Comments by "William Warren" (@wbwarren57) on "Russian Economy - Secret Police and the New "Time of Troubles"" video.

  1. Two questions: first, what happened to the Stasi in East Germany when East Germany disappeared? Second, is the secret police apparatus in China similar and as stunting as the FSB in Russia?
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  2.  @EconLessons  The CCP imho is focused on total control, institutionalized theft, and fantasy narratives. By comparison, the FSB and Putin are very small-minded thieves with little or no imagination. 1. The CCP achieves total control by near real-time censorship of all electronic communications, the social point system, all propaganda news all the time, the home-province registration system, central economic planning, etc. Since there is no real legal system or independent judiciary under the CCP, normal people have little or no rights. The belt and road initiative is the CCP's attempt to export total control to the rest of the world through debt traps. 2. For thieving, the tofu dregs construction is the result of institutionalized theft where the prime contract takes a cut off the top and subcontracts to another firm that does the same until there is almost no money to actually pay for construction. The real estate Ponzi scheme is another form of institutionalized theft that involves the real estate firms, the provincial governments, and the banks. The building of poorly conceived, poorly designed, poorly build infrastructure is another form of theft - the Chinese people are saddled with debt that will never be repaid (such as that used to build the high speed rail) with the majority of the money going into the pockets of local and national officials. 3. The CCP focuses on creating fantasy narratives about how great and strong the CCP and strives endlessly to convince the Chinese people that there the CCP IS China and that without the CCP, there is no China. To support this narrative, the CCP builds huge infrastructure projects that will be the biggest in the world which in fact are nothing but huge wastes of money like the high speed rail, the interstate highway system, the unused bridges, the space program, the CCP global positioning system that does not work, the over-inflated military that really can't fight, the huge navy of small ships that can't leave China's shores, the huge skyscrapers that never get finished, etc.
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