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like mister lif once said, and in the tone that he said it: welcome to the world, pan.
"made in the united states" is meaningless.
it does not matter what you or anyone else would prefer to see done with tax money--if the manufacturing capacity does not exist, there's noplace to buy from. this is what globalizing capitalism has meant. the neoliberal cheerleading enabled folk who were not looking to pretend to themselves that none of this was happening, it seems. but it's been a long process, the fragmentation of production, particularly in heavy industries, and the exporting of the component elements of manufacturing to places with cheap labor, available technologies and repressive union laws. in general....
what does "made in america" mean?
that the majority of stock is held by american residents?
stock trades transnationally, and so you cannot tell at any given point what ownership pattern obtains at the level of stock. so you have to go firm by firm, based on annual report information (if that geography of ownership is understood as important in that context--capital is capital and these reports are about charting flows for shareholders and not about providing maps of shareholding itself back to the readers of the reports...)
that the corporate headquarters is located in the united states?
what does that mean? that the dominant corporate language is english, that the physical headquarters is somewhere in the states, that it's corporate culture is likely to embody all the negative features of american corporate culture (and such positive features as there are)...and maybe it provides some jobs for the executive cadre, it's support staff and groundskeepers)...
buy american? what are you talking about?
you can't tell from looking at labels where commodities are produced because of the rigging of country of origin definitions across the 1980s such that the "country of origin" does not correspond to nation-state boundaries and refers to a space in which the largest percentage of value added takes place---so if an item requires various steps of assembly and that assembly happens in a series of "free-trade zones" located in many different nation-state spaces, the country of origin will say "united states". what does that refer to? the legal status allotted to free trade zone spaces, not geography.
this is the world that the free-marketeers engineered, pan. it was class warfare from the beginning, and it's outcomes are only now becoming apparent to folk who did not want to look at this aspect of reality over the past 35 years. but if you have looked, this is in no way surprising.
so i fully expect to see that language erased from the compromise package.
o yeah--your position about the wto indicates that you don't know the first thing about it. up to this point, the americans have acted as if the wto was a direct extension of it's foreign policy, with the result that rulings against american corporations have been ignored while those against other countries are enforced if it suits american interests at the time.
the world is just like this now.
wake up.
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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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