Help Animals on Cruel Factory Farms

Billions of chickens, cows, and pigs in factory farms are never allowed to spend a single moment of their lives doing anything that is natural and important to them. From birth until slaughter, these animals are either crammed by the thousands into warehouses or confined to cages and pens so small that they can barely move. Most of these animals will never feel the sun or breathe fresh air. Each day brings more physical pain and psychological trauma. Their deaths are the final injustice, as they are killed in a cruel and painful manner. You can help end this cruelty to animals today by making a tax-deductible gift to PETA. Factory farms are the biggest cause of animal suffering in the world. However, PETA has won several historic victories for animals that have sent shock waves through this cruel industry in recent months. Our actions are changing how some of the world's biggest meat buyers and producers do business—and improving the lives of literally billions of animals who are used for food. But there are still countless animals who need our help. I hope that you will support PETA's ongoing campaign to reform factory farming. Making a donation today is the most effective action that you can take to stop the suffering of the greatest number of animals. Your support is helping PETA transform the entire animal agriculture industry. For example, PETA has worked behind the scenes with Burger King for the past six years. As a result of our efforts, the company recently announced a series of animal welfare reforms that are changing the face of commercial animal farming. Burger King will now start purchasing more of its animal products from farms that do not confine hens to cruel battery cages or keep sows trapped in hideous gestation crates. The company is also rewarding its suppliers for adopting a much less cruel method of chicken slaughter. These changes will mean less painful lives and deaths for billions of animals. In response to Burger King's and other companies' new purchasing demands, Smithfield Foods—the largest pork supplier in the world—announced that it will phase out the use of all gestation crates in its farms. Just a few days later, Canada's largest pork producer, Maple Leaf Foods, announced that it will follow suit. Almost simultaneously, Cargill Foods—another of the world's biggest pork producers—pledged to stop using gestation crates in half its farms immediately. Thanks to your generosity, PETA is changing how the world's cruelest industry treats the animals it uses. But there are still holdouts. Some companies, like KFC and its chicken suppliers, continue to choose cruelty. To keep the pressure on the animal agriculture industry, we must do more than we ever have before, and we are counting on your continued support. Together, we can spare billions of chickens, pigs and cows the agonizing lives and violent deaths that they now suffer in factory farms and slaughterhouses. Now is our moment to make important changes that will stop animal suffering. Thank you for your immediate response. Sincerely, Bruce Friedrich Vice President for Campaigns P.S. Factory farms aren't going away any time soon. PETA can do the most good by changing how billions of factory-farmed animals are bred, kept and killed. Please support PETA's efforts to reform factory farming by making an online donation right now.

Some good articles on Master Data Management

• Gartner and Forrester frameworks designed to combat confusion around MDM technology options
• Forrester is saying "buyer beware" when it comes to MDM technology investments
• seven master data management best practices
  
• learn how to build a business case for MDM
• an introduction to MDM basics,
  
• a discussion of MDM trends
• conversation about MDM and CDI, including a discussion about MDM ROI
• BuildingPublish Post a customer data integration business case: Project specifications

All thanks go to SearchDataManagement.com 's classy BI newsletter

Harry Potter Can't Save the Day

An insight-fool article!

One of the big headlines circulating today is that, while next month's final installment in the wildly popular Harry Potter series should drum up major traffic for booksellers, there is a negative twist -- the boy magician is also a huge drain as bookstores try to gain advantage over one another. This is no surprise to many of us, though. In such a cutthroat industry, even an amazing phenomenon like Harry Potter can't quite save the day.

Back in February, one analyst upgraded Barnes & Noble's (NYSE: BKS) stock thanks (at least partially) to Harry's imminent arrival. However, at the time -- and since then -- many of us have mulled the idea that booksellers like Barnes & Noble and archrivals Borders (NYSE: BGP) and Books-A-Million (NYSE: BAMM) don't have much to gain through the actual book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, given the air of mutually assured destruction that's going around.

All the booksellers -- including Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) -- have been slashing the price for pre-orders of the book, which is obviously one way to try to funnel Harry Potter business to their own businesses, but it also does a number on their margins. Fanfare can cost money, too, if some of the physical booksellers want to throw midnight release parties as they have done in the past. Of course, when it comes to the bookstores, the hope is that the customers who come in for the book, even at its deeply discounted price, will snap up other items while they're in the stores. Let's hope so, for shareholders' sake.

Publisher Scholastic (Nasdaq: SCHL) may have seen that its runaway hit franchise is coming to an end and boosted the price for the hardcover up to $34.99, but lots of people are currently pointing out that booksellers are slashing half off the cover price in order to drive traffic.

Big hits drive traffic to booksellers, but it's still tough going for Borders and Barnes & Noble, both of which have been pushing hard to get a leg up on the competition; their loyalty programs offer deep discounts to try and lure more and more customers (from one another). Amazon.com is no stranger to discount pricing, either, but at least it offers many different types of products and has the edge of its original tagline, "the world's biggest bookstore" -- it's much easier to find anything you want at Amazon.com, even if what you're looking for resides further down the so-called Long Tail of commerce.

Given the competitive landscape, investing in bricks-and-mortar bookstore chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble just doesn't appeal to me these days; they're hard-pressed to be able to turn even blockbuster hits like Harry Potter's latest adventure to their advantage, profit-wise, and that's really saying something. (And of course, with this installment, Harry Potter mania will come to a close.) Until they can figure out innovative ways to create loyal customers without slashing prices on their bestsellers, it's hard to foresee sustainable growth ahead.

For related Foolishness, crack open a good article:

• Some of us believe there's little magic for booksellers.
• Harry Potter's magic comes back.
• What's the "Long Tail"? We asked Wired editor and author Chris Anderson about it in this interview.

Amazon.com is a Motley Fool Stock Advisor recommendation. Borders has been recommended by Motley Fool Inside Value.

Alyce Lomax does not own shares of any of the companies mentioned. The Fool's disclosure policy knows the secret of the Sorting Hat.

Offshore outsourcing must for Indian cos

Indian organizations facing IT skills shortage and second-class treatment from local service providers must consider offshore outsourcing, advices research and advisory firm Gartner Inc.

Demand for skilled IT personnel is exceeding local supply with rapid economic growth aggravating the problem, observes Gartner. Local chief information officers (CIOs) find it hard to manage the shortage as internal business units become even more demanding in the area of IT requirements and schedules.

"Local service providers lack adequate focus on the Indian domestic market, widening the demand-supply gap by not allocating enough quality resources for Indian customers," said Linda Cohen, vice president of Gartner's IT sourcing group.

The challenges and market conditions require Indian CIOs to look beyond the limits of their own geographical boundaries, much like their Western counterparts.

Gartner predicts that Indian companies will increasingly go to offshore in their sourcing strategies, which will result in outsourcing deals offered by some Indian companies that include higher end parts of service delivered from other parts of the world.

"This global sourcing model will become business-as-usual for Indian organizations," said Arup Roy, senior research analyst for Gartner's IT services market group.

Indian companies will increasingly source IT skills from nearby Singapore and Hong Kong. The market has already seen the first signs of this trend, adds Roy who cites the example of the Indian embassy which outsourced its visa collection and delivery services to a US company.

"Many Indian IT firms with operations spread across the U.S. and Europe are now outsourcing a part of their administrative work locally."

Gartner recommends innovative programs for retaining talent and alternative sources of talent like recruiting from small and mid-tier cities. It also suggests evaluating offshore outsourcing or staff augmentation from other parts of the world to create a sense of competition among the local vendors, potentially increasing their focus on local opportunities.

The absurd story of the relative corporate tax burden

BIG IS BEAUTIFUL - The absurd story of the relative corporate tax burden

Cutting Corners Ashok Mitra

The Economic and Political Weekly continues to surprise. Perhaps only the Dutch periodical, Ekonomist, shares with it the idiosyncrasy of combining comments on contemporary political, economic and social events in the first half with serious, often abstruse, articles on grave themes in the social sciences in the later pages. Juxtapositions of this nature can pose problems. Separating the mundane from the profound is not always that easy a task. This is where the EPW scores. It has met the challenge with rare panache. Even the presence of papers with formidable-looking mathematical equations has failed to scare away its readers who include members of academia as well as policy-makers. Some of the articles it carries in the latter half of the journal have acute relevance to contemporary problems affecting the polity and the economy. Consider, for instance, the issue of May 19 last. It carries a fascinating article, “Corporate Size and Effective Corporate Tax Rate”, summarizing the results of an empirical work undertaken by a young, hitherto-unknown scholar, Atulan Guha. His institutional affiliation is not mentioned, but that hardly matters. The message his paper puts across should make one sit up. The sample Guha chose for his investigation consisted of panels of Indian private companies mentioned in the database published by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, the reputed Mumbai-based research institution. This was, in a sense, the only source available to him, since the ministry of finance does not publish detailed data on the collection of corporation tax at the company level. The ‘proxy’ data covering the period, 1992-2001, were fed into an econometric model. The results Guha arrives at are startling. The simple-minded may have an idealized view of the system of taxation: the bigger the size of the company, the larger its capital stock and the magnitude of its turnover and gross profits, the higher must be its tax liability. But no; Guha has discovered it works the other way. The effective tax rates, that is, actual taxes paid by firms as a proportion of their gross profits, are inversely correlated with their size. The larger companies pay taxes at lower rates while relatively smaller-sized firms are charged at higher rates. A topsyturvy situation, you and I will be tempted to say. In the kind of society we subsist, this is how the cookie crumbles. Guha speculates on the factors which lead to this kind of a denouement. A number of things appear obvious. Bigger firms enjoy larger benefits in the way of write-offs for depreciation and obsolescence. They often have a substantial turnover of exports, thereby qualifying for further tax concessions. None of this tells the entire story though. The bigger the firm, the greater, Guha is sanguine, is its ability to hire accountants and tax experts who are conversant with the nooks and corners of the entire range of tax exemptions a company can lobby for and avail itself of. They are equally cognizant of the various loopholes in the tax structure. In some cases, these highpriced tax advisers can fudge the accounts in such a marvellous manner that revenue officials are totally bamboozled. Guha also hints at the likelihood of the greater ability of the bigger firms to hire top-notch lawyers who argue their case with super aplomb, starting all the way from the level of junior tax authorities through the rungs of tax tribunals and further on through different layers of the judiciary. With presumably a twinkle in his eye, Guha drops, at the next state, a half-hint: the big cheeses in the corporate sector are in a position to either arm-twist or otherwise ‘influence’ officials in the department of revenue to get tax assessments adjusted in their favour. The modalities of such influence-peddling are well known and hardly need to be spelled out in detail. Guha is more explicit about a fourth reason he adduces for the effective relative lightness of the tax burden for bigger firms: it is their nexus with the political administrative system. What he implies is fairly obvious. The fat cats in the corporate sector have the ability to maintain a close liaison with the political top brass. In a rigidly hierarchical institutional arrangement, there are ways and ways of applying moral suasion from the top; where tax assessment is concerned, the benefits of such suasion accrue to the larger firms. It is a class-biased society. Guha’s findings will not put to shame either the corporate sector or the government’s revenue-collecting apparatchik. Nor will it embarrass the politicians who rule the roost. There can, however, be some major spin-offs on account of the manner the tax system has been made to operate in favour of the richer corporations. The government foams in the mouth while exhorting each and all to participate in the free market where every one is supposed to have equal clout. The reality is simply not so, as the regime of effective tax rates so vividly illustrates. Small and medium-sized entities in the corporate world will soon learn the lesson this kind of tax regime imparts. To survive and prosper in such a milieu, the smaller firm will quickly decide to come to an arrangement among themselves and cultivate the art of being big. Given the built-in inequity in the effective tax rate structure, small- and medium-sized firms will convince themselves that only the big is beautiful; they will begin to think in terms of forming carte-type organizations of their own — or in terms of mergers. Some legal impediments may exist making it inconvenient to form cartels or arrange amalgamations. Devices nonetheless exist through which an informal system of collusion can be worked out by the relatively smaller firms. By coming to a tacit understanding with one another in the matter of purchase of inputs, pricing of products and regulation of output, they could develop enough power and bargaining capability to draw the same respect and attention from the revenue authorities as are accorded to the biggies in the corporate sector. The capitalist system as currently unfolding in India would, in any case, have hastened the arrival of a network of monopolies with near-total command over the economy: the ‘tax breaks’ that the top layer of the corporate sector enjoys will further advance the dawn of that ethereal day. And one can have a fair hunch of the total fiscal anarchy likely to ensure once the giant-sized special economic zones are ushered in. Ask not what the SEZs will do for the nation; ask what further blessings the nation can shower on the SEZs. Given this frame of mind of the political masters, nothing need be left to the imagination. There is a tailpiece, though, to this absurd story of relative tax burden. For nearly fifty years now, a group of economists, particularly those trained in London and Chicago, have been haranguing the policy-framers on the advantage accruing from low tax rates. They have based themselves on the so-called Laffer Curve, according to which the elasticity of income of tax collections — or whatever the jargon is — is greater than unity, meaning thereby that a lowering of the tax rate will yield a more than proportionate increase in tax revenue. Guha’s research ought to set everybody to rethink on the soundness of the proposition. If the tax rate is lowered, there would be that much of extra money in the kitty of a company with the help of which it could hire more accountants and more smart lawyers to explore fresh and fresher avenues of tax avoidance; it would, at the same time, have a larger slush fund at its command from which consideration money might be offloaded to tax officials and ruling politicians. Adieu, Arthur Laffer!