Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic

dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolfe. Today we're

going to be talking about struggles between the U.S. and China, struggles between the U.S. and Russia,

and also a little bit about Europe, scapegoating immigrants, and all that's involved there.

So let's jump right in.

Recent weeks have seen the United States heaping on multiple layers of new sanctions

against China.

And other countries, too, but China, and mostly around semiconductor chips.

This is a crucial industry to running all the devices that we now run electronically with those chips.

It's been going on this kind of harassment of the rest of the world's business

by the United States for some time. So far it has not been matched all that much by other

countries, a little, but the United States is clearly a leader in going away from the globalization of recent decades

to a new program of not promoting free markets, quite the opposite, intruding on one market after

another, reorganizing it by government intervention.

And there is no clear evidence that this works.

Here's what I mean.

If you hamper the Chinese semiconductor industry, they get the message, and they are

going to now speed up their own development of their

own semiconductor chip industry. And I'll come back to that in a moment. But they're not

going to stop there. They understand, because the United States makes it quite clear, that this is all designed to slow down

the competition coming to the United States from China, slow down the advance of China as the

great challenger of the American Empire and of American capitalism.

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