Tag Archives: American ports

About That Longshoreman’s Strike

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On Friday, Hot Air posted an article about the Longshoreman’s strike that is currently on hold. The hold will end, and the strike may resume on January 15th. One of the reasons the strike has not been settled is the debate over the automation of American ports. Oddly enough, President Trump has come out against automation.

Hot Air reports:

…The Biden administration was completely hands-off until the union physically shut the ports down. Even then, their participation only went as far as the Secretary of Labor finally flying in to meet with both parties to “urge” them to work through their differences and for the USMX to give a little to the union. That’s classic Scranton Joe for you there.

Public pressure and outrage, election upheaval, not to mention a looming economic disaster all probably served to cool some heated jets enough for a bit of progress to be made in a short period of time. The USMX agreed to something on the order of a 62% wage hike over 6 years. Then everybody agreed to get the docks reopened under the terms of the old contract while they hammered out other, thornier issues, but only until 15 January 2025.

The article notes:

This contract agreement is set to end five days before the inauguration – the 15th. Trump owes much of his support for winning to disaffected union workers who bucked their bosses and union tradition to vote for him. Trump IS the ‘workers’ president,’ and he knows it. Don’t forget, he even had a good meeting with curmudgeonly ILA head Harold Daggett before the election. He knows what their issues are, and he’s also an international businessman. Trump’s dealt with shipping companies, etc.

Trump also knows all about these guys – this is the foreign face of the USMX, the “alliance” that controls the ports. 

The article points out that the jobs that would be automated would not help with the bottlenecks that occur at our ports.

The bottleneck is caused by the rail capacity going in and out of the ports.

The article concludes:

So it makes you wonder if the foreign operators of these ports are simply looking to dump the dozen or so biggest salaries under the guise of efficiency when, in reality, nothing is going out of the gate any faster than it already is. It physically can’t.

One more angle Bingley thought of, and I thought it was brilliant.

The optics of a strike or a lockout.

These longshoremen want to work. Ostensibly, they are fighting not to be out of work.

If the ports shut down and Trump invokes Taft-Hartley, as Bingley said to me, 1) sending the National Guard in to force people to work (an ILA strike) versus 2) sending them in to unlock the gates to ALLOW people to work (a USMX lockout)?

The first is greedy union and zero sympathy.

In the second scenario, Trump becomes the America First president, acting on his promise of protecting American workers against powerful foreign interests. The same ones who, for too long, have taken advantage of liberal business policies and conditions here, destroying American jobs.

It’s BOX OFFICE GOLD.

So that’s our wild-eyed take on it. We could be way wrong, but then again…

I mean, crazier things have happened. 

Like…Trump’s gonna be president again, isn’t he?

Stay tuned.

The Trojan Horse In American Ports

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Many Americans are slowly waking up to the threat to America posed by China. Russia openly stated, “We will bury you,” but China is much more subtle. They are slowly undermining us economically, socially, and culturally. The amount of industrial espionage, copyright violations, and spying that has been going on right under our noses is frightening. Every Chinese exchange student in America has ties to the communist government or they wouldn’t be here. China has established Chinese police departments in some of our major cities to keep watch over its citizens in this country (article here).

On Monday, Townhall posted an article about China’s presence at American ports.

The article reports:

The highly visible but generally ignored ship-to-shore cranes at American ports are responsible for loading and unloading tens of millions of shipping containers each year. In addition to being a critical component of American supply chains, they’re also used in some cases by the U.S. military. 

Some of these cranes are innocuous, but an estimated 80 percent of ship-to-shore cranes operating at U.S. ports are made by ZPMC, a China-based manufacturer, leading to rising concern among American defense and national security personnel that have compared the cranes to a “Trojan horse,” according to an exclusive report in The Wall Street Journal.

WSJ reports that the ZPMC cranes made by the Chinese company are “comparably well-made and inexpensive” compared to other cranes produced by other manufacturers, but “they contain sophisticated sensors that can register and track the provenance and destination of containers, prompting concerns that China could capture information about materiel being shipped in or out of the country to support U.S. military operations around the world.”

The article also notes:

The WSJ report quoted the former cybersecurity lead at the port of Houston who warned “[i]t wouldn’t be hard for an attacker to disable one sensor on a crane and prevent the crane from moving” because the “systems aren’t designed for security, they are designed for operations.”

Among other worries enumerated in the report, some fear that the ZPMC cranes could, in addition to being shut down by an outside attacker or tracking what is moving in and out of U.S. ports, be turned into sabotage devices to cripple American ports without a foe needing to float its navy into U.S. waters.

We are definitely paying the price for relying on China for cheap manufactured goods.

Lied To Again

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There is a container backup at American ports. There are various places on the Internet where you can look at the ships waiting to be unloaded. The Biden administration claims that the backup is due to the coronavirus. Actually there is another part of the story.

Yesterday The Conservative Treehouse reported the following:

Hundreds of requests for details on the specifics of the container shipping backlog.  So, I spent 3 days calling sources, digging for details and gathering information on the substantive issue at hand.  The epicenter of the problem is not what is being outlined by financial media, corporate media and politicians who have a specific interest in distracting from the issues at hand.  This has nothing to do with COVID-19.

The issues being discussed today relate to events that happened a long time ago.  As a matter of fact, it was so predictable that Amazon, Walmart, UPS, FedEx, Samsung, The Home Depot and Target all had taken actions years ago -long before COVID- because they knew this day would come.  It was not accidental that those companies showed up at the White House to discuss the issue, because there’s now a full court press to hide it.

There is one very specific regional issue driving the problem.  Read on:

The trucking issue with California LA ports, ie the Port of Los Angeles (POLA) and the Port of Long Beach (POLB), is that all semi tractors have to be current with new California emissions standards.  As a consequence, that mean trucks cannot be older than 3 years if they are to pick up or deliver containers at those ports.  This issue wipes out approximately half of the fleet trucks used to move containers in/out of the port.  Operating the port 24/7 will not cure the issue, because all it does is pile up more containers that sit idle as they await a limited number of trucks to pick them up.  THIS is the central issue.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. There needs to be a balance between environmentalism and progress. Some of our state governors have not learned this lesson yet.