Some Ways Americans Are Ripped Off
Spying and Stealing by Communist China
How long are we going to put up with the fiction that free trade with China is beneficial to the United States? China uses our myopia about free trade to cheat us coming and going, steal our patents and manufacturing secrets, and violate the rules of the World Trade Organization to which they agreed when they joined.
Communist China’s strategy is to spend and spy and steal to become the number one superpower in the 21st century. The Chinese are seeking every kind of technology: aerospace, biotech, information, and energy.
They subsidize their exports to undersell U.S. products, engage in massive intellectual property theft, and impose high tariffs on imports to protect their home market. A Detroit-made Jeep Grand Cherokee sells for $27,490 in the U.S., but $85,000 in China.
U.S. Trade Ambassador Ron Kirk, recently interviewed on Fox News, demands that we be nice to Communist China lest we start a “trade war.” But as Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation said, “The trade war has already been going on for five or ten years. The Chinese have shot the most volleys and we’re losing.”
Kirk didn’t mention the nasty way China treats U.S. companies that locate plants in China. The Chinese force U.S. corporations to give China their technology and manufacturing secrets as the price of doing business in China.
Stealing industrial secrets is a major part of China’s trade relationship with America. China has a large pool of potential spies among Chinese immigrants to the United States and the unprecedented number of Chinese graduate students attending U.S. universities.
Take, for example, the story of DuPont’s $17 billion-a-year industry selling a product called “Titanium white,” which makes dozens of commonplace items white, from toothpaste to plastics to paint. China tried to buy the process from DuPont, but DuPont wouldn’t sell its 70-year-old business.
So the Communist Chinese stole it, using a Chinese immigrant, Tze Chao, working for DuPont as an engineer. After his arrest, he explained that the Chinese, “in asking me to provide DuPont trade secrets to them, overtly appealed to my Chinese ethnicity and asked me to work for the good of the PRC.”
A Chinese immigrant scientist named Kexue Huang, who held positions at both Dow AgroSciences and Cargill Inc., stole their trade secrets and sent them to China to promote China’s strategic science goals. After he was caught and pled guilty, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer said, “These crimes present a danger to the U.S. economy and jeopardize our nation’s leadership in innovation.”
Ron Paul has been working for years to get transparency in the Federal Reserve System. But a Chinese national named Bo Zhang, who was still trying to get a visa, was arrested in January and charged with stealing proprietary software code from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which had cost the United States $10 million to develop.
Chinese Communist officials must be laughing all the way to the bank at U.S. self-deception about free trade. What the Chinese mean by free trade is that the U.S. is bound by rules, but China gets our manufacturing technology free, sells us shoddy and sometimes poisonous merchandise, and uses its profits to build a military to overtake ours.
For years, U.S. free traders have been promising that we will soon be exporting our products to China. What we are exporting to China is U.S. jobs.
The auto-parts industry has been a backbone of U.S. manufacturing; three-fourths of the more than 600,000 U.S. auto-industry jobs are with parts companies. The auto-parts jobs are now migrating to China, and California alone is at risk of losing 70,000 jobs.
To build its own auto-parts industry, China is using all sorts of predatory trading practices. These include an $8.7 billion illegal subsidy, rigging its tax laws, manipulating its currency, tax incentives, low-interest loans, border taxes, and mandates that autos assembled in China must use engines made in China.
The free traders in the United States have been telling us for years that trade would lure China away from Communism, to embrace private enterprise, and become a good fellow in the global community. That isn’t happening; although China has allowed a few powerful bosses to get very rich, the Communist Party has retained all the reins of power.
China’s Justice Ministry just issued a requirement that new lawyers must swear an oath of loyalty to the Communist Party. Here is the essential part of this oath: “I swear to faithfully fulfill the sacred mission of legal workers in Socialism with Chinese characteristics. I swear my loyalty to the motherland, to the people, to uphold the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the Socialist system.”
When President Obama was participating in a live video chat, Jennifer Wedel asked him, “Why does the government continue to issue and extend H-1B visas when there are tons of Americans just like my husband with no job?” Her husband is a semiconductor engineer laid off three years ago and still unable to find an engineering job. We all would like the answer to that question.
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that, counting only U.S.-born individuals, there are 101,000 with an engineering degree who are unemployed, another 244,000 who are not working or not looking for work and therefore not counted in unemployment statistics, and an additional 1.47 million who have an engineering degree but are not working as an engineer.
Obama’s answer to Mrs. Wedel sounded like he had been well briefed by the big corporation lobbyists. He even expressed bewilderment that any U.S. high-tech engineer could be out of work because industry executives tell him there is an unfilled “huge demand” for engineers.
Obama said, “H-1Bs should be reserved only for those companies who say they cannot find somebody in that particular field.” Yes, indeed, they should. But in fact they are not.
Created in 1990, the H-1B program was designed for employers to import foreign H-1B workers to fill various high-tech jobs only when Americans could not be found, and the law was supposed to make it illegal for an employer to replace an American with an H-1B worker. However, the big corporation lobbyists succeeded in fuzzying up the law so there is now no effective rule to prevent employers from firing American jobholders and replacing them with H-1B aliens.
Big companies prefer H-1B workers because they can pay them significantly less than Americans, never have to give them a raise or promotion, and have the unilateral power to deport them. H-1B workers don’t dare to complain about working conditions or unpaid long hours, and can’t quit to take a better job.
Most H-1B workers are imported for entry-level jobs and trained by experienced U.S. workers who are then laid off. This process has introduced a new expression and acronym into the English language: DYOG: “Dig Your Own Grave.”
One Senator understands this problem: Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA). In a letter to the President last month, he pointed out how Obama’s response to Jennifer Wedel shows he is only regurgitating the corporation lobbyists’ sales talk with their phony mantra that “there are better and brighter people abroad.”
Grassley said “thousands of qualified Americans remain out of work while companies are incentivized to import foreign workers.” Grassley criticized the Obama administration for proposing new rules to “attract and retain highly skilled immigrants” to replace Americans, to expand eligibility for foreign students to remain in the U.S., to eliminate protections for U.S. workers, to allow employers to pay lower wages to alien workers, and to give work authorizations to spouses of H-1B workers, thereby increasing competition for Americans looking for all kinds of jobs.
Obama has made expanding H-1Bs a feature of his reelection campaign, trying to broaden the program that already allows the importation of 65,000 H-1B visa aliens annually. Some people are even pushing the ridiculous notion of stapling a green card to college diplomas, so that foreigners would automatically be allowed to stay and work in our country.
Will that include the 57,000 Chinese undergraduates now in U.S. universities, most of whom were admitted on the basis of fake transcripts and recommendation letters, and are awarded college degrees for which they did not qualify? That’s another racket that should be cleaned up.
Dickinson State University in North Dakota awarded degrees to 584 foreign students who did not earn them. On the day of an all-campus student meeting concerning this matter, Education Dean Douglas LaPlante was found dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot.
Media coverage of Obama’s colloquy with Mrs. Wedel focused on inviting her to send her husband’s resume, but the real news should have been jobs. Is Obama ignorant of the unemployment reality facing U.S. engineers, or is he disingenuously reciting the self-serving lies of his high-tech donors?
A good example of how the H-1B visa system works was described in a lawsuit filed against Molina Healthcare Inc., which handles Medicaid and Medicare paperwork for the government, and Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., which recruits H-1B workers in India. On January 14, 2010, one day after the Department of Labor approved Molina’s application for 40 H-1B workers, Molina fired approximately 40 competent U.S. programmers, managers and analysts and hired 40 H-1B replacements imported by Cognizant from India.
That is how H-1B visas work in the real world to take jobs away from Americans.
Islamic Indoctrination in Textbooks
Political Correctness has a double standard when it comes to teaching about religion in public schools. Drop Christianity down the Memory Hole, but give extensive and mostly favorable coverage to Islam.
Even the mainstream media have provided extensive coverage of the steady stream of court cases and ACLU threatening letters aimed at removing all signs of Judeo-Christianity from public schools. Not only must prayer be prohibited, a cross and the Ten Commandments removed or covered up, a valedictorian banned from thanking God for His help, a football coach prohibited from bowing his head during a student-led pre-game prayer, singing of Christmas carols banned, school calendars required to recognize Winter Holiday instead of Christmas, but there is also the complete omission of the history of the Founding Fathers’ public recognition of Christianity.
An organization called ACT for America conducted an analysis of 38 textbooks used in the 6th- through 12th-grades in public schools, and found that since the 1990s, discussions of Islam are taking up more and more pages, while the space devoted to Judaism and Christianity has simultaneously decreased. In 2011, NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) reported that American 12th graders scored lower in History than in any other subject, even lower than in science, math and economics.
Most of these students are too young to remember 9/11, so textbook descriptions about 9/11 is all they will learn. In one textbook example of pro-Islamic revisionism, 9/11 is portrayed as “a horrible act of terrorism, or violence to further a cause,” without any mention that the attackers were Muslims or that the “cause” was Islamic jihad.
The textbooks generally give a false description of women’s rights under Islam. The books don’t reveal that women are subject to polygamy, a husband’s legal right to beat her, genital mutilation, and the scandalous practice misnamed “honor killings,” which allows a man to murder a daughter who dares to date a Christian.
Slavery is usually a favorite topic for the liberals, but historical revisionism is particularly evident in the failure to mention the Islamic slave trade. It began nearly eight centuries before the European-operated Atlantic slave trade, and continues in some Muslim areas even today.
Other examples of historical revisionism in currently used textbooks include the omission of the doctrine of jihad or failure to accurately define it. Discussions of Muhammad’s life and character are often contrary to accepted historical facts.
Muslim conquests and imperialism are usually omitted or downplayed, and a completely false narrative about the Crusades is given. The books often falsely claim that Islam is tolerant of Jews and Christians.
Another technique is to describe Christian and Jewish religious traditions as mere stories attributable to some human source, whereas Islamic traditions are presented as indisputable historic facts. In one textbook, you can read that Moses “claimed” to receive the Ten Commandments from God, but that Muhammad simply “received” the Koran from God.
ACT for America is sending its report to all U.S. school board members nationwide. We hope they read it and tell the publishers the schools won’t buy books that contain such errors and biases because that may be parents’ only remedy for this indoctrination.
In the year of 9/11, a big controversy erupted at Excelsior public school in Byron, California, where seventh graders were being taught a three-week course about the Islamic religion. This course required the kids to learn 25 Islamic terms, 20 proverbs, Islam’s Five Pillars of Faith, 10 key Islamic prophets and disciples, recite from the Koran, to wear a robe during class, adopt a Muslim name, and stage their own “holy war” in a dice game.
Excelsior was using one of the textbooks that omit information about Islam’s wars, massacres, and cruelties against Christians and Jews. Christianity was mentioned only briefly and negatively, linked to the Inquisition and to Salem witch-hunts.
The students were given Muslim names and told to recite Muslim prayers in class. They were required to give up things for a day to recognize the Islamic practice of Ramadan, and the teacher gave extra credit for fasting at lunch.
For the final exam, the students had to write an essay about Islamic culture. The essay assignment warned students in these words: “Be careful here; if you do not have something positive to say, don’t say anything!!!”
Parents naively thought they could appeal to the courts to uphold their right to reject this class for their children, which was really not education but behavior modification. They didn’t realize that federal court decisions have ruled consistently against parents’ rights and in favor of the authority of public schools to teach whatever they want.
The parents lost in court. And on October 2, 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider the parents’ appeal from the lower court decision against them.
Look What’s Going On in Charter Schools
The charter school movement was presented to the American people as a way to have more parental control of public school education. Charter schools are public schools financed by local taxpayers plus federal grants.
Charter schools are able to hire and fire teachers, administrators and staff and avoid control by education department bureaucrats and the teachers unions. No doubt there are some good charter schools, but loose controls have allowed a very different kind of school to emerge.
Charter schools have opened up a path for foreigners to run schools at the expense of the U.S. taxpayers, without much news coverage. One of the few breakthroughs in the media was a front-page article in the New York Times (6-7-11), carried over to two full inside pages, about the many charter schools run by a secretive and powerful sect from Turkey called the Gülen Movement.
Headed by a Turkish preacher named Fethullah Gülen who had already founded a network of schools in 100 other countries, this movement opened its first U.S. charter school in 1999. Gülen’s schools spread rapidly after he figured out how to work our system and get the U.S. taxpayers to import and finance his recruitment of followers for his worldwide religious and social movement.
The Gülen Movement now operates the largest charter school network in the United States. It has at least 135 schools teaching more than 45,000 students in at least 26 states, financed by millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars a year.
The principals and school board members are usually Turkish men. Hundreds of Turkish teachers (referred to as “international teachers”) and administrators have been admitted to the United States, often using H-1B visas, after claiming that qualified Americans cannot be found.
In addition, the Gülen Movement has nurtured a close-knit network of businesses and organizations run by Turkish immigrants. These include the big contractors who built or renovated the schools, plus a long list of vendors selling school lunches, uniforms, after-school programs, web design, teacher training, and special education materials.
Several other news sources have started to publish information about the Gülen charter schools. In Ohio, an NBC-TV station reported that Ohio taxpayers’ money was used to recruit teachers for charter schools from overseas, especially from Turkey.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Turkish scientists, engineers and businessmen have opened several charter schools in Pennsylvania, plus 120 charter schools in 25 states, funded with millions of taxpayer dollars. Just one charter school, called the Truebright Science Academy, received $3 million from the Philadelphia School District.
According to a guest post in the Washington Post (3-27-12), Gülen’s U.S. schools are openly discussed in the Turkish press. The goal for Gülen’s schools is to “teach tens of thousands of people the Turkish language, introduce them to our culture and win them over,” and so the schools regularly take students to Turkey for “cultural immersion.”
The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that charter schools in New Orleans and Baton Rouge are linked to businesses run by people from Turkey.
In Texas, 36 Turkish charter schools, called the Harmony Network, have received over $100 million in government funds. These schools now have 290 (mostly Turkish) employees on H-1B visas, about 16 percent of its workforce.
In Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota, a substitute teacher named Amanda Getz reported about what goes on inside a charter school called TiZA. TiZA is a K-through-8th-grade charter school funded by U.S. taxpayers and sponsored by Islamic Relief.
The teacher says there is no clear division between the subjects studied during school and the study of the Koran after school. She says that homework assignments for after-school religious instruction are written on the board right alongside assignments for math and social studies.
Ms. Getz says she was informed that, on Fridays, the Muslim holy day, there would be a school assembly in the gym after lunch. She was instructed to take her students before the assembly to the bathroom, four at a time, for “ritual washing,” and afterwards “teachers led the kids into the gym, where a man dressed in white with a white cap” led the students in Muslim prayers.
This school has only 300 students, but it has a waiting list of 1,500. TiZA shares its building with a mosque and also with the headquarters of the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, whose mission is “establishing Islam in Minnesota.”
Ms. Getz said almost all TiZA students stay after school for “Islamic Studies” instruction provided by the Muslim American Society. The religious instruction is technically not part of the school day, but the school buses don’t leave until after Islamic Studies are over.
Most American taxpayers would be mighty surprised at what their money is financing.
