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