It became very popular about 10 years ago when the media began to use it to describe UPA2 or Manmohan Singh's government at that time to say that all economic policies were being drafted and rules were being bent to have just a few big corporate friends or cronies. These capitalists were getting all big government contracts, they were getting all the licenses, they were being handed out public assets like airports, 2G spectrum, coal mines and government banks were being told to give these few big capitalists mega loans to finance their project. So you add the word crony, a friend to capitalism and you get crony capitalism. Now all economists will tell you that this is an aberration, a perverted version of capitalism which is ultimately about free enterprise. Everyone and anyone who has talent is willing to work hard and take risks, can do well in a proper capitalist economy. But in reality all capitalism is crony capitalism and has always been that and there are two parts to this relationship. The first is that capitalism always inevitably leads to monopolies. Let's take any starting point, let's say 2012, 10 years ago. Imagine at that time there were 10 businesses in an economy and they were already well established and a hundred new people wanted to become entrepreneurs. Some did well because they probably had a new product to sell or had to come up with a new cheaper technique to make things that already existed in the market. The older companies would first try to buy out these new companies and own the new technology and use it for themselves. Remember they're already sitting on a big amount of cash and assets which they can use. Now if the acquisition attempts fail, plan B comes into the picture. The bigger companies would simply drop their prices and take temporary losses. They have deep pockets, they're going to afford to lose money for a few months, even a few years if they wanted. But what about the new businesses? They have invested everything they have and have probably taken loans which they have to pay back. They can't afford to bring their prices down. But people, the average consumer likes low prices. You like it, I like it and after showing some brand loyalty, we too switch to the brand which is charging us a little less. So the newer companies start to lose their market share and from there it is a very short step to making losses and then finally going bankrupt. And what happens then? They have no option but to sell their businesses to the bigger, older company. But now they won't get the same valuation they would have got if they had sold their company in the first place itself. This process inevitably, by the very internal logic of capitalism, leaves behind monopolies in every sector. Oh yes, there are exceptions every now and then when there are fundamental shifts in consumer behavior that is when new companies emerge and succeed. So you have the Apple's, Google's, Facebook, Amazon's of the world, who are all relatively new but are now amongst the most valuable companies in the world. But remember even these are now monopolies. They command the entire market and buy out every new entry. If anything, the digital revolution has created even bigger monopolies than ever before which now actually straddle the entire world. What does that mean for capitalism as a political system? If a few companies, a few families control the entire economy, it is but logical that they would use their money power to control and influence governments and other institutions of the state. So that is the first part of crony capitalism, that it is not only crony capitalists who get all the benefits of government policy but the cronies of capitalists who sit in government in the first place. So that is the first thing to understand that crony capitalism is not just policies being twisted to help cronies but also that cronies are in government and in state institutions, institutions of authority. And yes, once they are in power, what do they do? They make policies to help their friends who put them in government in the first place. So that is what crony capitalism is and all capitalism inevitably leads to that and becomes crony capitalism. This is not unique to India. It was not unique. Into the UP period, it happens everywhere, especially the home state of capitalism, the United States of America. That's the show today. Keep watching, use clicks, subscribe to our channel. We'll get a lot of such videos which mainstream media will never show you. And yes, if you've come all the way through to this video, then just press that bell icon and get notifications on our channel. Also like this video because that will tell YouTube's algorithm that this is a video that more people should watch. Until next time, goodbye.


In this video, I'm going to show you how to create a Toastmasters brand compliant poster using Canva in less than 15 minutes. Let's get started. Canva is an easy to use service that allows you to create professional designs in a few minutes and it is free. To get started, go to www.canva.com. If you have already signed up to the service, all you need to do is click login and proceed. If not, click on the sign up button to create your free account. You can sign up with your Google account or with your Facebook account or even with your email and your own password. Let me sign up with my Facebook account because I don't want to remember too many passwords. It will automatically link your Canva account with your Facebook account and you are ready to go. To create Toastmasters brand compliant posters, you need to be familiar with Toastmasters website www.toastmasters.org and all of the resources that are available to you under this section called resources and the brand portal. This video will focus on the resources that are available to us in the brand portal and how to map them correctly in Canva. A Toastmaster brand compliant design consists of these four elements colors, fonts, logos and images. Let's go through each of these one by one. The Toastmaster color palette consists of three primary colors cool gray loyal blue and true maroon one accent color called happy yellow and the black and white colors along with a color called digital loyal blue which can only be used as a gradient along with the loyal blue color. Each color is defined with a precise color code. Here the color codes are represented as hex codes and the reason is because in Canva we can directly type hex codes when we are defining colors for objects and fonts. An important note about these colors is that the color loyal blue true maroon black and the digital loyal blue are considered as dark colors and the color cool gray happy yellow and white are considered as light colors. Why is this important when you have a color and you want to write something on it make sure that you write with a light color on the dark background on a dark color on a light background. As you can see in this example let's get back to Canva and see how we can apply these colors to our design. Let's start by creating a new design and choose the type of design. Each design gives you different dimensions for example if you want to post on Instagram which has a square shape then you would choose an Instagram post. If you want to post to Facebook you would choose a design that is more appropriate for Facebook. You can also search for the designs by typing here. If I search for Facebook I get the different designs that I can make for Facebook. Let's start with an Instagram post I'll click on this and this will take me to the design page with a square design shape that is appropriate for Instagram. If I want to change the color of my design click anywhere and then click on this color wheel. You can choose from the list of colors available to you but since we are creating a brand compliant design we must make sure that we enter the precise color code as shown in the previous slide. For example if I want my background to be true maroon I can click here and type the color code 772432 and it will give me the precise color code to be used in my design. Click on it and your design color is now true maroon. If you find it difficult to remember these color codes every time you create a design there are several tools and techniques you can use to make it easy for you. I will make a separate video of all the techniques you can use to make it easy to remember all these color codes but for this example let's just enter the color codes. To add creative elements to your design you can go to the elements section. Be careful of the elements that you put in your design most of the elements available in canva are not terse master brand compliant. The elements that I would recommend that you use are the shapes. To see all the available shapes click on the see all and choose any of the shapes that are available to you. For example if I want to use this triangle element just click on it to move this element around click anywhere on the element and hold the mouse key and move it around. You can resize the element by holding one of these corners and dragging it to make it small or to make it big. It is not necessary that the entire element is visible in your design. For example if I only want part of this triangle I can move the element like this and only this part will be visible in our final design. If I want to change the color of this shape let's say to happy yellow click on it and then click this color button and type the color code of happy yellow which is F2DF74 click on the color and the element changes to happy yellow. Let's add one more element let's say a circle move it to your desired location click the color button and change the color to let's say cool gray click on the color the color code for cool gray is A9B2B1 and your shape gets that color code. The next design element is fonts. A Toastmaster brand compliant poster can use only two fonts. The first font is the Gotham font and the second font is the Mediate Pro font. Gotham is typically used for headings while the Mediate Pro is used for the body of the text. Both of these fonts are paid fonts and they are not available in Canva. So as per the brand guidelines we are allowed to use Montserrat wherever you were supposed to use Gotham and use the font Sosans Pro instead of Mediate Pro. Both of these fonts Montserrat and Sosans Pro are free fonts and available in Canva. To add text to our design click on this button text and choose from one of the three texts available to you heading subheading or body it doesn't matter. Let's click on add a heading. This will add a text to my poster and I can move it around by holding the mouse key and placing it where I want to resize the text hold one of the corner circles and drag it to make it small or big. To change the font to be one of the Toastmaster brand compliant font click on this arrow and select the font that is either Montserrat or Sosans Pro. Canva comes with hundreds of fonts so it might be difficult to find the right font by scrolling through the list. You can easily search for the font by typing the name of the font in the search box. For example let's say I want to make it Montserrat type the word Montserrat and all the versions of Montserrat will be shown to you. Choose anyone let's say Montserrat extra bold to change the color of the text click on this button text color and choose one of the Toastmaster brand compliant color. Since I'm writing on a dark color a light color such as white, gray or yellow would be appropriate. Let me use white which is the letter F six times and that gives me the white color replace the text by selecting the text and typing your text over it. Let me type some more text to complete the poster and for the rest of the text I'll use the second font that is available to me which is Sosans Pro. I've completed all the text that I wanted to put in this poster the club name club details the meeting details and I'm now ready for the next step. The third design element is the logo and we can get the logo from the Toastmasters website as mentioned go to the resources the brand portal and the logo and design elements. You are allowed to use all of the logos that are available on this page and most logos are provided as either JPG or PNG and it comes to Canva. I highly recommend that we use the PNG files because those have a transparent background and work better with Canva. Let's pick up a color logo by clicking on this link and here's a very easy way of transferring this logo from the Toastmasters website to the Canva poster. Right click anywhere on this image and select copy image. Next go to your Canva design click control V the logo is now inserted in your design resize it using the corner handles move it to a desired location. The logo is done. One very important consideration of the logo is that the logo should have clear space around it. This would not be acceptable because there is no enough space on the left side of the logo. Similarly you cannot place the logo on anything other than a clear background that is Toastmaster branded color. This is perfect. One final note about the logo you don't have to go to the Toastmasters website every time you need the logo. When you copy the logo using control V in Canva the logo is automatically placed in your Canva upload folder. If you click on the uploads you will find that the logo is now available for you for future use. The next time that you need this logo you can simply click on it and drop it into your design. The final brand element for Toastmaster design is the images. If we click on the brand manual and download the manual the guidelines for images is defined in the manual and the images should reflect the Toastmasters environment where people look engaged, empowered and supported such as in a meeting, presentations, speeches and so on. The best images that you can use in your Toastmaster material is images from your own meeting. Images of your members delivering speeches or images of your club members. These are the best images to use for your PR material. To add images from your computer simply click on the upload button and click upload media. Choose the option device. Navigate to the folder which has your images and select the image. This will load the image in Canva. You can now click on it, move it around, resize it and you are done. The second alternative is to go to the Toastmasters website and select professional images. You will find hundreds of images available on the website, browse through the collection available to you and once you find the image that you like to use in your poster click on this download button to download the image to your PC. You have a choice of different resolutions to use. For example if you want only a medium resolution image select and download. The image is now on your PC. To use the downloaded image follow the same steps. Click upload media, click device. Navigate to the download folder where your image has been downloaded and click open. The image is now available for you to use. Click on the image and the image will be now in your poster, move it around. If you don't want one of the images click on it and then click this button to delete. If you want this image to be placed behind click on it and then click position and move backwards. Feel free to add other elements such as shapes, text, images but do make sure that all of those elements are in compliance with the brand guidelines as mentioned earlier. Once you are satisfied with your design click on the download button and you have options to download it in different formats such as PNG which has a high quality image, JPG or even as a PDF. You can directly share this design to various social media sites by clicking on these three dots and choosing one of the social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter etc. And that's all there is to it to create a Toastmaster brand compliant poster. I hope you found this video useful and I wish you all the best in creating great content using Canva.