“OSHA will not enforce 29 CFR 1904’s recording requirements to require any employers to record worker side effects from COVID-19 vaccination.”
The Biden administration is forcing you to take the jab in order to work, and simultaneously the Biden administration doesn’t want the employer to tell them about workers who are injured by the jab. Simply more evidence the vaccine mandate is not about your health.
Posted originally on the conservative tree house on October 18, 2021 | Sundance | 277 Comments
Yesterday Maria Bartiromo opened her Sunday talk show with a note that beltway speculation is stirring about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell possibly stepping down. WATCH:
While there’s nothing specifically cited to support Ms. Bartiromo’s statement as a DC insider and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, there has long been evidence that both Pelosi and McConnell will exit. Here’s why it makes commonsense:
♦ For Nancy Pelosi – Joe Biden is an appointed figurehead for a background agenda driven by Obama’s Chicago Marxists. The Biden far-left policy agenda is strategically a massive throw everything at the legislative process in an effort to create major change in a short period of time. Biden is the disposable front man for this operation, and Pelosi is the facilitating legislative cohort.
Massive inflation, skyrocketing gas prices, collapsed supply chains, empty shelves, increased crime, devalued dollar, diminished international influence, horrible polling, predictable political consequences, none of this matters because Biden is disposable to the agenda. There are no limits to the obvious lies they will tell, because no one cares about any public impact. This effort is to drive the agenda regardless of political damage that can only catch them in the 2022 mid-terms.
The Marxist strategy included the likelihood the Democrats will lose the House in 2022 the same way they lost the House in 2010 during Obama’s first mid-term. The objective is to push their current program regardless of consequences.
Everything you would normally consider to be a concern that would limit the extremes of any legislative effort has been removed. They plan to lose next year, so they have nothing to lose right now.
Pelosi will not go back to being the Minority Leader if/when the Democrats lose the House. That’s a given reality. So yeah, she will step down once she has delivered on the objective. This is why there is such intensity and urgency behind everything House Democrats are doing. Rule changes, manipulative parliamentary tricks, the ridiculous and distracting J6 committee, all of it. All of it is based on this two year far-left plan that doesn’t have any consideration for impact. It’s a one way mission.
♦ For Mitch McConnell – Mitch knows he has lost any/all connection to the standards of the Republican base. Mitch knows he is a dead man walking and has taken all appropriate steps to exit his position, because he knows if the Republicans take the Senate back in 2022 he too will be removed. The MAGA base, including President Donald Trump, can’t stand the guy.
Mitch has been grooming Senator John Thune to replace him for years. If the voters deliver the Senate back into Republican control, Mitch McConnell will happily step aside from leadership and John Thune will step in. Thune is a younger version of McConnell, and he has learned the DeceptiCon ways at the knee of his master.
What the selection of Paul Ryan was to the position of House Speaker in 2014, so too is the selection of John Thune to the position of Senate Majority Leader in January of 2023. These DC groups game this stuff out and plan for these contingencies to retain the beltway system.
Posted originally on the conservative tree house on October 18, 2021 | Sundance | 20 Comments
I have been asked to outline why the author of the “Steele Dossier”, former British intelligence officer Chris Steele, is doubling down on two central and disproven claims within his dossier.
In this preview segment of the Chris Steele interview with George Stephanopoulos, you will note that Steele denies there are to two major flaws in his dossier: (1) the Russian pee-tapes story of Trump having Russian hookers peeing on him in a Moscow hotel; and (2) Michael Cohen traveling to Prague to facilitate the Trump-Russia collusion.
Both of these claims are ridiculous and debunked by Robert Mueller and FBI investigations, yet Chris Steele stands by them. There is an obvious reason why Steele must stick to those claims; however, few people understand the deep background of both claims. CTH knows the likelihood of both false claims and as a consequence we see the motive for why Steele needs to stick to them. First, watch this preview segment (prompted):
It is highly likely that John Durham knows the exact origin of the Pee-Tapes and Cohen in Prague story. It is also likely when this interview took place that Chris Steele did not know what Durham and Aldenberg know, well, until now. {Hi Chris} Whether Durham does anything to hold Steele accountable will depend on whether Durham is going to act on the criminal referral he was given for Nellie Ohr {Go Deep}. I do not hold any level of confidence.
That said, let me explain why each of those fabricated elements of the Steele Dossier must be retained or else Steele opens himself up to a much larger issue. You’ll understand why he cannot admit they are false when you understand where he likely got the information. We shall start with the origin of the Pee Tapes story, and embed a bunch of links for those interested in going deep.
Chris Steele (left) and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos (right)
♦ The story of the Russian hookers peeing on Donald Trump almost certainly came from a Russian billionaire named Oleg Deripaska.
Christopher Steele was actually a contracted employee of Deripaska, at least Deripaska was paying Chris Steele for some type of work in the U.K. Oleg Deripaska is a typically sketchy wealthy Russian with some quirky aspects to his humor. Oleg’s U.S. lawyer was a guy named Adam Waldman. You might remember that Adam Waldman was also the legal liaison between Chris Steele and SSCI Vice-Chairman Mark Warner {Go Deep}.
Adam Waldman is the connective tissue between Chris Steele, Oleg Deripaska and another name from the SSCI, former staffer Dan Jones. When Senator Chuck Grassley wanted to question the lawyer/lobbyist Adam Waldman, Waldman lied to avoid testimony {Go Deep}. Unfortunately it was a line of senate query that was quickly dropped.
Oleg Deripaska was on his yacht in the summer of 2016 with a sketchy Russian sex/intelligence worker named Anastasia Vashukevich (27). [Both Pictured Left]
Vashukevich is the Belarusian woman who was being held in a prison in Thailand under charges of recruiting women to act as prostitutes and escorts. {Go Deep}
Ms. Vashukevich name surfaced early in 2018 when CNN claimed she had dirt on Trump and “tapes” of some sort relating to Deripaska and his activities with contacts around the 2016 election. [More Backstory]
In the height of the Trump-Russia madness, CNN sent Ivan Watson to Thailand to interview Ms. Vashukevich in the hopes that she could validate the “hookers” and “pee-tapes” material that was in the Steele dossier. However, by the time CNN arrived, Anastasia changed her mind.
It turned out the recording Ms. Vashukevich was promoting/leveraging, was actually a recording of Oleg Deripaska; and, at his request she returned them to him.
FOX NEWS: […] Vashukevich told The Associated Press that she had turned over audio recordings to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, whose conversations about election interference she claimed to have taped.
She has said she provided “escort” services to Deripaska, who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and who has links to Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager now being tried in the United States on money laundering and other charges.
Speaking to an AP reporter in the courtroom in Pattaya, Vashukevich said she had promised Deripaska she would no longer speak on the matter, and that he had already promised her something in return for not making that evidence public. (read more)
The tapes Ms. Vashukevich was discussing at the time (trying to leverage her way out of jail) was a previous recording by Deripaska of a conversation between Oleg and his retained employee Christopher Steele about then presidential candidate Donald Trump. This is the conversation where Trump, Russian hookers and pee-tapes came up. Keep in mind Oleg likely knew what Steele’s questions were for; Oleg knew what Chris Steele did for a living, and Oleg had a motive to snark at the entire operation and U.S. election.
Deripaska didn’t trust anyone related to intelligence operations in either the U.K or the U.S, and Deripaska had previously been burned by the FBI in 2009 after they asked for his help. {Go Deep}
In 2009 the FBI, then headed by Robert Mueller, requested the assistance of Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska in an operation to retrieve former FBI officer and CIA resource Robert Levinson who was captured in Iran two years earlier. The agent assigned to engage Deripaska was Andrew McCabe; the primary FBI need was financing and operational support. Deripaska spent around $25 million and would have succeeded except the U.S. State Department, then headed by Hillary Clinton, backed out.
In the summer of 2016 Steele was under retainer by Deripaska and also working for Fusion-GPS. In hindsight the conversation was almost certainly part of the research Steele was doing for his Fusion-GPS assignment and assembly of the dossier into Trump. Oleg was an easy and obvious source and Anastasia Vashukevich just happened to be with Oleg when the conversation took place. She snagged the tapes upon departure, she was busted in Thailand and tried to use the info to get out.
Keep in mind in September of 2016 Andrew McCabe was Deputy Director of the FBI, when two FBI agents approached Deripaska in New York – asking for his help. The FBI request was for Deripaska to outline Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort as a tool of the Kremlin. Deripaska once hired Manafort as a political adviser and invested money with him in a business venture that went bad. Deripaska sued Manafort, alleging he stole money. However, according to a John Solomon article, despite Deripaska’s disposition toward Manafort he viewed the FBI request as absurd. He laughed the FBI away, telling them: “You are trying to create something out of nothing.”
After Trump won the 2016 election the entire apparatus of the U.S. intelligence system and DOJ turned on Deripaska because he now represented a risk {Go Deep}.
Chris Steele is sticking to that story of the pee-tapes because his connection to Oleg Deripaska, Adam Waldman, SSCI Chairman Mark Warner, Dan Jones, Fusion-GPS, Glenn Simpson, Nellie Ohr and Bruce Ohr is very prickly when it comes to his participation and intentional fabrication.
♦ The origin of the Michael Cohen in Prague is even more convoluted. However, that story connects to the recently highlighted connection between Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann and Rodney Joffe. While working for Perkins Coie, Sussmann also represented Rodney Joffe, a cybersecurity expert referred to in Durham’s indictment as “Tech Executive-1.” In 2016, Joffe, who has not been previously identified, worked with researchers to collect internet data about the Trump Organization that Sussmann took to the FBI. {Go Deep} You’ll see where Joffe surfaces toward the end.
The Michael Cohen in Prague story originates in the research conducted by Fusion-GPS after Glenn Simpson hired former CIA open-source researcher, Nellie Ohr.
Mrs. Nellie Ohr was the wife of DOJ-NSD lawyer Bruce Ohr who was also the primary 2016 conduit between Chris Steele and the FBI.
In September 2015 Nellie Ohr was hired by Fusion-GPS (Glenn Simpson) to work on the Trump research project {Go Deep}. In April 2016 Fusion-GPS was contracted by Clinton Campaign through Perkins Coie specifically to use their previous research and help fabricate evidence that Donald Trump and his associates were in collusion with the Russians. Fusion-GPS then contracted with Christopher Steele for the creation of the Trump-Russia dossier which later became the “Steele Dossier.”
For all intents and purposes Christopher Steele was a laundry operation where he was given information from Nellie Ohr (and others), washed it, and then passed it back to his DOJ contact Bruce Ohr, who then passed it along to the FBI seemingly washing away the originating political fingerprints of Fusion-GPS and Nellie Ohr.
After the laundry was discovered; and after Bruce Ohr was demoted from his position at the DOJ; he was later interviewed by FBI investigators where Bruce Ohr passed along a thumb-drive with the total of his wife’s research. However, when he did that the Fusion GPS header was stripped (link).
It’s worth remembering here that Nellie Ohr’s involvement in the scheme was considered such a risk that the New York Times even ran an article saying Nellie Ohr did not work on the dossier. However, both Bruce Ohr and Nellie Ohr gave testimony that she did. The way Bruce Ohr described it, his wife’s research was like an additional dossier assembled from Fusion GPS research to augment what Steele was separately providing the FBI.
In October of 2018 Mrs. Nellie Ohr was questioned by a House committee about her involvement with Fusion-GPS while working as a paid contract agent for the firm. Additionally she was questioned on: her relationship with the dossier origination; her contacts with Christopher Steele; her role and responsibility within Fusion as it related to the Trump project; and the nature of the communication between herself and the participating players inside and outside of government.
We now know that in 2016 a cybersecurity expert named Rodney Joffe was under contract with Perkins Coie and collaborating with researchers to collect internet data about the Trump Organization that Clinton Lawyer Michael Sussmann took to the FBI.
So we know the FBI was getting research information from Nellie Ohr via Chris Steele, and from Rodney Joffe via Michael Sussmann.
What do Nellie and Rodney have in common? They are both HAM Radio operators. What a coincidence.
There is every indication the Michael Cohen visiting Prague story originated from Nellie’s research and was passed along to Chris Steele becoming a point in his dossier. An unfortunately named art dealer from New York likely mistaken for President Trump’s lawyer.
Former Senate Intelligence Committee lead staffer Dan Jones was working with Glenn Simpson at Fusion-GPS. Fusion-GPS contracted with Nellie Ohr in “late 2015”. This is the exact same time when thousands of unauthorized “contractor searches” were taking place within the NSA/FBI database. This is where the Ham radio comes in handy to receive, share and discuss information from database extraction.
Nellie Ohr then sends research outcomes to Chris Steele for the dossier assembly; and the dossier is then laundered back to Bruce Ohr and FBI for use in their operation against the Trump campaign. Meanwhile Simpson and Jones are leaking to the media who are writing articles…. Nellie then captures those articles to validate material in the dossier; puts the citations on a thumb-drive and gives it to Bruce… Again, it’s the same damn origin.
Chris Steele is not defending his lies, he is defending the mistaken research of Nellie Ohr.
For obvious reasons Chris Steele cannot reveal where he got both points of erroneous information without exposing himself to the legal ramifications that accompany a group of political operatives successfully weaponizing the FBI against a U.S. presidential candidate. This is not conspiracy theory, this is a factual conspiracy.
Posted originally on the conservative tree house on October 17, 2021 | Sundance | 295 Comments
No politician in history -sans Carly Fiorina- is as intellectually deficient on any policy yet resoundingly skilled at parseltongue sentence structures as Alfred E. Newman, aka Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
The ability to speak in structured sentence soundbites, that mean absolutely nothing, was and is his forte.
When Barack Obama and James Clyburn were organizing the pathway for Joe Biden in the 2020 election, they reached out in March to the remaining candidates and told each of them they were going to withdraw. Each candidate was given an offer they could not refuse along with a question of what terms it would take to get them out of the race and support the avatar that was/is Joe Biden.
Having watched the Buttigieg snap-n-pop candidacy, it was obvious his terms involved getting an innocuous job that would provide him and his husband enough graft to facilitate their lifestyle. Obama and Clyburn offered Alfred E. Newman the job of Secretary of Transportation. Pete Buttigieg’s curriculum vitae included that he held a drivers license, so he gleefully exclaimed his qualifications and accepted the job.
The guy is an absolute doofus; a soy version of Greta Thunberg, who is incapable of speaking about anything that makes any sense. He is a caricature of the person who thinks they know something, so they speak in weird sentences that amount to total gibberish. WATCH:
“What I can tell you is that we are doing everything for the short term and the long term and we will work through the factors that present themselves as challenges in the terms that we encounter on everything. … The significant problems are not problem of insignificance because they are not important problems, they are significant challenges because of the importance of their significance and we are addressing them in both long and short term solutions. … This is important, not just morally but also economically, because the challenges are what we need to recognize as important maintenance issue challenges.”
Posted originally on the conservative tree house on October 16, 2021 | Sundance | 225 Comments
This is a follow-up to the original explanation of the epicenter of the supply chain backlog issue, ie “The Clog“. {GO DEEP} 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.
A Conservative British lawmaker, a member of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Party, was stabbed several times while meeting his constituents at a church and has died. These politicians had better wake up. Following Klaus Schwab’s agenda for this Great Reset and deliberately destroying people’s lives to satisfy this insane academic lofty view of the world is going to put their own lives on the line. Likewise, journalists better wake up and get on the right side of the fence. You are destroying people’s lives, and when someone has nothing else to lose, they become the most dangerous man in the room.
They think you can keep pushing people with no pushback. And when they rally, you push them even more. That is how revolutions are forged. As they say, even the most honest man will steal food when there is nothing else left to do. Our model is WARNING that violence will continue to rise into 2023. Violence is up dramatically already. People are shoplifting in New York City, and some stores are just being stripped. In NYC, a Democrat is running for mayor on the basis of cracking down on the widespread shoplifting because it is out of control.
Even the FBI reported a 5.6% increase in violent crime in 2020, but homicide increased 30%. When compared to pre-pandemic levels, the first half of 2021 was up 42% overthe same period in 2019.
These politicians have seriously hurt people, and violent crime is rising, much of it out of frustration. Two men got in an argument about a parking spot, and he simply killed the guy. If people are upset about losing everything, you do not want to be the one standing in front of them in an argument.
My recommendation is to be very careful in cities.
Posted originally on the conservative tree house on October 15, 2021 | Sundance | 183 Comments
Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, MIT PhD, was part of the forensic audit group that looked at ballots in the Maricopa County audit of Arizona. Expanding his review, Dr. Ayyadurai also provided a mathematical and pattern analysis of mail-in ballot requests and mail-in ballot return rates in Pima County, AZ in 2020 U.S. general election.
What Dr. Ayyadurai discovered is quite remarkable and would seem to prove that specific precincts within Pima County were used to dump ballots into the county election system. The average rate of ballot return in Pima County was 87%. However there were 40 very unusual precincts with more than a 97% return rate of mail-in ballots, and there were two precincts that were over 100% rate of return. They counted more ballots than they shipped.
What Dr. Ayyadurai discovers {Direct Rumble Link Here} is that once Pima County precincts passed that average ballot return rate (87%), the precincts above 92% then shifted massively toward Joe Biden. It would appear several precincts scanned Biden ballots more than once, OR, several precincts participated in ballot dumps from mule harvests. It is a very compelling presentation. WATCH video starting at 25:36 to save time:
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President Donald Trump draws attention to these findings by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai with a public statement – READ HERE
Posted originally on the conservative tree house on October 14, 2021 | Sundance | 423 Comments
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.
On October 16, 2020, the EPA reached a settlement agreement [DATA HERE] with California Air Resource Board (CARB) to shut down semi tractor rigs that were non-compliant with new California emission standards:
2020 SAN FRANCISCO – “Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced settlements with three interstate trucking companies imposing $417,000 in penalties for violating the California Air Resources Board’s federally enforceable Truck and Bus Regulation, Drayage Truck Regulation and Transport Refrigeration Unit Regulation.
“As trucks are one of the largest sources of air pollution in California, EPA will continue to ensure these heavy-duty vehicles have the needed pollution-control equipment and operate in compliance with the rules,” said EPA Pacific Southwest Regional Administrator John Busterud. “These companies have agreed to bring their trucks into compliance and operate more cleanly in all communities they serve.”
Transportation is a primary contributor to the high levels of air pollutants in Southern California and the Central Valley. Diesel emissions from trucks are one of the state’s largest sources of fine particle pollution, or soot, which is linked to health issues including asthma, impaired lung development in children, and cardiovascular effects in adults. Many of these trucks are older models and emit high amounts of particulate matter (PM) and nitrogen oxides (NOx).
[…] California Truck and Bus Regulation and Drayage Truck Regulation have been essential parts of the state’s federally enforceable plan to attain cleaner air. California requires trucking companies to upgrade vehicles they own to meet specific NOx and PM performance standards and to verify compliance of vehicles they hire or dispatch. Heavy-duty diesel trucks in California must meet 2010 engine emissions standards or use diesel particulate filters to reduce the diesel particulates emissions into the atmosphere by 85% or more. (read more)
In effect, what this 2020 determination and settlement created was an inability of half the nation’s truckers from picking up anything from the Port of LA or Port of Long Beach. Virtually all private owner operator trucks and half of the fleet trucks that are used for moving containers across the nation were shut out.
In an effort to offset the problem, transportation companies started using compliant trucks (low emission) to take the products to the California state line, where they could be transferred to non-compliant trucks who cannot enter California. However, the scale of the problem creates an immediate bottleneck that builds over time. It doesn’t matter if the ports start working 24/7, they are only going to end up with even more containers waiting on a limited amount of available trucks.
Yesterday, in an effort to obfuscate and actually hide the epicenter of the issue, the White House put on a performance to provide political cover. In a grand pantomime, Joe Biden met with the heads of the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach (Gene Seroka and Mario Cordero, respectively), and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU).
The publicized meeting and White House conference was sold as Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg showing actions they are taking to address delays and congestion across the transportation supply chain in Southern California.
As a result of the meeting, the Port of Los Angeles (POLA) announced that it will join the Port of Long Beach (POLB) in expanding to 24/7 operations. POLA will add new off-peak nighttime shifts and weekend hours, nearly doubling its hours of operation. The ILWU said its members are willing to work those extra shifts to add needed labor capacity.
That publicly promoted action event was a complete political farce. No amount of extra productivity in working the docks to off-load ships will solve the issue of trucks that cannot pick up the containers and distribute them toward manufacturing or warehouses.
As I noted, the issue started becoming visible several years ago when the California Air Resource Board (CARB) announced the new environmental regulations. Several massive multinational corporations, with specifically in-tune supply and logistics operations, immediately recognized the issue they would face if 50+ percent of the trucking fleet would be blocked from entering California ports.
Yes, years ago the private sector predicted this would happen, and they started taking actions to protect their supply chains. What these massive corporations did to reduce their exposure to supply chain disruption was to immediately formulate plans to divert their goods to other ports. This was a very expensive shift in supply chain and logistic efforts for these massive corporations, which includes: Amazon, Walmart, UPS, FedEx, Samsung, The Home Depot and Target.
A long time before and during the era of the Trump administration, those massive multinational corporations knew they would need to redirect their import cargo quickly to avoid the bottleneck caused by California’s new emission standards. They began organizing new destination ports for their products and began setting up new hubs and distribution networks to avoid the predictable California port bottlenecks.
Obviously, for politically correct reasons; and in an effort to avoid the woke mob of environmentalist jackboots, the corporations didn’t publicly share any of the issues they could foresee coming – they just worked independently and quietly to avoid the issue.
However, it costs more money to move and entire supply chain for trillions of tons of goods coming. Hence, we saw 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) to the ports where internal transportation would not be an issue.
Ships from China and SE Asia being diverted from California into the Gulf of Mexico or East coast have to go through the Panama Canal. It takes twice as long and costs twice as much, if not more. Hence, massive shipping price increases:
Unfortunately, small companies and small brokers of import goods do not have the control over their part of the supply chain from Asia to the West Coast. They don’t contract for entire cargo ships with thousands of containers. Those wholesalers, brokers and smaller companies that feed raw material and parts supplies to manufacturing and smaller retail outlets are stuck waiting for their containers to get through the trucking issue in California.
The bottleneck at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach run by Gene Seroka and Mario Cordero is not caused by a lack of longshoremen and dock workers to off-load the vessels. The bottleneck is caused by half of the previous trucks used to enter the ports and pick up containers not being allowed. Factually, it doesn’t make a tinkers damn worth of difference if the port works 24/7/365. The ports are simply running out of space.
The 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.
If you want to know how long this has been taking place, take the time to watch this video of a trans-continental shipment belonging to Amazon Inc from China. As you watch this really good discussion, think about how long Amazon Inc. has known about the problem in order for them to have put such a massive solution into place in order to avoid California.
Yeah, this California emissions issue has been identified for years, and Amazon has been planning to avoid it for years. WATCH:
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This is a library of News Events not reported by the Main Stream Media documenting & connecting the dots on How the Obama Marxist Liberal agenda is destroying America
Centinel2012 