This article says it all. Why did America lose 16 million jobs is the last three recessions? Because the Rich and the Capitalists got bored with making money the old fashioned way and decided playing the markets was easier and more fun. Why beside laziness have they decided that America will become a second class country? Oh they blame the unions, deficit spending, socialism etc., but all the elites really know right now is that greed is good and attacking other countries is really profitable.
Report says China is squeezing U.S. firms out of its massive wind-power market
12:00 AM CDT on Thursday, March 18, 2010
By JIM LANDERS / The Dallas Morning News
jlanders@dallasnews.com
WASHINGTON – U.S. companies are getting squeezed out of the big Chinese wind-power market even as Dallas investors are bringing Chinese firms here via a big wind farm in Texas, according to a new industry report.
“They’ve used every measure you could possibly think of to enhance production of renewable energy equipment in China,” said report author Alan Wolff of the trade law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP.
U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk won a pledge from the Chinese last fall to drop rules giving preference to Chinese makers of wind-power equipment. But Kirk’s office hasn’t seen any evidence that the pledge has been carried out, said spokeswoman Carol Guthrie.
Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturers are entering the U.S. wind market under a joint venture led by Dallas investor Cappy McGarr.
McGarr’s U.S. Renewable Energy Group, with Cielo Wind Power LP of Austin and China’s Shenyang Power Group, is planning a $1.5 billion, 600-megawatt wind farm on 36,000 acres in West Texas.
Several U.S. senators have complained that the West Texas project would use hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. economic stimulus funds for wind turbines built in China. They introduced a bill this month that would halt federal funding of renewable energy projects until “buy American” requirements are written into law.
McGarr’s Chinese partners announced plans last week to build a wind turbine factory in Nevada, and McGarr says most of the jobs for the West Texas project will be American.
“A minimum of 70 percent of each wind turbine in the … project, including the massive towers and blades, will be wholly manufactured in the United States and made entirely of American steel,” McGarr said.
Dewey & LeBoeuf’s report on China’s renewable energy equipment market was done for a U.S. industry group, the National Foreign Trade Council, where concern about China’s market restrictions and treatment of foreign firms is growing.
“If you’re not operating under a rule-of-law country, if you have no place to adjudicate, and there are places where the country has stacked the deck against you, you may look for somewhere else” to do business, said trade council president Bill Reinsch.
Some wind power advocates are urging everyone to calm down and are particularly concerned about the Senate “Buy American” bill.
“This proposal would torpedo one of the most successful job creation efforts of the Recovery Act [the economic stimulus program], which has already preserved half of the 85,000 American jobs in the U.S. wind industry,” said Denise Bode, president of the American Wind Energy Association.
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