Cesarnc's market talk, gossips, rumours & fun

..........I couldn't have put it, simpler..........but will the elite go for it?..........a bit long but awesome..........

In my view, the only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity along the lines of a 21st-century democratic socialism in which humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature.
William I. Robinson is a Professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin American Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara. His latest book is Latin America and Global Capitalism.

Santa Barbara, CA - As the crisis of global capitalism spirals out of control, the powers that be in the global system appear to be adrift and unable to proposal viable solutions. From the slaughter of dozens of young protesters by the army in Egypt to the brutal repression of the Occupy movement in the United States, and the water cannons brandished by the militarised police in Chile against students and workers, states and ruling classes are unable are to hold back the tide of worldwide popular rebellion and must resort to ever more generalised repression.
Simply put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy can no longer be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. The ruling classes have lost legitimacy; we are witnessing a breakdown of ruling-class hegemony on a world scale.
To understand what is happening in this second decade of the new century we need to see the big picture in historic and structural context. Global elites had hoped and expected that the "Great Depression" that began with the mortgage crisis and the collapse of the global financial system in 2008 would be a cyclical downturn that could be resolved through state-sponsored bailouts and stimulus packages. But it has become clear that this is a structural crisis. Cyclical crises are on-going episodes in the capitalist system, occurring and about once a decade and usually last 18 months to two years. There were world recessions in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and the early 21st century.
Structural crises are deeper; their resolution requires a fundamental restructuring of the system. Earlier world structural crises of the 1890s, the 1930s and the 1970s were resolved through a reorganisation of the system that produced new models of capitalism. "Resolved" does not mean that the problems faced by a majority of humanity under capitalism were resolved but that the reorganisation of the capitalist system in each case overcame the constraints to a resumption of capital accumulation on a world scale. The crisis of the 1890s was resolved in the cores of world capitalism through the export of capital and a new round of imperialist expansion. The Great Depression of the 1930s was resolved through the turn to variants of social democracy in both the North and the South - welfare, populist, or developmentalist capitalism that involved redistribution, the creation of public sectors, and state regulation of the market.
Globalisation and the current structural crisis

To understand the current conjuncture we need to go back to the 1970s. The globalisation stage of world capitalism we are now in itself evolved out the response of distinct agents to these previous episodes of crisis, in particular, to the 1970s crisis of social democracy, or more technically stated, of Fordism-Keynesianism, or of redistributive capitalism. In the wake of that crisis capital went global as a strategy of the emergent Transnational Capitalist Class and its political representatives to reconstitute its class power by breaking free of nation-state constraints to accumulation. These constraints - the so-called "class compromise" - had been imposed on capital through decades of mass struggles around the world by nationally-contained popular and working classes. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, globally-oriented elites captured state power in most countries around the world and utilised that power to push capitalist globalisation through the neo-liberal model.
Globalisation and neo-liberal policies opened up vast new opportunities for transnational accumulation in the 1980s and 1990s. The revolution in computer and information technology and other technological advances helped emergent transnational capital to achieve major gains in productivity and to restructure, "flexibilise," and shed labour worldwide. This, in turn, undercut wages and the social wage and facilitated a transfer of income to capital and to high consumption sectors around the world that provided new market segments fuelling growth. In sum, globalisation made possible a major extensive and intensive expansion of the system and unleashed a frenzied new round of accumulation worldwide that offset the 1970s crisis of declining profits and investment opportunities.
However, the neo-liberal model has also resulted in an unprecedented worldwide social polarisation. Fierce social and class struggles worldwide were able in the 20th century to impose a measure of social control over capital. Popular classes, to varying degrees, were able to force the system to link what we call social reproduction to capital accumulation. What has taken place through globalisation is the severing of the logic of accumulation from that of social reproduction, resulting in an unprecedented growth of social inequality and intensified crises of survival for billions of people around the world.
The pauperising effects unleashed by globalisation have generated social conflicts and political crises that the system is now finding it more and more difficult to contain. The slogan "we are the 99 per cent" grows out of the reality that global inequalities and pauperisation have intensified enormously since capitalist globalisation took off in the 1980s. Broad swaths of humanity have experienced absolute downward mobility in recent decades. Even the IMF was forced to admit in a 2000 report that "in recent decades, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population has regressed. This is arguably one of the greatest economic failures of the 20th century".
Global social polarisation intensifies the chronic problem of over-accumulation. This refers to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, so that the global market is unable to absorb world output and the system stagnates. Transnational capitalists find it more and more difficult to unload their bloated and expanding mass of surplus - they can’t find outlets to invest their money in order to generate new profits; hence the system enters into recession or worse. In recent years, the Transnational Capitalist Class has turned to militarised accumulation, to wild financial speculation, and to the raiding of sacking of public finance to sustain profit-making in the face of over-accumulation.
While transnational capital’s offensive against the global working and popular classes dates back to the crisis of the 1970s and has grown in intensity ever since, the Great Recession of 2008 was in several respects a major turning point. In particular, as the crisis spread it generated the conditions for new rounds of brutal austerity worldwide, greater flexibilisation of labour, steeply rising under and unemployment, and so on. Transnational finance capital and its political agents utilised the global crisis to impose brutal austerity and attempting to dismantle what is left of welfare systems and social states in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, to squeeze more value out of labour, directly through more intensified exploitation and indirectly through state finances. Social and political conflict has escalated around the world in the wake of 2008.
Nonetheless, the system has been unable to recover; it is sinking deeper into chaos. Global elites cannot manage the explosive contradictions. Is the neo-liberal model of capitalism entering a terminal stage? It is crucial to understand that neo-liberalism is but one model of global capitalism; to say that neo-liberalism may be in terminal crisis is not to say that global capitalism is in terminal crisis. Is it possible that the system will respond to crisis and mass rebellion through a new restructuring that leads to some different model of world capitalism - perhaps a global Keynesianism involving transnational redistribution and transnational regulation of finance capital? Will rebellious forces from below be co-opted into some new reformed capitalist order?
Or are we headed towards a systemic crisis? A systemic crisis is one in which the solution involves the end of the system itself, either through its supersession and the creation of an entirely new system, or more ominously the collapse of the system. Whether or not a structural crisis becomes systemic depends on how distinct social and class forces respond - to the political projects they put forward and as well as to factors of contingency that cannot be predicted in advance, and to objective conditions. It is impossible at this time to predict the outcome of the crisis. However, a few things are clear in the current world conjuncture.
The current moment
First, this crisis shares a number of aspects with earlier structural crises of the 1930s and the 1970s, but there are also several features unique to the present:
The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction. We face the real spectre of resource depletion and environmental catastrophes that threaten a system collapse.
- The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented. Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. Also unprecedented is the concentration of control over the mass media, the production of symbols, images and messages in the hands of transnational capital. We have arrived at the society of panoptical surveillance and Orwellian thought control.
- We are reaching the limits to the extensive expansion of capitalism, in the sense that there are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism. De-ruralisation is now well-advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen. Like riding a bicycle, the capitalist system needs to continuously expand or else it collapses. Where can the system now expand?
- There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a planet of slums, alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to crises of survival - to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This raises in new ways the dangers of a 21st-century fascism and new episodes of genocide to contain the mass of surplus humanity and their real or potential rebellion.
- There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social scientists refer to as a "hegemon", or a leading nation-state that has enough power and authority to organise and stabilise the system. Nation-states cannot control the howling gales of a runaway global economy; states face expanding crises of political legitimacy.
Second, global elites are unable to come up with solutions. They appear to be politically bankrupt and impotent to steer the course of events unfolding before them. They have exhibited bickering and division at the G-8, G-20 and other forums, seemingly paralysed, and certainly unwilling to challenge the power and prerogative of transnational finance capital, the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale, and the most rapacious and destabilising fraction. While national and transnational state apparatuses fail to intervene to impose regulations on global finance capital, they have intervened to impose the costs of the crisis on labour. The budgetary and fiscal crises that supposedly justify spending cuts and austerity are contrived. They are a consequence of the unwillingness or inability of states to challenge capital and their disposition to transfer the burden of the crisis to working and popular classes.
Third, there will be no quick outcome of the mounting global chaos. We are in for a period of major conflicts and great upheavals. As I mentioned above, one danger is a neo-fascist response to contain the crisis. We are facing a war of capital against all. Three sectors of transnational capital in particular stand out as the most aggressive and prone to seek neo-fascist political arrangements to force forward accumulation as this crisis continues: speculative financial capital, the military-industrial-security complex, and the extractive and energy sector. Capital accumulation in the military-industrial-security complex depends on endless conflicts and war, including the so-called wars on terrorism and on drugs, as well as on the militarisation of social control. Transnational finance capital depends on taking control of state finances and imposing debt and austerity on the masses, which in turn can only be achieved through escalating repression. And extractive industries depend on new rounds of violent dispossession and environmental degradation around the world.
Fourth, popular forces worldwide have moved quicker than anyone could imagine from the defensive to the offensive. The initiative clearly passed this year, 2011, from the transnational elite to popular forces from below. The juggernaut of capitalist globalisation in the 1980s and 1990s had reverted the correlation of social and class forces worldwide in favour of transnational capital. Although resistance continued around the world, popular forces from below found themselves disoriented and fragmented in those decades, pushed on to the defensive in the heyday of neo-liberalism. Then the events of September 11, 2001, allowed the transnational elite, under the leadership of the US state, to sustain its offensive by militarising world politics and extending systems of repressive social control in the name of "combating terrorism".
Now all this has changed. The global revolt underway has shifted the whole political landscape and the terms of the discourse. Global elites are confused, reactive, and sinking into the quagmire of their own making. It is noteworthy that those struggling around the world have been shown a strong sense of solidarity and are in communications across whole continents. Just as the Egyptian uprising inspired the US Occupy movement, the latter has been an inspiration for a new round of mass struggle in Egypt.What remains is to extend transnational coordination and move towards transnationally-coordinated programmes.On the other hand, the "empire of global capital" is definitely not a "paper tiger". As global elites regroup and assess the new conjuncture and the threat of mass global revolution, they will - and have already begun to - organise coordinated mass repression, new wars and interventions, and mechanisms and projects of co-optation in their efforts to restore hegemony.

"The basic idea is that we offer ourselves up, 99 per cent of us anyway," author argues [EPA]
In 1729, when Ireland had fallen into a state of utter destitution at the hands of its British landlords, Jonathan Swift published a famous essay, "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public".
His idea was simple: the starving Irish should sell their own children to the rich as food.
His inspiration, as it happened, came from across the Atlantic. As he explained, "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young, healthy child well nourished is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout".
Inspired in turn by Swift, I want to suggest that we put in motion a similar undertaking: on January 16th, Martin Luther King Day, citizens from around the country should gather at the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street. Let's call this macabre gathering - with luck and even worse times, it should be mammoth - "We Surrender" or "Restore Debtor's Prisons" or "De-Fault Is Ours" or "Collateralise Us". And plan on a mirthful day of mourning.
The basic idea is that we offer ourselves up, 99 per cent of us anyway, on the altar of high finance as a sacrifice to the bond markets. It was Karl Marx who first observed that high finance is "the Vatican of capitalism". How right he turned out to be - right with a vengeance!
Death of democracy
Whole governments, democratically elected, are collapsing, or abdicating on orders from our secular version of the papacy. Who will weep for the passing of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi? Not many, surely. Still, it's appalling that, in Italy as in Greece, governing authority has been usurped by technocrats, elected by no one, answerable only to the European institutions of high finance that installed them in power.
http://aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/...7951734_21.jpgIn-depth coverage of the global movement
At last count, eight governments of the European Union have come and gone, suffering the wrath of our new god. Other European governments barely hang on and scurry to curry favour with the bond market, proposing in effect to eat their own children and the futures of 99 per cent of their people, if that's what it takes to make high finance happy. More will follow. By the time this piece was published, who would be surprised if yet another government had bitten the dust?
What about here in the USA? That capitalism and democracy go together (like love and marriage in that old song) has been the imperial boast conveyed to the rest of the world by American banks and diplomats and presidents and Marines for a century - and more recently, by crony capitalist outfits like KBR and predator drones. Today, at home and abroad that particular gospel seems a sorry piece of hypocrisy. Capitalism has become a synonym for - to use an old word on its way back just in time - plutocracy, not democracy. The Obama administration like the Bush administration before it, and the one before that, and the one before that, has bent its knee to "the Vatican of capitalism".
Take our children, please!
Anticipating Swift, we are already eating our own children or, at least, the futures available to them. My suggestion is to make the most of that reality.
When we assemble on January 16th, we should arrive as supplicants, bringing the deeds to our homes, if we still have them. We could come dressed as credit-default swaps or collateralised debt obligations. (Use your imagination!)
You'll want to turn in your subprime mortgage documents. And do you really need that mobile home or tent? And certainly, you'll want to offer up your children to Wall Street if they're young enough to make a "delicious" and nourishing meal. If a bit older, haul along that creaky swing-set from your backyard, or dilapidated blackboards and outmoded computer consoles from your child's underfunded, disintegrating school. Bring with you the paints, recorders, and stage props once used by art, music, and theatre teachers, but made superfluous when their programs were cut by schools too poor to afford them.
If your children are older still, and waterlogged from the college loans that put them "underwater" before they even had their first jobs, why not donate those debts as securitised gifts to the Street? Better yet: give back their college diplomas.
If you can, cart along vats of heating oil or coal bins to symbolise the winter fuel that you can no longer afford. (Thank god for global warming!) Declare yourself undocumented or at the very least "undeserving" (a prematurely retired and wonderfully apt word used by the 1 per cent back in the late 19th century to describe those who apparently preferred starving to working). Turn in your food stamps and unemployment insurance checks.
If you happen to have a job, return it or tithe a portion of your wages or pension for the cause.
Give back your votes; they do you no good, but might placate "The Street". If you're not too shy, donate your medical records, X-rays, CAT scans and IV drips; you won't need them anymore since the odds are you won't be able to afford health care, and Wall Street can use them. After all, who is more endlessly ingenious when it comes to turning misery into money?
Here's a really big January 16th gesture if you're up for it: securitise your body parts. What, for example, is a leg- or ear- or brainpan-derivative really worth on the open market? You don't know, but Wall Street will. And you can think of it as your contribution to solving the deficit dilemma, which keeps the 1 per cent awake at night.
My poor imagination is hardly up to the task of imagining all the ways in which we might express our fealty to Wall Street's financiers. But we, the partisans of OWS, are if nothing else a remarkably creative bunch. I'm confident that, when we get together on January 16th, the world will marvel at our inventiveness.
Archipelago of isolation chambers
However "Swiftian" our mood, signage, and costumes, however much we retain the vital capacity to laugh at our own predicament and make fun of our tormentors, what I'm proposing is, in the end, serious business. A massive "Collateralise Us" day is doable - and through its wit could embolden us and shame those in charge of the care and feeding of the 1 per cent. More important, it could put in the most graphic terms, where everyone could see it, a core indictment of a system in ruins and perhaps even hint at what might replace it.
http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Ima...21467734_8.jpg
Why pick a single day and a single place to symbolically immolate our own children (and their children to come)? Why not continue to occupy as many places as we can on all days? We should!
However, the simple epiphany that OWS allowed millions to experience was its blunt discovery that Wall Street, the world of financial mis-engineers and predatory speculators, was the taproot of our multiple dilemmas. For people around the globe, that street remains, at least symbolically, the site where our misbegotten Age of Austerity was born. So it makes continuing sense to persevere in pressing that singular insight, in pursuing a determination to confront a dysfunctional system where it originates.
So, too, local governments around the country have consistently used their police forces to cage, disperse, or otherwise fragment local occupations and may even have coordinated their police "occupations" with one another. "Our streets" are ever less "ours" in any meaningful sense. The geography of democracy is being transformed into an archipelago of isolation chambers.
But that won't be the case if untold numbers assemble in New York on the 16th. If every movement and organisation that has had anything to do with OWS over these last months were to collaborate in mobilising, even on the bitterest of January days, the streets will again be "ours".
Martin Luther King and Jubilee Day
Then, of course, there is the resonant significance of the day itself. Martin Luther King was a lawbreaker for justice. So, too, were all those who defied "legitimate authority" alongside him. I'm not suggesting we break the law. I do suggest we exercise rights that are growing weak, and will grow weaker, if allowed to atrophy further. And I do suggest as well that we, like King, become the midwives of new law.
If credit-default swaps and structured investment vehicles are legal, as they are, and if marching in the streets is becoming ever less so, as it is, then on January 16th we should begin to turn that kind of preposterous world upside down. What was lawful shall become criminal and what was denied to the people shall be taken by them and made good law.
When we gather on the 16th of January at the corner of Broad and Wall streets - don't worry, you'll find it! - in an act of unprecedented symbolic self-sacrifice, we might also make one modest request. With Martin Luther King in mind, let us propose that January 16th also become Jubilee Day.
Such days were a more or less regular part of the calendar in biblical times and long after. It was the moment when common people were relieved of their crushing debts and the world was allowed to start over again. Our own version of such a "day of forgiveness" would focus on all the debts with which the 1 per cent have burdened so many working people.
On that day, we might resume a conversation about how to start the world anew. It would undoubtedly be a conversation about all the vital resources that everyone depends on to enjoy life, be healthy, and have a future worthy of bequeathing to our children. It would certainly be about how these must never again be allowed to congeal in the hands of an infinitesimal elite organised in a tiny number of private institutions indifferent to the commonweal and immune from censure.
See you on the 16th. Bring your children.
Steve Fraser is Editor-at-Large of New Labour Forum, and co-founder of the American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books). He is a labour and economic historian whose most recent book is Wall Street: America's Dream Palace.
A version of this article was first published on TomDispatch.

Next time we go and buy some Chinese lights for Christmas, spare a thought for this guy who seems to have done no wrong. Someone correct me?

Chonchy's posts of glamour girls, one of whom was actually showing nipples (are nipples allowed on FF?) followed by the serious stuff is a coup de theatre par excellence, as we say here in Euroland. We're wondering how the f*** USA will pay all of its debts while it's pointing fingers at Greece, Italy et al.

You're a star!

Do something unexpected to please someone. You know who she is. Don't you?

This is the cocktail of the week: (delay due to the fact I'm likely to post my favourite and I've forgotten which ones I have posted)

Try Binging "cocktail of the week"

This is who you'll be when you've had too many:



(Man I need a shave... what was i doing last weekends????)

..........Thanks Smikester for the cocktail of the week..........them smikester, you have bether teeths than me, and I think you are older than me, ah?

I was lurking true FF.........and a funny thing happens, I got confused

I found this thread

http://www.forexfactory.com/showthre...=48001&page=11

this thread is about how much you can make a month, I always heard from a good friend of mine from slovakia that 5% a month is more than good, and for me he is a very reliable trader and consistent, now is it me or this guy saids that he enters with 15% of his capital and I understand by this that he enters with 150 dollars risk, on a 1000 dollar acc, or his stop loss is 15% of his acc, on a one dollar a pip trade his risking 150 pips, or 150 dollars, correct? and on a standard lot (10 dlrs a pip) is 15 pips stop loss or 150 dollrs stop loss wish is all the same.........ok, and he say that he has made 20+ trades in a few months and make 11 pips in each at least, 220 pips, that with a standard lot equals 2200 dlrs, if he is trading standard lots he will get rich soon and if he is trading one dlrs lots he is making 220 dlrs in who know's how many months or 22% in those months, so unless we get the amount of months or the lot size we can stablish if he is going to crash and burn soon or if he is going to be able to make a living on this 220 dlrs in a few months, if is 10 months, is 22 dlrs a month, and if is in 5 months is 11 dlrs a month, so like I say is eather crazy or starving.........we will need exactly the lot amount or size...........

........... my gues is that eather he is crazy and will crash and burn or will starv to death........

JUST CALL ME CRAZY!
I know that what I am about to say will probably have everyone saying that I am crazy and will crash and burn soon. Well, I believe in my system so much that I trade 15% of my capital, yes that is not a typo and it's not 1.5 it says fifteen percent and go for only 11 pips trading the h1 TF in combination with the h4 and daily TF with no stop loss. My style of trading is countertrading tops and bottoms based on the TF's mentioned and go for it. I started trading this manual system with OANDA (not the MT4) for the past 2 weeks and have made 24% so far. After observing this for months. I have made over 20+ trades all winners and I don't plan on losing any trades. How you may ask, with patience, discipline, confidence, timing, displaying no emotions, not getting greedy, waiting for the special setup, and lasty market order and wait to collect. There has been times that my entry is so perfect in timing and I have become so good at this, I will place an order twice (yes twice) and get my pips in less than a minute. This really is not scalping, as I do not go for anything less than 11 pips. Like I said it's all about the patience, setup, and timing. To those who think that I am going to crash and burn, sorry but not this trader. Anyway I wish good luck to all here at FF and may the pips be with you. Happy trading.

Riki

smikester I have being googleling this guy but google told me that without a name, they don't have a face reclinizing software yet, at least not legal yet, so who is this guy smikester? and what is that on the floor, beens?

well thanks Smikester I was inspired by the malvec grapes wine and the pic of the nipples magnified, but I realy don't know how they will pay off their debt, but I realy will love one of those newborns deep fried or in the oven..........

pic of the magnified..........

Now that you talk about nipples..........

............skarlet's nipples............



jenifer's nipples...........

..........cristina Aguilera's nipples..........



and last but not least Miss Gomez's nipples.............

The Chinese gentleman is Ai Weiwei.

Staying with China, and after reading your posts Chonchy, take a google at eating foetus - in China in particular, and Asia in general. I'm not so sure if it is true, but having spent many years in Asia, I can attest to the fact that Asia sure eat things that, whilst normal for them and a sign of how they would survive a food crisis better than the traditional West, would turn many a Westerner's face white with horror.

Thanks Condor. I spelled it wrong. How could that have happened?

.........Ai Weiwei, and what is the story with him if I may know, and the cristmas lights I most confess, I'm lost..........and I have being for days now..........

..........anyways, my brother in law sell dollar store items and of course he is an importer, so he is being there and told me that they won't starv for sure, yes......but I was borne in cuba, and they have their horrors also, we make cat's croquetes and I must confess, they are good, whole generations have being raise on cats, there and other animals, some times, or must of the time, without the customer knowing that he is eating a cat croquete, also they eat an island animal that looks like a big rat, also delicius if done well, very espensive as a mather of fact because is also used in santeria, budu........but the most unusual of our menu is a cleaning mop steack, let me explain, don't go like this on me, I love that emoticon, is my favorite, the cuban mop steak is made out of the cleaning "Frazada" that they use to clean the floors with, they marinated with spices and onions and garlic and beleive me you will never know that is a cleaning rag, they cut it in pieces like a steak and after is cook you will leak your fingers, now, I'm not kidding ok, ask a real cuban about this, some one from the get go, some one that have leave there in the special period what they called, on the time when russia closed all help to cuba, all this new things, show up in the cuban menu, and beleive me, many turists are victims of this delicatesens being sold in what we call the paladares, I was lucky I got out before this innovations took place but a good quantity of cats croquetes, I did eat, without knowing of course, but not that I would care much anyways, when you are hungry, you have to eat or die............

...........If you think you have problems spelling, what those that leave me?

Well, there is a lot of history between Cuba and the US that has led to the current state of Cuba, and it is not appropriate to discuss and opine upon all the twists and turns between the egos of politicians, greed of corporations, and so on, and so on. However, I consider the current sanctions placed on Cuba by the US, and the US blackmail of other countries to not deal with Cuba, as they will be blacklisted for any commerce with the US, to be a gross violation. When sanctions affect the poor who struggle to feed themselves, they who impose the sanctions lose all credibility.

It would be nice to see all those that create these problems – no matter what side – to be taken out and shot as the traitors that they are to common decency of most people around the world.

Oh, and thanks for the tip on Cuban cuisine. If I ever visit Cuba, I’ll be sure to ask for a list of foods from you before I go.

And as for your comment upon language – hey, until someone becomes fluent in your mother tongue, I do not think that you should feel the need to apologize for trying to communicate in English… which may sometimes be a little difficult to understand, but eventually is, nonetheless.

If you really want a laugh, you should hear me trying to speak Spanish. I can manage to ask for a coffee with milk, and a chicken sandwich. That is all I know, and consider this the minimum that I need in order to survive in a Spanish-speaking country.

..........any body want to buy a gold coin?

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/293479


http://www.digitaljournal.com/img/2/...ld_coin_02.jpg

..........Ah 45 condor, the sanctions, the blockade...........

some of us think the sanctions have only help castro in power, he use that statement to tell the people in cuba that they are strugleling because of the blockade or the sanctions, while the state (own by him ) export all the beef, tobaco and seafood from the island to japan wish pay handsomely for this items, while the people in return receive a poor healthcare, some very expensive education consider that you have to work 45 days a year like a slave in the farms growing the tobacco that he later sell to the japanese and the rest of the world to the highest biter, and if you become a doctor you must work in venezuela for two years to become a very unpaid doctor, making very little while being in there, because he charge the venezuelan goverment more and pay them less, and if you leave the countrie that education is worse nothing because you have to make an exam here that most don't pass because of the language barrier or the lack of time or maney to go true the process all over again, so if you heard that the comunist countrie of cuba give something for free, tell him to come to talk to me about it.........and of course if to have 13 000000 slaves I have to give some back, I will, won't you? ........well he dosen't, to get some in cuba, you need to be a killer for the goverment or a thief, period, beleive me........sorry for the drama and the pain showing, but we have spend 50 years suffering and surviving in other countries thinking that one day we will come back, but there is nothing in cuba to interest the world to be taking castro out, but hear this, if tomorrow some one say in the midle of the central park in havana that in Moa ( the nickel mines of Moa ) they have found lithium ( the stuff to make cell phones and lap tops batheries) I'm sure an invasion just like the one with kennedy fail, will be arrange............

In other words if it wouldn't be a blockade, castro would of invent one, beleive me.............he is a master in creating gains from disasters.......

In regards of this people's being punished, I think god have that in mind but for now this is how he rolls, me think, leave us to behave freely so then he can judge...........my concience is clean..........

Entirely agree, and please do not think that I consider Castro a hero… my position on most politicians is that they are self-centred, self-enriching traitors that rape whenever possible. That said, no viable alternative seems to be on the horizon, and I certainly do not advocate anarchy.

And, I am pleased that you seem to be living comfortably in Miami – a city that I have never visited, but not without both its highlights, and its problems, from what I hear. Of course, I couldn’t live there… the wife would not take too kindly to me sitting on the beach all day looking at girls whilst trading currencies.

Okay, it's lunchtime here in France, and so off to wine and cheese I go. A tad cold, too, so the fire is burning, and perhaps calling for me to do a spot of reading on the sofa, followed by a siesta.

........well 45condor if you have never visited miami because a lack of friends, here you have one that is forcing you to come, but I will tell you this right now, I don't seat at the beach trading and seing girls pass by ( it makes me lose my focus on the trade) but if you come here I will take you fishing with me, and snorkeling but the main attraction here is the spanish food and I will take you to the best palces where you will eat the best sapanish food on the planet, and no "Frazadas, or Rags marinated" I asure you that, so get your self together and come down here and leave the rest, and you don't have to stay, you will go back to your place, otherwise where do I visit then............

.........oh come on Turtle, fxhermit, smikester, 4d's, fmostel1, MPP, dskw don't look at me like that you are also invited, cesar you know you don't need an invitacion and Teemo shut up, you leave here next to me........... supreme Chaos is also being invited for speargunfishing a while ago but the invite still stand, and if my two slovenians friends and the Australian are reading, oh hell just come all together and we will have a great party here all together in miami, but no no waith don't come all at once that the last time I did that I was left with no girls here.............

.........45Condor I will try to find this book in english or french to send it to you because I can only find it in spanish, but this is the most inparcial book abaut the man, that I don't think is a hero eather but a very interesting follower of Maquiavelo............. a good read.........

http://www.bookfinder.com/dir/i/Vida...ro/9802710997/




.........also good read, for your siestas with wine and cheese........

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show...IAVELO_NICOLAS

........enjoy it.........
http://www.deandeluca.com/ProductImg/175/105260.jpg