PrairiePundit

 Federalist Wire: ... At a recent Claremont Institute gathering, Vice President JD Vance delivered a sharp critique of New York Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, framing him as a vivid reflection of the American Left’s internal contradictions. Describing Mamdani as a “33-year-old communist running an insurgent campaign,” Vance argued that his win in the Democratic mayoral primary reveals “interesting threads” that mirror the current state of the American Left. He contrasted Mamdani’s support base with the coalition behind President Donald Trump, which Vance characterized as a “broad working-and-middle-class coalition.” Mamdani’s supporters, he noted, form “almost the inverse of that.” Vance highlighted Mamdani’s appeal among “high-income and college-educated New Yorkers, and especially both young, highly educated New Yorkers,” while pointing out his weaker performance among Black voters and those without college degrees. He also noted Mamdani’s strong support in “the Ban...

 Red State: Markets aren't perfect, but they generally get things right in the long run, as long as they are left alone. Argentina's wonderful Javier Milei seems to have assimilated that fact, even if his American counterparts mostly have not. In the most recent evidence of  El Presidente  Milei's economic acumen, we see that he has trashed Argentina's rent control program - and the  rental housing market is now booming . For years, Argentina imposed one of the world’s strictest rent-control laws. It was meant to keep homes such as the stately belle epoque apartments of Buenos Aires affordable, but instead, officials here say, rents soared. Now, the country’s  new president , Javier Milei, has scrapped the rental law, along with most government price controls, in a fiscal experiment that he is conducting to revive South America’s second-biggest economy.  The result: The Argentine capital is undergoing a rental-market boom. Landlords are rushing to put their...

 NY Post: This rueful joke has made its way around Cuba for decades: A foreign tourist, soaking up what he thinks are the advances of the communist revolution, stops a kid in the street for a chat. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” the visitor asks. “A foreigner,” answers the young Cuban. Morbid humor has long been the staple of communist regimes, from Czechoslovakia to the Soviet Union, from China to the once-prosperous Caribbean island of Cuba. People who have lived through communism, with its alternating bouts of horrors and tedium, say it is one way to deal with such surreal surroundings. But today, the joke meant to pour scorn on Cuba’s miserable conditions has become reality: Between 2022 and 2023, 10% of all Cubans have fled their socialist paradise to live elsewhere. That’s more than one million people, and most of them have come to the United States, courtesy of President Biden’s open-border policies and the miserable record of his “border czar,” Vice President K...

Ward Clark: China's in trouble. They have for some time now been facing the inevitable pop of their real estate bubble, and it looks to be happening now. China, being a communist country, reacted as communist and socialist regimes always do—by throwing more money at the problem. As is always the case,  it's not working . Markets in China sank Friday despite a fresh flurry of measures to help prop up the ailing property sector, as the International Monetary Fund forecast that the Chinese economy will continue to slow in coming years.  The  report by the IMF  forecast that the economy would expand at a 4.6% annual pace this year, down from 5.2% in 2023. It put growth in 2028 at 3.4%. It noted that housing starts had fallen more than 60% from pre-pandemic levels after a crackdown on excessive borrowing that began in 2020.  That’s a pace “only seen in the largest housing busts in cross-country experience in the last three decades,” it said.  Shanghai’s benchmar...

 Seattle Times: Since Deng Xiaoping opened China to the West in the 1980s and instituted a free-market economy, the country experienced a stratospheric rise. Under Deng and his successors, gross domestic product rose at high rates for four decades as millions of Chinese were lifted out of poverty. China became the world’s workshop as Western capital, technology and corporations flooded in. By 2010, China became the world’s second-largest economy after the United States. Xi set a goal of doubling the nation’s economy by 2035, surpassing America. But it is apparently not to be . China suffers from a mountain of debt. Empty apartment towers proliferate amid an enormous real estate bubble. For example, the meltdown of Country Garden , one of China’s largest builders, has rippled to affect workers and small businesses. With deflation setting in, Xi’s goal of turning the country into a consumer-driven economy is out of reach. So is his ambition to expand homegrown advanced technology to ...

 Reuters: The Cuban capital of Havana will begin electricity blackouts in August, has canceled carnival and is taking other measures as the country’s energy crisis worsens, state media reported on Saturday. The capital, home to a fifth of the population of 11.2 million and center of economic activity in Cuba, had been spared the daily power outages of four or more hours that the rest of the island has endured for months. Blackouts have sparked a few small local protests this summer and a year ago in July fueled a day of unprecedented unrest across the country as discontent boiled over. For now, a schedule of power outages will mean each of Havana's six municipalities will have its electricity cut every three days during peak mid-day hours, according to the local Communist Party daily, Tribuna de la Habana, which reported on a meeting of local authorities. The blackouts reflect a deepening economic crisis that began with harsh new U.S. sanctions on the island in 2019 and worsened wi...

  Daily Mail: Republicans launch bill to make history of COMMUNISM compulsory teaching in schools to combat CRT and because 'Soviets could not have imagined a better ally than the Democrat socialists of America today' I suspect Democrats would try to take advantage of this law to push their socialist agenda by rewriting the history of communism. 

 Washington Free Beacon: New York Times journalist and 1619 Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones praised the communist dictatorship of Cuba for leading the "most equal" country in the Western Hemisphere. "Cuba has the least inequality between black and white people of any place really in the hemisphere," Hannah-Jones said in a 2019 episode of the podcast Conversations, hosted by Vox cofounder Ezra Klein. "Cuba actually has the least inequality. And that's largely due to socialism, which I'm sure no one wants to hear." The National Pulse first reported on Hannah-Jones's comments following anti-regime protests that have rocked Cuba and led to violent crackdowns from President Miguel Díaz-Canel. While some U.S. media, the Black Lives Matter movement , and Díaz-Canel blamed pandemic shortages and the American embargo for the protests, the protesters say they oppose the communist regime, with many chanting "Liberty," "We want change,...

  Epoch Times: ‘Down With Dictatorship’: Thousands of Cubans Demonstrate Against Communist Regime Thousands of Cubans took to the streets on Sunday in a number of cities to protest against human rights abuses, a lack of freedom, and a worsening economic situation in the communist-ruled country. ... I suspect that AOC and the Squad are shocked that people think "free" healthcare sucks.  I think the only surprise is that it took the people who remain in Cuba this long to get fed up with the incompetence and enforced poverty of communism.  See, also: Cubans' Desire for Freedom Confuses American Commies And:  Outspoken Democratic socialists in Congress silent as Communist Cuba cracks down on mass protests Cuban leaders overrate the competence of the Biden administration: Cuban President Blames U.S. for ‘Social Unrest’ after Massive Anti-Communist Protest The Biden team is one of the least likely to be behind the unrest.  They have more pro-communist than any recen...

 Roger Simon: ... Although an astonishing number of younger Americans have little or no knowledge of the Holocaust , I would imagine most readers of this outlet realize that Germany’s takeover with the Vichy government’s compliance resulted in such events as the notorious July 1942 night time roundup in suburban Paris of 7000 Jews, including 4000 children, before they were shipped off for extermination. Comparing that to the election of Donald Trump really is obscene, and also wildly anti-Semitic, unless, of course, you think saying nasty things about your opponents on Twitter is the equivalent of Auschwitz. Many of our supposedly “progressive” friends evidently did, overwhelmed by a delusional case of moral narcissism all out of proportion to reality, allowing them to “act out” in the most self-aggrandizing manner, identifying with the true heroes of “La Résistance” when there was no discernible threat to them whatsoever. Indeed, what actually happened to the daily lives of our l...

NY Times: Local Officials in China Hid Coronavirus Dangers From Beijing, U.S. Agencies Find A new U.S. intelligence report says top officials in Beijing were in the dark in early January on the true dangers of the virus. That could affect U.S. policy on China. When you have a dictatorship, lower officials are unwilling to discuss a problem.  It is the nature of Communist control.  It was one of the reasons why communism failed in the Soviet Union.  American Marxists are also unlikely to recognize the same problem.

Glenn Beaton: In an environment of limited resources – which is to say an environment in the real world – those resources get allocated. Not everyone can start and build Microsoft and not everyone can conceive of the General Theory of Relativity. So how does society decide which people do? The answer is that society doesn’t decide. Instead it happens as a result of merit. The most meritorious aren’t allocated those titles, wealth, inventiveness, prestige and accolades. They earn them. The founder and builder of Microsoft is an extraordinarily talented, hard-working and risk-taking individual named Bill Gates. The guy who thought up the General Theory of Relativity is an obscure and un-trumpeted (at the time) but brilliantly creative man who is now synonymous with “genius” named Albert Einstein. Others could have done what they did. But others didn’t. They lacked sufficient merit. If this sounds like social Darwinism, that’s because it is. In the animal world, it’s survival ...

Red States: ... ... Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) appeared on Fox News on Tuesday and laid out   in stark terms   what the GOP message should be going forward into the fall elections. Jordan made the remarks in context of the reports on how some University of Wisconsin students are demanding removal of a statue of former President Abraham Lincoln: “Is it going to be Joe Biden or Donald Trump. I mean, think about the cancel culture mob [that] says that if you stand for the pledge now, you stand for the anthem, somehow you’re terrible,” Jordan said. […] “The fundamental question, I think, for the American people is who do you think can stand up to the mob? Joe Biden or President Trump? That is really what this election now in my mind all boils down to,” Jordan said. “Where does it end? Where does it stop? No one is safe with the mob and that’s why it is so important that we stand up now before this gets even more out of control. Stand up and say it is wrong, it should not h...

Mark Hemingway: After leaving Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., in 2017 amid a clash with woke activists, progressive academic Bret Weinstein has often felt like a lonely voice on the left warning about the dangers of campus intolerance and unrest spilling out into the real world. But now, with "cancel culture" on the rise as protesters nationwide tear down statues in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, the biologist says he feels an uneasy sense of vindication -- and the tide turning. “I’ve started to get calls in the last week or two – the people who mocked me and others … for making too much of what appeared to be college kids going wild on college campuses,” he said on the Joe Rogan podcast on June 18. “Some of them have started to call and say: ‘I got it wrong. What do we do now?’” It turns out that a quiet counterrevolution is already underway. In March of last year, President Trump issued an executive order making federal research fu...

Washington Post: Sanders’s Cold War trips to communist countries become a problem for his campaign Video clips from the 1980s of Bernie Sanders talking about his visits to the Soviet Union, Cuba and Nicaragua are being spread online by rivals who say his views were naive — and that they make him vulnerable to GOP attacks in the general election if he is the Democratic nominee for president. His defense of despots like Castro in recent interviews has also hurt his campaign especially in states like Florida.  He is still a naive commie when it comes to his agenda.  He makes promises on spending that he cannot possibly keep.  He can't really tell you what Cuba and Venezuela did wrong in implementing socialism.  That is an area where his adversaries have really failed to push him.  If he can't tell you what the did that was wrong how can he give any assurance that he would not make the same mistakes?

John Miltimore: The fall of the Soviet Union is sometimes remembered as Nov. 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall symbolically collapsed. While the physical barrier endured for some two more years, on that day, East German Communist Party officials announced they would no longer stop citizens of the German Democratic Republic from crossing the border. The fall of the barrier that scarred Germany was indeed a watershed in the collapse of the Soviet Empire, yet one could argue the true death knell came two months before at a small grocery store in Clear Lake, Texas. On Sept. 16, 1989, Boris Yeltsin was a newly elected member of the Soviet Parliament visiting the United States. Following a scheduled visit to Johnson Space Center, Yeltsin and a small entourage made an unscheduled stop at a Randalls grocery store in Clear Lake, a suburb of Houston. He was amazed by the aisles of food and stocked shelves, a sharp contrast to the breadlines and empty columns he was accustomed to in Russia. ...

NY Times: Bernie Sanders Scores Narrow Victory in New Hampshire Primary The Vermont senator tightened his grip on the Democratic Party’s liberal wing, benefiting from a field that has divided moderate voters. The second place went to a gay male whose father was a Marxist.  The Democrat voters appear to have given up on moderation and appealing to the middle. In third was Klobacher who probably is the sanest of the active candidates for the Democrat nomination despite a reputation for being mean to her staff and eating a salad with a comb. Warren and Biden trailed badly.  Warren who is a Senator from Massachusetts had no home-field advantage in New England.  Warren tried to mimic Bernie on healthcare and she lost credibility.  Somehow Bernie still was able to get several suckers to vote for his awful policies. The problem for Democrat "moderates" is that they have been too reluctant to challenge Sander's absurd policies which would destroy the health insu...

Silvio Cantu Jr.: Many years ago, my mother used to say "me voy a la cola" or loosely translated to "I am going to stand in line." Back then, they were ration lines from "a" to "z." My mother carried "una tarjeta" or a ration card where the merchant would mark how many ounces of this or that she got this week.    Not much has changed, as we see in this report by the Wall Street Journal : Pushed by the implosion of top ally Venezuela and sanctions imposed by the Trump administration, Cuba has driven into an economic ditch. The government has tightened state rations. Residents stand in lines for hours to buy scarce basic goods such as eggs, flour and chicken. The lines are still here. What's also here are the excuses. Back then, it was "Yankee imperialismo" choking the revolution. We were told that sacrifice made the new "socialist man or woman". ... The lines are part of Cuba, again. The excuses alw...

Kevin Williamson: Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has one-upped socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: She proposes to nationalize every major business in the United States of America. If successful, it would constitute the largest seizure of private property in human history. Warren’s proposal is dishonestly called the “Accountable Capitalism Act.” Accountable to whom? you might ask. That’s a reasonable question. The answer is — as it always is — accountable to politicians, who desire to put the assets and productivity of private businesses under political discipline for their own selfish ends. It is remarkable that people who are most keenly attuned to the self-interest of CEOs and shareholders and the ways in which that self-interest influences their decisions apparently believe that members of the House, senators, presidents, regulators, Cabinet secretaries, and agency chiefs somehow are liberated from self-interest when they take office through some ...

NY Times: Cubans Doubt a Change at the Top Will Trickle Down On the streets of Havana, the passing of power out of the hands of the Castro family was met with a collective sense of apathy. It is hard to imagine after decades of ruinous communist rule anyone would still have faith in such a disastrous economy model, but Cuba is not alone in that delusion.  Many in US academia hold that same view of a system that has failed everywhere it has been tried.  At its heart communism is a system with few if any incentives to increase production other than negative ones.  It is like slavery in that regard.  The result is increased poverty and a need for control freaks to manage "markets" that lead to the kind of disasters seen in Cuba and Venezuela.  Why any sentient human being could look at that and say that is what they want is a mystery.  It only works for a few corrupt individuals at the top.