new MLK statue in DC made in China

[cordilleran]

Diplomacy and Most-favored Trade status are world's apart. Here's the conundrum. It's the 1960s, and you are a poor white trailer trash boy who jumps the fast tracks of Johnson's Great Society to get a ticket to Harvard. You hook up with upper middle class kids who hate the privileges they've been afforded and frankly, you hate your parents. Mao, Che, and Castro are fashionable because they also hate your government for its free market success and by default, they hate your parents, too. Loco parentis ad extremis. Killing innocents through the SLA, SDS, Weathermen, et. al, gets a little blase with the fall of Saigon, and the Killing Fields is not a star you want to hang your Chairman Mau cap to. After all, you do not want to interfere in Khmer Rouge shennanigans as these are ideological brothers. Go underground and infiltrate the cornerstones of U.S. society: media, government, arts, education, religion. Lambaste traditional mores. Redefine the family. Situational ethics, Moral relativity. You get the picture. Fast foward 20 years. You are now in the thick of the mainstream. You represent a candidate who reinvents democracy. You've finangled yourself into a position as Arkansas governor. It's a stepping stone to greater ideological goals. Its the early 1990s and everyone is drunk on the malaise of good times and amnesia. You are John the Baptist, preparing the way for the new secular messiah. You are elected president because a spoiler by the name of Perot. You are the first president to forge a strict trade relationship with communist China. You are the first president to bolster up every sagging communist country globally and the first to spread the intellectual/industrial/military knowledge around to our adversaries claiming to "level the global playing field". You provide taxpayer dollars and technology to have constructed nuclear reactors in North Korea. Not surprisingly, the same nuclear capability we are now concerned with (but hear little about by the apologist media who largely bought into the "dream"). Of course the Messiah, despite having worn the face of Al Gore previously, a man whom leftards so desperately desired to usher in the age of chains and constraints, was defeated in 2000, would manifest himself as the great usurper to kow-tow the intellectual/developmental/industrial/economic might of the United States, hanging chads notwithstanding (you paid for the recount in the tens-of-millions of dollars). So here we are. The tolerant, diverse, and morally downtrodden superpower about to be eclipsed by an ideological foe who despises freedom. Guess what? While you were trying to convince yourself how great you were by allowing the flotsam and jetsam into your living space, you have brought about your own destruction. Your adulation of the mediocre, the mundane and the uninspired as exemplars to be emulated societally has resulted in a Bevis and Butthead reality. High art is whomever can outgross the next posuer masquerading as an enlightened soul and the soul is reduced to a feeling, highest bidder gets the prize for pot or poontang. After all isn't the Cubs, Red Sox, Giants. Green Bay Packers the mostest?

So do you expect me to care one iota about the hardships to come? Doesn't matter to me. Been there done that. Your enlightened, progressive society marginalized people like me eons ago. Aristotle said it best in Ars Poetica: "The ignorant masses are most easily swayed by appeals to emotion". You've made your pudding. Now eat it and don't complain to the headmaster that it tastes like offal.

 

[cordilleran]

Gunther: you pose an interesting question. The bottom line is that there exists a "guild mentality" even among the lowest classes which forces workers from the job market based upon ethnicity. At one time, in recent history, there were "Oakies" who plied the harvest field, traveling from the south to the northernmost fields picking produce throughout the seasonal year. As it stands today if you are not from Michoacan, you do not stand a chance working as a field produce harvester. We have not only been edged out of job possibilities thanks to legislative fiat rewarding foreign markets abroad, we are also forced from viable employment by foreign interlopers domestically. Auto de-fe?

 

[suzanne]

[][][]you are correct. Most people are clueless. That's what the politicians want because sheep are easier to herd than, say, cats.

 

[GuntherHess]

so, getting back to the original topic.
I guess I'll play the devils advocate.
The statue was made in China. Why is that a problem?
Public funds werent used to build it, it was a private endeavor.
The foudation had to decide what was the best deal they could get.
The Chinese contributed about 25 million to the project,
almost 1/4 of the cost and filling a shortfall that might not have been reached.
The chinese source for the stone was the best quality stone available.

The biggest problem I see is that the Chinese human rights record directly conflicts with the life work of MLK.
Hey, but business is businesss right?[]

 

[cordilleran]

Gunther: please enlighten us with your definition of "human rights".

 

[GuntherHess]

read the US bill of rights , its defined pretty well there.

 

[cordilleran]

As I recall, the Bill of Rights (United States) dealt with the first 10 amendments of the Constitution basically enumerating Locke's dictum of less government in the pursuit of one's true potential (with heavy emphasis on property rights and self-enrichment). Do I interpret this as meaning, from your interpretation, that human rights are those rights unencumbered by the heavy hand of government intrusion?

 

[GuntherHess]

if you are trying to creep towards a conclusion that US government is just as bad as the Chinese goverment I think you are on a wild goose chase.

 

[cordilleran]

The conclusion, based upon empirical method, might reinforce that age-old maxim that one is judged by the company one keeps. After all, does not the United States provide equal opportunity to all in every venue irrespective of race, creed, sex, or political affiliation for instance? (This covenant is noninclusive of avian rights, emancipated or domesticated however).

 

[GuntherHess]

all things considered we do a pretty darn good job, China has a long way to go.