Winston Crown Publishing House: brazil

Showing posts with label brazil. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Meet My Brazilian Friends: Roads I Have Traveled ... Transition Journal

Founder, Project C.U.R.E.
Author, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist

Lorena:

The next time I flew into Sao Paulo, Sostenez and his wife Miriam met me at the airport. They brought along with them the medical student, Lorena. She was a real winner, and for the rest of the many times I visited Brazil, Lorena translated for me. Little did I know at that time the importance and providence of that meeting at the airport in Sao Paulo.

Lorena was from a medical family. They had moved to Brazil from Chile during the repressive regime of Pinochet. Lorena’s mother, Natalia, was one of the best known gynecologists in the whole Sao Paulo area. Her sister, Natasha, was a dentist, and Paulo, Lorena’s fiancé, was a doctor already well known for his outstanding work in infectious diseases. I was totally surrounded by medical people. They would invite me to go to their church with them and then would insist that I come to their home for Sunday dinner. Following dinner, I would be expected to accompany them on their hospital rounds. I got a real introduction to Brazil’s health-care system.

At times they would insist that I join them as they visited the poorest of the poor favelas, or shantytowns, to perform free medical service to the desperate dwellers. It was so dangerous in some of the favelas that the police or military would not even enter the areas. Then, the family would tell me how every October they would fly in small airplanes into the remote villages of the Amazon region and perform free clinics for the native people, who would have an opportunity to see a doctor only once a year. I began to truly admire the members of the family and all the acts of goodness in which they were involved.

I was fully engaged with my economic consulting work with President Jose Sarney and his chief economist, Antonio Bacelar on our plan that came to be known as the “Libra Proposal.” I was also becoming extremely sensitized to the urgent need in the Lesser Developed Countries for someone to go and help them with their health-care delivery systems. Even just the simplest of medical help was not available to millions of poor, but good, people.

NOTE: Lorena and her family became a strategic keystone to what would eventually become Project C.U.R.E. (Commission on Urgent Relief and Equipment), the largest handler of donated medical supplies and pieces of medical equipment in the world. Over the years Anna Marie and I totally adopted Lorena and her family. We told our sons, Douglas and Jay,that Lorena and Paulo were as close as they would ever get to having a brother and sister. Eventually, I began working directly with the two medical universities in Sao Paulo state where Lorena and Paulo were affiliated. We visited them many times and had them come to our home in Colorado. In recent years Paulo and Lorena even came to the mountains of Colorado with their teen-age sons to spend Christmas with us in our home on the creek. We also brought them from Brazil to Colorado to meet all our friends when we celebrated the launching of my book The Happiest Man in the World.

Over the ensuing years Lorena and Paulo have become very influential medical doctors in Brazil. Lorena and her mother, Dr. Natalia, now have their own successful medical clinic. Paulo is highly decorated as a researcher and professor at the university in the areas of dermatology and infectious diseases. Little did we know what God had in store for us when Sostenez and Miriam introduced me to Lorena at the Sao Paulo airport that day in 1987.

Permissions granted by Winston-Crown Publishing House

www.jameswjackson.com

Dr. James W. Jackson often describes himself as "The Happiest Man in the World." A successful businessman, award-winning author and humanitarian, Jackson is also a renowned Cultural Economist and international consultant, helping organizations and governments to apply sound economic principals to the transformation of culture so that everyone is "better off."

As the founder of Project C.U.R.E., Dr. Jackson traveled to more than one hundred fifty countries assessing healthcare facilities, meeting with government leaders and "delivering health and hope" in the form of medical supplies and equipment to the world's most needy people. Literally thousands of people are alive today as a direct result of the tireless efforts of Project C.U.R.E.'s staff, volunteers and Dr. Jackson.

To contact Dr. Jackson, or to book him for an interview or speaking engagement: press@winstoncrown.com

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Meet My Brazilizn Friends: Roads I Have Traveled. . . Transition Journal

by Dr. James W. Jackson

Founder, Project C.U.R.E.
Author, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist

Sostenez Pimentel:

By 1986, I was being recognized as a knowledgeable international economic player, and people began to contact me for my help and opinions. I had thoroughly enjoyed what I had been doing in helping people in an area that was comfortable to me. But in my quiet times I would keep asking why I was being taken on a trip to strange parts of the world where I was meeting and working with people of influence and high position. It wasn’t going to be very long, however, until I discovered the next installment of revelation on the quest. Then I would know just why I had been taken on such an adventure.

When I arrived in Brazil, I was introduced to some very powerful people who had considerable influence in the capital, Brasilia. My credentials included letters of recommendation from US Senator John McCain and Senator Bill Armstrong. The Brazilian government had requested that I come to Brasilia, and our US Ambassador Shlackman, US Consul on Economic Affairs, Michael J. Delaney, and US Economic Minister to Brazil, John Bowen, would formally introduce me to Brazil’s Minister of Finance and Minister of Foreign Affairs.

I endeavored to pick up some key phrases in the Portuguese language, but there was no way that I was going to become proficient in the language in time to adequately participate in high level talks. I was fortunate enough to make some friends in the British Embassy in Brasilia, and they were more than happy to help me. If they were not available to help me, there was a fine missionary gentleman in the Brasilia area who had volunteered to help me with the translating.

Soon I met a young, ambitious man named Sostenez Pimentel. He also was an economist and had been employed by the Brazilian government. He was married to a lovely young schoolteacher, named Miriam. They wanted to get ahead financially, so they decided that Sostenez would quit his government job and become an entrepreneur. They both asked me if I would help them get involved in the import/export business. I agreed that I would help them, and in exchange they could help me with translating when I was away from Brasilia.

The only problem with the deal was that Sostenez’s English was about as good as my Portuguese. We really had to work hard at communicating with each other. Portuguese was just enough different from Spanish to get things all mixed up, even though both languages were derived from the Latin root.

One day we had time as we were traveling across Brazil by car for me to approach the language subject with tact. “Sostenez,” I said, “when I am in business or government meetings in Brasilia I can do very well. But when I need to travel to Rio or Sao Paulo or Belo Horizonte or Goiania and I have meetings, I really need to have someone to help me who can speak better English. I mean absolutely no offence to you, but do you know of someone who might be able to help me?”

To my delight he was not offended, and quickly went on to try to make me understand that there was a very sharp medical student who knew English very well. In fact, she was coming over to Sostenez and Miriam’s house every Saturday morning and teaching them English. Sostenez agreed to ask Lorena if she would help out a crazy American in distress. I assured Sostenez that I would continue helping him get into business, even though he would no longer need to translate for me.

One of the saddest incidents that I personally encountered during all my work in Brazil was about a year later on a Sunday night when a group of young, drunk Brazilian thugs forced Sostenez off the road and tried to rob him. He resisted. They killed him and left his body crumpled by the rear wheel of his small car. I lost a dear friend and it was another wake-up call for me as to the dangers of working in developing countries where the rule of law is not well established.

Permissions granted by Winston-Crown Publishing House

www.jameswjackson.com

To contact Dr. Jackson, or to book him for an interview or speaking engagement: press@winstoncrown.com

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

JOURNAL HIGHLIGHTS: Roads I Have Traveled. . . Transition Journal, Excerpt # 4

by Dr. James W. Jackson

Founder, Project C.U.R.E.
Author, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist

(continued): Brasilia, Brazil, 1986: While I was still working with Zimbabwe, the embassy in Quito, Ecuador, heard what I was doing, and I went there at their request. I had a great opportunity to research and study the concept of the debt swaps or debt-for-equity exchanges. By this time I was working under my newly formed company, International Market Exchange, (IMX).

From Quito I went to Lima, Peru, then to Caracas, Venezuela, and finally I traveled to Brazil, where I worked for nearly three years with President Jose Sarney and his chief economist, Antonio Bacelar. Our plan became known as the “Libra Proposal,” and we were joined in the effort by Mr. Dilson Funaro, the outgoing Minister of Finance, the incoming Minister of Finance, Mr. Bressler, and William Canvallo, the Secretary of the Federal District of Brazil.

My involvement with the financial leadership in Brazil ultimately included my leading a delegation to Washington D.C. of Brazilian leaders to meet with Honorable James Baker, Secretary of the US Treasury. That was before James Baker had assumed the position of Secretary of State for the US.

The Libra Proposal was a plan that made it possible for the repayment of Brazil’s debt back to the American banks. Brazil’s economy was at that time experiencing runaway inflation of three thousand percent. By the time the money would get into their system there was nothing left to pay the debts.

While working on the necessary research for writing the economic sections of the book, What’cha Gonna Do with What’cha Got ?, I had run into an interesting concept. Many of the US banks had been coerced by our government, the World Bank, and United Nations to make sizable loans to foreign countries as economic relief measures. Instead of our government simply handing over large sums of additional monies to the United Nations, who in turn would hand out the monies to foreign countries, especially in Central and South America, they pressured our banks to make the loans directly to those needy countries. That sounded like a great strategy to bypass the corruption of the United Nations and the World Bank. But there was a big problem.

The banks insisted that the sovereign countries sign legitimate promissory notes guaranteeing the repayment of the loans. Perhaps the United Nations or the World Bank could allow the foreign countries to default on the loans and just write them off as bad debts. But individual banks in America were under the tight scrutiny of the US Federal Bank Examiners and Federal agencies like FDIC.

It was true that under the Nixon administration in the 1970s, when the US economy was cut loose from the gold standard, banks were allowed to use foreign sovereign debt instruments as credits toward their necessary Fractional Reserves. But it was high risk to make foreign sovereign loans, and utter disaster for the US banks if those foreign loans should ever go into default.

By the mid-1980s, many of the foreign countries were in default to the US banks. South American countries simply shrugged their shoulders and said, “Sorry, we can’t make good on our loan commitments.” That threw the US banks into a crisis. Once the loans were declared non-performing loans, the US banks had to write them off, and if they had used them as part of their fractional reserves, their assets and lending powers began to implode.

But some creative financial folks in the US came up with a clever way to take care of the problem. That program, known as Debt Swap caught my attention. It simply utilized the common elements of the old barter system to save the banking industry in America.

Here is a common way debt swaps worked: US bank examiners would require that a certain bank would have to declare a sovereign foreign loan as a non-performing loan. The bank could no longer use the sovereign foreign debt instrument as part of its fractional reserves, and its lending ratio would shrink by approximately twenty times the amount of the non-performing loan. That would spell really big trouble.

At that point a group of individuals or an entity would agree to purchase the bad loan at an attractive discount from the bank, and their new note would heal the bank. Thereupon, the new holders of the foreign note would take the note to the country owing the debt and agree to swap the note for assets within the country to settle the debt.

Those assets could include government controlled exports, natural resources like oil concessions, mineral rights, undeveloped real estate, government-owned buildings, fishing rights, rights to ports and harbors, or any other service or commodity of equally agreed-upon value. Simply, the indebted country could use its own assets to settle the debt where it could not come up with cash to make the payments.

Many times, as was the case in Brazil, large corporations within the country would desire to purchase portions of their own government’s debt so that they could use the credits to purchase commodities from the government within the country, or apply it to their tax obligations. The sovereign countries would end up better off, the banks would be better off, and the arbitrators would be handsomely enriched for their efforts.

Next Week: Implications of International Debt Swaps or Debt for Equity Swaps for the trillions of dollars of U.S. international debt situation.

Permissions granted by Winston-Crown Publishing House

www.jameswjackson.com

To contact Dr. Jackson, or to book him for an interview or speaking engagement: press@winstoncrown.com

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

GRATEFULNESS

by Dr. James W. Jackson

Founder, Project C.U.R.E.
Author, The Happiest Man in the World: Life Lessons from a Cultural Economist

There is a certain excitement and energy that gusts down through our Colorado mountain canyon as October morphs into November. The golden aspen leaves of autumn skip along the surface of our high altitude stream in lively funnels of brilliance. The late afternoon air takes on a crisp and moist characteristic as the nighttime dustings of snow begin to cover the highest mountain peaks. The gorgeous summer flowers are but pleasant memories now, the picnic umbrellas have been put away, and the bright yellow snowplow blade has been methodically re-attached to the ATV. It’s fall in Colorado!

I love the fall, and I love November, because I am still the kid who loves Thanksgiving. I have adopted, and throughout my life I have embraced, the idea that it is not happiness that makes us grateful, but gratefulness that makes us happy. Gratefulness is the thankful recognition and acknowledgement of having received something good from another. When we receive something and express our appreciation for it something happens in our very soul.

It has been my observation that people who are more grateful are happier, less depressed, less stressed, and more satisfied with their lives. It seems that grateful people also have higher levels of harmony with their environments, and more control over their own personal growth. Additionally, it seems they have clearer purposes in life, and enjoy a broader spirit of self-acceptance. I’ve even heard grateful people claim that they sleep better, because they practice thinking thankful and positive thoughts just before going to sleep, instead of allowing their minds to be filled with bothersome thoughts.

Because of my travels into so many venues, I have been able to observe that the major religions encourage the practice of appreciativeness and giving of thanks in their religious practices. According to the Greek philosopher, Cicero, "Gratitude is not only the greatest of the virtues but the parent of all others."

Judaism is grounded in a Hebrew worldview that all things come from God and that the worshiper must be continuously involved in the practice of being grateful for that goodness: “I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart” (Ps. 9:1). Faithful Jewish worshipers recite more than one hundred blessings, called berachot, throughout the day.

In Christianity, gratitude is regarded as a virtue that shapes not only emotions and thoughts but actions and deeds as well. Gratitude could be called "the basic Christian attitude," and is referred to as "the heart of the gospel." One of the most sacred rites is called the Eucharist, that is translated thanksgiving.

The Islamic Quran is filled with the idea of gratitude. Islam encourages its followers to be grateful and express thanks to God in all circumstances. Islamic teaching emphasizes the idea that those who are grateful will be rewarded with more. A traditional Islamic saying states, "The first who will be summoned to paradise are those who have praised God in every circumstance."

Dr. Casio Amoral and his wife, Vera, ran the best cranial/reconstructive and plastic surgery hospital in Brazil, and it was there I learned a most unforgettable lesson about the inner need to express gratefulness. Anna Marie and I were ushered into a conference room where Dr. Amoral and Vera shared the story of their lifelong work and the establishment of the hospital in1972. We were escorted through the hospital as I performed the customary needs assessment study. At 11:00a.m. , we returned to the conference room and joined a team of twenty staff members and the Drs. Amoral for a pre-operative session with all the surgical patients for the following week. One at a time the cases were reviewed, and the doctors handling each case reported to Dr. Amoral and made recommendations regarding the upcoming operation and status of the case.

There was really no way to prepare ourselves for such an experience. I was invited to sit right next to Dr. Amoral during the examination and consultation. Viewing each of the nearly twenty patients was enough to make me cry out. It was very traumatic. The patients ranged from just a few weeks old to some being in their teens. Most of the mothers and patients had traveled perhaps hundreds of miles to get to the hospital that day. They were poor mothers who were typically single, unemployed, indigent, and very frightened.

The first little girl, age eight, had already undergone ten operations. She still had many, many operations to go. Her hands were completely grown together as one clump per arm. Many surgeries had already been done on her hands to separate the clumps into fingers and thumbs. Her feet were the same way. But it was her head that was most severely deformed. The present operation was to include a complete cranial restructuring to relieve the constriction on the brain that was causing behavioral and motor problems.

But one mother, who appeared very poor, brought in her daughter, Sylvia, who was wearing a large hat, jeans and a T-shirt. I would guess the daughter to be in her early teens. She had many congenital deformities of the face, head, and thorax area. She had received several earlier surgeries, and only recently had Dr. Amoral been able to complete a major operation.

The girl’s mother, an older lady, was sitting next to me. As the doctors began discussing Sylvia’s case, she turned to me, gripped my forearm, and began speaking directly to me. Her eyes were like sparkling fires and her words flowed in a steady stream of white-hot emotion. I could literally feel the intensity of emotion build as her speech rose to a crescendo and her grip on my arm tightened. Neither her emotion nor her flow of talk slowed down a bit when they informed her that I could not understand any of the Portuguese she was talking. She just kept on.

They said she was telling me that her daughter had been so deformed and so ugly, but now Dr. Amoral had made her pretty. She just couldn't stop praising the doctor and thanking him. No one could quiet her. I took her by the hand and just smiled. She needed to express her feelings and her praise, and she was not concerned whether I spoke English, French, Chinese, or Pig Latin. She needed someone to listen as she expressed her gratefulness, appreciation, and thanksgiving. Her precious daughter was now so beautiful! And with every word of recognition and tribute came an uncontrollable flood of happiness and deep joy washing over her.

I learned a spiritual lesson from that sweet Brazilian lady. Many in the room were embarrassed for the woman and tried to quiet her. I simply stood up as she left and kissed her, first on one cheek, then on the other. I had just experienced the unstoppable power of praise and the satisfying gift of gratefulness.

To contact Dr. Jackson, or to book him for an interview or speaking engagement: press@winstoncrown.com