It is always a temporary glitch, huh? — Sunday Morning's propagandized look at our current supply chain problem

18 October 2021

Regarding American capitalism's shortcomings . . .

. . . it is always somebody (or something) else's fault.

Y'all have read or heard about all the unloaded container ships sitting off California's coast.

And all the supply chain shortages all over the United States.

Causing massive price increases. And so forth.

Recently, CBS's Sunday Morning tried to blame all this on . . .

. . . COVID's shutdown of production. Followed, of course, by the same lockdown's unleashing of bored American consumers going online to buy all manner of amusing (and not) things:

Sunday Morning, What's behind supply chain breakdowns?, CBS News (10 October 2021)

This phenomenon CBS observed, is what caused all the problems with currently limited product supplies. As well as an associated shortage of trucks and truck drivers.

Viewers were left to infer that global supply chains cannot cope with sudden increases in demand.

Sunday Morning closed with an optimistic claim that this 'bother' — a Winnie the Pooh word — will iron itself out by the third quarter of 2022.

How anyone could reliably forecast such a glorious culmination into sheer happiness, was left unsaid.

Not mentioned at all . . .

. . . was the following tidbit:

The White House seems to have put enough political pressure on the Port of Los Angeles, where some 60 ships were reportedly waiting offshore last month for the opportunity to unload, that the port will begin operating 24/7 in the near future.

It's pretty wild that the port wasn't already doing that—in light of, you know, the 60 ships that are reportedly waiting offshore, and the fact that most major ports around the world already operate around the clock.

The blame there seems to lie at least in sizable part with Biden's union pals—specifically the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represents workers at the Port of Los Angeles and others along the west coast.

"A long history of toxic labor-management relations, particularly on the West Coast, has led to many of the issues at the heart of US container flow today," writes Peter Tirschwell in The Journal of Commerce, a trade publication.

"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."

As Scott Lincicome, a trade policy expert with the Cato Institute, noted in a recent newsletter published by The Dispatch, the U.S. does not have a single port ranked in the top 50 of the World Bank's Container Port Performance Index.

Philadelphia's port ranks highest, at 83rd-best in the world. Los Angeles ranks 328th.

Hmm

The world's presumably richest country — and its most aggressively militaristic — cannot do better than rank 83rd to 328th in the efficiency of its ports?

Do you think that this may be indicative of more than just a sudden increase in product demand?

And why is there a massive shortage of trucks and truck drivers in the United States?

Might that alleged trucking shortage not have national security implications?

Why is The Great Oligarchy's leadership not visibly working to fix it?

No mention of any of these considerations by Sunday Morning

Propaganda, we can infer, must proceed as laid out by the Oligarchs. Those same Fat Cats, who really-really do not want to interrupt their blood-sucking of America's comatose Rabble.

The moral? — America's 24/7 propaganda 'lullabys' — (a verb) — the nation's sheep

Sleep is our enemy, lambkins.

Let's wake our wooly heads up.

And get our trotters to moving against Predatory Tyranny's mind-numbing flows of untrue drivel-drool.

PeteFree.com

It is always a temporary glitch, huh? — Sunday Morning's propagandized look at our current supply chain problem