Obama- Opening Diplomatic Relations With Cuba

fly away pelican!

Now now, communism/socialism isn't exactly evil, they are just misguided socialistic and economical standards.

Nothing good ever comes out of mob mentality, and nothing good comes out of singular rule either.

Misguided is great...

Lets see to 2 socialist countries in the world, north corea and cuba. Both seems very well, isnt it?

North korea is a very picture of what is socialism: while population starves and are repressed by a dictatorship they never choose to have, their "leader" takes a trip to meet Mickey Mouse...

USA seems not to care about the recent left polical rising in south america. First venezuela with chavez, bolivia with evo morales, argentina with kischner, here on brasil with 12, and going to 16 with the pseudo socialist party. The common term with cuba are the long time government. A longevity achieved through social politics like giving poor people pocket money, and with that they buy forever their votes, using the fear every election. Its an evil wheel, when those politians need to keep population as poor as possible to maintain their electorate.

Thats because, when lenin first implanted the socialism, he used his diabolic mind to create all mechanism to retain power, mechanism extensivelly used nowaday, and still fully functional, through keeping population in poverty, press censorship and military force.

Honestly i dont get what obama will manage with this opening. Cuba is a bankrupt country. Population prefer to swin through ocean together with sharks just to leave that island. Shaking hands with castro just show the world he condine with that dictatorship.

Poor population of socialism countries. Even their hope for a better life is stolen. They can do nothing but to follow rules imposed by corrupt and bloodthristy persons, being convicted for life to live in poverty and ignorance.

Venezuela is suffering economic collapse as we speak, they were hurt by the low international oil prices far more then Russia was. They have become so far into the hole that national bankruptcy is seen as inevitable within the next five years. Because of this they can no longer provide free Oil to their close alley Cuba who relies on the selling of that oil at international rates in order to fund their socialist government programs. US Oil shale has done in a few years what the US foreign policy has utterly failed to do over decades. Economics always wins.

North Korea is a military dictatorship. Not a Socialist state.

True Socialism would have zero leaders, as everyone is the same and are basically allocated the same resources. Every issue is voted on by the people in whole, and everything is controlled by the government. Businesses wouldn't be able to expand or grow unless the government allows it, so there is nearly no economic expansion, which keeps the people poor. The government controls everything but everyone is in the government.

North Korea instead has a leader (Un) who controls all and determines who does what and what happens to the country. His power is spread over a specific area (namly, the military) who enforces his rule. His power squashes any dissent before it spreads to prevent an uprising that will remove his power. His people have no freedoms to live, as their leader's word is law and whatever he doesn't like gets punished quicker than you can scream "human rights violation."

Cuba has historically been the same way as North Korea.

If you want to know what Socialism looks like, look towards France instead. While they are not a true Socialist society, they have been going that way for years, which is why their country has been regressing as a society as a whole.

Now plans for Knott's Berry Farm Cuba can resume!

Oh no you dit-int.

Drill baby drill was a misguided over simplified tool of palin rhetoric that in reality has no impact on today's record US oil production, and the current plummet of oil prices.

At least that's what I got in the other forum, by the libs at ffxiah.com, supply and demand doesn't work..

Yep! American shale oil was such a threat that the Saudis flooded the market with oil.

Supply exceeds demand so prices drop. It currently costs more to extract shale oil then the price of crude.

I might mention that cheap oil has hurt the Russian economy more than all our sanctions. And that the Saudis don't like Russia at all.

Some American operations have already begun to slow down or will eventually have to shut down due to the fact that it is no longer economical for them to continue on as they spend more to produce than it sells for.

Was their plan to run themselves out of business Nausi?

You still oversimplify the reasoning behind the drop in the price of oil.

OPEC didn't really FLOOD the market with oil, they just dropped their pants in an effort to make it less profitable.

It's a common practice in some commodities, I work a job where my competitors do the exact same thing. Problem is, when you give it away for free (or next to it) you don't make any money either.

Not really sure how long the they will be able to do it. Competitors in my field have gone out of business cause they were so hungry for some business that they decided to do it at a loss. IF they go out of business, and OPEC raises prices again, they will go back into business.

A lot of smaller interests are already feeling the pressure, the largest of the fraking crews has already lost over half of it's value, and foreign interests are able to weather the storm due to lower production costs.

It wasn't really OPEC as much as it is the Saudi's in particular. Venezuela is a member of OPEC and they are getting destroyed by this. There were a few other countries in OPEC that opposed their actions as well.

I think a barrel is around $55-$60 now I haven't checked in a bit but anyways... It costs the Saudi's around $20-25 to produce a barrel. Much of the new drilling in the US I was reading was around $60-70 to produce a barrel. It's becoming an issue economically for them.

It depends on what their motivation is for keeping production up even though demand globally for oil had dropped. They could keep this up for awhile though if they really wanted to.

The point being that no matter how many times you yell drill baby drill its not the sole reason, but possibly a contributing factor, for the fall in oil prices.

The other part would rely on how much money they have to open and close their business and how profitible it would be for them to get back in the market. Would they just push the prices back down again? How long might they have to wait for a solid rebound among other variables.

Ignoring the last 20+ years of severe economic issues and bad laws which led to more economic issues in Venezuela and saying fracking has brought Venezuela to its knees.

Yeah, no.

A default is likely to occur shorter than 5 years, at the min. on some of the global finance projects they have. Not surprising since they've had problems with their bond holders before.

In your economic101 class while you were learning about supply and demand theory did your teachers happen to mention elastic and inelastic products?

Oil is widely considered to be an inelastic product and therefore does not follow completely the simplified supply and demand theory. It never has.

If only supply had increased (let alone only in the US) we would not be seeing the free fall in prices.

Like I said before, major contributing factors
-World wide demand has dropped. Forecasts have been heavily adjusted every month since June and will continue through next year.
-USD is high and historically this has an inverse effect with oil prices (oil bought in USD is more expensive for everyone else)
-The likelyhood of seeing several countries retreat into recession at the end of this year is high. (Decrease in global growth)
-World wide supply has increased (US increase falls under here)

There are a lot of other smaller contributing factors:
-More fuel efficient cars = less demand for gas to go the same distance travelled previously
-Shorting oil futures/forwards (drastic change from long to short positions from speculators, not hedgers)

Demand is still WAY ahead of supply, just not by as staggering an amount as before. Previously the economic expansion of China and India were casting demand to skyrocket. Now that the USA is supplying much of it's own oil needs and China's economy has started to slow down, the projected future demand isn't nearly what it was before and so prices are dropping. The value of oil itself hasn't changed but it's price can no longer be inflated by a cartel of producers. What we are seeing now is the market balancing itself as a prime exporter is a free market nation.

OPEC isn't going to cut it's production because the new exporter isn't a member, they can't force the USA to cut back production to maintain their high price standard and so the only option left for them is to keep producing and hope for the best. US shale is profitable down to $40 USD a barrel, yes technology has advanced that much. The economies of the other oil exporting nations are based on 75~100 USD per barrel prices. They all have state owned oil companies that take the proceeds and funnel it into social programs and wealth for their own populations. For them, such low prices is causing massive debt and an inability to support their populations at the current standard of living.

The idea that they can just "wait it out" and cause US shale industry to explode is very bad economics. No matter what they do the genie is already out of the bottle, nothing they do will make the technical / economic feasibility of shale oil go away. If they force the prices so low that shale becomes economically unfeasible they would have to maintain them at that low rate, otherwise shale production would start back up again. So can they maintain their own oil based economies at less then $40 USD per barrel permanently?

So everyone sit back and eat some popcorn, your about to witness rearranging of global power structures. And this is only the beginning, there are several other disruptive technologies being developed and in some places actually implemented.

Umm Cuba's healthcare is funded by them selling oil on the open market, oil they get for free from Venezuela. Venezuela can no longer provide them this oil for free as their economy is crumpling, and neither can Cuba make enough money off it's sale to continue it's social programs which include the Healthcare one.

The US healthcare system maybe sh!t but the ones in socialist countries aren't any much better. Just look at the economic state of Europe to get a good idea how much in debt they all are right now. Nothing is "free", someone must pay for everything and ultimately that someone ends up being the middle class tax payers / office workers. And when they can't pay, either because the are too many beneficiaries or there simply isn't enough tax payers, then the nation must borrow money to cover the difference. That works for short term but permanent long term borrowing is very bad for a nation as it'll eventually crush it's economy.

So amusing to watch the left side of the forum flailing their arms as they try to defend past stances they have made that no longer hold any weight.

We better be careful.. with two dollar gas people might actually have some money to spend and our economy may actually recover for real!

"I think it's bad for the environment, therefore I must explain away any economic benefit it provides out of principle."

I...really cannot wait to see how people like Jet and Sparth reply to that.

I'm so scurred!

Heck, it doesn't even have to be past stances.

Altima, have you looked at this guy try to explain economics? Even his theories are wrong, but most certainly not based by reality.

You don't understand Alti, only unemployment and welfare money can actually grow the economy. Not this fancy money saved from fracking.

The best part is that most of these liberals are on the record falling just shy of wanting to throw frackers in jail.

I mean can you imagine their horror as money is sucked out of the middle east and someone eventually credits fracking as a major component in the fall of islamic terrorism???




Drill baby drill!

No it is not.



Consumption started falling in 2014 while world production increased.

Short term outlook as of Dec. 9th 2014

Castro to Pocket 92% of Salaries

What was Vic saying earlier? Oh yeah, it was:


You're right, there's nothing negative about putting more money into the Cuban government while the people there continue to get screwed over. Clearly Cuba is ready for change.

Here in brasil, its already applied with cuban doctors.

Brazillians inovation to evil is one of the biggest in the world. Here, we lack doctors in poor country town here. The solution was to hire foreign doctors, in majority cubans, in a system where cubans costs 10k u$, that arent paied direct to cubans, despite they are working in brasil. The money is sent direct to cuba, that repay cuban doctors around 2k. With that, the government manage to supply the demand for doctors in country towns.

The problem is that this is slave work!

Also, huge amount of cash is sent to foreign countries, just to be "washed", after all, left governments tend to help themselves... And screw the population. From both countries.

And i dont think i need to say, but obviously large amount of doctors manage to escape from brasil. Thats nothing news. Even never stepped in cuba, it doesnt requires too much brains to deduce cubans socialism is evil. Every little chance to escape, cubans will do what it takes to leave that country, and funny thing is, to flee to usa, the exact oposite to socialism.

Why don't we trade leaders with Cuba? We can impeach Castro without being called racist (as Castro isn't black, or half black in Obama's case), and Cubans are already used to getting *** in the *** by the government, so it's a win for us and no change for them.

I have a better idea. Wait for him to croak.