And that isn’t going to last, take advantage of it while you can, America.
You can build domestic industry and jobs without this dumb shit. It’s just going to reduce the purchasing power.
Extremely critical support to Trump for destroying the AmeriKKKan empire
It would be very funny to see Americans mald over rising treat prices, except…
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This shit never seems to catch the biggest fish. They just send everything to a big warehouse in some exempted country (Indonesia, Korea, Canada, wherever) and have people put stickers on the widgets as part of the “final assembly process”, then insist that’s the country of origin.
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People will pay $1500 for a “next gen” iPhone that has a slightly nicer camera and a chromium finish. The tariffs don’t seem to meaningfully impact our import rate.
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Insourcing production to the US (assuming this is ever actually going to happen) is technically good for the American economy. Trump’s methods are ham-fisted and ill-conceived, but re-capitalization of the American economy would be an unmitigated good and would strengthen this cursed white supremacist state.
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The whipped dog of the American proletariat only ever knows how to lash out at weaker and more vulnerable people around them. They continue to lack any revolutionary character that might actually harm the foundation of the bourgeois dictatorship.
re-capitalization may seem alluring to American nationalists but its actually dumb as hell. Capitalism is a world system lubricated by USD, which americans send abroad to pay for imports. Its not a competition of discrete national economies, capitalism is global and totalizing. Everyone else in the world does the actual work, Americans just need to do their part: consume to provide high-end demand. Trying to go to protectionism now is like trying to make the oil pump in the opposite direction, your gonna break the motor and probably set something on fire.
re-capitalization may seem alluring to American nationalists but its actually dumb as hell.
China and India are recapitalizing to good effect. Russia is recapitalizing, and that’s why the country hasn’t collapsed under the weight of their stupid war. Germany is capitalized, and that’s why it can bully everyone else in the EU except France.
Meanwhile, the UK is just six banks in a trench coat and their economy is disintegrating underneath them. Saudi Arabia is trying to build out capital in excess of its oil drilling and desalination systems, but all MBS knows how to do is build Monaco over and over again in a big line. Hong Kong has fucked itself, because all the business assets are in Shenzhen and western nations no longer need a UK-backed financial bridge into China. Japan is increasingly just Tokyo plus Alabama, as all the capital wealth concentrates in a handful of metropoles.
Everyone else in the world does the actual work, Americans just need to do their part: consume
So much of what gets “consumed” from abroad is waste. Wasted textiles. Wasted foodstuffs. Disposable packaging and one-use commodities. Wasted energy from A/C cooling empty buildings and cars lined up in five mile long traffic queues. Technology that’s run at high capacity solely to put up fake shit on the internet. Technology that’s designed not to last longer than the next marketing cycle. It isn’t even stuff Americans get to enjoy. It’s Instant Trash that just molds in a factory somewhere. Grain during the potato famine. The Grapes of Wrath.
Americans have a bunch of jobs that desperately need doing - education, health care, infrastructure maintenance, logistics, waste management - that they don’t want to pay anyone to do. Consequently, everyone runs off and gets jobs in finance and advertising, because that’s the only shit that pays. So we have more and more of Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs putting up numbers on the domestic economy while fewer and fewer people know how anything in the country actually works.
But to say Americans aren’t “doing work” is absurd. Americans are chronically overworked. They’re perpetually exhausted. They’re a miserable, wrung out, and depressed. They’re not idle. They’re wasted. Americans are working overtime to produce excess waste.
IMO points #1 and #2 are key reasons why #3, as you describe it (with appropriate skepticism) isn’t going to happen. The parasitism of deeply established rentiers (of industry) and the hyper-financialization is not going to come to a halt, not without what can only be described as a death to the system (it could be resuscitated after- but all these contradictions would frankly need to be purged, a politically painful and systematically tumultuous process, to allow for such developments).
The world reserve currency status and the consequences of its decades-long abuse/“cheap money” (or rather, toilet paper money, the ubiquitousness and cartoonish levels of debt and speculation, etc) is also a noose around AmeriKKKa’s neck in this regard. There is no soft landing, and there will be no reining in the system, not without the destruction of the wealth of the capitalist classes and of the global economic system the US has made itself the center of (though it is unsustainable in its own right).
As for #4… sure, I agree entirely. And thus personally I hope to get the hell out of the imperial cores before the death camps and/or pogroms begin, if they do. But thankfully however, the rest of the world- the overwhelming majority of the world- is moving past the west’s hateful, racist, genocidal, and deranged system, and will leave them in the dust if they cannot progress forward (IMO the west will not- not for a long time, anyways, the social, ideological, institutional, etc. contradictions of 500 years, and the contradiction of settlerism in particular, shall be a hurdle that will take a very long time to be overcome, if ever- though I do expect it will happen eventually in the long run).
The west will embrace fascism, and likely will try to take all the rest of humanity down with it if they can’t keep them as their slaves. It sounds dismal, but that’s my expectations for the western regimes, anyways- whether the masses, or even those within the system with the decency or self-preservation to resist and break free from this course, will be able to recognize in full just what path they are headed down and prevent it is another matter.
But- in response to #4- my answer is- “yeah, so what?” Not to be callous, but this is the path these societies were almost certainly going to go down from the beginning; this is the great hurdle they must overcome (that they created for themselves). I am not disregarding the suffering that it will cause (which I will likely also face, and so will many of my loved ones). But this is still progress of an overwhelmingly positive nature for the rest of the world- just because the slave masters (the “international community”) might tear themselves apart and get homicidal, does not mean that the slaves (the overwhelming global majority) should wait on their liberation and the improvement of their lives till it is convenient; it does not mean that the global south should continue bending over to western parasitism (which is in fact becoming more and more deranged and intolerable, as shown with their attempts at “Ukrainizing” countries like the Philippines and Armenia and their march to WW3, with their blatant genocide in Gaza and their constant provocations and meddling reaching a fever pitch across the globe, their attempts to destroy the peace, prosperity, and development of ASEAN, of Africa through its trade and cooperation with BRICS, etc…).
If the west wishes to go fascist (which I don’t doubt they most likely will), if they want to destroy all of humanity if they cannot re-establish global slavery, unquestioned imperialism, and omnipresent hegemony as they desire- that’s a hurdle that humanity will have to face. And humanity, the collective humanity, will either win (whether those in the west wish to consider themselves a part of it, or bring destruction upon their heads to the bitter end is another matter) or go extinct, but either way the ordeal will have been- if not necessary, absolutely inevitable (because the west and even the western masses, if they play along with their regimes, will have done everything to ensure it was so).
The world will free themselves from AmeriKKKa and the league of western imperialists- they will free themselves from the petrodollar’s parasitism, from western enforced monopolies, from theft and coercion, from the US’ salami-slicing tactics of moving ever-closer to a “winnable nuclear war” and the effective genocide or enslavement of the entire planet. Whether the western populations are ready for such a change is irrelevant, and they can either get with the program (and they will have every chance of doing so- right up until the call comes to launch the nukes) or die rejecting the most basic decency and humanity.
That’s my take on it, anyways. All the west, the “garden peoples,” have left (as a simplification- they have much, but their system has reached the end of the road and they can only try to threaten the world to prevent it from moving further) is terrorism. And all the west, the “garden,” can accept, is the complete subservience and enslavement of the world, to return to the unipolar moment and not only that, but worse- to gradually balkanize and de-industrialize all the nations of the global south, so as to never allow such a challenge to their “garden” to arise again.
All they offer is terrorism, and their reward, to those who submit- as Russia’s experience post-dissolution, Ukraine’s current experience, etc. and that of countless others have shown- the reward for submission is slavery and death, the loss of everything of value and of all hope. The global south (and the masses of the west, if they can get their heads out of their asses to realize it) truly has nothing to lose but their chains.
To your point 3, I don’t think the US in its current form will ever actually onshore meaningful industry. Industry is a riskier and lower impact investment. It takes a ton of money to buy land, build a huge building on it, fill it with machines, fill it with people, train those people, fill it with inputs, and coordinate the shipping and distribution of the outputs. This is a huge huge huge cost for not a lot of payoff in the short term, at least to someone trying to fund it privately.
What private investors want to do that when they can just buy real estate or insurance bonds or whatever, rent it or turn around and sell it all in a few years for a huge profit to some other investors trying to do the same?
Trying to onshore industry to the US via protectionism won’t accomplish anything meaningful beyond “Americans can afford less shit.” An economy built on financialization and that doesn’t care about anything except short term profit has no incentive to build industry. At the kind of scale that would make a meaningful impact on the average American, only a government could accomplish it, and that definitely won’t happen.
I don’t think the US in its current form will ever actually onshore meaningful industry
We’re doing it with battery manufacturing as we speak. A big reason the Atlantic Coast is trending blue stems from re-shoring of automotive manufacturing, particularly with regard to EVs. In theory, we’d be doing it with semiconductor manufacturing, too, if we weren’t so far behind the curve.
What private investors want to do that when they can just buy real estate or insurance bonds or whatever, rent it or turn around and sell it all in a few years for a huge profit to some other investors trying to do the same?
Some private investors see value in real assets, even if they aren’t producing the immediate sky-high returns available in the IP markets. Yes, GE’s sort of blazed a trail of “don’t own anything except the debt of other industries” as a corporate model. But you’ve also got big energy producers like Exxon and construction companies like Bechtel that have huge investments in income generating capital projects. Even companies like Amazon and Microsoft are invested in data centers - which require material infrastructure, maintenance, energy, etc. For all the shit AI gets, its been an excuse to build out these enormous facilities for data processing that have value beyond whatever lies Sam Alton is telling people.
Trying to onshore industry to the US via protectionism won’t accomplish anything meaningful beyond “Americans can afford less shit.”
I disagree, but I guess we’ll see. I think onshoring means rebuilding the collapsed base of engineering, technical management, and logistics that we’ve let sag over the last 40 years. And I think it’s going to boost the quality of work for a vital sector of the national economy.
