money 
Tue Jul 13, 2010 at 14:23:32 PM EDT
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On the heels of the amazing and much-needed Domestic Workers victory, which we've covered a bunch on JSpot, I saw this project: a "photographic leveling" of employers and the women who work in their homes. Dressed and posed alike, it is up to the viewer to speculate on who is the employer and who the employee. Looking at the photos, I thought about all of the Jewish families that employ domestic workers. I wonder how many Jewish families were already giving overtime and sick days, etc and how many will have to be pushed by this law or even persecuted prosecuted if they don't follow it.
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Mon Feb 01, 2010 at 12:13:47 PM EST
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There’s this new website which is encouraging people to move their money out of large banks and into community banks or credit unions. I heard about it on NPR this weekend and decided that I’m going to do it. Yes, my giant bank is convinent, but it's also evil. A smaller one that is close to my job would be convenient too and I already go to whatever random ATM I see anyway, incurring fees. I don’t really do too much else at the bank. And sorry to be crude, but F banks being “too big to fail.” If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big to manage.
Here’s what Move Your Money’s saying: “Community banks are typically more conservative about how they manage their money, they’re more closely connected to the people and businesses that live near them, and they’re more inclined to make loans they know will get paid back. In other words, they have the values that more people would want banks to have.”
On their website they have way to search the closest community, which oddly named my closet bank as Woori Bank, a bank headquartered in Korea. Eh...that makes no sense, but I guess I’ll figure it out.
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Wed Dec 30, 2009 at 14:19:32 PM EST
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Some intense photos showing the process of marijuana harvesting in California.   
Check out the photographer's awesome photo stories on everything from New Orleans, trash and teaparties HERE
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Mon Apr 27, 2009 at 00:00:00 AM EDT
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The always-provocative Peter Singer has a fascinating column in this week's Forward in which he argues that charitable giving that benefits the poor should be eligible for tax breaks, but that giving to philanthropies that do not work on poverty issues should not. In my new book I point out that, according to UNICEF, 27,000 children under 5 die every day around the world from avoidable, poverty-related causes. That’s an emergency that we ought to be doing much more to prevent. If Obama were to increase the tax deduction for donations aimed specifically at reducing that terrible death toll, and the extreme poverty that causes it, I’d applaud. But that doesn’t mean that I want to subsidize every charitable donation made by an American taxpayer. By far the largest slice of the roughly $300 billion dollars that Americans give to charity goes to religious organizations. I’m not religious, and I don’t see why people should pay less in taxes because they give to their church, synagogue or mosque. No doubt some religious organizations do some good, but others definitely don’t. . . I also don’t want to subsidize all of the museums, art galleries, theaters and performing arts organizations that are registered as charities. . . In the United States, public schools in poor districts tend to start from behind when it comes to funding, because the property tax base just isn’t there. And rich school districts can tip the balance even further in their favor because their residents can better afford to donate money to their local schools. Such giving is often done through tax-deductible donations to nonprofit organizations and foundations that channel money to specific schools and districts. Since the rich are taxed at a higher rate than the poor, and are more likely than other taxpayers to itemize their deductions, the government actually gives an additional subsidy to schools in affluent districts.
Ultimately, Singer's suggestion that the government should distinguish between charitable organizations that alleviate poverty and those that do not seems untenable. Virtually every non-profit can make an argument that it works on poverty in some way. Even the largest university can point out the amount of financial aid given to students in need, many cultural institutions offer public education programs for schools in low-income areas, and virtually every religious institution does some kind of service work. It doesn't seem reasonable for the government to try to sort out whether gifts to a church that hosts a soup kitchen should be tax deductible, or whether only gifts to organizations that devote the majority of their budgets to poverty relief should be eligible. The reason that tax guidelines for non-profit donations are so broad is that the government doesn't want to get involved in deciding which organizations are worthy and which aren't, lest we end up with government subsidies only for groups with one political agenda or another. But Singer does tap directly into the very Jewish question of the distinction between tzedakah and other kinds of philanthropic giving. Though he is not one to speak from a Jewish text perspective, he (unwittingly?) precisely defines one of the problems with the way in which we often speak about tzedakah.
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Tue Mar 31, 2009 at 20:03:20 PM EDT
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A number of years ago, two of my colleagues, Jeffrey Dekro and Rabbi Mordechai Liebling (along with Lawrence Bush) coined the term "Torah of Money." In short, this concept describes the idea that Judaism has something to say about how we use our money, and specifically that Jewish law and tradition ask us to invest in socially responsible ways and to give tzedakah. I was just browsing Amazon's top ten Jewish books, and noticed that #2 is a very different approach to the Torah of Money--a book by Rabbi Daniel Lapin called "Thou Shall Prosper:Ten Commandments for Making Money." The book's not new--it came out in 2005, though somehow I missed it, but as of right now, it's the second-most purchased Jewish (per Amazon's classification) book. (Number one, in case you're wondering, is Shmuley Boteach on sex.) Lapin's book purports to read the Ten Commandments as ten clues to making money. He weaves Jewish text, cute stories, and economic advice together into one core message: Judaism says that you should get rich.
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