China’s Cultural Revolution is History but the one raging in the U.S. Isn’t

December 12, 2018

Will the United States survive its current cultural revolution being led by Alt-Right billionaires, bullies, trolls, racists, and Donald Trump?

China survived its Cultural Revolution in the middle of the 20th Century and look where that led: WeForum.org reports, “China’s meteoric rise over the past half century is one of the most striking examples of the impact of opening an economy up to global markets.

“Over that period the country has undergone a shift from a largely agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse. In the process it has seen sharp increases in productivity and wages that have allowed China to become the world’s second-largest economy.”

There is a big difference between these two Cultural Revolutions. Mao’s Cultural Revolution was meant to benefit most of the people and punished the wealthy.  At first Mao failed to achieve all of his goals, but once Mao died and his Maoists lost power, China recovered like no country in history has ever done before.

However,  what happened in China will not happen in the United States, because the Cultural Revolution taking place in the U.S. will only benefit a small number of people, the wealthy.

The only thing Mao’s Cultural Revolution has in common with America’s Cultural Revolution is the propaganda designed to prop them up. Understanding the Mechanism of Propaganda teaches us: “At its most basic, propaganda is biased or misleading information circulated via some form of mass media with the intent of promoting a political agenda or viewpoint. Propaganda is deliberately not objective and is usually part of a larger psychological campaign to influence people toward a specific opinion. It may include outright lies or more subtle misinformation and censorship.”

Donald Trump learned how to use propaganda from masters at this game of deception like all the dictators Trump admires and worships.

Trump has been using a propaganda campaign since before he was elected president in 2016 to cast doubt on all media fact check sites because Trump wants the media to report only what he wants people to hear just like every dictator and tyrant in history.

If you Google “who is fact checking the fact checkers” you will run in to some of the propaganda designed to feed the confirmation bias of Trump’s base and to erase any doubts they might have.  These Trump followers are so willingly blind, they will not fact check the claims from the propaganda that claims the media and its fact checkers can’t be trusted.

Once that idea is planted in their minds, Trump’s rabid followers will dismiss everything they read from media fact check sites that does not match what they are hearing from Trump and the Alt-Right misleading, conspiracy theory media machine.

For Trump’s mindless mob it has become automatic to dismiss everything and only accept what Trump tells them.

However, Real Clear Politics has a Fact Check Review.

Fact Check Review Methodology

“The goal of the RCP Fact Check Review project is to understand how the flagship fact-checking organizations operate in practice, from their claim and verification sourcing to their topical focus to just what even constitutes a ‘fact’.” …   (Click the link above for more)

If you want to discover the rankings of the fact check sites, click the link above and scroll down to discover that in the first column, Snopes was 99-percent correct for the previous week, FactCheck.org was 90-percent correct, Politifact was 86-percent correct, the Washington Post was 85-percent correct and the New York Times was 83-percent correct.

Then compare that to Trump’s lies.  All of the fact check sites list Trump’s lies and according to Real Clear Politics, the media fact check sites are overwhelming accurate with the truth compared to Trump.

CNN.com reports, “Donald Trump lies. And he is doing a lot more of it lately.”

The sad fact is, once seduced by Trump, nothing in this blog post will matter to Trump’s Red Guard. Whoops, I mean supporters. To Trumpists, the media Trump hates is full of fake news and fact check sites can’t be trusted because they are always wrong. Only trust in Mao. I’m sorry. I’m bad. I meant to say Trump and didn’t mean to insult Mao.

If Donald Trump and the Alt-Right billionaires, bullies, trolls, and racists win the U.S. Cultural Revolution in the United States, it will make Mao’s Cultural Revolution look like preschool.  If you doubt that, click the link and read what Vox.com has to say about “White American men are a bigger domestic terrorist threat than Muslim foreigners. Since Trump took office, more Americans have been killed by white American men with no connection to Islam than by Muslim terrorists or foreigners.” … “between 2001 and 2015, more Americans were killed by homegrown right-wing extremists than by Islamist terrorists, according to a study by New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, DC.”

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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How the Chinese saved GM’s Buick Brand and Donald Trump is killing American Jobs

December 5, 2018

Malignant Narcissist and the embarrassingly ignorant Donald Trump used his “BULLY” pulpit as the president of the United States to threaten: “General Motors Should Pay Back Bankruptcy Aid.”

Trump said this, “One day after General Motors reported it will shutter five North American assembly and powertrain plants.” The reason: the tariffs President Donald Trump has placed on steel and aluminum in his trade war with the world.

After Losing $1 Billion to Tariffs, General Motors Announces 14,000 Layoffs

And the BBC.com reports. “(Trump’s) Critics point out the US gets most of its (imported) steel from Canada and the EU – staunch US allies.”

In addition, ABC News reports, “The U.S. produced 81.6 million metric tons of steel in 2017, according to steel trade group The World Steel Association (WorldSteel).” How much steel did the U.S. import: “In 2017, there were 36 million metric tons of steel imported to the U.S.”

In June, Trump already had “imposed a 25 percent tariff on $50 billion in Chinese goods, including China-built cars such as the Buick Envision.”

The Envision was first introduced publicly in China on July 1, 2014, with a photo of the car under a cover and placed between a Buick Encore and a Buick Enclave.

The Buick Envision has never been manufactured in the United States and no American jobs were lost jobs because of the Buick Envision being produced in China.

Back in July 2014, NBC News reported, “How China, Not Your Grandfather, May Have Saved Buick’s Future.”

The reason China saved Buick is because in China Buick became a luxury car equal to BMW and Mercedes Benz. “In the late 1990s, when General Motors wanted to become one of the first Western automakers to set up a plant in China, government officials told then-CEO Jack Smith they wanted GM’s ‘best brand,’ he once recalled — not Cadillac, not Chevrolet, but Buick. Today, GM is the second-largest automaker in China and Buick is its top brand.”

How many GM Buicks are sold in China vs the United States?

Forbes.com reports, “When GM went through bankruptcy a decade ago and euthanized Saturn, Pontiac, Saab and Hummer, the custodians also pressed the case to relegate Buick to the automotive graveyard along with Mercury, Plymouth, Hudson, Studebaker, AMC, LaSalle, etc. But they were deterred by a passionate case for Buick made by GM executives stating that if the brand were killed in the U.S., it would probably dramatically impact the brand’s bizarrely healthy business in China. That’s right. Buick sells more than 800,000 Buicks a year in China. In the U.S., Buick did about 220,000 last year.”

Do you think the Chinese would be willing to buy that many Buicks if China allowed them to be imported, with a price increase, if GM moved manufacturing back to the United States for Buicks sold in China?

In fact, some U.S. made vehicles are exported to and sold in China. USA Today reports, “Altogether, Chinese sales of U.S.-made vehicles totaled about 266,657, representing less than 1% of the world’s largest automotive market.” Compare that number to how many cars made in China were sold in the US: USANews.com provides the answer: 50,000.

What country will lose the most jobs if the U.S. is forced to stop selling more than a quarter million cars made in America to Chinese consumers while China stops selling fifty-thousand to U.S. consumers all thanks to Donald Trump’s trade war?

Let’s not forget that Donald Trump has said he is a stable genius, very intelligent, and a great businessman … that caused U.S. banks to lose more than a billion dollars from Trump’s six biggest bankruptcies. Did you know that Donald Trump said during the 2016 presidential election debates that he never had a bankruptcy?

It is safe to say that if Donald Trump brags about how great he is, he is lying.

If you are curious how to sell China manufactured products in China, visit the China Law Blog here.”

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

Where to Buy

Subscribe to my newsletter to hear about new releases and get a free copy of my award-winning, historical fiction short story “A Night at the Well of Purity”.

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Donald Trump’s Revival of Racism in the U.S. reminds me of the Chinese woman who died a thousand times

November 28, 2018

Until Chinese started to immigrate to the United States in the mid-19th century, they never encountered a people who considered them racially and culturally inferior. At the time, the discrimination against the Chinese in America was only exceeded by the racism directed at African-Americans.

The Chinese-American woman I’m thinking of was Anna May Wong (1905 to 1961), and the American brand of racism that hatched the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers also had a negative impact on the life of this woman.

As a child, Anna loved going to the movies and even cut school to go to the show. Eventually, she gained some success in film as an actress. Between 1919 and 1961, she acted in 62 films. The Internet Movie Data Base says she was the “first Chinese-American movie star”.

However, to act, Anna had to play the roles she was given. Because she was Chinese, the American racist stereotype always cast her as a sneaky, untrustworthy woman that only fell for Caucasian men. The price she paid to act in movies meant Anna had to die so the characters she played got what they deserved.

Anna often joked that her tombstone should read, “Here lies the woman who died a thousand times.”

In fact, in the 1960s, many of the anti-racist laws enacted during the Civil Rights era focused on protecting African-Americans. Since the Chinese, due to cultural differences, often did not complain, they were left behind.

In many respects, this racism toward the Chinese still exists in the U.S. today and manifests itself through the media as China bashing. How often have you been reminded of the alleged Tiananmen Square Massacre or the millions Mao allegedly murdered during the Great Famine and have never heard that China in the last thirty years is responsible for 90-percent of the world’s reduction in poverty?

Anna was determined to play Chinese characters that were not stereotypes, but it was a losing battle. To escape the hateful racism that murdered her dreams, she lived in Europe for a few years before returning to the racist U.S.

Since the law in the United States at the time did not allow her to marry the Caucasian man she loved, and she was afraid that if she married a Chinese man he would force her to give up acting since Chinese culture judged actresses to be the same as prostitutes, she never got married or had children.

Anna May Wong died of a heart attack in Santa Monica, California at age 56. For her contribution to the film industry, Anna May Wong received a star at 1708 Vine Street on the inauguration of the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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Subscribe to my newsletter to hear about new releases and get a free copy of my award-winning, historical fiction short story “A Night at the Well of Purity”.

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The Power Women Hold in China vs the U.S.

November 21, 2018

Since the end of foot binding in 1949, when Mao said women hold up half the sky, how much power have women gained in China vs the United States?

On July 4, 1776, when the U.S. became a country, women were considered the property of men and they were not allowed to vote. It wasn’t until June 4, 1919 when the 19th Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution that women gained the right to vote.

The Chinese Communist Party didn’t wait almost 143 years to make women equal to men and technically, women in the U.S. are still not equal because the Equal Rights Amendment has never been passed.

In October 2017, the BBC reported, “Of the 89.4 million members of the Chinese Communist Party, just fewer than 23 million are women – that’s 26%.

“And women make up 24% of China’s National Congress – the sprawling national parliament. You don’t have to be a Communist Party member to sit on that.

“Women are less represented the higher up the political tree you climb.

“After the last Congress in 2012, only 33 women sat on the Central Committee which elects the powerful Politburo – that’s 9%.

“Only two of the 25 members of that Politburo were women – 8%.”

How about the power Women hold in the United States?

Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics reported, the “Percentage of Women in Elective office. In 2018, 20-percent held seats in the U.S. Congress, 23.7 percent held statewide Elective offices and 25.4 percent held seats in state legislatures.”

The United States doesn’t have a Central Committee but it does have the President’s Cabinet that was established in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution. The Cabinet’s role is to advise the President on any subject he may require relating to the duties of each member’s respective office.

Trump’s cabinet currently has 22 members listed and only five are women (was six but one recently quit), or 22.7-percent. Cabinet members are not elected but they must be approved by the U.S. Senate.

China’s Central Committee is currently composed of 205 full members and 171 alternate members. Thirty-three are women.

Members are nominally elected once every five years by the national Congress of the Communist Party of China. The Central Committee is, formally, the “party’s highest organ of authority” when the National Congress is not in session. Of the 2,280 delegates at the National Congress, less than a quarter was women.

No woman has ever been China’s president since the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, but the United States also has never had a woman as its president.

“Even though Mao once famously said, ‘Women hold up half the sky’, women still have a long way to go in their fights for equal representation.”

The same holds true for the United States.

China Power.org says, “China’s constitution guarantees women ‘equal rights with men in all spheres of life,’ and over the last several decades, women in China have enjoyed some notable gains. Life expectancy and literacy rates, for instance, have risen as China’s economy has developed. This progress, however, has been outpaced by the rest of the world. China’s ranking in the index fell sharply from 63rd out of 115 countries in 2006 to 100th out of 144 countries in 2017.”

While women in the U.S. have achieved 1st place in educational attainment, women in China are ranked 102nd. China has also taken strides to improve postnatal care … a significant improvement over the US, which has no federally mandated leave.

On Global Gender Parity, Chinese women beat American women for political empowerment. China is ranked 77th and the US is in 96th place.

Then there are the billionaires. Barrons.com reports, “China dominated a ranking of the world’s self-made female billionaires, making up almost two-thirds of the total, as well as sweeping the top four spots.” … “In total, China had 64 self-made women billionaires, representing 63% of the total. … “The U.S., with 17 women billionaires, had the second largest share of the list, accounting for 17% of the total.”

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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Subscribe to my newsletter to hear about new releases and get a free copy of my award-winning, historical fiction short story “A Night at the Well of Purity”.

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Is China already the World Leader in Climate Strategy

November 14, 2018

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) reports, “As the United States steps away from global climate leadership, China is stepping up. EDF has been working there for more than 25 years, and now we’re helping the Chinese government launch a national system to control climate pollution.”

How serious is China?

In 2017, the BBC wrote, “China leads world in solar power production” …

“The largest solar farm in the world – Longyangxia Dam Solar Park, all 30sq km of it – is a Chinese project. And the country recently opened the world’s largest floating solar farm, in Huainan, Anhui Province.”

CNBC reports, “China continues to lead global wind energy market, says new report.” …

“The GWEC said that Asia would lead growth, with China – which installed 23 GW in 2016 – leading all markets.”

CNBC also says, “China now produces more solar, wind and hydro power than the US and EU combined.” … “And, according to a recent report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), last year alone China pumped over $44 billion into increasing its renewable energy reach.

“This model of renewables replacing coal is now being replicated throughout Asia.”

China is also in the process of replacing its taxi fleet with electric cars.  Quarts reports, “China added as much battery-storage capacity in 2018 as all previous years combined.” … “China isn’t building gigafactories,” says Patrick Hurley, chief technology officer of A123, a lithium-ion battery company. “It is building gigacities.” … “In 2017, CNESA estimates that China built 40 GWh worth of batteries for electric cars and buses. That accounts for the batteries in more than 50% of all electric vehicles sold globally in the same year.”

“Beijing Leads China in Promoting Battery Electric Vehicles,” Inside EVs says. “Beijing is one of the most EV rich places in the world with 188,000 all-electric vehicles, which is 11.6% of all electric cars registered in China.

“The Chinese capital increased the number of BEVs this year by 17,000. Around 140,000 out of a total of 188,000 were purchased by individuals and companies, while the remaining 48,000 were used in the public sphere.

“All those vehicles can use roughly 130,000 charging points – 93,000 privately installed for home use, 20,000 accessible to the general public, and 17,000 installed for the public transport system.”

And Vox.com reports, “By 2020, every Chinese coal plant will be more efficient than every US coal plant.

China’s efforts to tackle coal are comprehensive and ambitious, a new report shows.”

What has President Donald Trump done in the U.S. to cut back on fossil fuel emissions/pollution?

Nothing!

 

In fact, Trump has signed executive orders that allow coal mines to pollute US rivers and coastal waters with more toxic emissions. … “Old coal-fired power plants may get to keep polluting the air we breathe and the atmosphere that sustains life on earth, thanks to Trump’s call to toss out the Clean Power Plan. And future power plants may not be held to tougher standards that would have largely prevented new coal plants from coming online.”

Vox continues, “China is waging an aggressive, multi-front campaign to clean up coal before eventually phasing it out — reducing emissions from existing plants, mothballing older plants, and raising standards for new plants. Unlike the US, it is on track to exceed its Paris carbon reduction commitments.

“In short, while the US dithers along in a cosmically stupid dispute over whether science is real, China is tackling climate change with all guns blazing. The US, not China, is the laggard in this relationship.”

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.

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Subscribe to my newsletter to hear about new releases and get a free copy of my award-winning, historical fiction short story “A Night at the Well of Purity”.

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2 Comments | America, business, China, economy, environment, politics, science, United States | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
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