Retired police chief: Inept “transportation secretary” Buttigieg in far over his head in supply chain crisis
October 18, 2021 in News by RBN Staff
source: lawenforcementtoday
Biden trying to develop plan for ships stuck outside ports-YouTube screenshot
Editor note: In 2020, we saw a nationwide push to “defund the police”. While we all stood here shaking our heads wondering if these people were serious… they cut billions of dollars in funding for police officers. And as a result, crime has skyrocketed – all while the same politicians who said “you don’t need guns, the government will protect you” continued their attacks on both our police officers and our Second Amendment rights.
And that’s exactly why we’re launching this national crowdfunding campaign as part of our efforts to help “re-fund the police”.
For those looking for a quick link to get in the fight and support the cause, click here.
LONG BEACH, CA- Let’s just call the Biden administration thus far “Nine Months of Crises.” With this guy, it’s literally been one cluster f*ck after another. Worse yet, this administration doesn’t appear to have a plan.
The current crisis finds hundreds of container ships stranded outside ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach, California and New York and New Jersey on the east coast.
On Tuesday, the White House told Reuters in an interview that Americans should be aware “there will be things you can’t get” in time for Christmas, as the latest Biden blunder is causing supply chain issues across the country.
Refusing to accept accountability for anything, the unnamed official Reuters spoke to merely suggested Americans might want to purchase goods that are available.
“At the same time, a lot of these goods are hopefully substitutable by other things […] I don’t think there’s any real reason to be panicked, but we all feel the frustration and there’s a certain need for patience to help get through a relatively short period of time,” the official said.
Officials who spoke with Reuters said that inflation has impacted families’ ability to obtain everything they need, especially goods with high consumer demand.
“We recognize that it has pinched families who are trying to get back to some semblance of normalcy as we move into the later stages of the pandemic,” the unnamed official said.
The administration, which has been asleep at the switch for the past couple of weeks and basically ignoring the situation said they are hopeful that “port operators, transportation companies and labor unions” will work longer hours to unload ships and transport cargo across the country to fill empty store shelves, Politico said.
However, it may be too late to do so according to Steve Pasierb, president and chief executive of the Toy Association in a statement to Politico.
“There’s no political intervention that’s going to get this done, and there may not be a human intervention that gets this done because this issue is now going to last well into next year,” he said.
The admonishment from the White House came as container ships holding tens of thousands of shipping containers remain backlogged at ports on both coasts. According to reports, there are 65 cargo ships waiting outside the Los Angeles port, which is currently full. In addition, 8,000 shipping containers are stuck at the Port of Savannah.
Meanwhile, Coresight Research Founder and CEO Deborah Weinswig made an ominous prediction, saying she believes the supply chain issues will linger past next year and into 2023.
“Let’s look at the math: It’s 14 days to get a container from APAC [Asia-Pacific] to the U.S. and 40 days for it to get back,” she told Yahoo Finance. “And we have a complete container misalignment right now. So that’s 80 days, we’re talking, in our opinion—we’re probably looking at Q1 2023 before all of those containers get back and realign.”
“This is not just a holiday challenge—which it is acute, probably the worst I’ve ever seen,” she continued. “I think that this continues. And that is where we’re going to see innovation and new jobs created, but we’re still really short right now.”
All of these issues have exposed the ineptitude and inexperience of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the failed mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a city of 103,000 people who saw himself as worthy of being president. Failing at that, he found himself nominated by Biden to the transportation post.
And why wouldn’t he be? After all, as Joe Concha of The Hill points out, South Bend has a fleet of some 60 buses, a small train station and a small regional airport. So clearly, Buttigieg had the “experience” to manage the Department of Transportation, which has over 58,000 employees and a budget of & 87 billion.
Buttigieg has basically done nothing over the first nine months. Oh, he came out when the infrastructure bill was first proposed and talked about “systemically racist” highways…or something. He was all over the news as he and his “husband” adopted a couple of kids, which had the media in orgasmic delight.
But now? Old “Mayor Pete” has himself a genuine crisis to deal with, and clearly, as Concha points out, he is in way over his head.
Expanding on the above, the Washington Post in a tweet broke down the supply chain nightmare facing the country.
“Ships wait off the California coast, unable to unload their cargo. Truckers are overworked and overwhelmed, often confronting logjams. Rail yards have also been clogged, with trains at one point backed up 25 miles outside a key Chicago facility,” they said last Sunday.
Part of the issue, Concha notes is a labor shortage which has not only affected the transportation industry but has impacted industries and businesses across the board. There is a shortage of workers to offload ships, and truck drivers to get the goods to where they need to go. This is nothing new during Biden’s ill-fated, incompetent term since this has been ongoing for ten months. Nobody in the administration is able to explain it, least of all Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, former Boston mayor.
So what of Buttigieg? Surely the media must be curious what old “Mayor Pete” is doing to deal with the crisis, right?
Concha said he did a quick Google search of Buttigieg and used the “News” option. People Magazine, USA Today, and NBC News all were concerned only about his adoption of twins. Business Insider was waxing poetic about another possible presidential run, while only Fox News questioned what the hell he was doing about the supply chain issues.
The issue was finally addressed last week by Buttigieg, where all he said is the “challenges” would continue possibly for years and then turned to pitch the stalled $3.5 trillion socialist reformation of America plan touted as an “infrastructure” package.
“These challenges are definitely going to continue in the months and years ahead,” Buttigieg said. “This is one more reason why we do need to deliver this infrastructure package, so that we can have a more resilient, flexible physical infrastructure to support our supply chain in this country.”
Fine and dandy, Concha notes. “What is Buttigieg doing right now to address the crisis?” he asked.
Well, apparently there is a “task force” set up by the White House. He then tried to place blame at least in part on “private sector systems,” and then said the federal government has been doing such apparently useless things such as holding “roundtables” and talking to people.
Kind of like Kamala Harris’s “attacking” the issues at the border, Concha mused. Lots of fluff, not much substance. Actually in the case of Harris, there really hasn’t been fluff…just a bunch of vapid talk about “root causes.”
The best way to address Buttigieg’s amateur inexperience, Concha said, is brought to us by old Sleepy Joe himself…an attack ad from the 2020 presidential campaign mocking Buttigieg’s inexperience.
Then, after mocking Buttigieg Biden then went on to nominate him not for official White House dog catcher, or maybe West Wing interior decorator…no he nominated him to be Transportation Secretary, clearly payback for Mayor Pete immediately giving Biden his endorsement after dropping out of his laughable campaign for president.
To quote Concha:
“Qualifications? Who needs them?”
Especially in the midst of one of the biggest transportation and supply chain crises in our history.
In case you missed our previous report on the supply chain issues, we invite you to:
DIG DEEPER
WASHINGTON, D.C.- According to reports, President Joe Biden continues to struggle to meet the immediate challenge of clogged sea ports, as American consumers face major shortages ahead of the winter holiday season.
This is nothing new as the president has been well aware of the problems for the last several months, promising back in August to monitor the situation and “offer solutions.” On August 11th, Biden said in a statement:
“My administration is bringing together the port operators, shipping lines, the labor unions, trucking companies, railroads, and others to seed up the port’s operations.”
He added:
“Right now, our experts believe — the major independent forecasters agree as well — that these bottlenecks and price spikes will reduce as our economy continues to heal.”
On August 21st, Biden appointed John D. Porcari as a “Port Envoy” for the administration. He will reportedly be joining Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to try and solve the shipping problems. Yet, two months later, ports delays are still happening.
According to reports from the weekend of October 9th-10th, there are 146 cargo ships off the California coast waiting to get unloaded. The Marine Exchange of Southern California said that one ship waiting offshore arrived from Asia on September 5th.
There are 76 container ships carrying clothes, furniture and electronics that have been stuck at ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach for nearly three months. They’re carrying 14,000 containers with about $100,000 of merchandise each.
During an interview with MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Thursday, October 7th, Buttigieg struggled to offer any reassurance that the Biden administration was making any sort of progress as the problem continues to worsen.
He admitted that it is an “incredibly complicated situation,” posing that the government was handling the problem by holding video conference “roundtables” of private companies, port operators, and labor unions to discuss the issues.
He argued that his department was making short term gains, but warned Americans that it was a long term problem. He said:
“We’re going to continue to see a lot of challenges. Not just going into the next year or two, but going into the long term.”
During the daily press briefing on Friday, October 8th, White House press secretary, Jen Psaki also struggled to demonstrate any progress on the issue. She said:
“The president recognizes that there are several, several layers of the challenge here that contribute to the bottleneck.”
Psaki argued that Biden’s appointment of a “port envoy” was “proof” that the administration was handling the crisis. She said:
“The fact that he designated and appointed someone at that level with a range of vast experience shows that this is a part of the issue we’re absolutely focused on.”
In addition to what is happening on the coast of California, there are reportedly 80,000 shipping containers stuck at the port of Savannah, which is a full 50 percent more than normal.
Steal containers are just waiting for either trucks to carry them to warehouses or ships to take them to another port, but like Savannah, other ports are also full. As a result, some “700 containers” have been left at the port, on the banks of the Savannah River, by their owners for “a month or more.”
Executive Director of the Georgia Ports Authority, Griff Lynch, said that the Port of Savannah has never been this full before. He added:
“We’ve never had the yard as full as this. They’re not coming to get their freight. The stress level has never been higher.”
Due to the jam, Lynch said he has forced cargo ships to wait to dock for nine days. He said the backlog of ships was more than 20 waiting in line and anchored 17 miles off the coast. He added:
“The supply chain is overwhelmed and inundated. It’s not sustainable at this point. Everything is out of whack.”
Another challenge for the ports have been a truck driver shortage. Without drives, many of the items American families depend on remain undelivered to points of purchase.
The situation has also been compounded by Democrat-controlled states paying people not to work through large unemployment checks. These checks are in addition to federal government unemployment checks, which result in reducing the supply of labor.
