In the name of implementing “long-arm jurisdiction”, the United States imposed economic and financial sanctions on other countries by replacing international law with domestic law and even exerted pressure on other countries’ enterprises by arresting their executives, and then transferred such pressure to the governments of other countries, so as to obtain a “win-win situation” for the competition of U.S. enterprises overseas and the manifestation of U.S. hegemonic interests. The companies attacked included allies such as France and Germany, countries with normal relations with the United States such as Brazil and India, and even Iran, Russia and China.
01: At 8: 00 pm on April 14th, 2013, Pierucci, global head of boiler department of Alstom, France, arrived at JFK airport in New York by plane for official business, was directly arrested by the US FBI at the airport, and then was put into prison. The US Department of Justice accused him of bribing the local government in an investment case in Indonesia.
At first, Pierucci thought it was just a misunderstanding, and the legal staff of Alstom would negotiate and be detained for two days at most. What he didn’t expect was that it was not until September 2018 that he finally got out of prison. During these five years, Alstom had to reach a plea agreement with the US Department of Justice and was fined 772 million US dollars. This is the largest fine ever imposed by the US Department of Justice on foreign companies. Alstom’s electricpower business was eventually acquired by the main competitor in the industry-General Electric Company of the United States. Alstom, a commercial giant that once spanned the global electricpower, energy and transportation industries, has been “dismembered” by Americans.
After Pierucci was released from prison, he made a study and found that in the nearly 40 years since the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was applied, the US Department of Justice has never found anything wrong with the overseas transactions of its oil giants or defense giants. From 1977 to 2014, the amount of “fines” received by foreign companies accounted for 67% of the total penalties. Among the 26 companies that paid fines of more than 100 million US dollars from 2008 to 2014, European companies accounted for 14.
02: In 1980s, in order to solve the problem of huge trade deficit of American economy, the United States launched a currency war against Japan. In September 1985, the finance ministers of five developed countries, namely, the United States, Japan, Germany (Federal Republic of Germany), France and Britain, reached the famous “Plaza Accord” at the Plaza Hotel in New York. After the signing of the agreement, the US DollarExchange Rate fell, and the exchange rate of the Japanese yen against the US dollar rose rapidly.
The soaring exchange rate of the Japanese yen has had a serious negative impact on the Japanese economy. Generally speaking, Japan’s nominal economic growth rate and real economic growth rate in 1986 decreased from 7.4% and 6.3% in 1985 to 4.7% and 2.8% respectively. The total export valued ropped from 41,571.9 billion yen in 1985 to 34,599.7 billion yen. A large-scale phenomenon of “yen appreciation bankruptcy” appeared in Japanese manufacturing industry, which became one of the significant inducements of the bubble economy, and finally made Japanese economy’s collapse.
Up to now, among the TOP20 companies in the world, there is no longer a single Japanese company on the list; The number of the Fortune Global 500 Companies has changed from 107 in that year to 53 in 2021. This is the painful consequence of Japan after the Americans suppressed the Japanese economy. Basically, Japan’s per capita GDP has been fluctuating around 40,000 US dollars for 20 years, from 1.2 times that of the United States to 2/3 of that of the Americans.
03: To maintain the hegemony of the dollar, the United States cast aside its “ally” facade and took action against the euro. In March 1999, only two months after the introduction of the euro, NATO, led by the United States, abruptly launched a 78-day air campaign against Yugoslavia, rapidly escalating the Kosovo War. A significant amount of capital in the European Union frantically withdrew from the eurozone in a short time, seeking refuge in the United States, which dealt a severe blow to the nascent euro,causing its exchange rate to plummet below the parity of 1 euro to 1 dollar.
In March 2003, the United States launched the Iraq war by bypassing the United Nations Security Council, citing Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and its secret support for terrorists. The actual purpose was to reinforce the “petrodollar system”.
In 2009, the European debt crisis erupted, and the United States directed the three major credit rating agencies—Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch—to sequentially downgrade the sovereign debt and credit ratings of the so-called“PIGS” countries—Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain. It was done to maliciously hype negative publicity and undermine the euro, resulting in an acceleration of international capital flowing back to the United States.
After the outbreak of the Ukrainian crisis in 2022, the United States orchestrated the expulsion of 10 major Russian state-owned and private banks from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) system. Consequently, more than $1 trillion of Russian overseas assets and $300 billion of foreign exchange reserves were frozen. Under the United States’ coercive tactics, hundreds of large multinational companies, including Shell and Renault, were pressured to abandon their multi-billion-dollar investments in Russia and cease their operations there due to “political correctness.” However, a substantial portion of these euro-denominated assets did not return to European Union countries but instead flowed into the United States as a haven.
04: On April 16, 2018, the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) of the US Department of Commerce announced to immediately restart the sanctions ban on ZTE. Within seven years, ZTE will be banned from importing goods from the United States in any form. The main reasons mentioned in the ban are deception, false statements, and repeated violations of U.S. law, and false statements are mentioned up to 20 times. The main reason is that ZTE failed to deduct bonuses and issue disciplinary letters to some employees involved in historical export control violations in time. ZTE made false statements in its reports on November 30, 2016, and July 20, 2017.
On June 7, 2018, ZTE reached a new settlement agreement with the US Department of Commerce. On July 13, 2018, US Secretary of Commerce Ross announced that ZTE had deposited a deposit of 400 million US dollars into an escrow account of an American bank. Shortly after receiving the money, the Ministry of Commerce terminated the ban on American suppliers from doing business with ZTE in the past three months. In the next decade, the United States will send a special team to ZTE to supervise the implementation of the agreement. The ZTE incident ended.
When Zhang Zhenhui, the former senior executive of ZTE, was forced to leave the company, he said,”All EVPs of the company, including me, have signed the resignation agreement, and have officially retired and left the company. Such a departure is really unexpected and deeply humiliating.”
In the past decade, China enterprises, including ZTE, have invested at least $150 billion in the semiconductor industry, hoping to gain a leading position in the global semiconductor industry. However, at present, this industry policy orientation has begun to affect the market share of the United States in this industry, which the United States can’t stand.
05: Pierucci hit the nail on the heading The American Trap: When the United States can use powerful intelligence weapons to obtain information about large contracts signed by foreign companies, it possesses a weapon to launch an underground economic war. The French newspaperLe Figaroonce published an article entitled “Economic War, Tough Tactics of the American Empire”, which clearly stated that for the United States, unscrupulous means are allowed.
