John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY MIKE WHITNEY IN UNZ REVIEW

 

“Huawei in the Crosshairs”

 

In the end, America’s prolonged and stubborn attack on Huawei is only going to harm its own interests.

It risks falling behind in applied technology, and a system like 5-G opens doors for other important advances.

For example, the Chinese have demonstrated a medical operation conducted by robot at quite a long distance, something only possible because of the speed and volume of information transmitted with 5-G.

America risks irritating all of its allies, many of whom are already irritated by threats and demands over what they are allowed to buy and from whom.

And since many of them are going to ignore American demands about Huawei, considering them unrealistic, it really begins to erode America’s traditional international authority.

It strains American credibility even farther because everyone knows America is only doing this as part of a hybrid economic war against China. It is playing the big ugly bully.

America’s allies know that it spies on everyone, with its NSA facilities and with built-in back doors in American technology and with the cooperation of Internet giants like Amazon and Wikipedia and Google and Facebook.

Huawei has been remarkably open about America’s accusations of spying, inviting foreign experts to examine its technology, building countries’ confidence in it.

America’s behavior speeds the day of Putin’s multi-polar world emerging, something already well underway through ongoing natural evolutionary changes in various countries and changes in technology and changes in patterns of trade and growth in some markets over others.

And there’s the fact of America’s lack of competitiveness in so many things. It arrogantly demands that everyone help it regain its past position. America refuses to get busy improving its competitiveness with hard work and lots of investment.

Even its infrastructure is crumbling, but there’s always hundreds of billions for wars and coups which build and advance nothing.

No, America thinks it can issue diktats to regain its position of 1959. That’s literally impossible, and America looks foolish thinking it can.

Accusations of China’s stealing intellectual property are often incorrect and display ignorance about America’s own past.

From the late 18th century through the 19^th, America stole intellectual property from Europe on a large scale – everything from new farm implements to books were brought home and copied with no royalties ever being paid.

The set of actions around Huawei provides a rather fitting symbol for America’s government at this time.

A 21st century Luddite.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY KONRAD YAKABUSKI IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Competitiveness and innovation are never affected by government exhortations, nor indeed are they affected by any other exhortations, including those of business schools or “inspirational” speakers.

They come from the underlying real economic and financial conditions of a country and of the world in which it functions.

One can only look at the United States’ position in the world and offer a bitter smile at Obama’s empty words.

Debts of monumental proportions in every accounting from international balances to personal finance, idiotic pointless wars, and mindless military and security expenditures – all at the same time new competitors like China, India, Brazil, and even Russia grow to new strengths.

The United States is simply not competitive in so many areas of its economy. Nor is there any reason to believe that it can become so before undergoing a great deal of painful adjustment, the kind of adjustment its government works tirelessly to avoid.

Their government ignores reality because Americans are on average surely the world’s greatest whiny babies when it comes to painful adjustments.

It is their sense of boundless entitlement, fostered by countless dumb politicians blubbering in Fourth of July speeches about the American Dream and passing laws and budgets, year after year, which are completely irresponsible.

That is simply a one-way trip to nowhere, no matter how big your economy and how great some of its past performance.

But Americans are suckers for tent preachers, in everything from new product advertising to politics and self-help gurus helping themselves to people’s pocket books, and Obama is really starting to sound like one more of a tiresome breed.

The answer, of course, is for America to shut-up and roll its sleeves up – even then there are no guarantees of the same kind of future as it has enjoyed in the past – but you never fire America’s imagination by truth and reality.

Miracles, sermons, sugar plums, and fairy stories are always in demand.