cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/3872

From Toshiba to Huawei: America’s Long War on Superior Competitors.

For decades, the United States championed free markets and fair competition—until it no longer had the upper hand.

Today, oligarchs like Peter Thiel—a key player in the U.S. security apparatus and founder of Palantir, the taxpayer-funded surveillance and profiling giant built with CIA backing—say competition is “bad for business.”

In Thiel’s world, monopoly is not just acceptable; it is the true engine of innovation and profit, turning the American ideal of open markets on its head.

In reality, Washington’s “commitment” to free markets was always lip service. The U.S. has consistently tried to crush superior competitors of its major corporations. Economic warfare is nothing new.

Take Toshiba: According to an August 1992 Los Angeles Times article, it was Japan’s leading chipmaker in the 1980s, commanding about 80% of the global market for dynamic random access memory (DRAM) in 1987.

Like Huawei today, Toshiba became a U.S. target under the banner of “national security.”

After Toshiba and a Norwegian firm sold advanced milling machines to the Soviet Union in 1986—just as other European companies had done—Washington pounced.

It imposed a sweeping two- to five-year ban on all Toshiba products, claiming a threat to U.S. security. This blow cleared the way for American chipmakers, while other foreign companies that sold similar equipment to the USSR escaped unscathed.

Whether Toshiba, Alstom or Swiss banking, the story is the same: Washington weaponizes “law,” “security” and “ethics” to eliminate rivals, then adopts the very practices it condemns abroad.

But Huawei—and by extension, China—is a different kind of target. Unlike Japan, France or Switzerland, China cannot be easily coerced into submission. On the contrary, the U.S. campaign against Huawei is far more likely to backfire, turning into a decisive defeat for the Western aggressors—as the rest of this article will show.

From MR Online via This RSS Feed.