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I was referring to Merkel being spied on by the US, it was in the news a while back, I was not referring to international trade imbalances.

But since you mention it, here are our trade stats with Germany for 2013:

Export $47.442 billion

Import $114.644 billion

Balance -$67.202 billion

So our negative balance as a percent of Imports is about -58%, and the negative balance is about 1.4 times as much as we export.

In the case of China, the negative balance percent of Imports is about -72%, and the negative balance is about 2.6 times as much as we export.

Worse stats than those with Germany, but we’re still way out of wack with Germany as well.

I wholeheartedly agree, we should be net exporters of manufactured goods, though since our economy is so large, we should not shoot for reliance on a massive trade surplus. Ideally, we should look to be net balanced in total, but our financial elites do not have nationalism at heart, so they won’t be pursuing that goal any time soon.

Note that the above totals don’t break out manufactured goods from commodities, services, etc.

Can we say that trade imbalance is the root cause of the US government not being able to take a “tough stand” on internet security with China ?

Actually, it should help us. In theory, it should give us tremendous peaceful leverage, since we theoretically could easily limit imports of manufactured goods.

But even though China is communist, every adminstration back to the 70’s has steadily increased our economic relationship with China, notwithstanding any disagreements our government supposedly has with communism or how China’s elites rule their peasants.

Thus we can see that those financial elites in power behind the US government never push it to do things like balance trade - or even secure the internet.

Internet security is quite a sad joke. Right from the start, packet payloads were open to view of every router they pass through from the time they leave their origin until they finally reach their destination. The “standards” developed never really dealt with physically preventing packet sniffing. Encryption of data payloads is simply an afterthought which has come into use precisely because espionage and criminal operations have come to so widely exploit the lack of security in the internet’s architecture - and the private sector is interested in their own information security and thus there is a market for encryption facilities to enable sending data securely over a completely insecure network infrastructure.

Simply put, the internet was never intended to be secure, and, while it was not invented by Al Gore per se, it certainly was brought into use largely by the US government, with various public-private partnerships, “sweetheart” companies, the “standard” elite universities associated with new world order, top defense and government contractors, etc.

We can only conclude that our illustrious financial elites never sought secure internetworking over which to transport data belonging to the sheeple. Makes sense, why, they would certainly not want to be blocked from seeing the sheeple’s data as it passes through the elites’ internet.

Some interesting historical links:

Bonus link (IMHO, a cool link) for entrepreneurs:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effects