December 26, 2024

End Of Year World Socialism Round-Up: Cuba, China, Venezuela

December 26, 2024/ Francis Menton

For obvious reasons, our legacy media have very limited interest in reporting regularly on economic news from the various socialist/communist paradises around the world. So if you want to learn the latest, best to turn to the Manhattan Contrarian.
Needless to say, all the economic news from these places is bad.
If you think that Bidenomics has been bad for America, you really need to look at the destruction that serious socialism can bring to a country when given a chance.

October 29, 2024

Cuba: The Collapse Accelerates

October 29, 2024/ Francis Menton

Less than three weeks ago, on October 10, I had a post about Cuba with the headline “What The Hell Is Going On In Cuba?”
The post noted that it is difficult to get real information from Cuba, and that there had recently been almost total silence about that island from the mainstream media. But if one researched some out-of-the-way sources, it turned out that there is some sort of sudden economic collapse going on there.
Besides economic production declining significantly, and pervasive shortages of basic goods, there was also information from a source in Spain (El Pais) that Cuba’s population had suddenly dropped by close to 20% over just the past two to three years. Moreover, the 20% who had departed were not randomly distributed, but rather were concentrated among those in their prime working years, meaning that Cuba had suddenly lost around a third of its working age population.
In the short period since that post, the collapse has accelerated.

October 10, 2024

October 10, 2024/ Francis Menton

Have you seen any economic news coming out of Cuba recently? With barely a couple of exceptions, if you read the U.S. Corporate Media, likely you have not.
Searching for the most recent articles on Cuba’s economy from mainstream sources just now, I find nothing in the Washington Post about Cuba’s economy since May 2022; nothing from the New York Times since a piece in April rehashing the usual litany of Cuba’s long-known economic failures; silence at CBS since a piece in April quoting a Cuban official as “blam[ing] the U.S. for exodus of migrants, economic issues”; nothing from CNN since a March article discussing “power cuts and food shortages.” And so forth. OK, Cuba’s economy has performed poorly for decades, ever since Castro’s revolution 65 years ago. We already knew that. But are there any important new developments we should know about?
I last wrote about the economic situation in Cuba about a month ago. The news I could find then already made the World Bank “data” appear ridiculous.
Since then, more facts have dribbled out to make Cuba look like a full-on disaster.

September 15, 2024

September 15, 2024/ Francis Menton

With a radical far-leftist in serious contention for the presidency in our upcoming election, it is worthwhile to check in on the record of leftism and socialism in other countries.
It so happens that pretty much every country to our South in the Western Hemisphere has a long history of some variety of leftist/socialist politics. With a few exceptions here and there, when there has been an election in Latin America in my lifetime, the winning strategy has been to run against the “Yanqui imperialists” and advance a program of “social justice” and redistribution.
Particular policies vary from country to country, but the usual playbook includes such things as massive government intervention in the economy, government ownership of major companies (starting with the energy industry), central planning, requirements of multiple licenses and permits to start any business, and many more such.
Recent elections have continued or returned leftists to power in all but one of the most important countries — Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile.

August 23, 2024

August 23, 2024/ Francis Menton

Here in the U.S., we are accustomed to economic growth almost every year. Look at a chart of U.S. GDP over the course of the last century, and the impression is of near-continuous and extremely robust growth. Here is such a chart from USA Facts, based on data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (Commerce Department).
This pattern of continual growth is unfortunately not true for all countries. For an extreme case of the opposite situation, consider Venezuela.

August 07, 2024

August 07, 2024/ Francis Menton

As the saying goes, Socialists: You can vote them in, but you have to shoot them out. We’re watching an extreme example of that saying play out right now in Venezuela.
The U.S. press seems remarkably uninterested in events in Venezuela following its presidential election held July 28. Likely that’s because those events show just how much a determined election fixer can get away with when he controls all the levers of power in a country and is in a position to block and stymie any investigation into election fraud.
There are clear lessons from that for the upcoming U.S. election, lessons that the press would prefer not be learned.
First, a review of where we are.