← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · JoseyWales
Thread ID: 18786 | Posts: 10 | Started: 2005-06-23
2005-06-23 16:03 | User Profile
[url]http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/050623/unocal.html?.v=10[/url]
2005-06-23 17:22 | User Profile
Other than a nuclear attack the selling of a US oil company to China represents the greatest danger to the US that I have ever seen.
In the old US nothing like this would even be considered or come to light but now days who knows.
We left the Panama Canal Zone and China took over.....very stupid in the part of the US for giving up this strategic location and more for letting the Chinise take over it.
My feelings about all this? :censored:
2005-06-23 17:56 | User Profile
The Chinese are just pumping the oil Americans don't want to pump. And this is just the free market at work, so you must blindly accept that it is automatically the absolute best outcome in this situation, or else you are a communist.
2005-06-23 19:34 | User Profile
China not only wants the gas from your SUV, but if they get the Maytag Company too, we will be back to using a scrubboard to do the laundry...but just maybe Wallymart will be nice enough to sell us some washing machines- made in China.
[url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4096458.stm[/url]
Chinese fridge maker eyes Maytag
Maytag is struggling to cut costs Haier Group, a Chinese fridge and washing-machine maker, is considering sparking a bidding war for Maytag, the US firm that makes Hoover cleaners.
The group, whose slogan is 'Haier and higher', issued a statement that it was "very interested in events surrounding Maytag", Reuters news agency reported.
Maytag agreed to a $1.13bn (ã670m) offer from US investment group Ripplewood Holdings in May.
But the deal gave Maytag until 18 June to seek other buyers.
Several US private equity groups are also exploring a bid for Maytag, including Bain Capital, Blackstone and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the Financial Times reported.
Haier said it "has not yet made an decision" on whether to try to buy Maytag.
Maytag is a 102-year-old US company whose best-known brand internationally is the Hoover cleaner but - for US shoppers, at least - it has been linked with many iconic household products.
Haier's US plant in Canton, South Carolina Haier invested $30m to open a plant in South Carolina
Iowa-based Maytag was founded as a farm-implements company, making its first washing machine in 1907. By the mid-1920s it was selling one in five of all washing machines bought in the US.
In the past year, falling profits have led to 1,100 job cuts as higher steel prices and competition from abroad hit sales.
State-owned Haier began in a bankrupt fridge factory in 1984, and now distributes its fridges in the US through Wal-Mart and Home Depot, concentrating on smaller 'beer-cooler' style fridges.
It was named China's most valuable brand by Forbes in 2004, and employs about 30,000 people.
Several Chinese firms are pushing to build international brands by buying struggling parts of big-name firms.
Lenovo bought IBM's PC operations, the most ambitious such deal so far, while mobile phone maker TCL bought Alcatel's mobile phone business, and Thomson's TV business.
Maytag's deal with Ripplewood includes a wipe-out of $975m of Maytag's debt and a break-up clause of $40m.
The prospect of a bidding war pushed up Maytag's shares on Wednesday.
2005-07-16 19:55 | User Profile
[url]http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/07/15/unocal.china/[/url]
U.S. Red storm ahead
By Lou Dobbs CNN Friday, July 15, 2005; Posted: 6:41 p.m. EDT (22:41 GMT)
(CNN) -- Americans owe Congressman Duncan Hunter their gratitude and congratulations. The powerful chairman of the House Armed Services Committee ordered hearings on China's $18.5 billion bid to buy California-based Unocal this week.
Not only were Chairman Hunter and his committee the first elected officials to seek the truth about the Communist Chinese government's effort to buy this important U.S. energy asset, they did so in direct opposition to the demands of the Chinese government that Congress not interfere with what it calls a "purely commercial" transaction.
Congressman Hunter and the Armed Services Committee had the temerity to actually put U.S. national security ahead of so-called free trade and laissez-faire politics. Their courage stands in stark contrast to the default libertarian views of the Bush administration and its obvious role as lackeys of U.S. multinationals. It also stands in stark contrast to the cowardly and unprincipled congressional vote to deny President Bush the power to impose sanctions against European companies that sell weapons and sensitive technology to China.
Even if the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company, or CNOOC, agrees to every demand the Unocal board of directors requests, we must always intensely question and analyze the promises of a company that's 70-percent-owned by a Communist government. And the Chinese state's mission is clear, whether we choose to continue our ongoing naiveté or awaken to reality: It seeks to control the world's natural resources, become the global manufacturer of choice and rapidly build its military power to rival that of the United States.
You have to hand it to the Chinese government, though. China has the audacity to demand that the United States' Congress allow this deal to proceed, despite the utter absurdity and contradictory position it holds, denying foreign ownership of companies in its country, including its energy assets. The Chinese also must have absentmindedly forgotten it owns nearly all of CNOOC and carries an unadulterated record of currency manipulation and unfair industry subsidization.
As former CIA Director James Woolsey testified at the Armed Services hearing: "For anyone who believes that this is purely a commercial undertaking, unrelated to a national strategy of domination of energy markets and of the western Pacific, I would suggest that that view is extraordinarily naive."
While China is showing its teeth on this deal, President Bush is saying nothing at all. Speaking at the G8 summit in Scotland, the president said he thought it best to let the U.S. security review of the offer "move forward without comment." Some of our lawmakers have spoken out against the bid, but there's been no indication whatsoever from the people in charge of protecting the homeland and upholding our national interest that the merger will be challenged.
China has an astounding $700 billion in U.S. currency in reserve. Here's an idea of what China could do with that money if this administration and Congress decide to allow it to buy the U.S. strategic assets: $700 billion, for example, could buy all of this nation's top oil companies, worth an estimated $615 billion. It would still have enough money to buy two of our top defense contractors, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, worth a combined $81 billion.
Having covered Wall Street for several decades, I understand the desire for Unocal's board to back CNOOC's bid, which bests the Chevron offer by $2 billion. After all, the board has a duty to secure the best possible deal for the company's shareholders. But this offer should by no means win the complicit support of the U.S. government or the Bush administration, especially at a time when crude oil, heating oil and gasoline prices are rising to new record highs seemingly every day.
"It makes no rational sense to help China soak up more and more supply," says C. Richard D'Amato, chairman of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, "pushing us toward an earlier energy train wreck in the foreseeable future."
But not only would China gain control of oil pipelines and gas storage across North America and key assets in Alaska's Cook Inlet and North Slope, we would be transferring technology for Alaskan oil production and deep sea drilling that could have significant military applications. And I hope I'm not alone in thinking it would be a grave mistake to give the Communist government of China such a strategic asset.
"The object of China's strategy is inexorably to supplant the United States as the world's premier economic power," says Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, "and if necessary, to defeat us militarily."
And shortly after Congress denied the president the power to impose sanctions against companies selling arms to China, a top Chinese general fiercely declared the People's Liberation Army would respond with nuclear weapons if it's provoked by the United States. Engagement anyone?
Laissez-faire economics can no longer disguise the potentially ruinous C'est la vie politics that define our relationship with China.
2005-07-16 22:14 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Quantrill]The Chinese are just pumping the oil Americans don't want to pump. And this is just the free market at work, so you must blindly accept that it is automatically the absolute best outcome in this situation, or else you are a communist.[/QUOTE]
Those who sees the situation as you wrote above are only looking at the here and now and not at the future.
Space ship Earth has only so much of anything and we MUST take command of those right now......but not the way that Bush is doing it.
2005-07-17 19:33 | User Profile
Perhaps if the American government - in the late 1940s - hadn't sat around and watched China being sacked by the communists, maybe this buying attempt wouldn't even be happening.
In fact, if America had done the right thing and joined forces WITH the Nazis against the Soviet Union in about 1935 [the Soviet Union was an illegal, mass-murdering, Jewish-built state], maybe communism would not have spread all over the world to places like China, North Korea and Cuba.
2005-07-17 21:27 | User Profile
Now, Franco, you know better than that. America's sin was not declaring war on Germany on 31 January, 1933. :taz:
2005-07-17 22:25 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius]Now, Franco, you know better than that. America's sin was not declaring war on Germany on 31 January, 1933. :taz:[/QUOTE]
Is ok Sert the Jews did it on March 23 1933. :caiphas:
2005-08-02 13:28 | User Profile
update this morning, china withdrawls offer [url]http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/050802/china_cnooc_unocal.html?.v=10[/url]