Moral Innovators’ perspectives on TikTok, Alstom, Huawei, 1941 Lend-Lease Act, and CFIUS

Between 2014 and 2020, a book written in French was only translated into Chinese and not English.  In 2020, “The American Trap – My Battle to expose America’s Secret Economic War Against the Rest of the World” was published and currently available in Amazon.  Please read that story about how France lost part of the control of its nuclear power plants to the USA through the arrest of an Alstom executive. In 2014, USA’s General Electric acquired Alstom’s power and grid businesses for Euro12.35 billion. This was GE’s largest ever industrial acquisition, quickly followed by mismanagement and layoff of 12,000 Power business employees in December 2017.

In December 2018, The CFO of Huawei Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Vancouver, Canada, after the now-disgraced Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ announced Chinese economic espionage that posed a real and illegal threat to the US economic prosperity and competitiveness. Ms. Meng returned to China on September 24, 2021 and all charges against her were dismissed on December 2, 2022.

Today, USA threatens to ban or force a sale of a social media company TikTok that reaches 150 million Americans and about 2 billion people worldwide.    Similar to the GE acquisition of Alstom in “The American Trap,” a forced TikTok sale or a ban gives the impression that USA is following the Chinese lead of excluding or controlling foreign social media companies.  It reflects a lack of confidence that USA is the rightful global leader, unafraid of competition.

Looking deeper without comparing social media to industrial companies, we find a quote in the article ‘Business and Foreign Policy” printed in the May/June 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs:

Throughout most of American History, commercial interests have played a central role in foreign policy, and vice versa. During the next few decades the interaction between them will become more intense, more important, more difficult to manage…

• Jeffrey Garten, Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, 1993-1995

Outside the USA, the 1941 Lend Lease Act elevated USA to become a global leader after World War 2. The Lean Lease Act “…lends or leases arms and other supplies needed by any country whose security was vital to the defense of the United States…”  Some of you may be more familiar with the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022, echoed by President Zelenskyy as an “investment” in Ukraine.  The danger of Lend-Lease lies in the reliance that the borrower/lessee of the Lend Lease Act must survive and thrive. This happened in Europe after World War 2. USA will come out ahead when Ukraine wins and recovers. If Russia takes a more extreme position, USA will be forced to become more extreme in order to protect the Lend Lease investment.

Within the USA, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) was launched under the 1950 Defense Production Act and strengthened by Executive Order 11858, then 2018 Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act and the 2022 Executive Order 14083, as amended. Several decades ago, a Chinese acquisition of a US producer of a component that allowed cell phones like Blackberry with keypads to type messages was considered a threat to national security. It was already a declining market when the transaction was scrutinized. Today, we no longer use an actual keypad in our cell phones. TikTok may not trigger CFIUS because there is no transaction yet, but this may be more important in the future unless the USA develops new technology to replace TikTok.

The Brennan Center for Justice published an article: Social Media Surveillance by the US Government dated January 7, 2022. It highlights how this mostly unregulated use of social media raises a host of civil rights and civil liberties concerns. Misinformation is the norm. Antisemitism is at the highest point in more than 40 years. A friend reminds me to raise the question: What is the value of social media data? If we go down this path to regulate social media, we will be confronted with Free Speech (First Amendment Rights) which are just as strong as the right to own Firearms (Second Amendment Rights). Given the USA has the longest lasting Constitution in the world, we are heading towards our day of reckoning – revamp the US Constitution.

Moral Innovators believe an American competitor to TikTok will be far superior than fiscal interference. We do not want to follow the footsteps of the Chinese government and exclude foreign social media companies. Beat technology with technology. That’s the American way. Look at ChatGPT: It took ChatGPT 5 days to reach 1 million users compared to 75 days for Instagram (10 months for Facebook and 2 years for Twitter). ChatGPT is estimated to have reached 100 million users in two months, and will reach 1 billion users in one year.

Encourage new technology with moral foundations. That’s the path to sustainable global leadership.

Moral Innovators’ perspective on humanity today

Moral Innovators focus on humanity and to thrive with knowledge of your place in the world. 

Earth was formed ~4.5 billion years ago.  Our Last Universal Common Ancestor (or LUCA) lived ~4 billion years ago as life evolved through photosynthesis with Rubisco enzyme to deliver oxygen from carbon dioxide that changed our atmosphere.  Geology (i.e. land mass) and climate cycles through the last ice age 15,000 years ago have shaped today’s earth.  With a stable atmosphere, humans were created/evolved and settled down to domesticate animals that produced more food than we can consume.  Languages and arts/music emerged as some humans did not have to concentrate on food and shelter.  Today, three communities represent over 90% of humanity on earth:  1) Atheists in China, 2) Henotheists in India, 3) Monotheists in the rest of earth.

Until 200 years ago, Atheists and Henotheists commanded the global economy with the Silk Road, bigger than Roman and Ottoman Empires.  Christian Monotheists industrialized for 300 years by taking treasures and enslaving other humans.  Britain sought all global treasures.  When the 1773 Boston Tea Party happened, Britain gave the British East India Company (BEIC) the monopoly power to trade opium that same year (1773).  BEIC produced opium in the newly colonized Henotheist India and delivered opium into Atheist China.  For over a century until World War I, a united front of Christian Monotheists took treasures (i.e. capital) out of China.  After the puppet-state Japan replaced Shogun culture with Meiji Restoration after the 1854 US Commodore Perry visits, the radicalized Japan under Hirohita tested and used chemical weapons in Atheist China and raped/killed civilians throughout Asia with no remorse.  Even today, textbooks in Japan generally defended Japan without teaching Japanese students the inhumane Japanese invasions across Asia.  Japan colonized Korea, Ryukyu and Taiwan until the atomic bombs ended World War II in 1945. 

The global human population grew from 1 billion in the year 1800 to 2.5 billion in 1945 through the US Gilded Age and Jim Crow Laws when Christian Monotheists led immoral innovations under the name of opium trade to take US$100 trillion (2010$) capital from Atheists China until there was no more capital (i.e. money) to be taken just before World War I.

Adolph Hitler was democratically elected via a coalition government to become Chancellor using the platform that Germany should no longer pay the obligations under the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I.  To rebuild the depleted German capital, Hitler radicalized USA eugenics under the name of an Aryan race that first took money and then annihilated a large portion of Jews through the Holocaust.  Today, students in Germany learn the Jewish holocaust.

Following the footsteps of Portugal and Spain who declared ownership of the world beginning in 1493, USA and Japan signed treaties that declared Hawaii belong to the USA, and Ryukyu (its largest island is known today as Okinawa) belong to Japan.  As recently as 2019, Japan’s now assassinated Prime Minister Abe nominated the radicalized USA egotistical narcissist Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Britain identified fossil fuel as the engine to sustain industrialization. After the 1874 demise of BEIC, British Petroleum (BP) was incorporated in 1908 after the discovery of oil in Persia (today’s Iran). In 1953, Winston Churchill convinced USA’s President Eisenhower to use CIA in a coup d’etat to replace the democratically elected President of Iran with the puppet Shah of Iran in order to control Iranian oil.  This is one of the root causes of poor US-Iran relations today.

Monotheist Muslims did not emerge until OPEC flexed its muscles beginning in 1973.  Each one of the more than 8 billion humans today contributes to an average of $2 trillion dollars of profit to the owners of fossil fuels for the last 50 years.  This is like delivering the 8^th largest economy on earth (i.e. Canada) to the fossil fuel owners each and every year.  Unless we take action to mitigate giving our money to the owners of fossil fuels, we are like a frog in heating water – we may not survive.

Unlike frogs, we must jump out of the heating water and focus on the root cause – the widening wealth gap.