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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."
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.
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.
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...
USA elects Don Quixote for president!
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
USA, China and Russia are going to duke it out for who's top dog.
That is two big dogs and a chihuahua. Does anyone really thing Russia will ever be a "top dog" again? Russia's economy is smaller than the economy of Brazil or Italy. Russia's population is declining, partly because of low birthrate and poor public health policies, but also because of emigration of the best and brightest.
If a third major power emerges in the 21st century, it is more likely to be India than Russia. India already has a bigger economy, and far more upside potential. They just need the will to reform their country, get rid of the corruption and subsidies, and open up their economy. If they did that, they could grow as fast as China.
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.
Surely he's just tilting at windmills.
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.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
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