I Love It When I'm Right.

If you've read many of my entries in this blog, you'll know that I'm not a big fan of China, and I'm not a real big fan of companies that do business with China. Well the reason is spelled out quite nicely in the Washington Post today. An article mentions that several companies gave away the store on attack helicopters or, after the fact, conspired to cover up the givaway. United Technologies and Hamilton Sundstrand tried to cover up the givaway by Pratt & Whitney Canada. This is one China didn't have to steal. Pratt Whitney gave it away in the hopes they would get a big contract to build commercial helicopters for China, hoping China wouldn't use the technology for the military. Oh, that makes sense. To teach them a lesson, they were fined $75 million. But then again their net sales were $58 billion, making it just over 1%. At that rate, they could consider it a cost of doing business. There may be some criminal charges to go along with the fine, but my problem with this whole thing is, why do we allow a company that wants to do business with an enemy like China, why do we allow them to have important information? Expecially the kinds of information we know China would love to get their hands on? Now I know companies like this claim they can keep information from different countries segregated. So how're they doing on that score? It looks like they're going to have to repeat first grade. If you ask me, they should get kicked out of school permanently. I'm just not sure we can afford to do business with the Pratt & Whitneys of the world. Well maybe with technology that's deeply flawed we can.