: : *Sounds very similiar to the story here in California about 6 months ago when 12 "illegals" (those men/woman/children/ who slave for less than minimum wage in the 100°+ heat to protect you and I from having to pay one nickel more than we need to for that head of lettuce) were found asphyxiated to death in the back of the moving van employed to transport them to the field... including two girls aged 9 and 11. No charges were filed against the owner of the field.: Yeah, those sorts of things are always happening along the border from Texas to California. Things aren't so hot in Mexico either I guess if people are begging to work in the fields for a buck an hour.
**But how can this be??? Have the Communists taken over parliament in Mexico? Has socialism supplanted capitalism as the dominant economic form? Could it be that your "Cuba can't compete with the US economically because of socialism/communism" just won't hold up under scrutiny? Could-it-be that comparisons of First World Superpowers to Third World nations under embargo are unfair? I'll leave you to puzzle it out.** --K
: If they were illegals, how would any field owners be responsible?
**You Ayn Rand types really crack me up. You pour out invective for the death of people on a raft from Cuba and hold Fidel Castro personally responsible for the tragedy; for your own native owning class? Nothing. Fortunately, I doubt everyone else is so obtuse. Obviously, someone is profiting from the use of "illegal" labor and it ain't just the poor suckers from that capitalist Third World paradise. By holding these workers 100% responsible even though they have no say in their wages, hours or working conditions while the employers have all the say but 0% responsiblity, you display the poverty of your position.** --K
Besides, aren't the real problems in semi-dictatorships like Mexico and Cuba?
**I *know* there are some Xians here... what's that one passage from the Bible? (Lark, perhaps could help me out here...) Something about pointing out the splinter in (Cuba's) my eye while ignoring the beam in your (US's) own? Regardless of whether or not you and I can agree upon the cause of Cuba's economic woes, it is the cause of the privations people there endure. What is the US's excuse for the types of abuses human beings suffer here given that this is the wealthiest nation in history?** --K
: :
: : Cuba is a Third World nation under a 38 year embargo enforced by the most powerful nation on the planet which offers automatic citizenship to any Cuban who washes up on our shores (care to examine what happens to Haitian boat people or Mexicans or Guatemalans who cross the border escaping US sponsored poverty and oppression??). This is a First World country and arguably the wealthiest nation in history. What's our excuse?
: You have the typically "looking at the wrong end of the telescope" disease commonly found on this board. While it's true we instituted an embargo it's equally true that Cuba had access to markets in S. America, the Soviet Union (ooops, that went belly-up, didn't it?) China (why isn't there more fraternal assistance coming from there to Cuba? They are after all trying to get into Long Beach and Panama...), and a lot of European nations as well. Could it be that the return on equity in Cuba is zero point shit? Perhaps....
**Let's say for the sake of argument that you are right and socialism is a terrible economic engine and that for reasons, mouthed by you and every other rightwing whore since the Cuban Revolution such as, "the return on equity in Cuba is zero point shit" is correct. Why erect and enforce a 38 year economic embargo on trade in that case?? That's a real head scratcher, huh?** --K
: "US sponsored poverty and oppression"...stock Cold War boiler-plate rhetoric...MarxSpeak for fostering envy and a false sense of entitlement amongst uneducated and manipulable simple folk.
**Would you care to compare and contrast Cuba with its island neighbors Haiti and the Dominican Republic on a wide range of socio-economic indicators? I doubt it. *AND* these receive millions of dollars in US aid and investment; not an embargo. I guarantee you that Cubans have a longer life span, better education, higher rates of literacy, better medical care and higher GDP per capita than their Dominican Republic and Haitian brothers and sisters. Do you fear such an apples to apples comparison? Or should we compare and contrast capitalist Bangladesh with communist China (which is basically what you're doing with Cuba and the US)?** --K
: : Not holding my breath for an answer...* --K
**Good thing too...** --K
: PS, why do I get all this stuff with the carots at the ends? Is that something that you have to type in? Are you using linux?
: Yup, I'm computer illiterate....duh.
: --
: McSpotlight: They're standard html tags; in this case, they point to an animated .gif file located on Krasny's site.
: Frenchy; you're probably seeing them because your browser is either broken in some way or doesn't support animated .gifs.
: Krasny; did you know that Unisys (which owns the LZW-compression method used to produce .gif images) is trying to crack down on people using .gifs without a licence? If you didn't use a commercial image manipulation tool to make that animated .gif, then Unisys could charge you $5,000 for using their compression algorithm.
**Oooh! You're scaring me! LOL. Though, in point of fact, it was created at GifWorks (or some such).** --K
: (Which has had the effect of causing an uproar among the geek community and a rapid move to the free .png format, which isn't covered by a stupid licence.)
**I agree... all such licenses are stupid. Knowledge should benefit all of mankind.** --K
