Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CARMICHAEL CONTINUED…
Michael, since the last time I saw you in the newspapers and whatnot, there is a drumbeat of stories about China and about Russia that all are very disconcerting, especially the ones about China. First of all, China has once again become extremely insular. They’re turning inward.
They’re not telling anybody what’s going on. They have these property companies that have defaulted. Now they’re trying to find ways to fund them. Nobody quite knows. Other than the international debt that these companies have raised has fallen to $0.20 on the dollar.
And then you have an article like this that says China Will Soon Lead the World in Tech. The CIA Agency Director Bill Burns announced in October that the agency is establishing, and I’m quoting from The Wall Street Journal two new major mission centers, one focused on China, the other on Frontier Technologies.
But it goes on to say that last year China produced 50 percent of the world’s computers and mobile phones. The US produced six percent. China produces 70 percent of solar panels for everyone that we produce, that it sells four times the number of electric vehicles and has nine times as many 5G stations.
And then it has a whole list of other things where China is ahead. And part of our problem is that our mega stock market companies like Netflix, Google and Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook, want to ride the back of the broadband, but they don’t want to make the investment in broadband.
Biden is putting a terrible choice in on the FCC because this gets into this net neutrality issue and who gets to charge for what. And you see companies like Verizon and ATT of which I’m not a particular fan of either one of them as their corporate governance goes.
But they’re the companies that invest the money to create the broadband that everything and our technology rides on. And by regulation, the investment that they’re making is being so reduced in terms of ROI, so that the companies like Facebook and Netflix and all these other companies that do streaming so that they can do their streaming cheap for consumers.
But the broadband companies aren’t making a good return. So consequently, they’re not making the investment that’s needed. In China, on the other hand, they are going full tilt in technology. They’re also building up their military.
They’re building up their Navy, they’re building up their Air Force, they’re building up their missile systems. And we’re inviting countries to come in together and talk about democracy without talking about the need to have proper voter IDs. And the way the Biden administration is focusing on this, it’s kind of a farce.
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “Xi Jinping” by Narendra Modi. CC BY-SA 2.0.
