A “found” corruption

March 11, 2013

Have you ever heard of a “found” poem?

If not, this is what it means: “Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.” Source: Poets.org

Well, I found something about consumer related corruption, but it wasn’t linked to China. It took place in the United States, and I’m going to write a “found” post by piecing together a collage of corruption with one example from China compared to similar private sector corruption in the United States where greedy CEOs took short cuts to boost profits.

On “60 Minutes” Sunday night, March 10, 2013, I first heard about the NECC Drug Scandal: Fake names used to bypass regulations (the story first broke September 2012).  I then Googled “NECC Drug Scandal” and came up with 786,000 hits.

Then I Googled “Chinese drywall import scandal” (2001) and came up with more than 4.4 million hits.

Since the late 1990’s there has been a conservative political agenda in the United States to take away and/or limit Federal government regulatory and watchdog protection for consumers. One of those exemptions from FDA over-site led to the NECC Drug Scandal. That same conservative political agenda also led to the 2007-08 global financial crises.

Wiki reports that from the NECC scandal (started September 21, 2012 and still ongoing) there have been 48 deaths, 720 injuries and more than 400 lawsuits filed against NECC.

Let’s compare that to the potential for injury from the Chinese drywall scandal: “The Center for Disease Control, in collaboration with The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry released a guide indicating the residents of affected homes reported irritated and itchy eyes and skin, difficulty breathing, persistent cough, bloody noses, runny noses, recurrent headaches, sinus infection, and asthma attacks.”

Out of curiosity, I Googled, “the Ford Pinto Case (1972) where, due to a cover up at Ford, people died.”The cases involving the explosion of Ford Pintos due to a defective fuel system design led to the debate of many issues, most centering around the use by Ford of a cost-benefit analysis and the ethics surrounding its decision not to upgrade the fuel system based on this analysis.” My Google search came up with 719,000 hits. Twenty-seven deaths were attributed to Ford Pinto fires.

Does this “found” post on corruption and good-old-fashioned universal human greed reveal that a scandal in China will cause more of an uproar than a similar or worse scandal in the United States? If so, why?  After all, no one has died yet from that tainted drywall that was made in China and sold in the US.

If the fungus tainted drugs from NECC had been made in China and exported to the United States, how many Google hits do you think would result?

Discover High Speed Rail Tragedy in China Reveals Small Minds in West (39 people died and it was an accident not linked to corruption) and More on China’s July 2011 Rail Accident (Note: a Google search of this topic came up with 22.2 million hits)

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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3 Comments | America, American culture, business, capitalism, China, Chinese Culture, crime, cultural differences, economy, media, politics, United States | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Dissecting an American Conservative Spin Master – Part 2/4

November 5, 2011

To understand Dennis Prager and his flock of Parrots (used as a metaphor), one must know the difference between facts, theories and opinions.

A fact has undisputed evidence to support its truth and is driven by rational thought. In science, “fact” is an objective and verifiable observation. For example, several centuries ago, many in the West held an opinion that the earth was flat and that the sun and stars revolved around the earth until explorers (such as Christopher Columbus) and scientists proved that wasn’t true.

A scientific theory is a well-confirmed hypothesis that explains a large body of facts inspired by a large body of research. When the body of research is convincing, many people accept the theory as a potential fact.

Since most of our objective and verifiable observations come from experts and/or scientists, according to Dennis Prager, if you believe these experts about Global Warming, you would be a hysterical leftist-liberal that trusts what the traditional media reports as news.

An opinion is based on a belief or personal view and varies according to an individual’s knowledge, experience, culture, beliefs and is driven and reinforced by emotion. An opinion may also be a simple, uniform message designed to be acceptable to a large number of people.  An opinion is not a fact, because opinions have not been proven or verified.

If you click on this link and read Why Liberals Fear Global Warming More Than Conservatives Do, you will discover that what Dennis Prager preaches in his essays is driven and reinforced by emotional terms.


As we know, Google returned to China on China’s terms.  Did Prager later apologize for his praise of Google’s Sergey Brin after Goolge backed down?  Prager says he suspects China needs Google more. Wrong again.  China has Baidu, which is a search engine with about 76% of the search traffic in China.

In the Global Warming essay, Prager says, “Observers of contemporary society will surely have noted that a liberal is far more likely to fear global warming than a conservative.”

In the previous opening sentence of his essay of Global Warming, Prager defined the difference between liberals and conservatives in a simple generalization, which is an opinion and he has no facts to support what he claims.

However, to Prager and his fans, if you fear global warming, you are a leftist-liberal and are prone to hysteria. He then goes on to say that leftists also believes what The New York Times and other liberal news sources report, which means if you are a liberal, you will believe almost anything you hear or read in the mainstream media.

However, Gallup reported in September 2010 that “Distrust in U.S. Media edges Up to Record High” saying, “For the fourth straight year, the majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly.”

The Gallup study also reveals that 33% of conservatives had a great deal of trust in the media while 46% of liberals had little or no trust.

Hmm, if we return to Prager’s opinion (I meant essay), we see that he said, “Liberals rarely question the authority of the mainstream media,” but when we examine the facts gathered by experts working for Gallup, this isn’t true.

Do you see the difference between Prager’s opinions and the facts, and how he relies on reinforcing his opinions by using terms that manipulate emotions?

Did you know that Prager wrote in the Jewish World Review that Mao “butchered” 60 million Chinese? But there are no facts from eye witnesses to support the claims and opinions that Mao deliberately “butchered” any Chinese. To discover more, I suggest you read China’s Great Famine – Fact or Fiction.

Continued on November 4, 2011 in Dissecting an American Conservative Spin Master – Part 3 or return to Part 1

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Regarding Mao and China-Recommended reading on this topic for those who seek the unblemished truth: From the Monthly Review, Did Mao Really Kill Millions in the Great Leap Forward? by Joseph Ball

From Griffith University, Australia, Poverty, by David C. Schak, Associate Professor

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Beware of Hidden Political Agendas

November 2, 2010

The Frum Forum had a guest post by Kapil Komireddi.

Komireddi is an Indian freelance writer that writes principally about foreign affairs, particularly Indian foreign policy, and his work has appeared in American, Indian and British publications. He blogs at NewMajority.com.

China defeated India in a 1962 border war that hasn’t been settled yet. In fact, India has had border disputes with Nepal and Pakistan too. Due to India’s defeat by China, there have been hard feelings in India for almost fifty years.

Komireddi says the Chinese cannot reproduce without restriction, that they cannot search the internet, assemble, or travel.

His opinions are far from the truth.

During China’s national holidays, several hundred million travel inside China. I know. We were in China during the holiday in 2008 and were stuck in that migration. It was as if everyone in America were on the move at once.

Rural Chinese may have more than one child and the fifty-six minorities in China number more than 100 million and have no restrictions on how many children they have.

There’s also Baidu, a search engine, and Google is available even if certain topics are censored, and the US has more restrictions on Chinese traveling to American than the Chinese do.

Yet, between 2008 and last year, 600,000 visited the US and spent 2.56 billion dollars. Source: New America Media

In addition, Business Week says, “With barriers to European travel lowered, mainlanders (from China) are arriving in droves.” In 2004, almost a million visited Europe.

I imagine Komireddi must have felt he was getting some pay back for India’s loss to China in 1962.

The Frum Forum is a site edited by David Frum, who is dedicated to the modernization of the American Republican Party and the conservative movement.

David J. Frum is a Canadian American journalist and former economic speechwriter for President George W. Bush, which reveals another motive.

It is obvious that the goal was to make China look bad to the uneducated while bashing President Barack Obama for having the Dalai Lama exit the White House through the back doors.

Since most of the Dalai Lama’s Hollywood supporters are probably registered Democrats, a biased post with a political agenda like Komireddi’s might get some liberals not to vote.

Propaganda is a two-way street and China’s Tibetan, Islamic, Indian and Sinophobic enemies know how to use it to influence and mislead.

Learn about India and China at War

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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Google’s China SeeSaw

July 8, 2010

They say that bad news is better than no news.  If true, Google is reaping a bounty in free media coverage.  Since so many do not like China’s Net Nanny, Google stands to earn loyalty and respect in the West.  Keeping track of this Google ploy over Internet censorship in China, I enjoyed posts from two Blogs.

Gizmodo.com had a creative illustration of the Great Wall with holes in it that are being bricked up to close Google. Even if China blocks the Chinese from using Google, Gizmodo says, “Google will still continue to exist in the country however, through Android phones and other services.”

eConsultancy’s Google’s Train Wreck Continues was fun, and I had a good laugh following the timeline of quotes for Google’s on again off again attention caper.

Was Google serious when they said, “We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we’ve faced…” as if China would say yes to offer uncensored search in Hong Kong for all of China but not in China.

Maybe Google knows what it is doing and decided to boil China’s pot and generate free global PR while getting out of a tough market that Baidu dominates.

See Google Recycled

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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No Talking About White Elephants

June 12, 2010

Most Chinese do not like anarchy and chaos. They also do not like talking about the “white elephant” in the room. After suffering for more than a century starting with the Opium Wars in 1839, life in China improved after Deng Xiaoping opened a global market economy in China.

Deng Xiaoping Billboard in China

With that in mind, it should not surprise that when Google was complaining about being hacked by China’s government and refusing to censor their search engine in China, many Chinese turned to Baidu, which operates China’s most popular Internet search engine.

Chinese officials defended the government’s censorship and denied being involved in the cyber-attacks against Google. In fact, most Chinese don’t care what happened to Google.

On February 10, 2010, Simple Thoughts reported that Baidu’s 4th quarter earnings jumped 48%.  Then on June 4, Investor’s Daily Edge reported that Baidu’s stock price was up over 200% in the last year.

It would seem that Google became the “white elephant” in the room—a big mistake in China.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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