The flow of Money is the flow of energy
The flow of Money is the flow of energy sorting out the landscape and eventually delivers to us all the eventual outcome of how it all is. The world is slowly needing to take a long serious hard look at what is going on with itself. Please do not step into the flow without knowing how unconditional the flow really is and how it is always forever. It is perfect every time. If it washes your building away and creates a mess down stream., you can’t then cry because something is then bigger than you in the world.
The movement from the childish adolescent “I want it all for myself forever and ever” to “how can we help you here with the next step into the Unknown”.
That falls into the category of unconditional HONESTY. This is assumed that someone is still trustworthy or that Trust is still needed in this neo Libertarian “just take it all and quit with the virtues nonsense” in our behaviour.
Regardless of whether there is or has been a long enduring economical war across the greater global community or not, Western Aristotle didn’t believe in a world without slaves. The Almighty God of the West has just said take it all, as much as you want, for you are without argument my “Chosen Ones”.
This does not appear true as it turns out.
In fact the money has been growing in the East uninterrupted for thousands of years. No matter how much the Libertarians and later the refurbished Neo Libertarians tried to destroy all matters for the sake of business interest. Nothing is out of context. Look out the window and stop burning history accounts. The big money is real, it is cash, it has re invaded China and China is the legal entity that will protect all that hard work, now cash that has returned to China from the distantly dispatched and once exiled Over Seas Chinese. Too bad the West was not chosen as a friend.
Neo Libertarian political structures have not and still can not interfere with this solid source of ongoing cash.
If the West is not the friend because it is seen as a corrupt thief, mindset stealing and liar, it cannot cry like a baby and refuse to grow up beyond adolescence and expect to be treated as anything different.
The world in the mean time has grown up without the West and it is perceived Government-Business lamination of self deluded Old Money owners.
The money is so old that it is dying. Greatness and therefore immortality is not in question for the west.
Below is a historical snapshot of getting to a point of saturation so early in the opportunity of trade when dealing with the West. This is an omen for the West.
It is over for the Western "Take it All" Experiment.
One World, World Order pretentiousness seems a bit embarrassing now.
Greater China
Mar 3, 2011 |
Trade dance stomps on Huawei deal
By Benjamin A Shobert
Criticism of how Chinese companies participate in their export markets is fairly easy to come by: they compete primarily on price, or they make short-cuts on product quality, or they do not understand how to build brands.
The good thing about each of these criticisms is that they can be addressed, whether through investment or recrafting their business strategies. But, as the rebuffed attempt by one of the world's biggest telecommunications equipment suppliers, Huawei Technologies, to purchase assets from a small information technology company, illustrated last week, one criticism of China's leading exporters is not so easily remedied: Washington's concern over the lack of transparency between China's government and certain industries, in particular those with a potential impact on national security matters.
Huawei, whose technology is also used around the world to build mobile phone networks, said last week it had decided to cancel a deal to buy patents and hire some employees from 3Leaf Systems, a California-based cloud-computing company. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon demanded Huawei retroactively seek approval of the transaction from a secretive panel called the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews foreign investment that might threaten national security.
Post September 11,2001, policymakers and politicians in Washington have been understandably focused on looking for vulnerabilities in America's infrastructure. One of the primary concerns that this process has elevated has been cyber-security, specifically the country's reliance on the Internet not only for commerce, but for linkages between military assets, the power grid, and overall telecommunication capacity. Washington, and from Huawei's perspective not rightly so, has conflated concern over cyber-security with the ongoing role of the Chinese government in Huawei's business.
This concern has been hammered on by, among other agencies, the US-China Congressional Committee (USCC). Over the past several years, its hearings and annual reports have repeatedly pointed to the emphasis China's military places on cyber-warfare and the potential for key and Chinese-made components in America's telecommunications sector to somehow enable a Chinese cyber-attack on US interests.
Given the enormous role China's supply chain plays in this particular part of America's economy, these questions have informed many key American politicians who have blocked Huawei's attempts to either sell into the US, or purchase technology from American firms.
Huawei clearly understands that this suspicion has been poisonous to its ability to pursue meaningful merger and acquisition activities in the US. As Ken Hu, chairman of Huawei USA wrote in an open letter to the US government last week: 'The allegation that Huawei Hu then goes on to state, "We are committed to working together with governments in all countries to take all necessary measures to protect information security."
Huawei obviously believes the CFIUS review process has been politicized in a manner that has prevented them from getting a fair hearing. But William Vigdor, a Washington-based lawyer at Vinson and Elkins and an expert on the CFIUS review process, disagrees with this.
According to Vigdor, "The computer and telecommunications industries are industries in which CFIUS has taken an interest for many years. Also, the United States government is examining closely issues of cyber-security. The transaction touched (at least in part) on those areas."
According to Vigdor, the CFIUS review process has been more actively deployed over the past several years, "particularly when it comes to extending reviews into 75-day investigations. This is due largely to the enactment of the Foreign Investment and National Security Act of 2008 that requires CFIUS to conduct an investigation (not just a 30-day review) for a transaction involving a government owned entity or critical infrastructure, unless the Department of Treasury and lead CFIUS agency determine at the level of deputy secretary, that the transaction will not impair the national security."
Some have suggested that Huawei's problems in the US boil down to two primary areas: first, a perceived lack of transparency as to the ongoing relationship between China's military and the tentacles of its global business, and second, a lack of effective public relations to plead its case with key decision-makers and influence-peddlers both in Washington and around the country in advance of the CFIUS process being triggered. Huawei's formal response from its USA chairman appears to acknowledge the latter concern and, while too little too late, is a major step in the right direction since the last time Huawei and CFIUS butted heads.
In that sense, Huawei's reaction to the rejection of its 3Leaf deal shows that the company is learning. While the formalized boundaries that guide CFIUS make for potential obstacles that Huawei can identify and may hope to ultimately work through, the more intangible challenge is best illustrated by a letter from eight US senators last summer.
The politicians questioned allowing the company to provide key telecom equipment to Sprint on the basis of national security concerns. Their concerns amount to "what-ifs", a set of questions and scenarios that are admittedly of the sort policymakers are elected to ask, but equally designed to be so open-ended that they would prove extremely difficult for Huawei to answer.
For all the discussion over the role of public relations in Huawei's management of its relationship with Washington, these "what-if" questions may prove to be the most damning, in large part because they are unanswerable and speak to fundamental discomforts held by many in Washington.
In Hu's letter he writes that "... in the United States we hire independent third-party security companies, such as EWA, to audit our products in order to certify the safety and reliability of the products at the source code level", but if no matter what Huawei offers to do along these lines, the country's politicians are fundamentally uncomfortable with turning over key parts of the nation's telecommunication infrastructure to near-peer economic competitors, then Huawei may have reached a saturation point in the US.
However, it could be a mistake to interpret Washington's Huawei-3Leaf decision purely through the lens of national security. While these concerns did constitute part of the pushback by CFIUS, they may not have been the only factor. This decision can also be seen as part of an ongoing dance between the two countries as they define the next generation of rules that will animate their trade relationship for several years to come.
Last year, US companies in the information technology and medical-device markets in particular raised concerns over China's Indigenous Innovation policy and its restrictions on their ability to export high-value products into China. To many companies in these sectors, it seemed as if Chinese trade policy had decisively tilted towards a protectionist mindset. For all the concern that America would turn inwards, it seemed to these businesses that in fact it was China that was becoming overly protectionist.
Most of these concerns related to how the Indigenous Innovation policy prohibited Chinese government stimulus monies from being spent on any goods or services not provided by a Chinese-owned firm. This was felt by many in the US to be a classic protectionist move that walled off critical segments of China's market from US companies.
Additionally, portions of the policy required US companies to disclose key parts of their technologies to Chinese partners, amounting to a state-sponsored transfer of technology that would have left many US companies empowering new competitors as a trade for short-term access to China's market.
Last year, politicians in Washington heard from frustrated American chief executive officers who believed they were being unfairly discriminated against in their attempts to penetrate the Chinese market. And now a frustrated Chinese company, told again that it will have limits placed on its ability to work in the US, believes it is being treated unfairly in the American market.
While an effective public relations strategy might aid both groups, much of what they are each bumping into remains political concerns that outstrip the ability of their businesses to address and remedy.
Have we reached a point in US-China relations where both countries are saying to one another: "This far, but no further"? Rather than resort to enacting new, more stridently protectionist measures, have both countries determined the same outcome can be achieved through more nuanced approaches: For China, through policies tied to government stimulus that direct monies only towards Chinese-owned businesses, and for America, by using national security concerns as an easy mechanism for pushing Chinese businesses out of key parts of the national economy?
It may be that the Huawei-3Leaf situation can be fully understood as specific to the American telecommunications market, and the country's concerns over letting a Chinese company own technology deemed critical to US national security. Or, it could be that Huawei represents an opportunity for Washington to score an easy point on a politically sensitive issue; the threat China plays not against US national security, but to the American economy.
If so, Huawei may have reached the limits of what it can successfully achieve in the US, a lesson that will surely resonate with the many other Chinese-owned multinationals whose plans for American markets involve similar market exploration, mergers and acquisitions.
Benjamin A Shobert is the managing director of Teleos Inc (www.teleos-inc.com), a consulting firm dedicated to helping Asian businesses bring innovative technologies into the North American market.
(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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