The USA is still trying to figure out how to shift in light of the energy crisis once again. This happened once before in the 1970's when Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the rest of the middle eastern countries figured out that we have been screwing them for all these years promoting democracy in one place and supporting tyrannical regimes in another. and yes, the Arab spring could turn against us if we dont apologize for our forefathers. They will do the same. A few people will strick back, but it wont be anything like 9/11. It will be more like the Underpants Bomber. You know the one that tried to blow his shorts off with a small amount of explosives. He was probably given that by the CIA to trick our government into continuing with the sharade.
The joke is that not even America or France or Britain or Italy are real democracies and for good reason. It didn't really work for the white people.
But what about India? Now there appears to be a strong candidate for democracy. Look at what they've done, how they've grown... blahh
The rest of the joke is that we the people know it takes time to fall apart and so we (the diplomats) suggest it to our buddies from ivy league and a few of their (the foreigners) graduates come from the same schools, here in the USA. That's a mean joke. They know it doesn't work and yet they continue to pretend.
No, what's really worse, is that each time we the people figure it out, they figure out how to make us forget! With war. Its called revolution. They know that once we figure out that American deomocracy and American capitalism are pyramid schemes designed to keep the cycle going for as long as possible.
The sad part is that some people believe all the fear mongering and they have poorer health or worse they die in the wars directly, as soldiers or civilians.
But hey you got to take part in the game so you are guilty too! Not like them, the investment bankers, stock brokers, mortgage brokers, real estate agents, bureaucrats from the SEC, FDIC, IRS, MMS, Fed, Treasury, Congress, the Whitehouse, the NBA, or whatever. , spooks (CIA), and oil men that engaged in predatory capitalism. They played for keeps. Casualties of business wars were building up everywhere. You believed that BS? But this time was not the same. This time it's the arabs or the muslims, the mexicans, or whatever. Strange they never complain about the French, the British, Russians, Ukranians, the Italians, the Swiss, the Brazilians, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, or the Japanese for good sake. They all have gangs, mafias, drug smuggling, right here within our borders.
No you simply went along with what everybody else said because you are a product of your own environment. Or did you? Did you KNOW at the bottom of your heart that they were killing people all over the world?
Shit you stood by didnt you? You KNEW something and you did nothing? Shame on you, says the Catholic church. You should confess and then BAMM. The Catholic Mafia has you.
Look don't feel bad. Everytime we go through this game, this cycle, this empire, we get better. Hmm. That made me think. Are we better off than we were 2000 years ago? That answer to that question depends on what you and your people say and DO. Me, I think have a few options.
Foreigners Follow Money to Booming Brazil, Land of $35 Martini
Ipanema Beach in Rio de Janeiro. Prices for prime office space in Rio became the highest for any city in the Americas this year.
RIO DE JANEIRO — Pondering the financial storms lashing Europe and the United States, Seth Zalkin, a casually dressed American banker, sipped a demitasse and seemed content with his decision to move here in March with his wife and son.
“If the rest of the world is cratering, this is a good place to be,” said Mr. Zalkin, 39.
For those with even the dimmest memories of Brazil’s own debt crisis in the 1980s, the global order has been turned on its head. The American economy may be crawling along, but Brazil’s grew at its fastest clip in more than two decades last year and unemployment is at historic lows, part of the nation’s transformation from inflationary basket case into one of Washington’s top creditors.
With compensation rivaling that on Wall Street, so many foreign bankers, hedge fund managers, oil executives, lawyers and engineers have moved here that prices for prime office space surpassed those in New York this year, making Rio the costliest city in the Americas to lease it, according to the real estate company Cushman & Wakefield.
A gold rush mind-set is in full swing, with foreign work permits surging 144 percent in the past five years and Americans leading the pack of educated professionals putting down stakes.
Businessmen have long been drawn to Brazil, along with get-rich-quick confidence men, dreamers of Amazonian grandeur and even outlaws like Ronald Biggs, the Briton who absconded here after his 1963 Great Train Robbery.
But now schools catering to American and other English-speaking families have long waiting lists, apartments can cost $10,000 a month in coveted parts of Rio and many of the newcomers hold Ivy League degrees or job experience at the pillars of the global economy.
Once here, they find a country facing a very different challenge than do the United States and Europe: fears that the economy is getting too hot.
One particular shock for newcomers is the strength of Brazil’s currency, the real. That may help Brazilians snapping up apartments in places like South Beach in Miami, where properties cost about a third of their equivalents in Rio’s exclusive districts. But it also hurts the country’s manufacturers and exporters.
So in a bid to prevent it from going even higher, Brazil is now one of the biggest buyers of United States Treasury securities, becoming a larger stakeholder in the ailing American economy. That is a sharp break from the past, when Washington helped cobble together bailout packages for Brazil’s financial crises.
“Brazil is doing great, but honestly, every other week I ask myself, ‘When is this going to end?’ ” said Mark Bures, 42, an American executive who moved here in 1999, just in time to see an abrupt devaluation of the currency and other sharp swings in Brazil’s fortunes.
A few veteran American expatriates even remember Brazil’s last economic “miracle” in the early 1970s, when The Wall Street Journal quoted an ebullient banker at the start of a front-page article who predicted, “In 10 years, Brazil will be one of the five great powers of the world.” Instead, the country ended up with daunting levels of foreign debt.
The recent commodities boom and growth in domestic consumption, the result of an expanding middle class, helped turn Brazil into a rising power that bounced back handily from the 2008 global financial crisis. The economy grew 7.5 percent last year and is expected to register about 4 percent growth this year — slower, but still enviable in the United States.
Yet Brazil offers many challenges to give newcomers pause. Labor legislation favors hiring Brazilians over foreigners, and the lengthy process of obtaining a work visa can surprise those unaccustomed to Brazil’s gargantuan bureaucracy.
Some economists consider the Brazilian real the world’s most overvalued currency against the dollar and inflation has climbed (as evidenced by $6.16 Big Macs and $35 martinis). Interest rates remain stubbornly high and analysts debate whether a credit bubble is forming as consumers continue a multiyear spree on everything from homes to cars.
Brazil is hardly immune to the turbulence in global markets, and its currency has weakened a bit this month. Rio’s real estate has been bustling as soccer’s World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016 approach, but its infrastructure is inadequate. Violent crime, though falling in some areas, plagues big parts of the country and Rio, which suffered through a traumatic bus hijacking this month.
Still, foreigners are arriving, and work authorizations for them jumped more than 30 percent in 2010 alone, according to the Labor Ministry.
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