Osama Bin Ladden.

I will repeat it again so you can understand it this time:

You degrade Americans in your posts.


Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are both idiots. Especially Billly boy.

 

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September 11, 2008

SouthAmerica: This morning I turned the television on to check the financial news then I realized that MSNBC cable was showing all the events that they had broadcasted live on September 11, 2001.

I did watch the program and saw the 2 airplanes hit the World Trade Center Towers in New York City all over again, and then I watched the program until the second tower came down.

Here we are 7 years later and what a fiasco of major proportions has been the response of the United States to that attack on US soil.

Here is what happened since then:

In the last 7 years Osama Bin Ladden became a “Legend” in the Arab world.

And the Bush administration is so incompetent that after 7 years they still can’t find a giant of the size of Bin Ladden – He is the size of a forward playing on the NBA – he is about 6’ 8’’ tall and he is not black.

I would understand if they could not find someone of a regular stature – but I bet that any place where Osama Bin Ladden goes he is the tallest guy around. You would not be able to miss him even if you wanted to.

The entire world knows that Pakistan has been giving Osama Bin Ladden a sanctuary inside their country all these years.

But still the Bush administration is completely “IMPOTENT” and they can’t find a 6’ 8” tall giant after 7 years even with all the resources available from a country such as the United States.

O.K. I understand this is the same group of people that could not figure out that Hurricane Katrina had done a lot of damage inside of the United States and took them more than five days to grasp what was happening to the people who were affected by that massive storm.

History will record the legacy of the Bush administration as: “Complete Incompetence.”

I know a few people who lost loved ones on 9/11 at the World Trade Center and today will be a sad day for them as the mainstream media celebrates the 7th anniversary of that historical day.

Osama Bin Ladden was also able to destroy something that I had great admiration for: “The United States Constitution and The Bill of Rights.”

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S.A.

Odd that you live here - having come from brazil - freely write all that you do... bask in the security of that very constitution - knowing full well you that few countries in the world protect your freedom of thought and speech the way we do and then write such a reprehensible statement.

Did you not read the recent supreme court decision. We gave the prisoners more rights under our constitution than they have in the own countries.

By protecting their rights the court protected yours.

We are still leading the way in freedom. Unfortunately many in the world hate us for our freedoms and inalienable rights.

The funny thing is the more you bash the us - the more you embolden others who oppose our freedoms.

If really care about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights - you need to change the focus of your writing.

Your stuff seems to place you in the leftist and pro socialist hate america team.

Hey you might take exception to my interpretation... but when it comes to writing -- its what the audience perceives not what you intend.

 

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Jem: Your stuff seems to place you in the leftist and pro socialist hate america team.


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September 12, 2008

SouthAmerica: Hi Jem

Nice to hear from you.

Thank you for your reply, made me feel good when I read your posting.

Earlier today I had to defend myself because someone accused me of being a conservative pro John McCain at the Brazzil magazine website. And in another thread someone said that he had been reading many of my articles and he arrived to the opposite conclusion that you arrived regarding my articles.

I must be doing something right since in the same day people thought that I am a leftist and a conservative at the same time.

I might be confusing a hell of my readers about where I stand – left or right.

Depend from where you stand I am something else from your point of view.

That has happened many times before.

From most Americans point of view I am a liberal and a terrible person since I was against the war in Iraq before Bush got his war. Since mid 2002 I was writing that instead of going to war against Iraq the US government should invest the money instead to rebuild the entire infrastructure of the United States. And that makes me very anti-American since I am thinking about the future of the young members of my family and friends who born here in the United States.

Here is another example of me bashing the United States: I wrote a number of times that we have the worst government since 1776 they got their war in Iraq then they decided to put all the spending on a credit card for the future generations to pay the bill. Not only they have been fighting a war on credit, but at the same time they have been giving themselves tax cut after tax cut to make things even worse for future generations. The last 7 ½ years we have had idiots running this country.

Yes I became a liberal and a leftist regarding the issue of national health insurance, since I had the opportunity of watching a number of people get very sick over the years the catastrophic type that would break anyone’s finances in no time.

It does not matter where you look at and the system is broken and a number of people that I talk with on a regular basis feel completely hopeless about the future.

In my opinion based on everything that is going on today (the Perfect Storm) I knew we had just one last hope for this country there was only one person that I thought had the chance to ride the storm and turn this country around and that man was Al Gore.

Since he disappeared from the picture I know that we are in big trouble and I gave up on the future of the United States. It does not matter who wins in November 2008 we are all aboard of the Titanic and that’s it.

What drives most people nuts is that at the end of the day I don’t conform with most people’s ideas about being a liberal, a conservative, a socialist, a libertarian and so on, because I am all over the place, and people can’t find the proper label to classify me.

Today was a good day since I was accused of being a leftist and a conservative at the same time.

By the way, if I were a politician the closest politician that I know here in the US that would fit my style and way of thinking is Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (The Terminator) – I remember when he was interviewed on The Charlie Rose Show last year and he said that he was interested in solutions and he did not care from what kind of ideology the solutions came from as long it made sense and it was the best option to solve the problem. He said that when he was trying to come up with a solution for a problem he never gave much thought if that solution would fit a Democratic or Republican Party ideology. He was interested in intelligent solutions and good results.

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September 12, 2008

SouthAmerica: Reply to Jem

About 6 years ago I wrote an article criticizing the United States, I sent the article for publication in October 2002 and the article was published in November 2002 on Brazzil Magazine about 5 months before the US invasion of Iraq.


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Part 1 of 2

Brazzil Magazine – November 2002
The Big American Lie
By: Ricardo C. Amaral

I was stunned and very surprised to find out of how little it took for the terrorists to put the United States on its knees. Today I have realized how fragile the entire American system is.

I live in New Jersey, but only twenty miles from the World Trade Center site in New York City. About four miles from my house I have a beautiful view of the New York skyline and I could see the two gigantic twin towers of the World Trade Center. Now, when I look in the direction where the twin towers used to stand I feel a strange feeling.

The terrorists destroyed a few buildings and they killed about three thousand people. The attack will have a profound impact on the lives of the people who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001. It also had a negative psychological effect on the US population, when we realized how vulnerable we all are to any kind of terrorist attacks.

We can consider the 3,000 people who died in the attack to be a very small loss in terms of people when we compare that number with the total size of the US population of 270 million people. The monetary loss of an estimated $100 billion dollars also can be considered a small loss when compared to the size of the US economy of $9 trillion dollars.

The damage to the US seems small when put in perspective to the damage done to other countries in the last 20 years. For example, most Americans don't even know where Sudan is located in our globe, and they don't know that they have had a devastating civil war going on since 1983, where more than 2 million have been killed.

In the last 25 years we had a war in Angola that killed over 600 thousand people. In Rwanda over 500 thousand people were killed in that civil war in the 1990's. There are too many countries around the world that have been completely destroyed by civil wars such as Congo, Ivory Coast, Colombia, Somalia, Liberia, Afghanistan, Serbia, and Bosnia, just to mention a few.

If one watches American television here in the New York area on a regular basis, it would seem that there is only one problem around the world—between Israel and the Palestinians. Israel has the latest in war technology, including tanks, F-16 jets, helicopters, atomic bomb, etc. The Palestinians have stones, sling shots, small firearms, and as a last resort they blow themselves up as suicide bombers.

US on its knees?

The terrorists did not only destroy a few buildings and kill over 3,000 people in the US. They continued to score victory after victory over the United States in the last year. They also destroyed the American way of life. Let me explain what I mean.

In my opinion the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights is one of the greatest documents ever written. These documents are a masterpiece. These documents embodied the soul of the American nation. It is what sets the United States apart from the other nations. I wish every American would send a copy of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights to all the politicians in Washington D.C. to remind them of what this country is all about.

After President Bush declared war on terrorism, the US government took some drastic measures to wage such a war. On October 26, 2001 President Bush signed into law the USA Patriot Act of 2001. This law is based on the assumption that Americans are willing to give up their civil liberties in exchange for safety. A legislative analysis of the USA Patriot Act by the American Civil Liberties Union shows the following:

…3) Minimize judicial supervision of federal telephone and Internet surveillance by law enforcement authorities.

4) Expand the ability of the government to conduct secret searches.

5) Give the Attorney General and the Secretary of State the power to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations and deport any non-citizen who belongs to them.

6) Grant the FBI broad access to sensitive business records about individuals without having to show evidence of a crime.

7) Lead to large-scale investigations of American citizens for "Intelligence" purposes.

There are 23 pages in this new act dealing with the subject of money-laundering. This extensive section of the USA Patriot Act dealing with money laundering also gives the government new powers and makes it easy for the government to freeze and confiscate assets of anyone, including American citizens. The USA Patriot Act increased substantially the risk of doing business in the US because of the possibility of confiscation of assets and property.

I wonder what the long-term full impact of the USA Patriot Act will be on the US culture and economy—the capital flight from the US economy, the impact on immigrants and their families who are living in the US today, the impact on new immigration to the US, and the impact on civil liberties of the American people.

The USA Patriot Act represents a major victory of the terrorists over the United States and its free society. We can see another victory for the terrorists in the creation of the Homeland Security Agency, a department which is exempt from following the rules and guidelines set by the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. This is another example of how the American people handed their civil liberties on a silver platter to the terrorists' cause. From what I understand, this new Homeland Security Agency is an organization similar to the Soviet KGB or the German Gestapo.

The US government has been operating for a long time with two fine organizations; the CIA and the FBI. Both organizations operate under the rule of law, meaning the US Constitution and Bill of Rights. This new Homeland Security Agency looks very suspicious to me with its secret intelligence court. Even two American citizens were put on trial and denied the right to meet with a lawyer. As we all know, democracy and justice can die behind close doors.

As reported in The New York Times on September 10, 2002, the Bush Administration unveiled the new TIPS program ( for Terrorism Information and Prevention System ) to recruit Americans to spy on their fellow Americans. These developments make me wonder if the US is in the process of becoming a fascist nation with the blessings of the American people.

…The American overreaction to the terrorist attack of 9/11 has major long-term consequences to the US economy. The New York Times reported on October 13, 2002 that "slowdown on US visas stalls business, science, and personal travel plans. A global slowdown in the issuing of American visas to foreigners is disrupting lives in the United States and abroad. It is interfering with scientific research and business deals, forcing some people to postpone medical treatment and weddings and stranding others away from their homelands, say government officials and advocates for immigrants. Foreigners have been waiting months for security clearances to the US."

…Brazil’s Chance

I have first-hand experience as to what is happening here in the New York/New Jersey job market, since I also have been looking for a job for a while. I see a large number of qualified people every day when I go to the labor department and nobody is finding decent jobs in accordance with our education level. We have all the skills but where are the jobs? If we can't find a job here in the New York Metropolitan area, then forget about finding a job in the rest of the country.

In an article entitled "Out of a job and no longer looking, " The New York Times on September 29, 2002, wrote that the real unemployment rate in the US is completely misleading. It is close to double the numbers reported by official government statistics. Millions of discouraged unemployed people have turned to disability insurance.

Instead of 5.8 percent, the real unemployment number is close to 12.0 percent. People who run out of unemployment benefits are not counted anymore as being unemployed. The government statistics are all smoke and mirrors, and hype of meaningless information. I wonder if the stock analysts that covered Enron, WorldCom, and other worthless companies also worked on the published numbers of these government statistics.

Many of the people that I meet at the labor department on a regular basis have exhausted their unemployment extensions, and they are living now by depleting the nest egg that they have accumulated for the retirement years.

These people are in their 50's; they don't know how much longer they can keep going on in this fashion, and they don't know what they will do when it is time for retirement and the money is all gone. Seems to me that we are in the process of milking the American economic system dry.

…The new Brazilian government should learn here in the US how to hype misleading information and show how things are going well when in reality they are losing money or are falling apart. How to live in the world of illusion.

There is one thing no one can take away from the US government and US corporations: they are the masters of illusion. We can see that on a daily basis not only in Hollywood and on the Disney Amusement Parks, but also in the business world and the government's economic statistics.

I am sure that Brazil also can become a world economic power if Brazil is allowed by the world community to borrow itself to a ridiculous amount of $8 trillion dollars of debt, such as the United States.

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Part 2 of 2

Brazzil Magazine – November 2002
The Big American Lie
By: Ricardo C. Amaral

Today economics and finance are so much out of touch with reality. The numbers are so ridiculous today that they don't make sense to me. The total Brazilian government debt is considered high at $250 billion dollars.

And at the same time the total US government debt is so high, at over $8 trillion dollars, that the US government has to pay as interest on its debt the amount of approximately $200 billion dollars per year. The US pays in interest per year an amount close to the entire Brazilian government debt. Something is wrong here. The total US government debt is 32 times the amount of the total Brazilian government debt.

The US Deflation

Seems to me that the financial markets of the world lost any common sense, and they are driven only by hype and nothing else. In the new deflationary environment that we will be living in the future, God knows for how long, the US economy is in a position for a repeat performance of the great depression of the 1930's.

It is like a recipe for big trouble to be in debt during deflationary times. The housing bubble is ready to be burst, just like the stock market bubble. From that point on, consumer confidence and everything else will go down hill.

Companies lay off people, there is less buying power, they lay off even more people, we have a deflationary spiral and so on. People with no jobs can't pay the bills including credit cards and mortgages.

People have to sell their houses, and the flood of new houses on the market depresses even further the market price for houses. After a while, if you have some money, you can buy what used to be a $100,000 house for about $ 15,000. The last time we had deflation on this large scale in the US was in the 1930's and very few adults remember those days.

Recent experience in Japan and here in the US showed us how quickly asset values (in equities or real estate) can melt away. Remember, asset values decline very fast but the liabilities don't go away. If you just bought a house for $400,000 and have a mortgage for that amount, when housing values decline in the near future and that house is worth only $200,000 or less, you still owe the bank the $400,000. Your debt doesn't go away, as asset value is declining. I am not surprised that they are trying very hard in Washington to change the bankruptcy laws. The creditors know that massive losses are on the horizon related to the deflationary wave that will affect the US economy.

Here is some further information which I am quoting from the article "The Risk That Won't Go Away,” in Fortune magazine dated March 7, 1994: Financial derivatives are tightening their grip on the world economy. And nobody knows how to control them. Like alligators in a swamp, financial derivatives lurk in the global economy.

Deriving their value from the worth of some underlying asset, like currencies or equities, these potentially lucrative contracts are measured in trillions of dollars. But they also lie in convoluted layers in a tightly wound market of global interconnections. And that gives them the capacity to bring on a worldwide financial quake.

“...The lead actors, small in number, are derivative dealers: the big commercial banks, the major securities firms, plus an occasional outlander from insurance.

For these players, derivatives have become an imposing source of profits, earned largely on the fastest-growing, most controversial instruments of all: customized, over-the-counter contracts written between a dealer and another party.

“...Counting everything, including both derivatives traded on the futures and options exchanges and over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives, the notional value of derivative contracts outstanding is today an estimated $16 trillion. That leaves the GDP of the US, at around $6.4 trillion, in the dust.

...Most chillingly, derivatives hold the possibility of systemic risk—the danger that these contracts might directly or indirectly cause some localized or particularized trouble in the financial markets to spread uncontrollably.

“...An imaginable scenario is some deep crisis at a major dealer that would cause it to default on its contracts and be the instigator of a chain reaction bringing down other institutions and sending paroxysms of fear through a financial market that lives on the expectation of prompt payments. Inevitably, that would put deposit-insurance funds, and the taxpayers behind them, at risk."

That Fortune magazine article also mentioned that the derivatives market was growing at a 40 percent rate per year. That means that on the conservative side, the value of contracts in the derivatives market must have grown by over 300 percent since March 1994, and the estimated value for them at the year end 2002 should be over $ 50 trillion dollars.

I don't understand why, after such a sharp stock market decline since January 2000, compounded by the economic losses of 9/11, the collapse of the telecom, and airline industries, and massive corporate fraud on corporate America, how come all this did not result in major losses for the banks, insurance companies, hedge funds, and other financial institutions, creating havoc in this derivatives market.

Massive losses in this derivatives market can sink the entire US economy. The new deflationary wave which will hit the US economy will be bigger than the Japanese wave. This will be the biggest deflationary contraction in world history. It is a record that most Americans hope that they don't achieve.

…I don't understand why the US dollar is not crashing, and losing its value in relation to other currencies.

The combination of all of the above opens the door to Brazil become the next world economic power. In other words, Brazil will pick up the pieces from the decline of the United States.


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September 12, 2008

SouthAmerica: Reply to Jem

Here are some things that I said on my articles in August 2002 about the US and Brazil before the US invasion of Iraq.

Keep in mind when these articles were published the United States was in the flag waving mode and 80 percent of the US population approved George W. Bush’s performance and not many people on the mainstream media were criticizing anything about the Bush administration at that time.


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Brazzil Magazine – August 1, 2002
Brazil and the Bully

…In another example, Wall Street did not destroy the value of the US dollar when George Bush was elected US president by the US Supreme Court. Democracy? What does it mean for a country to be a democracy? Why there is so much hype in the US for democratic ideals? What type of democracy do we have in the US today? I had a very high regard for the US Supreme Court until they played politics in the last election, when they elected the new US president. If there were a similar election to the last US presidential election in any country in South America or in Africa, I am sure that the US media would characterize the event as a coup d'état.

The Constitution of the United States with its Bill of Rights served well the needs of the American people for the last 215 years. This US Constitution was one of the greatest documents in world history. I am sorry to see the American people allowing the destruction of such a great document in the name of fighting terrorism.

Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the US nation, once said: "Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety". Since September 11, 2001 the US government took many measures—including the US Patriot Act and the formation of the Homeland Security with its special powers, which overrule the US Constitution and The Bill of Rights. I hate to see the United States becoming a totalitarian state with the blessing of the American people.

I hope that this new totalitarian mentality of some members of the US government does not translate into action and they decide to interfere with the coming Brazilian election if Mr. Lula is elected president. I would hate to see a replay in Brazil of the fiasco that occurred in Venezuela and the overthrow of a democratically elected president—Mr. Chavez.

Brazil is a democracy and Brazilians should honor the result of the election even if Mr. Lula becomes the next president of Brazil. But it is not a good idea to elect Mr. Lula president at this time, mainly now that Brazil could become an option for investments for the money leaving the United States for a safer haven. Brazil can become a major option and a safe haven for investments from the capitalist world.

With only two months to the presidential elections in Brazil, up to this point a Lula victory seems almost certain. After trying to be elected president so many times, finally, Lula has the chance to achieve his goal.

…Final Suggestion

From this point on, the October election will become a horse race to the wire between only two candidates as the latest polls are showing—Mr. Lula with 33 percent of the votes and Mr. Ciro Gomes with 26 percent of the votes.

If some of the other candidates who have no chance to win this election drop out of the race and put their support behind Mr. Gomes, then he will have a real chance to defeat Mr. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October. I believe that between the candidates currently available for this election, Mr. Ciro Gomes will be the best choice to become the next president of Brazil.

Mr. Gomes has been a mayor, and a governor of the state of Ceará. He served briefly as Brazil's Finance Minister in 1994. He has all the credentials necessary to become the next president of Brazil.

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