Random Letters: 2-17-22

Re: Profiteering Foreign Shipping Companies Versus U.S. Workers

Frank Ponce De Leon’s editorial on profiteering by the foreign shipping companies is smack on the mark correct. They have used the pandemic as cover to increase shipping prices by 1,000% and more.  This can not possibly be justified. Are ship crews paid 10 times more? Longshoremen? Ship builders? Certainly not. 

Cost of shipping a container from China to the USA, up from $2,000 to $25,000. Why?  Can someone answer if the cost from the USA to China is also $25,000?  Or it is unchanged? 

By shipping empty containers from USA to overseas because they make more money faster than shipping USA goods in those containers they have manufactured a VERY profitable crisis.  

And how much of the very same thing is being done in our USA supply chain by greedy shippers and sellers? The Biden administration needs to look into the profiteering and use Anti-Trust laws to clean this mess up.  

John Mattson, San Pedro

It Never Ceases to Amaze Me

Near the end of the Super Bowl a conservative sitting at our table asked,

“So many people call in sick to work the day after the Super Bowl. Why don’t they just make it a national holiday?”

I had to laugh. Conservatives are lukewarm to Presidents Day. They are downright hostile to the MLK Holiday. And they spasm uncontrollably at the mere mention of making federal election days a holiday (search Paul Weyerich’s quotes on voting “I don’t want everybody to vote,”). [He’s an American conservative political activist and commentator]

Yet they can come up with something that could be called “National Hangover Day.” Straight out of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. 

Steve Varalyay, Torrance

….

Steve,

 I think we should trade them one hangover day for one election day holiday.

James Preston Allen, Publisher

Beating the Drums of War

Here we go again.

With talk of war in Ukraine rising to a fever pitch, U.S. media outlets are once again beating the drums.

We’re told that we’re facing a new Hitler. That this is a “new axis of evil” and a “Cold War 2.0.” That if we don’t “forcefully confront” Putin, it’s “appeasement.”

I’ve covered nearly every major U.S. military action since the 1990s, and it’s always the same.

The talking heads on cable news are almost drooling over the prospect of a ratings-boosting war. Retired Pentagon officials on the payroll of the defense industry are presented as “experts,” often with no disclosure of their financial conflicts of interest.

And once the shooting starts, mainstream pundits will drop any remaining pretense of journalistic integrity and begin openly cheerleading for “the troops,” like sports announcers rooting for the home team.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is the world’s largest arms dealer and it spends more on “defense” than China, Russia, India, the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and Australia combined.

As co-founder of The Intercept, I guarantee that we will never surrender to the jingoistic media stampede. Our tenacious team of investigative journalists will interrogate every official claim, challenge the Pentagon’s spin, and never defer to the conventional wisdom of a foreign policy establishment that has been disastrously wrong over and over and over again.

Jeremy Scahill, The Intercept, Washington, D.C.