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
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.
Posted Oct 02 2009, 09:07 AM by Michael Brush
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:
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While shareholders suffered miserably, annual pay for CEOs barely moved down at all.
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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
Once again I am interested in all of your thoughts and ideas on this.
-Jacques
Posted by Jacques on October 3, 2009 | 3 Comments
I found this interesting article at MSN Money. Apparently when the CEO of Bank of America leaves, he will be awarded a $125 million severance package. With this state of the economy and the bailouts recently received by the banks, this is an insult to the American People.
Posted Oct 02 2009, 05:38 AM by Douglas McIntyre
When Ken Lewis finally leaves Bank of America (BAC) he will get a $125 million goodbye from the financial firm, unless the federal government’s pay czar decides to challenge the package.
Most of the Lewis compensation was set long before the big bank got into trouble and had to take $45 billion in TARP funds, so his employment contract may be sacrosanct. If so, he will get one of the largest severance packages in American corporate history.
According to Reuters, “Lewis’ severance package includes $53.2 million in retirement benefits, mostly from a program frozen years ago, and $72.8 million in accumulated stock and other compensation.”
Read the full article at MSN Money
Apparently this is why Bank of America was given $58 billion in tax payer money! As the average American is finding it harder and harder to make ends meet, the federal government is taking our hard earned money to pay out these CEOs.
I would be very much interested to hearing everyone’s thoughts on the matter.
-Jacques
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
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
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
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