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WELCOME TO THE GLOBAL ECONOMY II - Well, we in North Carolina are being blessed with "new opportunities" for export, now that the China trading deal has been closed, in those exciting high-tech areas of chicken, pork and tobacco. Sometimes I think we are lucky to get even these scraps.
One of the leading proponents of the recent China deal was Motorola, which spent over $2,000,000 in newspaper and other advertising to promote the legislation.
Not for us, they said, but for America, because America and America's workers stand to gain so much from these new, increased levels of exchange.
Like what?
Like this: In early August, to soften us up, Motorola announced that they had signed two new contracts for packet radio telephone services in nine Chinese provinces with a population roughly that of the U.S.A. The first, for $190,000,000 was followed with a second deal worth $258,000,000. That sounded like astoundingly good luck, good timing, good news for American wage-earners, didn't it?
Then on August 21, the other shoe dropped.
Motorola announced that it had signed agreements to supply $1,900,000,000 in investments in two facilities: the Motorola Tianjin Integrated Semiconductor Manufacturing Complex and the Motorola Asia Telecommunication Product Manufacturing Site. The American negotiator of the deal boasted that this would lead to the training of world-class semiconductor professionals in China. MTISMC will have an initial work force of 2,400; MATPMS will have an initial complement of 1,500, growing to over 8,000.
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This institute now employs 800 scientists, soon to grow to 1,500 (by the end of 2001). They will also offer research contracts and academic support to eight Chinese technical universities.
These announcements were followed by a message to the staff of the Motorola Phoenix [AZ, USA] facility, that the American semiconductors that were to go into the initial contracts - the $448,000,000 worth of radio telephone equipment - would not be needed: they will be manufactured in China.
This series of announcements - the above are all based on the company's own press releases - gives new meaning to the verb "underdevelop."
Motorola is participating in a massive effort to "underdevelop" the work force of the U.S.A.
They are taking literally billions of dollars to train the Chinese workers, not the American workers, for the sake of "new markets."
We do not need to be reminded that this technology was built on research-and-development contracts - sweetheart deals - by NASA and the Department of Defense, to develop semiconductor technology in the first place. Government-sponsored research that brought us to the point where we are now is being further developed in China, underdeveloped in the U.S.A.
Now look at the numbers again.
Motorola is spending each year half ($180,000,000, soon to grow to $250,000,000) of the big-deal one-time radio telephone contracts ($448,000,000) on the MCRDI. Or one can look at it this way - Motorola is spending almost four and a quarter times as much money on development ($1,900,000,000) as it recovers with these first two contracts ($448,000,000).
Radio telephone semiconductors are not simply a narrow sub-discipline that need not concern us. Because of the close connection with fiber optics, the combinations of the technologies are the basic building blocks for the future for all of telephony.
All of this is comprised of state-of-the-art metalurgy, materials science, physics, optics, electronics, etc.
Once the Chinese facility is under way fully, there will be a concatenation of discoveries and innovations that will become the basis for a next generation of discoveries and innovations. China will continue to develop as it advances from one stage to the next of its home-made development - and America will continue to underdevelop as it devolves from one stage to the next of its home-made underdevelopment, until America becomes totally dependent on China for advanced radio telephony technology.
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Get used to it, my friends. Motorola is one, just one of many - and by no means the largest. Billions of "U.S. dollars" and "U.S. interest" and fundamentally "U.S. property and intellectual property" are escaping, never to return. Ah, the global economy. What was the world like before we had all this?
Ronald E. Diener
Raleigh, North Carolina
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