...and I'm not talking about you're favorite hipster pretending to be the second guitarist for Mayden.
I'm talking about our foundries, our mills. I'm talking iron, steel, aluminum. The vast majority of imported Ferrous-alloys (the "cookie" ingredients so to speak) come from China, Russia, Brazil, South Korea and Korean peninsula at large, and South Africa. Think back to the year/s of bullheaded campaigning promising to revive American Steel. Light bulbs yet?I'm not against military aggression for the sake of controlling a few out of line "dictators." Honestly, I don't know enough about them to say where I land either which way. I know this though, I work in supply chain and importing of these goods. It's been increasingly difficult to get these goods into the states. Here's the problem, we have no self reliance. We don't have large deposits of silicon alloy like China. We don't have insane stockpiles of Ferrochromium like Albania and Turkey. We do have Molybdenum to compete with Germany, Sweden, and SA, but it's in Alaska and everyone is against the pebble mine so there's that. Bring it closer to home, the majority of pouring taking place in the Pacific Northwest is self-spawning (a term that gets thrown around loosely in the industry). That is, most of the casting is for the wearable parts being used in mining and extraction domestically. So to paint the picture: we're going after the bad guys, who control the ingredients for American Metal, and locally, we're using these ingredients to cast parts for domestic mining which we're limiting anyways. Doesn't add up.