Thread by @wydna00

Notice how discourse around supply chain issues is dedicated entirely to the morality of that discourse’s own sentiment regarding how the issue affects hypothetical individuals. The history and material realities of the international maritime order go completely undiscussed

Cafruny, Alan. 1995. “Class, State, and World Systems: The Transformation of International Maritime Relations.” Review of International Political Economy 2 (2): 285–314.

Carlisle, Rodney. 1980. “The ‘American Century’ Implemented: Stettinius and the Liberian Flag of Convenience.” Business History Review 54 (2): 175–91.

Sharife, Khadija. 2010. “Flying a Questionable Flag: Liberia’s Lucrative Shipping Industry.” World Policy Journal 27 (4): 111–18.

Levinson, Marc. 2006. “Container Shipping and the Decline of New York, 1955–1975.” Business History Review 80 (1): 49–80.

The international maritime order is identical to American global hegemony. It doesn’t exist as some accident. It was planned to incredible degree between the foreign policy establishment and America’s leading industries using wartime public officials as intermediaries

All of the world’s shipping was transferred under the control of flags of connivence sold by US client states like Liberia and Panama, with those states’ share of the revenue acting as a kind of unofficial foreign aid to purchase their complicity in America’s Cold War strategy

Today the Clinton and Gates Foundations and others continue to funnel developmental aid into these same countries, utilizing the same philanthropic infrastructure Edward Stettinius put into place 70 years ago.

The rise of flags of convenience and container shipping both served to undercut American labor unions. Between 1951 and 1976 for instance tens of thousands of jobs at America’s primary port city of New York were liquidated. Covid did not cause our maritime shipping labor shortage

Not only did these projects benefit and find support from shippers, oil companies, anti-unionism, and the Cold War foreign policy establishment, they were a huge boon to real estate redevelopment of America’s rail and port infrastructure. Plans for which in NYC dated back to 1926

Online owns about whether the libs are cringe or not for being sad Christmas is ruined have absolutely nothing to do with any of this. This is a vast international structure of maritime law, offshore financial networks, and international development programs. Wake up

The complete absence of any of this from online discourse demonstrates perfectly how such discourse functions to further conceal and normalize the actual material structures at play while laundering the underlying class interests motivating their perpetuation.