics of being a good provider excludes men from a number of other spaces, which, not coincidentally, are reserved for women. What more, as they aspire to switch traditional breadwinner roles with men in our evolving economy, even highly successful professional women collapse into the expectation that men are supposed to provide.

The best available apples-to-apples comparison of inflation-adjusted earnings shows what the typical fully employed man earned back in the 1970s and what that same fully employed man earns today. The picture isn’t pretty. As the GDP has doubled and almost doubled again, as corporations have piled up record profits, as the country has gotten wealthier, and as the number of billionaires has exploded, the average man working full-time today earns about what the average man earned back in 1970. Nearly half a century has gone by, and the guy right in the middle of the pack is making about what his granddad did. The second punch that’s landed on families is expenses. If costs had stayed the same over the past few decades, families would be okay—or, at least, they would be in about the same position as they were thirty-five years ago. Not advancing but not falling behind, either. But that didn’t happen. Total costs are up, way up. True, families have cut back on some kinds of expenses. Today, the average family spends less on food (including eating out), less on clothing, less on appliances, and less on furniture than a comparable family did back in 1971. In other words, families have been pretty careful about their day-to-day spending, but it hasn’t saved them. The problem is that the other expenses—the big, fixed expenses—have shot through the roof and blown apart the family budget. Adjusted for inflation, families today spend more on transportation, more on housing, and more on health insurance. And for all those families with small children and no one at home during the day, the cost of childcare has doubled, doubled again, and doubled once more. Families have pinched pennies on groceries and clothing, but these big, recurring expenses have blown them right over a financial cliff.

The big celebration, the wedding or housewarming, takes place not when the debt is discharged, but when it is undertaken. What is emphasized on TV, for example, is not the middle-aged man who has finally paid off his mortgage, but the young man who moves into his new home with his family, proudly waving the papers he has just signed and which will bind him for most of his productive years. After he has paid his debts—the mortgage, the college expenses for his children and his insurance—he is regarded as a problem, a “senior citizen” for whom society must provide not only material comforts but a new “purpose.

If we sold insurance or financial products: * Most families need insurance. * Most insurance is too expensive. * Most people don’t have extra money to invest. * Most people want their money to work hard for them. * Most people hate risky investments. * Most people would love to have their savings pay for their insurance. * Most families don’t have time to become investment experts. * Most company retirement plans aren’t enough. * Most people want a financial counselor to help them with their finances. * Most people need insurance, but can’t afford it. * Most people want to protect themselves from emergencies.

But we must all be conscious of the power of our archaic internal dialogues. Of how they weave themselves through our public discourses and our unspoken expectations of each other. Good provider? Think it over. What are you doing to a man when you call him a good provider? Are you normalizing and reinforcing the Man Box paradigm of a man who sacrifices his emotional expression and hidden aspirations to insure a steady stream of revenue for his family? Are you relegating him to some space outside the daily emotional sphere of the family and by extension, depriving the family of crucial male emotional modeling and connection?

For financial services: * Well, you know how it is almost impossible to save money now with the cost of living so high? Well, I show people how to use tax advantages to fund all their savings. * Well, you know how insurance is so expensive, but we need it? Well, I show families how to get inexpensive insurance so that they still have money to enjoy life. * Well, you know how hard it is to get out of debt? Well, I show people how to pay off their debts quickly so that they have more money to enjoy life. * Well, you know how we are all going to die? Well, I show people how to manage their money so that they can party and have a great time before they die. (Okay, am I going too far yet?)

The truth is that I'm a bad person. But, that's gonna change - I'm going to change. This is the last of that sort of thing. Now I'm cleaning up and I'm moving on, going straight and choosing life. I'm looking forward to it already. I'm gonna be just like you. The job, the family, the fucking big television. The washing machine, the car, the compact disc and electric tin opener, good health, low cholesterol, dental insurance, mortgage, starter home, leisure wear, luggage, three piece suite, DIY, game shows, junk food, children, walks in the park, nine to five, good at golf, washing the car, choice of sweaters, family Christmas, indexed pension, tax exemption, clearing gutters, getting by, looking ahead, the day you die.

What was still preventable in the 1980s would, in a couple decades, become manifest; what once was treatable would become deadly. I'm not sure my immediate family's brushes with death when I was a kid-mom's hemorrhage in childbirth, Grandma's collapsed lung, Dad's chemical poisoning-would be survived today. Mom would have been less healthy going into labor, Grandma would have been sent home too soon for lack of insurance, Dad would have been given a cheaper and less effective treatment. The morality rate for poor rural women, in particular, has risen sharply over my lifetime. Health insurance had been around for a long time, of course, but the power of that industry had swelled up fast, transforming access to care and all the costs that come with it.

Or is it the opposite-that the US has moved so far and so fast toward cultural permissiveness that we've reached a kind of apsidal point? It might be instructive to try seeing things from the perspective of, say, a God-fearing hard-working rural-Midwestern military vet. It's not that hard. Imagine gazing through his eyes at the world of MTV and the content of video games, at the gross sexualization of children's fashions, at Janet Jackson flashing her aureole on what's supposed to be a holy day. Imagine you're him having to explain to your youngest what oral sex is and what it's got to do with a US president. Ads for penis enlargers and Hot Wet Sluts are popping up out of nowhere on your family's computer. Your kids' school is teaching them WWII and Vietnam in terms of Japanese internment and the horrors of My Lai. Homosexuals are demanding holy matrimony; your doctor's moving away because he can't afford the lawsuit insurance; illegal aliens want driver's licenses; Hollywood elites are bashing America and making millions from it; the president's ridiculed for reading his Bible; priests are diddling kids left and right. Shit, the country's been directly attacked, and people aren't supporting our commander in chief. Assume for a moment that it's not silly to see things this man's way. What cogent, compelling, relevant message can the center and left offer him? Can we bear to admit that we've actually helped set him up to hear "We 're better than they are" not as twisted and scary but as refreshing and redemptive and true? If so, then now what?

In her book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler reports that 96 percent of American adults have relied on a major government program at some point in their lives. Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans' generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes. In 2022, this benefit is estimated to have cost the government $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $6oo billion. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent). Altogether, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021. That amount exceeded total spending on law enforcement, education, housing, healthcare, diplomacy, and everything else that makes up our discretionary budget. Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent. The top I percent of income earners take home more than all middle-class families and double that of families in the bottom 20 percent. I can't tell you how many times someone has informed me that we should reduce military spending and redirect the savings to the poor. When this suggestion is made in a public venue, it always garners applause. I've met far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class, even though we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense.

The family was also the welfare system, the health system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police. When a person fell sick, the family took care of her. When a person grew old, the family supported her, and her children were her pension fund. When a person died, the family took care of the orphans. If a person wanted to build a hut, the family lent a hand. If a person wanted to open a business, the family raised the necessary money. If a person wanted to marry, the family chose, or at least vetted, the prospective spouse. If conflict arose with a neighbour, the family muscled in. But if a person’s illness was too grave for the family to manage, or a new business demanded too large an investment, or the neighbourhood quarrel escalated to the point of violence, the local community came to the rescue.

Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans’ generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes.

Those diversions sparked her life with momentary excitement. Without them, Charis felt she would be driven mad by the unrelenting sameness of life in the palace. Now and again she imagined that she would like to run away, to disguise herself and travel the tumbled hills, to see life among the simple herdsmen and their families; or perhaps she would take a boat and sail the coasts, visiting tiny, sun-baked fishing villages and learning the rhythm of the sea. Unfortunately, making good either of those plans would mean taking action, and the only thing more palpable than the boredom she endured was the inertia that enclosed her like a massive fist. The weighty impossibility of changing her life in any but the most insignificant detail insured that she would not try. She sighed again and returned to the corridor, pausing to pick a sunshade from a nearby bush, idly plucking the delicate yellow petals and dropping them one by one, like days, fluttering from her hand.

Some incidents of facial profiling have been more inconvenient than others. I’ll never forget walking through airport security when I was flying to give a speech to a Christian men’s group in Montana. The Department of Homeland Security screeners obviously didn’t recognize me as “Jase the Duckman” from Duck Dynasty, and I felt like I was one wrong answer away from being led to an interrogation room in a pair of handcuffs! Hunting season had recently ended, so my hair and beard were in full bloom! The security screeners saw a Bible in my bag, and I guess they figured I was a Christian nut because of my long hair and bushy beard. Somehow, I made it through the metal detector and an additional pat-down, and I guess they couldn’t find a justifiable reason to detain me. But as I was getting my belongings back together, I accidentally bumped into a woman. She screamed! It must have been an involuntary reflex. It was a natural response, because she thought I was going to attack her. Once she finally settled down, I made my way to the gate and sat down to compose myself. After a few minutes, a young boy walked up and asked me for my autograph. Finally, I thought to myself. Somebody recognizes me from Duck Dynasty. Not everyone here believes I’m the Unabomber! Man, I could have used the kid about twenty minutes earlier, when I was trying to get through security! I looked over at the boy’s mother, and she was smiling from ear to ear. I realized they were very big fans. I signed my name on a piece of paper and handed it to the kid. “Can I ask you a question?” he said. “Sure, buddy,” I said. “Ask me anything you want.” “How much does Geico pay y’all?” he asked. My jaw dropped as I looked at the kid. “Wait a minute, man,” I said. “I’m not a caveman!” “What do you mean?” the boy asked. “I’m Jase the Duckman,” I said. “You know--from Duck Dynasty? Quack, quack?” It didn’t take me long to realize the boy had no idea what I was talking about. In a matter of minutes, I went from being a potential terrorist to being a caveman selling insurance.

Over time, states and markets used their growing power to weaken the traditional bonds of family and community. The state sent its policemen to stop family vendettas and replace them with court decisions. The market sent its hawkers to wipe out longstanding local traditions and replace them with ever-changing commercial fashions. Yet this was not enough. In order really to break the power of family and community, they needed the help of a fifth column. The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said. ‘Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead. We will provide food, shelter, education, health, welfare and employment. We will provide pensions, insurance and protection.

At the same time, surveillance will change the very nature of insurance. Insurance is an industry, traditionally, that draws on the majority of the community to respond to the needs of an unfortunate minority. In the villages we lived in centuries ago, families, religious groups, and neighbors helped look after each other when fire, accident, or illness struck. In the market economy, we outsource this care to insurance companies, which keep a portion of the money for themselves and call it profit. As insurance companies learn more about us, they’ll be able to pinpoint those who appear to be the riskiest customers and then either drive their rates to the stratosphere or, where legal, deny them coverage. This is a far cry from insurance’s original purpose, which is to help society balance its risk. In a targeted world, we no longer pay the average. Instead, we’re saddled with anticipated costs. Instead of smoothing out life’s bumps, insurance companies will demand payment for those bumps in advance. This undermines the point of insurance, and the hits will fall especially hard on those who can least afford them.

What is a “pyramid?” I grew up in real estate my entire life. My father built one of the largest real estate brokerage companies on the East Coast in the 1970s, before selling it to Merrill Lynch. When my brother and I graduated from college, we both joined him in building a new real estate company. I went into sales and into opening a few offices, while my older brother went into management of the company. In sales, I was able to create a six-figure income. I worked 60+ hours a week in such pursuit. My brother worked hard too, but not in the same fashion. He focused on opening offices and recruiting others to become agents to sell houses for him. My brother never listed and sold a single house in his career, yet he out-earned me 10-to-1. He made millions because he earned a cut of every commission from all the houses his 1,000+ agents sold. He worked smarter, while I worked harder. I guess he was at the top of the “pyramid.” Is this legal? Should he be allowed to earn more than any of the agents who worked so hard selling homes? I imagine everyone will agree that being a real estate broker is totally legal. Those who are smart, willing to take the financial risk of overhead, and up for the challenge of recruiting good agents, are the ones who get to live a life benefitting from leveraged Income. So how is Network Marketing any different? I submit to you that I found it to be a step better. One day, a friend shared with me how he was earning the same income I was, but that he was doing so from home without the overhead, employees, insurance, stress, and being subject to market conditions. He was doing so in a network marketing business. At first I refuted him by denouncements that he was in a pyramid scheme. He asked me to explain why. I shared that he was earning money off the backs of others he recruited into his downline, not from his own efforts. He replied, “Do you mean like your family earns money off the backs of the real estate agents in your company?” I froze, and anyone who knows me knows how quick-witted I normally am. Then he said, “Who is working smarter, you or your dad and brother?” Now I was mad. Not at him, but at myself. That was my light bulb moment. I had been closed-minded and it was costing me. That was the birth of my enlightenment, and I began to enter and study this network marketing profession. Let me explain why I found it to be a step better. My research led me to learn why this business model made so much sense for a company that wanted a cost-effective way to bring a product to market. Instead of spending millions in traditional media ad buys, which has a declining effectiveness, companies are opting to employ the network marketing model. In doing so, the company only incurs marketing cost if and when a sale is made. They get an army of word-of-mouth salespeople using the most effective way of influencing buying decisions, who only get paid for performance. No salaries, only commissions. But what is also employed is a high sense of motivation, wherein these salespeople can be building a business of their own and not just be salespeople. If they choose to recruit others and teach them how to sell the product or service, they can earn override income just like the broker in a real estate company does. So now they see life through a different lens, as a business owner waking up each day excited about the future they are building for themselves. They are not salespeople; they are business owners.

The Americans had urged us to finish the Mavi Marmara affair. We had already reached a compensation agreement with Turkey for the families of the Turks killed in the operation. What was needed now was a carefully worded script for a concluding conversation between Erdogan and me. As extra insurance against a future abandonment of the agreement by Erdogan, I asked Obama to be in on the phone conference. He did so from a special mobile cabin at the airport. “Recep, how are you, my friend?” the president said to Erdogan. “How’s the wife, how’s the family?” The genuine camaraderie in his voice tallied with what I had heard: One of Obama’s closest friends among foreign leaders was the Turkish president, possibly because in Obama’s eyes Turkey was an example of a modern, successful and democratic Islamic state. Presumably this friendship later weakened when, following an attempted coup against him on July 15, 2016, Erdogan transformed Turkey into a rigidly authoritarian regime, locked up all his political opponents, and threw more journalists in jail than almost any other ruler on earth. Erdogan and I each read our lines. I thanked Obama. The Marmara affair was finally settled.

When we get down to potential versus reality in relationships, we often see disappointment, not successful achievement. In the Church, if someone creates nuclear fallout in a calling, they are often released or reassigned quickly. Unfortunately, we do not have that luxury when we marry. So many of us have experienced this sad realization in the first weeks of our marriages. For example, we realized that our partner was not going to live up to his/her potential and give generously to the partnership. While fighting the mounting feelings of betrayal, we watched our new spouses claim a right to behave any way they desired, often at our expense. Most of us made the "best" of a truly awful situation but felt like a rat trapped in maze. We raised a family, played our role, and hoped that someday things would change if we did our part. It didn't happen, but we were not allowed the luxury of reassigning or releasing our mates from poor stewardship as a spouse or parent. We were stuck until we lost all hope and reached for the unthinkable: divorce. Reality is simple for some. Those who stay happily married (the key word here is happily are the ones who grew and felt companionship from the first days of marriage. Both had the integrity and dedication to insure its success. For those of us who are divorced, tracing back to those same early days, potential disappeared and reality reared its ugly head. All we could feel, after a sealing for "time and all eternity," was bound in an unholy snare. Take the time to examine the reality of who your sweetheart really is. What do they accomplish by natural instinct and ability? What do you like/dislike about them? Can you live with all the collective weaknesses and create a happy, viable union? Are you both committed to making each other happy? Do you respect each other's agency, and are you both encouraging and eager to see the two of you grow as individuals and as a team? Do you both talk-the-talk and walk-the-walk? Or do you love them and hope they'll change once you're married to them? Chances are that if the answer to any of these questions are "sorta," you are embracing their potential and not their reality. You may also be embracing your own potential to endure issues that may not be appropriate sacrifices at this stage in your life. No one changes without the internal impetus and drive to do so. Not for love or money. . . . We are complex creatures, and although we are trained to see the "good" in everyone, it is to our benefit to embrace realism when it comes to finding our "soul mate." It won't get much better than what you have in your relationship right now.

In other words, you have been hypnotized or conditioned by an educational processing-system arranged in grades or steps, supposedly leading to some ultimate Success. First nursery school or kindergarten, then the grades or forms of elementary school, preparing you for the great moment of secondary school! But then more steps, up and up to the coveted goal of the university. Here, if you are clever, you can stay on indefinitely by getting into graduate school and becoming a permanent student. Otherwise, you are headed step by step for the great Outside World of family-raising, business, and profession. Yet graduation day is a very temporary fulfillment, for with your first sales-promotion meeting you are back in the same old system, being urged to make that quota (and if you do, they’ll give you a higher quota) and so progress up the ladder to sales manager, vice-president, and, at last, president of your own show (about forty to forty-five years old). In the meantime, the insurance and investment people have been interesting you in plans for Retirement—that really ultimate goal of being able to sit back and enjoy the fruits of all your labors. But when that day comes, your anxieties and exertions will have left you with a weak heart, false teeth, prostate trouble, sexual impotence, fuzzy eyesight, and a vile digestion.

Shortly after I returned home from the Ukraine, I became severely ill with what doctors believed was a parasite. I couldn’t hold my food down and lost a lot of weight. Different doctors kept prescribing me antibiotics, but none of them seemed to help. For a couple of months, I was poked and tested in a variety of ways, only to have more questions surface than answers. Then I was sent to an ear, nose, and throat doctor for an evaluation. I was sitting in a waiting room with a bunch of toddlers, when my name was called. By the time I got into the examination room I knew I’d had enough. “Hey, I’m outta here,” I told the doctor. “I’ll take my chance with the resurrection.” Well, a couple of weeks later, my insurance agent called me. He was one of my lifelong friends and sounded concerned. “Hey, Jase,” he said. “Your insurance company wants you to see a psychiatrist.” Apparently, the ear, nose, and throat doctor recommended I undergo a full psychiatric evaluation based on my refusal to be examined, along with my speech on the resurrection! Apparently, he thought I was crazy. I convinced my buddy that I didn’t need a psychiatrist and eventually got over my illness. I would later read a passage of scripture in the Bible that caused me to smile in reflection on the entire ordeal. Second Corinthians 5:13 says: “If we are out of our mind, as some say, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you.

Staying at Home during this lockdown period is the right time to find your life purpose within Ba Ga Mohlala family/clan. This is an opportunity to know yourself better and to understand what motivates and feeds your mind and your soul, and also to find out as to where you fit in the bigger Ba Ga Mohlala family/clan. All members of each family/clan possess characteristics, abilities, and qualities specific to that family/clan. It is up to the family/clan to distinguish itself amongst other families/clans. Ba Ga Mohlala has become an institution to build cooperation in order to build and forge unity for social and economic benefits for Ba Ga Mohlala and Banareng in general. An institution is social structure in which people cooperate and which influences the behavior of people and the way they live. intelligence and assertiveness comes to us as our nature, it is in our blood (DNA) and all there is for us to do is to nature it and it will shine, otherwise it will gather dust and rust in us. The key of brotherhood and sisterhood is that brothers and sisters carry the same genetic code. Together, united, they carry the legacy of their forefathers. Our bond (through our shared blood/DNA) as Ba Ga Mohlala family/clan is our insurance for the future. As Ba Ga Mohlala we can have our own Law firms, Auditing Firms, Doctors's Medical Surgeries, Private School, Private Clinics or Private Hospital, farms and lot of small to medium manufacturing, service, retail and wholesale companies and become self relient. All it takes to achieve that is unity, willpower and commitment.

According to Bartholomew, an important goal of St. Louis zoning was to prevent movement into 'finer residential districts . . . by colored people.' He noted that without a previous zoning law, such neighborhoods have become run-down, 'where values have depreciated, homes are either vacant or occupied by color people.' The survey Bartholomew supervised before drafting the zoning ordinance listed the race of each building's occupants. Bartholomew attempted to estimate where African Americans might encroach so the commission could respond with restrictions to control their spread. The St. Louis zoning ordinance was eventually adopted in 1919, two years after the Supreme Court's Buchanan ruling banned racial assignments; with no reference to race, the ordinance pretended to be in compliance. Guided by Bartholomew's survey, it designated land for future industrial development if it was in or adjacent to neighborhoods with substantial African American populations. Once such rules were in force, plan commission meetings were consumed with requests for variances. Race was frequently a factor. For example, on meeting in 1919 debated a proposal to reclassify a single-family property from first-residential to commercial because the area to the south had been 'invaded by negroes.' Bartholomew persuaded the commission members to deny the variance because, he said, keeping the first-residential designation would preserve homes in the area as unaffordable to African Americans and thus stop the encroachment. On other occasions, the commission changed an area's zoning from residential to industrial if African American families had begun to move into it. In 1927, violating its normal policy, the commission authorized a park and playground in an industrial, not residential, area in hopes that this would draw African American families to seek housing nearby. Similar decision making continued through the middle of the twentieth century. In a 1942 meeting, commissioners explained they were zoning an area in a commercial strip as multifamily because it could then 'develop into a favorable dwelling district for Colored people. In 1948, commissioners explained they were designating a U-shaped industrial zone to create a buffer between African Americans inside the U and whites outside. In addition to promoting segregation, zoning decisions contributed to degrading St. Louis's African American neighborhoods into slums. Not only were these neighborhoods zoned to permit industry, even polluting industry, but the plan commission permitted taverns, liquor stores, nightclubs, and houses of prostitution to open in African American neighborhoods but prohibited these as zoning violations in neighborhoods where whites lived. Residences in single-family districts could not legally be subdivided, but those in industrial districts could be, and with African Americans restricted from all but a few neighborhoods, rooming houses sprang up to accommodate the overcrowded population. Later in the twentieth century, when the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) developed the insure amortized mortgage as a way to promote homeownership nationwide, these zoning practices rendered African Americans ineligible for such mortgages because banks and the FHA considered the existence of nearby rooming houses, commercial development, or industry to create risk to the property value of single-family areas. Without such mortgages, the effective cost of African American housing was greater than that of similar housing in white neighborhoods, leaving owners with fewer resources for upkeep. African American homes were then more likely to deteriorate, reinforcing their neighborhoods' slum conditions.

If you're involved in a motorcycle accident, this can result in devastating injuries, permanent disability or perhaps put you on on-going dependency on healthcare care. In that case, it's prudent to make use of Los Angeles motorcycle accident attorneys to assist safeguard your legal rights if you are a victim of a motorcycle accident. How a san diego car accident attorney Aids An experienced attorney will help you, if you're an injured motorcycle rider or your family members in case of a fatal motorcycle accident. Hence, a motorcycle accident attorney assists you secure complete and commensurate compensation because of this of accident damages. In the event you go it alone, an insurance coverage company may possibly take benefit and that's why you'll need to have a legal ally by your side till the case is settled to your satisfaction. If well represented after a motorcycle collision, you may get compensation for: Present and future lost income: If just after motor cycle injury you cannot perform and earn as just before, you deserve compensation for lost income. This also applies for a loved ones that has a lost a bread-winner following a fatal motorcycle crash. Existing and future healthcare costs, rehabilitation and therapy: these consist of any health-related fees incurred because of this of the accident. Loss of capability to take pleasure in life, pain and mental anguish: a motorcycle crash can lessen your good quality of life if you cannot stroll, run, see, hear, drive, or ride any longer. That is why specialists in motor cycle injury law practice will help with correct evaluation of your predicament and exercise a commensurate compensation. As a result, usually do not hesitate to speak to Los Angeles motorcycle accident attorneys in case you are involved in a motor cycle accident. The professionals will help you file a case within a timely fashion also as expedite evaluation and compensation. This could also work in your favor if all parties involved agree to an out-of-court settlement, in which case you incur fewer costs.

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this. I have no praise anthems, nor old Negro spirituals. The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why they are so precious. And the soul did not escape. The spirit did not steal away on gospel wings. The soul was the body that fed the tobacco, and the spirit was the blood that watered the cotton, and these created the first fruits of the American garden. And the fruits were secured through the bashing of children with stovewood, through hot iron peeling skin away like husk from corn. It had to be blood. It had to be nails driven through tongue and ears pruned away. “Some disobedience,” wrote a Southern mistress. “Much idleness, sullenness, slovenliness…. Used the rod.” It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d… with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization. “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.*

The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. What country do you want to live in?

Some patients choose not to pursue treatment out of a sense of denial about the tumor. They may think, “Maybe they’re wrong. Why take these risks associated with treatment? I don’t want to put my family through this and my insurance won’t cover it.

Jared Kushner in quite a short period of time—rather less than a year—had crossed over from the standard Democratic view in which he was raised, to an acolyte of Trumpism, bewildering many friends and, as well, his own brother, whose insurance company, Oscar, funded with Kushner-family money, was destined to be shattered by a repeal of Obamacare.

Dale Soutas began his financial services career in San Jose California in 1985. He moved to the Central Valley and opened his own Company "Soutas Financial and Insurance Solutions Inc". Dale is enthusiastic about helping families on their street to retirement.

The most important modification that must be made to a standard analysis of incentives is salience. Do the choosers actually notice the incentives they face? In free markets, the answer is usually yes, but in important cases the answer is no. Consider the example of members of an urban family deciding whether to buy a car. Suppose their choices are to take taxis and public transportation or to spend ten thousand dollars to buy a used car, which they can park on the street in front of their home. The only salient costs of owning this car will be the weekly stops at the gas station, occasional repair bills, and a yearly insurance bill. The opportunity cost of the ten thousand dollars is likely to be neglected. (In other words, once they purchase the car, they tend to forget about the ten thousand dollars and stop treating it as money that could have been spent on something else.) In contrast, every time the family uses a taxi the cost will be in their face, with the meter clicking every few blocks. So a behavioral analysis of the incentives of car ownership will predict that people will underweight the opportunity costs of car ownership, and possibly other less salient aspects such as depreciation, and may overweight the very salient costs of using a taxi.* An analysis of choice architecture systems must make similar adjustments.

New Deal legislation undoubtedly saved thousands of lives and prevented destitution for millions. New labor laws led to a flourishing of unions and built a strong white middle class. The Social Security Act of 1935 established the principle of cash payments in cases of unemployment, old age, or loss of a family breadwinner, and it did so as a matter of right, not on the basis of individual moral character. But the New Deal also created racial, gender, and class divisions that continue to produce inequities in our society today. Roosevelt’s administration capitulated to white supremacy in ways that still bear bitter fruit. The Civilian Conservation Corps capped Black participation in federally supported work relief at 10 percent of available jobs, though African Americans experienced 80 percent unemployment in northern cities. The National Housing Act of 1934 redoubled the burden on Black neighborhoods by promoting residential segregation and encouraging mortgage redlining. The Wagner Act granted workers the right to organize, but allowed segregated trade unions. Most importantly, in response to threats that southern states would not support the Social Security Act, both agricultural and domestic workers were explicitly excluded from its employment protections. The “southern compromise” left the great majority of African American workers—and a not-insignificant number of poor white tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and domestics—with no minimum wage, unemployment protection, old-age insurance, or right to collective bargaining.

All the same, Kiev was a melancholy city. Its defining features were failures, absences. Some were obvious: only one supermarket (dollars only), few private cars (six at an intersection counted as a traffic jam), a joke of a postal service (to send a letter, one went to the railway station, and handed it to a friendly face going in the right direction). Others one only felt the force of after a time. With benefits and pensions virtually non-existent, the crudest health care (drugs had to be paid for; doctors wanted bribes), and no insurance (a few private firms had sprung up, but nobody trusted them with their money), Kievans were living lives of a precariousness unknown in the West, destitution never more than an illness or a family quarrel away. It showed in their wiry bodies and pinched, alert, Depression-era faces; the faces of people who get by on cheap vodka and stale cigarettes, and know they have to look after themselves, for nobody else will do it for them.

An exemplary son of Sicilian immigrants, he worked hard and made big plans. At seventeen he was already an insurance agent and engaged to Josie, a sweet local girl; he anticipated a flourishing American life, a happy family, a prosperous business. But three nights after Mardi Gras, Josie had a dream. She dreamed that evil was about to descend on the neighborhood. She was prescient. Frank’s life was about to become a nightmare.

She grabbed the knob. In the past, anger had often been her fuel. She’d been energized by it, and she realized, had depended on it to propel her over hurdles of exhaustion when Ben was an infant. Through red tape when dealing with insurance companies and physicians. Into new routines like learning sign language and coordinating treatments and surgeries with various specialists. She all but stumbled to her room. Closed the door and sank to sit on the bed, her breathing shallow. Yes, there’d been long periods of time she’d lived on anger. Now she saw she couldn’t afford it, or the way it made her behave toward her family.