Financially Struggling Quotes

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

When you see a man struggling financially, usually it's because he simply lacks a perfect muse.

Rule #1: You must know the difference between an asset and a liability, and buy assets. If you want to be rich, this is all you need to know. It is rule number one. It is the only rule. This may sound absurdly simple, but most people have no idea how profound this rule is. Most people struggle financially because they do not know the difference between an asset and a liability. “Rich people acquire assets. The poor and middle class acquire liabilities that they think are assets, “ said rich dad.

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Momma, a welfare cheater. A criminal who couldn't stand to se her kids go hungry, or grow up in slumbs and end up mugging people in dar corners. I guess the system didn't want her to get off relief, the way it kept sending social workers around to be sure Momma wasn't trying to make things better.

The rich does not work for money, but money work for them...., While the poor work for money.Illiteracy, both in word and numbers, is the foundation of financial struggle....,Wealth is a person's ability to survive so many number of days forward... or if i stopped working today, how could i survive?...,Wealth is the measure of cash flow from to asset column compared with the expense column...,

Some day you will look back on these days as the happiest of your life. You will forget your financial struggles. You will forget the unfair division of duties. You will forget feeling trapped and smothered, imagining that you are in a loveless marriage. You will only remember the joy of a young family, working together making your way through an unfamiliar world. Appreciate what you have now. pg vi

The main reason that over 90 percent of the American public struggles financially is because they play not to lose. They don’t play to win.

One of the reasons the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class struggles in debt is because the subject of money is taught at home, not in school. Most of us learn about money from our parents. So what can a poor parent tell their child about money? They simply say "Stay in school and study hard." The child may graduate with excellent grades but with a poor person's financial programming and mind-set. It was learned while the child was young.

Financial struggle is often directly the result of people working all their lives for someone else.

You see, in our world, there exists a certain hierarchy. The people at the bottom devote their lives to achieve financial freedom, while those who have transcended higher, aspire for freedoms of a different kind. Most of us are so entangled, so helpless, that there never comes a time when money isn’t at the back of our minds. Most people spend their entire life at the bottom, constantly struggling to amass as much wealth as they can.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace - business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs and we know now that a government by organized money is just as bad as a government by organized mob.

Few people knew how much I was struggling both emotionally and financially, because I didn’t talk to anyone about it or even understand how bad off I was.

Checking the address, he knocked on the door. The door opened a crack. “We’re closed.” He recognized those violet eyes. His throat went dry. “Oh. You again.” Her eyes narrowed as she chuckled. “You must have women throwing themselves at you with lines like that. What are you doing here?” “I came to see if Flynn Enterprises has made an offer to buy your property.” His gaze wandered against his better judgement. On his ship, she’d been wearing jeans and a t-shirt. Now her curves were covered by a quality replica of a pirate’s frock coat, complete with deck boots, a bandana covering her hair, and a single hoop earring. “Didn’t take you for a pirate earlier today.” “You seriously came over here to talk to a stranger about private financial information, and then you have the balls to comment on her work attire?” She raised a brow. “We’re hardly strangers.” He struggled to hold back a smile and offered his hand. “I don’t think I introduced myself earlier. I’m Colton. Colton Hayes.” She looked at his hand and finally opened the door. “Skye Olson. And apparently I’m a glutton for punishment.

I noticed that my mother paid for her intellectual freedom with chronic financial struggles and occasional personal chaos,

Your financial struggles have not gone unnoticed in heaven.

Perfectionism can also emerge from the need to be independent very early in our lives because our parents may have struggled financially, physically, or emotionally.

Please, do not let fear or laziness be the reason you continue to struggle financially, I cannot stress this enough.

we cannot divorce capitalism from race, nor can we divorce our struggle against racism from our struggle against capitalism. Every financial crisis is a racial crisis as well.

Immanuel Kant was born into a family of financially struggling artisans in 1724, and he lived and worked his whole life in the cosmopolitan Baltic port city of Konigsberg, then part of Prussia.

Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it. In fact, the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom. Without good financial habits, you will always be struggling for the next dollar. Without good health habits, you will always seem to be short on energy. Without good learning habits, you will always feel like you’re behind the curve.

Some men are afraid of committing because they see themselves in no shape to build a future with someone else. Some are insecure about where they are in life and how far they are from their goals. They don’t want to bring a struggle to the table. They want to be stable and comfortable in life first. They don’t want to feel as if they aren’t man enough. They want to be able to protect and provide without bringing the woman they love into failure with them. To the man stuck in that situation: She loves you, she wants you. The most valuable thing you can give a woman whose heart belongs to you is your time and affection. You are getting in your own way, not your financial status or failures.

Somewhere along the way we've gotten the message that the more we struggle and the more we suffer, the more valuable we will become and the more successful we'll eventually be. And so we overwork ourselves, overschedule ourselves, and become "busier than thou" because we think there's some sort of prize on the other side of the pain we cause ourselves. And you know what? There's no prize. All you get from suffering is more suffering.

Millennials: We lost the genetic lottery. We graduated high school into terrorist attacks and wars. We graduated college into a recession and mounds of debt. We will never acquire the financial cushion, employment stability, and material possessions of our parents. We are often more educated, experienced, informed, and digitally fluent than prior generations, yet are constantly haunted by the trauma of coming of age during the detonation of the societal structure we were born into. But perhaps we are overlooking the silver lining. We will have less money to buy the material possessions that entrap us. We will have more compassion and empathy because our struggles have taught us that even the most privileged can fall from grace. We will have the courage to pursue our dreams because we have absolutely nothing to lose. We will experience the world through backpacking, couch surfing, and carrying on interesting conversations with adventurers in hostels because our bank accounts can't supply the Americanized resorts. Our hardships will obligate us to develop spiritual and intellectual substance. Maybe having roommates and buying our clothes at thrift stores isn't so horrible as long as we are making a point to pursue genuine happiness.

People aren’t really needed for anything else in the Griftopia, but since Americans require the illusion of self-government, we have elections. To make sure those elections are effectively meaningless as far as Wall Street is concerned, two things end up being true. One is that voters on both sides of the aisle are gradually weaned off that habit of having real expectations for their politicians, consuming the voting process entirely as culture-war entertainment. The other is that millions of tenuously middle-class voters are conned into pushing Wall Street’s own twisted greed ethos as though it were their own. The Tea Party, with its weirdly binary view of society as being split up cleanly into competing groups of producers and parasites—that’s just a cultural echo of the insane greed-is-good belief system on Wall Street that’s provided the foundation/excuse for a generation of brilliantly complex thievery. Those beliefs have trickled down to the ex-middle-class suckers struggling to stay on top of their mortgages and their credit card bills, and the real joke is that these voters listen to CNBC and Fox and they genuinely believe they’re the producers in this binary narrative. They don’t get that somewhere way up above, there’s a group of people who’ve been living the Atlas dream for real—and building a self-dealing financial bureaucracy in their own insane image.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. --Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from a 1936 speech in New York City

Society itself falls apart into class and intraclass groups; individual life-sequences are directly linked with these and together both individual life and subgroups are opposed to the whole. Thus in the early stages of slaveholding society and in feudal society, individual life-sequences are still rather tightly interwoven with the common life of the most immediate social group. But nevertheless they are separate, even here. The course of individual lives, of groups, and of the sociopolitical whole do not fuse together, they are dispersed, there are gaps; they are measured by different scales of value; each of these series has its own logic of development, its own narratives, each makes use of and reinterprets the ancient motifs in its own way. Within the boundaries of individual life-series, an interior aspect makes itself apparent. The process of separating out and detaching individual life-sequences from the whole reaches its highest point when financial relations develop in slaveholding society, and under capitalism. Here the individual sequence takes on its specific private character and what is held in common becomes maximally abstract. The ancient motifs that had passed into the individual life-narratives here undergo a specific kind of degeneration. Food, drink, copulation and so forth lose their ancient "pathos" (their link, their unity with the laboring life of the social whole); they become a petty private matter; they seem to exhaust all their significance within the boundaries of individual life. As a result of this severance from the producing life of the whole and from the collective struggle with nature, their real links with the life of nature are weakened-if not severed altogether.

The struggle for Financial Freedom is very unfair. Just look at the rewards.

With the power of God, we can scale any wall.

Financial struggles are temporary; the lessons they teach can last a lifetime.

Drinking and drugs might temporarily bring some relief, but there is no problem in life that drugs and alcohol don't make worse--whether the issue is financial, emotional, or legal. If you are reading this and find yourself struggling, ask God to take the burden off your shoulders, reach out for help, and stop digging a deeper hole for yourself. There is a community of millions of men and women who have been in similar circumstances and will be there for you, stranger or not, because their own recovery depends on helping people like you.

There are times where life is unfair to us; we may experience poor health, financial struggles, or emotional turmoil. Remain steadfast through the storm; the clouds shall part in time.

-Prayer In My Life- Every person has his own ideas of the act of praying for God's guidance, tolerance and mercy to fulfill his duties and responsibilities. My own concept of prayer is not a plea for special favors, nor as a quick palliation for wrongs knowingly committed. A prayer, it seems to me, implies a promise as well as a request; at the highest level, prayer not only is supplication for strength and guidance, but also becomes an affirmation of life and thus a reverent praise of God. Deeds rather than words express my concept of the part religion should play in everyday life. I have watched constantly that in our movie work the highest moral and spiritual standards are upheld, whether it deals with fable or with stories of living action. This religious concern for the form and content of our films goes back 40 years to the rugged financial period in Kansas City when I was struggling to establish a film company and produce animated fairy tales. Thus, whatever success I have had in bringing clean, informative entertainment to people of all ages, I attribute in great part to my Congregational upbringing and lifelong habit of prayer. To me, today at age 61, all prayer by the humble or highly placed has one thing in common: supplication for strength and inspiration to carry on the best impulses which should bind us together for a better world. Without such inspiration we would rapidly deteriorate and finally perish. But in our troubled times, the right of men to think and worship as their conscience dictates is being sorely pressed. We can retain these privileges only by being constantly on guard in fighting off any encroachment on these precepts. To retreat from any of the principles handed down by our forefathers, who shed their blood for the ideals we all embrace, would be a complete victory for those who would destroy liberty and justice for the individual.

Those with NPD gain power over others by holding things over their head. This is often financially, but not always. They use what's important to you. They fish for your deepest desire and sink the hook. Take a look at your life. Have you been caught? Is your desire and gratitude out of balance? You can get free. Don't struggle. Follow your heart. -promotion for Escape from Narc Island

It’s important to me. When people already struggle with making good financial decisions, I don’t want to be the one to push them over the edge. I want to be the one advising them on how to make it better.

what makes the choice pressing for us now is the absence of any viable middle way. We owe the dearth of alternatives to neoliberalism: that exceptionally predatory, financialized form of capitalism that has held sway across the globe for the last forty years. Having poisoned the atmosphere, mocked every pretense of democratic rule, stretched our social capacities to their breaking point, and worsened living conditions generally for the vast majority, this iteration of capitalism has raised the stakes for every social struggle, transforming sober efforts to win modest reforms into pitched battles for survival. Under such conditions, the time for fence-sitting is past, and feminists must take a stand: Will we continue to pursue “equal opportunity domination” while the planet burns? Or will we reimagine gender justice in an anticapitalist form—one that leads beyond the present crisis to a new society?

They painted one another and painted next to one another and supported one another emotionally and financially, and today their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But in the 1860s, they were struggling. Monet was broke. Renoir once had to bring him bread so that he wouldn’t starve. Not that Renoir was in any better shape. He didn’t have enough money to buy stamps for his letters. There were virtually no dealers interested in their paintings.

Scholarships allowed her to study at Woods Hole Biological Laboratory, where she fell in love with the sea, and at Johns Hopkins University, where she was isolated, one of a handful of women in marine biology. She had no mentors and no money to continue in graduate school after completing an M.A. in zoology in 1932. Along the way she worked as a laboratory assistant in the school of public health, where she was lucky enough to receive some training in experimental genetics. As employment opportunities in science dwindled, she began writing articles about the natural history of Chesapeake Bay for the Baltimore Sun. Although these were years of financial and emotional struggle, Carson realized that she did not have to choose between science and writing, that she had the talent to do both. From childhood on, Carson was interested in

good news is that we’re all doomed, and you can give up any sense of control. Resistance is futile. Many things are going to get worse and weaker, especially democracy and the muscles in your upper arms. Most deteriorating conditions, though, will have to do with your family, the family in which you were raised and your current one. A number of the best people will have died, badly, while the worst thrive. The younger middle-aged people struggle with the same financial, substance, and marital crises that their parents did, and the older middle-aged people are, like me, no longer even late-middle-aged. We’re early old age, with failing memories, hearing loss, and gum disease. And also, while I hate to sound pessimistic, there are also new, tiny, defenseless people who are probably doomed, too, to the mental ruin of ceaseless striving. What most of us live by and for is the love of family—blood family, where the damage occurred, and chosen, where a bunch of really nutty people fight back together. But both kinds of families can be as hard and hollow as bone, as mystical and common, as dead and alive, as promising and depleted. And by the same token, only redeeming familial love can save you from this crucible, along with nature and clean sheets. A

Mamaw could spew venom like a Marine Corps drill instructor, but what she saw in our community didn’t just piss her off. It broke her heart. Behind the drugs, and the fighting matches, and the financial struggles, these were people with serious problems, and they were hurting. Our neighbors had a kind of desperate sadness in their lives.

The problems of our community hit close to home. Mom’s struggles weren’t some isolated incident. They were replicated, replayed, and relived by many of the people who, like us, had moved hundreds of miles in search of a better life. There was no end in sight. Mamaw had thought she escaped the poverty of the hills, but the poverty—emotional, if not financial—had followed her.

Despite their efficiency, some people still wonder about the benefits of habits. The argument goes like this: “Will habits make my life dull? I don’t want to pigeonhole myself into a lifestyle I don’t enjoy. Doesn’t so much routine take away the vibrancy and spontaneity of life?” Hardly. Such questions set up a false dichotomy. They make you think that you have to choose between building habits and attaining freedom. In reality, the two complement each other. Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it. In fact, the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom. Without good financial habits, you will always be struggling for the next dollar. Without good health habits, you will always seem to be short on energy. Without good learning habits, you will always feel like you’re behind the curve. If you’re always being forced to make decisions about simple tasks—when should I work out, where do I go to write, when do I pay the bills—then you have less time for freedom. It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.

The secret to a good marriage is grocery shopping . It's a boring duty , you will always bond with someone you struggle together with , you are making financial decisions truly together and learning compromise , you are being seen in public together thus committing to the relationship in front of the community , and when you get home you get to enjoy the fruits of your labor Together .

Approximately 95% of our society settles for far less than they want in life, wishing they had more, living with regret and never understanding that they could be, do, and have all that they want. According to the Social Security Administration, if you take any 100 people at the start of their working careers and follow them for the next 40 years until they reach retirement age, here’s what you’ll find:  only 1 will be wealthy; 4 will be financially secure; 5 will continue working, not because they want to but because they have to; 36 will be dead; and 54 will be broke and dependent on friends, family, relatives, and the government to take care of them. Monetarily speaking, that’s only 5% of us who will be successful in creating a life of freedom, and 95% who will continue to struggle their entire lives.

I'm like a shark," Janie said. "I need to keep moving or die, which means I need to expand-" she stopped there. Her own father's business was successful mainly because he kept expanding, kept moving onward and upward. The only difference was Dan Westerveld didn't have a spouse who gambled away all available equity in the house and business. But Janie kept that information to herself. Neither her sister nor her parents knew how dire her financial situation was. "What do you mean? And you're kind of struggling as it is." "And that's why I need to expand. I'm just trying to make sure I can sustain my current lifestyle, which is hardly extravagant." "I'll say. I can't believe that beater of a car of yours is still running." "Regular maintenance helps." And prayer, Janie thought. Something she spent a lot of time on these days.

Soul work is the 'more' that we need to do to heal our souls. Soul retrieval is one more step toward balance and wholeness. The trauma of major illness, death, financial devastation, abuse, terror, and other stressors in our lives will not cease while we live and breathe. But, knowing they can rob us of our soul allows us to address those loses before or as they occur, so that we do not have to struggle to survive without that which makes us who we are.

Despite our financial struggles, he - the narcissist - would insist that we take lavish vacations, get $150 bottles of wine, and spare no expense. When the bills came in, he couldn’t be bothered, but he always expected the show to go on. Narcissists will tend to spend money they don’t have to throw a big show. One place this will sometimes emerge is in wedding planning. Many people I talked with reflected back on their weddings as though they were a “show”.

The world is filled with talented poor people. All too often, they’re poor or struggle financially or earn less than they are capable of, not because of what they know, but because of what they do not know. They focus on perfecting their skills at building a better hamburger rather than the skills of selling and delivering the hamburger. Maybe McDonald’s does not make the best hamburger, but they are the best at selling and delivering a basic average burger.

Our children won’t stay around us forever but will soon move on to their own lives. It’s during the few short years we have them to ourselves that we can help them awaken to the fullness within them, because it’s into this inner cup that they will dip when they are alone at college and under pressure, in a relationship and struggling with intimacy, or in a financial crunch and anxious. To prepare them for this, their spirit needs to be nourished on a daily basis.

Whether you have experienced financial struggles, a challenging childhood, prejudice or criticism against your weight, sex, race, or faith, or even rejection, failure, and loss, you should never give up. Your experiences, challenges, and struggles are all the more reasons for you to succeed. So get up, get busy, and start building the future you deserve. There are no limits other than the ones we create for ourselves. Grow from your past to gain success in your future.

Your weight problems, your financial problems, and most likely any other physical or mental pains you are experiencing all center on one single issue. You have something you love to do and were born to do, and you’re turning your back on it. Having something that you love doing is a gift from the universe, and you’re rejecting it. When you reject that kind of gift, you are rejecting the grace that goes along with it. As a result, you struggle, you yearn, and you starve.

Embedded in the myth of arrival…is the message that…there will come a day when our struggles and suffering will be finished. Depression, anxiety, anger, and all manner of “ill being” will finally end. We will wake up one morning and clearly recognize that we have “arrived”: We will have gotten ourselves and our lives “together” in a way that can never be undone. We will be healthy and happy. We’ll be in the job, the home, and the relationship that we have always wanted, financially comfortable and fundamentally at peace with ourselves.

Just as in the days of the witch trials, as the global situation worsens, people become more and more fearful. The current febrile political environment often veers dangerously to the right. Many of us anxiously contemplate the present and future realities of the climate crisis, struggle with the financial and social pressures of modern life, watch on in impotent horror at the seemingly constant worldwide conficts — all while actively participating in the emotionally heightening petri dish that is social media We must take great care to guard against a new iteration of the witch trials.

The intelligent want self-control; children want candy. —RUMI INTRODUCTION Welcome to Willpower 101 Whenever I mention that I teach a course on willpower, the nearly universal response is, “Oh, that’s what I need.” Now more than ever, people realize that willpower—the ability to control their attention, emotions, and desires—influences their physical health, financial security, relationships, and professional success. We all know this. We know we’re supposed to be in control of every aspect of our lives, from what we eat to what we do, say, and buy. And yet, most people feel like willpower failures—in control one moment but overwhelmed and out of control the next. According to the American Psychological Association, Americans name lack of willpower as the number-one reason they struggle to meet their goals. Many feel guilty about letting themselves and others down. Others feel at the mercy of their thoughts, emotions, and cravings, their lives dictated by impulses rather than conscious choices. Even the best-controlled feel a kind of exhaustion at keeping it all together and wonder if life is supposed to be such a struggle. As a health psychologist and educator for the Stanford School of Medicine’s Health Improvement Program, my job is to help people manage stress and make healthy choices. After years of watching people struggle to change their thoughts, emotions, bodies, and habits, I realized that much of what people believed about willpower was sabotaging their success and creating unnecessary stress. Although scientific research had much to say that could help them, it was clear that these insights had not yet become part of public understanding. Instead, people continued to rely on worn-out strategies for self-control. I saw again and again that the strategies most people use weren’t just ineffective—they actually backfired, leading to self-sabotage and losing control. This led me to create “The Science of Willpower,” a class offered to the public through Stanford University’s Continuing Studies program. The course brings together the newest insights about self-control from psychology, economics, neuroscience, and medicine to explain how we can break old habits and create healthy habits, conquer procrastination, find our focus, and manage stress. It illuminates why we give in to temptation and how we can find the strength to resist. It demonstrates the importance of understanding the limits of self-control,

According to the Social Security Administration, if you take any 100 people at the start of their working careers and follow them for the next 40 years until they reach retirement age, here’s what you’ll find: only 1 will be wealthy; 4 will be financially secure; 5 will continue working, not because they want to but because they have to; 36 will be dead; and 54 will be broke and dependent on friends, family, relatives, and the government to take care of them.  Monetarily speaking, that’s only 5% of us who will be successful in creating a life of freedom, and 95% who will continue to struggle their entire lives.

the immorality of slavery became patently clear that spring. He had acquired from Colonel Dent the mulatto slave named William Jones who had worked on Dent’s farm and was now thirty-five years old. It was the only time Grant ever owned a slave and Jones may have come as a gift. Then, on March 29, 1859, Grant appeared at circuit court in St. Louis to file papers that declared “I do hereby manumit, emancipate & set free said William from slavery forever.”136 Still struggling financially, Grant could have earned a considerable sum had he chosen to sell Jones rather than liberate him. Instead he made good on his pledge to set free

It was common knowledge at one prominent women’s brand I worked for that the reason they didn’t have more women of color, specifically Black women, on their legacy magazine covers was because they didn’t sell as well. For a business enterprise, and a financially struggling one at that, the editorial strategy to routinely flood the covers with normatively sized straight white women was presented as necessary business, and not a deeply racist lens. But this is where I’ve encountered capitalism to be at its most damaging: it provides an all-encompassing language to code racism, heterosexism, and classism as something else—to establish distance between these deeply coursing prejudices and the unavoidable realities of running a business. This distance insulates. It establishes an alternative reality in which testimonials, diversity reports, investigations, and data analysis on representation don’t resonate because making money is the ultimate objective above all else. But that’s all the more reason why the impetus to drive profits also needs to be aligned and analyzed in endeavors against oppression. Because the drive to make money, more money, more money than your competitors, more money than you made last year, more money than projected for the following year is an enduring vehicle for suppression.

In a harsh, cruel world where success is only measured by financial income, the higher moral values are ‎getting lost and forgotten. No one counts your efforts, good deeds, struggle, and giving unless if these ‎deeds make money. Money nowadays, unfortunately, is the fake God everyone follows. If you make ‎solid profits you are a human being worth respect, but if you are struggling and working so hard in life, ‎yet your struggle and good deeds don't make you the money you need, you only worth neglecting.‎ For all those who struggle to live another day by doing the right thing, hang in there, God is with you ‎and better days are coming too by God’s will.‎

[The eighteenth century] was the century, as we are frequently told, of women - the intellectual life of women in salons, women wielding unseen influence, women as members of academies, theatrical productions whose success depended on the power of actresses to charm; in the economic sphere, financiers amassing great fortunes in order to marry their daughters into the aristocracy, and women ruling over whole peoples and empires: Maria Theresa, Catherine the Great, Queen Elisabeth Farnese of Spain, as well as the likes of Mme du Pompadour and Mme du Barry. It was as if some residual matriarchy - the oldest culture of the Mediterranean - was struggling to emerge from the blood and the collective unconscious; as if the time would one day return when, in every tribe, it was the women who possessed wealth and power and the men who 'married out', moving into the wife's extended family, where they became gentle, pampered, more or less superfluous drones. [...] In the century of women, it was inevitable that these erotic legends should attach themselves to the outstanding female figures of the time [...] and all this applied even more strongly in France. It was there that women reached the greatest positions of power, and there that this erotic momentum was at its strongest, by virtue of the traditions and nature of the French people.

The European dream was dead, he thought, the Europe of grand ideals was buried in the ashes of apathy. There was no brotherhood of nations, only the squalid struggle of the political and financial masters to line their own pockets, while the masses were brainwashed into a zombie-like existence under the false flag of liberty. All its values were secular and materialistic—with propagandistic jargon employed to nullify citizens from detecting the corrosion of their souls. Once Europe had professed itself to be the embodiment of a spiritual ideal. But, like a fossil, all that remained of it now was its hollow shell, the insides having rotted away during the passage of centuries.

Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it. In fact, the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom. Without good financial habits, you will always be struggling for the next dollar. Without good health habits, you will always seem to be short on energy. Without good learning habits, you will always feel like you’re behind the curve. If you’re always being forced to make decisions about simple tasks—when should I work out, where do I go to write, when do I pay the bills—then you have less time for freedom. It’s only by making the fundamentals of life easier that you can create the mental space needed for free thinking and creativity.

Georgia Populist Tom Watson was the party’s most vocal advocate of black-white cooperation in facing their common economic problems. Time and again, he pointed out “the accident of color can make no difference in the interests of farmers, croppers, and laborers.”105 Watson often spoke to mixed groups of black and white farmers, always hammering home the message of their shared plight. In 1892 Watson told an audience: “You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the arch of financial despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both.

We know that we are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions) while insisting that there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that human institutions manufacture, and that, if imagined differently, could build the kind of caring society we need. Anni Vassiliou, a youth worker who is part of the struggle against the Eldorado gold mine in Greece, describes this as living in “an upside down world. We are in danger of more and more floods. We are in danger of never, here in Greece, never experiencing spring and fall again. And they’re telling us that we are in danger of exiting the Euro. How crazy is that?

Education is an industry that is driven and financially backed by the realities that dark children and their families just survive. It is Teach for America’s mantra: spend two years in an inner city or rural school with poor and/or dark children and help them survive. Individuals with little to no experience are tasked with working in struggling schools that were designed to fail (e.g., they are underfunded, with high teacher burnout, tests that punish students, and low-quality teachers) and given only two years—if they can make it that long—to “make a difference,” when hundreds more qualified have tried and failed before them. These educational parasites need dark children to be underserved and failing, which supports their feel-good, quick-fix, gimmicky narrative and the financial reason for their existence.

If you listen to financial TV, or read most market columnists, you’d think that investing is some kind of sport, or a war, or a struggle for survival in a hostile wilderness. But investing isn’t about beating others at their game. It’s about controlling yourself at your own game. The challenge for the intelligent investor is not to find the stocks that will go up the most and down the least, but rather to prevent yourself from being your own worst enemy—from buying high just because Mr. Market says “Buy!” and from selling low just because Mr. Market says “Sell!” If your investment horizon is long—at least 25 or 30 years—there is only one sensible approach: Buy every month, automatically, and whenever else you can spare some money. The single best choice for this lifelong holding is a total stock-market index fund. Sell only when you need the cash

Although I don’t know for sure, I’d bet my dog and lot that John Grisham never worked for the mob. All of that is total fabrication (and total fabrication is the fiction-writer’s purest delight). He was once a young lawyer, though, and he has clearly forgotten none of the struggle. Nor has he forgotten the location of the various financial pitfalls and honeytraps that make the field of corporate law so difficult. Using plainspun humor as a brilliant counterpoint and never substituting cant for story, he sketches a world of Darwinian struggle where all the savages wear three-piece suits. And—here’s the good part—this is a world impossible not to believe. Grisham has been there, spied out the land and the enemy positions, and brought back a full report. He told the truth of what he knew, and for that if nothing else, he deserves every buck The Firm made.

The proletariat has not succeeded in negating itself as such - the century and a half since Marx has made that clear. The proletariat has failed to negate itself qua class and thereby abolish class society per se. Perhaps this is because the proletariat never was a class, as had been supposed - because only the bourgeoisie was a true Class, and therefore the only one capable of negating itself as such. For it has indeed negated itself, along with capital, and so generated a classless society, albeit one which has nothing to do with the classless society that was supposed to arise from a revolution and from a negation of the proletariat as such. As for the proletariat, it has simply disappeared - vanished along with the class struggle itself. There can be no doubt that had capitalism developed in accordance with its own contradictory logic, it would have been defeated by the proletariat. In an ideal sense, Marx's analysis is still irreproachable. But Marx simply did not foresee that it would be possible for capital, in the face of the imminent threat to its existence, to transpoliticize itself, as it were: to launch itself into an orbit beyond the relations of production and political contradictions, to make itself autonomous in a free-floating, ecstatic and haphazard form, and thus to totalize the world in its own image. Capital (if it may still be so called) has barred the way of political economy and the law of value; it is in this sense that it has successfully escaped its own end. Henceforward it can function independently of its own former aims, and absolutely without reference to any aims whatsoever. The inaugural event of this mutation was undoubtedly the Great Crash of 1929; the stockmarket crisis of 1987 was merely an aftershock.

That City of yours is a morbid excrescence. Wall Street is a morbid excrescence. Plainly it's a thing that has grown out upon the social body rather like -- what do you call it? -- an embolism, thrombosis, something of that sort. A sort of heart in the wrong place, isn't it? Anyhow -- there it is. Everything seems obliged to go through it now; it can hold up things, stimulate things, give the world fever or pain, and yet all the same -- is it necessary, Irwell? Is it inevitable? Couldn't we function economically quite as well without it? Has the world got to carry that kind of thing for ever? "What real strength is there in a secondary system of that sort? It's secondary, it's parasitic. It's only a sort of hypertrophied, uncontrolled counting-house which has become dominant by falsifying the entries and intercepting payment. It's a growth that eats us up and rots everything like cancer. Financiers make nothing, they are not a productive department. They control nothing. They might do so, but they don't. They don't even control Westminster and Washington. They just watch things in order to make speculative anticipations. They've got minds that lie in wait like spiders, until the fly flies wrong. Then comes the debt entanglement. Which you can break, like the cobweb it is, if only you insist on playing the wasp. I ask you again what real strength has Finance if you tackle Finance? You can tax it, regulate its operations, print money over it without limit, cancel its claims. You can make moratoriums and jubilees. The little chaps will dodge and cheat and run about, but they won't fight. It is an artificial system upheld by the law and those who make the laws. It's an aristocracy of pickpocket area-sneaks. The Money Power isn't a Power. It's respectable as long as you respect it, and not a moment longer. If it struggles you can strangle it if you have the grip...You and I worked that out long ago, Chiffan... "When we're through with our revolution, there will be no money in the world but pay. Obviously. We'll pay the young to learn, the grown-ups to function, everybody for holidays, and the old to make remarks, and we'll have a deuce of a lot to pay them with. We'll own every real thing; we, the common men. We'll have the whole of the human output in the market. Earn what you will and buy what you like, we'll say, but don't try to use money to get power over your fellow-creatures. No squeeze. The better the economic machine, the less finance it will need. Profit and interest are nasty ideas, artificial ideas, perversions, all mixed up with betting and playing games for money. We'll clean all that up..." "It's been going on a long time," said Irwell. "All the more reason for a change," said Rud.

Even the cinema stories of fabulous Hollywood are loaded. One has only to listen to the cheers of an African audience as Hollywood’s heroes slaughter red Indians or Asiatics to understand the effectiveness of this weapon. For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California. And along with murder and the Wild West goes an incessant barrage of anti-socialist propaganda, in which the trade union man, the revolutionary, or the man of dark skin is generally cast as the villain, while the policeman, the gum-shoe, the Federal agent — in a word, the CIA — type spy is ever the hero. Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments. While Hollywood takes care of fiction, the enormous monopoly press, together with the outflow of slick, clever, expensive magazines, attends to what it chooses to call ‘news. Within separate countries, one or two news agencies control the news handouts, so that a deadly uniformity is achieved, regardless of the number of separate newspapers or magazines; while internationally, the financial preponderance of the United States is felt more and more through its foreign correspondents and offices abroad, as well as through its influence over inter-national capitalist journalism. Under this guise, a flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom. Prejudice is rife. For example, wherever there is armed struggle against the forces of reaction, the nationalists are referred to as rebels, terrorists, or frequently ‘communist terrorists'!

Even as a kid, I’d lie when people asked if I attended church regularly. According to Gallup, I wasn’t alone in feeling that pressure. The juxtaposition is jarring: Religious institutions remain a positive force in people’s lives, but in a part of the country slammed by the decline of manufacturing, joblessness, addiction, and broken homes, church attendance has fallen off. Dad’s church offered something desperately needed by people like me. For alcoholics, it gave them a community of support and a sense that they weren’t fighting addiction alone. For expectant mothers, it offered a free home with job training and parenting classes. When someone needed a job, church friends could either provide one or make introductions. When Dad faced financial troubles, his church banded together and purchased a used car for the family. In the broken world I saw around me—and for the people struggling in that world—religion offered tangible assistance to keep the faithful on track.

This scholarly shortfall did not happen by chance. Part of it has to do with particular discomforts characteristics of left-leaning academic social scientists. Conducting high-quality ethnographic or long-term participant observation research can require a great deal of empathy for one’s subjects. Such research involves more or less taking on the perspective of the people and culture being studied. It means listening to their stories with honesty and, if only for a moment, giving their experiences and their explanations the benefit of the doubt. But most social scientists know the facts about inequality, wealth, and privilege, and thus find the empathy required for ethnographic research in short supply when it comes to the ultra-wealthy. Empathy is more naturally given to the people and communities obviously suffering harm, rather than, say, a Wall Street financier who struggles with the life complexities and social-psychological dilemmas that accompany immense wealth and power.

I forgot the maid who works in my P.G. and struggles to make money, every day, who is in fear that one day her cruel husband will find her out eventually and beat her and her son to death. I forgot that auto driver I met on my way to M.G. road metro station, and who wanted to be in the army but gave up study due to the financial crisis. I forgot that security guard I met at IIT Delhi, and who was forced to leave the study and marry at the age of 15. I forgot those little kids I generally encounter at Railway stations and trains selling packets of pens @ Rs.25 per packet. I forgot that 75 years old ricksha wala I met in sector 23 market with only one eye and high power lens I forgot that washroom cleaning staff at my office who always welcomes me with a broad smile. I forgot the dead body of that martyred soldier I saw at the Kashmir airport, laden with garlands of marigold and people shouting," jawan amar rahe!" I forgot the scream of that pig near my office when a thick rope was brutally tied in its nose and it was forcefully taken by some people on a bike. I almost forgot everything!

Which meant, if somehow GameStop did start to go up, the people who had shorted the company would begin to feel pressure to buy; the more the stock went up, the heavier that pressure became. As the shorts began to cover, buying shares to return them to their lenders, the stock would rise even higher. In financial parlance, this was something called a 'short squeeze.' It didn't happen often, but when it did, it could be spectacular. Most famously, in 2008, a surprise takeover attempt of the German automaker Volkswagen by rival Porsche drove Volkswagen's stock price up by a factor of 5 — briefly making it the most valuable company in the world — in two quick days of trading, as short selling funds struggled to cover their positions. Similarly, a battle between two hedge fund titans — Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Capital Management, and Carl Icahn — led to a squeeze involving supplement maker — and alleged pyramid marketer — Herbalife, which cost Ackman a reported $1 billion. And perhaps the first widely reported short squeeze dated back a century, to 1923, when grocery magnate Clarence Saunders successfully decimated short sellers who had targeted his nascent chain of Piggly Wiggly grocery stores.

Ohio hadn’t gone through the same real estate boom as the Sun Belt, but the vultures had circled the carcasses of dying industrial towns––Dayton, Toledo, Mansfield, Youngstown, Akron––peddling home equity loans and refinancing. All the garbage that blew up in people’s faces the same way subprime mortgages had. A fleet of nouveau riche snake oil salesmen scoured the state, moving from minority hoods where widowed, churchgoing black ladies on fixed incomes made for easy marks to the white working-class enclaves and then the first-ring suburbs. The foreclosures began to crop up and then turn into fields of fast-moving weeds, reducing whole neighborhoods to abandoned husks or drug pens. Ameriquest, Countrywide, CitiFinancial––all those devious motherfuckers watching the state’s job losses, plant closings, its struggles, its heartache, and figuring out a way to make a buck on people’s desperation. Every city or town in the state had big gangrenous swaths that looked like New Canaan, the same cancer-patient-looking strip mall geography with brightly lit outposts hawking variations on usurious consumer credit. Those entrepreneurs saw the state breaking down like Bill’s truck, and they moved in, looking to sell the last working parts for scrap.

{The final resolutions at Robert Ingersoll's funeral, quoted here} Whereas, in the order of nature -- that nature which moves with unerring certainty in obedience to fixed laws -- Robert G. Ingersoll has gone to that repose which we call death. We, his old friends and fellow-citizens, who have shared his friendship in the past, hereby manifest the respect due his memory. At a time when everything impelled him to conceal his opinions or to withhold their expression, when the highest honors of the state were his if he would but avoid discussion of the questions that relate to futurity, he avowed his belief; he did not bow his knee to superstition nor countenance a creed which his intellect dissented. Casting aside all the things for which men most sigh -- political honor, the power to direct the futures of the state, riches and emoluments, the association of the worldly and the well- to-do -- he stood forth and expressed his honest doubts, and he welcomed the ostracism that came with it, as a crown of glory, no less than did the martyrs of old. Even this self-sacrifice has been accounted shame to him, saying that he was urged thereto by a desire for financial gain, when at the time he made his stand there was before him only the prospect of loss and the scorn of the public. We, therefore, who know what a struggle it was to cut loose from his old associations, and what it meant to him at that time, rejoice in his triumph and in the plaudits that came to him from thus boldly avowing his opinions, and we desire to record the fact that we feel that he was greater than a saint, greater than a mere hero -- he was a thoroughly honest man. He was a believer, not in the narrow creed of a past barbarous age, but a true believer in all that men ought to hold sacred, the sanctity of the home, the purity of friendship, and the honesty of the individual. He was not afraid to advocate the fact that eternal truth was eternal justice; he was not afraid of the truth, nor to avow that he owed allegiance to it first of all, and he was willing to suffer shame and condemnation for its sake. The laws of the universe were his bible; to do good, his religion, and he was true to his creed. We therefore commend his life, for he was the apostle of the fireside, the evangel of justice and love and charity and happiness. We who knew him when he first began his struggle, his old neighbors and friends, rejoice at the testimony he has left us, and we commend his life and efforts as worthy of emulation.

When Washington became president of the United States, he was still wrestling with the meaning of the American Revolution. He'd entered the conflict an unrepentant Virginia slaveholder. By the end of the war, he'd learned that his African-American soldiers were as competent and brave as anyone else in his army. He'd also befriended the idealistic French nobleman Lafayette, who later claimed, "I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery." Gradually, ever so gradually, a new Washington was emerging, one who realized that "nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating bond of principle." But even if he had come to recognize the direction the country must take in the future, he remained a slaveholder himself for the rest of his life. A struggle was being waged inside Washington between his ideological aspirations and his financial and familial commitment to slavery at Mount Vernon. Yes, Washington freed his enslaved workers upon his death, but it had been a very long time in coming. And yet, given where Washington had begun in life--as a slaveholder through inheritance at the age of eleven, when his father died--his eventual decision to free his slaves was no empty gesture.

Soon all humane people would understand the need for a revolution from below, where those who worked and struggled and produced would be the ruling class. Those with eyes to see could detect this with ease, while those whose eyes had yet to be opened could always… well, it was thought that events would also assist in persuading them. I realize that this may sound slightly as if I had joined a cult. There actually was a rival Trotskyist group, later to make itself notorious by recruiting Corin and Vanessa Redgrave, whose depraved “leader” Gerry Healy did in fact teach us all we needed to learn about cultism and the mental and sexual and financial exploitation of the young and the credulous. (I learned a lot about “faith-based” movements from this early instruction.) But the “I.S.,” as our group was known, had a relaxed and humorous internal life and also a quizzical and critical attitude to the “Sixties” mindset. We didn’t grow our hair too long, because we wanted to mingle with the workers at the factory gate and on the housing estates. We didn’t “do” drugs, which we regarded as a pathetic, weak-minded escapism almost as contemptible as religion (as well as a bad habit which could expose us to a “plant” from the police). Rock and roll and sex were OK. Looking back, I still think we picked the right options.

Firstly, the Azerbaijanian struggle for a measure of autonomy and self-government is genuine and is locally inspired. The facts of history and existing conditions show that Azerbaijan has always been struggling to overthrow the feudal conditions imposed upon it (and upon the rest of Iran) by corrupt Iranian Governments. Secondly, the extent of Russian interference appeared to be negligible. In our travels we saw few Russian troops, and in Kurdistan we saw none at all. The leaders of the Azerbaijanian Government are not Russians but Azerbaijanians, and with few exceptions their sole aim seems to be the recovery and improvement and economic reform of Azerbaijan. There may be some Russian influence by indirect means, but I would suggest that it is less than our own influence in Iran which we exercise by direct control of ministers, political parties, state financiers, and by petty bribery. As for Kurdish Independence. The Kurds ask for an independence of their own making, not an independence sponsored by the British Government. Like the Azerbaijanians the Kurds are seeking real autonomy, and more than that, self-determination. Our present scheme to take them over and use them as a balancing factor in the political affairs of the Middle East is a reflection upon the honest of our intentions, and a direct blow at the spirit of all good men.

The Negro today is not struggling for some abstract, vague rights, but for concrete and prompt improvement in his way of life. What will it profit him to be able to send his children to an integrated school if the family income is insufficient to buy them school clothes? What will he gain by being permitted to move to an integrated neighborhood if he cannot afford to do so because he is unemployed or has a low-paying job with no future? During the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, a nightclub comic observed that, had the demonstrators been served, some of them could not have paid for the meal. Of what advantage is it to the Negro to establish that he can be served in integrated restaurants, or accommodated in integrated hotels, if he is bound to the kind of financial servitude which will not allow him to take a vacation or even to take his wife out to dine? Negroes must not only have the right to go into any establishment open to the public, but they must also be absorbed into our economic system in such a manner that they can afford to exercise that right. The struggle for rights is, at bottom, a struggle for opportunities. In asking for something special, the Negro is not seeking charity. He does not want to languish on welfare rolls any more than the next man. He does not want to be given a job he cannot handle. Neither, however, does he want to be told that there is no place where he can be trained to handle it. So with equal opportunity must come the practical, realistic aid which will equip him to seize it. Giving a pair of shoes to a man who has not learned to walk is a cruel jest.

The overall U.S. homeownership rate increased from 64 percent in 1994 to a peak in 2004 with an all-time high of 69.2 percent. Real estate had become the leading business in America, more and more speculators invested money in the business. During 2006, 22 percent of homes purchased (1.65 million units) were for investment purposes, with an additional 14 percent (1.07 million units) purchased as vacation homes. These figures led Americans to believe that their economy was indeed booming. And when an economy is booming nobody is really interested in foreign affairs, certainly not in a million dead Iraqis. But then the grave reality dawned on the many struggling, working class Americans and immigrants, who were failing to pay back money they didn't have in the first place. Due to the rise in oil prices and the rise of interest rates, millions of disadvantaged Americans fell behind. By the time they drove back to their newly purchased suburban dream houses, there was not enough money in the kitty to pay the mortgage or elementary needs. Consequently, within a very short time, millions of houses were repossessed. Clearly, there was no one around who could afford to buy those newly repossessed houses. Consequently, the poor people of America became poorer than ever. Just as Wolfowitz's toppled Saddam, who dragged the American Empire down with him, the poor Americans, that were set to facilitate Wolfowitz's war, pulled down American capitalism as well as the American monetary and banking system. Greenspan's policy led an entire class to ruin, leaving America's financial system with a hole that now stands at a trillion dollars.

The world is in the midst of a war, but it is not the kind of war you may be imagining. It is a currency war in which nations compete to lower the value of their currency in order to help their industries gain greater profits from exports. The currency disputes have arisen from a conflict of interest between the United States and China. The U.S. has been struggling against a massive fiscal deficit and foreign debt in recent years, especially since the global financial crisis. With so much at stake, the era of U.S. dollar hegemony seems to be ending. China has been raking in profits from its biggest export market, the U.S., by keeping its yuan, also known as the renminbi, undervalued. China has also been purchasing U.S. treasury bonds to add to its foreign reserves, worth more than $2 trillion. In September, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Currency Reform for Fair Trade Act with a vote of 348 to 79. Under the bill, the U.S. is allowed to slap tariffs on goods from China and other countries with currencies that are perceived to be undervalued. Basically, the U.S. is pushing China to allow the yuan to appreciate. “For so many years, we have watched the China-U.S. trade deficit grow and grow and grow,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on the day of the vote, which was on Sept. 29 local time. “Today, we are finally doing something about it by recognizing that China’s manipulation of the currency represents a subsidy for Chinese exports coming to the United States and elsewhere.” But China does not want the value of its currency to increase because a stronger yuan will hurt Chinese exporters who will see a decline in exports to the U.S. once the currency’s value rises.

If we focus on the meat, this contrast is, financial death and warrior death, a split which Oswald Spengler calls 'hunger death' and 'hero death'. The hungry human, in a 9 to 5 existence is threatened, dishonored, and debased by financial worry and the fear of mental starving, which stunts possibilities, chokes consciousness, produces darkness and pressure not less than starvation in the literal sense. You can lose your whole life-will through the gaping wretchedness of living in the modern world of debt and work. The tragedy is that in the modern world, you die of something (starvation, disease, boredom) and not for something (death by action). In waring and fighting, you sacrifice for higher policies, you can die for something higher, you full for a metaphysics, a mode of consciousness higher than your meat body. On the other hand, economic life merely waste you away. Spengler writes, 'War is the creature, hunger the destroyer, of all things'. In war life is elevated by death, often to the point of irresistible force whose mere existence guarantees victory. But in the economic life hunger awakens the ugly, the vulgar, and wholly un-metaphysical form of fearfulness for one's life under which the higher form of being a human miserably collapses and the naked struggle for survival of the human beast begins. By the warrior, Evola isn't writing about what Henry Kissinger called 'dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy'. Evola's metaphysical fighter need no longer be a Viking or a Helene, like king Ragnar or Achilles. That world has vanished. The modern soldier has no metaphysics. Evola writes about the struggle within. It is within where the struggle for essence takes place.

The United States over the last thirty years has seen a growing gap - indeed, a deepening gulf - between rich and poor. The gap is significantly greater than in any other developed nation. Moreover, the growing gulf between rich and poor is the result of social and economic policy, not because some classes of people worked harder and others slacked off over the last thirty years (all of us, according to most studies, are working harder). The differences among countries generate the same conclusion: social policy, not simply individual effort, is responsible for the distribution of wealth. Our recent social policy may not have been intended to produce this result, but it has. The consequence is increased suffering and desperation among the poor and potentially grave consequences for the society as a whole. Moreover, many people in the middle, who are most often struggling financially, support the individualistic ideology underlying our social policy - namely, the notions that we each have worked hard for what we have and ought to be able to keep all of it, that government is bad (or at least inefficient and wasteful - and hungry for our tax dollars), and that things will be better for all of us if we let the wealthiest people in our country make and keep as much money as possible. Many of us seem not to realize that the people who benefit the most from our politics and economics of individualism are the wealthiest 10 percent, especially the top 1 percent. People will support a tax cut that saves them $300 a year, without considering that the same tax cut will save the very wealthy tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands a year, with significant damage to the social fabric, including not only decreased help for the poor and disadvantaged but also cuts in services such as public schools, road repairs, parks, libraries, and so forth.

His Burden Is Light Then Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you. Let me teach you, because I am humble and gentle, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke fits perfectly, and the burden I give you is light.” Matthew 11:28-30 What heavy burden is weighing you down and causing a heaviness and weariness in your spirit? Is it the need to take care of an elderly parent? a seemingly impossible deadline at work? juggling overwhelming responsibilities of a job plus parenting a houseful of kids? the burden of chronic illness? a difficult relationship with someone you love? financial struggles? Whatever your “heavy burden” might be, Jesus invites you, just as he did the crowds he was teaching: Come to me. Give me the heavy load you’re carrying. And in exchange, I will give you rest. Whenever I read these verses from Matthew, I breathe a sigh of relief. Jesus knows the challenges and deadlines we face and the weariness of mind or body we feel. He understands the stress, tasks, and responsibilities that are weighing us down. As we lay all that concerns us before him, his purpose replaces our agenda, and his lightness and rest replace our burden. LORD, thank you for your offer to carry my burdens for me. I give them all to you and I gladly receive your rest! I place myself under your yoke to learn from you. Teach me your wisdom that is humble and pure, and help me to walk in the ways you set before me. Thank you for your mercy and love that invite me to live my life resting and trusting in you!   WHEN HE SAYS TO YOUR DISTURBED, DISTRACTED, RESTLESS SOUL OR MIND, “COME UNTO ME,” HE IS SAYING, COME OUT OF THE STRIFE AND DOUBT AND STRUGGLE OF WHAT IS AT THE MOMENT WHERE YOU STAND, INTO THAT WHICH WAS AND IS AND IS TO BE—THE ETERNAL, THE ESSENTIAL, THE ABSOLUTE. Phillips Brooks (1835-1893)    

Activists who expressed genuine and reasonable concern for the struggles of trans-identified people would simultaneously dismiss women’s desire for safety, privacy, dignity and fair competition. Unlike those activists, I feel compassion both for people who feel at odds with their sexed bodies, and for the people, mainly women and children, who are harmed when sexual dimorphism is denied. At first I was puzzled that well-educated young women were the most ardent supporters of this new policy of gender self-identification, even though it is very much against their interests. A man may be embarrassed if a female person uses a male changing room; a male in a communal female facility can inspire fear. I came to see it as the rising generation’s ‘luxury belief’ – a creed espoused by members of an elite to enhance their status in each other’s eyes, with the harms experienced by the less fortunate. If you have social and financial capital, you can buy your way out of problems – if a facility you use jeopardises your safety or privacy, you will simply switch. It is poorer and older women who are stuck with the consequences of self-ID in women’s prisons, shelters and refuges, hospital wards and care homes. And some women’s apparent support for self-ID is deceptive, expressed for fear of what open opposition would bring. The few male academics and journalists who write critically on this topic tell me that they get only a fraction of the hate directed at their female peers (and are spared the sexualised insults and rape threats). This dynamic is reinforced by ageism, which is inextricably intertwined with misogyny – including internalised misogyny. I was astonished by the young female reviewer who described my book’s tone as ‘harsh’ and ‘unfortunate’. I wondered if she knew that sexists often say they would have listened to women if only they had stated their demands more nicely and politely, and whether she realised that once she is no longer young and beautiful, the same sorts of things will be said about her, too.

We have a deal.” “The hell you do!” Maria cried out, dashing into the room. She barely noticed that the others stayed behind in the hall. Nathan looked disconcerted by her appearance, and Oliver looked alarmed. “Leave this to me, Maria,” he said tersely. “The only way that scoundrel is getting your mother’s pearls,” she shot back,” is if I strangle him with them.” She marched up and snatched the box from Nathan. “Besides, you already have them to me.” “And you left them behind,” Oliver reminded her. “Gran said you refused to keep them.” “Well, I want them now.” “At the risk of being dragged through the courts?” he said, coming to her side. “Of having your name maligned by this vermin?” He lowered his voice. “Do you really want him examining every action you’ve taken in the past two weeks, having it all laid out before a judge?” She could tell he was thinking of her appearance at the brothel and the unpleasantness there, not to mention her public betrothal to him. “Let him do his worst.” She had an ace in the hole. She was about to call for Miss Kinsley when Oliver said, “Hyatt won’t let go of this matter without some financial consideration. With 125,000 pounds at stake-“ Nathan’s bark of laughter cut him off. “Is that what she’s told you her half of the company is worth, Lord Stoneville?” Nathan sneered. “Now I understand why a marquess is sniffing around her.” Oliver’s eyes turned a dangerous shade of black. He seized the man by the throat and slammed him against the wall. “I don’t give a damn what her half of the company is worth, you little worm. She could come to our marriage with nothing but the gown on her back and I wouldn’t care. She’s worth more to me than any amount of money. If you had an ounce of sense, she’d be worth more to you, too.” As Nathan clawed at Oliver’s hands, struggling for air, Maria hurried to lay her hand on Oliver’s arm. “You promised not to throttle him,” she reminded him, though she was rather enjoying it. After a second’s hesitation, he released Nathan with a look of disgust.

I am convinced that the year 1941 will be a historic year in the great reorganization of Europe! The platform can be none other than that of making the world accessible to all, breaking the privileges of individuals, breaking the tyranny of certain people and their financial rulers. And, finally, this year will help to secure the foundations for true international understanding and thus for a reconciliation of nations. I would not like to forget to repeat the advice that I gave before the German Reichstag on January 30, 1939: namely, the advice that should the outside world allow itself to be plunged into a general war by Jewry, then all of Jewry will be finished in Europe! They may still laugh about this today, just as they earlier laughed about my prophesies. The coming months and years will show that I have foreseen things correctly this time also. Now already, our racial idea takes hold of one people after another. And I hope that those who are at enmity with us today will one day recognize their internal enemies and form one front with us: a front against international Jewish exploitation and corruption of people! The year that lies behind us as of January 30 was a year of great successes, but also of great sacrifices. Even if the total number of dead and wounded is small in comparison with those of former wars, the sacrifice is difficult for all those who are individually concerned. Our affection, our love, and our solicitude belong to those who had to make these sacrifices. They suffered what generations before us suffered in terms of sacrifice, but every German made his sacrifice. The nation worked in all spheres, and, above all, the German woman worked to replace the man! It is the wonderful idea of the community that rules our Volk! That this idea may be preserved in its full force will be our wish today! That we may work for this community will be our pledge! That we may gain the victory in the service of this community will be our faith and our confidence! And that the Lord God may not abandon us in this struggle in the coming year will be our prayer! Deutschland - Sieg Heil! Speech in the Sportpalast Berlin, January 30, 1941

But employee ownership is not just about sharing. It is also, in practice, often about giving. Such schemes depend on someone, usually the proprietor, deciding at some point to transfer ownership of some or all of a company to its employees. And it is this aspect of the ideal, I think, that has the greatest significance for my story. Of all the things I have given, it is arguable that the shares in my company that I gave away had the greatest financial value. In fact, I have rarely thought of this transfer of ownership as a gift, and I would be wrong if I did. The staff had a right to share in the company. Without them, the company would not have been so prosperous (and I am certain that Xansa would never have reached anything like the financial heights it eventually did if it hadn’t been powered by the fuel of staff ownership). But while I never doubted that aspect of the transfer, I did sometimes struggle with a more abstract issue: the fact that transferring ownership also means, ultimately, transferring control. That was the real challenge: surrendering power. Anyone can adjust to having a bit less money; ceding control of an enterprise that really matters to you is, by contrast, painfully counterintuitive. Who in their right mind would entrust an organisation that they have built up against all the odds, through years of tears, toil and sweat, to someone else? What if they mess it up? What if they don’t really understand what it is that you have created? What if they take it in some dangerous new direction, or manage it in a less idealistic way? Yet without that surrender, the most important part of the transaction is lost. A feudal grandee can be as generous as he likes with his wealth and property, but as long as he remains the grandee then his dependants are not empowered: they are merely well-fed. Empowering them means letting go: in other words, ceasing to be the grandee. I have struggled all my life with an instinct to hang on to the things that matter most to me, to control and protect them myself. Yet the art of surrender is, I am convinced, a key to many kinds of success - and fulfilment. And many lives are limited by a failure to master it.

I think that's quite true. and in fact the people who understand this the best are those who are carrying out the control and domination in the more free societies. like the U.S. and England, where popular struggles have have won a lot of freedoms over the years and the state has limited capacity to coerce. It is very striking that it's precisely in those societies that elite groups—the business world, state managers and so on—recognized early on that they are going to have to develop massive methods of control of attitude and opinion, because you cannot control people by force anymore and therefore you have to modify their consciousness so that they don't perceive that they are living under conditions of alienation, oppression, subordination and so on. In fact, that's what probably a couple trillion dollars are spent on each year in the U.S., very self-consciously, from the framing of television advertisements for two-year olds to what you are taught in graduate school economics programs. It's designed to create a consciousness of subordination and it's also intended specifically and pretty consciously to suppress normal human emotions. Normal human emotions are sympathy and solidarity, not just for people but for stranded dolphins. It's just a normal reaction for people. If you go back to the classical political economists, people like Adam Smith, this was just taken for granted as the core of human nature and society. One of the main concentrations of advertising and education is to drive that out of your mind. And it's very conscious. In fact, it's conscious in social policy right in front of our eyes today. Take the effort to destroy Social Security. Well, what's the point of that? There's a lot of scam about financial problems, which is all total nonsense. And, of course, they want Wall Street to make a killing. Underlying it all is something much deeper. Social Security is based on a human emotion and it's a natural human emotion which has to be driven out of people minds, namely the emotion that you care about other people. You care. It's a social and community responsibility to care whether a disabled widow across town has enough food to eat, or whether a kid across the street can go to school. You have to get that out of people's heads. You have to make them say, "Look, you are a personal, rational wealth maximizer. If that disabled widow didn't prepare for her own future, it's her problem not your problem. It's not your fault she doesn't have enough to eat so why should you care?

The enemy won some points at the very beginning. On both of the two days preceding his remarks about Worth, Hitchcock notes that American deserters had been shot while crossing the Rio Grande. Probably they were just bored with army rations but there was some thought that they might be responding to a proclamation of General Ampudia’s which spies had been able to circulate in camp. Noting the number of Irish, French, and Polish immigrants in the American force, Ampudia had summoned them to assert a common Catholicism, come across the river, cease “to defend a robbery and usurpation which, be assured, the civilized nations of Europe look upon with the utmost indignation,” and settle down on a generous land bounty. Some of them did so, and the St. Patrick Battalion of American deserters was eventually formed, fought splendidly throughout the war, and was decimated in the campaign for Mexico City — after which its survivors were executed in daily batches.… This earliest shooting of deserters as they swam the Rio Grande, an unwelcome reminder that war has ugly aspects, at once produced an agitation. As soon as word of it reached Washington, the National Intelligencer led the Whig press into a sustained howl about tyranny. In the House J. Q. Adams rose to resolve the court-martial of every officer or soldier who should order the killing of a soldier without trial and an inquiry into the reasons for desertion. He was voted down but thereafter there were deserters in every Whig speech on the conduct of the war, and Calm Observer wrote to all party papers that such brutality would make discipline impossible. But a struggling magazine which had been founded the previous September in the interest of sports got on a sound financial footing at last. The National Police Gazette began to publish lists of deserters from the army, and the War Department bought up big editions to distribute among the troops. Taylor sat in his field works writing prose. Ampudia’s patrols reconnoitered the camp and occasionally perpetrated an annoyance. Taylor badly needed the Texas Rangers, a mobile force formed for frontier service in the Texas War of Independence and celebrated ever since. It was not yet available to him, however, and he was content to send out a few scouts now and then. So Colonel Truman Cross, the assistant quartermaster general, did not return from one of his daily rides. He was still absent twelve days later, and Lieutenant Porter, who went looking for him with ten men, ran into some Mexican foragers and got killed.

It felt like fate when I first encountered the automated trading system that promised to transform small investments into substantial wealth over time. The marketing was aggressive, bombarding my social media feeds with images of people lounging on exotic beaches, driving fancy cars, and celebrating their newfound financial freedom. WhatsApp info:+12723328343 As a recent college graduate struggling to make ends meet, I was desperate for a way out of my financial rut, and the allure of easy money was too tempting to ignore. On a whim, I decided to take the plunge. I borrowed from my meager savings and even took out a small loan to fund my excitement. The rush I felt when signing up was like nothing I had ever experienced—an intoxicating thrill, like hopping onto a rollercoaster at full speed. At first, everything seemed to be going exactly as promised. My investment seemed to grow almost overnight, doubling and tripling in value.  My skepticism began to fade, replaced by a sense of confidence and hope for the future. I even shared my success with friends and family, excitedly telling them about the platform that was going to change my life. I imagined a future free from financial worries, a life of luxury and freedom, all thanks to this “revolutionary” trading system. But soon, a familiar sense of unease began to settle in. What had been an impressive surge in profits suddenly plateaued, and I found myself facing unexpected hurdles when trying to withdraw my funds. Pop-up messages about my “account needing an upgrade” and “market tightening” explained away the issues, but the discomfort grew. Still, I convinced myself that success required patience and continued to hold out hope that the system would recover. As weeks turned into months, my investment continued to dwindle. The once-promising account balance plummeted, and each attempt to reach customer support went unanswered. The promises of easy wealth had turned into an unsettling nightmare. Email info: Adwarerecoveryspecialist@auctioneer. net Desperate for answers, I began scouring the internet for any information or advice. That’s when I stumbled across reviews of ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST , a service that seemed to specialize in helping people like me recover lost funds from fraudulent platforms. I felt a glimmer of hope as I read about others who had managed to retrieve their investments with the help of ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST. Perhaps, after all, there was still a way out of this mess. I reached out to their team, and to my relief, they were able to assist me in recovering a portion of the money I thought I had lost for good. ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST gave me the guidance and support I needed to navigate this complicated process, helping me regain control of a situation that had seemed hopeless. Their professionalism and expertise allowed me to salvage what I could, and for that, I am incredibly grateful.

When I spoke to you here the last time, my old party comrades, I did so fully conscious of victory as hardly a mortal has been able to do before me. In spite of this, a concern weighed heavily on me. It was clear to me that, ultimately, behind this war was that incendiary who has always lived off the quarrels of nations: the international Jew. I would no longer have been a National Socialist had I ever distanced myself from this realization. We followed his traces over many years. In this Reich, probably for the first time, we scientifically resolved this problem for all time, according to plan, and really understood the words of a great Jew who said that the racial question was the key to world history. Therefore, we knew quite well-above all, I knew-that the driving force behind these occurrences was the Jew. And that, as always in history, there were blockheads ready to stand up for him: partly spineless, paid characters, partly people who want to make deals and, at no time, flinch from having blood spilled for these deals. I have come to know these Jews as the incendiaries of the world. After all, in the previous years, you saw how they slowly poisoned the people via the press, radio, film, and theater. You saw how this poisoning continued. You saw how their finances, their money transactions, had to work in this sense. And, in the first days of the war, certain Englishmen-all of them shareholders in the armament industry-said it openly: “The war must last three years at least. It will not and must not end before three years.”-That is what they said. That was only natural, since their capital was tied up and they could not hope to secure an amortization in less than three years. Certainly, my party comrades, for us National Socialists, this almost defies comprehension. But that is how things are in the democratic world. You can be prime minister or minister of war and, at the same time, own portfolios of countless shares in the armament industry. Interests are explained that way. We once came to know this danger as the driving force in our domestic struggle. We had this black-red-golden coalition in front of us; this mixture of hypocrisy and abuse of religion on the one hand, and financial interests on the other; and, finally, their truly Jewish-Marxist goals. We completely finished off this coalition at home in a hard struggle. Now, we stand facing this enemy abroad. He inspired this international coalition against the German Volk and the German Reich. First, he used Poland as a dummy, and later pressed France, Belgium, Holland, and Norway to serve him. From the start, England was a driving force here. Understandably, the power which would one day confront us is most clearly ruled by this Jewish spirit: the Soviet Union. It happens to be the greatest servant of Jewry. Time meanwhile has proved what we National Socialists maintained for many years: it is truly a state in which the whole national intelligentsia has been slaughtered, and where only spiritless, forcibly proletarianized subhumans remain. Above them, there is the gigantic organization of the Jewish commissars, that is, established slaveowners. Frequently people wondered whether, in the long run, nationalist tendencies would not be victorious there. But they completely forgot that the bearers of a conscious nationalist view no longer existed. That, in the end, the man who temporarily became the ruler of this state, is nothing other than an instrument in the hands of this almighty Jewry. If Stalin is on stage and steps in front of the curtain, then Kaganovich and all those Jews stand behind him, Jews who, in ten-thousandfold ramifications, control this mighty empire. Speech in the Löwenbräukeller Munich, November 8, 1941

Society must show that blue-collar crime never pays. Insidious white-collar crime pays very well, and nothing is declared. It's the same reason why Financial Education, probably the most important subject of all, is absent from the general school curriculum - to keep the have-nots ignorant and the establishment's riches safe.

The world is filled with talented poor people. All too often, they’re poor or struggle financially or earn less than they are capable of, not because of what they know, but because of what they do not know. They focus on perfecting their skills at building a better hamburger rather than the skills of selling and delivering the hamburger.

Money and power magnifies our temptations. It allows us to do the things that we already wanted to do mentally. It allows us to be who we already wanted to be. In position, people will show you who they really are. Sometimes a financial burden is saving you from yourself. We seem to only have emotion for the things that have affected us. Some leaders had to be put through a struggle in order to genuinely lead. Some are placed in the mud before they find their purpose. A real leader, leads in the mud too. They can’t help but lead wherever they are.

Habits do not restrict freedom. They create it. In fact, the people who don’t have their habits handled are often the ones with the least amount of freedom. Without good financial habits, you will always be struggling for the next dollar. Without good health habits, you will always seem to be short on energy. Without good learning habits, you will always feel like you’re behind the curve. If you’re always being forced to make decisions about simple tasks—when should I work out, where do I go to write, when do I pay the bills—then you have less time for freedom.

What to Do Tonight Make sleep a family value, and set a family goal of sleeping more. Ned always tells his teenage students, “Pay yourself first,” a lesson adopted from financial planning that involves putting money into your savings account before you pay your bills. He tells kids “you’ll need to sleep something in the neighborhood of sixty-three hours a week (nine hours a day), so plan that and then plan what you’ll do the rest of the time.” It’s good advice for you as well as your kids. Talk to your kids about your own sleep-related challenges, and let them know if you’ve found things that have worked for you. Tell them you’re open to their suggestions. Assess whether your child has an effective wind-down routine before bed. If not, read about what experts call good sleep hygiene, or sleep habits. Try getting ready for bed before you’re really tired, as it’s harder to inhibit the desire to do one more thing or watch one more episode when you’re tired. Encourage your teens to try the same thing. Dim lights and pull shades at least thirty minutes before a child’s bedtime, which will trigger melatonin production. Try using blackout curtains and/or relaxation tapes. Also try warm milk, which actually does have a sleep-inducing effect. If necessary, talk to your pediatrician about the use of melatonin, which can be very effective for highly anxious kids and for kids with ADHD. Encourage exercise during the day, particularly if falling asleep in the first place is hard. If your child is a light sleeper or struggles to fall asleep, consider a white-noise generator.

Hour of Power One of my favorite things is starting my day with my morning Hour of Power. It’s an hour that I set aside every morning, first thing in the morning, to reflect, review, and recommit to my goals. I take this time to train my mind and reconnect with who I want to be.

You can design your hour of power (or 35 minutes or 45 minutes) to be what you need to perform at your best. With your hour of power, you can start your day strong, organized, and tracking toward your goals, starting by reconnecting to what matters most.  Here are some things you can schedule in your Hour of Power: • Goal Review: Review the goals that you’ve set for yourself and reconnect to what it feels like to have achieved that goal. Cover the delta between where you are now and where you need to be to achieve your goals.

In making policy on Palestine over most of the past century, leaders in both Britain and the United States were driven primarily by powerful strategic and domestic political considerations, rather than by principle. The strategic considerations included the goals of dominating this crucial piece of territory, keeping it in friendly hands, and denying it to others. The political ones included cold calculations of the considerable domestic electoral and financial advantages to be obtained from supporting Zionism, as against the negligible domestic political costs. There also existed naive sympathy for Zionism among many British and American politicians, based on a particularly Protestant immersion in the Bible. This sympathy was often combined with a laudable desire to make amends for the persecution of the Jews in different parts of Europe (often combined with a less laudable, indeed reprehensible, desire to have the victims of persecution find haven somewhere other than Great Britain or the United States). The result of such attitudes, which necessarily ignored or downplayed vital realities on the ground in Palestine, has been an enduring tragedy.

Mind your own business. Financial struggle is often directly the result of people working all their lives for someone else.

A call to detach ourselves from the myth that the only and best way to raise a child depends on the presence of a man we call a father. It’s also a call to reexamine what we expect from fathers, present or not. What’s imagined is Cliff Huxtable trading wit and canned wisdom with his children before traipsing off to a job that enables to provide financially and then coming home to hand out a healthy dose of necessary discipline to keep the children well-behaved. What’s real is that having a father in the home increases the likelihood for abuse for both the spouse and children. What’s real are fathers who are broken and showing up to fill a role that they themselves are struggling to understand. We have spent so much time valorizing the mere existence of fathers we haven’t discussed what type of fathers they will be. We haven’t shown any concern for whether or not these fathers show up as full, healthy human beings.

Xiaochen Fu is one of Richard’s former students at the Kennedy School and now a manager at the Bank of China. When she worked at Agricultural Bank of China, the third largest bank worldwide, she used this maxim to help the bank make its transition to the digital era. At a time when clients were increasingly using smartphones to conduct banking transactions, her bank still had more than 300,000 staff working at 25,000 branches around the country. Some branches found that fewer and fewer clients came in person. She and her staff were struggling to decide how they should adjust the number and location of their branches. “Then I remembered Professor Zeckhauser’s maxim. To find the extreme case, we went through regulations and procedures for all the services provided by a full-function bank branch, in order to identify which services would be very difficult or impossible to deliver online. (For example, the government forbids third-party couriers to deliver physical gold, so clients who want to buy physical gold products must go to branches.) After finding all such services, and considering the needs and preferences of clients served at different branches (for example, senior clients and rural area clients still prefer face-to-face financial services), it became much clearer which branches should be closed, and which ones should be saved. The planning project proved to be cost-efficient, and allowed the bank to adapt to the digital age and better meet the needs of our clients. I reckon that the maxim gave me not only the tools but also the courage to deal with such complicated conditions.” Xiaochen’s account identifies two critical benefits a maxim may bring. It can help you focus on how to approach a problem, and it can give you the courage to take action when you determine the best decision. This is true for many other maxims in this book.

The main reason that over 90 percent of the American public struggles financially is because they play not to lose. They don’t play to win.

of climate change. What was needed was a massive nudge in the right direction. In the past, the stick of regulation and the rod of taxation were the methods that environmentalists believed could break the fossil fuel economy. But the Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t rely on such punitive tactics, because Manchin culled them from the bill. Instead, it imagined that the United States could become the global leader of a booming climate economy, if the government provided tax credits and subsidies, a lucrative set of incentives. There was a cost associated with the bill. By the Congressional Budget Office’s score, it offered $386 billion in tax credits to encourage the production of wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal plants, and battery storage. Tax credits would reduce the cost of electric vehicles so that they would become the car of choice for Middle America. But $386 billion was an estimate, not a price tag, since the legislation didn’t cap the amount of money available in tax credits. If utilities wanted to build more wind turbines or if demand for electric vehicles surged, the government would keep spending. When Credit Suisse studied the program, it estimated that so many businesses and consumers will avail themselves of the tax credits that the government could spend nearly $800 billion. If Credit Suisse is correct, then the tax credits will unleash $1.7 trillion in private sector spending on green technologies. Within six years, solar and wind energy produced by the US will be the cheapest in the world. Alternative energies will cross a threshold: it will become financially irresponsible not to use them. Even though Joe Biden played a negligible role in the final negotiations, the Inflation Reduction Act exudes his preferences. He romanticizes the idea of factories building stuff. It is a vision of the Goliath of American manufacturing, seemingly moribund, sprung back to life. At the same time that the legislation helps to stall climate change, it allows the United States to dominate the industries of the future. This was a bill that, in the end, climate activists and a broad swath of industry could love. Indeed, strikingly few business lobbies, other than finance and pharma, tried to stymie the bill in its final stages. It was a far cry from the death struggles over energy legislation in the Clinton and Obama administrations, when industry scuppered transformational legislation. The Inflation Reduction Act will allow the United States to prevent its own decline. And not just economic decline. Without such a meaningful program, the United States would have had no standing to prod other countries to respond more aggressively to climate change. It would have been a marginal player in shaping the response to the planet’s greatest challenge. The bill was an investment in moral authority.

When I started building my own wealth, when my business grew to six figures and then seven figures, when I paid off my debt . . . I felt ashamed. Sometimes that shame was internally induced: I would feel ashamed that I wasn’t struggling when so many others were, ashamed that being financially comfortable must mean I wasn’t donating enough. That internal shame was the result of our culture’s messaging about women with money, but the trolls that swarmed my social media mentions, making assumptions about my story, just reinforced that I was supposed to feel ashamed for having money.

Personal finance is about 20 percent personal choice and 80 percent circumstantial. Yet historically, money experts’ advice has suggested that if you’re broke, in debt, or financially struggling, it’s entirely your fault.

- A specific working strategy (How we will reach them) - Finance (How much it will cost to reach them) and - Facilities (Where we will reach them) STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION It answers the questions: where do we begin, when, and with whom? This step involves determining specific action steps, deciding our priorities, setting deadlines and allocating tasks. MINISTRY CONTINGENCIES This process answers the question: How will we handle pleasant and not so pleasant surprises that could affect the strategy? Churches need to prepare for contingencies both harmful and helpful. Potentially harmful contingencies are: heart attack during the service, a mentally deranged person worshiping with us, an accusation of 419 or sexual molestation against a minister, an HIV/AID baby in the children church, an epileptic patient in the teens church. Pleasant surprises like: large financial donations, visit of a celebrity, General overseer, a revival etc. Even the smallest contingency, helpful or harmful, if handled poorly, could ultimately hurt the growth of a church MINISTRY EVALUATION It asks the question, How are we doing? Churches that do not evaluate what they are doing and the people doing it, will struggle to improve. What gets evaluated gets done, and usually gets done well.

Laws permitting segregation had been struck down, but in the opinion of many whites the government continued to give blacks unfair advantages, everything from college and hiring quotas to a welfare system that leached away even the most marginal financial security from hardworking, law-abiding white folks. These beliefs were at complete variance from the daily experience of African Americans trapped in crushing poverty and inadequate housing. Far from effortlessly benefiting from federal largesse and rioting at the slightest perceived provocation, they struggled with bureaucratic red tape in the social service and legal systems. Applying for welfare, Social Security, and disability payments was a complex, often tortuous process. Gangs and drugs were rampant in slums and public housing. A disproportionate percentage of poor black males were either in prison or at risk of it. In too many instances, black women had to raise extended families without an adult male presence or financial support. And, always, there was the despairing sense that things were never going to get much better.

But worse than that, worse than the endless, bloody exhausting financial and energy-sapping struggle, was that being a parent on your own when you were totally out of your depth was actually the loneliest place on earth.

Major life changes—anything from moving across country to graduating from college New relationships—either in personal or professional work Challenges and difficulties—from sickness to strife to struggle Goals attained and milestones achieved—losing weight, learning a new skill, gaining financial freedom Travel—a visit to a new city or state or country or a journey that brought new insight Spiritual experiences—encounters with grace, growth experiences, new awareness and understanding Special serendipitous blessings—divine encounters that especially encouraged us

A strong and stable capitalist economy needs guardrails, and it’s the government’s responsibility to put them in place. The pillars of capitalism—competition, access to information, enforcement of contracts, protection of private property, and consumer choice—develop from the right mix of markets and regulation. The third issue is the most pernicious: the belief that our economy rewards the deserving (and, the unspoken counterpart, punishes those who are not). If you are making money and saving, you should be thankful to your employer and pretend the government had no role. If you are drowning in debt or struggling to put food on the table, you should remember that you are to blame and pretend the government had no role. Either way, in our economy, you get what you get and you shouldn’t get upset. The government isn’t responsible for your prosperity or your poverty. You are. These beliefs mask the reality that government shapes the contours of economic opportunity at every turn, from funding financial aid to allowing tax deductions on vacation homes. Those with income and wealth sufficient to cozy up to a president and get appointed to the cabinet can literally afford to take a rosy view of capitalism and a dim view of government intervention. No experience is required for financial regulators because there is no job to do; the economy, left unchanged, continues to build their wealth. And if today’s economy doesn’t work for you, that’s your fault.

Because students leave school without financial skills, millions of educated people pursue their profession successfully, but later find themselves struggling financially. They work harder but don’t get ahead. What is missing from their education is not how to make money, but how to manage money. It’s called financial aptitude—what you do with the money once you make it, how to keep people from taking it from you, how to keep it longer, and how to make that money work hard for you.

Most people play not to lose, when they need to be playing to win. And that’s why so many people struggle financially. They might have a safe, sensible and balanced portfolio, but it’s not a winning portfolio.

The dog account’s popularity spread beyond her family and friends to a few thousand people. But on a Monday night in December 2012, the account started gaining fans around the world. After Toffey posted three pictures of Tuna on the Instagram blog that night, the dog’s following grew from 8,500 to 15,000 within 30 minutes. Dasher pulled to refresh the page: 16,000. By the next morning, Tuna was at 32,000 followers. Dasher’s phone started ringing with media requests from around the world. Anderson Cooper’s talk show offered to fly her to DC; she appeared via webcast, thinking it wouldn’t be feasible to take a vacation day. But as requests for appearances continued to come in, her friends warned her about what was coming before she realized it: she would have to quit her job at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles and run her dog’s account full-time. It sounded ridiculous, so she took a month off to test the theory. Sure enough, BarkBox, which made a subscription box for pet items, was willing to sponsor Dasher and her friend on an eight-city tour with Tuna. People in various cities came up to her, crying, telling her they were struggling with depression or anxiety and that Tuna was bringing them joy. “That was the first time that I realized how much weight these posts had for people,” Dasher later recalled. “And that’s also when I realized I wanted to do this full-time.” Her life became about managing Tuna’s fame. Berkley, part of Penguin Random House, signed her up to write a book titled Tuna Melts My Heart: The Underdog with the Overbite. That led to more brand deals, plus merchandising to put Tuna’s likeness on stuffed animals and mugs. In her book’s acknowledgments, she thanks Tuna most of all, but also Toffey for sharing the post that changed her life. The tastes of one Instagram employee directly affected her financial success, but also the habits of the two million people who now follow that dog—including Ariana Grande.

Fascism is nothing more than a final solution to the class struggle, the totalistic submergence and exploitation of democratic forces for the benefit and profit of higher financial circles.

The former head of this operation, Gary Wendt, who is credited with much of the enormous success of GEFS, used his personal agenda as a simple but inordinately powerful tool for growing the business into ever new entrepreneurial arenas. Over the years, he used his personal agenda to make it unequivocally clear that he expected entrepreneurial business growth from every member of management. At every major meeting, the topic of business development was on the agenda (usually in the number one spot). In every annual review, managers were asked to demonstrate the revenues they had created from businesses that did not exist five years before. From division heads to newly hired analysts, everyone was held accountable for some set of activities having to do with creating entrepreneurial revenue and profit streams. In short, no one who worked in the organization could avoid the unremitting focus on new business development. You need to make sure that you are similarly consistent, predictable, and focused, and that you sustain this emphasis over a long period. Pressure applied only once is soon forgotten, and alternating pressure (as in flavor-of-the-month management) will cause people to be confused, disillusioned, or angry. Wendt’s consistent, visible, and predictable attention to business development created a pressure in GEFS for entrepreneurial business growth that took it from the $300 million installment loan portfolio we looked at in chapter 6 to a financial services behemoth with $250 billion in assets under management when he left in 1998. Examples of Wendt’s single-minded determination to drive growth through entrepreneurial transformation at GEFS are numerous. Years ago, for instance, he was asked whether his agenda would change if someone rushed in and told him that the computer room was on fire (implying that his business could be completely destroyed). Wendt replied that he employed firefighters to handle such emergencies. As the leader, his most important job was to keep people focused on business development. Since business development is an uncomfortable and unpredictable process, Wendt knew that if he allowed it to appear to be a low priority for him, all those working for him would heave a sigh of relief and go back to business as usual, with new businesses struggling to find a place on the priority list. In fact, as he remarked, even if he did try to get involved in putting out the fire, he would probably only interfere with the efforts of the highly competent people employed to do so.

Things to keep private : - your sins - the sins of others - family disputes - marital matters - acts of worship to Allah - financial matters - dreams with meaning - trusted conversations (amanah) - aspirations and accomplishments - struggles and hardships Remember, there is a certain barakah with keeping things private. The more you share things with the world, the less value they have. There is too much envy and hate among people so don’t innocently assume that no one will wish bad against you. May Allah protect us all.

Societal expectations and middle-class upbringing had indoctrinated defeatist views about creators in me from a very early age. Stories about artists' financial struggles and suffering also did not help. Family and friends encouraged me to regard education as a passport to a well-paid job and a higher standard of living. That was the case with most who did not have family-owned successful businesses to fall back on.

One reason Occupy got so much attention in the media at first--most of the seasoned activists I talked to agreed that we had never seen anything like it--was that so many more mainstream activist groups so quickly endorsed our cause. I am referring here particularly to those organizations that might be said to define the left wing of the Democratic Party: MoveOn.org, for example, or Rebuild the Dream. Such groups were enormously energized by the birth f Occupy. But, as I touched on above, most also seem to have assumed that the principled rejection of electoral politics and top-down forms of organization was simply a passing phase, the childhood of a movement that, they assumed, would mature into something resembling a left-wing Tea Party. From their perspective, the camps soon became a distraction. The real business of the movement would begin once Occupy became a conduit for guiding young activists into legislative campaigns, and eventually, get-out-the-vote drives for progressive candidates. It took some time for them to fully realize that the core of the movement was serious about its principles. It’s also fairly clear that when the camps were cleared, not only such groups, but the liberal establishment more generally, made a strategic decision to look the other way. From the perspective of the radicals, this was the ultimate betrayal. We had made our commitment to horizontal principles clear from the outset. They were the essence of what we were trying to do. But at the same time, we understood that there has always been a tacit understanding, in America, between radical groupes like ourselves, and their liberal allies. The radicals’ call for revolutionary change creates a fire to the liberals’ left that makes the liberals’ own proposals for reform seem a more reasonable alternative. We win them a place at the table. They keep us out of jail. In these terms, the liberal establishment utterly failed to live up to their side of the bargain. Occupy succeeded brilliantly in changing the national debate to begin addressing issues of financial power, the corruption of the political process, and social inequality, all to the benefit of the liberal establishment, which had struggled to gain traction around these issues. But when the Tasers, batons, and SWAT teams arrived, that establishment simply disappeared and left us to our fate. (p. 140-141)

You know what I need before I even say it, Father. I need healing; I need deliverance in my mind and emotions. My family members need deliverance. Lord, I’m asking You to help me. I believe that what Jesus did on the Cross was for me, and I partake of His power and provision right now in Jesus’ Name.” Tell the Holy Spirit, “I know I’ve struggled with fear and doubt, Holy Spirit, but I also know that You have compassion on me. So I’m agreeing with You right now that Jesus is the Bread of Heaven and He gave His life so I could partake of the miracle I need. In this loaf is my healing, my deliverance, my financial provision, and help in my relationships. I take hold right now of Your power, Holy Spirit, and I won’t stop pressing in for my miracle until I see my answer with my own eyes!

Essentially those with an external locus think the outside world controls their destiny, and that they are almost powerless to change their fate. No Zer says outright, “I feel as though there is an external locus of control over my life.” Instead, the thinking develops on a much deeper level due to the struggles currently enveloping society. One small example of this is McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey, which shows generation Z’s financial trepidation. Nearly 23% of the ~25,000 respondents queried say they don’t expect ever to retire. Only 41% ever hope to own a home15

The Importance of Bookkeeping for Business Success Bookkeeping is a vital component of any business, regardless of its size or industry. It involves the accurate recording of financial transactions, which provides essential data for financial reporting, decision-making, and tax compliance. By maintaining well-organized and detailed financial records, businesses can ensure long-term stability and growth. What is Bookkeeping? Bookkeeping refers to the process of systematically recording a company’s financial transactions, including income, expenses, payroll, and other financial activities. It provides the foundation for creating financial statements such as balance sheets and income statements. Without proper bookkeeping, businesses would struggle to maintain accurate records, which could lead to financial mismanagement and compliance issues. Benefits of Professional Bookkeeping One of the most important benefits of bookkeeping is improved financial management. Professional bookkeepers help businesses maintain accurate and up-to-date records, ensuring that every transaction is tracked and categorized correctly. This level of organization allows business owners to monitor their cash flow, identify areas where they can cut costs, and make informed decisions. Additionally, by outsourcing bookkeeping, businesses can focus on their core operations without worrying about financial details. Tax Compliance and Preparation Tax season can be stressful for businesses, but proper bookkeeping makes it much easier. When financial records are well-maintained throughout the year, tax preparation becomes a seamless process. Bookkeepers ensure that all income and expenses are accurately recorded, allowing businesses to file their taxes without errors. Moreover, organized records help businesses take advantage of tax deductions and avoid penalties for late or inaccurate filings. Financial Reporting and Growth Accurate bookkeeping also plays a key role in generating financial reports. These reports provide insights into a business’s profitability, cash flow, and overall financial health. With this information, business owners can plan for future growth, make strategic investments, and secure loans if needed. Without reliable financial data, making informed decisions becomes much more difficult. In conclusion, bookkeeping is an essential practice for any business. By ensuring accurate financial records, tax compliance, and detailed reporting, businesses can achieve greater financial stability and growth opportunities.

Mamaw could spew venom like a Marine Corps drill instructor, but what she saw in our community didn’t just piss her off. It broke her heart. Behind the drugs, and the fighting matches, and the financial struggles, these were people with serious problems, and they were hurting. Our neighbors had a kind of desperate sadness in their lives. You’d see it in how the mother would grin but never really smile, or in the jokes that the teenage girl told about her mother “smacking the shit out of her.” I knew what awkward humor like this was meant to conceal because I’d used it in the past. Grin and bear it, says the adage. If anyone appreciated this, Mamaw did.

This may seem harsh, but I come from a family where finances were a struggle. So, you see, this is an issue that specifically stresses me out. Not getting a good night’s sleep because I’m stressed over someone else’s finances, boyfriend or not, was a no-brainer. Especially because I have worked hard to not have any debt myself.

Struggling with debt in Florida? Fleysher Law, established in 2010, is a trusted name for individuals and families seeking debt relief and bankruptcy solutions. Their team of experienced attorneys and staff helps clients solve difficult financial problems (including overwhelming debt, garnishment, repossession, and foreclosure) and achieve a financial fresh start. With offices conveniently located throughout Florida, Fleysher Law offers personalized guidance and support throughout the legal process, empowering clients to make informed decisions and regain control of their financial future.

In addition to inflated beauty standards, women are now also expected to be career-driven, achievement-orientated, financially independent, and a competent badass in the boardroom, bedroom, kitchen and nursery. On the flip side, the plights of men are often dismissed and unseen, since men are regarded as the ones wielding all the privilege and power. But what happens when the same societal structures that grant men superiority also deny them the full range of human emotions and threaten their status as men if they experience even the slightest form of sensitivity, vulnerability or indication of their needs for love, emotional safety and tenderness (basically, if men admit to having any attachment needs at all)? What happens when men are paralyzed by shame and made to feel unworthy of love and partnership unless they meet certain masculine expectations around financial or professional success? And what happens to a person’s ability to feel safe and connected when they are transgender or do not fit in the gender binary at all? Many of the personal problems and relationship struggles that we face are actually societal issues impairing our ability to bond, connect and love in secure ways.

When Vincent Van Gogh was 27, he dedicated himself entirely to painting. He used to work with extreme intensity. Painting was his whole life and he was highly productive. He used to paint at lightning speed but despite his hard work and genius, he struggled financially because his painting wouldn’t sell. He was a man ahead of his time. His younger brother, Theo Van Gogh, had to support him financially. Later on in life, Vincet’s mental health deteriorated and on July 27th, 1890, he shot himself in the chest with a pistol while painting alone in a field. He died two days later.

In support of the compact, there was also agreement to move the EFSF onto a more permanent footing, with the creation in 2012 of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). The ESM replaces the EFSF and provides a much more extensive set of financial reserves to support struggling Eurozone economies. In contrast to the compact, it sits firmly within the EU’s system of enhanced cooperation, applying to all Eurozone members.

Artists face unique hurdles compared to other occupations. A large percentage of employment in the media and entertainment industry is either contract or freelance. Which means it’s more difficult for artists to access bank loans, credit cards, rental properties and capital.

Many dreams die while suffering. Think about it. We conjure our biggest dreams, our most audacious goals, when we feel safe and warm. Even if you’re struggling financially, emotionally, spiritually, or physically, your grand plan to defy the odds probably came to you in a moment of comfort, when you had time to evaluate where you are and how you got there.

We are all walking one fire road or another, be it paved by relational upheaval or financial upheaval, physical or emotional or the general inconveniences of life. But when you and I come along with a posture of peace, or with gentle and kind words, or with an offer of prayer or a hug, or with anything that looks and acts like Jesus, it is as though we have used a fire extinguisher - the flames that burned hot settle down.

Following God can make us look foolish in the world’s eyes. Unbelievers can’t understand why we would give money back to God when we’re struggling financially. It doesn’t make sense to them when we forgive someone who has hurt us terribly, or when we put aside our own desires in order to hold our family together. God may call us to leave a lucrative career for mission work, take in a homeless person, or do something else that seems illogical from a human standpoint. People may even question our sanity. But even when our actions seem strange to those around us, it’s always wise to follow God’s instructions in our most important building project—a life that brings glory to him.

financial and energy-sapping struggle, was that being a parent on your own when you were totally out of your depth was actually the loneliest place on earth.

Do you think it is sad for people to struggle their entire working life just to get by, only to retire into guaranteed poverty? I know I do. And the reason I feel this way is because we all have so much potential to do better.

The term ‘democracy’ can have two kinds of meaning. It can refer to ways of making effective claims for a more just and egalitarian common world. Or it can refer to a mode of governing populations that employs popular consent as a means of limiting claims for greater equality and justice by dividing up the common world. Such limits are formed by acknowledging certain areas as matters of public concern subject to popular decision while establishing other fields to be administered under alternative methods of control. For example, governmental practice can demarcate a private sphere governed by rules of property, a natural world governed by laws of nature, or markets governed by principles of economics. Democratic struggles become a battle over the distribution of issues, attempting to establish as matters of public concern questions that others claim as private (such as the level of wages paid by employers), as belonging to nature (such as the exhaustion of natural resources or the composition of gases in the atmosphere), or as ruled by laws of the market (such as financial speculation). In the mid-twentieth century, this ‘logic of distribution’ began to designate a large new field of government whose rules set limits to alternative political claims: the field that became known as ‘the economy’.

Financial struggle is often the result of people working all their lives for someone else.

Stop the Flow of Money It doesn’t matter whether we are on a fixed income or are blessed with abundant financial resources, a common denominator among enablers is the flow of money to our adult children. It doesn’t matter whether it’s $20 or $20,000, we must stop coming to the rescue with our checkbooks. Our money must cease being the life preservers that buoy up our adult children, keeping them afloat through yet another storm. We might be amazed at just how well our adult children can swim when given the opportunity to do so. More important, they just might be surprised at their own ability to survive without life support, a powerful lesson that no amount of money can purchase.

My father came first," says a Missouri painter who consistently faces a work slump whenever she commits herself to submitting paintings for a show. "My mother was defined by him. If she behaved well he would love her, buy her presents, and take care of her - she was a queen. He did take care of her. She behaved, she ran the house. He bought her presents all the time." "Was she smart?" I asked. "I don't know," the woman replied. "I think she may have been, once. She stopped thinking." One reason Mother remains shadowy is that she was intimidated by the forceful, vivid personality of her husband. The peacemaker, a kind of half-person who chooses to tag along safely behind her husband, Mother is protected from the more abrasive aspects of life in the world. Huge fights, open power struggles - these were not characteristic of the girl's relationship with her elusive mother. (...) Mother was there (...). But she was also not there. (...) Father is active; Mother is passive. Father is able to rely on himself; Mother is helpless and dependent.

Yet just days later Ryanair announced that it had placed one of the biggest-ever orders for Boeing’s 737 series aircraft. The company said it would purchase one hundred Boeing 737-800 aircraft in the next eight years and had taken options on fifty more planes, claiming that Boeing’s offer was ‘exceptionally competitive’. Ryanair said the ‘catalogue value’ of the deal was $9.1 billion, but refused to disclose the extent of the discount it had negotiated. Airline industry observers, aware of the US aircraft manufacturer’s desperate need to win the contract, speculated that it amounted to between 30 and 50 per cent. Boeing had been forced to sharply reduce its aircraft production and to lay off up to 30,000 workers as it struggled to stave off a financial crisis in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Some people who know O’Leary and Tony Ryan well suggest one of their great similarities is their ability to ‘corner their prey’.

All those songs I used to pretend to understand, all the angsty, heartbroken songs I had heard all my life, they suddenly made so much more sense. "Well, then she probably needs a giant coffee, a huge box of your creations, and some time to nurse her feelings in private, don't you think?" Brantley Dane, local hero, saves girl from sure death brought on by sheer mortification. That'd be his headline. "Come on, sweetheart," he said, moving behind me, casually touching my hip in the process, and going behind counter. "What's your poison? Judging by the situation, I am thinking something cold, mocha or caramel filled and absolutely towering with full fat whipped cream." That was exactly what I wanted. But, broken heart aside, I knew I couldn't let myself drown in sweets. Gaining twenty pounds wasn't going to help anything. There was absolutely no enthusiasm in my voice when I said, "Ah, actually, can I have a large black coffee with one sugar please?" "Not that I'm not turned on as all fuck by a woman who appreciates black coffee," he started, making me jerk back suddenly at the bluntness of that comment and the dose of profanity I wasn't accustomed to hearing in my sleepy hometown. "But if you're only one day into a break-up, you're allowed to have some full fat chocolate concoction to indulge a bit. I promise from here on out I won't make you anything even half as food-gasm-ing as this." He leaned across the counter, getting close enough that I could see golden flecks in his warm brown eyes. "Honey, not even if you beg," he added and, if I wasn't mistaken, there was absolutely some kind of sexually-charged edge to his words. "Say yes," he added, lips tipping up at one corner. "Alright, yes," I agreed, knowing I would love every last drop of whatever he made me and likely punish myself with an extra long run for it too. "Good girl," he said as he turned away. And there was not, was absolutely not some weird fluttering feeling in my belly at that. Nope. That would be completely insane. "Okay, I got you one of everything!" my mother said, coming up beside me and pressing the box into my hands. She even tied it with her signature (and expensive, something I had tried to talk her out of many times over the years when she was struggling financially) satin bow. I smiled at her, knowing that sometimes, there was nothing liked baked goods from your mother after a hard day. I was just lucky enough to have a mother who was a pastry chef. "Thanks, Mom," I said, the words heavy. I wasn't just thanking her for the sweets, but for letting me come home, for not asking questions, for not making it seem like even the slightest inconvenience. She gave me a smile that said she knew exactly what I meant. "You have nothing to thank me for." She meant that too. Coming from a family that, when they found out she was knocked up as a teen, had kicked her out and disowned her, she made it clear all my life that she was always there, no matter what I did with my life, no matter how high I soared, or how low I crashed. Her arms, her heart, and her door were always open for me. "Alright. A large mocha frappe with full fat milk, full fat whipped cream, and both a mocha and caramel drizzle. It's practically dessert masked as coffee," Brantley said, making my attention snap to where he was pushing what was an obnoxiously large frappe with whipped cream that was towering out of the dome that the pink and sage straw stuck out of. "Don't even think about it, sweetheart," he said, shaking his head as I reached for my wallet. "Thank you," I smiled, and found that it was a genuine one as I reached for it and, in a move that was maybe not brilliant on my part, took a sip. And proceeded to let out an almost porn-star worthy groan of pure, delicious pleasure. Judging by the way Brant's smile went a little wicked, his thoughts ran along the same lines as well.

Throughout history there have been populations that have lived in desperation, and none of them have resorted to the intentional targeting and murder of children as an officially practiced and widely praised mode of achieving political ends. When extremist elements of otherwise legitimate liberation movements such as the Republican Sinn Fein have committed such atrocities, their actions have been unconditionally condemned by the civilized world, and their political objectives have been discredited by their vile crimes. This is not so with the Palestinians. Once upon a time there was a special place in the lowest depths of hell for anyone who would intentionally murder a child. Now that place is in the pantheon of Palestinian heroes. Now that behavior is legitimized as ‘armed struggle’ against Israeli ‘occupation’ by, among others, the United Nations General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Commission, and the European Union. Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the rise of Hamas in 1987, the campaign to destroy Israel has taken on an ugly, fanatic religious tone. Holy obligation reinforces (and is replacing) Palestinian nationalism as the motivation for committing terrorist murder. As we have seen the secular, ‘moderate’ factions of the Palestinian nationalist movement (such as Abbas’s Fatah Party) will shrink into insignificance, and is replaced by terrorist Islamic factions such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Hamas receives financial and material support from the same sources as al Qaeda, and from al Qaeda directly. Islamic Jihad receives financial and material support from Iran, directly and through Hezbollah. These are the same international criminal entities that wage religion-based terror war against the United States. They do it for the same reason and by the same means: to make Islam supreme in the world, by the sword or the suicide bomb.

The main cause of poverty or financial struggle is fear and ignorance, not the economy or the government or the rich. It’s self-inflicted fear and ignorance that keep people trapped.

Organizations seeking to commercialize open source software realized this, of course, and deliberately incorporated it as part of their market approach. In a 2013 piece on Pando Daily, venture capitalist Danny Rimer quotes then-MySQL CEO Mårten Mickos as saying, “The relational database market is a $9 billion a year market. I want to shrink it to $3 billion and take a third of the market.” While MySQL may not have succeeded in shrinking the market to three billion, it is interesting to note that growing usage of MySQL was concurrent with a declining ability of Oracle to sell new licenses. Which may explain both why Sun valued MySQL at one third of a $3 billion dollar market and why Oracle later acquired Sun and MySQL. The downward price pressure imposed by open source alternatives have become sufficiently visible, in fact, as to begin raising alarm bells among financial analysts. The legacy providers of data management systems have all fallen on hard times over the last year or two, and while many are quick to dismiss legacy vendor revenue shortfalls to macroeconomic issues, we argue that these macroeconomic issues are actually accelerating a technology transition from legacy products to alternative data management systems like Hadoop and NoSQL that typically sell for dimes on the dollar. We believe these macro issues are real, and rather than just causing delays in big deals for the legacy vendors, enterprises are struggling to control costs and are increasingly looking at lower cost solutions as alternatives to traditional products. — Peter Goldmacher Cowen and Company

You can get rich if you were born financially poor, But you can't get rich if you are poor minded.

The world is filled with talented poor people. All too often, they’re poor or struggle financially or earn less than they are capable of, not because of what they know, but because of what they do not know.

Hillary looked at her ’16 press corps and thought we were hopelessly young and driven entirely by clicks and the financial demands on our struggling news outlets. (The head-nodding stories admittedly didn’t help matters.) She missed her high-minded State Department press corps, worldly, substantive reporters who didn’t care about the horse race, understood the intricacies of Hillary’s plan to arm the moderate Syrian rebels, and could find Kyrgyzstan on the map.

Today’s monopolization of affluence by a rentier class avoiding taxes and public regulation by buying control of government is the same problem that confronted the classical economists. Their struggle to create a fairer economy produced the tools most appropriate to understand how today’s economies are polarizing while becoming less productive.

The main substantive achievement of neoliberalization … has been to redistribute, rather than to generate, wealth and income. [By] ‘accumulation by dispossession’ I mean … the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations; conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive private property rights; suppression of rights to the commons; … colonial, neocolonial, and imperial processes of appropriation of assets (including natural resources); …and usury, the national debt and, most devastating of all, the use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession. … To this list of mechanisms we may now add a raft of techniques such as the extraction of rents from patents and intellectual property rights and the diminution or erasure of various forms of common property rights (such as state pensions, paid vacations, and access to education and health care) won through a generation or more of class struggle. The proposal to privatize all state pension rights (pioneered in Chile under the dictatorship) is, for example, one of the cherished objectives of the Republicans in the US.

While he was to become adept at business, Hamilton, the man who was to found America’s financial system, as a schoolboy had to struggle with mathematics.

My target customer will be? (Tip: how would you describe your primary target customer) The problem my customer wants to solve is? (Tip: what does your customer struggle with or what need do they want to fulfill) My customer’s need can be solved with? (Tip: give a very concise description / elevator pitch of your product) Why can’t my customer solve this today? (Tip: what are the obstacles that have prevented my customer from solving this already) The measurable outcome my customer wants to achieve is? (Tip: what measurable change in your your customer’s life makes them love your product) My primary customer acquisition tactic will be? (Tip: you will likely have multiple marketing channels, but there is often one method, at most two, that dominates your customer acquisition — what is your current guess) My earliest adopter will be? (Tip: remember that you can’t get to the mainstream customer without getting early adopters first) I will make money (revenue) by? (Tip: don’t list all the ideas for making money, but pick your primary one) My primary competition will be? (Tip: think about both direct and indirect competition) I will beat my competitors primarily because of? (Tip: what truly differentiates you from the competition?) My biggest risk to financial viability is? (Tip: what could prevent you from getting to breakeven? is there something baked into your revenue or cost model that you can de-risk?) My biggest technical or engineering risk is? (Tip: is there a major technical challenge that might hinder building your product?)

Remarkably, Grace never considered pursuing a career and very rarely sought consistent employment. At no time in her long life was Grace driven by the question of how to make a living. Accordingly, political considerations frequently guided her choices about employment, including where to work, for how long, and even whether to take a job. This set of choices, of course, was available to her because of the relative material security she enjoyed at most stages of her life: her comfortable middle-class upbringing and the family support she continued to enjoy when she returned to New York during the 1940s; her marital union with Jimmy; and the support of her political community, as she sometimes worked as a member of the organization’s (minimally) paid staff and later received financial support from Freddy and Lyman. But that alone does not explain her employment decisions. Grace’s indifference to career and upward mobility reflected her decidedly nonacquisitive personality and a complete disinterest in status or the trappings of any sort of professional life. This was evident in 1940 when Grace earned her Ph.D. Securing an academic job “was never on my mind,” she said decades later, thinking back to her mind-set and priorities while completing the degree. With no aspiration of becoming a professor—“ I had not studied philosophy in order to teach it”—Grace had allowed herself to sink into her studies without regard for where they would lead, intellectually or materially. The need to eventually find employment beyond what she had already been doing “was never in my consciousness. It just never bothered me,” she recalled. “What I knew was that by and large I had been able to make a living because I was a very good typist and I figured, if I needed money I can type.” 84 And that is what she did over the next two decades, taking various secretarial and clerical jobs, most of them short term or temporary and some of them part time.

What is my motivation for writing this? I’m tired of seeing so many people struggle. I’m frustrated at seeing so many kids coming out of college without even the basic skills for living a free life for themselves. I’m fed up watching so many parents in a stage of utter exhaustion, wondering what happened to their life after believing that following the rules we were all taught would lead them to success rather than the road to nowhere. I’m sad watching so many of us in our thirties and forties miss out on precious time with our families by drowning in meaningless work, and then finding relief inside a bottle of wine. And I want to prevent those about to embark on this journey to learn from our mistakes and successes.

One of the reasons the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the middle class struggles in debt is that the subject of money is taught at home, not in school. Most of us learn about money from our parents. So what can poor parents tell their child about money? They simply say, “Stay in school and study hard.” The child may graduate with excellent grades, but with a poor person’s financial programming and mindset.

I didn’t realize until I was an adult that most of my poor childhood friends were Asian American or Pacific Islanders. My idea of Asian Americans very much fit in with the popular stereotype of hard-working, financially and academically successful, quiet, serious people of predominantly East Asian (Chinese, Korean, or Japanese) descent. But most of my friends’ parents were from Guam, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and India. Most of my friends’ parents had fled war, conflict, and economic disaster. They were all poor, they were all struggling, and they were all discriminated against for their brown skin and their strong accents. But even though they were my friends, their racial and ethnic identity was invisible to me and continued to be so well into my adulthood.

Hitler began a long speech with a sop to the industrialists. “Private enterprise,” he said, “cannot be maintained in the age of democracy; it is conceivable only if the people have a sound idea of authority and personality … All the worldly goods we possess we owe to the struggle of the chosen … We must not forget that all the benefits of culture must be introduced more or less with an iron fist.” He promised the businessmen that he would “eliminate” the Marxists and restore the Wehrmacht (the latter was of special interest to such industries as Krupp, United Steel and I. G. Farben, which stood to gain the most from rearmament). “Now we stand before the last election,” Hitler concluded, and he promised his listeners that “regardless of the outcome, there will be no retreat.” If he did not win, he would stay in power “by other means … with other weapons.” Goering, talking more to the immediate point, stressed the necessity of “financial sacrifices” which “surely would be much easier for industry to bear if it realized that the election of March fifth will surely be the last one for the next ten years, probably even for the next hundred years.

Rice family’s ninety-five slaves either escaped or were freed by Yankee troops. Their home and other property on Hazel Hill was destroyed or stolen and their lives were threatened. Meanwhile, their men were missing, away south of the Missouri River with the army of Sterling Price or in some independent unit of Confederate cavalry or guerrilla warriors. After four decades in Missouri, first toiling for financial security, then arriving at a position of almost unimaginable wealth and privilege, and then struggling to survive an intense and violent conflict, the Rice family found itself homeless and almost penniless, together with other refugees who were fleeing in every direction to escape the devastation.

Italy is the currency bloc's biggest long-term headache because of its chronic stagnation ever since joining the euro and failure to recover from a deep slump since the global financial crisis. Italian GDP contracted in 2008-09 and again in 2011-13. Even if growth returns in the coming months, it is expected to be meager. Mr. Renzi, a 39-year-old political maverick, came to power early this year promising to break the political deadlock that has held back economic overhauls for years, even decades. But he has become bogged down in a struggle to streamline Italy's electoral law and unwieldy bicameral legislature, seen as prerequisites for passing major economic reforms in subsequent steps.

the underdeveloped peoples will decide to continue their evolution inside a collective autarky. Thus the Western industries will quickly be deprived of their overseas markets. T he ma­ chines will pile up their products in the warehouses and a merciless struggle will ensue on the European market between the trusts and the financial groups. The closing of factories, the paying off of workers and unemployment will force the European working class to engage in an open struggle against the capitalist regime. Then the monopolies will realize that their true interests lie in giving aid to the underdeveloped countries—unstinted aid with not too many conditions. So we see that the young nations of the Third World are wrong in trying to make up to the capitalist countries. We are strong in our own right, and in the justice of our point of view

When you enable someone, you prolong them from hitting their bottom. They stop trying to do for themselves what you have taken over doing for them. When you constantly finance their habit by letting them live in your house, sending them money, or whatever, you are prolonging them from hitting their bottom. When someone is on a destructive path with drugs, most make a decision to change their life because they run out of financial resources and a place to live. You can let them know you love them, and you will be for them when they are ready to change, but don't continue to enable them and keep them from hitting their bottom. Never stop praying for them, and let them know you will take them to detox when they are ready to change, as well as treatment if necessary. Praying for the families who are struggling, suffering, who feel helpless because they are dealing with an active addict in their family. It's not easy, but you have to let go if you want to see them get better. I also want to encourage you to get involved in a support group with others dealing with what you are going through right now.

For years some of us have focused our attention (and worries) on our adult children. We’ve not only taken on the role of director in the drama of their lives, but the roles of producer, stage manager, dresser, caterer, financier, and scriptwriter as well. We’ve done countless things for them that they are more than capable of doing for themselves.

could join his siblings in helping their mother. After a brief-but-publicized legal struggle, the children reached an agreement with Joan: Two financial professionals would watch over her estimated $9.5 million in assets while a guardian would monitor her and guide her medical decisions. The agreement stipulated that if Joan abused alcohol or endangered herself again, more control would be shifted away from her. Any rift caused by the legal proceedings had been long repaired by 2009, when Ted Kennedy died of brain cancer in the Hyannis Port home his family had owned since the 1920s. His new wife, Vicki, was by his side, as were his children. Joan quietly attended his funeral, her presence evoking a quarter-century of his life—both the highs of the long-lost Camelot days and the lows of two assassinations, a near-fatal plane crash, a son’s battle with cancer, and a political life nearly derailed. In 2011, her daughter, Kara, died suddenly of a heart

What about the poor? How many poor people, unemployed people, financially struggling people are in your church? Are they even willing to let those facts be known? If not, why not?

law says a child’s IEP must be drafted without any influence of financial limitations.

And indeed today as it struggles with its financial crisis, the central issue in Greek politics remains resentment of the influence of Brussels, Germany, the International Monetary Fund, and other external actors, which are seen as pulling strings behind the back of a weak Greek government. Although there is considerable distrust of government in American political culture, by contrast, the basic legitimacy of democratic institutions runs very deep. Distrust of government is related to the Greek inability to collect taxes. Americans loudly proclaim their dislike of taxes, but when Congress mandates a tax, the government is energetic in enforcement. Moreover, international surveys suggest that levels of tax compliance are reasonably high in the United States; higher, certainly, than most European countries on the Mediterranean. Tax evasion in Greece is widespread, with restaurants requiring cash payments, doctors declaring poverty-line salaries, and unreported swimming pools owned by asset-hiding citizens dotting the Athenian landscape. By one account, Greece’s shadow economy—unreported income hidden from the tax authorities—constitutes 29.6 percent of total GDP.24 A second factor has to do with the late arrival of capitalism in Greece. The United States was an early industrializer; the private sector and entrepreneurship remained the main occupations of most Americans. Greece urbanized and took on other trappings of a modern society early on, but it failed to build a strong base of industrial employment. In the absence of entrepreneurial opportunities, Greeks sought jobs in the state sector, and politicians seeking to mobilize votes were happy to oblige. Moreover, the Greek pattern of urbanization in which whole villages moved from the countryside preserved intact rural patronage networks, networks that industry-based development tended to dissolve.

Today was a day to face that very temptation. A family who had become dear friends had left the church with no warning or explanation. Not even good bye. When they were missing on that first Sunday, we didn’t realize that they had removed themselves from our church. We thought maybe someone was sick or an alarm clock didn’t go off or something simple. If it had been something serious, they would have called us, of course. We had done so much for them and with them. We rejoiced when they rejoiced, we cried when they cried, we prayed with them, we prayed for them, we loved them and felt as if they loved us in return. Of course, one Sunday turned to two, and then three. I mentioned to Michael that I had called and left a message. He told me that he had the same thought as well. He had left a message and sent a card. We felt sad as the realization sank in: they had left the church. People don’t know how to leave a church, and many pastors don’t take such a loss graciously. In all our determinations about pastoring, we had considered the possibility of losing members, but this family was the first. It was time for a lesson for all of us, and I felt the Lord tugging at my spirit. I was to take the first step. Sunday afternoon, Michael taking a nap, kids playing games in their room... Now was as good a time as any. I got into my car and headed toward their house. Suddenly nervous, I sat in the driveway for a minute at first. What was I doing here again? Pastor’s wives don’t do this. I had been around pastor’s wives all my life. Since sensing my call to full time ministry at eighteen, I had been paying close attention to them, and I had never seen one of them do this. I got my words together. I needed an eloquent prayer for such a moment as this one: “Lord, help” (okay, so it wasn’t eloquent). I remembered a verse in Jeremiah: “I, the LORD, search the heart, I test the mind, Even to give every man according to his ways, According to the fruit of his doings” (17:10). The Lord knew my heart, and He understood. In this situation, I knew that I had opened myself up to Him. In this situation, I knew that my heart was pure before Him. All of a sudden, my courage returned. I opened the car door and willed myself toward the front porch. As I walked up the driveway, I also thought about Paul’s warning which I had read earlier that morning: “they failed to reach their goal... because their minds were fixed on what they achieved instead of what they believed” (Romans 9:31-32). This family was not my achievement; they were the Lord’s creation. What I believed was that I had been right in opening my heart to them. What I believed was that Michael and I had been faithful to the Lord and that we had helped this family while they were in our flock. I had not failed to reach my goal thus far, and I felt determined not to fail now. This front porch was not unfamiliar to me. I had been here before on many occasions, with my husband and children. Happy times: dinners, cook-outs, birthdays, engagement announcements, births.... Sad times as well: teenaged child rebelling, financial struggles, hospital stays or even death .... We had been invited to share heartache and joy alike. No, “invited” is the wrong word. We were needed. We were family, and family comes together at such times. This afternoon, however, was different. I was standing on this familiar front porch for a reason that had never brought me here before: I came to say good bye. On this front porch, I knocked on the door. This family had been with us for years, and we had been with them. Remembering how this family had helped and blessed our congregation, I quietly smiled. Remembering how they had enriched our personal lives with their friendship and encouragement, I could feel the tears burning behind my eyes. We would miss them. Remembering all that we had done for them, I wondered how they could leave with no word or even warning. Just stopped coming. Just

The years 1928-1933 were a time of crisis and unemployment all over Europe an the struggle to survive - be housed, fed and clothed - was real. I did not actually understand, at the time, everything that went on around me, but struggling hard against financial difficulties and being Jewish, too, made for an on-going hard life.

68. In A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), Wilder writes, "The ghetto is not so much a place as it is a relationship - the physical manifestation of a perverse imbalance in social power. The ghetto is not the cause of social pathology, it is its destination. It is not the set of ever-changing, ever-negotiated disparities that dominate it but the financial, physical, and legal coercion that give rise to them. It cannot be defined by the people who occupy it but by the struggles that place them there. It is not social inequality but the attempt to predetermine the burden of social inequality. Thus, ghettos are different sizes, have different demographics, and suffer different conditions. They have in common only the lack of power that allows their residents to be physically concentrated and socially targeted" (p. 234).

For example, people ask me about Eastman Kodak’s slow disintegration and financial struggle. Let me tell you that people at Kodak knew where the wind was blowing. The decline in sales of photographic film and its slowness in transitioning to digital photography was no surprise to anybody who studied it intensively or was directly involved. Listen to your intuition and sell, or even better, don't invest in it at all.   Selling

Now you’ve seen how I became Ms. Money, a highly paid financial strategist and TV stock market commentator with a bank account to die for. I took off my clothes, so to speak, and bared it all. I have two children who are worth more to me than anything in the world. Even more important you now know that the hero of my story is a woman. She is neither slave girl, nor princess, as central casting would have it. She knows that women can be heroes not heroines. And she knows what she has to do to become one. What I am is a woman who understands the heroism of being a woman. I’m ready now for grueling arduous conflict. But please pay careful attention because my struggle is a woman’s. Fire-breathing dragons have been extinct for centuries.

Being broke is not a financial status; it’s a state of mind. It breaks you. Every setback pushes you closer to believing you don’t deserve better, that you’re struggling because you deserve it, because you’re worthless.

The number of movies released shrank too, from twenty-two in 2011 to just thirteen in 2015. And annual development spending, the R&D of the movie industry, fell dramatically, from $127 million in fiscal 2010 to $71 million in 2015. Pascal even had to let go of her longtime assistant, Mark Seed. He made her life run so magically that she nicknamed him “Mark Poppins,” but he made more than $250,000 per year. Pascal had less to work with and at the same time, Sony Corporation demanded more from her, as it responded to pressure from Loeb and the struggles of its electronics business. One result was growing tension between Pascal and Lynton, who in 2012 had been promoted to CEO of Sony Entertainment, putting him in charge of the company’s music businesses and officially making him Pascal’s boss, not her partner. Their relationship grew less familial, and he privately admonished her about the company’s faltering financial situation. “Why is everyone freaking out[?]” she asked, when the Hollywood Reporter revealed her assistant’s eye-popping salary. “Because we said no cost is too small,” responded Lynton. “An assistant paid that amount suggests a lack of controls. We claim to have those controls.

It wouldn’t be fair for me to say, “I’m just an average person,” or “an ordinary” person, because I am also a lucky person. I was raised in a loving home and grew up to have another loving home, and I do not suffer from the dire physical, financial, or situational disadvantages that so many people struggle under. But being fortunate doesn’t mean you won’t reach a certain point in life—many points, actually—and panic. It doesn’t mean you don’t periodically wonder how you got where you are and if there’s any way to get out.

You have to be careful, Bouchard answered: There are often hidden costs in a chain that’s struggling financially. Better to pass up an opportunity than rush into one too quickly.

Well, keep that attitude and you’ll learn nothing. Keep the attitude that I’m the problem and what choices do you have?” “Well, if you don’t pay me more or show me more respect and teach me, I’ll quit.” “Well put,” rich dad said. “And that’s exactly what most people do. They quit and go looking for another job, a better opportunity, and higher pay, actually thinking that this will solve the problem. In most cases, it won’t.” “So what should I do?” I asked. “Just take this measly 10 cents an hour and smile?” Rich dad smiled. “That’s what the other people do. But that’s all they do, waiting for a raise thinking that more money will solve their problems. Most just accept it, and some take a second job working harder, but again accepting a small paycheck.” I sat staring at the floor, beginning to understand the lesson rich dad was presenting. I could sense it was a taste of life. Finally, I looked up and asked, “So what will solve the problem?” “This,” he said, leaning forward in his chair and tapping me gently on the head. “This stuff between your ears.” It was at that moment that rich dad shared the pivotal point of view that separated him from his employees and my poor dad—and led him to eventually become one of the richest men in Hawaii, while my highly educated but poor dad struggled financially all his life. It was a singular point of view that made all the difference over a lifetime.

Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. This is what we’re after. This is worth giving up the rooting-tooting boots for: belief, togetherness, equality. This is why people get obsessed with festivals, or clubs, or drugs, or football, or other temporal approximations of togetherness; these distilled vials of the elixir are craved by our starved souls. I’m as materialistic as the next man, probably more, given that the next man is George Orwell, and I am prepared to relinquish my trinkets for a shot at living in that ramshackle paradise. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. Orwell wrote this in the mid-thirties. Consider how radically capitalism has advanced since then. In his great dystopian fiction 1984, Orwell described a totalitarian regime where humans were constantly observed, scrutinized, and manipulated, where freedom had been entirely eroded, omnipotent institutions dominated, and every home glowed with the mandatory TV screen streaming state-sponsored data. Well, he was spot on, aside from a bit of glitter and the fact that we voluntarily install our own screens. Orwell saw this brief period in Spanish history as a potential template for an alternative future. Ordinary workers took over their businesses and factories and ran them democratically. Naturally, they were brutally massacred by a multitude of enemies—the fascists, communists, and liberal democracies all coiled about them in a terrified asphyxiating clench. I’d never heard of this Revolution. The reason for this is, of course, that it’s so fucking inspiring. The Revolutions that we’re taught about are ones that wind neatly back to repression of one flavor or another and convey the bleak, despairing narrative that makes the forms of impoverishment we live with now, whether financial or spiritual, seem preferable. No one, absolutely no one, will tell you that an alternative is possible, and the ways and means are strewn all about us. A lot of other political struggles and social uprisings labeled “Revolutions” are, in my mind, unworthy of the term, in that they were simply a hegemonic exchange. Whether it’s the Russian Revolution, which led to Stalinism, or the American Revolution, which led to corporate oligarchy. The Revolution we advocate ought to have two irrefutable components: 1) nonviolence, and 2) the radical improvement of the quality of life for ordinary people.

Your most expensive advice is the free advice you receive from your financially struggling friends and relatives.

I’ve been helping my mom financially since then, which is probably why she struggles with money now. I don’t know what else to do other than help.

While we are in the midst of our unique, difficult circumstances, whether combat deployments, illness, financial troubles, loneliness, addiction, relationship struggles, or even rocket launches, God gives each of us the ability to choose the path of either hope or fear.

Here are a few things that may be underlying causes of inflammation, according to a large body of research (see if you can spot the commonalities): lower social class, being divorced or separated from a partner, not having a job, being in financial trouble, having a greater number of negative interactions with other people, having people close to you struggle with their health, and being treated with disrespect or verbally threatened because of your race or your weight.27 In other words, having bad shit happen to you—especially experiences of social injustice—is a risk factor for both increased inflammation and chronic disease.

If someone grows up poor, in a family that struggles to make ends meet, that person might view wealth in a fantastical, idealistic way. If asked to design a logo for a financial institution, they might opt for a representation of money that matches those idealistic feelings, such as… gold, extravagant, glitzy, big! Conversely, if a person grows up well-off, where having lots of money is normal, then their design might be quieter and more corporate. The latter is more universally accepted as “good” design in most classrooms and design spaces. When thinking of how often a student is asked to design something and make it look “expensive,” or “cool” or “trendy,” it becomes clear how the cultural interpretation of those words will affect the fonts, colors, and symbols used to express those concepts.

And lack of income is stress. Lack of income is struggle. Lack of income is not an acceptable outcome for you and your family. Make this your declaration.

People who publicly struggle with work-life balance problems or continually turn to the company for help get pigeonholed as ambivalent, entitled or incompetent—or all of the above. Rarely do people in the top 20% of any organization complain about work-life balance. At home, as at work, they’re so competent that they’ve figured out and implemented sustainable solutions. Below-average performers, by contrast, have three strikes against them. First, they tend to be less expert at organizing their time and sorting through priorities, not just at work, but at home. Second, because of their middling performance, these people have been told they have limited chances of advancement. That lowers their self-confidence and raises their ambivalence. And finally, they’re not as financially secure as people in the top 20, giving them fewer resources to buy work-life balance with nannies or personal trainers or whatever. Put all three dynamics together, and it’s no wonder underperformers struggle publicly with work-life dilemmas and ask for help so often.

Even if you’re struggling financially, emotionally, spiritually, or physically, your grand plan to defy the odds probably came to you in a moment of comfort, when you had time to evaluate where you are and how you got there. There is no space for big-picture thinking when you’re in the heat of battle. When all is calm, even temporarily, damn near anything can feel possible. So that’s when you dream it up and map it all out.

Throughout the history of mankind the struggle for survival on this earth has been extremely, horribly intense and never ending. Wars have been fought, almost continually, when there were enough people to pick sides and fight; and enough dispensable men to be called onto die for their leader, country, or the current god. Then there was slavery; every country or body wanted a slave. Someone to do their work or make money for them. Sometimes slaves were all a war was about. And, if not a whole war, then groups, communities, families, and friends would fight and kill each other. Ain't that interesting? Not just African slaves; every nationality alive has been a slave, at some time, for some other nation. Believe me. It would seem most of mankind likes killing. For Greed of something, for Gold or financial reward. They doing it now!

Seeing my dad forfeit promotions so he could have more time with my sister, brother, mom, and me gave me a role model in my dad that was more than a financial womb—more than a success object.

The middle class finds itself in a constant state of financial struggle.

If they divorce, there is a legal apparatus in place to determine custody arrangements, visitation rights, and financial obligations. of course there is often conflict between divorcing couples, but at least they each have legal standing with regard to their children. And in recent decades, family laws have shifted in a more egalitarian direction toward divorce. Courts are now obliged to treat mothers and fathers fairly in determining custody, and the usual legal standard is now the best interests of the child or children. As a result, there has been a dramatic shift toward joint custody arrangements.

It was helpful at a time when the economy was still struggling, but it would not be enough on its own.

Polarity—the presence of opposites—is one way that the Universe draws our attention to what we need to see. You might see these polarities, or sharp contrasts, in your life too. Some instances are perhaps a mother who holds down the steady job, while the father is always pursuing new opportunities that may not always pan out. Or you come from a family that struggled financially and marry into a family of wealth and privilege. When challenges exist, the presence of polarities point to the emotional contradictions you might be struggling with internally. For instance, a part of me was drawn to what was westernized, and a part remained deeply traditional. What polarities do you see in your life or lineage?

Adam Smith saw what had happened to markets and societies for millennia. Winners are never satisfied with success in the latest market battle, with a cool product or financial or political achievement. As humans, we use any recent advantage to ensure that competitors will fail in future struggles.

Durstan Reginald McDonald, whom everybody called Dusty. Dusty became one of my most important mentors. Aside from being chaplain, he taught philosophy and had a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Probably in his late forties at the time, Dusty was a married father with a crew cut—in other words, a grown-up. Contrary to the iconic proclamation of the ’60s to “never trust anyone over thirty,” Dusty was trusted by every kid on campus, from conscientious objectors to conservative fraternity guys. Dusty helped me arrive at answers in the way a good chaplain does: He listened, asked questions, and maybe made a few suggestions. He never made a conclusion for you, instead helping light the way as you eked out your own path. We had one particularly influential conversation on an airplane, on our way to a student conference. I was still considering law school but starting to think more and more about ordination. I told Dusty about my father’s financial struggles. “I’ve seen what that’s like. I don’t need to be rich, but maybe I could go to law school and make some money and do good at the same time,” I said. “It’s true, you don’t get rich by being ordained,” he said. “But you’ll never starve, either. Your family will have enough to get by.” Thinking about my own family again, I realized that even under extreme circumstances, it was true. In the worst crises, we never starved, or even wanted. “You have to ask yourself what you want out of life. If it isn’t money, then maybe having enough is enough.” This conversation helped me get much clearer on myself. It wasn’t my dream to be rich. I knew I wanted to work for a better world. But should it be through law or public administration, or in the church? I meditated and prayed on that question, and I always felt myself coming back to my grandma.

Picture yourself when you’re old and gray. Do you really want that version of you to be struggling financially because present you couldn’t stop buying faux-fur pillows at Target?

Amidst superabundance, even we in rich countries live in an omnipresent anxiety, craving "financial security" as we try to keep scarcity at bay. We make choices (even those having nothing to do with money) according to what we can "afford," and we commonly associate freedom with wealth. But when we pursue it, we find that the paradise of financial freedom is a mirage, receding as we approach it, and that the chase itself enslaves. The anxiety is always there, the scarcity always just one disaster away. We call that chase greed. Truly, it is a response to the perception of scarcity. Let me offer one more kind of evidence, for now meant to be suggestive rather than conclusive, for the artificiality or illusory nature of the scarcity we experience. Economics, it says on page one of textbooks, is the study of human behavior under conditions of scarcity. The expansion of the economic realm is therefore the expansion of scarcity, its incursion into areas of life once characterized by abundance. Economic behavior, particularly the exchange of money for goods, extends today into realms that were never before the subject of money exchanges. Take, for example, one of the great retail growth categories in the last decade: bottled water. If one thing is abundant on earth to the point of near-ubiquity, it is water, yet today it has become scarce, something we pay for. Child care has been another area of high economic growth in my lifetime. When I was young, it was nothing for friends or neighbors to watch each other's kids for a few hours after school, a vestige of village or tribal times when children ran free. My ex-wife Patsy speaks movingly of her childhood in rural Taiwan, where children could and did show up at any neighbor's house around dinner time to be given a bowl of rice. The community took care of the children. In other words, child care was abundant; it would have been impossible to open an after-school day care center. For something to become an object of commerce, it must be made scarce first. As the economy grows, by definition, more and more of human activity enters the realm of money, the realm of goods and services. Usually we associate economic growth with an increase in wealth, but we can also see it as impoverishment, an increase in scarcity. Things we once never dreamed of paying for, we must pay for today. Pay for using what? Using money, of course — money that we struggle and sacrifice to obtain. If one thing is scarce, it is surely money. Most people I know live in constant low-level (sometimes high-level) anxiety for fear of not having enough of it. And as the anxiety of the wealthy confirms, no amount is ever enough.

that night. I believe that the stress and uncertainty of Daddio’s lifelong financial struggle was a major part of what kept him from being able to emotionally sustain a family. After you’ve just discarded a dead rat with your bare hand and laid your head down in the same space, you’re not trying to hear shit from nobody about how hard their day was.

Friends are not impositions. They are gifts. And when a friend is struggling and you are given the opportunity to lend a hand—whether that be by listening, advising, or offering financial help, that gift blossoms into something richer.

Independent Licensed Insolvency Practitioners, providing solutions for business directors who are struggling with financial pressures. We are experienced in rescuing and restructuring businesses across a wide range of business sectors.

was here on the backs of generations who had struggled through hardship and sacrifice—the blessed recipient in a long lineage of striving African Americans to have a stable, educated, middle-class life in America. Mom-Mom and Daddio’s generation grew up in the throes of segregation and immense poverty. Gigi’s family had escaped the Jim Crow South. My mother had fought through decades of school district bureaucracies, financial uncertainty, and Daddio’s bullshit to get me to this point. And she was going to be damned if I didn’t go to college because of some music I was doing at basement parties with homeboys named Jazz and Ready Rock.

My parents did their best to feed their children’s bodies, minds, and hearts, every day, whether they felt like it or not. Now that I have had children, I am in awe of how consistently they did this at such a young age, without complaint. They made a commitment to each other and to my brother and myself, and they kept it. I do not know what this cost them. I may never know. But having had children of my own, I know how hard it is some days to do what has to be done. Many of my parents’ generation were raised with a belief that was both curse and blessing: commitments were to be fulfilled, duties carried out. There was no choice. When we are convinced there is no choice, we waste less energy on wondering what to do and railing against that which needs to be done. This is the blessing we have when the rules are clear, the duties delineated. But there is another side to the ease we feel when our duty is laid out for us. If the strict parameters of what is expected do not fit us, we must shape ourselves to meet them, regardless of the costs. My mother, if she did not by nature fit the role of full-time homemaker, successfully managed the Herculean task of bending to meet it, without losing her enthusiasm for life, her ability to experience joy. Other women and their children were not so fortunate. Behind closed doors, within spotless rooms, many of my friends mothers drowned the pain of not living who they were with alcohol and prescription drugs, and they sometimes descended into illness and suicide. Many of the women of my generation are torn apart daily by the choices available to us, choices I am nevertheless grateful to have. When I went to work, I felt worried and guilty about leaving my children at daycare. When I stayed home I thought I would go out of my mind with the mental boredom, the struggle to live without enough money, and the worry that I would never be able to go back into the workplace and make a living. I had inherited my parents’ values in a world with so many more choices and demands, plus my own expectations that I could, and should, develop my own interests and talents. So, I tried to do it all - to keep a house and care for my children according to the standards required of a full-time homemaker, to attend classes to develop my skills, and to work to provide money and financial security. And I got sick – very, very sick. One of the gifts of lying on the floor too ill to get up with two young children to look after is the ease and clarity with which you know what really does have to be done. No, when I work with men and women who are worn out with too much work and worry, you tell me all the things they have to do, I tell them, “You know, very little actually has to be done.” I found out when I was ill that cookies do not have to be baked, floors do not have to be spotless, PTA meetings do not have to be attended, the dish drainer does not have to be emptied, meals do not have to be exotic and innovative. Too ill to do anything that did not have to be done, I did the impossible: I lowered my standards.

That secret is: Mind your own business. Financial struggle is often directly the result of people working all their lives for someone else. Many people will simply have nothing at the end of their working days to show for their efforts.