Where does the ‘Canadian steel’ come from?
I swear, if I hear one more major-network American TV debater (they pretend to be “interviewers,” but they’re not interested in helping facilitate any Trump administration “guest’s” EXPLANATION of our current trade policies — they’re there to argue, with a scripted list of “positions” all ready for the shouting) echo the Trudeau-Soros globalist line on “Canadian steel,” I think I’ll scream.
“How can you claim it somehow endangers America’s ‘national security’ to import low-priced Canadian steel?” goes the lisping, now familiar siren song. “After all, Canada is one of our oldest, most reliable allies,” blah bah blah.
OK, are you ready? Read this very slowly, if you seem to be having trouble absorbing it: There IS VIRTUALLY NO CANADIAN STEEL!
Yes, Canada still produces small quantities of what they call steel “specialty products.” But the Green Extreme has largely shut down Canada’s once booming steel industry over the past 40 years . . . just as they’ve come close to doing, here. Check any list of the world’s top steel producers. China dominates, producing 800 million metric tons a year. Japan (104) India (101), the United States (81) and Russia (71) follow. Canada (rolling out a mere 13.7 million tons) ranks SEVENTEENTH, behind Taiwan, Iran and Spain — barely ahead of Belgium, Holland and Slovakia. That’s not even enough to meet their own needs, let alone make them any kind of major exporter.
So how on earth can Canada be “our major supplier of imported steel”?
The “fatal flaw” with NAFTA is that Europe and particularly China have figured out they can ship big quantities of stuff — steel, aluminum, cars, electronic gizmos needing only minimal additional assembly — to Canada or Mexico, and then run them right into the United States, avoiding all tariffs, thus sidestepping the need to engage in any honest bilateral trade negotiations with Uncle Sugar.
(This is no accident; it ties right in with the Bilderberg-Trilateral Commission-United Nations plan to eliminate the Middle Class in Europe and America, leaving a rich upper class to rule over legions of fatherless welfare moms and swarming masses of unassimilated barbarian socialist “migrants” herded into “urban enclaves” where they’re more interested in Female Genital Mutilation, “honor killings,” raping 14-year-olds, and fighting machete battles in the streets than paying attention to what Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Soros, the Bush clan or the big international bankers are up to. You think these are all just a weird series of accidents? Read Jim Tucker’s “Bilderberg Diary,” for starters. It’ll even tell you who decided the Clinton administration needed to start pushing a giant panic called “catastrophic man-made global warming” . . . and why.)
So, let’s assume we go with this Happy Fairy Tale theory that “It’s perfectly safe to let all our steel mills and aluminum smelters be shut down due to their inability to compete with (for now) low-price, lower quality imports — after all, we can always trust our loyal friend Canada to ship us ALLLL the steel or aluminum we could ever need!”
(All while most of these countries that are doing all the squawking currently have in place all kinds of tariffs and ‘Value Added Taxes’ and other sneaky ways to make sure their consumers buy less than 25 percent as much American stuff as we buy from them. You know how much American rice gets into Japan? Zero. You know what the Canadian “free trade” tariffs are on American dairy and American gypsum wallboard? Between 150 and 270 percent.)
But OK, let’s say we let our last remaining steel and aluminum smelters -– our last manufacturer of armored plate -– go out of business next year, as was about to happen.
I’ve written it before, but one more time:
Three years from now, or 10 years from now, God forbid, our military intelligence guys rush to the White House to tell our American president the signs of a military buildup are unmistakable — Red China is about to invade Taiwan. President Trump (or his successor) picks up the phone and tells Beijing to stop, or we’ll go to war. We’ll use all that great steel we import from Canada to build more warships, submarines, tanks, rifles; we’ll go to war.
And what does the premier of China say? He says “None of that steel you’ve been importing from Canada is made there, you simpleton. The Canadians smelt hardly ANY steel from iron ore these days. It’s all Chinese steel that we’ve been trans-shipping through Vancouver in order to get it into your country duty-free. And I just cut off our steel shipments to Canada last week. Cut them to zero! Ha-ha!
“There IS no Canadian steel, you fool, and all your American steel mills have shut down, they’re rusting, pigeons roost in them. You can’t make a single warship. To make one tank, you’ll have to melt down a dozen old Toyotas. And who’s going to man the blast furnaces to do even THAT? A bunch of Pancake House waitresses and convenience store clerks?
“We just sank four of your aircraft carriers, using missile technology sold to us by the Clintons. Shut up and go home, old man. We’ll call you when we need some new 3-D movies.”
That’s what the Chinese are going to say. But Chris and Jake and Margaret and all the rest of the gang want a tariff exemption for Canada? It’s OK for our last steel mills and aluminum smelters to be put out of business by cheap Chinese steel imports next year, as long as that Chinese steel is all shipped here through Canada or Mexico? Are you folks really that stupid . . . or are you just pretending?
June 11th, 2018 at 3:28 am
The only “Happy Fairy Tale theory” here is that the “national security” is strengthened by taxing American consumers for the benefit of politically connected companies. Which is all the steel and aluminum (or any other) tariffs amount to.
June 12th, 2018 at 11:59 pm
Need another bookstore novel. Charles
June 13th, 2018 at 9:29 pm
“Red China is about to invade Taiwan.”
Why would they bother? Jiimmy Carter already ceded them title.
June 14th, 2018 at 7:26 am
The national security of the amerikan empire is the functional equivalent of slavery and death for the american people. While an invasion of the US would be detrimental to their well being I fail to see why a chinese civil war over Taiwan should be of any legitimate concern to them at all.
July 26th, 2018 at 7:42 am
And if instead of “Red China is about to invade Taiwan” I’d used the example “Red China is about to invade Hawaii,” our Libertarian Purity Police would have objected “Why should anyone in New York or Maryland stir a whisker if Hawaii is invaded? After all, for a New Yorker to rush to the defense of Hawaii would be a ‘collective action,’ and we’re against collectivism! I mean, there are no borders. Borders are imaginary lines dreamed up by Government, and Government is an evil collective endeavor and nothing but an illusory figment of the statist imagination, so why can’t a few hundred thousand Chinamen in uniform show up to enjoy Hawaii’s beaches, without showing any stinking visas or passports, if they choose to? Visas and passports are nothing but the certificates of our slavery to the Great Collective. Each individual is free to stand at the corner of his own quarter-acre suburban lot with his squirrel rifle, and tell those swarming Communist legions ‘You’d better not set foot on MY property, bub’ . . .” — V.S.
August 25th, 2018 at 2:34 pm
Regrettably, this is the reduction to absurdity ‘logic’ (sic) that now has the US empire garrisoning virtually the entire world in a vain attempt to ‘protect’ itself from the entire world when that ‘solution’ is in fact, the cause of the problem and the source of its risk.