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Thankful
Posted in Soul Brother Presents
Tagged affirmation, inspiration, life, message, self-enlightenment
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Deepak Chopra – Finding peace in the big city
Posted in Soul Brother Presents
Tagged Deepak Chopra, Enlightenment, life, meditation, self-enlightenment
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CEO Pay Went Up 16% Last Year to $15 million — How Much Did Your Pay Go Up?
Private Jet Boeing 737-200 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
By Helaine Olen
Congratulations CEOs! You’ve been having a great time of it. Salaries are up, and up in a major way. The Economic Policy Institute says you brought home an average $14.1m in 2012. The New York Times, looking at slightly different numbers, claims the news is even better, saying the median number is $15.1m. That’s a 16% increase in one year.
As for the rest of us … well, about that.
The money for our bosses has to come from somewhere, doesn’t it? Here’s one place it likely originated: us.
According to the Department of Labor Statistics, hourly wages plunged by a record-breaking 3.8% in the first quarter of 2013.
These are more than just numbers. This pay disparity is having an increasingly corrosive effect, leaving us governed by and lectured to by an elite that seems out-of-touch with the lives of everyone else.
No wonder you can turn on Bloomberg Radio, like I did last week, and hear this advice: flying on a private jet was extolled as a budget-conscious option for parties of ten or more who were otherwise planning to fly first-class. According to the good folks at XOJET, if the plane is $20,000 for the trip and the average first class ticket about $2,000 … well, you do the math!
Read More CEO Pay Went Up 16% Last Year to $15 million — How Much Did Your Pay Go Up? | Alternet.
Why Paid Family Leave Is Good for Everyone (Even People Who Don’t Use It)
Army offers 10-day paternity leave for new fathers 090616 (Photo credit: familymwr)
By Nanette Fondas
The Rhode Island legislature voted last week to pass a law to give workers paid time off to care for a new child or seriously ill or injured family member. If Governor Lincoln Chafee signs the bill into law as expected Rhode Island will become the third state with some type of paid family leave policy, after California and New Jersey. Connecticut appointed a task force in May to consider the feasibility of such a policy, and Washington passed a law in 2007 but for now it remains unfunded. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act, passed in 1993, provides 12 weeks of job-guaranteed unpaid leave to workers in businesses with more than 50 employees, but nearly half of eligible workers say they cannot afford to take it. Paid leave proponents regularly point out that the U.S. joins only two other countries–Swaziland and Papua New Guinea–in not guaranteeing some paid maternity leave.
The Rhode Island law, reports Bryce Covert,
expands the state’s current Temporary Disability Insurance (TDI) program, which currently only covers those who need time off for a work-related illness or injury, to cover those who need family leave. Temporary Caregiver Insurance (TCI) will allow workers to pay into the program through a payroll deduction and then, starting January 2014, take up to four weeks of paid leave, which would rise to six weeks the year after and eight weeks by 2016. Paying into the program would cost someone making $43,000 a year 83 cents a week. The minimum weekly payment for the TDI program is currently $72 and the maximum is $752. It would cover nearly 80 percent of the state’s workforce.
Opponents of this type of law worry about the replacement cost of labor to cover workers on leave, particularly for small firms, though Rhode Island small business owners joined the coalition favoring passage. California and New Jersey both report PFL produced a positive or neutral impact on business. Savings usually come from worker retention and therefore reduced costs to recruit and train new employees. Even “card-carrying capitalists” should support family leave programs, writes Cali Yost in Forbes. She observes that state paid leave programs are wage replacement programs and therefore should be named more accurately “Family Leave Insurance.”
Bernhard Goetz on George Zimmerman: ‘The Same Thing Is Happening’
By Harry Siegel and Filipa Ioannou
“I’m surprised,” said Bernhard Goetz, outside of his 20-story apartment building on Manhattan’s 14th Street, the same street he lived on back in 1984, when he shot four black teenagers on a downtown No. 2 subway train. “I’m surprised the same thing is happening 30 years later. It’s a different place, but the prosecution is the same.”
The man he says “the same thing is happening” to now, George Zimmerman, was just 1 year old in 1984, when Goetz, now 65, “stood his ground” against Barry Allen, Troy Canty, Darrell Cabey, and James Ramseur, friends who had come down from the Bronx to rob video-arcade change boxes. When the mild-looking electrical engineer, who’d been violently robbed before, got on the train at 14th Street, the four boys surrounded him and, after one of them asked him for five dollars, he unloaded his unlicensed revolver, hitting all four of them. He then fled through a tunnel before police arrived, and the identity of the white “subway vigilante” remained a mystery until he turned himself in to the New Hampshire police four days later, offering a dramatic confession that may have shaded into revenge fantasy. All four boys survived, though one was paralyzed, yet Goetz became a folk hero in the eyes of many New Yorkers and Americans at a time when urban crime was widely considered out of control, daylight muggings were commonplace, and the murder rate in Gotham was more than three times what it is today. After a riveting eight-week trial that captured national headlines, and hinged on the question of whether or not he had reason to fear for his life, Goetz was convicted only of criminal possession of a lethal weapon and was sentenced to just six months in prison.
Zimmerman, whose murder trial will conclude Friday when his defense offers its closing argument, was a neighborhood-watch captain in a gated community in Sanford, Fla.—a far cry from mid-1980s Manhattan—last Feburary when he confronted Trayvon Martin, a teenager with no criminal record or history of violent behavior. “These assholes, they always get away,” Zimmerman told a police dispatcher after spotting Martin—before he disregarded the dispatcher’s instructions and got out of his car, with a loaded gun, to confront the teenager who was returning home with a drink and Skittles from a trip to a convenience store during half-time of the NBA All-Star game. That confrontation ended with the two individuals fighting and Zimmerman shooting Martin, who died on the scene. The police, though, released Zimmerman, who claimed self-defense, after just a few hours—before they’d even conclusively identified his victim.
Read More Bernhard Goetz on George Zimmerman: ‘The Same Thing Is Happening’ – The Daily Beast.
Posted in News from the Soul Brother
Tagged Bernhard Goetz, George Zimmerman, Manhattan, murder, New York, Sanford, Sanford Florida, Trayvon Martin, Zimmerman
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Justice For Trayvon
#JusticeForTrayvon
Affirmation
Posted in Soul Brother Presents
Tagged inspiration, life, message, self-care, self-enlightenment, self-improvement
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What the Rising Number of Single Dads Says About Fatherhood in General
Single Dad Laughing is a Vampire! (Photo credit: SingleDadLaughing)
By Noah Berlatsky
If my wife and I divorced, who would get the kid?
Obviously, if only for mental health reasons, this isn’t the sort of hypothetical I want to spend any significant proportion of my time worrying about. But I’ll admit it did flit across my mind while reading the recent Pew paper The Rise of Single Fathers. The report shows a massive, ninefold increase in single dads raising their kids, from around 297,000 in 1960 to 2.6 million today.
There are a number of factors that have contributed to this change. Some are the same factors that have contributed to the rise of single mothers. Divorce rates have stabilized, but they’re still way higher than they were in the 1960s. Out-of-wedlock births are more common and less stigmatized than they used to be, too. Marriage has, since 1960, gotten less stable, and single parenting has gotten more accepted. As a result, you’ve got more single parents, of whatever gender, raising kids.
But single dads haven’t just increased in absolute numbers. They’ve also increased as a percentage of all single parents. Back in 1960, single dads made up only 14 percent of single-parent headed households. Today that number has climbed to 24 percent–almost a quarter. Men’s rights advocates would have you believe that feminism has systematically prevented men from gaining custody of children. Yet, according to this data at least, it seems like the (limited, but real) feminist gains of the last 50 years have actually coincided with greater parity. It’s hard to say whether this is correlation or causation, but either way, it looks like folks who want more men getting custody should be rooting for more feminism, not less.
Target Reminded Bosses Not All Hispanic Employees Eat Tacos, Wear Sombreros: Lawsuit
By Kim Bhasin
Three former employees are suing Target for discrimination, citing a document the company distributed to managers with reminders that not all Hispanics eat tacos and burritos or wear sombreros.
The former warehouse workers’ lawsuit, filed in California’s Yolo County, claims they were victims of discrimination on the job, and that Target’s “Multi-Cultural Tips” for managers were themselves offensive, according to Courthouse News.
According to the complaint, Target gave its distribution warehouse managers a document entitled, “Organization Effectiveness, Employee and Labor Relations Multi-Cultural Tips,” which featured suggestions on how to manage Hispanic employees. The tips addressed variety of Hispanic stereotypes, from music to food to clothing.
The document stated the following, according to the lawsuit:
a. Food: not everyone eats tacos and burritos;
b. Music: not everyone dances to salsa;
c. Dress: not everyone wears a sombrero;
d. Mexicans (lower education level, some may be undocumented);
e. Cubans (Political refugees, legal status, higher education level); and
f. They may say ‘OK, OK’ and pretend to understand, when they do not, just to save face.
Read More Target Reminded Bosses Not All Hispanic Employees Eat Tacos, Wear Sombreros: Lawsuit.
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