By Louis Chan, AsAmNews National Correspondent
A new ad running in Ohio just might be funny if it weren’t so serious.
The ad features ominous looking Chinese officials and a narrator warning of Chinese who “took over our manufacturing jobs, shuttered our factories, now they’re coming for our energy jobs.”
The ad is a preemptive strike against a petition circulating in the state calling for the overturn of a $1 billion bailout of two nuclear power plants in Ohio.
This may sound too incredulous to be true. You can see the ad for your self here.
Ohioans can expect to see the ad until it makes them nauseous. The campaign to defend the bailout is expected to spend a million dollars on TV and radio spots soon, according to CleveScene.com.
This is happening in Ohio. Its a state Donald Trump needs to win to be elected to a second term. Remember, no Republican has ever been elected president without winning Ohio. If this type of campaign can win in Ohio, it’s an indication Ohioans just might hand Trump another four years.
An analysis by the Cincinnati Enquirer calls the ad’s claims weak.
The assumption here is that Ohio’s natural gas fired plants are trying to bury competition from nuclear power plants.
“They want to kill their Ohio-based competition so their companies gain market share and gain a majority of Ohio’s electrical grid,” Carlo LoParo, a spokesman for the group behind the ad, told The Enquirer.
Ohioans for Energy Security says three out of four of the natural gas fired plants in Ohio are backed by the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. What the ad leaves out is that those same plants are also financed by a total of ten banks including global banks from Switzerland, France, Australia and other countries. The ad also doesn’t mention that the Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp of Ohio which runs several nuclear power plants in the state also has been back by the Chinese bank.
The experts say that claims Chinese foreign interests can gain control of America’s energy grid are suspect.
“We have pretty strong regulation of utilities that would prevent foreign governments from controlling them,” David Dollar, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Enquirer.
Those are the facts, but unfortunately as this country has learned, facts don’t always matter to uneducated voters who kept swept up by misguided emotions lead by unscrupulous demagogues.
At least one Asian American group in Ohio is discussing how to respond to the ad. As word makes its way across the country about this ad, hopefully groups in Ohio will also gain support from national Asian American groups.
This type of anti-Chinese hysteria is nothing new. National Asian American leaders have long warned of racial profiling against the Chinese community as tensions rise between the US and China. Innocent Chinese American lives have been ruined by false charges of spying-charges which were later dropped without apology or explanation.
This ad is just the latest chapter in the rising phobia against the Asian American community. National leaders in the community would be wise to join in speaking out against the latest racist attack.
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