FedEx sues U.S. government over 'impossible' task of policing exports to China

Isn't USPS part of the US government?

It's strange especially, that the bit.ly allows you to check statistics without any form of restriction:

https://bitly.com/1I7ipyR+

They do in fact have their own shortener (https://go.usa.gov/)... but after abuse, they changed it to require a login so I'm guessing there was an issue hardcoding someone's login to let the API generate them?

bit.ly, the service that is nominally in Libya, which is, in turn, subject to various sanctions?

This is hilarious.

Customs will know if Huawei is the shipper or importer of record, if it was on the docs. However "John Smith" could walk down to FedEx/UPS/DHL and go "I have this box of phones I'd like to ship, as John Smith" and hand a box full of Huawei phones across the desk.

The origin station goes "ok" and the provided documents get scanned in (commercial invoice, waybill). The packages goes along its way. If it is headed to the United States those documents then get transmitted to an office somewhere and someone reviews them and files entry on the shipment with the port it is expected to land in.

Say it's John Smith to Not Huawei Inc and it's 12 phones.

So Customs would get that it's John Smith and such and such street, shipping to Not Huawei Inc at such and such street. They'd then get the tariff number of 8517120050 for cellphones, that the quantity is 12, the country of origin on the docs and the value of the shipment.

What Customs won't see, unless they decide to manually review the commercial invoice themselves, is that the phones were manufactured by Huawei. What Customs and the carrier doen't realize is that "John Smith" is actually "Huawei Employee at Huawei, shipping for Huawei from Huawei to Huawei" because the commercial invoice says John smith to Not Huawei Inc which happens to be a DBA for Huawei (although Customs could catch this via the EIN).

A lot of customs clearance is "If it's written on the commercial invoice, it must be true" unless Customs flags something for manual inspection and decides to question it themselves. And the volume of packages entering the United States is such that it is just impossible to go over even 20% of shipments with a fine-toothed comb. You'd need to drastically increase the number of ports, the size of the ports, probably increase the number of CBP employees doing the job an order of magnitude and you'd still end up slowing down how fast freight is getting moved.

We live in a world where stuff gets on a plane in China and 12 hours later is clearing Customs and getting on a truck to head to it's final sort facility or onto a truck to be delivered to the importer. If you wanted to manually inspect every shipment you'd need an insane amount of warehouse space and something might get released a week or two after landing at the port of entry.

Let's be clear that this is a "government" goal, and that isn't necessarily a goal of the people whom the government serves. The government doesn't have it's own money to serve it's own goals, so I'd appreciate it if it stopped using my money to ignore my goals for society, so that it can pursue it's own. See also: having to donate basic school supplies to the public school, but the state patrol has state-of-the-art weaponry and technology headquartered in my town that hasn't had a murder in 20 years.

> it wants to be compensated for complying.

This will not scale. Next, industries will want to be compensated to add filters to not pollute rivers. Car makers will want to be compensated for doing safe cars. Supermarkets will want to be compensated for having to check customers age before selling alcohol or tobacco. Etc.

To follow the law is part of doing business. If the law is unreasonable or it is a problem with the law or it is a problem with the business model.

And when a government policy makes FedEx money, FedEx is eager to return that to the government.

The issue here is that this is like physics: You may not like it but you cannot beat it.

In my view it is simply 'physically' impossible for the world to remain unipolar under American so-called leadership.

It worked for a time because the only other developed pole was Europe (and Japan), which is not united with each and every country much smaller than the US.

But as the rest of the world develops then we fall back to a situation similar to the rise of the US in Victorian times: Whatever the British thought, it was 'physically' impossible for them to remain at the top.

This is not only because of China. India, the EU, maybe an African block longer term.

In today's world, war between 'superpowers' to find out who's #1 is also simply not possible because the cost would be astronomical and the result inevitably that everyone would revert to the stone age in a nuclear wasteland.

In 100 years this will all stabilise with the US being may in 3rd place, maybe just in the top 5. No direct war, but maybe a few proxy wars in the meantime.

The US could give up their priviledged position in the anglosphere and give all of us who are currently just along for the ride (i.e. weaker weatern nations) a real shot at the democracy they so fervently sprout. I forsee more colsolidation along the lines of the EU where western powers officially come together to maintain their top status, but as a whole rather than individual nations. A situatiom which comes with its own benefits & issues...

> Whereas the current unipolar system, despite its flaws, is correlated with the largest expansion of peace and prosperity in history

Problem being US is discarding its previous status, maybe because it is pretty expensive to sustain.

The longest/largest expansion of peace and prosperity sounds great, but the major enabler and beneficiary of such expansion is ironically, China.

I would not frame the current ongoing unsettlement of established order around the world as the war of good and evil, democracy versus totalitarianism. It could simply due to the fact of the west's diminishing lead in terms of technology and economy. On paper, we are still innovating faster than ever, however as more players on the playground, the exclusive period of ripping monetary reward from innovations is shortening, no matter it is through theft or reverse-engineering or just competitor learning faster, even open source. Knowledge is spreading faster than ever.

Such trend doesn't start with China, it started with Japan, then to SK/Taiwan, finally it had reached China. Had China reached Japan's status domination of technology like it was in the 80s and 90s, with its huge domestic market, it will wield unthinkable influence over the global economy, and it will lead to empower its military ambitions.

So where does this all lead. It is hard to predict really. With a loss of vision and confidence, this world would be much more unpredictable thus dangerous, but probably something could be done to prevent a Cold War 2.0, until the equilibrium is reached.

Does "expansion of peace" include peace in Kosovo, Lybia, Syria, Iraq and other countries? The list of military operations by US [1] is nowhere near empty. That "authoritarian nation" didn't do anything close to it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili...

> Whereas the current unipolar system, despite its flaws, is correlated with the largest expansion of peace and prosperity in history.

The post-WWII expansion occurred largely under a bipolar world. Calling this the "greatest expansion of peace and prosperity in history" is very questionable, though.

> has a million people in detention for practicing moderate Islam

I'm not going to claim to be an expert on what's going on in Xinjiang, but then again, 99% of the people who give their opinions on it aren't. This isn't an issue of "moderate Islam." China has a pretty significant Hui Muslim population (much larger than the Uighur population), which does not face the same issues. The issue in Xinjiang has to do with "East Turkestan" separatism, not Islam per se. The Chinese government really does not like separatism.

> claims sovereignty over Tibet, Taiwan and Hong Kong despite vigorous protest from all the aforementioned

Those territories are all internationally recognized as being part of China. Hong Kong was handed back to China by the UK as the result of a treaty. Tibet was never internationally recognized as an independent state. Taiwan is the most complicated issue. Most countries, including the United States, recognize only "one China," which is the PRC. The RoC (Taiwan) also officially recognizes only "one China," which it claims to represent. Funnily enough, Taiwan's territorial claims are even more expansive than those of the PRC, since Taiwan still officially considers Mongolia to be part of China. All those islands in the South China Sea? Taiwan also claims them (and it occupies more of them than the PRC does).

>Just like wars, in trade wars one side gets hit worse than the other, which is kinda the point I guess.

but if both sides are worse off at the end than at the beginning... why do it? Are people really willing to immiserate themselves if they know the other guy is even worse off?

I always thought of wars as conflicts over resources where one side, at least, though they could gain more by fighting than what the fight would cost them. But some wars, I have a hard time putting some wars into that framework without going way out into conspiracy land, and even then, what possible profit, say, could the US have gotten out of Vietnam, or the USSR out of Afghanistan that would justify the cost of those wars? was it just an error in judgement about how much such a war would cost?

I understand the mercantilist view, I just don't think it's credible.

"USA wants free trade", and that's why they are creating obstacles for Huawei without even a court decision.

Yeah, the current US administration claims that China started a "trade war" but they're also making similar claims intermittently about other trade partners like Mexico. It's nonsense, and the lack of economic understanding behind the claims that led to them kicking off a trade war is evident in how poorly the war is turning out for american businesses

This is true but it is also rewriting the past.

The WTO was designed to encourage free trade. The problem with free trade is that countries with developed industries will crash those that don't have developed industries. Basically, there is little incentive to join if you are still developing since it will kill your local industry.

What the WTO did is a compromise. Countries that are developing get special exceptions that expire once the country reaches certain milestones. The US was one of the founding members that helped to write these rules and the rules were designed to largely help US companies.

The exceptions allow developing countries to put rules in place to help local industry. From what I can tell China looks like it will move from a "developing" country into a "developed" country sometime in the next 5 to 10 years (based on rules that the US made when it helped setup the WTO) but now it thinks that it should happen sooner.

If they started the trade war by following rules that the US helped to write then ... I don't know what I think about that ...

https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/devel_e/devel_e.htm

Most of the world, I think, went to war against the axis powers because they were attacked by axis powers, so the question is "what did Germany and Japan think they could get out of starting this war?" and the best answer I can come up with is Norman Ohler's book on it;

I mean, I can see why the allied countries decided they needed to throw all they had into the fight... I just don't see how Germany could have actually done the math sober and thought they could win a war against... almost the rest of the world.

All taxpayers. We're the ones indirectly responsible for the government that imposes the unreasonably trade-disrupting regulations, and it's in everyone's interest that we be able to export smoothly (not just that of the exporters themselves).

All taxpayers should. They chose the government, and they're responsible for it. If you don't like footing the bill for a crappy policy, then do a better job voting.

All taxpayers should, because the entire US economy would collapse without cost-effective export shipping. Also, the issue is less of who pays and more of the strict liability. I don't think FedEx would mind implementing commercially reasonable measure to check high-risk packages--like customs does--but the issue is that they are now in the business of interpreting the law, and if the government disagrees they get in trouble.

Publicly traded companies don't get to just shut down in protest. They are obligated to take whatever actions would be interpreted as best fulfilling their fiduciary obligations to the stockholders.

No. Fedex is not saying it can violate the law; it's saying as a private company it should not bear the responsibility to interpret or enforce the law. The ban was originally designed to target a small groups of well identified 'bad guys', such as terrorists and human traffickers. Now Trump administration used it to cover a large number of Chinese companies, most of which may be against US national interest but do not conduct any criminal activities. So the hastily imposed ban made it unclear what is covered and what is not. It's not hard to imagine how confused Fedex is: is it legal to send a Huawei phone? Is it legal to send a document to a lawyer hired by Huawei? What about a personal order by someone works at Huawei?

I don't want to make a moral judgement whether Fedex should win the case, but bringing the case to a court has great legal merits. It can force the administration to clarify the ban, and help many other companies which are as confused as Fedex.