By Glen Ford

May 19, 2019 "Information Clearing House" -   US rulers promised that technology would bring the return of the millions of jobs that were outsourced to low-wage countries, but America has lost the hi-tech race and excels only in weapons of war.

“The early U.S. global hi-tech lead was squandered in the chaotic and criminally wasteful corporate capitalist game of all-or-nothing.”

If you can’t pronounce Huawei (Wah-Way), then you won’t be able to explain to your grandchildren how the United States definitively lost the race for planetary technological supremacy, the last non-military contest with China that American capitalism had any chance of winning. The inherent inferiority of the chaotic U.S.-led system is now manifest – even to the thick-skulled Donald Trump, who only three months ago held off on banning U.S. companies from doing business with Huawei, the China-based world leader in 5G technology. Back in February Trump tweeted that he wanted American companies to win the ultra-high speed mobile telecommunications race by competition and “not by blocking out currently more advanced technologies,” meaning Huawei. “American companies must step up their efforts, or get left behind. There is no reason that we should be lagging behind.” But Trump is expected to sign the Huawei banning order this week , having finally despaired of making U.S. hi-tech “great again” by peaceful means. The only card the U.S has left to play, is war.

“The inherent inferiority of the chaotic U.S.-led system is now manifest.”

The U.S. 5G eclipse by China is permanent, rooted in the systemic mayhem of the imperial economic (dis)order. Although the U.S. virtually invented the Internet as a byproduct of military technology, the early U.S. global hi-tech lead was squandered in the chaotic and criminally wasteful corporate capitalist game of all-or-nothing. As recounted by the South China Morning Post (“How US went from telecoms leader to 5G also-ran without challenger to China’s Huawei”) the U.S. refused to set national standards for mobile carriers, allowing tech companies to choose between wireless networks like TDMA, CDMA and GSM. Since 1987 -- the year Huawei was founded -- Europe has mandated that all its wireless systems use the GSM standard. But the Americans allowed U.S. corporations to wager billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of competing jobs on rival mobile systems. The deregulation of U.S. telecommunications in 1996 further fueled the high-tech capitalist pandemonium. “The US was like the Wild West,” said Thomas J. Lauria, a former AT&T employee, telecoms analyst and author of the book The Fall of Telecom. “Europe managed itself more contiguously than the US, they did not have a lot of disparate networks and picked the [GSM] standard that everyone had to agree to.”