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Calling Out the National Guard Won’t Solve Breakdown of U.S. Port Functioning

With 58 giant container ships reportedly still moored offshore of California’s Los Angeles and Long Beach ports as of Oct. 12, President Joe Biden and his White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki this week put out the word that the administration could call out the National Guard or Navy to help unload cargo or drive trucks at those ports, should the logjam continue.

Gimmicks won’t work. Yesterday’s story by Bloomberg, “Biden Races Clock and Holds Few Tools in Supply-Chain Crisis,” gives a glimpse of the layer-upon-layer of bottlenecks to port functioning which are the result of decades of anti-American System, every-man-for-himself, “profit-first” policies.

Take the case of the much-discussed shortage of port truck drivers to move the cargo, which President Biden hopes to remedy by speeding up licensing for these jobs. That is tantamount to making it easier to become a slave laborer. Port truck drivers are independent contractors, forced to work without benefits, and only paid when hauling cargo, not for the long hours they must wait to pick it up. “The port truck driver, for decades now, has basically been the slack adjuster in the whole system,” the University of Pennsylvania’s Steve Viscelli explained to Bloomberg News; “the entire system, he said, is built around free labor from truck drivers as they wait for containers.”

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