UNITED NATIONS – The American economy continues to weaken, bled dry by overseas trading "partners" who steal our trade secrets, undervalue their currency and lie about what they're doing.
With partners like these, who needs enemies?
Commerce Department data show the U.S. trade deficit with China soared to $365.7 billion in 2015. That's a huge jump from the previous year's record of $343 billion.
Meanwhile, the latest figures show our overall trade deficit with the world also widened in December.
Why do we care? The trade deficit is a major reason the economy stinks.
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Americans in places like Ohio, California, Virginia and Missouri used to make the goods we are now buying from China, Mexico and Bangladesh. Americans replaced by overseas labor don't have jobs – or paychecks to spend at a restaurant or a dentist. So everyone is affected even if their job didn't move offshore.
The trade deficit sapped almost half a percentage point from gross domestic product in the fourth quarter, holding down growth to 0.7 percent annual rate, economists say.
Our trading "partners" – read China – manipulate the value of their currency so they can undersell American-made goods and drive American industries into bankruptcy.
It's basically the same scam John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil ran in the 1800s. He'd sell his oil for less than what the competitors were asking and drive them out of business. Once they were gone, he could charge what he wanted.
This business practice is illegal in the U.S., but global players can still – and do – get away with it. Multinational corporations that moved their factories out of the U.S. are complicit in the scam, as they also profit while beggaring America.
Now we are seeing how our trade deficits and the offshoring of our industries threatens national security.
China is using the dollars it accumulates from our trade deficits to corner key technologies used not just to watch videos on smartphones but to guide missiles.
"China is spending billions of dollars on a major push to make its own microchips, an effort that could bolster its military capabilities as well as its homegrown technology industry," the New York Times reports.
The latest deal of concern is China's bid to buy the company that produces light-emitting diodes and the most advanced semiconductor material known as gallium nitride.
"It's the most important semiconductor material since silicon," Colin Humphreys, a British physicist at Cambridge University, tells the Times.
Gallium nitride chips are used in radar for anti-ballistic missiles and were key to upgrading the Patriot missile system.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., Cfius, made up of representatives from the Treasury and Justice Departments, reviews investments that could pose a risk to national security. It blocked the sale.
While this sale didn't go through, China is committed to acquiring the technology it needs to be the world leader – economically and militarily. What it can't buy it will steal.
None of this happened by accident.
Our government has been all too willing to let China and its enablers in the C suites of global corporations have their way.
It was a deliberate policy choice to bleed our country of jobs and industries.
It will take a different policy choice to make America, and the American people, strong again.
Media wishing to interview Curtis Ellis, please contact [email protected].
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