Home > Uncategorized > “Chinese Professor” and political button-pushing

“Chinese Professor” and political button-pushing

March 27, 2011

Watch this chilling, sci-fi vision of American downfall:

You might be wondering; “Who are these heroic “Citizens Against Government Waste” and how did they scrape up enough money to get this important message to us? We’ll get to that in a minute but first, what ingredients are in the message?

  • Huge Communist symbols? Check.  (Do they still have big pictures of Mao all over the place in China today?)
  • Super-modern, economically powerful Asia?  Check.
  • Massive oversimplification?  Check.
  • Symbols of once-great America, lost in the fog of liberalism?  Check.
  • Tea-party talking points? (Health care, Wall-Street as “Private Business”, “Tax and Spend”?)  Check
  • Race-baiting?  Check.  It’s a little more sophisticated than a WWII propaganda poster, yes.  But the auditorium is full of young, well-educated, ambitious Chinese right out of Central Casting, all smirking at stupid, failed America.  All of them completely invested and united in a single nationalistic identity and a common vision of crushing us under their zero-sum success.

That’s an amazingly engaged room full of college students, by the way.  In real college classrooms, a goodly percentage of the students will be engaged in “non- class-related” activities.  But the Chinese kids in this video are, to an individual, enraptured by this professor’s simplistic lecture.  They laugh on cue.  The few that are using electronic devices are looking up additional information relevant to the lecture. None of them are texting their friends or checking their Renren pages.

Clearly the producers hope we won’t think about it too much.  Are they saying that by staying true to its Communist roots, China will beat slovenly America in the world marketplace?  Or what?

The “runaway spending that’s bankrupting America” is interesting. Do they mean spending on infrastructure, financial regulation, basic research, education, and public health? The US invested heavily in those things after WWII, with a top tax rate of more than 90%. The result was the emergence of a powerful and productive middle class, and economic superpower status for the nation.

Maybe they’re talking about runaway military spending; things like the X-35 jet that even the Pentagon says we don’t need, but which are impossible to cancel. Maybe they mean the bombing of Libya, where we spent five years of NPR funding in ten minutes.

What do they mean? The giveaway is the focus on “health care debacle” and Wall Street as “Private Business” that shouldn’t be regulated, lest we fall prey to the smirking, laughing evil yellow menace.

Of course, China’s economic advantage of cheap labor and lax safety standards (enforced by government oppression) wouldn’t have anything to do with Americans being out of work. Or the fact that China is outspending 1.8x on green energy development (despite a one-third smaller economy) and has become a net exporter of High Speed Rail technology. Nope, it’s NPR funding and food stamps whut sunk us. Or lazy teachers and their pension programs. Or even the merest whiff of universal health care.  No nation could take of its sick people and survive!

Where did the grassroots citizens of “Citizens against Government Waste” get the money and media savvy to put this ad together? Did hard-working farmers and small business owners tighten their belts and set aside some money to fight the Democrats who want to hand America over to the Chinese? Did they meet down at Mabel’s diner to pool their funds and share their concerns in the marketplace of ideas?

Yeah, that’s exactly how it happened, if the hard-working Americans you’re talking about are ExxonMobile, Merrill Lynch, the Altria Group, Ingersoll-Rand, and Jack Abramoff.  And if by Mabel’s Diner you mean a Madison-Avenue public relations firm.  It’s no mystery why they’d shell out for astroturf think tanks like CAGW; after practically sinking our economy and being bailed out by the government, they decided they really liked that arrangement.  It’s worked out really, really well for them.

The Right Wing wants to push several myths, and one is that we’re broke and can’t afford to do anything but throw the poor overboard and turn to big corporations for salvation.  If only we’d listened to Wall Street to save us from the Smirking Yellow Menace!

The United States will have some kind of future.  Will making the super-rich a little bit richer prepare us for it?  Or would investing in infrastructure, in education, basic research, clean energy and public health?

 

Categories: Uncategorized
  1. April 11, 2011 at 21:29 | #1

    Its starts out with a weak premise and then just gets ridiculous. The sad thing is the shear amount of people that buy this crap.

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