The United States government never ceases to endlessly talk about the God given rights of Americans, and the threat posed to these rights by hostile foreign powers.
There is no truth in any of its talk. It signs off on the Bill of Rights with its right hand, and betrays it with its left; it tells the people it serves them while it is bound hand and foot by the interests of corporate monopolies. In reality, there is only one right that the U.S. government is interested in upholding: the “right” of American corporations to economic supremacy. It will go to any lengths to ensure that this “right” is protected.
The House of Representatives passed, by a vote of 352-65, the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” on March 13, which will ban TikTok and any successor applications owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, LTD, unless ByteDance divests Tik Tok to an approved U.S. based company. It is not really a “ban” at all. It is an attempt to seize the property of a company that is seen as being controlled by a “foreign adversary” nation.
The U.S. Code provides a list of foreign adversary nations; the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran.
So, what does it mean, according to the bill, for a company or application to be controlled by a foreign adversary nation?
“(A) a foreign person that is domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in or is organized under the laws of a foreign adversary country; (B) an entity with respect to which a foreign person or combination of persons described in subparagraph (A) directly or indirectly own at least a 20 percent stake; or (C) a person subject to the direction or control of a person or entity described in subparagraph (A) or (B),” states the bill.
To translate this into everyday language, if an entity is made up of a group of individuals who are citizens of a foreign adversary nation, or of individuals who answer to citizens of a foreign adversary nation or which has its base operations in a foreign adversary nation or at least 20% of which is owned by citizens of a foreign adversary nation, then it is defined as an entity which is under the control of a foreign adversary nation.
What this means is that, if this bill passes, it will be illegal for any company of North Korean, Chinese, Russian or Iranian origin to operate within the U.S. and market towards American citizens. They would be forced to either cease all activity within the U.S., or sell their assets to American companies. What does that have to do with protecting American citizens?
This has nothing to do with protecting people, and everything to do with protecting American corporations from having to compete on the international market. It seems that American businesses are no longer capable of competing with Chinese businesses.
It seems that the American government knows this, and that it is making a desperate effort to defeat Chinese companies not by fair competition, but by fraud and force. How ironic that the Chinese Communist Party is better at capitalism than American corporations!
This is nothing more than an escalation of the trade war that the U.S. has been attempting (and failing) to wage against China for the past two decades. American businesses are not as productive as they once were; they cannot compete. Every year, billions of dollars are siphoned out of the American economy and into the Chinese economy via the import of Chinese manufactured goods.
Every year, the American economy stagnates, and the Chinese economy grows by leaps and bounds. According to the website Macrotrends, in 2021 Chinese production output increased by 27.15% from 2020, whereas U.S. production output only increased by 11.55%.
Looking at the production of basic industrial goods by both countries, in the year 2021, the U.S. produced:
- 85.8 million tons of steel according to Statista
- 90 million tons of cement according to Mineral Commodities Summary 2022
- 11 million barrels of crude oil a day according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration
China, in the same year, produced:
- 113.55 million tons of steel and 190.85 million tons of concrete according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China
- 15 million barrels of crude oil a day according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration
So we see that China consistently outperforms the U.S. in regards to industrial production, and this isn’t even taking into account Chinese production of consumer goods.
The U.S., lacking sufficient industrial capacities (which was caused by outsourcing manufacturing to China in the 80s) cannot prevent the importation of Chinese goods without ruining its own economy. The only route open to the U.S. is to prevent China from doing the one thing that the U.S. can do; digital services.
The U.S. has massive, intricate digital infrastructure and is perfectly capable of maintaining its own digital services (even if it does this poorly). The U.S. does not need Chinese digital infrastructure, so that is the first thing to go.
If this bill is passed, the U.S. will soon find that it is not enough to prevent China from operating its digital infrastructure within its borders. The Chinese economy will not suffer at all from this, nor will the U.S. economy gain, because nothing will fundamentally change.
The next step will inevitably be to pass further restrictions on the import of Chinese goods, to raise tariffs, increase the amount of bureaucratic regulations and perhaps even the outright banning of certain Chinese consumer goods imports, all of which will greatly increase the cost of living for working Americans.
We are now entering a period of great economic upheaval, which will be characterized by hamfisted measures to regulate economic activity in an attempt to preserve the power of monopoly capitalism. This bill is its beginning.
