Page 20 THE VILLADOM TIMES III • September 1, 2010 Gangsters and gamblers are far from unknown. Only “dumb” people actually want to do useful work, she said. My ace other spy, who also understands Chinese, reports that most Chinese don’t like their government, would rather be more like the United States, and aren’t in any way interested in becoming the world’s Number Two economic power unless the results show up in their pay. There were 128,000 reported strikes and job actions in China in 2008 and 58,000 in the first three months of 2009. After that, the reports dried up. What most people in China want is higher wages and more political and religious freedom. What they get is chronic overwork. A few years ago, the Chinese government sanctioned an American documentary on China’s rural legal system. The earnest female judge and the fearless male prosecutor – obviously professional actors – admitted there were abuses, but asserted that things were getting better. The malnourished local farmers, obviously real Chinese people, told the film crew things were terrible and that they hated their own government. When the communists took over, they originally murdered all clergymen: Christian, Buddhist, and Taoist. In the 21st century, they merely discourage the state-approved Christian church in China, but more than a third of all Chinese are now Christians. Roman Catholics, along with Buddhists and Falun Gong, are still actively persecuted. Whatever happened to America’s concern for religious freedom and human rights? We don’t need to enact anything as crude as an economic boycott. All we need to do is to remember that people who don’t chose to honor their contracts should not and cannot become serious players in the world economy. If the Chinese people could get rid of the oligarchs who control their economy, they could become huge players in the world economy. Right now, their economy is a house of cards. China is not the monolith portrayed by the American mass media, but a deeply troubled nation of people who don’t understand why their own lives are so povertystricken despite their immense hard work. My spies are reliable because they do not have to answer to political hacks or journalistic hacks with axes to grind. China is a threat mostly to China, and only a threat to the United States due to American and other non-Asian people who depend on profits to be made through investments in cheap Chinese labor. The threat to the U.S. economy doesn’t come from China, Japan, South Korea, Germany, or the Muslim world. The threat to the U.S. economy comes from Americans who expect that the U.S. government is somehow going to maintain an economy where the stock market enables people without investments in real estate and utilities to maintain a regal lifestyle. Those days are over. Investments that produce double-digit dividends through the sometimes cruel exploitation of cheap foreign labor are gradually vanishing. The idea that local schools are going to provide every kid with a private quality education at the expense of the local taxpayers is also history. Investments in the stock market, huge increases in real estate equity, and double-digit bank interest used to subsidize that dream through the generosity of older people who loved the towns they grew up in, even after their own kids had long since finished school. They do so no longer. The idea that municipal government will provide everybody who knows somebody with a safe job that provides a solid paycheck and a pension and insurance package that is the envy of people in the private sector is also history. People in the public sector are now at the same risk as people in the private sector, and they have a right to be scared if the main event of the day is the two-hour debate about where to have lunch. People who blame President Obama for all this are victims of disinformation: the wrong-headed idea that the government can somehow be held responsible when individual citizens are unemployed. It was President Clinton who instituted the easy-credit policy that ruined real estate as the last safe investment, and took a lot of contractors down along with the investors. It was Bush the Younger who involved us in the war in Iraq, the greatest waste of American lives, money, and popularity since Vietnam. Bush was president during the now-notorious bank bailout, but Obama and John McCain both voted for it. Obama simply hasn’t been able to cope with the aftermath. It’s not his job to make sure that everybody with a college degree has a government job where he or she makes as much money as a doctor. It’s not anybody else’s job, either. The federal government was originated to make sure we have a big enough army and navy for national defense, and to deliver the mail and collect taxes, not to provide government jobs. The post office is now being massacred by the e-mail, wiping out another source of safe jobs for people without connections. Auto inspection, except for emissions testing, has been abolished. I’m glad it’s over, but it cost a lot of people their jobs. The tax collection industry, however, hasn’t taken any hits. Back when there were communists, we used to get disinformation sluiced to us: false information to over-strain our resources. What we’re now getting is “disunderstanding” – the perception that college for everybody can compensate for the loss of jobs in manufacturing and the budget-mandated reductions in government jobs and save us from Big Bad China. Don’t worry about China. Buy American whenever possible, and bring back some jobs that could be good for the tax structure. You heard it here first. China’s new status as the world’s second economy, and projections that China will be the world’s first economy by 2030, are about to collapse. I just got the letter in the mail this afternoon. “Thank you for ordering the 802153/WW I MK-IV model tank. Unfortunately, this item has been discontinued by our supplier. We have regretfully dropped this item out of our future catalogs and will refund your money.” American honor, Southern variety, remains intact. When a Southerner gives you his word, you can generally depend on it. Yankee that I am, I honor that. Internationally, however, I must observe that China strikes again. I desperately needed that foot-long model of a MK-IV World War I British tank – essentially a dumpster with treads and cannon and machine guns sticking out of sponsons – for my tutorial program to demonstrate to American kids the difference between a prototype and an archetype. The Mark IV, a scow on treads, was the archetype. Designed with two cannon and four machine guns, it was a battleship with U.S.-style traction. As Winston Churchill predicted, it helped turn the tide in World War I. The British Mark IV was the archetype. It was nothing like a modern tank, but it was important because its bulletproof skin was an antidote to machine guns. The FT-17 with its 360-degree turret was the prototype. I was told by an inside American source, another bluntly honest Southerner, that the aspiring Chinese capitalist who had the single set of molds to produce the metal model of the FT-17 had absconded with the production molds and the tank model was off their inventory. Being Southerners, and Americans, they refunded the money. A few months later, the same model tank turned up with another catalog company from a different manufacturer at twice the price. I’m a Yankee, but I’m also part Neanderthal. I don’t like crooks, and I don’t like dealing with crooks. The fact of the matter is that I’m an anachronism because I believe that Americans, at least those who try to do the right thing, shouldn’t be ripped off or humiliated by foreign crooks. I’m also enough of an internationalist to understand that Japan’s labor force is priced out of producing pressedmetal models of World War I tanks, and that South Korea’s labor force is headed there fast. To my horror, the Japanese and South Koreans have both opted to stop active production except for automobiles and top-flight electronics and to supervise cheap labor in China. That is a big mistake. Japanese and South Korean industrial workers – most of them girls waiting for Prince Charming to save them from a life at the sewing machine or women whose husbands don’t earn a lot – actually tried to produce quality work to protect their country’s reputation. In mainland China, nobody even cares any more. Most Chinese are not all that fond of officially “socialist” life in China, Puritanism, or the do-or-die work ethic that made the present economic boom possible. My ace spy just returned from a long stay in Beijing. She reports that China’s capital is crawling with guys looking for emancipated foreign-born Asian women to pimp off of. She wasn’t interested. It’s time to stop worrying about China Ready for school David Manus and his mom, Antonina, of Allendale stopped by Archer Nursery School in Allendale to meet and play with Mommy and Me teacher Mrs. Dube before classes start this month.