Crows are so shy, it's too cute! They're like cats, if you stare at them or lock eyes, they get really nervous. So slowly close your eyes and look away to put then at ease. If you pull out food they like, like peanuts in their shell, you can almost see a little exclamation mark appearing above their heads, like 🥜 ❗ 🐦‍⬛

It was very clear, that the British Empire's days were numbered almost 200 years earlier. And it took two mayor wars for them to get the point. 1775-1783 and 1812-1815. The "great rapprochement" wasn't until 1895-1915. The US empire needs to catch on that it's over way faster than that, preferably without starting World War III.

That's the official reasoning even. They say it's to make the "defense" industry more independent. And whether planned or not, it increases the likelihood of global war:

A similar thing happened in the lead up to the great depression and World War II: faced with a recession, the ruling class turned to protectionism with the Tariff Act of 1930. With the very high tarrifs, the recession worsened into the Great Depression until World War II saved the economy by enabling mass employment.

War is great for the capitalist class, if they want to win some time against an economic crisis, because it's a way to have mass government spending without cutting into anyones profits. If value gets created by a not for-profit entity in any sector, profits go down, because businesses who need to make a profit can't compete. Capitalists love war, because it only destroys value instead.

It's the golden triple chance for profit: first accumulation by dispossession (taxes and austerity to finance the war effort flowing directly to weapons manufacturers), then imperialism (opening new markets, stealing resources), then restarting the production cycle (lucrative contracts for rebuilding efforts after everything is destroyed).

Leftists reaction to the tarrifs must be to shift organizing to focus more strongly on anti war efforts.

According to the article, they haven't cut the exports yet, just made it legally possible. Hope they do.

Let's hope these new "export licenses" really do get used against the US in practice. So far, it's just the legal groundwork to restrict the supply. Nothing's been turned off yet.

Yes, that's it. Class solidarity has historically been annoyingly high amongst capitalist both national and international and (whatever other effects), this might have the potential to further erode both at the same time.

An afterlife. Might be nice.

Yes, obviously.

That's a really really long idealist article, that dosn't say much in the end and might have been much shorter if the author had a materialist perspective on fascism.

The reason is that all those other things create actual value, thus cutting into profits of capitalists if publicly funded. If you're a capitalist state that wants to steal massive amounts of wealth from the people and redistribute them to the rich by funding an Industry, then war really is the industry you want because it only destroys value.

For example, if you cancelled the Pentagons budget and funded centrally planned healthcare instead, no private healthcare provider could compete. It would completely close down a huge market. Same with education, infrastructure, etc. War doesn't have this problem of closing down a market, but has the advantage of opening up new markets (resources, cheap labour, more consumers, even rebuilding after the war, etc.) via imperialism.

Edit: In short, imperialism is in part a reaction to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and offers an opportunity to renew primitive accumulation.

Maybe it's about measurement, but also look closer, the change is not 2006, it's 2007. It's when the financial crisis related to the US real estate bubble hit. Also the x-axis is in percent. So it might just be, that the crash hit the regions harder, whose banks had invested most in the bubble: US and Europe. The apparent rise we see might just be production in the global south staying constant, while falling elsewhere.

Also China started huge investments, but I think most of that was at the end of 2008.

Edit: No, I was wrong. Looks like production shifted from medium skilled south to low skilled south. I have no explanation.

This would work inverted as well: "Yeah, I'm running a quick vibe check on the data to find out where the noise is coming from."