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Countries with high levels of atheism are also the most charitable both in terms of the percentage of their wealth they devote to social welfare programs and the percentage they give in aid to the developing world. The dubious link between Christian literalism and Christian values is belied by other indices of social equality. Consider the ratio of salaries paid to top-tier CEOs and those paid to the same firms’ average employees: in Britain it is 24:1; in France, 15:1; in Sweden, 13:1; in the United States, where 80 percent of the population expects to be called before God on Judgment Day, it is 475:1. Many a camel, it would seem, expects to pass easily through the eye of a needle.
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Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation)
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The business professional also must value his employees as well, for they are his most valuable asset. He must attend to their welfare.
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Daniel Lapin (Business Secrets from the Bible: Spiritual Success Strategies for Financial Abundance)
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Job tip: If you were the employer, what kind of person would you most desire as an employee? Be that person.
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Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
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The way to overcome oligarchy is for the rest of us to join together and win America back. This will require a multiracial, multiethnic coalition of working-class, poor, and middle-class Americans fighting for democracy and against concentrated power and privilege, determined to rid politics of big money, end corporate welfare and crony capitalism, bust up monopolies, stop voter suppression, and strengthen the countervailing power of labor unions, employee-owned corporations, worker cooperatives, state and local banks, and grassroots politics. This agenda is neither right nor left. It is the bedrock for everything else America must do.
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Robert B. Reich (The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It)
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The next time you drive into a Walmart parking lot, pause for a second to note that this Walmart—like the more than five thousand other Walmarts across the country—costs taxpayers about $1 million in direct subsidies to the employees who don’t earn enough money to pay for an apartment, buy food, or get even the most basic health care for their children. In total, Walmart benefits from more than $7 billion in subsidies each year from taxpayers like you. Those “low, low prices” are made possible by low, low wages—and by the taxes you pay to keep those workers alive on their low, low pay. As I said earlier, I don’t think that anyone who works full-time should live in poverty. I also don’t think that bazillion-dollar companies like Walmart ought to funnel profits to shareholders while paying such low wages that taxpayers must pick up the ticket for their employees’ food, shelter, and medical care. I listen to right-wing loudmouths sound off about what an outrage welfare is and I think, “Yeah, it stinks that Walmart has been sucking up so much government assistance for so long.” But somehow I suspect that these guys aren’t talking about Walmart the Welfare Queen. Walmart isn’t alone. Every year, employers like retailers and fast-food outlets pay wages that are so low that the rest of America ponies up a collective $153 billion to subsidize their workers. That’s $153 billion every year. Anyone want to guess what we could do with that mountain of money? We could make every public college tuition-free and pay for preschool for every child—and still have tens of billions left over. We could almost double the amount we spend on services for veterans, such as disability, long-term care, and ending homelessness. We could double all federal research and development—everything: medical, scientific, engineering, climate science, behavioral health, chemistry, brain mapping, drug addiction, even defense research. Or we could more than double federal spending on transportation and water infrastructure—roads, bridges, airports, mass transit, dams and levees, water treatment plants, safe new water pipes. Yeah, the point I’m making is blindingly obvious. America could do a lot with the money taxpayers spend to keep afloat people who are working full-time but whose employers don’t pay a living wage. Of course, giant corporations know they have a sweet deal—and they plan to keep it, thank you very much. They have deployed armies of lobbyists and lawyers to fight off any efforts to give workers a chance to organize or fight for a higher wage. Giant corporations have used their mouthpiece, the national Chamber of Commerce, to oppose any increase in the minimum wage, calling it a “distraction” and a “cynical effort” to increase union membership. Lobbyists grow rich making sure that people like Gina don’t get paid more. The
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Elizabeth Warren (This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class)
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We do not claim to be more unselfish, more generous or more philanthropic than other people. But we think we started on sound and straightforward business principles, considering the interests of the shareholders our own, and the health and welfare of the employees, the sure foundation of our success.
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Jamsetji Tata
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In a mass society where obtaining credit is as easy as it is, there’s probably no way to efficiently collect on delinquent accounts by writing real affidavits, filing legitimate, error-free lawsuits, and serving legitimate summonses in each and every individual case. Without the shortcuts, it doesn’t work. So techniques like robo-signing and sewer service are essential to the profitability of the business. Plenty of people—consumers and merchants both—are probably glad that so much credit is available, but they don’t realize that systematic fraud is part of what makes it available. Legally, there’s absolutely no difference between a woman on welfare who falsely declares that her boyfriend no longer lives in the home and a bank that uses a robo-signer to cook up a document swearing that he has kept regular records of your credit card account. But morally and politically, they’re worlds apart. When the state brings a fraud case against a welfare mom, it brings it with disgust, with rage, because in addition to committing the legal crime, she’s committed the political crime of being needy and an eyesore. Banks commit the legal crime of fraud wholesale; they do so out in the open, have entire departments committed to it, and have employees who’ve spent years literally doing nothing but commit, over and over again, the same legal crime that some welfare mothers go to jail for doing once. But they’re not charged, because there’s no political crime. The system is not disgusted by the organized, mechanized search for profit. It’s more like it’s impressed by it.
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Matt Taibbi (The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap)
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Detroit is an extreme example of the fact that public-sector employment has become in effect a supplementary welfare state, with salaries and benefits – and, above all, pensions – entirely disconnected from legitimate municipal purposes. Unionized public-sector employees with a high degree of political discipline fortified by narrow financial self-interest become an unstoppable constituency, and the government becomes its own special-interest group.
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Kevin D. Williamson (What Doomed Detroit (Encounter Broadsides Book 37))
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Light-touch government works more efficiently in the presence of social capital. Police close more cases when citizens monitor neighborhood comings and goings. Child welfare departments do a better job of “family preservation” when neighbors and relatives provide social support to troubled parents. Public schools teach better when parents volunteer in classrooms and ensure that kids do their homework. When community involvement is lacking, the burdens on government employees—bureaucrats, social workers, teachers, and so forth—are that much greater and success that much more elusive.
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Robert D. Putnam (Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community)
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There is good reason for pervasive middle-class angst. Financial insecurity has been written into the DNA of the New Economy. Not only has the New Economy been more volatile and the economic gains been distributed more unequally than during the era of middle-class prosperity, but Corporate America has rewritten the social contract that once underpinned the security of most average Americans. The company-provided welfare safety net that rank-and-file employees enjoyed from the 1940s into the 1970s has been sharply cut back, and a huge share of the cost burden has been shifted from companies to their employees.
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Hedrick Smith (Who Stole the American Dream?)
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Although the 1996 welfare reform pushed millions of low-income single moms into the workforce, it did nothing to improve the conditions of low-wage jobs. In fact, if anything, economic theory (and plain old common sense) might support the opposite conclusion: although we can’t know for sure, it stands to reason that by moving millions of unskilled single mothers into the labor force starting in the mid-1990s, welfare reform and the expansion of the EITC and other refundable tax credits may have actually played a role in diminishing the quality of the average low-wage job in America. As unskilled single mothers flooded into the workforce at unprecedented rates, they greatly increased the pool of workers available to low-wage employers. When more people compete for the same jobs, wages usually fall relative to what they would have been otherwise. Employers can also demand more of their employees. What
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Kathryn J. Edin ($2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America)
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Disparity, Education and Economy
Every dollar spent on luxury is a dollar of disparity. Citizens of earth could force big tech to pay their employees fair wages tomorrow, if they just stop buying their fancy, overpriced products and go for humbler alternatives unless the companies bring down their disparities in salary.
The CEO may enjoy certain benefits of their position, but not until those working at the bottom can afford the fundamentals of life for their family. I'll say it to you plainly. An employee wronged is a company wronged.
You see, trying to build a disparity-free economy pursuing revenue is like trying to achieve pregnancy through vasectomy. So long as greed drives the economy, it's not economy, but catastrophe. So long as greed drives the industries, it's not industrialization, it is vandalization.
Ambition to climb the ladder of status so that you could be on the affluent side of disparity, is no ambition of a civilized human, it's the ambition of a caveman. So, before you pursue an ambition in life, educate yourself on a civilized definition of ambition.
Yet the situation in our world is so pathetic that that's exactly the kind of ambition educational institutes sell. Schools and universities don't teach you to build a civilized society free from disparity, they teach you clever tactics to be on the affluent side of disparity. This is not education, this is castration.
Concern for the society should be the bedrock of education - collective welfare should be the bedrock of economy - if not, we might as well start living as hobos on the streets, because with greed as the driving principle of education and economy, sooner or later all of us will end up on the streets.
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Abhijit Naskar (Ingan Impossible: Handbook of Hatebusting)
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The Seventh Central Pay Commission was appointed in February 2014 by the Government of India (Ministry of Finance) under the Chairmanship of Justice Ashok Kumar Mathur. The Commission has been given 18 months to make its recommendations. The terms of reference of the Commission are as follows: 1. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure including pay, allowances and other facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, having regard to rationalisation and simplification therein as well as the specialised needs of various departments, agencies and services, in respect of the following categories of employees:- (i) Central Government employees—industrial and non-industrial; (ii) Personnel belonging to the All India Services; (iii) Personnel of the Union Territories; (iv) Officers and employees of the Indian Audit and Accounts Department; (v) Members of the regulatory bodies (excluding the RBI) set up under the Acts of Parliament; and (vi) Officers and employees of the Supreme Court. 2. To examine, review, evolve and recommend changes that are desirable and feasible regarding the principles that should govern the emoluments structure, concessions and facilities/benefits, in cash or kind, as well as the retirement benefits of the personnel belonging to the Defence Forces, having regard to the historical and traditional parties, with due emphasis on the aspects unique to these personnel. 3. To work out the framework for an emoluments structure linked with the need to attract the most suitable talent to government service, promote efficiency, accountability and responsibility in the work culture, and foster excellence in the public governance system to respond to the complex challenges of modern administration and the rapid political, social, economic and technological changes, with due regard to expectations of stakeholders, and to recommend appropriate training and capacity building through a competency based framework. 4. To examine the existing schemes of payment of bonus, keeping in view, inter-alia, its bearing upon performance and productivity and make recommendations on the general principles, financial parameters and conditions for an appropriate incentive scheme to reward excellence in productivity, performance and integrity. 5. To review the variety of existing allowances presently available to employees in addition to pay and suggest their rationalisation and simplification with a view to ensuring that the pay structure is so designed as to take these into account. 6. To examine the principles which should govern the structure of pension and other retirement benefits, including revision of pension in the case of employees who have retired prior to the date of effect of these recommendations, keeping in view that retirement benefits of all Central Government employees appointed on and after 01.01.2004 are covered by the New Pension Scheme (NPS). 7. To make recommendations on the above, keeping in view: (i) the economic conditions in the country and the need for fiscal prudence; (ii) the need to ensure that adequate resources are available for developmental expenditures and welfare measures; (iii) the likely impact of the recommendations on the finances of the state governments, which usually adopt the recommendations with some modifications; (iv) the prevailing emolument structure and retirement benefits available to employees of Central Public Sector Undertakings; and (v) the best global practices and their adaptability and relevance in Indian conditions. 8. To recommend the date of effect of its recommendations on all the above.
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M. Laxmikanth (Governance in India)
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the welfare of employees was an important component in commercial success.
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Hugh Williams (Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History)
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The Founding and the Constitution WHAT GOVERNMENT DOES AND WHY IT MATTERS The framers of the U.S. Constitution knew why government mattered. In the Constitution’s preamble, the framers tell us that the purposes of government are to promote justice, to maintain peace at home, to defend the nation from foreign foes, to provide for the welfare of the citizenry, and, above all, to secure the “blessings of liberty” for Americans. The remainder of the Constitution spells out a plan for achieving these objectives. This plan includes provisions for the exercise of legislative, executive, and judicial powers and a recipe for the division of powers among the federal government’s branches and between the national and state governments. The framers’ conception of why government matters and how it is to achieve its goals, while often a matter of interpretation and subject to revision, has been America’s political blueprint for more than two centuries. Often, Americans become impatient with aspects of the constitutional system such as the separation of powers, which often seems to be a recipe for inaction and “gridlock” when America’s major institutions of government are controlled by opposing political forces. This has led to bitter fights that sometimes prevent government from delivering important services. In 2011 and again in 2013, the House and Senate could not reach agreement on a budget for the federal government or a formula for funding the public debt. For 16 days in October 2013, the federal government partially shut down; permit offices across the country no longer took in fees, contractors stopped receiving checks, research projects stalled, and some 800,000 federal employees were sent home on unpaid leave—at a cost to the economy of $2–6 billion.1 39
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Benjamin Ginsberg (We the People (Core Eleventh Edition))
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The irony is that only by a particularly narrow definition does a Walmart job get you off welfare - as a matter of policy, Walmart encourages its employees to apply for government benefits. Indeed, Walmart and other minimum wage workers at McDonald's and similar McJobs are the largest group of Medicaid and food stamps recipients in the United States. That is to say, US taxpayers subsidize Walmart paychecks (and corporate profits) by paying welfare benefits to its workers and their children. Welfare reform eliminated virtually all education and job-training benefits beyond "work readiness" classes that taught women to dress nicely and get their kids up early. The result: women couldn't get the education to get a good job and they were still receiving welfare benefits, but they could be counted on to clock regular hours and make profits for their low-paying employers. From welfare reform to Walmart, it was all reproductive politics.
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Laura Briggs (How All Politics Became Reproductive Politics: From Welfare Reform to Foreclosure to Trump (Volume 2))
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Sea World was treading carefully. Park officials stated repeatedly how essential and valuable Tilikum had been to their operations. This is true. Zoos and circuses are a business, and Blackstone paid 2.3 billion dollars for its purchase. The most productive employees in that business, in terms of labor and revenue, are the orcas themselves. Tilikum has performed for almost nineteen years in Orlando, sired thirteen calves, and produced in the range of a billion dollars in revenue. Nevertheless, Sea World did not believe that Tilikum had earned the right to retire. None of that billion dollars would be used to build an ocean sanctuary for older captive orcas. They do not deserve it.
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Jason Hribal (Fear of the Animal Planet: The Hidden History of Animal Resistance (Counterpunch))
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June Brought, a leadership collaborator of mine, works in corporate wellness for the successful women’s clothing company Eileen Fisher. The company has flourished since its founding in 1984, currently earning revenue of more than $300 million a year. What truly sets the company apart, however, is its early adoption of conscious capitalism and a sincere desire to enhance the lives of all its stakeholders. Eileen Fisher was one of the first clothing companies that insisted on using sustainable materials such as organic cotton, and implemented programs to reduce fabric and fiber waste. Eileen Fisher’s philanthropic efforts focus on business leadership grants to develop and benefit the careers of young women around the world. The company is also committed to enhancing the well-being of its own employees at every level, which is why June was hired. According to June, “Eileen Fisher is not just another company that claims to care about the well-being of its employees but really only cares about how they can contribute to the well-being of the bottom line. Eileen Fisher truly is concerned with its staff as human beings first.” One of the tools June uses to help individuals at Eileen Fisher and elsewhere find a healthy balance between life and work involves what she calls “completing your own circuit.” She believes it is essential that we plug into our own beings first in order to feel empowered, fulfilled, and complete. As June explains, when we outsource our power to a job, a romantic relationship, or any external condition, “we compromise our emotional welfare and risk having someone cut off our power.” She says that completing our own circuit involves a deep internal knowing that “we are fully charged and complete unto ourselves without any need for outside support or validation.
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Andrea Kayne (Kicking Ass in a Corset: Jane Austen’s 6 Principles for Living and Leading from the Inside Out)
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Takeover Twattery (The Sonnet)
Oligarchs don't even care about the welfare of their employees,
And you want them to care about social welfare! Keep dreaming!
Oligarchs have no regard for the struggles of human life,
And you think they'll transform the world! Keep dreaming!
I thought Mark was bad for not treating facebook's health issues,
But the chief twat makes Zuck look like an incompetent simpleton.
Oligarchs are poster boys for regress, not crusaders for freedom,
Better to have a CEO without answers than one who answers to none.
However, like corrupt politicians, oligarchs are made by people,
If anybody is to blame it's the morons who put them in pedestal.
If you had the common sense to question your pavlovian attraction,
Spoiled brats could never treat society as daddy's mine of emerald.
Now more than ever it is imperative to ban large scale takeovers.
Moreover, it is vital to legally shun the rise of billionaires.
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Abhijit Naskar (Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence)
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am Divinely guided in all my ways, and I adapt myself to all new ideas. Infinite Intelligence is constantly revealing to me better ways to serve my fellow man. I am guided and directed to create products that will bless and help humanity. I at- tract men and women who are spiritual, loyal, faithful, and talented, and who contribute to the peace, prosperity, and progress of our business. I am an irre- sistible magnet and attract fabulous wealth by giving the best possible quality of products and services. I am constantly in tune with the Infinite and the substance of wealth. Infinite Intelligence governs all my plans and purposes, and I predicate all my success on the truth that God leads, guides, and governs me in all my un- dertakings. I am at peace inwardly and outwardly at all times. I am a tremendous success. I am one with God, and God is always successful. I must succeed. I am succeeding now. I grasp the essentials of all details of my business. I radiate love and goodwill to all those around me and to all my employees. I fill my mind and heart with God’s love, power, and energy. All those connected with me are spiritu- al links in my growth, welfare, and prosperity. I give all honor and glory to God.” This business tycoon brought all these things that he had affirmed to pass, and he blessed countless others…Go, and do thou likewise (Luke 10:37), and become a multimillionaire blessing multitudes.
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Joseph Murphy (Your Infinite Power To Be Rich)
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During rough time in a Business, a Leader should act like a ship captain. His first and foremost priority should be to put his employees to security before thinking of his own welfare.
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Indy Bissessur
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Banks commit the legal crime of fraud wholesale; they do so out in the open, have entire departments committed to it, and have employees who’ve spent years literally doing nothing but commit, over and over again, the same legal crime that some welfare mothers go to jail for doing once. But they’re not charged, because there’s no political crime. The system is not disgusted by the organized, mechanized search for profit. It’s more like it’s impressed by it.
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Matt Taibbi (The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap)
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Abolishing “welfare as we have known it,” as the Clinton administration managed to do, was a way of enlarging the pool of vulnerable, low-wage workers with no other option but to become, if they were able, employees at will, no matter the terms and conditions of their work. What
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Steve Fraser (The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power)
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own. Save a parrot’s tree. Save ten. Without our help, without needed legislative protection and worldwide consciousness-raising on their behalf, parrots will be lost in short years to come. It is fitting to end this book with this succinct summation from Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States: We are at an odd moment in history. There are more people in this country sensitized to animal protection issues than ever before. The Humane Society of the United States alone has 8 million members, and in addition, there are more than 5,000 other groups devoted to animal protection. At the same time, there are more animals being harmed than ever before—in industrial agriculture, research and testing, and the trade in wild animals. It is pitiful that our society still condones keeping millions of parrots and other wild birds as pets—wild animals that should be free to fly and instead are languishing in cages, with more being bred every day. It’s an issue of supply and demand and it’s also an issue of right and wrong. Animals suffer in confinement, and we have a moral obligation to spare them from needless suffering. Every person can make a difference every day for animals by making compassionate choices in the marketplace: don’t buy wild animals as pets, whether they are caught from the wild or bred in captivity. If we spare the life of just one animal, it’s a 100% positive impact for that creature. If we can solve the larger bird trade problem, it will be 100% positive for all parrots and other wild birds in the U.S. and beyond our borders. I believe we will look back in 50 -75 years and say “How could we as a society countenance things like the decades long imprisonment of extraordinarily intelligent animals like parrots?” Acknowledgments For this work, which took more than two and a half years to research and write, I amassed thousands of documents and conducted several hundred interviews with leading scientists, environmentalists, paleontologists, ecological economists, conservationists, global warming experts, federal law enforcement officers, animal control officers, avian researchers, avian rescuers, veterinarians, breeders, pet bird owners, bird clubs, pet bird industry executives and employees, sanctuaries and welfare organizations, legislators, and officials with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), and other sources in the United States and around the world.
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Mira Tweti (Of Parrots and People: The Sometimes Funny, Always Fascinating, and Often Catastrophic Collision of Two Intelligent Species)
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the more fundamental problem with the big government explanation is that by most measures (all spending, or spending on the welfare state in real per capita terms, or spending as a fraction of GDP; number of government employees) the size of government lagged behind the I-we-I curve by several decades. Federal government spending and the number of employees rose steadily in tandem with the I-we-I curve from 1900 to 1970 and kept rising until they leveled off after the 1980s.
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Robert D. Putnam (The Upswing: How We Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again)
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In many other branches—for example, in retail trade—the trend is in a similar direction. In the food industry, moreover, particularly in meat packaging, we often find a still more glaring state of affairs. There, sometimes only one worker in ten has a regular contract. In one factory that I studied, there were only 184 direct employees out of around 600 workers in total.99 The majority of workers in this meat packaging facility were Romanian, officially employed by firms in their own country, and according to the regulations in force not entitled to any welfare rights in Germany. The works committees here were overburdened, and the Romanian workers had practically no one to represent their interests; even the foremen felt this gap. Regulations were frequently infringed, and communication was hardly possible in view of the language barrier. Initially the foreign workers were not even allowed to speak to the German workers or cooperate with them, as this would have amounted to a concealed contract.
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Oliver Nachtwey (Germany's Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe)
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From its establishment in the mid-nineteenth century until today, animal welfare has been an almost exclusively white middle- and upper-class social movement. As of 2005, African-Americans made up only 4 percent of animal welfare employees, according to one survey. Sixty-two percent of animal welfare organizations had no African-American employees at all. That
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Bronwen Dickey (Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon)
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You cannot be an entrepreneur, unless you are a good provider. As a 9 to 5 person, your family is your responsibility, as an entrepreneur the families of your employees are your responsibility, as well as the welfare of your customers or clients. Today who abandons their family for their entrepreneurial dream, tomorrow will abandon their employees when that dream goes bankrupt.
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Abhijit Naskar (Yaralardan Yangın Doğar: Explorers of Night are Emperors of Dawn (Sonnet Sultan))
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You cannot be an entrepreneur, unless you are a good provider. As a 9 to 5 person, your family is your responsibility, as an entrepreneur the families of your employees are your responsibility, as well as the welfare of your customers or clients.
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Abhijit Naskar (Yaralardan Yangın Doğar: Explorers of Night are Emperors of Dawn (Sonnet Sultan))
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Despite my misgivings, I was addicted to the cachet and perks of my job. Cold-pressed fruit juices lined up in neat colourful rows in the office drinks fridge, free gym membership, vouchers for massages and facials that would suddenly appear on my desk as part of the employee welfare program. The never-ending supply of free tickets to Broadway shows or prime seats at sports games. And, most importantly, the money they dangled in front of us.
It all gave me temporary amnesia, or perhaps wilful blindness, at the damage we wrought on the lives of the nameless people at that factory in Michigan, or a hundred other places affected by our decisions. We used profit as justification for shattering lives. It was that simple.
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Megan Goldin (The Escape Room)
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Income volatility can also interfere with the existing social safety net. Some welfare programs require beneficiaries to work a certain number of hours each week, assuming that the number of hours worked is under the control of the employee, rather than the employer.53 Qualification for programs like food stamps and health insurance subsidies is based on an average monthly income threshold. But of course volatile incomes mean that families bounce in and out of eligibility.54 Bouncing in and out of Medicaid ineligibility causes interruptions in care for chronic conditions, particularly in places where the doctors who accept Medicaid and private insurance don’t overlap.55 There can also be severe penalties for “fraud” in these programs, receiving benefits when your income is too high. But households subject to volatile incomes may not, themselves, know when or whether they will cross thresholds of eligibility. For instance, as of 2016, the Pennsylvania Medicaid Application asks whether anyone in the household has a hard time predicting their income, but in the very next question requires applicants to do exactly that—for the next twenty-four months—in order to establish eligibility.
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Jonathan Morduch (The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty)
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The day-to-day running of the Empire State Building fell to the building’s manager, Chapin L. Brown, who operated as if he were the mayor of a small town. Brown supervised about 350 service employees (full tenancy would have called for one thousand), including fire and sanitation departments and a police force, as well as elevator operators and mechanics, engineers, plumbers and pipe fitters, electricians, painters, cabinetmakers, a house smith, and a staff for the general welfare of the workers, which included a nurse.
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John Tauranac (The Empire State Building: The Making of a Landmark)
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Hospitals cannot continue to hemorrhage. For the country as a whole, medical insurance premiums include a surcharge that pays for treating the uninsured. However, if the proportion of uninsured indigent patients exceeds a certain figure, a hospital has no choice but to close. In California alone, the heavy cost of free medicine for foreigners forced no fewer than 60 hospitals to shut down between 1993 and 2003; many others were on the verge of collapse. From 1994 to 2004, the number of hospital emergency rooms in the country as a whole dropped by more than 12 percent.
In May 2010, Miami’s health care system was so strapped, it was considering closing two of its five public hospitals. This would mean laying off 4,487 employees and the loss of 581 acute-care beds. Experts explained that treating uninsured patients had stretched the system to the breaking point.
Houston is a good example of a city whose hospitals are barely making ends meet. In the nation as a whole, about 15 percent of the population has no medical insurance, but Texas, with its large population of Hispanics, has the highest percentage at 24 percent. In Houston, the figure is 30 percent. The safety net cannot accommodate so many people who cannot pay. “Does this mean rationing?” asks Kenenth Mattox, chief of staff at Ben Taub General Hospital. “You bet it does.”
There is such a crush at Houston’s emergency rooms that ambulances often wait for one or two hours before they can even unload patients. The record wait is six hours. Twenty percent of the time, hospitals end up sending patients to other hospitals, and some have died after being diverted. Politicians and businessmen pull strings so friends can cut in line.
Americans who fall sick in Mexico do not get free treatment. The State Department warns that Mexican doctors routinely refuse to treat foreign patients unless paid in advance, and that they often charge Americans for services not rendered.
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Jared Taylor (White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century)