Hat tip to William Monie Bauer for the following information:
“Essentially the trains and ports have formed an old fashion trust (as is Sugar trust, steel trust, oil trust, etc). They are all engaging in anticompetitive, monopolization behavior.
This has driven the costs astronomically higher from $2000 per container (TEU) to $20,000 per TEU to ship out of US Pacific Coast ports before rail costs are considered. All involved (ports and railroads) are profiting beyond belief at the expense of especially small and medium size businesses in the US.
Currently, the leftist cabal that controls CP, CN, BNSF, and soon KS, are engaged slowdown along with US west Coast ports. UP, if it is not in on the game, is swamped and beyond capacity.
None of these entities are hiring for these highly desired and well compensated jobs, yet they claim a labor shortage.
The key to this supply chain crisis (now termed portageddon) is the dwell times at the ports, the second key is the lack of available train slots to move goods.
I have brought this up with Democrats at all levels of the governments involved. Most, are too stupid, and too oblivious, to understand why this is important.
The smarter ones are carefully avoiding the subject.
None are willing to use the Sherman antitrust act.
As I have pointed out, key Democrat money men are behind this trust, including Warren Buffet (BNSF) and Bill Gates(CN) through their very fortuitously timed railroad investments (There are several others - all Democrats). Originally this started as an oil play, using left wing activist groups to shut down pipelines, and fracking in pipeline adjacent US oil fields, in order to drive oil onto rails from the Canadian Tar sands. This caused rails and trains to become extremely devoted to oil transport earning them between $10-30/barrel mostly $30) margins on a 700 barrel tanker cars which squeezed the lower cost margin containers ($2.12 mile average long haul cost) out of priority.
As a result, shippers started bidding on ever diminishing container slots, and those slots have become radically more expensive (again to around $20/long mile), all benefiting the bottom line of railroads.
Truckers have become in short supply because businesses have found it much cheaper to truck shipments and pay truckers very well to do long haul shipping rather than to use either rails or ships to US West Coast ports. This, as this article points out, has now collapsed the availability of short haul truckers to move containers to and from the ports.
Now with the squeeze on container shipping these costs have exploded ($20,000 per TEU to transport across the oceans, and either off load or onload at a US West Coast port, along with another $20,000 to ship to the port by rail = $40,000 per TEU total cost)
It is so bad, I know of businesses in Seattle paying long haul trucker to take containers to (Republican controlled) ports thousands of miles across country to get their product shipped abroad.
A left wing environmentalist who is honest, (ROFLMAO), would realize the huge carbon footprints this cascading crisis has caused as everything is being shipped by truck to South East US ports rather than boat or train from Pacific ports
But to acknowledge this would point a finger at Biden's disastrous decision to end stop all oil development on US public lands, ending the Keystone XL pipeline permanently, along with Trudeau's decision to end similar pipelines in Canada.
Elections have consequences.
Vastly higher carbon footprints, exploding shipping costs, closing small businesses (not to mention businesses never opened), and a collapsing North American supply chain is just a few.
The virtue signaling leftist voters have spoken. They want increased carbon footprints rather than tweets from the Orange man (who drove down America's carbon footprint), the want "Equity" in unemployment rather than any jobs in the US, they want oil on rail cars exploding in our towns and cities rather than on much safer pipelines, they want their super wealthy donors to become even wealthier while small and medium businesses are closed or never started as a result of their policies.
What the leftists wants and have voted for is a third world country, with hugely connected and fabulously wealthy oligarchs on top and everyone else poor and struggling at the bottom.
The US has now gotten what they voted for.....”