Obama Blocks Chinese Wind Farms In Oregon Over National Security

Hugh Pickens writes "Reuters reports that President Barack Obama has invoked a little-used law to block a privately owned Chinese company from building wind turbines close to a Navy military site in Oregon due to national security concerns. 'There is credible evidence that leads me to believe' that Ralls Corp, Sany Group and the two Sany Group executives who own Ralls 'might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States,' said Obama in issuing his decision. The military uses the Oregon naval facility to test unmanned drones and the EA-18G 'Growler.' The electronic warfare aircraft accompanies US fighter bombers on missions and protectively jams enemy radar, destroying them with missiles along the way. At the Oregon site, the planes fly as low as 60 m and at almost 480 km/h. The administration would not say what risks the wind farm purchases presented but the Treasury Department said the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, known as CFIUS, made its recommendation to Obama after receiving an analysis of the potential threats from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The last time a president used the law to block a transaction was in 1990, when George H.W. Bush voided the sale of an aerospace company, Mamco Manufacturing, to a Chinese agency."

Comments

Obligated to point out another security concern

[crazyjj]

Most computers and computer components sold in the U.S. are manufactured in China now. Just wanted to let you know, Mr. President, in case you missed it.

I know, I know "free market" and all that, sir. But is it really a free market if the country doing all the manufacturing isn't free?

Re:Obligated to point out another security concern

[war4peace]

Then use your in-house built electronics. Ah, too expensive? Well, tough shit, pay up or... what, no money? Maybe because of a debt that measures in trillions? Oh well, ask the Chinese for a big loan. Oh wait... :)

Re:Obligated to point out another security concern

[h4rr4r]

Debt for our nation is a good thing, within reason. Also the Chinese do not own most of our debt, they own only a decent percentage of foreign debt. When the USA can borrow money for negative interest, which is basically what is happening now, it should. We should use that money for investing in our nation and pay it back in better times.

Having no debt is bad for our nation, we then have no ability to influence interest rates.

Re:Obligated to point out another security concern

[ShanghaiBill]

We should use that money for investing in our nation and pay it back in better times.

It makes sense to borrow money at low (or negative) interest rates to invest in infrastructure, education, etc., because those investments will lead to higher growth in the future. But that is not what we are doing. We are borrowing money to put off dealing with entitlement reform. Spending money on pensions and healthcare for 80 year olds is pure consumption, and is not an investment in future growth. Pensions and healthcare for retirees are important, but funding them with borrowed money is insane.

Re:Obligated to point out another security concern

[h4rr4r]

We would not have to do that, if we could invest in things that would lead to higher growth. We have a political party that opposes doing so and fights it at every turn. This is of course because their own candidate for president prefers to ship jobs off overseas than to invest in America.

Please don't forget the entitlements to the defense contractors when you offer up the solution of removing the bread from the mouths of our seniors.

Re:Obligated to point out another security concern

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I know, I know "free market" and all that, sir. But is it really a free market if the country doing all the manufacturing isn't free?

Inconveniently, you can run something that looks remarkably like a free market economy while still executing inconvenient dissidents(the fantastic thing about dissidents is how often they are students, intellectuals, and other economically near-irrelevant bit players...) In fact, certain flavors of authoritarianism might actually make that easier: If the political process is free enough that it is viable and cost-effective to attempt to convert money into political influence(Americans should be readily familiar with this situation), there is a strong likelihood that either the private sector incumbents will gradually overrun the state and use it to suppress the aspects of the free market that are bad for margins(such as 'competition' and 'low barriers to entry') or public sector incumbents will gradually overrun the private sector in an attempt to suppress potential threats and ensure that the oligarchs of the private sector are in line with the strongmen of the public sector(the most notable case of this is probably Russia, where virtually anyone with a net worth worth talking about is either kissing Putin's ass, in prison on dubious tax charges, or hanging out in London).

If political authoritarianism is sufficiently ossified, such that money cannot be used to easily buy power, a certain dente comes to exist between the two sectors: because it is authoritarianism, the private sector will be coopted to some degree for state ends(espionage, vaguely mercantilist development/employment policies, enforcement of media blackouts and censorship; but because wealth is not easily transferrable to power, the state apparatus has an incentive to smile on anybody who is content to make money and keep his nose out of politics.

You can't have a command economy and a free market economy; but other flavors of unfreedom are substantially less incompatible...

Re:Obligated to point out another security concern

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Spending money on pensions and healthcare for 80 year olds is pure consumption, and is not an investment in future growth

Agreed.

Pensions and healthcare for retirees are important, but funding them with borrowed money is insane.

So let's cut them off and let them die while we take care of our debt issues. If any of them survive until our finances are in order, *then* we can take attend them. That's what civilized people do, don't you know - cast out their old and infirm, their non-contributors.

~

Re:Obligated to point out another security concern

[mcgrew]

We are borrowing money to put off dealing with entitlement reform. Spending money on pensions and healthcare for 80 year olds is pure consumption

I've been paying SS and Medicare taxes for 45 years. I fucking paid for it. Congress kept borrowing from the money we PAID. Yes, we ARE entitled to that SS amd medicare. Are you entitled to the food you bought and paid for? Are you entitled to the money you put in the bank? Yes, you are, and if you fuck with my retirement income, good luck getting reelected, kid.

BTW, fuck everyone who is against my getting what I PAID FOR. Goddamned thieves...

Re:Obligated to point out another security concern

[Anonymous Coward]

You paid it in and you (and your generation) elected politicians who squandered it. Your generation delivered the current economic problems to my generation and now you expect US to clean up YOUR mess. YOUR generation destroyed the SS and Medicare system. YOU should have been more responsible.

Re:Obligated to point out another security concern

[beelsebob]

Spending money on pensions and healthcare for 80 year olds is pure consumption, and is not an investment in future growth. Pensions and healthcare for retirees are important, but funding them with borrowed money is insane.

On the contrary...
Scenario 1: I, at 30, know that at 80 I will have to pay a bunch of extremely expensive medical bills out of my own pocket. The result – I squirrel my money away, and do nothing with it, because I know I'll be fucked later if I don't.
Scenario 2: I, at 30, know that at 80 I will have no such problems, and that the government will provide me with medical care at a significantly lower cost than if I'd had to pay it myself. The result – I put my money straight into the economy now by buying all kinds of shiny stuff, hence driving the economy.

You might say that the money I save gets worked by the banks I save with, but ultimately it works much less hard than the money I spend. You might also say that the money I pay in tax towards such a scheme would also be squirrelled away and hence not used for bolstering the economy, but that misses two critical things - 1) that it's much less money than I would be putting away myself as the healthcare is much cheaper this way 2) it's being paid for out of the negative interest, not my tax anyway.

Conclusion: investing in health care for the over 80 (or in fact socialised health care for everyone) is an excellent plan!

Aside – socialised health care for everyone would result in an even bigger boost to economic output, as it would make sure that as many as possible people were fit and healthy, ready to go and work, earn money, and spend it again.

Re:Obligated to point out another security concern

[MightyYar]

I fucking paid for it.

No, what you did was pretend to pay for it. Your generation tallied up the money that they paid in. They called this tally a "trust fund". Then they took the money and spent it on the general fund. Your parents' generation was complicit in this, and they are the ones who benefited from the scam.

We 30-somethings all want to know why you didn't burn these politicians at the stake in the 1980s when they set up this system. Our kids will want to know why my generation let Bush and Obama do the same thing to them.

Calling you children's generation "thieves" will not make them more sympathetic to you saddling them with trillions in debt.

Re:Obligated to point out another security concern

[paiute]

You paid it in and you (and your generation) elected politicians who squandered it. Your generation delivered the current economic problems to my generation and now you expect US to clean up YOUR mess. YOUR generation destroyed the SS and Medicare system. YOU should have been more responsible.

I just wanted to point out that there are no such things as "generations". That term is used by media as a filler because they don't have the time or inclination to be more subtle in their analyses. It isn't like humans give birth every 20 years en masse. The distribution of birth dates in the population follows a nice epidemiological curve.

Re:Obligated to point out another security concern

[Anonymous Coward]

Investing properly in education would solve that last part. By that I mean free university education for those who qualify at public universities.

Free to the students. So who pays for it?

Re:Obligated to point out another security concern

[h4rr4r]

The taxpayer, like most 1st world nations do to a large degree.

Having an educated society is of value to all members of that society. The party that embraces anti-education would of course fight this tooth and nail.

Re:Obligated to point out another security concern

[ArcherB]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/romneys-bain-capital-invested-in-companies-that-moved-jobs-overseas/2012/06/21/gJQAsD9ptV_story.html

So? Bain Capital invests in companies that employ people overseas. Lots of companies do that. Do you invest in Apple? How about Intel or AMD? Do you own an HTC phone, or a smart phone at all? Even the US Government has invests in companies that close down US plants to open them up overseas. Obama "invested" in GM. GM has closed down plants in the US to open new ones in Mexico and other places overseas. Do you think that Obama "prefers to ship jobs off overseas than to invest in America."? It's the same thing, isn't it? Well, except that Obama is using American tax dollars to do it against our will. Bain used freely invested money from investors.

Then, of course, there was that $2 billion loan to Brazil to drill off of their shores rather than our own. Isn't that preferring to ship jobs overseas rather than investing in jobs here in America?

The difference is that when Bain did it, it was because opening jobs overseas was the only way to save a company. When Obama did it, it was for.... Actually, I have no idea why Obama would invest in Brazilian oil and not Gulf of Mexico oil. Of course, like I said, Obama shipped jobs overseas with YOUR money against your will. Romney did not.

But the point is that you said "their own candidate for president prefers to ship jobs off overseas than to invest in America", which is something you can't back up because it's not true. You WANT to believe it so bad that you are actively silencing the the logic portion of your brain that is screaming, "why would Romney WANT to give American jobs to overseas workers? That doesn't make sense". It's sad when you have to lie to yourself to keep justify your beliefs.

Re:Obligated to point out another security concern

[gorzek]

I've made that particular healthcare argument more times than I can count, and because it is so sensible in terms of its cause, effect, and goals, you can only get responses that take issue with the very idea of government involvement in healthcare:

* "It's wrong for my neighbor to reach into my pocket to pay for what he can't afford." This is the libertarian argument, which is impossible to argue with because it comes from a fundamentally different view of government's purpose.
* "Let's get the government out of the healthcare business and let the free market sort it out." This is the conservative argument, which is naive at best and malevolent at worst. The "free market" is concerned with rent-seeking, not ensuring a healthy, productive workforce. Such policies have been proven over and over not to work, but conservatives keep pushing them because, I guess, enough people are gullible enough to buy them.
* Insert random argument about how socialized healthcare makes people lazy, dependent, etc. etc. etc.

Those who oppose a single-payer/socialized system in the US never seem to have an explanation for why healthcare is so much more expensive here, in our "free market" system, than in more socialized (e.g. European) systems. When confronted with this, their solution, puzzlingly enough, is to embrace even more "free market" policies to "bring costs down." It makes absolutely no sense.

It's official: the Cold War is back

[concealment]

The fact is that you can't have three big dogs in the same room, and not have each one want to be the top dog. USA, China and Russia are going to duke it out for who's top dog.

That being said, it's foolish that we allow so many Chinese firms to make vital parts of our infrastructure. The solution there won't be as easy as invoking a little-known law.

Re:China Conflation

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Now I don't know if there is ulterior motives, but if it was an American company they would probably do the same thing. China is not the issue. The concern is that wind farms effectively create radar blind spots. There is ongoing research attempting to solve this issue. It has happened a lot with British military bases.

It wouldn't entirely surprise me if somebody looked at the 'Red Chinese wish to place a field of antenna-shaped objects with wind turbines on top next to an ECM test site' concept and turned a slightly funny color, as well.

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's bad enough that foreign interests have taken up much of our manufacturing capability, but we certainly don't need them buying up our power generation capability. Every country should produce its own power. That's a mater of national security.

Re:Is this even Constitutional?

[drinkypoo]

A US company wouldn't be permitted to put up a wind farm in China at all, they would have to do it by partnering with a Chinese corporation which would build and actually own it.

Re:it's about the campaign

[JackieBrown]

He's tough on China now that Romney criticized him for not being tough on China. It will go right back to status quo right after the election.

Yes, it is constitutional

[Anonymous Coward]

From Section. 8.

"The Congress shall have Power To ... provide for the common Defence" and later on "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations". This is clearly both.The president is complying with an enacted law providing for the common defense by attemption to prevent a foreign nation from putting an ECM suite next to a test range, which is also a law which regulates commerce with foreign nations.

Social Security is entirely self-funding.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that the payments in have been raided for entitlement programs for the "wealth creators" by giving them a tax break that wasn't paid for.

Re:What about Walmarts?

[Chuckstar]

We weren't worried about Japanese military spying in the 80s because the Japanese had a tiny military, a pacifist constitution and, perhaps most importantly, seemed to have no interest in rebuilding military power.

China has a huge military, is overtly increasing its capabilities and has obvious aspirations to regional military hegemony.