The real Yale-Harvard game: taking dirty money

To scrutinize the course offerings, faculty biographies, and finances of some of America’s oldest, largest and most prestigious universities is to arrive at two distinct and incontrovertible conclusions: these institutions are packed with people who (a) hate capitalism and (b) love money.

The latter of these conclusions was underscored quite dramatically by a February 12 press release from the U.S. Department of Education. Now, it must be said that some of us are of the opinion that this department should never have come into existence in the first place (it was established in 1979 by the Carter Administration) and that it has, from its earliest days, been nothing more than an outrageously expensive bureaucracy whose elaborate intrusions into the activities of schools and universities are illegitimate under the U.S. Constitution, although it exercises its authority over these institutions by tying compliance to federal aid.

Still, once in a long while the Department of Education does something that is genuinely positive. Which brings us to the contents of that press release. In it, the department announced that it was “launching investigations into both Harvard and Yale Universities after it appears both Ivy League higher education institutions potentially failed to report hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign gifts and contracts.” Under the Higher Education Act, institutions that are eligible for federal aid under Title IV are required to report such gifts and contracts if they exceed $250,000. Yet in practice only a small fraction of colleges and universities ever file such reports. What is particularly striking, moreover, is that while the humanities and social sciences departments of these universities are chockablock with courses about the evils of American empire and whatnot, the sources of the cash in question include some of the more truly loathsome regimes on the planet: “Qatar, China, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.”

Last year a Senate report found that during the years 2012-18, fifteen U.S. universities “reported receiving $15,472,725 directly from Hanban, a propaganda arm of the Chinese government”; a closer look at the universities’ private records, however, showed that they had in fact pocketed $113,428,509 from Hanban – over seven times the amount reported. In describing the systematic secrecy with which these universities’ shady finances are shrouded, the Department of Education did not mince words: “The largest colleges and universities,” it stated,

are multi-billion dollar, multi-national enterprises using opaque foundations, foreign campuses, and other sophisticated legal structures to generate revenue that is intermingled with domestic sources of funding from tuition, grants, and the like.

These colleges and universities actively solicit foreign governments, corporations, and nationals for funds although some donors are known to be hostile to the United States and may be seeking to project “soft power,” steal sensitive and proprietary research and development data and other intellectual property, and spread propaganda benefitting foreign governments.

Although foreign money generally flows into the largest and richest colleges and universities, such money apparently does not reduce or otherwise offset American students’ tuition costs.

That last point is an important one. The endowments of Harvard and Yale are $40.9 bn and $25.4bn respectively; annual tuition at these universities averages $46,000 and $53,000. They do not need money from Communist China, the largest totalitarian entity in the history of humanity and the most potent enemy that America has today. But the administrators who run these institutions nowadays – people whose predecessors, generations ago, were preoccupied with giving students first-rate, well-rounded education – have no higher priority, it would appear, than accumulating money, no matter how unsavory the source or how questionable the strings attached.

Posted on February 27, 2020February 18, 2020 by usefulstooges 3

American professors, Chinese spies

We already knew that countless American professors in the humanities and social sciences encourage their students to despise the US while cultivating in them an admiration for Marxist ideology, the Castro revolution in Cuba, and other totalitarian regimes, past and present. But that, it turns out, is just the tip of the iceberg. For In recent months, as Kyle Houten noted earlier this month at Campus Reform, it has become increasingly clear that a whole lot of faculty members and students at some of America’s top universities have been literally working for the most dangerous of all foreign Communist governments – namely, that of China.

Last July, for example, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of Yi-Chi Shih, an electrical engineer and professor at UCLA, who had been convicted on 18 federal charges. Yi-Chi, reported Newsweek, was involved in “a plot to illegally obtain microchips from an American company” that supplies parts to the US Air Force and Navy. These microchips, which can be “used in missiles, missile guidance systems, fighter jets, electronic warfare, electronic warfare countermeasures and radar applications,” were sent to a Chinese firm called Chengdu GaStone Technology, of which Yi-Chi had previously served as president. Yi-Chi, who was found “guilty of conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, mail fraud, wire fraud, false tax returns, false statements to a government agency and conspiracy to commit cybertheft,” faced “a statutory maximum sentence of 219 years in prison.”

We wonder: did anyone at UCLA know that Yi-Chi had been president of a Chinese technology outfit – one that, as Newsweek noted, is listed by the Commerce Department as a threat to US national security? Did officials at UCLA know of Yi-Chi’s connection to the firm when they hired him? If so, did it cross their minds that his history of loyalty to America’s principal foreign adversary might be problematic?

Also last year, Bo Mao, who is on the permanent faculty at Xiamen University in China, was arrested for stealing proprietary technology from a Silicon Valley startup while serving as a visiting professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Arlington. Bo turned the technology over to a subsidiary of Huawei.

Late January saw the arrest of Charles Lieber, who is nothing less than the chairman of the chemistry and chemical biology department at Harvard University. Lieber, it appeared, had accepted huge sums of money to build and maintain a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Technology, where he worked as a “Strategic Scientist from 2012 to 2017, and was allegedly involved in China’s “Thousand Talents” program, which “recruits overseas scientists and induces them to sign secret contracts” that “violate U.S. standards of integrity.” He is accused, moreover, of engaging in “economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, and grant fraud,” and of having lied about his nefarious activities on behalf of China to the administration of Harvard, to the National Institutes of Health, and to the Defense Department.

There have been other such cases at the University of Kansas, at UCLA, at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and at other institutions of higher education, with researchers being found guilty of stealing research materials, of sending technology to China, of recruiting spies, and of concealing their Chinese ties. “No country poses a greater, more severe or long-term threat to our national security and economic prosperity than China,” FBI agent Joseph Bonavolonta told the Associated Press. “China’s communist government’s goal, simply put, is to replace the U.S. as the world superpower, and they are breaking the law to get there.”

The threat is clear. And yet many universities piously refuse to take it seriously, and take appropriate action, on the ridiculous grounds that it would be racist to do so. “No, I won’t start spying on my foreign-born students” read the headline of an August 2019 Washington Post op-ed on the subject by Columbia University President Lee Bollinger. The irony here, of course, is that the admissions policies of some of these same universities systematically discriminate against Asian-Americans.

Posted on February 14, 2020February 9, 2020 by usefulstooges 2

A turnaround in Venezuela?

Even as Juan Guaidó – recognized by the US and scores of other countries as the legitimate president of Venezuela since shortly after his swearing-in in January of last year – was accepting bipartisan applause during the State of the Union address in early February, back in his homeland dictator Nicolas Maduro was, according to various reports, more secure in his power than he was a year ago.

As Bloomberg News’s Patricia Laya and Alex Vasquez wrote recently, the Venezuelan economy, which for years has been going from bad to worse thanks to Maduro’s “corruption and colossal mismanagement,” has achieved “a certain measure of stability.” Fewer Venezuelans are escaping to Colombia or Argentina or the US, and some are even moving back. How did this happen? In the last few months, Maduro has lifted price controls and has been “allowing dollars to flow freely and private enterprise to flourish.” Yes, dollars:

Over the past year, the U.S. dollar has become Venezuela’s unofficial currency, appearing in cafeteria menus and mom-and-pop shop windows blocks from the presidential palace. Across the capital, bodegas filled with French Champagne, vacuum-sealed salmon and Grana Padano Italian cheese appeared where bankrupt shops had once been. The bolivar, the official currency, has become worthless through years of hyperinflation.

A Reuters dispatch even described Maduro has having initiated “a broad liberalization” of his country’s economy. The Economist wrote that Maduro had “become a capitalist, sort of.”

One factory owner told the Wall Street Journal, which ran a long article on these developments, that he felt encouraged: “Things were paralyzed. Now there’s cash flow. There’s a possibility to buy material. And that’s positive. We can offer work.” In Caracas, at least, “everything from imported medicines to Iberian hams to auto parts—all once hard to find—now overflows store shelves. And companies large and small, from Venezuela’s biggest private company, food producer Polar, to makers of glue and shoes, have begun to crank up production.”

Still the Journal underscored that Venezuela is hardly out of the woods. Far from it. It’s still “an economic basket case” whose economy has shrunk by 60% since Maduro inherited power upon the death of his mentor, Hugo Chávez, in 2013, and expected to contract a further 10% in 2020. And Venezuela continues to have the world’s highest inflation rate. “Some economists,” moreover, “say the economy’s recovery may be fleeting, since so much of it is import-driven. They note that the government has no macroeconomic stability plan, and none of its changes is codified in law, meaning the government could quickly return to the days of jailing shop owners accused of price gouging.”

In any event, this economic “liberalization” isn’t accompanied by anything resembling a boost in individual liberty and human rights. Free markets? Yes – to an extent, anyway. Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the like? No. As Laya and Vasquez put it, Venezuela seems to be headed toward “a version of Chinese-style state capitalism.” Similarly, the Journal reported that “factory operators, importers and store owners” in the Bolivarian Republic are “anxiously wondering whether Venezuela is moving, ever so slowly, toward a Chinese-like model of authoritarian capitalism—or whether Mr. Maduro is just temporarily giving the market a little freedom while the economy is under severe pressure from U.S. sanctions.”

If Maduro’s Venezuela is really following the Chinese model now, its starving slaves may one day be relatively well-fed slaves. If Maduro is just temporarily opening things up in a cynical attempt to cool things off, he may well clamp down again as soon as he feels he can get away with it. In either case, Venezuela is certainly not on its way to becoming a genuinely free nation. On the contrary, his superficial and perhaps impermanent “reforms” may, as the Journal noted, “reduce dissent” – and lessen the chances that Guaidó will ever be able to move into the Miraflores Palace.

Posted on February 11, 2020February 7, 2020 by usefulstooges 1

Who knew? Mayor Mike likes China

Michael Bloomberg is not only the former mayor of New York City and a recently announced candidate for president of the United States; he is also the richest person in New York State and the fourteenth richest person on earth. This wealth, however, has not prevented him from praising Communist China. To be sure, Bloomberg refuses to admit that China is, in fact, Communist. Well, yes, he acknowledged that it’s run by something called the Communist Party, but, in a September 27 interview with PBS, he was quick to add that the Party “wants to stay in power in China, and they listen to the public. When the public says I can’t breathe the air, Xi Jinping is not a dictator; he has to satisfy his constituents or he’s not going to survive.”

Politically correct though PBS may be, Bloomberg’s interviewer, Margaret Hoover, was, to her credit, so taken aback by Bloomberg’s claim that she actually responded by saying, with obvious astonishment: “He’s not a dictator?” “No,” replied Bloomberg. “He has a constituency to answer to.” Hoover, admirably, wasn’t buying this fantasy: “He doesn’t have a vote. He doesn’t have a democracy. He’s not held accountable by voters.”

Bloomberg went on to defend China’s environmental policies. Note that we’re speaking of a country that is such a serious polluter that a large percentage of its people walk the streets wearing masks to prevent them from inhaling deadly particles.

Is Bloomberg dumb? Of course not. You don’t get to be a billionaire by being an idiot. The fact is that few Americans who are as rich as he is don’t have financial interests in China. While the billionaire currently in the White House feels he owes it to the American people to take on the hefty Chinese tariffs that have contributed to that country’s swift economic growth and to the destruction of much of the American manufacturing sector, other U.S. billionaires, such as Bloomberg, prefer not to rock the boat and thereby protect their own financial interests at the expense of American factory workers. As New York magazine noted when reporting on Bloomberg’s remarks earlier this month, “The billionaire has vast financial interests in China, and those interests have allegedly compromised his civic-minded endeavors in the past. In 2013, the New York Times reported that Bloomberg News had killed an investigation that had threatened to upset Chinese officials.

As Kim Hirsch asked on December 3 at the Victory Girls Blog, “What is it about billionaires when dollar signs mean more to them than oppression of other humans? Or even the security of their own nation?” Hirsch noted that China has not only “organized mass detentions of Uighur Muslims in the western Xinjiang province” but that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), in November, “exposed China’s operating manuals that use data analysis to select whom they will detain. Not criminal activity. Just algorithms. As a result, people randomly disappear.” Hirsch quoted an Australian analyst who explained: “That’s how state terror works. Part of the fear that this instills is that you don’t know when you’re not OK.” But what should any of this matter to the fourteenth richest person on earth, who, as Hirsch reported, is “financing Chinese companies through US investor dollars he sends to the Chinese bond market.”

It’s funny how these things work. Bloomberg is 77 years old, and has $54 billion in assets. You might think that at this stage of his life, he’d figure he had enough money and, like Trump (who has lost billions in net worth since he became president), decide to give back. Well, Bloomberg seems to be the poster boy for the fact that some people, no matter how rich, just aren’t interested in giving back. Trump, whatever you think of him, is at least a regulation-cutter driven by a core belief in individual freedom: Bloomberg, famous for banning large sodas while mayor of New York, is a control freak, a man who craves power, and a man whose love of power and control are palpably driven by a desire to ensure that his bank balance keeps rising until he meets his maker – to whom, if that event actually takes place, he will have to explain his readiness to whitewash Chinese Communism, sell out American labor, and pick up more money than one man could ever spend in a hundred lifetimes.

Posted on December 10, 2019December 5, 2019 by usefulstooges 4

The making of loyal Chinese Communists – at Morningside Heights

We’ve been writing a great deal lately here about the pro-Beijing stooges who have come out of the woodwork in recent weeks, standing up for totalitarianism and smearing the freedom marchers in Hong Kong because doing otherwise might adversely affect their income. Several of these defenders of Chinese Communism have been people connected to the NBA, who make a lot of money, one way or another, on the popularity of American basketball in the world’s largest dictatorship. But it’s not just sports people who are on the Chinese government’s payroll. As we saw last week, the bigwigs at New York University, which has a branch in Shanghai, have stayed silent about the Hong Kong protests. Then there’s that equally cash-crazy institution a few miles north, Columbia University, where, as Richard Bernstein reported in October, a presentation the previous month by two democracy activists from Hong Kong, Brian Leung and Joshua Wong, was disrupted by a group of foreign students. Students, of course, from China. Standing up at their seats, they belted out the Chinese national anthem and another patriotic ditty, “Song of the Motherland.” As Bernstein observed, the incident was rich in irony: “Here were Chinese students, living and studying in the West, exercising the freedom to raise a ruckus at an academic conference and implicitly to denounce the pro-democracy yearnings of their Hong Kong counterparts.”

Bernstein proceeded to make some exceedingly canny points. This episode, he observed, reflected the “general readiness of many Chinese people, at home and abroad, to express their outrage against what their government deems to be ‘anti-China’ opinions in other countries.” In turn, Bernstein pointed out, this readiness was illustrative of “a broad generational cultural shift in China, mostly unexpected and little noticed in the West.” Three decades ago this year, after all, Chinese people turned out in massive numbers to protest the system under which they lived. The Soviet Union was crumbling, the Berlin Wall was about to fall, and in China, too, millions of subjects of totalitarianism, students especially, were aching for liberty. “Occupying Tiananmen Square for two months,” recalls Bernstein, “they held hunger strikes, displaying a statue they called the Goddess of Liberty, before hundreds of them gave their lives when the army opened fire.”

The now-iconic image of the unknown Tienanmen Square protester standing up to tanks, June 5, 1989

But that was then and this is now. In 2019, writes Bernstein, the younger generation of Chinese citizens are the ideological opposites of their 1989 counterparts. In China today, sending your kid to study at an American university is one of the most prized objectives; but this ambition, in most cases, has nothing to do with a regard for American freedom. For both the parents and the children, it’s about prestige, the potential economic value of an Ivy League diploma, and having the opportunity to see the world. But seeing America doesn’t seem to have turned many of the Chinese students at U.S. universities into critics of Beijing’s tyranny or fans of Western liberty. Hence, writes Bernstein, “[i]nstead of educating a new generation of leaders who might make China more liberal, U.S. schools may be training an oppositional cadre more interested in acquiring American know-how than American values.” Moreover, “[t]his is occurring against a larger backdrop in which a resurgent China aggressively trumpets its cultural norms, demanding that foreign businesses – from Google to the NBA – play by its rules.”

Yes, some of the 300,000 Chinese nationals who are currently studying at U.S. colleges may harbor a secret fondness for Western values – but they don’t dare say so. Yet close observers suggest that there are relatively few closet fans of America in this immense cohort. “I think that even compared to 10 years ago, the whole vibe among Chinese students has changed,” Echo Wang, a recent graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, told Bernstein, adding that she’s heard from several sources that the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the 2008 Western financial crisis boosted a lot of these students’ enthusiasm for their own country’s political system and severely weakened whatever admiration they might have had for capitalism.

Posted on November 21, 2019October 26, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

Thumbs up for Tarantino; thumbs down for Chan

As we’ve observed over and over again in recent weeks at this site, the current conflicts over the pro-liberty protesters in Hong Kong – and over the growing arrogance of China generally in its relations with the free world – have separated the sheep from the goats. Here are a couple of stories we haven’t covered yet.

To begin with, there’s Quentin Tarantino. We’ve criticized the brilliant, eccentric writer-director on this site, but it’s important to give credit where credit is due. His new Brad Pitt-Leonardo di Caprio vehicle, Once upon a Time in Hollywood, has been generating even more buzz than his pictures usually do, and looks like it has a fair chance to pick up a few statuettes at Oscar time. But there’s been one problem: the bigwigs in China, a top market for Hollywood films these days, insisted that he make certain cuts before they would allow the movie to be released there. To be sure, when Beijing objected to scenes of violence and nudity in one of his previous works, Django Unchained, he did agree to clip out a few of the scenes that bothered them. But this time Tarantino – who has rights to final cut – responded to their demands with a firm no.

Then there’s Canadian politician Michael Chan, a former minister of immigration and international trade in the government of Ontario who now sits on the board of governors of Seneca College. He’s come out firmly against the Hong Kong protest, echoing Beijing’s spurious claims that they’re the work of dark “foreign forces” that are interfering in Hong Kong’s affairs and out to make trouble for China. “I have been thinking, why are these young people so radical, so passionate [and] committed to do these things? And why so many people?” Chan said. “If there is no deeply hidden organization in this, or deeply hidden push from the outside, there is no way that such large-scale turmoil would happen in Hong Kong in a few months.”

Chan’s career history is far from irrelevant here. When he was in government, according to the Globe and Mail, Canadian intelligence was seriously concerned about the closeness of his relationship with Chinese consular officials in Toronto and privately warned higher-ups about Chan’s “conduct and the risk of foreign influence.” The Globe and Mail quoted Gloria Fung, president of a group called Canada-Hong Kong Link, as saying that Chan is clearly “not using Canadian values nor the universal values of Western democracies in making all these comments. Rather, he abides by the values of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Posted on November 19, 2019October 22, 2019 by usefulstooges 3

NYU, PRC, and $$$

In August 2015, we wrote here about several major U.S. universities that have established lucrative branches in less than free countries – such as the United Arab Emirates and other lands awash in petrodollars – and that, in order to be able to operate in those countries, have felt compelled, by their sheer pecuniary interests, to make major compromises when it comes to living up to the idea of a free university.

As we noted, a number of these institutions have branches in China. And that’s not all: there are universities in the U.S. that contain so-called “Confucius Institutes,” centers for the study of China that are essentially sources of propaganda for Communist China.

These cozy relationships between major American universities and the People’s Republic of China have many ramifications for the education of students at those universities. Colleges that play host to “Confucius Institutes” are forbidden by contract from recognizing Taiwan as an independent nation. They are under pressure not to arrange lectures or debates involving China scholars who don’t toe the Beijing line. The agreements with China also prohibit those American universities from sponsoring honest discussions of Tibet or the Tienanmen Square massacre. China scholars at U.S. institutions that have these sorts of links to the PRC dare not criticize China in the classroom or in their writings because they may find their Chinese visas revoked, which, of course, would make it impossible for them to pursue their scholarship. As we noted in 2015, one Chinese dissident, Chen Guangcheng, who had been tortured in China and who went on to have a fellowship at NYU had suddenly, in 2013, found that fellowship cancelled because the honchos at NYU were afraid of offending the Chinese leaders who had ordered his torture.

On October 19, Jon Levine wrote in the New York Post about the NYU branch in Shanghai, where the fall term had begun but where “one subject that won’t be on the syllabus is pro-democracy protests sweeping Hong Kong.” Levine explained that “NYU faculty in China and New York say the issue is a third rail” and quoted an NYU-Shanghai faculty member as saying that “Everyone is under a bit of a cloud of fear…..We don’t walk around trembling like rodents, but there is a general idea that there are certain topics you don’t discuss….We all learn over time how to self-censor.” Levine noted that young people enrolled at this campus, who receive NYU degrees at the end of their period of study, are “required to take classes like ‘Mao Zedong Thought,’ ‘Introduction to the Communist Party of China’ and courses in political education routinely mandated at other Chinese universities.” This is disgusting, but none of it should be surprising to anyone who is aware that NYU, founded in 1831 and once a revered center of liberal learning and a source of American pride, has long since gotten into the habit of accepting cash from the biggest bidder, however odious.

Posted on November 14, 2019November 16, 2019 by usefulstooges 3

Inside a Chinese “reeducation camp”

On Tuesday we wrote here about a Venezuelan, Christian K. Caruzo, whose account of his own life in the hell that is Venezuela under chavismo appeared recently at the Breitbart website. Today we’re here to draw attention to a piece in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in which reporter David Stavrou recounts the experiences of a woman named Sayragful Sauytbay in a Chinese reeducation camp. Sauytbay, an Uyghur Muslim teacher who was granted asylum in Sweden, where she now lives, recalled a place where the inmates spent their days and nights in shackles, using a plastic bucket for a toilet, were forced to confess fake sins and memorize “propaganda songs,” were subjected to electric shocks and other forms of torture, were the victims of gang rapes, and were given pills and injections as part of the kind of medical experiments that the infamous Dr. Mengele carried out in the death camps.

Knowing that the Chinese authorities were cracking down on Uyghur Muslims, Sauytbay’s husband and kids managed to flee China for their native Kazakhstan. But she didn’t. In 2016, as part of a broad round-up, some government thugs “came to my house at night, put a black sack on my head and brought me to a place that looked like a jail. I was interrogated by police officers, who wanted to know where my husband and children were, and why they had gone to Kazakhstan. At the end of the interrogation I was ordered to tell my husband to come home, and I was forbidden to talk about the interrogation.” She disobeyed the order, breaking off contact with her husband and kids. The result were further late-night raids and brutal interrogations. Finally, in November 2017, she was shuttled off to the reeducation camp, where she was given the job of teaching the Chinese language to Uyghur and Kazakh speakers. A big part of the curriculum consisted of propaganda songs and slogans, including “I love China” and “I love Xi Jinping.” Well, as John Lennon put it, all you need is love. Sometimes, let’s face it, the distance between Lennon and Lenin isn’t all that far.

Sauytbay recalled one incident from this adventure in love:

One day, the police told us they were going to check to see whether our reeducation was succeeding, whether we were developing properly. They took 200 inmates outside, men and women, and told one of the women to confess her sins. She stood before us and declared that she had been a bad person, but now that she had learned Chinese she had become a better person. When she was done speaking, the policemen ordered her to disrobe and simply raped her one after the other, in front of everyone. While they were raping her they checked to see how we were reacting. People who turned their head or closed their eyes, and those who looked angry or shocked, were taken away and we never saw them again. It was awful. I will never forget the feeling of helplessness, of not being able to help her. After that happened, it was hard for me to sleep at night.

Take that, Charles Barkley. Look at yourself in the mirror, LeBron James.

Posted on November 7, 2019October 19, 2019 by usefulstooges 4

China’s stooges

Our last few postings here at Useful Stooges may have led some readers to think we’re under the impression that only athletes, teams, sports leagues, and sports-related firms have been doing a yeoman’s job of defending the Communist Chinese regime. Let us reassure our readers that we labor under no such illusion. In fact it is no secret that some of the largest U.S. companies manufacture many of their products in Chinese sweatshops and/or make handsome profits on the Chinese market, and thus feel a strong compulsion to maintain friendly relations with the Chinese government – and consequently are not about to risk their income by standing up for the freedom fighters of Hong Kong.

In connection with the bowing and scraping of sports figures to the Beijing regime, we’ve already mentioned Nike, the sneaker company, which pays millions in endorsement deals to some of the biggest names in the hoops game. In September, as Fox Business reported, Nike’s CEO, Mark Parker, made a pretty straightforward declaration: “Nike is a brand of China, for China.” As Fox noted, Nike’s revenue in China during the third quarter of this year was no less than $1.7 billion. No wonder, noted Fox Business, that “Nike has gone silent on the controversy surrounding the NBA and China.” In fact it did more than go silent: after Daryl Morey, GM of the Houston Rockets, sent out a tweet supporting the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, Nike “pulled its Houston Rockets merchandise from five stores in Beijing and Shanghai.” Mustn’t offend the sensitive feelings of Chairman Xi and his cohorts.

Then there’s Apple. In an October 17 piece, Wired noted Apple CEO Tim Cook’s efforts to position his firm as “the Patron Saint of Privacy, the company willing to protect user data while others profit from it.” Yet whereas “Apple refused to help the FBI break into an iPhone that belonged to one of the alleged perpetrators of the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attack,” it has been considerably more cooperative with Beijing, eliminating an app that was used by pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and that came under criticism by People’s Daily, the official Chinese Communist Party newspaper. As we’ve previously noted, Apple obligingly made it impossible for Apple users in Hong Kong and Macao to access a Taiwan flag emoji. Also, in 2018, bigwigs at Apple ordered TV program developers in its employ “to avoid portraying China in a poor light.”

Of course Apple is not alone in the last-named regard. China has become a lucrative market for American films. It finances a good many of them. It owns U.S. theater chains. Hollywood studios and producers are therefore exceedingly careful not only to scrub scripts clean of anything that might be offensive to the Chinese government, but to include pro-China propaganda. A recent article at the Heritage Foundation website quoted an observation by Stephen Colbert that in the disaster movie 2012, “humanity is saved because the Chinese government had the foresight to build life-saving arcs,” and that in Gravity, “Sandra Bullock survives by getting herself to the Chinese Space Station.” As Heritage’s Tim Doescher put it – chillingly – “Hollywood is relying more and more on the Chinese markets to make profits on movies. That means our films are being written with China in mind.” As a result, noted Heritage’s Mike Gonzalez, “we get shown a very benign view of China, in which China is a normal country, no different from Paris, or Britain, or Germany.” We also get a view of the world that omits what Gonzalez called “the three Ts”: “Tiananmen, Tibet, and Taiwan.” Also omitted is Richard Gere – who was a top Hollywood star until his outspoken support for Tibet got in the way. In short, when it comes to China, there’s a lot of useful stoogery going around – and as China’s financial, military, and cultural power increases, and as it buys up more and more shares of more and more Western firms, we can fully expect that stoogery to increase massively.

Posted on October 31, 2019October 18, 2019 by usefulstooges 4

Cleveland’s favorite son is Beijing’s golden boy

The ongoing spectacle of rich American athletes and powerful sports organizations spitting on the democratic capitalist system that made possible their free and privileged lives – all the while giving succor to the prison wardens who govern Communist China – has been nothing less than chilling to observe. One can hardly stop wondering: are these people as cold-heartedly craven as they sound, gladly accepting the big payouts they get from Beijing because a whole lot of Chinese people happen to love American basketball while caring nothing at all for the armies of Chinese workers of China the profits from whose underpaid labor enables Xi & co. to buy their loyalty? Or are these U.S. sports stars just plain ignorant, possessed of some vague notion that the Chinese system is pretty much the same as America’s, or that the differences between them are just cosmetic distinctions that only a racist would focus upon?

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve written about hoop heroes like Charles Barkley who’ve rushed to stand by China. Now it’s time to turn to LeBron James, who has played for the Cleveland Cavaliers, Miami Heat, and L.A. Lakers, and is considered by many observers to be the greatest basketball player ever. In response to one of the very few good guys in this story – namely, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, who’d dared to express his solidarity with the freedom fighters of Hong Kong – James sneered that Morey “wasn’t educated” on the topic and should have kept silent. By way of explaining his remark, James told reporters that comments like Morey’s could harm some people “not only financially but physically, emotionally and spiritually.” A curious angle indeed, given that all Morey had done was to stand shoulder to shoulder with people who, by standing up for their liberty against a brutal totalitarian system, were risking their very lives. What seemed to concern James was that bringing up the harsh monstrous reality of the Chinese system could hurt the feelings of his NBA confreres while they’re on their way to the bank to cash their checks from China. It’s hardly irrelevant here that LeBron himself has an exceedingly profitable lifetime endorsement deal with Nike, many of whose sneakers are manufactured in Chinese sweatshops by slave laborers, some of them children.

James even went on to complain, in one tweet, that Morey’s support for Hong Kong had caused the Lakers to have a “difficult week” during a recent China tour. Many of his Twitter followers pointed out that the demonstrators in Hong Kong and the Uighurs, a Muslim group over a million of whose members are at present religious prisoners in China, have also been having a “difficult week.” Indeed, ever since China went Communist seventy years ago this month, untold hundreds of millions of its people have led highly difficult lives, and tens of millions have been subjected, at the orders of Mao and his successors, to brutal and violent deaths for their deviations from official ideologies. James also had some choice words for those who cheer on the Hong Kong inhabitants’ fight for freedom of speech, and who have defended Morey by pointing to his freedom of speech: “Yes,” wrote James, “we do have freedom of speech, but there can be a lot of negative that comes with that too.” Let’s just close with that one — and try to imagine the mental operations that can lead an American to say such a thing in all seriousness.

Posted on October 29, 2019October 18, 2019 by usefulstooges 2