Joe Biden Has a Response to Supply Disruptions: Ordering Suppliers to Fix Their Disruptions…Surprisingly, Experts Say That’s Not Going to Fix The Problem

“We have a leadership problem.”

Indeed.

We don’t have an actual president right now, either.

The container ships are still parked offshore without being unloaded. where is joe? Where is mayor pete?

As Expected Containergeddon is Getting Worse – Biden’s Political Solution to Clear The Ships From Los Angeles Ports Only Making Things Worse

This is a follow-up to the original explanation of the epicenter of the supply chain backlog issue, ie “The Clog“. {GO DEEP

The California Version of The Green New Deal and an October 16, 2020, EPA Settlement With Transportation is What’s Creating The Container Shipping Backlog – Working CA Ports 24/7 Will Not Help, Here’s Why

You need to review the years-long and building background issue to understand the fubar that Joe Biden has just made worse.

From the White House perspective, the problem at the California ports, specifically the Port of Los Angeles (POLA) and the Port of Long Beach (POLB), was visible due to hundreds of container ships sitting in a queue off the coast of Los Angeles awaiting their opportunity to offload their cargo. The media was reporting on the backlog of ships and Joe Biden was under fire.

The team behind Joe Biden wanted the optics removed asap. Hence, the White House meeting with the heads of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Gene Seroka and Mario Cordero, respectively.

The continuing supply chain crisis of empty store shelves, missing parts and component goods that are backlogged at the California ports may be politically represented by the optic of those floating vessels. However, that’s not the problem.

The problem is a shortage of CA emission compliant internal transportation trucks to move the containers out of the port and into the U.S. mainland.

As a result… the politically expedient goal to get rid of the optical problem (the ships) by offloading containers into a California port system, that is already overwhelmed with tens-of-thousands of containers, is only making the original issue exponentially worse.

With hundreds more containers being offloaded hourly, the port infrastructure needed to load trucks long-sitting in the queue to pick up containers that arrived weeks ago is collapsing.

Truckers are waiting for over 8 hours to pick up their freight because the yards are swamped with containers. As each hour passes, more containers are offloaded into the port that can no longer deal with the scale of the problem. Each individual container is now buried in an avalanche of more containers, and that is making the limited compliant trucking resources even more problematic….. “containergeddon“.

Long before the ships started lining up offshore, many massive multinational corporations could foresee what was happening. They diverted their contracted freight into alternative ports (outside California) and began setting up new transportation arrangements. Two things happened:

(1) The alternative ports started getting backed up due to the redirected cargo arriving; and

(2) The shifted Trucking and Railroad system priority now meant resources were pulled from California.

With trucking companies redirecting resources away from California, this exacerbates the California backlog. Suppliers and retailers then enter a bidding war for priority distribution to get their stuff and avoid the clogs. This is a perfect storm of disruption in the supply chain aptly called “containergeddon.” However, not all ports can offload ships with thousands of containers. Not all ports have massive gantry cranes that can efficiently offload the cargo.

Back in California (where POLA and POLB do have the gantry cranes), now you have Los Angeles port workers saying we are offloading ships at maximum productivity, and truck drivers saying they’ve been sitting around for hours, some even days, waiting to pick up their containers. Meanwhile, other ports outside California are under pressure from the rerouted backlog of container vessels, and a limited amount of resources, trucks and railroad shipments to clear their arrivals.

Port workers are saying it’s not their lack of offloading that creates the problem, and the truckers are saying it ain’t us… “we’re sitting here waiting”.

♦ Few people are paying attention to what actually created the crisis in the first place.

The backlog all comes from California West Coast ports. It’s the issues with the new California emission regulations {Go Deep} that created the regional bottleneck in the distribution pipeline. The growing issue started becoming visible several months/years ago when the California Air Resource Board (CARB) announced the new environmental regulations.

As a direct result, several massive multinational corporations, with specifically concerned supply chain and logical operations specialists, immediately recognized the issue they would face if 50+ percent of the diesel fleet (writ large) would be blocked from entering California ports. That’s why months ago massive corporations began exclusive shipping contracts to avoid the California created crisis:

REUTERS – […] “The dry bulk cargo ship has been drafted into the service of retail giant Walmart, which is chartering its own vessels in an effort to beat the global supply chain disruptions that threaten to torpedo the retail industry’s make-or-break holiday season.

[…] Other big retail players, such as Target, Home Depot , Costco and Dollar Tree, have said they are chartering ships to deal with the … slowdown of sea networks that handle 90% of the world’s trade.” (link)

It costs more money, a lot more money, to move an entire supply chain for billions of tons of goods coming. The increases in shipping costs are passed along to the consumer.

Hence, we see prices climbing as a result of increased transportation costs being factored in to the new logistics. Did you hear about massive increases in container shipment prices? Well, THAT’S WHY.

The entire supply chain from Asia to the United States was being modified from the closest port (California), which was cost effective, to the ports where internal transportation would not be an issue.

Ships from China and SE Asia were being diverted away from California, some through the Gulf of Mexico into Texas, Louisiana, Alabama ports or inland waterways. Some even headed to the East Coast. However, any shipment diverting from the West Coast has to go through the Panama Canal into the Gulf of Mexico. It takes twice as long and costs twice as much, if not more. Hence, massive shipping price increases per container.

Back in Washington DC, Joe Biden’s solution was to get rid of the ships floating off the coast of California by piling their cargo into Los Angeles ports that are already overwhelmed with cargo they are trying to organize. The emission compliant truck drivers are now charging the ports for their time sitting around waiting for the dock workers to locate their freight.

The more containers they pile into the port, the longer it takes a limited number of trucks to move them.

The California ports are running out of places to store containers full of goods that are getting off-loaded. Hundreds of thousands of them are piling up. The central issue is the inability of emission compliant heavy transportation in California to move those containers full of goods to manufacturing, warehouses and distribution points.

This California bottleneck has been building, and building and building for years, until now it has reached a crisis point.

FUBAR.

Trump would have resolved the supply chain issue the moment it arose and long before it because a devastating problem. He wouldn’t have been “working” (making a lies-riddled speech) 3 hours a day, then rushing off to Delaware every weekend.

Where is joe? Where is mayor pete?

Buttigieg: The Weak Link In The Supply Chain
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The only thing more laughable than Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s claim that spending two months on paternity leave counts as “work” is that the massive infrastructure bill in Congress would do anything to fix the supply chain crisis.

When asked on CNBC why the administration waited so long to take action, Buttigieg responded that “we’ve been working this issue from day one”.
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Well, not exactly.

As Politico reported, Buttigieg was “mostly offline” starting in mid-August, and only went on a media blitz after Politico disclosed the fact that he’d been on an unannounced leave.

It’s true that Biden issued a supply chain executive order in early February, saying that “we’re not going to wait for a review to be completed before we start closing the existing gaps.”

In June, Biden announced the creation of a new Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force with Buttigieg one of the key members. The next month, Buttigieg said, he’d “convened the entire ecosystem of supply chain actors.”

Press Secretary Jen Psaki, in an attempt to defend the administration’s response, told reporters that “we’ve not only been talking about this since January, we’ve been working to put in place a range of steps to help address the challenges in the supply chains.”

In August, just as Buttigieg was clearing out for the next two months, Vice President Kamala Harris was warning that “if you want to have Christmas toys for your children, it might be the time to start buying them because the delay may be many, many months.”

So Buttigieg’s absence during this was inexcusable. And other than acknowledging that the supply chain crisis existed, it’s hard to see what “work” anyone in the Biden administration was actually doing.

It’s possible, in fact, that Biden’s vague executive order contributed to supply chain problems. Jennifer Bisceglie, CEO of Interos, a supply chain monitoring and modeling company, told FreightWaves that “what normally happens in these cases is a slowdown in terms of executing a business strategy, because companies don’t know if that strategy will shift or change depending on the impact” of such a review.

Biden’s “rescue” plan likely contributed as well by fueling worker shortages across the country. The disruptions caused by his vaccine mandate haven’t helped. Nor has the sharp rise in transportation costs thanks to Bidenflation.

The one concrete step the administration has taken – keeping the Port of Los Angeles open 24/7 – isn’t likely to be the “game changer” Biden thinks.

As Jennifer Van Laar explains in RedState, “simply expanding port hours wouldn’t get goods to market faster because unless distribution centers/warehouses are also open 24/7, truckers won’t want to pick up loads during off-hours.”

Worse, Biden is now blaming the private sector for the supply chain problems – telling businesses they need to “step up” – and promising more government intervention. “One of the reasons why I think it’s very important that we get the – the infrastructure plan passed – my infrastructure plan – and that’s the supply chain system is almost entirely in the hands of private business,” he said.

Buttigieg says that the crisis is an argument for “why we urgently need to pass the infrastructure vision that the president has laid out,” because “it includes $17 billion to support our ports, and we’re seeing just how important that part of our supply chain is.”

While that $17 billion might seem like a lot, consider the context. The bill Buttigieg is talking about carries a price tag of $550 billion in new spending over the next decade – so, we’re talking about 3% of that money going to ports. And only $9 billion of that would go toward modernization and construction, according to a breakdown by MarketWatch.

That’s well below the $25 billion American Society of Civil Engineers says is needed over the next decade to close what it calls the “funding gap” for ports and inland waterways.

By way of comparison, Biden’s infrastructure plan would dump $39 billion on public transportation, $15 billion to subsidize electric cars, $65 billion to subsidize broadband, and $21 billion on “environmental remediation.”

So, the idea that this will have any meaningful impact on supply chains now or in the future is fatuous.

All this causes us to wonder what would be happening today if we had someone with actual business experience making decisions in Washington.

Let Us Count the Ways

What America really wants to know is: after those months of “family leave,” did Pete Buttigieg get the hang of lactating? Hey, if sexuality is just a “social construct,” then the functions of sexuality must be teachable. So now Pete can move on to ovulation lessons and become the “birthing person” of his dreams. Pete’s dreams are America’s dreams, you see.

In the meantime, though, America has a little transportation problem that a Secretary of Transportation might look into if he wasn’t so busy performing a gender reeducation parable for the Woke family values crowd. Namely, that federal rules combined with California Air Resource Board regulations are destroying the trucking industry, a major link in the broken supply-chains for the gazillion products and parts that an advanced technological economy needs to keep on keeping on.

Under the rules, for example, California wants to phase-out tractor trailer rigs more than three years old, and eliminate all trucks that run on fossil fuels by 2035. Now, it happens that most of the truckers who service the ports of southern California are independents. They have to buy their own rigs, on which many make the equivalent of a mortgage payment, because a semi-rig can cost as much as a house. Of course, the rig must be allowed to operate for the duration of the loan. The new government regulations cancel that financial formula, and with it, the trucking industry. So much for the good intentions of the eco-wonks.

Secretary Pete might have paid attention to the developing trouble at the shipping container ports in late summer and started an emergency review of these untenable rules and regs, but instead, while learning the ins-and-outs of “chest-feeding,” he allowed the system to break down. The reality spinners in the “Joe Biden” news media would like you to think that the breakdown only applies to Christmas schwag for the hoi-polloi: No inflatable Frosty-the-Snowmen for you this year, you deplorable insurrectionist gorks in your sad little towns out in the Flyover gloaming! Actually, it applies to most of the things even super-hip Wokesters need every day in the normal course of things, and especially the replacement parts for all the engines and machines that American normality depends on. Plus, the situation has already moved into food supplies. And now that it’s all broken, the shortages may persist as far ahead as anyone can see.

Let us count the ways that America is committing suicide by Democratic Party policy. There is, front and center, “Joe Biden’s” vaccination mandate — with no basis in law, by the way — that is destroying most of the critical services industries in the nation: the hospitals, school systems, police forces, firefighters, ambulance squads, airlines, railroads, restaurants, you-name-it. No vaxx, no job for you — and no resuscitation for the unfortunate persons writhing on their kitchen floors in myocardial infarction. I’d say that depriving folks of their livelihoods while ensuring harm and death upon the citizenry is a bad combo for public order. One can easily imagine the righteous wrath building to the point where lamp-posts in capital cities are decorated with the dangling government officials who caused this to happen.

Then there are the vaxxes themselves and the Covid cat that dragged them in. Do you feel all warm and fuzzy over a shot that will turn your body into a spike protein generator, considering how spike proteins behave in a human vascular system? Got any questions or doubts about the number of adverse events seen so far? Looks like more than ten thousand deaths in the USA directly attributable to the vaxxes under the VAERS registry, and millions of injuries around the world. Not to mention the murky origins of the disease, the participation of US public health officials in its design and development, and the colossal profits reaped by the pharma companies that sell the vaxxes. Have you noted the draconian desperation to vaxx up absolutely everybody, despite some excellent reasons for people to say “no thanks?” Does the Big Picture look a little nefarious to you? Like some parties are out to bump off a pretty large number of people — including parties who have stated out loud that steeply reducing the global population would be a swell idea?

In the course of an average day, do you ever think about all the people from around the world who are jumping the US/Mexican border? It’s thousands of them each day, and millions piling in over the year 2021 — under the averted eyes of “Joe Biden” & Co. Some of them are criminal opportunists who — how shall we say — aim to blow shit up in this country. That’s apart from the economic burdens that the nonviolent ones will impose on the nation. Can you blame genuine US citizens from regarding this as an affront to common sense and common decency, not to mention an insult to the law and the constitution behind the law? Well, it is, you know. Since it’s the federal government’s duty to control entry across the border, and since “Joe Biden” directed the border patrol to not perform its duties, will you be surprised if the citizens develop the notion that they will have to defend the border themselves?

Do you think economic collapse will make any of this better? As winter looms, you’ll have plenty of time to mull that over, all bundled-up in your kitchen with the propane tanks empty and the last can of cold Spaghetti-Os in your gloved fist. When the time comes for that, don’t expect “Joe Biden” to be reading Thanksgiving homilies off his teleprompter. He will be gone, and the Democratic Party horse he rode in on with him. And when that time comes, we will be ready to start stitching things back together again in this land, perhaps a bit differently than the way we’d gotten used to. Be patient and brave. Our time will soon be at hand.

80,000 truck drivers wanted…

SOURCE

The trucking industry is short 80,000 drivers, a record high, according to Chris Spear, President and CEO of the American Trucking Associations. That’s a 30% increase from before the Scamdemic, when the industry already faced a labor shortage of 61,000 drivers.

“That’s a pretty big spike,” Spear added. Many drivers are retiring, dropping out of the industry. Increased consumer demand, prompting a need for more drivers, also plays a big role in the shortfall.

California law AB5 bans independent owner-operators. CARB rules restrict registrations to newer trucks that are compliant with the latest emission standards. Price of fuel in Cal is 1/3 higher than elsewhere in the US. Those reasons combine so independent truckers are leaving Cal to where they make more money at lower overhead. Combine banned trucks, banned independents + scarce drivers and you now left with 1/2 the trucks picking up containers at these ports. Containers are stacked till there’s no more room. The remaining trucks still allowed in the ports drop their trailers at the state line for movement to the rest of the country. More added costs.
The big corporations that bring over entire shiploads of their own goods saw the writing on the wall years ago and have contracted their unloading to the east coast & the gulf coast–at higher expense and longer delays.
So Amazon, Walmart and Home Depot are still getting product, albeit at higher cost & longer waits.
It’s the smaller companies that are suffering the most with their containers sitting in the pacific waiting to unload at the 2 bottle-necked ports.

The global supply chain crisis worsens: Chip shortages, port congestion, truckers

Brutal Numbers For Biden: If Midterms Were Held Today 51% of Registered Voters Say They Would Vote Republican; Just 41% For Dems – Largest Lead EVER For GOP

The midterms are going to be a bloodbath for the left.
60-100 seats easily