Business Directory for Business Information | Richmondjwj.org

The Way In Which Some People Abuse The Benefit Of Sick Pay

This article describes how some people abuse the benefit of sick pay in the workplace. I am going to explain a couple of examples of this, which I have come across over the last couple of years.

There are many people who are in employment where if they are off work sick, they do not get paid. It must very much annoy these people to hear about the fortunate workers who are still paid when they are ill, abusing the system.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Quickest Way to Get is to Give

It’s true. You can’t really get what you want in life until you have given it to others. Doesn’t sound like it makes much sense, does it? How can you give what you don’t have? As you open your mind to the possibility and ask this question of yourself, you allow opportunity to come to you and knock at your door. Then you will find a way that it is possible to give to others what you want, before receiving it yourself.

It almost sounds like a chain letter and in a way it is. The chain letter is a facetious reference as so many of us have been exposed to them by now and know they are illegitimate scams. Yet the basic principles are: you give before you receive, and you give with the faith and expectation of receiving. A similar modern example can be seen in the film ‘Pay It Forward’. By giving to others, you allow good things to happen to you. And this all boils down to the simple law of attraction.

The law of attraction is like any other law of nature, like gravity. And like gravity, it is not one that has been generally ‘discovered’ yet. As a result, most of us are walking around thinking in a completely disordered paradigm.

Disordered paradigms of thought are displayed over and over in history, and discoveries of natural laws and observations of reality have brought order to transform the mistaken beliefs that had been accepted for fact. You can think of many examples, such as the belief that the world is flat, or the belief that we are at the center of the universe. Or the great changes that resulted as a discovery of the force of electricity and harnessing its natural power.

In this same way, we are able to make a change in our own disordered thought patterns. Right now 99% of us are probably dissatisfied. Dissatisfaction means larger life is seeking to be expressed through us, and it is being blocked. Self-sabotage is a very real process working in the invisible realms of the unconscious mind.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Morality of Child Labor

From the comfort of their plush offices and five to six figure salaries, self-appointed NGO’s often denounce child labor as their employees rush from one five star hotel to another, $3000 subnotebooks and PDA’s in hand. The hairsplitting distinction made by the ILO between “child work” and “child labor” conveniently targets impoverished countries while letting its budget contributors – the developed ones – off-the-hook.

Reports regarding child labor surface periodically. Children crawling in mines, faces ashen, body deformed. The agile fingers of famished infants weaving soccer balls for their more privileged counterparts in the USA. Tiny figures huddled in sweatshops, toiling in unspeakable conditions. It is all heart-rending and it gave rise to a veritable not-so-cottage industry of activists, commentators, legal eagles, scholars, and opportunistically sympathetic politicians.

Ask the denizens of Thailand, sub-Saharan Africa, Brazil, or Morocco and they will tell you how they regard this altruistic hyperactivity – with suspicion and resentment. Underneath the compelling arguments lurks an agenda of trade protectionism, they wholeheartedly believe. Stringent – and expensive – labor and environmental provisions in international treaties may well be a ploy to fend off imports based on cheap labor and the competition they wreak on well-ensconced domestic industries and their political stooges.

This is especially galling since the sanctimonious West has amassed its wealth on the broken backs of slaves and kids. The 1900 census in the USA found that 18 percent of all children – almost two million in all – were gainfully employed. The Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional laws banning child labor as late as 1916. This decision was overturned only in 1941.

The GAO published a report last week in which it criticized the Labor Department for paying insufficient attention to working conditions in manufacturing and mining in the USA, where many children are still employed. The Bureau of Labor Statistics pegs the number of working children between the ages of 15-17 in the USA at 3.7 million. One in 16 of these worked in factories and construction. More than 600 teens died of work-related accidents in the last ten years.

Child labor – let alone child prostitution, child soldiers, and child slavery – are phenomena best avoided. But they cannot and should not be tackled in isolation. Nor should underage labor be subjected to blanket castigation. Working in the gold mines or fisheries of the Philippines is hardly comparable to waiting on tables in a Nigerian or, for that matter, American restaurant.
Read the rest of this entry »

Slush Funds

According to David McClintick (”Swordfish: A True Story of Ambition, Savagery, and Betrayal”), in the late 1980’s, the FBI and DEA set up dummy corporations to deal in drugs. They funneled into these corporate fronts money from drug-related asset seizures.

The idea was to infiltrate global crime networks but a lot of the money in “Operation Swordfish” may have ended up in the wrong pockets. Government agents and sheriffs got mysteriously and filthily rich and the whole sorry affair was wound down. The GAO reported more than $3.6 billion missing. This bit of history gave rise to at least one blockbuster with Oscar-winner Halle Berry.

Alas, slush funds are much less glamorous in reality. They usually involve grubby politicians, pawky bankers, and philistine businessmen – rather than glamorous hackers and James Bondean secret agents.

The Kazakh prime minister, Imanghaliy Tasmaghambetov, freely admitted on April 4, 2002 to his country’s rubber-stamp parliament the existence of a $1 billion slush fund. The money was apparently skimmed off the proceeds of the opaque sale of the Tengiz oilfield. Remitting it to Kazakhstan – he expostulated with a poker face – would have fostered inflation. So, the country’s president, Nazarbaev, kept the funds abroad “for use in the event of either an economic crisis or a threat to Kazakhstan’s security”.

The money was used to pay off pension arrears in 1997 and to offset the pernicious effects of the 1998 devaluation of the Russian ruble. What was left was duly transferred to the $1.5 billion National Fund, the PM insisted. Alas, the original money in the Fund came entirely from another sale of oil assets to Chevron, thus casting in doubt the official version.

The National Fund was, indeed, augmented by a transfer or two from the slush fund – but at least one of these transfers occurred only 11 days after the damning revelations. Moreover, despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, the unfazed premier denied that his president possesses multi-million dollar bank accounts abroad.

He later rescinded this last bit of disinformation. The president, he said, has no bank accounts abroad but will promptly return all the money in these non-existent accounts to Kazakhstan. These vehemently denied accounts, he speculated, were set up by the president’s adversaries “for the purpose of compromising his name”.

On April 15, 2002 even the docile opposition had enough of this fuzzy logic. They established a People Oil’s Fund to monitor, henceforth, the regime’s financial shenanigans. By their calculations less than 7 percent of the income from the sale of hydrocarbon fuels (c. $4-5 billion annually) make it to the national budget.

Slush funds infect every corner of the globe, not only the more obscure and venal ones. Every secret service – from the Mossad to the CIA – operates outside the stated state budget. Slush funds are used to launder money, shower cronies with patronage, and bribe decision makers. In some countries, setting them up is a criminal offense, as per the 1990 Convention on Laundering, Search, Seizure, and Confiscation of the Proceeds from Crime. Other jurisdictions are more forgiving.
Read the rest of this entry »