Has Obama’s Big Spending Also Bought American Silence On Chinese Prison Camps?

By Investors Business Daily

December 26, 2012

Tyranny: A desperate, disturbing message from China found in a box of Halloween decorations is a reminder of how China “works,” as U.S. corporate and political elites have noted. Has America gone from beacon to bought off?

Despite a slew of laws to the contrary, it looks as though America’s vaunted trade relationship with China — the one hailed by the Obama administration and praised by CEOs from Siemens, Bayer, Coca-Cola, Citibank, and General Electric — remains what it always has been: a great slave empire.

Last October, Julie Keith, of Portland, Ore., opened up a kitschy box of “Totally Ghoul” Halloween decorations bought at Kmart and between two Styrofoam headstones found something more authentically jarring: an unsigned note in mangled English and Mandarin reading: “Sir: If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization. Thousands of people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever. This product produced by Unit 8, Department 2, Mashanjia Labour Camp, Shenyang, Liaoning, China.”

The mysterious writer went on to note that the workers were effectively slaves, paid about $1.61 a month, with many prisoners sentenced to work there to punish them for belonging to Falun Gong, a peaceful meditation sect reviled by Beijing as a threat.

There’s no reason to believe the letter isn’t authentic — the voice and handwriting are typically Chinese and it’s not uncommon for U.S. workers at Target and Wal-Mart to open boxes from China with newspapers or even money left inside. What’s more, the existence of the camp itself is well documented as practicing 20 different kinds of torture on its prisoners of conscience, as the letter described.

The note not only shows that China remains a terrible place for human freedom — but also that for all its lip service to the contrary, the U.S. could care less, putting its vast financial and trading relationship with China first.

When President Obama took office in 2008, he repeatedly praised China for its infrastructure and education focus, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated she wouldn’t let human rights “interfere” with administration priorities on China — trade, global warming cooperation, investment and security.

An amen chorus from the mainstream media echoed this line: New York Times columnist Tom Friedman praised China’s government for its supposed efficiency.

“One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,” he wrote. “But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.” He added that such a one-party state can “just impose” the policies that are needed.

Worse, the business community echoes this line.

GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt, linked to the Obama administration through the President’s Jobs Council praised China to TV host Charlie Rose. “The one thing that actually works, state-run communism a bit — may not be your cup of tea, but their government works.

Works? As in “seen the future and it works”?

The reality is that it never works, and we have seen this horror before — in the warnings of emigres from Cuba to Ukraine, to the reports of honest reporters, such as Malcolm Muggeridge, who reported the atrocities of Stalinism in Ukraine — all the way to the Oregonian’s Rachel Stark, who reported this Chinese story.

“Do those convinced pacifists hear the moans coming from there (the Gulag),” asked Russian novelist Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. “Or do they prefer not to hear?”

The main reason for the Obama administration’s lack of interest in human rights in China is because China enables the U.S. to continue its wild deficit spending. They’ve bought our silence on slave labor, in effect.

China now holds $1.16 trillion in U.S. treasury bonds, and is our largest creditor. So long as China enables Obama to spend cash at home, the silent screams will continue from China’s slave labor camps, only occasionally reaching the ears of the West.

The only question is: Will America’s own mandarins ever stop their uncontrolled spending and debt surge, which keeps them from telling the truth about China?

Original posting