Raytheon Unveils New Rent-Seeking Missile

revolver

America’s formidable military arsenal became even more so this week, as Raytheon Technologies revealed a brand-new rent-seeking missile.

The rent-seeking missile represents a revolutionary breakthrough in stealth technology, capable of blowing up the budget of an entire country before its taxpayers even notice something is wrong.

“People used to point and laugh when Congress would buy dozens of worthless tanks just to prop up General Dynamics,” said Senator and fanatical war hawk Lindsey Graham. “With this new missile, we’ll bankrupt our country before China can even blink.”

As befits its cutting-edge nature, the rent-seeking missile doesn’t come cheap: Each missile will cost $480 million—two hundred and forty times the price of a Tomahawk missile. But Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes says the number was arrived at after careful thought.

“I just looked up the most expensive house in the D.C. area and multiplied it by ten, LOL,” Hayes told Revolver. “F*** it, next time I’m just gonna say it costs a billion dollars. How many of these dumb congressmen do you suppose know how many zeroes there are in a billion?”

The missile’s design is the product of a more than a decade of work from the finest panderers and parasites in the greater D.C. area. Each missile broadcasts a powerful signal into the subconscious of senior administration officials. The signal makes officials extremely vulnerable to implausible suggestions like “Bashar Assad just did a gas attack on civilians for absolute no reason in a war he was winning,” and convinces them that the best response to such suggestions is to wildly fire dozens of missiles at obscure air bases nobody has heard of. These missiles will have to be replaced, ensuring a steady stream of income that Raytheon can spend on more lobbying and de facto bribes for politicians.

Besides the direct cost per missile, each rent-seeker will also automatically contribute an additional $5 million in aid to Ukraine and $10,000 to the bank account of each retired U.S. general currently working as a consultant.

“Come on, don’t you care about Ukraine?” said Kremer. “Ukraine Ukraine Kyiv Putler Ukraine.”

Experts say the rent-seeking missile’s reveal is likely a response to the People’s Republic of China, which recently revealed it has built an N-bombcapable of striking anywhere in the United States. The rent-seeking missile’s dramatic cost, they noted, will guarantee that America’s military budget remains far ahead of China’s, regardless of its effectiveness. The missile is also a deadlier weapon: While the N-bomb has to actually explode to devastate a city with its 250-decibel n-word, the rent-seeking missile causes the vast majority of its damage before being fired at all. The fact that the damage is inflicted on the U.S. rather than other countries did not seem to perturb members of Congress.

With more than $27 billion in annual defense contracts (higher than the budget of NASA), plus a former Air Force general, a retired Joint Chiefs vice chair, and an ex-deputy SecDef on its board, Raytheon was already a lucrative rent-seeker inside the Beltway. But company leaders say the new missile will secure the company’s future against the unlikely possibility of Congress coming to its senses and scaling back America’s overseas quagmires.

“With America’s humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and its ongoing meltdown in Ukraine, there were a lot of worries that America would realize what a colossal scam the military-industrial complex is,” said Raytheon CFO Neil Mitchill. “With this new rent-seeking missile, Raytheon is well-positioned to make billions no matter how many wars America loses in the years to come.”

Raytheon, the first defense contractor to get a perfect workplace rating from Human Rights Campaign, proudly noted that the rent-seeking missile’s explosive payload was designed by the defense industry’s first all-transgender aerospace team. Critics have noted that in tests, the missile prematurely exploded before reaching its target 42% of the time, but Raytheon spokesmen hit back by noting that each missile also has a transgender pride flag painted on the side.

“This missile identifies as the finest weapon ever produced for the U.S. armed forces,” said Hayes. “We are here to affirm the missile’s lived experience and support it as it lives its best life.”

X22, On the Fringe, and more- July 2nd

 

Way to spend a quiet Saturday: Binge almost the entire 1st Season of 'South Park', time will be flying by and you won't want to stop! :)

Here's tonight's news:

After Dobbs, What Comes Next for the Conservative Legal Project?

The time for playing jurisprudential and judicial defense is thus over. The time is now right for legal and judicial conservatives to go on offense.

by Josh Hammer for American Greatness

This past week and a half has been truly remarkable. From a conservative perspective, and a legal conservative perspective more specifically, there has not been a condensed period of such consistent, meaningful winning in my entire adult lifetime.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Biden v. Texas, the “remain in Mexico” policy immigration challenge, is a disappointment and will have deleterious real-world consequences for America’s security and sovereignty along its porous southern border. But the Texas litigation is hardly over, and it will now return to a favorable district court judge.

In all other recent meaningful cases this Supreme Court term, conservatives have indisputably triumphed.

Conservatives scored huge wins for religious liberty in this term’s cases of Carson v. Makin and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, which had the combined effect of peeling back decades of progressive jurisprudence, based on the ahistorical misnomer of “separation of church and state,” that discriminated against the faithful in the public square. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, conservatives scored a huge win for the Second Amendment, as the Court for the first time clarified that “bear(ing) arms”—and not just “keep(ing) . . . arms”—means what it plainly says. Most dramatically, the Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization stood its ground and failed to capitulate to the outrage mob that followed May’s leaked draft majority opinion; Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Court’s major abortion precedents, are no more.

Add to the equation the latest victory in West Virginia v. EPA, which cabins rogue agency discretion and hamstrings the former Obama Administration’s “Clean Power Plan” environmentalist power grab, and the result is a genuinely dynamic Supreme Court term. There is ample reason to celebrate.

The demise of Roe and Casey, in particular, is nothing short of epochal. The overturning of Roe, a 1973 case that only had only two courageous dissenters, was the foremost raison d’etre for the modern conservative legal project, including its prevailing constitutional interpretive methodology (originalism) and its leading institutional vessel (The Federalist Society, founded in 1982). Kudos are in order for all involved, including the five justices in the Dobbs majority, and very much also including former President Donald Trump and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Tens of millions of Americans who, in an alternative universe, would have faced the abortionist’s knife, will now be indebted to them.

But with Roe now joining Dred Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson and some of the Court’s other worst decisions in the ash heap of history, the centripetal force that long kept the conservative legal movement unified is gone. The fight is now on to see what exactly comes next—and how different it is, in terms of tangible goals or interpretive methodology, from what preceded it.

The key insight is that, for the past four to five decades, conservative jurisprudence and the broader conservative crafting of an agenda for the courts have typically operated from a defensive posture. There are some exceptions; the long-overdue securing of a Second Amendment individual right in 2008’s District of Columbia v. Heller, whose majority opinion is the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s signature originalist triumph, came from an offense-minded strategy.

But most of the time, in cases of lightning-rod cultural and civilizational salience, conservatives have simply sought to return to the pre-Burger Court, or pre-Warren Court, status quo ante. On abortion, that has meant a middle-ground federalist remedy, simply seeking to de-constitutionalize Roe‘s abortion “right” and return the issue to the states. That is what Dobbs did. On religious liberty, it has meant simply returning to a level playing field in which religion is not discriminated against. In Kennedy, for instance, the Court for the first time clarified that a 1971 case called Lemon v. Kurtzman, which fabricated an egregious “endorsement test” for Establishment Clause violations, was no longer good law.

In both of these doctrinal areas, then, the goal has merely been some sort of “neutrality.” But neutrality is an uninspiring goal for a political movement. The proper long-term goal is not neutrality, but victory. The time for playing jurisprudential and judicial defense is thus over. The time is now right for legal and judicial conservatives to go on offense. 

At a theoretical level, that means more widespread adoption of “common good originalism,” a strand of originalist jurisprudence I have proposed that is both less wedded to dispositional shibboleths about “judicial restraint” and more assertive about its substantive overarching orientation toward justice, human flourishing and the common good of the polity. On abortion, that means properly interpreting the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to actually ban abortion nationally. On public religion, that means bolstering America’s traditional ecumenical Christianity once and for all and delivering a fatal blow to the ahistorical misnomer of “separation of church and state,” which has no textual basis in the First Amendment and instead derives from a 233-word letter Thomas Jefferson once wrote. Other examples abound.

“Justice, justice shall you pursue,” reads Deuteronomy 16:20. Not proceduralism, that is, but justice—the rewarding of friends and the punishing of enemies within the confines of the rule of law. The modern conservative legal movement just had its most successful Supreme Court term; now it’s time for real, meaningful justice.

EXCLUSIVE: Jim Banks Demands White House Surveillance Logs To Vet Contested J6 Testimony

Days after a centerpiece of Hutchinson’s testimony fell apart, more claims are beginning to fail the credibility test under closer scrutiny.

Tristan Justice reporting for The Federalist

Indiana Republican Congressman Jim Banks is demanding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) disclose White House surveillance records to lawmakers in their investigation of blockbuster claims by the Jan. 6 Committee’s latest star witness.

On Tuesday, a top aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy Hutchinson, offered sensational revelations in public testimony before the nine-member House panel depicting a president in rage as supporters ransacked congressional chambers. At one point, Hutchinson said President Donald Trump assaulted a Secret Service agent and attempted to hijack the presidential limousine with plans to drive himself to the Capitol.

“The president said something to the effect of, ‘I’m the f’ing president, take me up to the Capitol now,'” Hutchinson told lawmakers, citing a conversation with then-White House Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato in the absence of a firsthand account.

Hours later, Hutchinson’s sources disputed the graphic events in question and told news outlets they were prepared to offer on-the-record denials under oath. Days after a centerpiece of Hutchinson’s uncorroborated testimony fell apart, more claims are beginning to fail the credibility test under closer scrutiny.

While Trump was intent on going to the Capitol, Hutchinson said, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone allegedly pressured aides to make sure the president remained far from the complex.

“We understand, Ms. Hutchinson, that you also spoke to Mr. Cipollone on the morning of the 6th, as you were about to go to the rally on the Ellipse,” said Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., who led Tuesday’s questioning. “Mr. Cipollone said something to you like, ‘make sure the movement to the Capitol does not happen.’ Is that correct?”

Hutchinson nodded.

That’s correct. I saw Mr. Cipollone right before I walked out onto West Exec that morning, and Mr. Cipollone said something to the effect of ‘please make sure we don’t go up to the Capitol, Cassidy. Keep in touch with me. We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen.’

According to multiple sources with direct knowledge of White House staffing on Jan. 6, however, Cipollone was not at the White House that morning.

“Every Trump White House senior staff member knows that Cipollone was not at the White House that morning so that conversation could not have taken place,” one source who spoke on the condition of anonymity told The Federalist. “In Cipollone’s absence, Pat Philbin was filling in for Pat [Cipollone] that morning.”

“Besides the fact that Pat [Cipollone] wasn’t there,” they added, “He simply doesn’t speak like that.”

To independently investigate Hutchinson’s claims, Banks sent a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas requesting to “review White House gate logs, surveillance video, and all other records that could indicate which of these senior staff were present at the White House during the times referenced in Ms. Hutchinson’s attached testimony.”

The Indiana congressman spearheading House Republicans’ own probe into the Capitol riot after Speaker Nancy Pelosi stripped his appointment as ranking member of the Jan. 6 Committee gave Mayorkas until July 8 to comply.

Banks also sent a letter to Cipollone over the White House counsel’s whereabouts.

“Approximately, at what time did you enter the White House campus on January 6, 2021?” Banks asked. “Please provide my office with written responses to the following questions by July 9, 2022.”

Cipollone did not respond to The Federalist’s inquiries.

Super-Majority Don't Want Joe Biden to Stick Around, but His Numbers in Nevada Might Be Even Worse News

Bonchie reporting for RedState 

If Democrats were hoping for a game-changing bump following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, they’ve been disappointed by the last several polls. As RedState reported, Republicans continue to enjoy a modest lead in the generic ballot, and Joe Biden’s numbers show zero sign of rebounding. Given the historical connection between a president’s approval and the first mid-term, that’s nothing but bad news if you are on the left.

Biden’s unpopularity has descended so far into the depths that 71 percent now don’t want him to run for re-election. I can’t be certain, but I’d strongly suspect that’s the lowest number ever for a first-term president in just his second year.

Shocking numbers, but hardly surprising, right? We are talking about a guy who has driven the country off a cliff in ways that not even most conservatives thought imaginable a year-and-a-half ago. Perhaps I was naive, but with the economy opening back up post-COVID, I figured not even Biden could screw things up to this extent. Yet, here we are, with gas prices at $5 a gallon, a supply-chain crisis, inflation exploding, the stock market crashing, and a likely recession. Heck, not even cryptocurrency has survived the president’s path of destruction, with Bitcoin in a state of collapse. For the first time in decades, there’s nowhere to put your money without taking it on the chin.

And while you’d expect Republicans to want Biden gone no matter what, Democrat voters can only lie to themselves for so long. Many see the writing on the wall as Biden fumbles around, making mistake after mistake. Heck, sometimes even when he’s doing what they ostensibly want, such as green energy nonsense, the political realities just become too toxic to abide. Obviously, the fact that Biden would be in his mid-80s at the end of the second term plays a large role as well.

But as bad as those numbers are for Biden and Democrats, I actually think the latest numbers out of Nevada are worse.

Nevada may be the most important state in the 2022 election. Not only are there competitive House seats, but its US Senate seat very well could decide who controls the chamber. Republican gains with Hispanics have already put Democrats on the defensive, and if they can’t hold Nevada, it portends doom across the rest of the nation. Never mind the implications for 2024 given the Silver State has been solidly blue several cycles in a row.

The overturning of Roe was the last gasp, and it simply isn’t providing the juice needed to overcome these horrific fundamentals. Further, the January 6th committee is falling flat, and no matter what happens to Donald Trump, there’s no reason to think that will affect Republicans at large. That stuff is already baked into the cake, and if the former president were the drag Democrats want him to be, Glenn Youngkin wouldn’t be Governor of Virginia right now.

It’s always good to be cautious while making political projections, but it feels like we’ve passed the point of no return. What exactly is going to save Democrats at this point? Perhaps someone smarter than I am can come up with an idea because I’m coming up blank.

Corrupt Media’s Lies About Clarence Thomas Aren’t Just Bad Journalism, They Are A Deliberate Smear Attempt

Jordan Boyd reporting for The Federalist

Axios tried to smear Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas this week by falsely claiming that he said Covid-19 shots were manufactured using “aborted children,” a factually true statement.

“Clarence Thomas says COVID vaccines are created with cells from ‘aborted children,’” one Axios headline blared.

The basis for Axios’s blatant lie about the justice stemmed from one of Thomas’s dissents after the highest court in the land refused to take up a case challenging New York’s Covid shot mandate.

One look at the dissent published on Thursday shows that Thomas was simply quoting the petitioner’s argument, which stated some healthcare workers have a religious objection to Covid shots “due to their origin from ‘abortion-derived fetal cell lines in testing, development, or production.’”

“Petitioners are 16 healthcare workers who served New York communities throughout the COVID–19 pandemic. They object on religious grounds to all available COVID–19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children,” Thomas wrote.

Despite the fact that Thomas was obviously not taking a direct stance on the ethics of vaccines, corrupt corporate media outlets such as Politico and NBC News twisted the justice’s repetition of the plaintiff’s claims into the lie that Thomas was somehow spreading a “debunked claim” about Covid shots from the bench.

These articles were quickly amplified by corporate media henchmen such as The Washington Post’s resident “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler and even picked up by local NBC channels.

Thomas did not take a stance on Covid-19 shots, plain and simple. But even if he did claim that the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines were “developed using cell lines derived from aborted children,” he wouldn’t be wrong.

As the petitioners noted in their case, all three of the Covid shot manufacturers used cells from aborted babies in their testing and sometimes manufacturing processes. That’s why so many religious groups including Catholics strongly opposed Covid shot mandates. Even the NBC write-up “refuting” Thomas’ alleged “debunked” claim admitted, “Pfizer and Moderna used fetal cell lines early in their Covid vaccine development to test the efficacy of their formulas … The fetal tissue used in these processes came from elective abortions.”

So if Thomas was only quoting the plaintiffs and didn’t lie in his quote, why did the corporate media target him without any regard for the facts? Because they hate Thomas and anyone who dares question their narrative about anything.

It was not an accident that at least three different outlets ran stories centered on a lie that was designed to discredit Thomas, as they’ve done for decades, since before he was confirmed as a justice. It was a coordinated effort to tarnish the reputation of the justice most hated by leftists and their allies in the press.

Sweeping efforts like these aren’t just bad journalism, they are straight propaganda invented to malign conservatives, punish them for failing to appease the leftist agenda, and erase them from history.

Updated 5:20 p.m.:

Politico revised its story late Friday afternoon, tweaking it to say Justice Thomas “cited claims” about cell lines from aborted babies being used in Covid vaccine production. The original article had “misattributed the claim that Covid vaccines were ‘developed using cell lines derived from aborted children’ to Thomas,” a correction note said. The revised article did not explain why it was newsworthy that a justice had quoted a petitioner’s argument in his dissent to the court’s denial of certiorari.

Former Top Obama Advisor David Axelrod Shreds Biden, Says He's 'Not in Command'

Bob Hoge reporting for RedState 

The man who masterminded both successful presidential campaigns for former President Obama, strategist David Axelrod, has harsh words for the current Commander-in-Chief saying, “There is this sense that things are kind of out of control and he’s not in command.” Appearing on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper” Thursday, he added, “so, you know, this is a very, very fraught environment for him right now.”

The first question that pops into my mind is, does this have Obama’s blessing? It’s hard to imagine that Axelrod, now a CNN commentator, would criticize the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer without running it first by his former boss. My second question is, how long does this guy want to work at CNN? Because if he keeps spouting off like this, he’s bound to upset some folks at the left-leaning network who have been covering for Biden since day one of his presidency. Paging Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy…

Axelrod didn’t stop there though, continuing to rip the president:

Inflation, no one president can control inflation, but it is a gale force wind right now. It’s affecting politics.

You heard him on gas prices today. He talks about the gas tax holiday, but he is not going to get the gas tax holiday and there are a lot of Americans who are skeptical about whether that would help.

It’s true that no one president can control inflation, but one can certainly exacerbate the problem with profligate spending. Biden’s out-of-control layouts include mega-bills like the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan providing for COVID relief. Throw in tens of billions more sent to Ukraine. Think all this might have something to do with inflation?

Don’t forget that Biden wanted to spend more—up to $5 trillion more on the Build Back Better bill, but was only stopped because he couldn’t get the votes. Imagine how much worse inflation would be had that behemoth made it through Congress.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said in November of 2021 that Biden’s monstrous agenda was even bigger than the New Deal and that “Never in American history has so much been spent at one time.”

The resulting inflation has come at a cost:

Tapper asked Axelrod about an AP-NORC poll which shows that 85 percent of respondents think the country is headed in the wrong direction. “That frankly points to disaster for Democrats in November,” Tapper argued. Axelrod agreed:

If you were looking at the chart, you’d say the vitals are not good. The President’s approval rating’s at 38%. His economic ratings are low. Consumer confidence is down. The number that you mentioned.

The two also discussed the filibuster, with both acknowledging that although Biden has recently suggested pausing it for an abortion vote, he can’t actually make that happen. Tapper flatly declared, “Well he’s not going to be able to get it done,” because he simply doesn’t have the votes. Axelrod once again concurred.

Being a loyal Dem and also a CNN contributor, Axelrod at least had to make a (weak) attempt at optimism, claiming that the recent overturn of Roe v Wade might galvanize the progressive base. “You know, If I were a Republican strategist, I’d be a little bit worried about that right now,” he said.

No David, Republican strategists are not worried about that right now. They can read polls too.

Axelrod has been critical in the past of the Biden Administration, but he seems to have really taken off the gloves in this interview. Does he have the Big O’s blessing, as I asked earlier? Is this a sign that a wave of Dems will soon jump the Biden ship and try to force out of the race in 2024?

Or are they clearing the decks for Michelle Obama?

Elon Musk reveals meeting with Pope after nine-day Twitter silence

 

Elon Musk has revealed he had a meeting with the Pope as he broke his nine-day silence on Twitter, the social media giant he is trying to buy.

The world's richest man said he was "honoured" as he tweeted a photo of himself with the head of the Catholic Church, alongside Musk's four teenage sons.  

Musk's transgender daughter - who applied to legally change her name last month because she no longer wants to be related to her father - was absent from the event.

The purpose and location of Musk's meeting with Pope Francis were not immediately clear.  

However minutes before he shared the image, Musk posted an old photo showing him celebrating his 40th birthday in Venice with his then-wife, British actress Talulah Riley.

"Venice, a site of Great Remembrance," he tweeted alongside the picture. 

Musk - who has eight children - posted on Twitter for the first time in nine days after going unusually quiet on the social media platform.  

He struck a legally-binding agreement to buy the company for $44bn (£35bn) in April, but last month said there were "still a few unresolved matters" on the deal.

The Tesla and SpaceX boss has threatened to pull out unless Twitter provides more information about how many fake accounts are on the social media platform.

He has argued, without showing evidence, that Twitter has significantly underestimated the number of "spam bots" - automated accounts that typically promote scams and misinformation - on its service.

It was reported last month that Twitter plans to offer Musk access to its "firehose" of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets to push his proposed takeover forward.

In April, Musk was named the world's richest man after relegating Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to second place for the first time in four years, according to Forbes.  

He was worth an estimated $219bn (£166bn) on 11 March, after adding $68bn to his fortune over the past year, it said. 

https://news.sky.com/story/elon-musk-reveals-meeting-with-pope-after-nine-day-twitter-silence-12644272

Cargo Routed Away from West Coast Ports as Labor Union Contracts Expire

Keep all of the Biden administration visits to the Port of Los Angeles, Port of Long Beach and Port of Oakland in mind (aka the hide the ships program) as you review this pending issue with port labor unions.   The labor union contracts expired at 5:00pm today.  Massive wage increases, the result of inflation, are demanded by the unions and White House is likely to get involved (if they are not already).

In a very weird economic scenario, the Biden administration actually benefits from a port stoppage as imports are a deduction to GDP and the U.S. economy is presumably on the “zero” growth bubble.   If the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) calculates a negative GDP in the second quarter (not likely for political reasons), the Biden administration would officially be responsible for a recession.  [Any delay in import quantification helps shape the economic statistics; however, Q2 ended yesterday.]

Additionally, port infrastructure specialist, John D. Porcari, is part of the Biden administration economic team.  Porcari shaped the response to the import and supply chain crisis in 2021 that formed the hilarious ‘hide the ships’ strategy.   Porcari works to prop-up the insufferable Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg who has no idea what he’s doing.

CALIFORNIA – LOS ANGELES, July 1 (Reuters) – The contract covering more than 22,000 workers at 29 U.S. West Coast ports expires late on Friday, dialing up worries that labor disruption could roil the nation’s battered supply chains, stoke inflation and threaten a weakening economy.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) and the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA) employer group, which declined comment for this report, said in a rare joint statement on June 14 that they were not planning any work stoppages or lockouts that would worsen supply chain logjams.

That matters because when the contract expires at 5 p.m. PDT(0000 GMT Saturday), so does its “no strike” clause, said Peter Tirschwell, vice president of maritime, trade & supply chain at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

History suggests a last-minute extension is not likely. The union in November rejected a one-year contract extension, saying its members had already granted a three-year extension to the current contract.

[…] Meanwhile, wary shippers are not taking any chances. They are routing cargo away from the West Coast to avoid potential labor-related slowdowns, particularly at the nation’s busiest seaport complex at Los Angeles/Long Beach that handle nearly $500 billion in cargo annually. That is driving up their costs and contributing to backups at ports in New York/New Jersey, Savannah and Houston.

The last West Coast port labor contract negotiation broke down in 2015 after nine months of talks. Dockworkers stopped work for eight days, a move that gummed up U.S. supply chains and siphoned an estimated $8 billion from the Southern California economy.

U.S. President Joe Biden met with the ILWU and the PMA in Los Angeles on June 10.

Any disruptions at Pacific Coast ports that handle almost 40% of imports to the United States could send transportation costs even higher, exacerbating pressure on a softening economy that is sinking Biden’s approval ratings.

“We’ve never had a White House that is all over these negotiations the way they are now,” Tirschwell said. (read more)

Hmmm….  Opportunity knocks?

A labor union stoppage would be bad for the economy although statistically good for Biden, and any extended work stoppage would be an excuse for empty shelves, shortages and increased ‘demand side’ inflation that might surface.   Huh, funny that.

Understand Operation Hide The Ships Here