The vast majority of American imported steel comes from Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and South Korea. As for aluminum, Canada is the only one worth mentioning. Source.
Canada and Mexico weren’t even considered adversarial until Trump pissed and moaned about how NAFTA is soooooo bad.
For starters, the United States, according to the Reuters article, imported some 508,000 tons of Chinese steel in 2024. By comparison, we imported 6.6 million tons of steel from Canada. According to the American Steel and Iron Institute, American steel production was 1.6 million tons in one week in November alone, and the nation produced over 74 million tons by November 2 of last year. You can annualize that to about 88.4 million tons last year. You can dig as far down to that number to calculate that we produce more steel domestically in two and a half days than we import from China in a year.
They’re really bitching and whining about maybe a dime flowing out of the country when the other 90 cents stays in it.
The American steel industry isn’t what it was in, say, the Carnegie days, and if you think that’s what it should look like, get in a time machine and go back to the gilded age. Please. While your eight year old daughter works from sunup to sundown with your wife at the coat factory, you’ll spend sixteen hours a day seven days a week mining iron ore with your ten year old son. You’ll live in a company town where you’re paid peanuts in what are essentially coupons that aren’t accepted anywhere in the world except that specific company town. Meanwhile, Andrew Carnegie gets to make real money selling the steel you break your back mining for over a hundred hours a week. And he gets a fuck ton of it, too. Just consider yourself lucky your wife didn’t die from a postpartum infection because the doctors didn’t wash their hands.
Yes, it is not what it was in those days, and it should never be that way again. American-made steel is still, by and large, a pretty healthy industry. They’re doing fine. The real whiners are the filthy rich owners who want to squeeze every nickel and dime out of everything. So they’re happy to act in protectionist ways that maybe prop up the industry in the short run, but makes everything more expensive in the long run. They don’t care. They know we need these metals for basic shit in our lives. We’ll buy them no matter what they cost.
Finally, the rights you have as a worker today are written in blood. And now, the government we the dopes have elected is working hard to bleach and torch them. People - lots of em - died fighting for what little we have today. And if you think we’re whiners for clinging onto those rights so the richest people in the world get to sleep on a mattress stuffed with a couple fewer hundred dollar bills, maybe it’s time to learn your fucking history.
The vast majority of American imported steel comes from Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and South Korea. As for aluminum, Canada is the only one worth mentioning. Source.
Canada and Mexico weren’t even considered adversarial until Trump pissed and moaned about how NAFTA is soooooo bad.
For starters, the United States, according to the Reuters article, imported some 508,000 tons of Chinese steel in 2024. By comparison, we imported 6.6 million tons of steel from Canada. According to the American Steel and Iron Institute, American steel production was 1.6 million tons in one week in November alone, and the nation produced over 74 million tons by November 2 of last year. You can annualize that to about 88.4 million tons last year. You can dig as far down to that number to calculate that we produce more steel domestically in two and a half days than we import from China in a year.
They’re really bitching and whining about maybe a dime flowing out of the country when the other 90 cents stays in it.
The American steel industry isn’t what it was in, say, the Carnegie days, and if you think that’s what it should look like, get in a time machine and go back to the gilded age. Please. While your eight year old daughter works from sunup to sundown with your wife at the coat factory, you’ll spend sixteen hours a day seven days a week mining iron ore with your ten year old son. You’ll live in a company town where you’re paid peanuts in what are essentially coupons that aren’t accepted anywhere in the world except that specific company town. Meanwhile, Andrew Carnegie gets to make real money selling the steel you break your back mining for over a hundred hours a week. And he gets a fuck ton of it, too. Just consider yourself lucky your wife didn’t die from a postpartum infection because the doctors didn’t wash their hands.
Yes, it is not what it was in those days, and it should never be that way again. American-made steel is still, by and large, a pretty healthy industry. They’re doing fine. The real whiners are the filthy rich owners who want to squeeze every nickel and dime out of everything. So they’re happy to act in protectionist ways that maybe prop up the industry in the short run, but makes everything more expensive in the long run. They don’t care. They know we need these metals for basic shit in our lives. We’ll buy them no matter what they cost.
Finally, the rights you have as a worker today are written in blood. And now, the government we the dopes have elected is working hard to bleach and torch them. People - lots of em - died fighting for what little we have today. And if you think we’re whiners for clinging onto those rights so the richest people in the world get to sleep on a mattress stuffed with a couple fewer hundred dollar bills, maybe it’s time to learn your fucking history.