Fair play to you Fernando. :o) To be honest, MANY of your points are valid and wholeheartedly agreed upon by many Americans (myself included--while I disagree with much of what you state, I agree with much also). However, it gets difficult to filter out the facts from what appears to be continuous bashing. When that happens, people stop listening and the 'truth' gets lost in the 'negativity' and its easy to become defensive instead of honestly looking for truth in the words. However, you have demonstrated yourself to be a compassionate and highly intelligent person in many posts.

Like you, I would like to see most (if not all) of the U.S. $ to foreign governments applied here within our borders. We have homeless people, poverty-stricken people, people without medical insurance, too much dependence on foreign fuel sources, and I could go on and on and on. We tax cigarettes to the highest possible percentage because we cannot get away with taxing the populace to pay for government costs. Our government is already too large and we cannot fix our problems. We just keep putting more money into it and not changing the structure or the outcome. Yet we fund rebellions on foreign soil when our government considers it to be in our country's 'best interest' without any input from its citizens. Most if not all of those attempts turned out to be dissastrous and created more problems for the host country than they had before. In addition, my mother is turning 65 this year and after planning for years to retire, ran into the 'reality of her investments' after 9-11 just recently and is now seriously wondering if Canada's medical system is not better than ours (I wonder too). To hear my mother (a die-hard liberal and yet a capitalist) consider socialist medicine is frightening, but a reality. With all of our economic success we have sadly failed in many ways and attempts to rectify those failures are met with stiff resistance by oposing political parties. While the more political parties a country has, the more it represents its citizens, bi-partisanship in this country at times becomes a detriment to evolution to because each party tends to fight the other party's petitions simply because it was submitted or backed by the opposing political party. We can learn alot from those countries that learned from us in the past.


>>Fernando, you spend an inordinate amount of time bashing the U.S.
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>Sorry, Tracy, you're right. It is not my intention to bash the U.S., really. I got so involved with this whole thing that I'm spending time searching and discussing with brazilian fellows about what's going on. Brazilian people is very attained to what's happening, not just the war, but the way U.S. is conducting things, and we are getting scared.
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>>If you feel so passionate, why don't you spend an equal or greater amount of time convincing your government to stop accepting all of this aid from the U.S.?
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>I do! I by any means agree with that, since the times of the dictatorship of brasilian military (supported by the U.S.). Me and a reasonable amout of brazilians (think lots of people in Latin America thinks the same way I do).
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>>I'm sure Brazil could fight narcotics on their own without the U.S. assistance. They could return the other aid also if the U.S. displeases the Brazilians so much. I thought Brazil no longer wanted to receive aid from the U.S., has it since stopped?
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>The U.S. gives assistance to Brazil to fight narcotics because its a problem THEY feel in their flesh. If U.S. didn't got affected by this, would they help?
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>Think the meaning of the word "aid" given by "rich" countries to Latin American countries, was somehow discussed in other threads.
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>IMHO the U.S. could spend they dollars with internal affairs and let other countries live by their own. But that is not good commercial politics, isn't?
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>>You might try marching in the peace protests instead. It may bring you more success.
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>I'll tell you: never in my life thought about that, but the way things are going, perhaps I will engage myself in protests when ALCA gets discussed in Brazil, or the Amazon or water.
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>Fernando