Jacques Youssef

The Promises of a President

Posted by Jacques on October 6, 2009 | 2 Comments

Mr. President, it has been 10 months since you took the office of the presidency and my question to you is are we better off now than we were before?

Have you kept any of the promises that you made during your campaign? Lets go through some of them and see:

You promised to withdraw our troops from Iraq. You promised to bring our troops out of Afghanistan. You promised  health care for all the Americans without raising tax dollars. So far your track record is not off to a good start as non of the promises have been fulfilled.

You also promised to fix the economy. In this issue you would get a failing grade. The deficit is on the rise, unemployment is in double digits, foreclosures have become a very serious problem and getting worse. You had promised transparency in government and to keep us informed of how all the tarp money was spent yet billions stand unaccounted for. Billions of our tax payer dollars Mr. President!

This money, our money, should have been used to recharge the economy. Instead however it seems to have been used to make certain corporation richer so that they could afford to reward their CEOs and executive with larger bonuses all at the expense of the American tax payers.

Furthermore, why are we still spending billions of dollars to fight terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan? In order for us to win the war against terrorism, we must first start here in our own country. We must secure our borders and stop illegal immigrants from entering as they wish. We must reform our intelligent services and equip them for this task. When terrorism no longer has the ability to attack and terrorize innocent people, it will cease to exist.

Mr. President, sending another 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan will not make us win this war! We are fighting a phantom. Our troops are trained to fight a classic war against an opposing side’s soldiers. They were never trained to fight this type of war against and almost unseen enemy.  It has been proven over and over, that a well trained professional army is not equipped to fight this type of battle. Please go back and look at the results of Vietnam; look at the result of the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan; what about the mighty Israeli army against Hezbalah in Southern Lebanon? The list goes on and on…

In the history of modern warfare, no professional army has ever been able to defeat militants, who fought in small groups hidden amongst the civilian population. How can an enemy like this successfully be pursued?  We must bring all our troops back home, secure our border, stop illegal immigration, strengthen our intelligent services and save the lives of our troops!

Mr. President, your first priority must be the economy of this country! We must be first on your list! You must start the engine of the economy, not by taxing the average American to death, but by allowing the money to be invested in creating new jobs and wealth; not by spending it on corporate bailouts and foreign wars.

It is your legacy Mr. President. I hope you will make the right choices. The American people must be your top priority. Remember if we succeed you succeed and this is how your presidency will be judged. Please keep your promises to the American people and set yourself apart from the other politicians in Washington as you said you would during the elections.

Thank you for your support.

-Jacques

MSN Money: The 5 most overpaid CEOs

Posted by Jacques on October 3, 2009 | 2 Comments

Another infuriating article I came across at MSN Money. While the rest of the United States is in an economic depression, the CEOs of these companies see themselves privileged enough to continue paying themselves excessive amounts of money while their stocks keep dropping and their stockholders actually lose money.

A CEOs’ job is to make a company perform for shareholders. So in a year like 2008, when the S&P 500 fell 37%, you’d expect CEOs to share your pain.

Not so much, a look at the final numbers from 2008 by the Corporate Library shows:

• While shareholders suffered miserably, annual pay for CEOs barely moved down at all.
• And total realized pay, a broader measure that includes money from cashing out stock options and stock vesting, was off by 6.4%. (That’s because the market crash made it harder for CEOs to earn money cashing out options. But 6.4% is a far cry from the 37% loss suffered by shareholders.)

“Surely with the collapse in the economy seen last year, real pay should have declined by more,” says Paul Hodgson, author of the 2009 CEO Pay Survey, where these numbers come from. “If there were ever an argument that pay is fatally divorced from performance, then this surely is it.”

Read the rest of the article at MSN Money

-Jacques

MSN Money: Ken Lewis’ $125 million goodbye

Posted by Jacques on October 3, 2009 | 3 Comments

I would be very much interested to hearing everyone’s thoughts on the matter.

-Jacques

The American Small Business: A Thing of the Past

Posted by Jacques on September 25, 2009 | 12 Comments

For the past year or so we have been hearing about economic recovery and our bail out programs for large corporations.

Let us go back in time, and discuss why this country became the greatest country on earth.

Our country was built by the hard working people of this land–farmers, pioneers and small business owners. This tradition has become a thing of the past however.  Small farming has been replaced by giant agricultural mega-corps, just as the entrepreneurial spirit of American small business owners have been crushed by the likes of Home Depot and Wallmart.

Our small businesses were once the backbone of this country. Under their watchful eye however, it seems that our government has completely abandoned the American small business owner in favor of the rich CEO’s and corporations that have forced these small businesses out of the market.

Just look around and you will see the same trend everywhere. Wallmart has replaced mom and pop stores all over, and Home Depots all over the country have forced millions of small hardware stores out of businesses. It is the same story everywhere as these business owners find themselves bankrupt over night with no where to turn.

The Average American sees no benefit from this of course. Instead it becomes harder and harder to find work or to make ends meet as more and more industries become swallowed up by the mega-corps. Why is it that our government has let small businesses down? Why is it that they don’t realize that strong small businesses equal employment opportunities for more and more Americans? Don’t they realize that successful small businesses as the backbone of our communities translate to a strong American economy?

Our government is instead crushing small businesses, taxing them to death as our large corporations get tax breaks and bailouts. Unless we change our policy, and go back to what made us so great in the first place, we are for sure destined to fail! If the government simply allowed the trillions upon trillions of dollars we wasted on the bailout to instead be invested into jump starting small businesses, we would have generated millions of new jobs, and unemployment would have gone down drastically. In the long run this would mean less unemployment, more tax revenue, and a decrease in our deficit as we would move back towards a more fiscally responsible budget.

We MUST change course before it is too late! Our factories must stop being shipped to China and other parts of the world! The USA was at one point a global leader in the manufacturing of goods. Now however the phrase “Made in the USA” no longer appears on store shelves. Let us join together and support American businesses by buying American made products, and returning manufacturing and strong small business to America!

As usual your comments are welcome. I look forward to seeing what you have to say.

-Jacques

What Happened to the American Dream?

Posted by Jacques on September 24, 2009 | 11 Comments

Two wars, five trillions dollars and counting, three trillion dollars to bail out large banks, giant insurance companies and all of the corruption on wall street.

Unemployment is in the double digits, and home foreclosures are forcing families to become homeless.

When are the American people going to get a “bail out”? The answer is we won’t of course. The government has no reason to bail us out! We don’t have any lobbyists in congress or in the white house.

There was once an American Dream! It was stolen from us however; there is no longer a dream, it has become a nightmare: factories are closing to be shipped overseas, American jobs are systematically destroyed, to be replaced by cheap labour in third world countries–all of this so that the large corporations could make triple their profit margin, and avoid paying taxes. How could our government allow this to go on?

Who are these people we elect to government? They are merely businessmen that run for office not to serve the American people, but to serve their own greed, the lobbyists, foreign companies, and special interest groups.

Long gone is the American dream. We are becoming slaves in our land. The money we work hard to make is taken from us in order to bail out large corporations and banks. These are the same banks that constantly raise the interest on our credit card bills. They borrow our hard earned money from the federal government at less then 2%, and they have the nerve to then turn around and raise our interest rates to 25% or higher!

Our government was supposed to bail out home owners with troubled mortgages. More lies as usual. They gave the banks 27 billion dollars–27 billion of our tax payer dollars and yet the banks refuse to help those with troubled mortgages. Much of this money they received cannot even be accounted for. It has been stolen just like the rest of the 2 trillion dollars of bail out money given by Bush and Obama.

For too long have the American people been in a deep sleep while our dreams and lives have been stolen away from us.

Are we going to wake up before it is too late? We must! It is time to make our voices heard. I ask all of you to write to your congressmen, senators and president. We must make them understand how we feel. The must understand that they have to act now.

Thank you for your support, and may God bless us all!

-Jacques

The Myth of Universal Health Care

Posted by Jacques on September 23, 2009 | 82 Comments

For the past 20 years or so, every now and then our presidents and law makers have brought up the topic of Universal Health Care. The Obama administration now seems adamant about bringing health care to all Americans. At what cost will this be however? Are we really going to trust the government with a decision like this after the constant trend of miss-managing our tax payer money with excessive spending?

How do they seriously consider getting this done anyway? Our federal budget is eleven trillion dollars and swiftly growing. They have bailed out banks, insurance companies, auto companies, and wall street, all the while situations for the average American family have been deteriorating. Why is it that our government feels that the large corporations deserve help more then us?  I’ll tell you why. It is because we have no lobbyists in the halls of the capital and of the white house.

Our politicians already have our vote to be in power and so now is the time for them to pay back the special interest groups who donated billions of dollars to their campaigns. Our President now wants to hand over our money and future to the health insurance companies. How could we just go alone with it while the politicians and health insurance executives negotiate our lives!

These are the same type of companies and executives that have been bailed out by our hard earned money; now the government wants to give them more? I guess it wasn’t enough. Our law makers must still owe more money, so that more CEO’s and executives can continue getting billions in bonuses, while the average American family see their future evaporate before their eyes.

Our law makers want mandatory health insurance for every American? Great! Who is going to pay for this Mr. President? The average Americans can barely keep their heads above water with the rising cost of living, home foreclosures, unemployment, and eduction. Is this “universal health care” going to be paid with new taxes, so that the average American could continue making your special interest groups fatter and fatter? Is this how our government wants to reward the hard working citizens of this country?

No Mr. President, the American people will not stand for this! Enough lobbyists and special interest groups taking our money for their extravagant and corrupt lives; enough big government intervention trying to tell us how to spend our money and live our lives! You need to keep your campaign promises, and end this trend of Washington back door deals and corruption.

I am no expert on health care planing, but I believe that in a country with 300 million, we could still find few honest experts to lead the way in making health care affordable and fair for every American family. Health insurance companies and corrupt Washington politicians should not be dictating this matter. Perhaps the proper way of getting universal health insurance is to establish a non profit organization that would be supervised and monitored by a group of experts without any ties to a political party or special interest group. The experts chosen would be responsible for researching and determining which ways if any would allow all Americans to be able to afford health insurance without infringing on peoples’ choices and freedom.

Private insurance companies should also not be allowed to wield the power they do. They are currently part of the problem and we cannot allow them to have any lobbyists in our government.

It is our life, future and final decision. Let us make our voices loud and clear: Enough corruption, and miss-handling of our money and future. We are rising to reclaim our freedom and future.

I look forward to discussions on this matter and seeing what people think. Thank you for your support!

-Jacques

Bush And Cheney’s War

Posted by Jacques on September 22, 2009 | 7 Comments

Three trillion dollars and counting, close to 5,000 soldiers dead, over 50,000 injured soldiers for life, and it is still going on.

Could some one please tell me why???

Weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical weapons, Al Qaeda training camps, Bin Laden!!!

Lies, lies, lies……………

We invaded a sovereign country, 5,000 miles away from our border! Yes Saddam Hussein was a dictator, but which country in the Middle East is not ruled by tyrants or dictators?

Are we safer now?

Of course not. Iraq never attacked us. They never were a threat to our interests around the world. Al Qaeda was not at all present in Iraq. By invading the country however we have invited terrorists to establish a heavy presence in Iraq. By alienating the ruling Sunni party that had controlled Iraq for over 30 years, Bin Laden was given the opportunity to take advantage of their desperation and provide them with weapons and training to attack our troops.

We did not at all strike a blow to Bin Laden, instead we gave him new fertile grounds to spread his war of terror on the whole region.

Is Iraq better off with Out Saddam? That probably depends on who you ask.

The Sunni and Christian sects definitely do not feel safer now. Saddam Hussein’s regime protected these groups to a certain extend. When Saddam Hussein was in power Iran and Syria were kept at bay, and the Christian minority lived and worshiped their religion with complete freedom. Now the Christians have for the most part been forced out and Iraq is still at a state of chaos and civil war.

The real winner of this war is Iran. By invading Iraq and putting the Shi’ites in power we actually gave Iran a major victory in the region. Iraq’s new ruling sect follow the guidance of the Shi’ite supreme rulers of Iran.

So, what will happen after our troops finally leaves Iraq? Civil war will continue to ravish the country worse then we have seen at this point.  Iraq will eventually be split into three separate states:

• The south with it’s oil riches will be controlled by the Shi’ite, under the guidance of Iran. This in turn would most likely drive up oil prices dramatically since Iran is no friend of ours as we know.
• The center will be controlled by the Sunni and since there is no oil, wealth or industries, poverty will end up fueling more terrorism and extremists.
• Up north, Turkey will feel threatened by Iraq’s Kurdish population. Fearing they will entice Turkish Kurds to break off and form an independent state, Turkey will have no choice but to invade and concur that part of Iraq.

Thank you, Mr.Bush and Mr. Chaney. You have lied and deceived the American people, by promising to protect us and make the world safer place. You have failed very badly, you have created new fertile grounds for terrorism to bread and launch attacks all over the world.

I know this seems to be an old topic however I feel it is still very important. We are still at war in Iraq. American soldiers are still dying but since the elections have ended it seems no one even bothers to give mention of any of this.

Thank you for your support. I look forward to reading your comments.

-Jacques

Elected By The People, For The People?

Posted by Jacques on September 21, 2009 | 4 Comments

Our politicians have been elected by the people, for the people. They have been elected to serve us, and to do what is right for the country. They make an oath on the bible to uphold the law of the land, and to be fair and just. Is this the reality of the situation however?

No! Instead of serving the American people, they serve the lobbyists and special interest groups. They serve the oil companies, the auto-mobile manufacturers, the pharmaceutical companies etc., all the while making their pockets fatter and fatter.

Our senators and congressmen don’t work for me and you as they should. How can they represent the American people, if 90% of the money raised for their election campaigns come from these special interest groups? As long as these special interest groups and lobbyists are allowed to roam the halls of our senate and the oval office nothing will change. They are really the ones in control of our country; we are being fooled and deceived into thinking we have a voice.

This corrupt practice must end! These thieves and criminal must not be allowed to desecrate the sacred institutions of our government.

The white house and the capital are the property of the American people. They belong to us and to us alone. We must win back the right to really decide who enters them; our elected officials must once again start working for us, not for corrupt lobbyists and corporations.

Nothing will change in our country unless we speak out and make our voices heard: “no more lobbyists in Washington!”

Nothing will change till we force our president and congressmen to pass a law prohibiting any campaign donations from special interest groups and corporations.

Let us all start by reaching out to our President, Senators, and congressmen. Let us write to them and let them know how we feel on this matter. They must understand that they work for us, and if our interests are not met they will not keep their offices next election.

Dear Mr. President, one of your campaigning points during the election was to stop the special interest groups and lobbyists from controlling Washington. It is time for you to step up to the plate and deliver on your promise otherwise your word will be empty and hallow like the rest of our politicians.

Let us all unite and make our voices heard! We must change the status quo and get our country back before it is too late.

It is time to make our politicians understand that we don’t only count during the elections. We put them in power to deliver on their promises. After all they are elected by us the people, and they must serve us to the best of their ability.

Let us unite and march to reclaim our country and freedom! Our future can not be negotiated behind closed doors and in secret deals!

Thank you for reading. I look forward to seeing your responses.

-Jacques

The State Of The Union Today Part 3

Posted by Jacques on September 20, 2009 | 3 Comments

Our national debt is over 11 trillion dollars and rising fast, Medicare is close to bankruptcy, social security will run out of money soon, our economy is close to a state of depression, our industry and manufacturing have been shipped oversees, home foreclosures are destroying families, and our schools, inter-state highways, bridges and tunnels are collapsing.

With all this happening in our country, congress has approved 21 billion dollars in aid to foreign countries. We have spent 3 trillion dollars on the war in Iraq. This was not a war to protect the American citizens. Instead we were lied to and continue on being lied to. Iraq did not attack us and we had no business invading a sovereign country.

This was George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s war. George Bush wanted to prove to his father, that he could be a better commander in chief than George Bush Senior; he wanted to prove to his father that he could do a better job in Iraq then his father did. As the war progressed Dick Chaney made billions of dollars in profits from weapons manufacturers and oil companies.

After seven years, the war is still going on, and we are throwing away close to half trillion dollars a year while our own citizens are in economic crisis. After we “discovered” that weapons of mass destruction were no where to be found in Iraq, the main objective of the war became the spreading of “democracy” throughout the Middle East…what a joke!

To say our government has the slightest concern of spreading democracy in the Middle East is an insult to the American people. Some of our major “allies” in the region are the worst kinds of dictators, thugs, and tyrants imaginable.  Just to name a few: the president of Egypt who has been “elected” for life, the king of Jordan, and the royal family of Saudi Arabia, whom are actually the biggest supporters of radical Islamic Extremists in the world. Saudi Arabia consistently supports radical extremists with money and supplies. Just keep in mind that 15 of the 19 hijacker on September 11 2001, were Saudi nationals.

Why are we so concerned about democracies in countries that are 5,000 miles anyway, when we have neighboring countries to our south that are run by criminals, drug lords and dictators. If we were so concerned about spreading democracy we would be focusing our efforts on Latin American before the Middle East. Criminals and drug lords off our southern borders are crossing into our heart land, smuggling in drugs that destroy our children and the future of our nation, all the while our concern is on countries 5,000 miles away instead of watching over our own homeland.

How could we allow congress to send over 21 billion dollars in aid to foreign countries that don’t even sympathize with us? Poverty and hunger still exist in the United States and is only getting worse, meanwhile our politicians are handing over our hard earned dollars to foreign thieve, thugs, and dictators.

When the government does decide to help out the situation back home, it is to the benefit of large corporations and banks. We have spent over 2 trillion dollars this year alone not to help the average American family, but instead to bail out large corporations which have been cutting American jobs and sending them overseas. To make matters worse, millions of these dollars have gone to awarding executives and CEO’s while the average American citizen is finding it harder and harder to make ends meet, and unemployment keeps rising!

It seems that our government has mortgaged our future and our children’ future by taking our tax money and giving it to the privileged class. This is the same class that is mostly responsible for the collapse of our countries’ economy.

Our voices must be heard! We must rise up and tell our representatives that they must act on our behalf or they will be sent home on the next election!

It is time for us to reclaim our land and our rights to how our money should be spent! After all the tax money is our hard earned money. It should be spent for the benefit of the American people, not for special interest groups, large corporations and foreign countries.

Thank you for listening. I look forward to reading your comments and ideas.

-Jacques

The State Of The Union Today Part 2

Posted by Jacques on September 19, 2009 | 1 Comment

Our unemployment is 10% and rising fast. Many fail to recognize however, the 5% of people who have been unemployed for more than one year and are no longer able to collect unemployment. If we were to add these two numbers together, the unemployment rate would really come out to 15%, the highest since the Great Depression.

With such high unemployment rates, our government has allowed twelve million illegal immigrants to enter the United States and take jobs away from American citizens. To put this further into perspective, let’s take a moment to calculate the amount of money tax payers spend yearly to support these illegal immigrants.

I will try to be very conservative with my number so that everyone understands how our government is robbing our money to give it to illegal immigrants who have broken the law.

Also I will discuss who is really benefiting from this cheap labor. It is most definitely not you or I, the average American citizen. Instead the vast majority of illegal immigrants work in the agricultural industry.  Even so, our fruits and vegetables continue rising in price and we find ourselves paying more and more to put food on our tables. Obviously it is the rich owners of the huge agricultural companies who benefit from this by being able to pay illegal immigrants much less then they would have to pay American workers who should be getting these jobs.

The same twelve million immigrants who are here illegally taking American jobs send almost 80% of their money back home. This money gets transfered in small amounts through Western Union and similar outlets making it untraceable.  Not only are these immigrants working here illegally, but they are reaping the benefits of our great nation while not paying any taxes and sending most of the money they earn out of the country.

Let me go back and give you some figures that illustrates why our health care system, schools , hospitals,  and tax payers are shedding their money to support these illegal immigrants.

Assuming our government is not lying and there are only 12,000,000 illegal immigrants here:

If the average family is four people then we have approximately two million four hundred thousand illegal families in the USA. As mentioned before I am being very conservative with my numbers. Considering the average family will cost about $5,000.00 in health care a year, and the average child will cost about $6,000.00 a year to educate then the numbers work out in this way:

• Health care cost          2,400,000 families x $5,000.00= $12,000,000,000.00

• School cost                   4,800,000 children x $6,000 = $32,400,000,000.00

In addition, the tax revenue  from the illegal immigrants’ income of approximately $120,000,000,000 should be about $25,000,000,000. These taxes are of course never collected since these immigrants are working here illegally.

If we add all these number up we come up with $70,000,000,000 that is being stolen from our pockets yearly.

Could we please ask our senators and congressmen to stop ignoring this major problem. They have been elected by us to serve the American people, not special interest groups and foreign illegal immigrants.

It is our land and our children’s future at stake. Let us reclaim our land once and for all and ensure that our politicians are serving the American people as they should be and that the immigrants in this country come here legally and join in the burden all Americans have to endure.

-Jacques