Supply Chain Blues: Who’s Pulling Yours?

 

BY TOM CROFTON

We are now witnessing the collapse of a supply chain based on the globalization we were all told would save us money. We’d ship all those low paying jobs away and become a booming service economy.

A few facts that demonstrate how this has worked out:

The other day there were 76 container ships off Long Beach.

There’s a bunch of other ports with similar backups.

An average ship carries 15,000 containers, some carry 20,000, some are soon going to be fully automated, with no crew.

For Long Beach there are, 76 x 15,000= 1,140,000 containers waiting to be unloaded, not including those on shore already.

A modern double stacked container train can carry 240 and is 8,400 feet, or 1.5 miles long.

4,750 trains will be needed to move those containers. A million trucks will need to make their final deliveries.

That’s just from Long Beach.

Wonder where the pollution is coming from?

How much of that stuff is actually necessary?

Can we make any of it here,

how about the diapers in the news,

how about cloth diapers?

When we talk about Green New Deal, we can not be talking about electrifying all of this. We need to think regional, local, handmade, long lasting.

We need to decide how much of this stuff we can afford to build, move, and buy.

The first link in the chain needs to be us, the consumers, waking up.

Someone’s been pulling our chains.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/20/supply-chain-blues-whos-pulling-yours/