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i'm a bit confused by this tempest in a teapot as well. i remember watching the dismantling of the american steel and iron industries across the 1980s. one of the central symbolic moments was the transition from us steel to us-x, the transition from steel manufacturer to holding company. this process unfolded in plain sight--among the side phenomena it produced was the emergence of ceo's who specialized in riding out implosions and/or bankruptcies and deriving profit--and often quite alot of it--from the process. i don't know where people were at that point in terms of getting all huffy about the transformations of industrial geography and it's implications for quaint notions like "national sovereignty"....that's all done now effectively. all done. nothing to complain about really as we all sat around and watched it happen---maybe because we weren't being told that there were Problems that attended this process many of us didn't see that there were any--only now are folk waking up from their neoliberal slumbers and trying to figure out what the fuck happened.
there are alot of reasons for the transformation of steel production. but i don't have time to make a primer at the moment---maybe the article tislyoni posted above will help in this respect. but think continuous casting in the longer durée, and the transnationalization of stock ownership in the medium durée, and the delusion of "free trade" in the shorter one.
i was going to post data about the international steel & iron trades over the past decade but thought that the format i found was maybe a bit opaque.
it seems to me that this "buy american" gesture is largely meaningless, so i'm not sure what folk are getting all bent about. the united states imports vastly more steel than it produces, and vastly more than it exports. it's not obvious what kinds of ownership extends through steel industry style supply chains at this point either. what is obvious is that "buy american" means outstripping capacity to produce within the territorial limits of the united states. the only way that meme could function would be for it to be linked to an industrial sector policy aimed at re-growing a domestically oriented steel production infrastructure through one or another adaptation of miti or some such. i think such a move would be a good idea in the longer run, but it isn't present at the moment, so it means nothing.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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