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The United States Senate has passed an amendment that reinstates the ban on Chinese telecoms concern ZTE doing business with US-based companies.
President Trump said he’d secured a reversal of the ban as a personal favour to Chinese president Xi Jinping in the hope that the show of good faith would ease trade negotiations between the two nations. ZTE was banned from dealing with US firms for flouting laws about exporting to Iran and North Korea. The ban cut ZTE off from critical component-makers like Qualcomm and led to it shuttering production lines and resellers dumping its products.
Trump's plan to have his friendship with Xi ease tensions appears not to have worked, in the short term at least, because the Trump administration today issued a statement that said “China apparently has no intention of changing its unfair practices related to the acquisition of American intellectual property and technology” and therefore threatening tariffs on US$200bn of Chinese goods.
The threat came after Trump last week announced tariffs on $50bn of Chinese goods, sparking retaliatory tariffs on about $35bn of US-made goods from China.
All of which doesn’t look like that personal favour worked out as planned.
Back to the ZTE vote, as it saw US Senators from both sides of politics decry the removal of the ban on grounds of national security. A joint statement from senior Republican and Democratic senators read: “We're heartened that both parties made it clear that protecting American jobs and national security must come first when making deals with countries like China, which has a history of having little regard for either. It is vital that our colleagues in the House keep this bipartisan provision in the bill as it heads towards a conference.”
And there’s the rub, because the US House of Representatives has passed a version of the same bill without the ZTE ban. Reconciling the bill may yet see ZTE given a lifeline, although the Senate vote passed 85 votes to 10 so there’s clearly not much will for a reversal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 21 2018, @05:50AM (1 child)
That's 1 metric.
It's not the (Trumpian) one that I would choose to dwell on.
With the conversion of Russian serfs to Soviet citizens, folks in USSR got universal education, universal healthcare, and a guaranteed roof over their heads.
...and everybody had a job to go to.
As I already mentioned, USA has a declining standard of living.
I see "success" as Joe Average doing better than his parents.
In 2015, 55 percent of USAians couldn't weather a $400 emergency without selling something or taking out a loan.
In 2016, the number went up to 60 percent.
This doesn't even include, with the financialization of USA's economy plus worker compensation flat since the early 1970s while costs constantly increase, that most folks have had to live on credit for well over a decade.
You clearly think that an increase in inequality [google.com] is not something to worry about in a "democracy".
I do.
...and USA's Labor Non-Participation Rate has stayed at a near-constant 23 percent for a decade.
(Unlike the New Deal years and the USSR's system, actual employment in the 21st Century Neoliberal USA isn't even keeping up with population growth.)
That's not what I call a successful system.
It is, in fact, a failure.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 21 2018, @02:32PM
China seems to be a success then. They've kinda put communism on a back burner, and joined the rest of the world in capitalistic ventures. Communism is a failure, and even the Chinese have tacitly admitted as much.