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As if we dont know how this will turn out. 'whats your is mine'.

http://www.laht.com/article.as...
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
http://www.miamiherald.com/new...
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/0...
http://www.scmp.com/news/world...
http://news.abs-cbn.com/overse...

There's exactly one fact that actually counts about Cuba's "universal healthcare": When Comrade Fidel gets a cold, the doctors that treat him are flown in from Spain via charter jet.

Don't believe me? Even pro-Castro sources flat out say it: http://www.laht.com/article.as...

The rest is a bunch of empty Michael Moore fapping.

P.S. --> Shouldn't the embargo make Cuba stronger? After all, the Revolution shouldn't be contaminated by evil American Capitalist Imperialism.. right?

So which is worse, being a failed communist state or what Cuba was before the revolution: America's whorehouse? Only an American would fail to understand why people would rather put up with communism than live in a capitalist paradise where the most promising career option for a young woman is to prostitute herself to fat and VD infested American tourists.

There's exactly one fact that actually counts about Cuba's "universal healthcare": When Comrade Fidel gets a cold, the doctors that treat him are flown in from Spain via charter jet.

Don't believe me? Even pro-Castro sources flat out say it: http://www.laht.com/article.as...

The rest is a bunch of empty Michael Moore fapping.

P.S. --> Shouldn't the embargo make Cuba stronger? After all, the Revolution shouldn't be contaminated by evil American Capitalist Imperialism.. right?

So do you agree that their policies are not Keynesian as the paper I provided shows?

I have to concede that I'm not an economist so I may be wrong, but the policies are sorta-Keynesian, involving government spending to stimulate the economy. And that spending is mostly social welfare projects, like the Bolsa Familia .

Can you provide a source for the improving wealth disparity you claim? Wiki shows this as steady, just like continued problems with corruption and taxes that target the poor.

My claim of the wealth disparity improving is not mine at all, you can look yourselft at the link you provided, Gini index has gone from ~0.6 to ~0.55 in one decade, a substantial improvement IMO. Corruption and taxes affects mostly everyone, not just the poor, and despite the cynism and bias of our media, I think we are slowly improving on that front too. :)

There is very little middle class in Brazil to my knowledge, maybe you have a data source that I can't find.

Not true at all . And Brazil's middle class has actually expanded during that last decade too.

How about Plasticination?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdAeDEHEneA

You could easily dub a Chavismo soundtrack onto this actually. Notice how the white skinned European Comprador/Kulak exploiter puppet has all the stuff at the beginning and sends the brown skinned and presumably native puppet, Hugo, away.

Pretty soon Hugo will mount a coup and, the murder rate will go up eleventy million percent and they'll have food shortages, hyperinflation and so on. Then Hugo will force all the TV stations to broadcast a four hour TV show and the white skinned exploiter puppet will leave for Argentina and take all the stuff with him and Hugo will denounce him angrily.

Incidentally this is an interesting article about Chavez

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/whats-happened-to-venezuelas-dream-of-progress/

Teacher Herma Marksman was Chavez's partner and lover for nine years. It was the early 1980s when they met; she was in her 30s, and he was a talkative army officer in his 20s. Marksman studied history in the 1960s. Her mother was a peasant and her German immigrant father a union organiser for ironworkers. She is a classic example of those in the lower middle classes who believed in Chavez.

"We were preparing for the time when we would be in government," Marksman recalls. "We wanted to establish a state in which the law was respected, to abolish corruption, to develop our basic industries and to do a real restructuring of the education system. None of that has happened. If anything, there has been a turning for the worse. Today there is more injustice, and no sign of that group of democrats who voiced, and accepted, different opinions. We live under an autocrat who does not respect the separation of powers. There is a chief justice who does not act, a financial comptroller who does not control, an ombudsman who only defends government interests. So where is the Bolivarian project?"

Marksman last spoke to Chavez on 28 July 1993. She now supports the opposition. Responding to the accusation that it comprises coup plotters, fascists and oligarchs, she asks whether it is possible that million-strong demonstrations can consist entirely of such people.

Another former Chavez ally is Pablo Medina, a leading member of the radical Causa R party. Medina provided cars, housing and logistics for the then aspirant leader. But the pair had a legendary bust-up in 1999. Now Medina says: "The civilian-military movement turned into a military-civilian government, and that changed order definitely altered the product." For Medina, Chavez has become "authoritarian, corrupt and neo-liberal".

Medina reserves his strongest criticism for Chavez's anti-globalisation 'posturing'. "This government has presided over a period of the largest net export of capital in our history," he says. "It has been incapable of renegotiating the foreign debt, and it has left the door open for further privatisations." Chavez's anti-imperialist, anti-globalisation rhetoric is, Medina adds, just "Chavez-speak".

Back at the university, Muñoz stares out across the campus. "I am not asking Chavez to be the most radical of radicals. What I ask of him is honesty about what he is doing. I did not ask for a revolution, just to aim for things that are possible." He cites the zero-hunger programme of Brazilian president 'Lula' da Silva. "So, OK, he is not going to go against the liberal state, against globalisation, against capitalism. No, his [target] is zero hunger. Let us say he only manages to lower the rate of hunger from 100 to 30 per cent. Good. That"s what we wanted in Venezuela, and there was a real consensus here to do just that. But what does Chavismo say? "No, we are going to make a revolution!" And in those big words and that confusion everything got lost."

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Okay, there's 10 citations for you. Begin your spin, denouncements, deflections, justifications, and outright lies.....

Every country can do that. Printing money is something every government does, and printing money doesn't create debt, and never has.

However, printing more money does cause inflation.

Kind of off-topic, but this is a common misunderstanding. The most direct causal link between inflation and printing money is that when inflation happens, you are eventually forced to print more money so that payment settlement can continue normally. [1] The misunderstanding comes from people confusing printing money with government spending.

There are a number of causes of inflation, but for this type of discussion, the relationship of productive capacity and aggregate demand is key. The short version is the following. When aggregate demand grows too fast for productive capacity to keep up, then you get inflation (because competition drives up prices). When productive capacity grows faster than aggregate demand, then unemployment results (because companies that cannot fill their order books lay off workers). Those are the key constraints of the economy.

From a sovereign government's point of view, this means that while it can obviously spend as much as it likes, there are real constraints to keep in mind. If the discretionary budget deficit is too large, there will be inflation. If the discretionary budget deficit is too small, there will be unemployment. (Of course, due to automatic stabilisers, the final budget outcome can be very large and unemployment can be high at the same time. In such a situation, the reasonable thing to do is to increase the size of the discretionary budget deficit. This often decreases the final budget outcome via automatic stabilisers.)

One cannot say a priori how large the budget deficit should be to be neutral with respect to both inflation and unemployment. The size of the neutral budget deficit changes over time, based on changing circumstances in the private sector's savings behaviour and the development of the external sector.

Fundamentally though, printing money is just a liquidity management operation. What really matters are spending flows.

If you truly have an open mind and want to learn more about the long version, I suggest you search for Modern Monetary Theory. A good starting point is here, and more thorough analyses can be found on this blog of an Australian economics professor.

[1] The recent story of Argentina in that respect is very educational. Basically, Argentina has long had quite high inflation, and the government believed - like most people do, unfortunately, due to that misunderstanding - that they could fight inflation by not printing any more money. Well, prices were rising anyway, and at some point there was a lack of physical money for people to make their payments. Keep in mind that electronic payments are not well developed in Argentina, so people might have had money in a bank account, but were unable to get it out simply because the ATMs ran out of notes. This was not in any way a bank run, it was just an under-supply of tokens, and the irrationality that goes along with that kind of problems hurt price stability on top of the inflation that was happening anyway. In the end, printing more money solved that problem, but crucially, it was really only about printing more money, purely liquidity management. By printing this money, the government did not increase its spending.

Successful thieves don't steal a little and hope that nobody finds out - they steal so much that, even though everybody knows, they can't be punished. Brazilians talk about "rouba mas faz" - he steals but does something - which I suppose it still better than "steals and does nothing for the country".

This guy was the highest voted Federal Congressman in 2006, although this time round an illiterate clown took first place.

Successful thieves don't steal a little and hope that nobody finds out - they steal so much that, even though everybody knows, they can't be punished. Brazilians talk about "rouba mas faz" - he steals but does something - which I suppose it still better than "steals and does nothing for the country". This guy was the in 2006, although this time round an illiterate clown" took first place.

http://www.laht.com/article.asp?CategoryId=10717&ArticleId=344086
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/601
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/07/something-fishy-in-venezuela/?feat=home_editorials

Dec 2002 to Mar 2003: Disrupting and attempting destruction of the oil industry, depriving everyone of fuel. Most of the saboteurs were fired and the government acquired more control of the industry.
Dec 2002 to Mac 2003: Owners lock-out attempting to force Chavez a resign, did nothing against the government, deprived people from food and basic consumables. It showed the dangers of leaving everything in private hands, the government started implementing state owned production, distribution, and now retail of goods. In short, backfired horribly to opposition interests.
Dec 2004: Opposition parties decide to retire all their candidates to the National Assembly, as a form of "protest", then proceed to cry the following years for not having any representation; get a little breath from former Chavez supporters turning sides (cheating their voters), but still almost non existent presence in the unicameral legislative branch.
2005 etc: Call to block streets near your home. Of course this works mostly in opposition zones, which makes them self isolated for a couple of days, rest of the country ignores them and lives normally.
2006+ attempts to try Ukraine style "orange" revolt (The Albert Einstein Institute method used in many countries) to use "pacific" methods to overthrown ("anti-us") governments. Unfortunately the Venezuelan "students" didn't get the "pacific" part too well, and ended igniting fires, destroying property and even using firearms, losing what little support from the civic society might have left in them.

I could go on, but you either get it or won't at this point. Opposition fails because of its own stupid mistakes, funny thing is they get openly funded by US Tax payers, in the form of National Endowment for Democracy (bi-partisan institution to fund "pro-american" groups in the world) USAID and such. http://www.venezuelafoia.info/english.html

If the USA used a fraction of the funds they waste all over the world funding parties and movements, and instead used it to solve their own social domestic issues, the effects of the economic crash would have been all gone by know, and wouldn't need people crashing planes against public buildings to show their discontent.

On the contrary, the facts of reality back it up perfectly.

Only if you're rooming on Endorphin with Chewbaca.

Is this your "evidence" - a bunch of free-floating notions, with no connection to actual events?

You mean connections like a whistleblower trying to warn the FTC for ten years but was completely ignored? Or Allen Stanford, the hedge fund manager that fled authorities for one day, turned in identical tax returns two years in a row without investigation?

The problem began with the Fed's move to artificially lower interest rates in the name of "affordable housing". Combine that with the implicit government backing of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which turned toxic assets into pure "gold" that could be traded as "securities", again in the name of "affordable housing". Combine that with community reinvestment plans from local/state and federal governments, which forced banks to accept loans from high risk individuals, again in the name of "affordable housing". These all came together to create a bubble that burst once interest rates went back up.

Typical wingnut misdirection. Our mess was caused by greed, by Fannie Maye, not by Freddie Mac, nor by minorities:

Federal Reserve Board data show that:

        * More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.

        * Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.

        * Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics.

And, once again since you ignored it the first time, maybe you'd like to explain how a 30 year old law turned a few hundred billion in mortgages blew up to over $60 trillion dollars in swap markets - more than the planet's entire GDP.

A huge Ponzi network just fell in Colombia, encompassing many cities and more than a billion dollars in loses:

http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=320773&CategoryId=12393

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_JZL9pC6-8

I've heard somthing similar also happened in Bolivia. I think it's all about greed/dreams of easy money.