Forbes | Communism Is The Reason For The Trade Deficit With China Forbes What a stunning turn of events over the last generation. Only in 1989, the year of the fateful events in Tiananmen Square, China was irrelevant in the world economy. The battered and brutalized giant had been growing, to be sure, since the agricultural ... |
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Communism Is The Reason For The Trade Deficit With China - Forbes
Dylan is a budding YouTuber who believes communism could save the United States.
Its 2017 and the communist revolution is being spearheaded online by a 10-year-old vegetarian with a preference for red shirts and a lot to say. If you frequent Reddit, Dylan, or Sceneable as hes known on YouTube, might have come into your sphere last week after his video, We Need Communism, climbed to the top of the socialism subreddit declaring him the smollest comrade.
If you havent yet been introduced to Dylan, well then, you are in for a treat. Select All caught up with the fourth grader via phone (with his dad also on the line) to discuss his political opinions, newfound viral fame, and his thoughts on President Trump.
Lets start by talking a bit about your channel, Dylan. How long have you been on YouTube? Well, I first uploaded my first video in March of 2015, but my original channel actually started out because there was a comment I wanted to leave. My channel was actually made in 2013.
What was the comment you wanted to leave that got you to join YouTube? I forget.
Then two years later you decided to start posting your own videos. What was the first video you uploaded?Um, well it was about a topic I cant I dont even have the energy or the will to talk about okay, so I used to like Pokmon. Im not interested in it anymore, and it was a video about that.
So youre totally over Pokmon now? I guess you probably didnt play Pokmon Go last summer then. No, that came out in 2016, and my video was in 2015.
You were way over Pokmon at that point.Oh, definitely. Definitely.
Ive watched lots of your videos, and I saw one where you talk about changing the name of your channel to Sceneable. Can you tell me about why you decided to change the name? I dont know. I just liked it better.
In the video, you talked a little bit about how you used to be emo, but now youre more scene. Can you explain what that means? I dont want to talk about that. I just dont want to.
Okay, no worries. How do you pick your video topics? A lot of times it just comes from inspiration in me. Fear, rage, disgust a lot of it is triggered by emotions.
So one of your big topics and obviously how a lot of people, myself included, have found your videos via Reddit is communism. What sparked your interest in communism? One day, I heard about it and so I found out more about it. I found out about its history of being, um it started when I first heard about communism and the idea of nations sharing the wealth. Oftentimes, schools just spread this propaganda about it being a bad thing, and say you shouldnt question it and you shouldnt think about the fact that it brings money to people who need it; you should just go along with the fact that its inherently evil, even though it would stop the problem of having so many poor people.
So thats what you like most about communism? The idea that wealth would be shared with poorer people? Yeah. Exactly. You got it in just one sentence.
But is there anything about communism that concerns you?Well, in the first video about communism I ever made, I said that I really dont like people like Joseph Stalin and or Mikhail Gorbachev however you say his name. People like that are people I could not support ever, which is why socialism is probably better than communism Im realizing.
Thats tricky. Somebody always has to lead and be at the top. Right. Leaders can definitely corrupt an idea. I mean, come one, lets think about Trump.
What do you think of President Trump? Um, how do I put this nicely [shouts into the phone] HES A BIG, FAT JOKE.
Thats putting it nicely, I guess. What concerns you the most about Trump? Starvation, stereotypes, war, but theyre just little problems.
You talk a lot about different forms of government, youve got some strong opinions of Trump, is politics something you could see yourself getting involved in as an adult? Yeah.
If you were president, what would be the first thing youd do? Okay, um, how about first of all, Id change capitalism to communism in a nanosecond. Actually, socialism. Not communism. Then Id move the troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
Sounds like youve given this some thought.Definitely.
Youve got almost 20,000 followers on YouTube, and youve been posting videos for years, so Im guessing youve faced a fair number of trolls. I have found so many people who dont like me. Who just cannot believe me. A lot of them are people who completely hate communism with either very little facts or no facts. They call it stealing. If stealing and sharing were the same thing, theyd probably be the same word. I think people need to remember definitions are important.
Do you get a lot of positive feedback too? Definitely. I think this was on my video criticizing how people say God can be omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient at the same time, which is one of my most popular videos. I forget the users name who left this comment, but he said, and I quote, This kid needs to be the president of every country.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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A Conversation With YouTube's Favorite 10-Year-Old Communist Vlogger - New York Magazine
"We're driving through Seattle right now. It's like an episode of Frasier," G.L. Jaguar says to me shortly after picking up the phone. He and his bandmates in Priests are bundled up in a van, embarking on a cross-country tour to promote their astonishing new album, Nothing Feels Natural. It's a playful and furious album one that feels perfectly suited to soundtrack the increasingly surreal and ominous times that we're living in right now.
Emerging from the D.C. punk underground, Priests have been turning heads for years with their fiery live sounds and chaotic, spirited records. Initially playing with explosive no-wave fury, they've evolved into a tightly coiled unit. On the mic, Priests singer Katie Alice Greer sounds like the long-lost love child of Poly Styrene and Mark E. Smith: Language just seems to pour out of her in manic, poetic fragments. Jaguar's guitar sputters and roars like a drowning surf rock band, and the rhythm section of Taylor Mulitiz's bass lines and Daniele Daniele's drumbeats holds it all together beautifully.
Priests also run their own record label, Sister Polygon. Talking with the quartet as they drove through Frasier Crane's hood, I asked them about the influences behind their new record and the struggles that can come from trying to run your own record label while staying true to your D.I.Y. roots.
New Times: How's the tour been so far?
Katie Alice Greer:It's nice to see so many people coming outwe haven't done a full U.S. tour since 2014. It's very exciting to play in all these cities that we haven't been to in years.
Has it been a challenge playing these new songs live as a four-piece band? You've incorporated a lot of new instruments and sonic touches on the album, like saxophones and pianos.
G.L. Jaguar: We don't have the additional instrumentation when we do it live... there's different ways that the songs play out in a live setting, like through pedals. There are definitely things we did on this record that we can't do live
Greer: This is the first time we've put out a release where we can actually play all the songs live because the basic structure was written by the four of us on our primary instruments. So it was very easy to transpose that into a live setting.
Daniele Daniele:About a month ago, we played a show at home. All the style of musicians who are on the album are DC musicians. So for that we got to have two of our friends come onstage and play those songs with us, songs that they had helped us record and play on. It was a blast.
I read a feature that SPIN recently did on Priests, and it'smentioned in there that Portishead's Thirdwas a big sonic reference point for Nothing Feels Natural. I was surprised by that, because I wouldn't have guessed at all from listening to the album that there was a Portishead influence on it. In what way did you draw inspiration from Third?
Jaguar:Since we tour so much, we're always listening to music in the van. Thirdis an album I really like to put on when I drive. It's a really good, almost-krautrock record where it's constantly flowing. The thing to me that was really appealing, from a sonics perspective, is that it had a lot of these very lo-fi raucous elements, but it was combined with big production values. It was a really good mix of the two. It helped us find a way to bridge our older material with the newer sound: to mix lo-fi rockin' sounds and fill it all out more with synthesizers, percussion, cello, and saxophones. So in that respect, that's how we draw from it sonically.
Speaking of road music, what are you listening to for this tour?
Daniele:As you called, we were just listening to Parliament.
Jaguar: The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, specifically.
That leads me to my next question. Katie, in "Appropriate," there's this line, "Is George Clinton the kinda story your adventure's looking for?" I was wondering what the meaning of that was?
Greer:That song is about cultural appropriation. What I meant with that line is is George Clinton's story really your story, or is it his story and it's something that you're trying on? If you're an artist who's relatively more privileged than someone else, you have access to all these different influences. It's important to be mindful of how you're bringing in your influences. I wrote that song almost as a dialogue between two people; the line before it is someone talking about maggots and bugs. One of my favorite records is [Funkadelic's] Maggot Brain, so it's kind of a nod to the monologue at the beginning of that song.
Considering your band's political beliefs and convictions, I was wondering how that has an impact on how you run your own record label.
Greer: It's important for us to own the means of production whenever possible. It's not always possible, but it feels good to us to have this little world for our music and our friends' music.
Daniele:It's really important to us to not have anyone do any work for free for us. And that goes for the band and the label. The downside to that is we're often paying to play, paying to put out sometimes we end up hitting ourselves financially cause we're trying to live up to that ethos. It's interesting because we want to practice ethos, but we're an island in a sea of capitalism in that way. ... We were in Vancouver last night, and we were talking about the real estate market there. There's all these empty apartments in Vancouverbecause in China you can't keep more than a certain amount of money in your bank account because it can be seized by the government. So all these people don't want to keep money in their accounts, so they just dump it in properties in Vancouver that they're not going to use. They just want to hold their money that way. And I was just like, wow, because China is a communist country essentially I'm not trying to be like "woo China" but I am "woo socialism" and different forms of economy. People are always like, "See? Communism doesn't work. Look at China, look at...," and that's not really fair, because the reason that fucked-up dynamic is happening is because it's one place within a larger capitalistic world economy. I'm not trying to endorse the Chinese economy because it's really fucked-up in a lot of ways. ... I just often feel that way with our record label and with how we run our band, that we're trying to live out certain ideologies but we keep butting our heads up against thisfucked-up system.
Priests will be performing with Olivia Neutron-John and Nanami Ozone at Valley Bar in Phoenix on Thursday, February 23.
Read more from the original source:
Priests Drummer Compares Running a Record Label to Chinese ... - Phoenix New Times
One of the historically remarkable settlements along the coastal stretch in Ilaje Local Government Area of Ondo State is Ayetoro, otherwise called the Holy Apostles Community. The town was a utopian Christian community where communism once fully held sway. There was joint ownership of properties; it tilted towards a classless society. HAKEEM GBADAMOSI, after a visit to Ayetoro, reports the peculiarities of the town and the challenges therewith.
Ayetoro was popularly known for its adoption and practice of communism in the late 1940s. The history of the community started when a group of militant Christians known as Omo Oba Jesu came into the coastal part of Ilaje in the southern part of the state. This group of Christian preachers called the Holy Apostles thus, on January 12, 1947, converged and established their church and a settlement called Ayetoro.
They reportedly had a unique way of communal relationship which was akin to communism as practiced by the early Christians in the Bible. In Ayetoro, these militant Christians ensured that there was the public ownership of all investments. At that early part, there was no individual ownership of property. Their peculiar way of life and place of settlement was initially opposed by some powerful rulers in Ilaje land.
It, however, took the intervention of the colonial authority through the secretary of Ondo Province who allowed them live as they deemed fit.
The people of Ayetoro were reputed for their commercial living and advanced technology in fishing, transportation, industry such as carpentry and furniture, shoe making, bakery, soap making, Textile and marine business.
The town was said to be so popular that it attracted the attention of Chief Obafemi Awolowo and the communist world in the 1950s, particularly the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Many students from Ayetoro were educated through a bilateral agreement with countries like West Germany, Hungary, Austria and the United Kingdom.
However, the decline in Ayetoros sense of communism began in the 1970s.
An octogenarian and one of the survivors of communism in Ayetoro, Pa Bankole Joshua, in an interaction with Nigerian Tribune spoke glowingly of the early days of communism in Ayetoro, just as he added that the people celebrated Ayetoros 70th founders day on January 15th, earlier this year.
He recalled that the community was uninhabitable before the first Christian militant, Zaccheus Okenla, received the call of the Almighty God and led others there.
Pa Joshua added that in the beginning there was no individual ownership of properties, no security challenges and the whole community worshipped in one church with the spiritual leaders being in control of all activities.
Speaking on the genesis of communism in Ayetoro, he said the spiritual leader then, Okenla, whom he described as intelligent, imaginative, and strong-willed received the inspiration on the style of governance from God through the Holy Spirit.
According to him, the adoption of communism was aimed at reducing the importance of family bonds and fostering of communal ownership of everything. Under Ayetoro communism, the traditional extended family was abolished and all activities organised along family lines were discouraged. By early 1950s, the whole settlement was spatially divided into female and male sections separated by a central board-walk raised on stilts.
He explained further that spouses lived separately saying about four or five women lived in one house in the female section while same applied to the men. Speaking about raising children, Pa Joshua said young children under the age of five were kept at a special section while their mothers worked in different departments until they retired home around 5pm.
He said different departments were created then and things were done together or uniformly. He listed the departments to include: textile, boat making, carpentry, shoe making, soap making and fishery which was the communitys major source of income.
He said fish were sold and the income used to develop the community, saying we had a central system; we ate together and whatever you needed would be catered to. But there was no right to private ownership; it was just collective ownership.
Children were usually assigned to foster parents whom they lived with from the age five or six. These foster parents were responsible for their training and behavior. Every man was regarded as a father to every child here. We saw ourselves as very civilized. People came from far and wide to understudy how we did things here. Christianity played a vital role as the church leaders whom we referred to as the Holy Apostles placed more emphasis on the role of the Holy Spirit in directing our affairs. Though communism is no longer fully practiced, it still plays out in our day to day activities.
Speaking on the state of communism in the town, one of the elders of the only church in the community, the Holy Apostles Church, Lawrence Lemamu affirmed that communism was not utterly eradicated as speculated by people but reformed to suit modern trends and to avert the circumstances that destroyed the system in Russia and other places where it was practiced.
Lemamu said as a matter of fact, the system was reformed to embrace individual responsibilities rather than a large whole feeding on the efforts of a few people. He said the traces of communism could still be felt in the church which is the only symbol of authority in the land: traditionally, spiritually and administratively.
He noted that the increase in human population was another factor that led to reforms in the communal system, saying that providing for the teeming population became a huge task which could not be met by the leaders.
According to him, the people of the community still jointly carried out some projects for the wellbeing and welfare of the people. The NDDC sunk a borehole for the community without completing the project but through communal effort, we finished it and water runs in almost every home in Ayetoro. Aside this, we renovated our old bakery and started production again. The loaves of bread we consume are produced by our people while we use the profits from the proceeds to develop our land.
To make life more comfortable for our people, each house in the community enjoys at least four hours of uninterrupted power supply every day of the week. At weekends, we supply electricity from morning till evening. We have been doing this since the days of communism. We dont depend on government for this, he said.
Lemamu lamented that those who were sponsored through communal efforts to acquire western education turned against the system when they returned home.
According to him, the educated elite saw themselves as more superior to the people who worked for their academic training. They considered the old tradition and system of the community as barbaric, archaic and evil. This affected us a great deal. They insisted that we embrace capitalism and not communism. Today, each family is responsible for the education of their wards or children. It is no longer through communal efforts.
A member of Ayetoro youth congress, Emmanuel Aralu, noted that those who turned against the tradition of the people were driven by selfish motives meant to destroy the traditional practices of the people under the guise of bringing civilisation to them.
This people, since they had acquired foreign education through communal sponsorship and attained influential status, they chose to fight the communitys governance establishment. Our community is educationally backward. The only secondary here is Happy City College which was established during the days of Obafemi Awolowo. Today, the school is nothing to write home about, he said
Aralu frowned on the neglect of the community by subsequent governments in the state. We have cried to government for help on the frequent occurrence of ocean surge which usually damage our homes but succeeding governments are insensitive to our plight. Some members of elite from this town are also not helping matters by using the embankment project of the government to siphon money into private pockets. We have not felt the impact of this embankment project. Our homes are daily flooded while some of them are interested in the oil deposit in the community, he said.
Leadership crisis
Lemamu said the peace in the land was disrupted by some members of the educated elite who wanted to change the style of living of the people after the demise of the last ruler of the community. He said leaders in the past were chosen after prayers were offered to the Holy Spirit, just as he insisted that the tradition would be maintained.
He explained that the kingship crisis reached its climax early last year when the whole community was preparing for its founders day anniversary. He recalled that on the eve of the anniversary, gunboats loaded with security personnel invaded the community with the aim of scuttling the anniversary.
According to him, it has been the usual custom of the entire community to hold a procession round the community in their white garments. This was however disrupted by the security men.
He accused some members of the towns elite group who wanted to forcefully install a leader.
They wanted to install a leader not chosen by the Holy Spirit. They raised the false alarm that the celebration would be marred, all in the name of scheming to install the next king after the demise of the fifth Ogeleyinbo, Oba Guard Asogbon on February 12, 2015. This people broke into the church and forcefully took all the paraphernalia of authority. That action was a taboo against the custom and tradition of the community. Since the time of our forefathers, no election has been conducted to choose the any king; therefore, the whole community rejected the moves by this people.
This led to closure of the only church in the land but the people of the community usually converge on the open street for their weekly church service. The first time the church was locked, the community resorted to the City Hall, which we built through communal effort. But we were prevented from using the City Hall by this people who brought security operatives to the holy land for the first time in 2016.
Since the days of our fathers, Ayetoro was the only community without a police post and yet, the peace of the community was never breached. Now they have brought mobile policemen to our community and we are restricted in our own land and from our properties. But we will continue to live as communally as we used to, Lemamu said.
See the article here:
Ayetoro: Once upon a communist town - NIGERIAN TRIBUNE (press release) (blog)
History tells us that when the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991, Russian communism collapsed.
Boris Yeltsin was elevated to president upon the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev on Christmas Day and a new era of dtente began between Russia and the U.S. after 44 years of cold war. For more than 20 years the U.S. and Russia were on mostly friendly terms; so friendly, in fact, that in 1996 a group of Bill Clinton campaign operatives helped save Yeltsins political career.
Although his approval ratings were in a ditch, two-thirds of Russians considered him corrupt, and he trailed five candidates in the polls four months prior to the election, Yeltsin was reelectedwith the help of American campaign professionals operating in secret and cash from American companies.
In 2012, GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, in a debate with President Barack Obama, first broached the neocon-inspired notion that Russia might be more our enemy than friend. Obama, establishment Democrats and the state propaganda mainstream media (apologies for the redundancy), laughed Romney off the stage and into the dustbin containing a litany of limp-wristed faux conservative neocon losers.
But Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, had/has every right to consider the U.S. an enemy. In 2011the Obama/Hillary Clinton State Department had funded if not instigated a protest movement against Putin in an effort to have him resign or get him defeated for reelection. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators gathered across the country and called for his resignation.
Those arent the only elections in which America has meddled. And WikiLeaks just released documents showing CIA espionage in the 2012 French presidential elections.
Now fast forward to the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Clinton lackeys and the mainstream media (again, apologies for the redundancy) along with the neocon establishment wing of the Republican Party are all caterwauling nonstop about Trumps alleged ties to Russia and Russian hacking of the election.
But to recap, the only evidence of Russian hacking comes from Crowdstrike, the Democrat National Committees cybersecurity firm, which has ties to the Council on Foreign Relations. American intelligence agencies were not allowed by the DNC to probe their servers, not that they can be trusted to tell the truth.
To clarify, the neocon wing includesCFR members and their servants and cronies(Republicans and Democrats); the Bush crime family cabal; and the leaders of the anti-Trump movement like Insane John McCain, his lapdog Lindsey Graham, William Kristol of the Zionist propaganda rag Weekly Standard; and former joke presidential candidate Evan McMullin (a former CIA agent). All of them are pushing for war with Russia because Russia stands in the way (in Syria, and alongside Iran) of complete U.S. hegemony over the Middle East.
The neocon wing are descendants of the Trotskyites and Wall Street moguls who funded both sides of the Russian Revolution for profit and exported socialism/communism to Russia.
Both Kristol and McMullin along with other neocons have openly called for a coup against Trump by the Deep State. Coups are said to occur in communist/Marxist/socialist backwaters, not republics. Yet there is an active coup underway against Trump.
Peopleare so nave. Communism is not dead in Russia. It is not dead in Europe. It is not even dead in the United States. Communism is alive and well worldwide.
Communism is only a cover word or disguise for state capitalism or monopoly capitalism and police state power. With only very small variations the entire world is on this system.
Russian communism gets the bad name because it has been used since World War II by the ruling oligarchy and their military-industrial complex to keep the American people in constant fear and political manipulation. More importantly, Russian communism has been used as a decoy to keep the American people and the world from seeing American communism.
Russian communism was exported to Russia from the U.S. (See Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, by Antony Sutton). But in the United States, communism was incubated, concealed and sold as democracy.
Bureaucratic tyranny, a ruling oligarchy and Deep State power areas nefarious in the United States as in any so-called communist country. It is just more sophisticated and the media plus the public school system has sold the U.S. brand of communism as democracy.
When the U.S. spying apparatus is unleashed unrestrained on the American people and even people running for president you are de facto living in a communist police state.
When the federal government, or as we call it, the state, can create money and pay it to you for goods and your labor, you are a slave. You may be a happy slave, but you are indeed a slave to the money creators.
This system is iron-fisted totalitarianism because it is backed by police power. Every countryin the world is on this money creation system backed by police power.
Police power is the power of the state to place restraints on the personal freedom and property rights of persons (individuals) for the protection of the public safety, health, and morals (Blacks Law Dictionary).
This says that public policy is the federal governments monopoly of police power to manipulate, restrict or extinguish human liberty and property for the benefit of the state. This includes legislating social relationships and even morality.
Here are the 10 planks of communism:
These planks are supported by both major political parties.
Russian communism anyone? What a joke. Focus on American communism.
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Read this article:
Russian communism vs. American communism - Personal Liberty Digest