[QUOTE=ewmayer;518283]And the reason they are in a position to make such a threat is?[/QUOTE]It's certainly not because rare earths are rare. Cerium is about as common as copper.

[QUOTE=ewmayer;518283][QUOTE=Dr Sardonicus;518261]Also, China is now threatening to use rare-earth metals as a weapon in the trade dispute.[/quote]And the reason they are in a position to make such a threat is?[/QUOTE]They have most of the refining capacity for turning rare-earth ores into pure metals.

The good ol' USA does have a rare-earth [i]mine[/i] in California, but it currently ships the ore to China for processing. (Due to the trade dispute, they have been paying a 10% tariff on these shipments, scheduled to increase to 25% June 1.)

There is a [url=https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/australian-rare-earth-ore-processor-wants-to-build-a-plant-in-the-us/]plan[/url] to build a processing plant in Hondo, TX, but it's years down the road.

There are also ideas for extracting rare-earth ores from the runoff from Appalachian coal mines. AFAIK, as of now, "ideas" are all they are.

China set to control rare earth supply for years due to processing dominance

[URL]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-usa-rareearth-refining/china-set-to-control-rare-earth-supply-for-years-due-to-processing-dominance-idUSKCN1T004J[/URL]
[QUOTE](Reuters) - U.S. companies are years away from challenging Chinese dominance of rare earth minerals due to a lack of domestic processing facilities, ensuring the Asian nation will maintain its near-monopoly on refining and powerful leverage in trade talks.

In an escalation of the trade conflict between the two countries, state media on Wednesday implied China could restrict rare earth sales to the United States, stoking fears about Beijing’s role as a supplier.
Although, according to U.S. Geological Survey data, China contains only a third of the world’s rare earth reserves, it accounts for 80% of U.S. imports of the group of 17 minerals used in military equipment and high-tech consumer electronics. [/QUOTE][LEFT]How the US lost the plot on rare earths

[URL]http://www.mining.com/web/us-lost-plot-rare-earths/[/URL][/LEFT]
[QUOTE][LEFT]It’s a little known fact that the United States was once the largest producer of rare earths in the world, at the Mountain Pass Mine in California.
Little happened at Mountain Pass during the 1950s except for the odd bit of research by the defense and scientific communities, but that all changed in the 1960s with the color TV. The discovery of europium, which emits a brilliant red light when bombarded with electrons, ushered in the age of technicolor, and Mountain Pass, which had abundant europium, flourished. Rare earths mined there were also used in medical scanners, lasers, fluorescent lights and microchips.

In 1980, a mis-classification of rare earths had catastrophic consequences for US rare earth mining. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Regulatory Agency placed rare earth mining under the same regulations as mining thorium – a radioactive element that drops out when processing heavy rare earth minerals like monazite. As we have written, the nuclear industry and its future would look a whole lot different if thorium rather than uranium was pursued as the main nuclear fuel. But that’s a different story.

New, onerous regulations on thorium made the mining and refining of thorium-bearing rare earth elements risky. Over the next two decades, the US rare earth mining industry collapsed. Defense One notes that, even though American mining companies extract enough rare earth ore, through mining other metals, to meet 85% of global demand, it is discarded because the regulations make it uneconomic to mine. How’s that for irony.

The Chinese filled the void left by US rare earth mining with gusto – establishing the world’s largest rare earth research facility; filing the first rare earth patent in 1983 and over the next 14 years filing more patents than the US which had been working on them since 1950; and acquiring US technology in metals, alloys, magnets and rare earth components.
[/LEFT]
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=kladner;518324]China set to control rare earth supply for years due to processing dominance

[URL]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-usa-rareearth-refining/china-set-to-control-rare-earth-supply-for-years-due-to-processing-dominance-idUSKCN1T004J[/URL]
[LEFT]How the US lost the plot on rare earths

[URL]http://www.mining.com/web/us-lost-plot-rare-earths/[/URL][/LEFT][/QUOTE]

Regarding regulation by radioactivity, the Ars Technica article links to another article from mining.com about how Malaysia is using the radioactive waste from rare-earth processing as an excuse to terminate (not renew) the license of the rare-earth refinery there: [url=http://www.mining.com/malaysia-tells-lynas-to-remove-radioactive-waste-for-licence-renewal/]Malaysia tells Lynas to remove radioactive waste for licence renewal[/url]

[b]Nit-pick:[/b] The quotation in the preceding post from this [url=http://www.mining.com/web/us-lost-plot-rare-earths/]article[/url] includes a real oopsadaisy:
[quote]but that all changed in the 1960s with the color TV. The discovery of europium, which emits a brilliant red light when bombarded with electrons, ushered in the age of technicolor[/quote]
Technicolor is a [i][b]movie film[/b][/i] process, featured in, e.g. the 1939 classics [i]The Wizard of Oz[/i] and [i]Gone with the Wind[/i]. It has nothing to do with color TV.

Kladner's excellent "how the US lost the plot" link illustrates a crucial malaise underlying many such stories, most ending up with mass-offshoring of once-thriving and decent-jobs-providing domestic industries: The US no longer does government-guided (and seed-funded, and regulatory-framework-aided) strategic industrial planning. It's all about short-term profits by the global mobile capital elite, the 0.01%. Thanks, Wall Street! (And by Wall Street I also mean the strains of academic economics which rose to prominence precisely because they provided intellectual cover for said multidecadal financialization looting operation - perhaps most notorious here is the Milton-Friedman-led Chicago School of Economics, which peddled all manner of socially/economically toxic nonsense, such as the - patently false in law - notion that corporations' only responsibility is "maximizing shareholder value", and that they have 0 broader social responsibility to act as good "corporate ciizens".)

The misguided thorium-related regulation would seem to be a rare instance where Trumpian regulatory rollback might be beneficial - get the domestic REE processing industry back in business, start stockpiling Thorium for a strategic long-term R&D investment in Thorium-based reactor technology. If nuclear really is a vital part of a low-carbon energy future, that is the way to go, not the enriched-Uranium route, which came to dominate during the 1950s and 60s because it was basically the same tech used by the nuclear weapons industry to generate the fissile material and Tritiated water vital for the then-burgeoning nuke arsenal. But that sort of strategic planning and the will to force it through a shot-term-thinking-dominated (and well funded to think that way) congress needs the likes of an FDR, not a Trump. (Or an Obama, or a W. Bush, or a Clinton, &c.)

[url=https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/05/how-qualcomm-shook-down-the-cell-phone-industry-for-almost-20-years/]How Qualcomm shook down the cell phone industry for almost 20 years[/url] | Ars Technica
[quote]I read every word of Judge [Lucy] Koh's book-length opinion, which portrays Qualcomm as a ruthless monopolist. The legal document outlines a nearly 20-year history of overcharging smartphone makers for cellular chips. Qualcomm structured its contracts with smartphone makers in ways that made it almost impossible for other chipmakers to challenge Qualcomm's dominance. Customers who didn't go along with Qualcomm's one-sided terms were threatened with an abrupt and crippling loss of access to modem chips.

"Qualcomm has monopoly power over certain cell phone chips, and they use that monopoly power to charge people too much money," says Charles Duan, a patent expert at the free-market R Street Institute. "Instead of just charging more for the chips themselves, they required people to buy a patent license and overcharged for the patent license."

Now, all of that dominance might be coming to an end. In her ruling, Koh ordered Qualcomm to stop threatening customers with chip cutoffs. Qualcomm must now re-negotiate all of its agreements with customers and license its patents to competitors on reasonable terms. And if Koh's ruling survives the appeals process, it could produce a truly competitive market for wireless chips for the first time in this century.
...
Qualcomm's patent licensing fees were calculated [u]based on the value of the entire phone[/u], not just the value of chips that embodied Qualcomm's patented technology. This effectively meant that Qualcomm got a cut of every component of a smartphone—most of which had nothing to do with Qualcomm's cellular patents.[/quote]
Yeah, I can see how that bolded bit would especially rankle Apple, with its $1000 top-line phones. Bit of pot-meets-kettle there. Of course Qualcomm learned its monopolist craft from the best:
[quote]An obvious question is how Qualcomm maintained its stranglehold over the supply of modem chips. Partly, Qualcomm employed talented engineers and spent billions of dollars keeping its chips on the cutting edge.

Qualcomm also bolstered its dominant position by selling systems on a chip that included a CPU and other functions as well as modem functionality. This yielded significant cost and power savings, and it was hard for smaller chipmakers to compete with.

But besides these technical reasons, Qualcomm also structured its agreements with customers to make it difficult for other companies to break into the cellular modem chip business.

Qualcomm's first weapon against competitors: patent licensing terms requiring customers to pay a royalty on every phone sold—not just phones that contained Qualcomm's wireless chips. This gave Qualcomm an inherent advantage in competition with other chipmakers. If another chipmaker tried to undercut Qualcomm's chips on price, Qualcomm could easily afford to cut the price of its own chips, knowing that the customer would still be paying Qualcomm a hefty patent licensing fee on every phone.

Judge Koh draws a direct parallel to licensing behavior that got Microsoft in legal trouble in the 1990s. Microsoft would offer PC makers a discount if they agreed to pay Microsoft a licensing fee for every PC sold—whether or not the PC shipped with a copy of MS-DOS. This effectively meant that a PC maker had to pay twice if it shipped a PC running a non-Microsoft operating system. In 1999, a federal judge ruled that a reasonable jury could conclude this arrangement violated antitrust law by making it difficult for Microsoft's competitors to break into the market.[/quote]

On the REE stories, I went looking because I had a vague memory of hearing of USS REE producer(s?) shutting down and selling their equipment to Chinese companies. That memory did not include the regulatory causes for the shutdown/selloff. In fact, while the article told of various companies in Western hemisphere countries moving their operations to China, I did not find the vague thing I started out looking for.


Instead, I found a much more interesting can of worms. :ch:

I remember the terror a few years ago over China's rare-earth dominance; somehow that time it disappeared after a few months.

I also remember (2010?) a previous drumbeat for a conflict with Iran, which mercifully also disappeared. Everything old is new again.

After Neoliberalism By Joseph E. Stiglitz
 

[URL]https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/56867-after-neoliberalism[/URL]
I can't agree about Neoliberalism's failures. It succeeds in what it was designed to do: rob the common folk to fatten the those on the upper fringes of the wealthy. That said, I can only hope to live long enough to see a fraction of the prescriptives accomplished.
[QUOTE]For the past 40 years, the United States and other advanced economies have been pursuing a free-market agenda of low taxes, deregulation, and cuts to social programs. There can no longer be any doubt that this approach has failed spectacularly; the only question is what will – and should – come next.[/QUOTE][QUOTE]The neoliberal experiment – lower taxes on the rich, deregulation of labor and product markets, financialization, and globalization – has been a spectacular failure. Growth is lower than it was in the quarter-century after World War II, and most of it has accrued to the very top of the income scale. After decades of stagnant or even falling incomes for those below them, neoliberalism must be pronounced dead and buried.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=kladner;518424][URL]https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/56867-after-neoliberalism[/URL]
I can't agree about Neoliberalism's failures. It succeeds in what it was designed to do: rob the common folk to fatten the those on the upper fringes of the wealthy. That said, I can only hope to live long enough to see a fraction of the prescriptives accomplished.[/QUOTE]
Speaking of "everything old is new again," you might find the following of interest:[quote]The reason why men enter into society is the preservation of their property; and the end while they choose and authorize a legislative is that there may be laws made, and rules set, as guards and fences to the properties of all the society, to limit the power and moderate the dominion of every part and member of the society. For since it can never be supposed to be the will of the society that the legislative should have a power to destroy that which everyone designs to secure by entering into society, and for which the people submitted themselves to legislators of their own making: whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence. Whensoever, therefore, the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society, and either by ambition, fear, folly, or corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people, by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and by the establishment of a new legislative (such as they shall think fit), provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society.[/quote]-- The Second Treatise on Civil Government (1689), John Locke

[QUOTE]Whensoever, therefore, the legislative shall transgress this fundamental rule of society, and either by ambition, fear, folly, or corruption, endeavor to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people, by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and by the establishment of a new legislative (such as they shall think fit), provide for their own safety and security, which is the end for which they are in society. [/QUOTE]
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary....."
I don't think I have read more than tidbits of Locke. I should take a look.