ICYMI: “Battling China’s Predatory Economics to Bring Back Jobs” By National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien and EXIM Chairman Kimberly Reed

WASHINGTON — Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) President and Chairman Kimberly A. Reed and National Security Advisor Robert C. O’Brien authored the following joint op-ed published online recently by Fox Business News:

“Battling China’s Predatory Economics to Bring Back Jobs”

By Kimberly Reed and Robert O’Brien

For more than a decade, the Chinese Communist Party has relentlessly attacked the American economy with tools ranging from intellectual property theft and forced technology transfer to widespread dumping and currency manipulation.

The latest manifestation of the CCP’s economic aggression is the increasing use of export financing to distort fair and free-market competition.

For Beijing, export financing helps increase its influence abroad and promote its One Belt, One Road initiative. Beijing can advance its strategic objectives by handing out money worldwide at low interest rates. The goal? Global dominance by 2049.

The scope of this effort is breathtaking. From 2015 to 2019, the People’s Republic of China offered subsidised export financing, totalling 90 per cent of that provided by all G7 countries combined.

In 2019 alone, communist China provided three times the export financing of the next-largest provider.

Chinese official financing in 2019 totalled at least $76 billion worldwide, all designed to further Beijing’s global objectives, and much of it targeted to reduce U.S. economic influence. That means tens of billions of dollars yearly crowding out American exporters, preventing them from reaching their prospective foreign customers.

The China Development Bank, the Export-Import Bank of China, and the Chinese state-owned provider of export credit insurance, Sinosure, together arm Chinese exporters with what amounts to an endless supply of capital, against which U.S. exporters — despite their high-quality “Made in the U.S.A.” products — face a steep uphill climb in the complex global marketplace.

To make matters worse, Beijing does not adhere to any official export credit agreements the United States and the vast majority of world nations abide by. Many of their signature corrupt, opaque, exploitative, and low-quality deals would be banned if they did.

The PRC’s One Belt One Road initiative projects are characterised by poor quality, corruption, imported labour, and environmental degradation. These deals often leave host countries debt-strapped and beholden to their PRC financiers.

If the U.S. is to combat China’s latest aggression, we must step up our export financing game. Roughly three-quarters of the world’s purchasing power and over 95 per cent of world consumers are outside America’s borders.

Enter the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM), which can play a central role in levelling the global marketplace for American exporters and supporting American jobs.

After years of near dormancy, President Trump and the U.S. Senate, on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis, restored the quorum of EXIM’s Board of Directors, thereby fully reopening the agency, and signed a seven-year reauthorisation of EXIM—the longest in the agency’s 86-year history.

The new EXIM is laser-focused on combating the threat from China. It launched a new “Program on China and Transformational Exports” to support the extension of loans, guarantees, and insurance to American exporters on terms competitive with the PRC’s.

EXIM’s goal is to reserve at least $27 billion in financing to “neutralise” PRC export subsidies and advance the comparative leadership of the United States concerning the PRC.

EXIM also supports U.S. innovation, employment, and technological standards through direct exports in ten industries key to America’s prosperity and security. These include 5G, artificial intelligence, biomedical sciences, and financial technology.

Already, EXIM is displacing Chinese financing.

For instance, EXIM recently approved two authorisations totalling $400 million in financing to support exporting U.S. goods and services to Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), Mexico’s national oil and gas company. It is expected to support approximately 1,700 U.S. jobs with large and small businesses.

We know China is interested in expanding its influence in North America because, during EXIM’s limited activity, China pursued closer ties with Pemex, closed its first transaction with the company, and has another in the pipeline, notwithstanding its 76-year association with EXIM.

In May, EXIM’s Board approved $4.7 billion in financing to support U.S. companies in the engineering and constructing of an integrated liquefied natural gas project in Mozambique.

It reflects how companies and governments planning major construction want to avoid proposed deals with Beijing and Moscow. In this case, as soon as they knew EXIM was reopening, Chinese and Russian entities were dropped as senior lenders. This was one of the most significant transactions in EXIM’s history. It will support 16,700 American jobs across 68 suppliers in eight states.

EXIM stopped another competitive threat from China this year with $91.5 million in loan guarantee financing for U.S. design engineering and construction services exports to Senegal, the first African country to sign up for China’s One Belt One Road initiative.

Some 78 per cent of Senegal’s bilateral debt is to China. EXIM’s transaction helped Illinois-based Weldy-Lamont prevail over foreign competitors, including one from China. Instead, 500 American workers will help bring electricity to approximately 330,000 Senegalese in more than 400 villages.

Under President Trump, the authorised EXIM will help our nation recover from a pandemic from China by thwarting economic aggression from China.

Levelling the playing field for American exporters will strengthen and grow American businesses of all sizes, create American jobs, and keep America strong.

Kimberly Reed is President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. She is the first woman and first West Virginian to lead the agency.

Ambassador Robert O’Brien is the 28th United States National Security Advisor.

ABOUT EXIM

EXIM is an independent federal agency that promotes and supports American jobs by providing competitive and necessary export credit to help U.S. goods and services sales to international buyers. A robust EXIM can level the global playing field for U.S. exporters when they compete against foreign companies that receive support from their governments. EXIM also contributes to U.S. economic growth by helping to create and sustain hundreds of thousands of jobs in exporting businesses and their supply chains across the United States. In recent years, approximately 90 per cent of the agency’s authorisations have directly supported small businesses. Since 1992, EXIM has generated more than $9 billion for the U.S. Treasury to repay U.S. debt.

Source: Press Release
Office of Communications (202-565-3206)
Date: October 19, 2020

WASHINGTON – Today, U.S. Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.) released the following statement in response to the White House releasing their new “National Strategy for Critical and Emerging Technologies,” which outlines how the United States will promote and protect our competitive edge in fields such as artificial intelligence, energy, quantum information science, communication and networking technologies, semiconductors, military, and space technologies.

“The Administration’s announcement today of a Critical and Emerging Technologies strategy is a positive step forward and something long overdue. Just as I laid out months ago in my Endless Frontier Act, this new strategy identifies critical technology areas. It proposes mobilising the federal government to focus significant resources on ensuring we remain the global leader in these fields. Combatting the influence of the Chinese Communist Party in these areas is vital for both our economic and national security. This new announcement lays the groundwork for my Endless Frontier Act which will provide the resources necessary for our country to act,” said Senator Young.

Senator Young has been calling for the federal government to provide more resources and make critical investments in research and development of emerging technologies. Senator Young has been working together with Senator Schumer and, earlier this year, unveiled a major bipartisan proposal titled the Endless Frontier Act.

Since introducing the Endless Frontier Act, Senators Young and Schumer have received praise from:

• Bloomberg: The U.S. Gets Serious About Catching Up to China in R&D
• National Review: Countering China’s Technology Offensive
• The President of MIT: Is the ‘endless frontier’ at an end?
• Chicago Tribune: The U.S. must not stop investing in scientific research
• Forbes: Wake Up America! Our Innovation Agenda Needs A Tune-Up. The
• Endless Frontier Act Tells Us How & How To Safeguard American Science
• Science Magazine: U.S. lawmakers unveil bold $100 billion plan to remake NSF
• Semiconductor Association: SIA Applauds Introduction of “Endless Frontier Act” to Advance U.S. Technology Leadership

Source: Press Release Date: October 16, 2020 young.senate.gov

NEW YORK – New York Attorney General Letitia James and the attorneys general of Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah released the following statement after the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced an antitrust lawsuit against tech giant Google:

“Over the last year, the U.S. DOJ and state attorneys general have conducted separate but parallel investigations into Google’s anticompetitive market behaviour. We appreciate the strong bipartisan cooperation among the states and the good working relationship with the DOJ on these serious issues. This is a historic time for both federal and state antitrust authorities as we work to protect competition and innovation in our technology markets. We plan to conclude parts of our investigation of Google in the coming weeks. If we decide to file a complaint, we will file a motion to consolidate our case with the DOJ. We would then prosecute the consolidated case cooperatively, much as we did in the Microsoft case.”

Last September, Attorney General James announced that she and a bipartisan coalition — that included almost every attorney general in the nation — had initiated a bipartisan investigation into Google for potentially anticompetitive conduct.

The investigation focuses on Google’s dominance in search and related industries and the potential harm caused to consumers and the economy by any anticompetitive conduct.

Separately, Attorney General James announced last September that she was leading a bipartisan, multistate investigation into Facebook for antitrust issues, which continues today.

Source: Press Release 
Date: October 20, 2020
Attorney General’s Press Office/212-416-8060 
nyag.pressoffice@ag.ny.gov

The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took this image of a crater cluster on Mars, the first-ever to be discovered AI. The AI-first spotted the craters in photos taken by the orbiter’s Context Camera; scientists followed up with this HiRISE image to confirm the cavities. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

It’s the first time machine learning has been used to find previously unknown craters on the Red Planet. Sometime between March 2010 and May 2012, a meteor streaked across the Martian sky and broke into pieces, slamming into the planet’s surface. The resulting craters were relatively small – just 13 feet (4 meters) in diameter. The smaller the features, the more difficult they are to spot using Mars orbiters. But in this case – and for the first time – scientists spotted them with some extra help: artificial intelligence (AI).

It’s a milestone for planetary scientists and AI researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, who worked together to develop the machine-learning tool that helped make the discovery. The accomplishment offers hope for saving time and increasing the volume of findings.

Typically, scientists spend hours each day studying images captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), looking for changing surface phenomena like dust devils, avalanches, and shifting dunes. In the orbiter’s 14 years at Mars, scientists have relied on MRO data to find over 1,000 new craters. They’re usually first detected with the spacecraft’s Context Camera, which takes low-resolution images covering hundreds of miles at a time.

Only the blast marks around an impact will stand out in these images, not the individual craters, so the next step is to take a closer look with the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE. The instrument is so powerful that it can see details as fine as the tracks left by the Curiosity Mars rover. (The HiRISE team allows anyone, including members of the public, to request specific images through its HiWish page.)

The process takes patience, requiring 40 minutes or so for a researcher to carefully scan a single Context Camera image. To save time, JPL researchers created a tool – called an automated fresh impact crater classifier – as part of a broader JPL effort named COSMIC (Capturing Onboard Summarization to Monitor Image Change) that develops technologies for future generations of Mars orbiters.

To train the crater classifier, researchers fed it 6,830 Context Camera images, including those of locations with previously discovered impacts that already had been confirmed via HiRISE. The tool also provided images with no fresh crashes to show the classifier what not to look for.

Once trained, the classifier was deployed on the Context Camera’s repository of about 112,000 images. Running on a supercomputer cluster at JPL made up of dozens of high-performance computers that can operate in concert with one another, a process that takes a human 40 minutes takes the AI tool an average of just five seconds.

JPL computer scientist Gary Doran said: “One challenge was figuring out how to run up to 750 copies of the classifier across the entire cluster simultaneously. It wouldn’t be possible to process over 112,000 images in a reasonable amount of time without distributing the work across many computers. The strategy is to split the problem into smaller pieces that can be solved in parallel.”

But despite all that computing power, the classifier still requires a human to check its work.

JPL computer scientist Kiri Wagstaff said: “AI can’t do the kind of skilled analysis a scientist can. But tools like this new algorithm can be their assistants. This paves the way for an exciting symbiosis of human and AI ‘investigators’ working together to accelerate scientific discovery.”

On August 26, 2020, HiRISE confirmed that a dark smudge detected by the classifier in a region called Noctis Fossae was, in fact, a cluster of craters. The team has already submitted more than 20 additional candidates for HiRISE to check out.

While this crater classifier runs on Earth-bound computers, the ultimate goal is to develop similar classifiers tailored for onboard use by future Mars orbiters. Right now, the data being sent back to Earth requires scientists to sift through to find interesting imagery, much like trying to find a needle in a haystack, said Michael Munje, a Georgia Tech graduate student who worked on the classifier as an intern at JPL.

“The hope is that in the future, AI could prioritize orbital imagery that scientists are more likely to be interested in,” Munje said.

Ingrid Daubar, a scientist with appointments at JPL and Brown University who was also involved in the work, is hopeful the new tool could offer a complete picture of how often meteors strike Mars and reveal minor impacts in areas that haven’t been discovered before. The more craters found, the more scientists add to the body of knowledge of the size, shape, and frequency of meteor impacts on Mars.

“There are likely many more impacts that we haven’t found yet,” she said. “This advance shows you just how much you can do with veteran missions like MRO using modern analysis techniques.”

JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the MRO mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The University of Arizona in Tucson operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colorado. Malin Space Science Systems in San built and used MARCI and the Context Camera Diego constructed and used MARCI and the Context Camera. Source: Press Release Date: October 01, 2020 Andrew Good Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 818-393-2433 andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov Alana Johnson / Grey Hautaluoma NASA Headquarters, Washington 202-672-4780 / 202-358-0668 alana.r.johnson@nasa.gov / grey.hautaluoma-1@nasa.gov 2020-188

New York to Receive More Than $2.7 Million

NEW YORK – New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced a multistate settlement with health insurance company Anthem, Inc. that resolves a massive 2014 data breach that compromised the personal information of 78.8 million customers nationwide, including more than 4.6 million customers in New York state alone.

The breach gave attackers access to Anthem’s data warehouse, where they harvested names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, health care identification numbers, home addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and employment information. Today’s agreement resolves the cyber-attack by forcing Anthem to pay the multistate coalition $39.5 million in penalties and fees — more than $2.7 million of which will go directly to New York state. In addition to the payment, Anthem has also agreed to a series of data security and adequate governance provisions designed to strengthen its future practices.

“New Yorkers have every reasonable expectation that their private health information will remain private and protected by their doctors and especially by their health insurance companies,” said Attorney General James. “This agreement signals that Anthem is committed to protecting consumers’ private information. In addition to bringing over $2.7 million into the state, affected New Yorkers will also be provided free credit report monitoring, along with Anthem’s commitment to strengthen security protocols.”

In February 2015, Anthem disclosed that cyber attackers had infiltrated its systems beginning in February 2014 using malware installed through a phishing email.

Anthem will pay New York $2,715,495.21 due to today’s agreement, and the company will make a series of changes to its security protocols designed to strengthen practices in the future, including.

• Prohibiting the misrepresentation of the extent to which Anthem protects the privacy and security of consumers’ personal information;
• Implementing a comprehensive information security program that incorporates principles of zero trust architecture and includes regular security reporting to the Board of Directors and prompt notice of significant security events to the CEO;
• Setting up specific security requirements concerning segmentation, logging and monitoring, anti-virus maintenance, access controls and two-factor authentication, encryption, risk assessments, penetration testing, and employee training, among other requirements; and
• We are scheduling third-party security assessments and audits for three years and requiring that Anthem make its risk assessments available to a third-party assessor during that term.

In addition to today’s agreement, Anthem previously entered into a class action settlement that established a $115 million settlement fund to pay for additional credit monitoring, cash payments of up to $50 per individual breached, and reimbursement for out-of-pocket losses for affected consumers. The deadlines for consumers to submit claims under that settlement have since passed.

The Office of the New York Attorney General was a member of the multistate Executive Committee and the attorneys general of Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Missouri. They were joined by the attorneys general of Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia. Additionally, California’s attorney general entered into a similar but separate agreement.

This matter was handled by Deputy Bureau Chief Clark Russell of the Bureau of Internet and Technology under the supervision of Bureau Chief Kim Berger. The Bureau of Internet and Technology is a part of the Division for Economic Justice, led by Chief Deputy Attorney General Chris D’Angelo and overseen by First Deputy Attorney General Jennifer Levy.

Source: Press Release
September 30­­, 2020
Attorney General’s Press Office/212-416-8060
nyag.pressoffice@ag.ny.gov