US Army Major General Jo Clyborne was ridiculed on social media after she protested that the military would not allow her to wear a French manicure to work.
Clyborne posted a photo to Twitter which showed her removing her manicure on Thursday evening.
Why the Army thinks a French Manicure is an “obnoxious” color compared to the civilian world which views it as an understated yet professional look is beyond me. But I have to be in uniform tomorrow, so here we are. It looked nice while it lasted. pic.twitter.com/GOxjDHbROR
“Why the Army thinks a French Manicure is an ‘obnoxious’ color compared to the civilian world which views it as an understated yet professional look is beyond me,” she complained, adding, “But I have to be in uniform tomorrow, so here we are. It looked nice while it lasted.”
Clyborne also explained that though the Army permits her to wear an American manicure, “it’s a weird pink that doesn’t look as nice.”
The post was soon ridiculed by Americans who questioned why such a high-ranking servicewoman was complaining about her nails online.
I regret to inform my fellow Europeans that if they rely on the United States for their defense, they don’t have a defense. https://t.co/1tELVOw8jm
“This is what an empire in decline looks like,”reacted one person, while another joked, “America’s enemies are trembling at this I’m sure.”
“After what happened in Afghanistan, you’d think Generals would keep this nonsense off of their social media. Our military is in rough shape in terms of leadership,” a concerned American opined, before Malaysian journalist Ian Miles Cheong claimed“military suicides have doubled” under Clyborne’s “watch” – a reference to a report which showed significantly more soldiers had died from suicide during the Covid-19 pandemic than from the virus itself.
Others demanded Clyborne delete the post, calling it unprofessional and arguing that it could undermine discipline in the armed forces, and Cliff Simms – a former special assistant to President Donald Trump – called on US military leaders to take a social media break “for a while.”
Ma'am, you probably should have put more thought into this before sending the tweet. Deleting it now would be a good idea, just because of the message it sends.
It is extremely unprofessional for a general grade officer to question uniform standards in front of the troops. It undermines disipline and erodes the authority needed by NCOs to maintain standards. You are setting up First Lines in your unit to fail.
In July, another US Army major general, Patrick Donahoe, was criticized for calling one online critic “a shill for Putin” after he asked how many wars the general had won.
Clyborne’s biography lists her as assistant adjutant general in the Minnesota National Guard and deputy commanding general of the US Army’s Cyber Center of Excellence at Fort Gordon, Georgia.
She responded to criticism by posting a short thread that started with “I’m a women [sic]. In the Army. Get over it.”
🧵2/3 4. If you think we'd lose a war b/c women are in the Army or wear nail polish, wake up. Rethink what excluding 51% of the population does to our nat strategy esp when only 1 in 10 are able to serve. Women earned their place rightfully to wear our great nation's uniform.
🧵3/3 5. When leaders are seen as human, face similar daily challenges & are approachable, our troops are more likely to reach out when they're struggling. 6. If you resort to ad hominem attacks & can’t debate fact and reason you've lost the argument and I have no time for you.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is set to report just under 2 million migrant encounters nationwide for the recently ended Fiscal Year 2021. The number of migrants encountered by Border Patrol agents and CBP officers jumped 202 percent over the previous year’s roughly 647,000.
CBP Officers and Border Patrol agents encountered nearly 1.96 million migrants nationwide during FY21 which ended on September 30, according to a highly placed source operating under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security. A document from the agency reviewed by Breitbart Texas revealed the record-breaking level of migrant encounters along the U.S.-Mexico Border.
Of the nearly 1.96 million migrants encountered, more than 1.66 million, a new record for Border Patrol, were migrants apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol agents at the southern, northern, and coastal borders. This represents an increase of 310 percent over the previous year’s 405,000 migrants.
The report for FY21 set a new record for the apprehension of migrants by Border Patrol agents for the nine southwest border sectors. The previous apprehension record of 1.64 million was set in FY2000, Breitbart Texas reported in late September.
Of the nearly 2 million migrants encountered by CBP and Border Patrol in FY2021, nearly 1.6 million took place following changes in immigration and border security policy following the Biden inauguration.
Single adult migrants accounted for more than 1.3 million of the total encounters, the report is expected to reveal. This is up from just under 537,000 the year before — an increase of nearly 146 percent. Of those, more than 616,000 came from Mexico and nearly 315,000 came from the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Family units accounted for the second-largest demographic of migrants encountered with just under 484,000 — an increase of more than 545 percent. More than 275,000 of those came from the Northern Triangle nations.
Encounters with Unaccompanied Minors also jumped by more than 333 percent. CBP officers and agents encountered more than 148,000 unaccompanied minors — up from only 34,000 the year before. Of those, more than 114,000 came from the Northern Triangle countries.
The numbers reported above do not include an estimated 400,000 migrant “got-aways.” The number is determined by counting migrants who ultimately escape apprehension after being observed by surveillance systems. Border Patrol agents also use traditional sign-cutting techniques to spot footprints. It is not a perfect investigative method, however, and sources say the actual got-away count is usually higher.
In a news interview on September 26, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas says the increase in apprehensions is nothing new. Mayorkas told Fox News’ Chris Wallace, “We are certainly seeing a large number here this year, but in 2019, we saw a large number. In 2014, in 2010. This is nothing new,” he says.
The statement contradicts the reality that the total number of migrant apprehensions along the southwest border with Mexico is higher than any recorded yearly apprehension statistic, dating to 1925 when 22,199 migrants were arrested by the Border Patrol–mostly on horseback.
First civilian to lead the Pentagon’s DSCA reportedly told colleagues overseeing foreign arms sales was her “dream job”
Heidi Grant will leave her position as director of the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which oversees foreign arms sales at the pentagon, on Nov. 6. Before officially stepping down, she has already landed a job overseeing the “defense, space and government services sales teams” at Boeing, and will start work for the aircraft and missile manufacturer just two days later on Nov. 8.
In a press release, Boeing boasted that “Heidi Grant, director of the U.S. Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), has been selected to lead Boeing’s defense, space and government services sales teams. She will join the company Nov. 8 as vice president of Business Development, leading the organization previously known as Global Sales and Marketing (GSM).”
“Heidi brings extensive experience in global strategy and competitive positioning across the life cycle,” Boeing President and CEO Leanna Caret stated. “We look forward to working closely with her as we compete, win and grow our business around the world.”
“In her current role she is responsible for the administration and execution of U.S. Department of Defense security cooperation programs and activities involving defense articles, military training and other defense-related services,” the statement continued. “She began her U.S. Department of Defense career in 1989 and held key roles with the departments of the Navy and Air Force, Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff and two combatant commands with assignments from base to headquarters levels, including an overseas assignment.”
Grant, who became the first civilian to lead the DSCA in August 2020, reportedly told colleaguesthat overseeing U.S. foreign arms sales was her “dream job.”
Various U.S. defense manufacturing corporations were confirmed to have employed members of the Chinese Communist party in 2020:
Multiple international news outlet today have confirmed the existence of a list of nearly 2 million Chinese Communist Party members that contains many hundreds of thousands of names of individuals who live and work in the West, including at top defense contractors, medical research and supply companies, financial institutions, and other critical roles throughout the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia.
In the United Kingdom, and potentially the United States, The Daily Mail confirmed that Rolls Royce, HSBC, Jaguar Land Rover, Boeing, Airbus, French defense contractor Thales, HSBC, Standard Chartere, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and GlaxoSmithKline all employ members of the CCP.
This crisis should prompt a rethinking of the needless inefficiencies we foist on ourselves.
If there is one universally recognized principle in American political life, it’s that the president of the United States should want Christmas to come off without a hitch.
Surely, this is one of the reasons Anthony Fauci rapidly backed off his comment in an interview the other day that it’s too early to say whether people should gather for the holiday. No sooner had Fauci relented than the national focus shifted to an ongoing crisis of the global supply chain that is clearly going to crimp the Christmas shopping season, forcing the Biden administration to scurry to try to alleviate a long-running, highly complex mess.
We’ve gone from fruitless “infrastructure weeks” in the Trump administration to fruitless “trying to pass infrastructure and reconciliation” weeks in the Biden administration to, now, an “attempting to make our infrastructure work” week that might have to be constantly repeated.
As part of the push to get our logistics unstuck, the president is prodding the Port of Los Angeles, one of the most important in the country, to operate on a 24/7 basis. This is welcome news, although it might cause most people to stop and think, “Wait a minute — our ports don’t already operate 24 hours a day?”
No, which speaks to the thick layer of irrationality encrusting our supply chain.
It is experiencing its worst disruption since the advent of the shipping-container era in the late 1950s, driven, at bottom, by the pandemic. A surge in e-commerce, coupled with a labor shortage, helped to create a spiraling series of bottlenecks.
Ships are idling, waiting to unload their cargo at ports, while containers are waiting at the ports to be shipped further inland, while cargo is waiting outside full warehouses on chassis that aren’t available to use to pick up other containers, and so on.
There’s no underestimating the challenge here. Yet the situation also highlights how, as Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute persuasively argues, our logistics system is beset by idiotic policies and practices that make it hugely inefficient.
Consider our ports. U.S. facilities are nowhere near the top-performing facilities around the world. They are generally less automated and less efficient. Ports in Asia operate 24 hours a day, matching the 24-hour-a-day pace of factories, whereas, until now, the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach were operating only 16 hours a day.
The main culprit for this massive inefficiency is the incredibly powerful International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which has a lock on the ports up and down the West Coast. It hates automation and has won extraordinary pay for its workers and strict work rules.
As Peter Tirschwell writes in the Journal of Commerce, “Huge cost increases, limited ability to automate terminals, chronic avoidable disruption during contract negotiations, and far lower productivity and working hours compared with ports in Asia and elsewhere around the world are at the core of the issue.”
Meanwhile, long-haul truckers around the country need about 20,000 more drivers and have also been hit by a shortage of chassis. In the midst of a major logistical nightmare, the U.S. International Trade Commission imposed roughly 200 percent duties (on top of Trump-era duties of 25 percent) on the world’s biggest manufacturer of chassis, China Intermodal Marine Containers. The head of the Harbor Trucking Association, representing port truckers on the West Coast, complained, “Now we’ve created scarcity and increased the cost.”
Then, as Lincicome points out, there are long-standing rules such as the Jones Act, which makes it much more expensive to ship goods from port to port within the U.S., putting a premium on the overtaxed ground systems.
Eventually, U.S. logistics will reach a new equilibrium. Still, this crisis should prompt a rethinking of the needless inefficiencies we foist on ourselves. It will be too late to hold this coming Christmas harmless, but it will serve us well going forward, whatever the season.
Americans appear to be growing increasingly weary of President Joe Biden’s economic policies, pointing to empty shelves all over the country and snarled traffic at shipping hubs as “proof” of his administration’s incompetence.
#EmptyShelvesJoe dominated Twitter’s trending topics for most of Thursday as social media users raked the president and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg over the coals, eviscerating their apparent inability to keep store shelves stocked even as cargo ships loaded with goods piled up along the coasts.
LOOK: The Port of Los Angeles was jam-packed with flotillas of cargo ships and stacks of shipping containers as a deal was reached to shift to 24/7 operations to break a supply-chain logjam https://t.co/Gq0apjBd2kpic.twitter.com/elNkrVfmty
Photos of seemingly endless fleets of container ships along the California coast and mountains of cargo sitting in port have made the rounds on social media this week. The back-up appears to be the result of multiple overlapping problems, from labor shortages to transportation and environmental regulations, coming to a head at once.
Time it takes for container ship to cross Pacific Ocean: 15-30 days
Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain has attempted to cast the empty shelves issue as an international problem inherited from his predecessor Donald Trump, only to be told that the goods had already made it to the US and were merely sitting on the dock waiting for drivers to haul them across the country.
The White House Chief of Staff in Ron Klain endorses this perspective around inflation and supply chain problems being "high class problems."
Perhaps someone can ask the press secretary today if the president shares this perspective… https://t.co/DvJso5AVYr
Last week, Buttigieg told MSNBC that the White House had “set up a task force” to address the mounting supply chain problem, calling it “obviously an incredibly complicated situation”and saying the DOT is “convening all of the different players … bringing together everyone connected to the ports.”
None of that actually made a dent in the 250,000 or so containers waiting to be offloaded in US ports, or backed-up trains and overworked truckers.
In a press conference on Wednesday, Biden also tried to blame the previous administration for the country’s supply-chain issues, and ordered the Port of Los Angeles to work round-the clock – without explaining how it might be staffed, or by whom – and echoed Buttigieg’s argument that a massive ‘Build Back Better’ spending bill would solve the supply chain issues.
However, the $3.5 trillion proposal has so far proven unpopular with Republicans, and even some moderate Democrats, many of whom have pointed out that the money involved has little if anything to do with actual infrastructure.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has reportedly been on paid leave for months as the U.S. is facing a historic supply chain crisis that is causing pain for Americans throughout the course of their daily lives.
“While U.S. ports faced anchor-to-anchor traffic and Congress nearly melted down over the president’s infrastructure bill in recent weeks, the usually omnipresent Transportation secretary was lying low,” Politico reported. “They didn’t previously announce it, but Buttigieg’s office told West Wing Playbook that the secretary has actually been on paid leave since mid-August to spend time with his husband, Chasten, and their two newborn babies.”
A spokesperson for the department told Politico that Buttigieg was “mostly offline” for the “first four weeks” except “for major agency decisions and matters that could not be delegated.”
“He has been ramping up activities since then,” the spokesperson claimed, adding that Buttigieg will “continue to take some time over the coming weeks to support his husband and take care of his new children.”
Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) slammed Buttigieg in a statement to Breitbart News on Thursday evening, saying:
We’re in the middle of a transportation crisis, and Pete Buttigieg is sitting at home. Meanwhile, cargo boats are unable to dock and shelves are sitting empty. Pete needs to either get back to work or leave the Department of Transportation. It’s time to put American families first.
Buttigieg’s absence comes as a $1 trillion pipeline of goods from Asia to the U.S. has been clogged for months, leading to skyrocketing shipping costs which are exacerbating inflationary pressures on an economy that is struggling to rebound under Democrat President Joe Biden’s administration.
A new report from Moody’s Analytics warns that the supply chain disruptions “will get worse before they get better.”
“As the global economic recovery continues to gather steam, what is increasingly apparent is how it will be stymied by supply-chain disruptions that are now showing up at every corner,” this week’s report said. “Border controls and mobility restrictions, unavailability of a global vaccine pass, and pent-up demand from being stuck at home have combined for a perfect storm where global production will be hampered because deliveries are not made in time, costs and prices will rise and GDP growth worldwide will not be as robust as a result.”
The report pinned the supply chain crisis on shortages of truck drivers, differences in how countries are fighting the pandemic, and a lack of a global effort to streamline operations.
“This will not be an issue next year at all,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon predicted on Monday. “This is the worst part of it. I think great market systems will adjust for it like companies have.”
They want to force people who have had [Covid] to have the vaccine, when in actuality, when you have it, you don’t need the vaccine. You become immune.’
If a person has had a previous Covid infection, they should have the option to refuse the vaccine, President Donald Trump insists.
Trump made the comments in support of natural immunity during an interview on Fox News’ Sean Hannity last week, slamming vaccine mandates for not allowing exceptions.
“You should not have to. If you get COVID or whatever you want to call it – plenty of names, ‘Wuhan virus,’ ‘the China virus,’ you can call it, we got plenty of names – but when you get it, you don’t…you shouldn’t have to be forced. They want to force people who have had it to have the vaccine, when in actuality, when you have it, you don’t need the vaccine. You become immune, so they say, and it’s rare that you get it twice. It is a natural immunity. Why are they forcing people to take the vaccine?
“Remember this, the drug companies make a lot of money, and they like it. I don’t know who else wants it or likes it, but when you get it, you don’t have to take the vaccine.”
A new report suggested Joe Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland may have a conflict of interest over critical race theory.
A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by America First Legal has revealed Garland’s daughter is married to Xan Tanner, who holds a top position at Panorama Education. The company he works for received $16 million from Facebook in 2017 to promote critical race theory and gender ideology programs in schools.
A press release regarding Facebook’s funding read, “Panorama Education will use the funding to expand its tools that help school districts develop students’ social and emotional skills, promote family engagement with school and increase college readiness.”
See if you can follow along: So Merrick Garland wants to sick the DOJ on parents protesting the Marxist agenda of Critical Race Theory in our schools.. meanwhile, his daughter Rebecca is married to the co-founder of an education company that publishes CRT materials for schools 🤔
This comes after Garland’s Department of Justice suggested parents who oppose such teachings in public schools are engaging in “domestic terrorism.” America First Legal said these ties raise ethical concerns in the DOJ to advance far-left propaganda for financial gain.
“AG Garland ordered the DOJ to use its vast national security powers to target parents who object to critical race theory being forced onto innocent children. It is therefore exceptionally urgent that the Department disclose all records pertaining to the Garland family’s financial interest in critical race theory and any and all ethical conflicts that arise from that financial interest,” said Stephen Miller, America First Legal founder and former adviser to President Trump.
The creators of the “Tuttle Twins,” a new animated series that celebrates freedom, free markets and traditional values, are betting that American parents will back an alternative to Hollywood’s increasingly leftist offerings for children.
The first episode of the kids’ show, based on author Connor Boyack’s conservative-flavored children’s books that have exploded in popularity during the pandemic — especially among home-schooling families — aired online Tuesday night.
Daniel Harmon, showrunner for the Angel Studios-distributed series, said the show, which chronicles the adventures of 11-year-old twins Ethan and Emily Tuttle as they learn about history and freedom with the help of their Cuban grandmother and her time-traveling wheelchair, is designed to attract as broad and as diverse an audience as possible.
The creators wanted to reach beyond the White conservative bubble where most Christian children’s programming languishes while big studios cash in on the wider market.
“I’m trying to reach other parents like me who love freedom and want to pass free-market principles down to their kids,” Mr. Harmon told The Washington Times. “These principles aren’t limited to any particular religious group, but we’re not seeing much about the Golden Rule, personal freedom and entrepreneurship in public schools or mainstream entertainment today.”
Mr. Harmon, a Mormon who home-schools all but one of his seven children, said he doesn’t even know the religious affiliation of most of his voice actors and production crew.
“For me, the show is pro-freedom, and that appeals to people regardless of whether they believe that our rights come from God,” Mr. Harmon said.
He said he hopes the 12-episode first season, distributed biweekly on Tuesdays via the studio’s Angel App, will launch “a long game” for the franchise as the only animated show that teaches children about economics.
“Our goal is to reach 100 million kids over the next 10 years and help them fall in love with the characters. We want kids to choose us as an alternative to Netflix, Disney+ and other apps,” Mr. Harmon said.
His brother Jeffrey Harmon, co-founder and chief content officer at Angel Studios, added that the upstart crowdfunding company embraced the project because it filled “a clear hole in the market” for quality animated entertainment to teach free-market values to kids whose families “aren’t being served by woke executives in Hollywood.”
“The show is about preaching values in a positive way rather than attacking other people’s ideologies,” he said. “With ‘Tuttle Twins,’ we want to teach our kids and their parents about the economic principles that made this country the most prosperous and peaceful society the world has ever seen.”
Launched a year ago, the “Tuttle Twins” campaign became the world’s largest crowdfunded kids’ media project at that time, raising nearly $3.7 million from more than 8,000 investors.
The show adapts a popular series of 21 “The Tuttle Twins” books that have sold more than 3 million copies. They include 12 titles in the children’s series, three toddler books and six books for teenagers.
Author Boyack, who serves as co-executive producer of the animated series, said sales of his books “exploded during the pandemic,” and led to the expansion of the franchise into a curriculum, card game and podcast. That set the scene for Angel Studios to step in.
“Our show is an effort to evangelize, not a religion but a set of political and economic values about freedom,” Mr. Boyack said. “As the author, I think those messages are complementary, but I think people of little or no faith will connect.”
The author, who based some of the twins’ personalities on his own two children, expressed satisfaction with the decision of the show’s writers to introduce fantasy elements such as time travel and “interdimensional silliness that involves the kids as intergalactic pirates,” a departure from the reality-based books.
“The books are primarily educational and a little entertaining. The cartoon flips the format to be primarily entertaining and a little educational,” Mr. Boyack said.
Founder and president of the free-market-oriented Libertas Institute in Utah, he said he wrote the first book for kids aged 5 to 11 in 2014 as a way of teaching personal responsibility to his young children. He recruited Elijah Stanfield, a coworker, as illustrator.
“Basically, I’m a full-time freedom fighter advocating for smaller government, and I wanted to be able to talk to a 5-year-old about the principles of free markets and property rights,” Mr. Boyack said. “I don’t know about the religion of people who buy them, but our audience is definitely right-of-center and independent.”
Home-schooling families account for half of his book sales, he said, and public school families for most of the rest.
Pastor Lucas Miles, a faith-based film producer familiar with the books and new show, said the “Tuttle Twins” animation is “really well done” and on a par with what comes out of Disney.
“Animated shows from major studios tend to push rebelliousness, LGBTQ agendas in shows like ‘Blue’s Clues’ and watered-down versions of critical race theory,” Mr. Miles said. “Not only will parents find entertainment in ‘Tuttle Twins,’ but they will be able to rest easy knowing that their kids are learning something of value about life.”
Mr. Miles, pastor of the nondenominational Nfluence Church in South Bend, Indiana, said families in his congregation have already used the books.
“I see the resources of ‘The Tuttle Twins’ as helping to bring a stronger foundation to kids at an earlier age in natural law, the free market, and capitalism, and helping to expose the fallacies of socialism that are being rammed down kids’ throats in public education right now,” Mr. Miles said.
He added that those fallacies include the notion that socialism is compatible with Christianity, increasingly popular on the Christian left.
“You hear people say ‘Jesus was a socialist,’ but Jesus taught personal responsibility and stewardship, he taught how to act with generosity in a self-regulated rather than government-mandated way,” Mr. Miles said. “It’s propaganda, not any kind of biblical scholarship.”
Tim Winter, president of the nonpartisan Parents Television and Media Council that advocates for family-friendly media programs, said the show could potentially become a popular counterweight to “a growing amount of animated shows that are marketed to children and include some pretty edgy stuff.”
“So much animated programming leans in only one direction politically and ‘The Tuttle Twins’ offers some balance that’s urgently needed,” Mr. Winter said. “When you have a family-friendly cartoon of high production values that leans a little right of center, it sticks out, because there’s a massive dearth of clean content that reaches this level of quality.”
Co-executive producer Matthew Faraci, who is Jewish, said the new cartoon “pushes back on the prevailing narrative that Hollywood feeds to kids.”
“This show may inspire other creators to do something similar,” Mr. Faraci said. “To push back, you need a thousand ‘Tuttle Twins’ shows, not just one.”
Mr. Harmon, the director, said that although the show takes part of its inspiration from “VeggieTales,” it will be more grounded in the realities of history.
He notes that the Tuttle twins’ Cuban immigrant grandmother, who left an oppressive communist regime, teaches them lessons from history and personal experience throughout the show.
The kids visit Gandhi in episode two to learn about his tradition of nonviolence, inspired by Jesus, and will visit other historical figures such as Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks in future shows.
“It doesn’t matter what your race is, your religion, it’s all about the principles of freedom and how they apply to economics,” Mr. Harmon said. “We’re going to create some context around the term socialism and show in principle what that translates to in the real world. We want parents and kids to watch the shows together and discuss them.”
Angel Studios is giving the biweekly episodes away for free on its clean-content app, without any ads and based on a pay-it-forward model similar to “The Chosen,” where viewers can offer to pay the company $15 to expand the show’s reach to 10 more people.
The U.S. Supply Chain Makes No Sense
This crisis should prompt a rethinking of the needless inefficiencies we foist on ourselves.
If there is one universally recognized principle in American political life, it’s that the president of the United States should want Christmas to come off without a hitch.
Surely, this is one of the reasons Anthony Fauci rapidly backed off his comment in an interview the other day that it’s too early to say whether people should gather for the holiday. No sooner had Fauci relented than the national focus shifted to an ongoing crisis of the global supply chain that is clearly going to crimp the Christmas shopping season, forcing the Biden administration to scurry to try to alleviate a long-running, highly complex mess.
We’ve gone from fruitless “infrastructure weeks” in the Trump administration to fruitless “trying to pass infrastructure and reconciliation” weeks in the Biden administration to, now, an “attempting to make our infrastructure work” week that might have to be constantly repeated.
As part of the push to get our logistics unstuck, the president is prodding the Port of Los Angeles, one of the most important in the country, to operate on a 24/7 basis. This is welcome news, although it might cause most people to stop and think, “Wait a minute — our ports don’t already operate 24 hours a day?”
No, which speaks to the thick layer of irrationality encrusting our supply chain.
It is experiencing its worst disruption since the advent of the shipping-container era in the late 1950s, driven, at bottom, by the pandemic. A surge in e-commerce, coupled with a labor shortage, helped to create a spiraling series of bottlenecks.
Ships are idling, waiting to unload their cargo at ports, while containers are waiting at the ports to be shipped further inland, while cargo is waiting outside full warehouses on chassis that aren’t available to use to pick up other containers, and so on.
There’s no underestimating the challenge here. Yet the situation also highlights how, as Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute persuasively argues, our logistics system is beset by idiotic policies and practices that make it hugely inefficient.
Consider our ports. U.S. facilities are nowhere near the top-performing facilities around the world. They are generally less automated and less efficient. Ports in Asia operate 24 hours a day, matching the 24-hour-a-day pace of factories, whereas, until now, the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach were operating only 16 hours a day.
The main culprit for this massive inefficiency is the incredibly powerful International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which has a lock on the ports up and down the West Coast. It hates automation and has won extraordinary pay for its workers and strict work rules.
As Peter Tirschwell writes in the Journal of Commerce, “Huge cost increases, limited ability to automate terminals, chronic avoidable disruption during contract negotiations, and far lower productivity and working hours compared with ports in Asia and elsewhere around the world are at the core of the issue.”
Meanwhile, long-haul truckers around the country need about 20,000 more drivers and have also been hit by a shortage of chassis. In the midst of a major logistical nightmare, the U.S. International Trade Commission imposed roughly 200 percent duties (on top of Trump-era duties of 25 percent) on the world’s biggest manufacturer of chassis, China Intermodal Marine Containers. The head of the Harbor Trucking Association, representing port truckers on the West Coast, complained, “Now we’ve created scarcity and increased the cost.”
Then, as Lincicome points out, there are long-standing rules such as the Jones Act, which makes it much more expensive to ship goods from port to port within the U.S., putting a premium on the overtaxed ground systems.
Eventually, U.S. logistics will reach a new equilibrium. Still, this crisis should prompt a rethinking of the needless inefficiencies we foist on ourselves. It will be too late to hold this coming Christmas harmless, but it will serve us well going forward, whatever the season.