Portuguese-Italian-Spanish mutual intelligibility
You are wrong. For instance, Spain go to the G-20 meeting in November.
GDP per capita:
1. France
2. Spain
3. Italy
4. Portugal
5. Russia
Russia, with a GDP per capita similar to those of developing countries in Africa, Central and South America belongs, however, to the G-8.
You are so naive in believing that the G-8 membership has anything to do with a high GDP per capita or a high development index. It's a matter of power and war as well as adulation! Otherwise Luxembourg as well as other small but highly developed countries should be members of the GShit-Group.
Spain is performing better than the rest of countries at the crisis. For example Spanish airlines Iberia now is bigger in terms of capitalisation than British Airlines. Also Telefonica now is bigger than Vodafone and has become the third biggest Telecommunication company after ATT and a Chinese one. Finally the Spanish bank Santander has bought other banks that collapsed due to the subprime crisis and would had bought many more if they were not rescued by the Governments of their respective countries. The false economies are those which are injecting public money to avoid the bankruptcy of their banks like if they were communist regimes, not the Spanish economy.
"With regard to mutual intelligibility, it is very easy for Portuguese speakers to understand and communicate with both Italian and Spanish speakers."
I can agree when it comes to Spanish speakers but not Italian so much. However I think Italian is easier to read and a lot of words are somewhat recognizable. There are even situations where there is the same word in Italian and Portuguese but it has a slightly different spelling in Spanish (porta, for instance).
"It's a lot harder for those speakers to understand Portuguese because of the strange emphasis we place on our 's' and the French sound of our double 'rr' and the numerous variations of accents (ex. Carros - cars is pronounced carrh-ouge although this varies with each region and there are so many accents)."
I don't speak fluently but my mother is from Madeira so I've heard enough that I can carry on a conversation, and in school in my Spanish classes, I would pronounce the Spanish words with a Portuguese accent (from Madeira) and the teacher said it sounded like Spanish with a speech impediment but she had no trouble understanding even when I spoke Portuguese to her. But it's definitely easier for Portuguese speakers to understand Spanish than vice versa.
"but when it is written pêlo, it means hair. "
I've never heard this, to me hair was always cabelo.
But the problem is that the Madeiran accent is one of the hardest accents to understand of Portuguese to the point that many mainland Portuguese people and all Brazilians can't understand them because the people of Madeira truly speak with a French pronunciation. I know many Latin American Spanish speakers that get some TV Globo channels that actually can follow the Portuguese news (Sao Paulo city accent not the state accent). But when they here The Portuguese news from Portugal, they ask if it is Russian or some Slavic language. My next posts I will put posts off of Youtube to compare all the accents.