Groups Warning of Imminent Global Supply Chain System Collapse

Under Joe Biden, it seems as though — in a very few months — we have been dragged into a boatload of crises.

But there’s another crisis that hasn’t been getting the attention it deserves from the media, and it’s affecting all of us whether you know it or not — and it’s about to get worse.

Cargo ships anchored off California and New York, and in rail yards and on trucking routes, shipping consumer goods are incredibly backlogged due to a lack of manpower and pandemic restrictions to unload the goods. And now, there are warnings that the supply chain may be on the brink of collapse.

Shipping ports which normally only had one or two ships in dock waiting to be unloaded prior to the pandemic now have dozens lined up, waiting to be unloaded for up to four weeks, slowing the whole chain. In Los Angeles and Long Beach, as many as 73 vessels were waiting to be unloaded last month. The bottlenecks at the ports are also impacting railways and trucking. In Chicago — that has one of the largest rail yards — it was at one point backed up for 25 miles.

From Daily Mail:

At APM Terminals, a 484-acre facility boasts 12 miles of railroad tracks in Los Angeles, and the largest container site in the Western Hemisphere, Steven Trombley, the facility’s managing director, struggles to keep up with the increased influx of products and a shortage of workers.

‘It’s a headache. Cargo is sitting here longer than planned,’ Trombley told The Washington Post. ‘If I don’t get the cargo moving, then the next ship is not going to have space.’

At the facility, containers set to travel by rail commonly sit dockside for weeks, in contrast to just days, prior the pandemic.

Across from the headquarters building, trucks sit parked across a backlog of containers stacked 50 feet high, waiting to be driven east.

That’s caused prices to soar, for everything in the supply chain which, of course, will be passed on to the consumers.

Pre-Covid, the cost of shipping a container from China to the US’s West Coast was roughly $1,300. Today, that cost has risen exponentially, with the cost of transporting one container being roughly $35,000.

And the right to use these containers goes the highest bidder, hurting a host of retailers, especially small ones.

These retailers cannot afford the increasing cost to transport their inventory, and many have gone out of business.

Some have tried to turn to air freighters, and that’s overwhelmed that system and made everything more expensive there, as well.

“This has turned the economy upside down,” a logistics expert told the Daily Mail. Unions that represent shipping workers around the world are warning of a coming “global transport systems collapse.”

From Just the News:

“Global supply chains are beginning to buckle as two years’ worth of strain on transport workers take their toll,” they wrote in an open letter signed by the International Air Transport Association, the International Road Transport Union and the International Transport Workers’ Federation.

“All transport sectors are also seeing a shortage of workers, and expect more to leave as a result of the poor treatment millions have faced during the pandemic, putting the supply chain under greater threat,” they argue in the letter released Wednesday.

So, what’s Joe Biden doing in the face of something else that’s about to blow up on us all? He’s demonizing the unvaccinated and calling for more mandates and restrictions. He and other Democrats are imposing restrictions, which are causing more people to be fired in a variety of jobs across the country. Biden also made it more profitable to get unemployment that would pay more, increasing the manpower shortage that the supply chains are facing.

It’s no wonder that now there’s also a crisis in consumer economic confidence.

"We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality."–Ayn Rand https://t.co/rerk36jgcd

— Glenn Jacobs (@GlennJacobsTN) October 2, 2021