One of the oldest cliches in Hollywood is that, if you want a story involving insane levels of corruption and over-the-top mob tactics, you should probably have a lot of dockworkers in your film. Some of the most famous movies ever made, like “On the Waterfront” starring Marlon Brando, made use of this conceit involving longshoremen. For generations, everyone’s understood that this industry functions a bit like a fiefdom, independent of the rest of the country. It promotes from within. It protects its own. And when it wants something, it’s not afraid to shut down the U.S. economy in order to get it.

Over the years, various presidents have had to tangle with the dockworkers and their unions. Some of these presidents, like FDR and Obama, have granted dockworkers massive concessions. Other presidents, like George W. Bush, went to court and used the Taft-Hartley Act to end strikes that were costing the U.S. economy billions of dollars a day. But no administration in the history of this country has adopted the approach that the Biden-Harris administration is now taking.

Right now, without any objection from the White House whatsoever, a 78-year-old union boss named Harold Daggett is proudly shaking down the entire country. He’s going on television wearing gold medallions and flaunting his $700,000 salary as his union, the 50,000-member International Longshoremen’s Association, shuts down 36 ports — including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. These ports, taken together, handle more than 50% of the imports and exports to this country. The cost to the U.S. economy is more than $4 billion a day, and very soon, this shutdown could lead to shortages and mass layoffs.

And Harold Daggett has made it very clear that he doesn’t care about any of these effects. He doesn’t care what happens to millions of Americans as a result of this strike. Watch:

Longshoremen pres. boasts about a strike hurting everyday Americans: “People never gave a shit about us until now, when they finally realize that the chain is being broke now. Cars won’t come in, food won’t come in, clothing won’t come in.” pic.twitter.com/rHJf1e96YU

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) October 1, 2024

Notice that there’s no rational argument here. He’s not arguing that dockworkers deserve higher salaries because they can’t make ends meet, or because they’re doing such a great job, or because they’re efficient, or any of that. He’s saying they should receive higher salaries because they’re holding America hostage. They have the power, so we need to pay the ransom.

When you look at the specific demands this union is making, the absurdity becomes even more apparent. Daggett wants the ports to give dockworkers a 77% pay raise to $69.00 an hour, after turning down a 50% pay raise. That’s far more than dockworkers make on the West Coast. Daggett also wants more “container royalties,” which gives money to longshoremen even if they’re not working. And he wants a complete ban on any forms of automation at ports.

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Previously I’ve talked about the rise of automation, and how it’s a threat to many Americans’ jobs. There are obviously a lot of important concerns as far as how automation is used, and how many jobs it’s allowed to replace. But in this context, this blanket demand — that no automation is used at all — is a dead giveaway. It’s evidence that these dockworkers don’t care about the economy at all, or remaining competitive with what other countries are doing.

Here’s a look at what they’re doing in ports in China, to give you some idea.

Longshoremen in China:

The Chinese port in Guangzhou.

Virtual Longshoremen unload ships remotely with 5G, and help supervise AI vehicles that automatically drive the containers to trucks and load them, all remotely. pic.twitter.com/Tt5J0oP1yr

— Brian Roemmele (@BrianRoemmele) October 1, 2024

They still have people working there, as you can see. But they’re using cellular connections and computers to remotely unload and offload the cargo. In many cases, that’s safer, faster, and cheaper than having humans do it. We don’t have any of this, and it’s because of unions. These unions are a big part of why U.S. ports are so inefficient compared to ports all over the world. As recently as 2020, the World Bank found that there wasn’t a single U.S. port that ranked in the top 50 global ports in terms of “getting a ship in and out of port,” quickly and affordably. Not a single one. Overall, our ports are about half as efficient as global ports on average. And now, the unions representing the workers at these ports are demanding a massive raise — along with a ban on any form of technology that could make the ports more efficient.

If the Biden administration wanted to put an end to this, they could. They could do what Bush did, and take this union to court. They could apply public pressure. They could also threaten to repeal other laws on the books that already benefit the dockworkers’ unions. There’s something called the Jones Act, for example. It requires that all goods transported between U.S. ports by water are carried on ships that are built in the U.S. and crewed by Americans. This leads to hundreds of millions of dollars in additional costs, but unions love the law because it means more union jobs are created.

Of course, that law won’t change, and no one in the Biden administration wants it to change. They don’t want to upset Harold Daggett — someone the DOJ once accused of being an “associate” of a mafia family. He has quite a life story, by the way.

The New York Post reports:

Daggett took the witness stand that year after federal prosecutors charged him with racketeering. … During the course of the trial, one of Daggett’s co-defendants – Lawrence Ricci, an alleged major mob figure – disappeared. His body was found weeks later decomposing in the trunk of a car outside a New Jersey diner. Ricci’s death remained unsolved, though speculation circulated that he was killed after refusing to plead guilty to avoid news reports of the trial. … Daggett was acquitted.

So Harold Daggett beat that racketeering rap. And now he’s holding the U.S. economy hostage. Ships are having to re-route to the West Coast in order to prevent economic calamity, all because of him. It’s quite a recovery for Harold Daggett’s career. For the rest of us, it’s a crisis that has no real precedent in the past several decades.

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And this is just one of the several disasters that are unfolding in the final days of the Biden-Harris administration. Yesterday, Iran launched a volley of more than 180 ballistic missiles into Israel. This is the second direct attack by Iran against Israel in just the last few months. It’s put us much closer to World War III than we’ve been in recent history. And it comes just a year after the Biden administration’s national security adviser bragged that the Middle East was “quieter” than it’s been in two decades.  Watch:

Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan (last week): "The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades" pic.twitter.com/59MYUXhmHf

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 7, 2023

A week after Jake Sullivan made that claim, Hamas terrorists backed by Iran committed a massacre in Israel. And now rockets are flying back and forth. And despite all of this, Jake Sullivan still has his job. He wasn’t fired. He wasn’t run out of Washington after making it abundantly clear that he has no idea what’s happening in the Middle East — which you’d think would be disqualifying for a national security adviser. They forced Mike Flynn out of the job of national security adviser after, what, three weeks? And then you have someone like Jake Sullivan, who’s obviously incompetent to the point of being dangerous, and he suffers no consequences whatsoever.

Again, nothing like this happened during the four years of the Trump administration. This level of international chaos, and complete ineptitude, simply was not present. Iran was not launching rockets directly into Israel, just like Russia wasn’t sending tanks directly into Ukraine. Are Iran and Russia taking advantage of the fact that the brain of the current U.S. president is basically applesauce at this point? That seems like a valid theory, especially since the Biden administration has no alternative hypothesis for what’s going on. If you ask them, everything’s fine — until suddenly it isn’t.

That’s the same story we’re seeing in North Carolina, as I discussed yesterday.

Gut wrenching scenes from Western NC today. This is Chimney Rock — just downriver from Asheville. It’s one of the countless communities completely devastated by Helene that still need help. Give if you can, and please keep them all in your thoughts @ABC11_WTVD pic.twitter.com/N7JDk0ygfz

— Sean Coffey (@seancoffeytv) October 2, 2024

After failing to evacuate residents from the western portion of the state, the federal government is now failing to help many of the survivors. Yesterday I shared an email that came from someone named Jason, who’s from the rural area of Ashe County. He reported that FEMA was nowhere in sight. Here’s an update he sent me last night:

I just got home from volunteering with a search and rescue team in Lansing which is one of the flooded rural towns. … Funny thing is the FEMA people showed up today but they are worthless. We ran into a bunch while we were delivering water and generators and they were just walking around making sure that people were still in the house.

So the federal government is still failing to help people in the most devastated rural areas. And communications are still spotty, in part because the government didn’t want to spend any money on Elon Musk’s Starlink system because they have a vendetta against Elon Musk. As a result, private citizens are now installing Starlink systems in the area. Journalist Nick Sortor just reported that “first responders still do not have reliable communications” in North Carolina after four days. He uploaded this footage of three North Carolina State Police units giving him a police escort so that he can deploy Starlink systems for others to use, and he added that the police are, “literally using MY Window Starlink to communicate with each other!” Watch:

🚨 First responders *STILL* do not have reliable comms here in Western North Carolina

After FOUR DAYS.

The three NC State Police units giving us a police escort so that we can quickly deploy Starlinks across the region are literally using MY Window Starlink to communicate with… pic.twitter.com/uLceenFYbL

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) October 1, 2024

The federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars to prepare for disasters like this, ostensibly so that vital communications equipment and supplies are available within hours. But they haven’t been doing that. For the past several days, random people — citizen journalists and volunteers — have been doing a better job than the government agency that supposedly specializes in disaster relief.

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So wherever you look — whether it’s the Middle East, or North Carolina, or the nation’s ports — you’ll find an ongoing, once-in-a-lifetime disaster that’s threatening to spiral even further out of control. This is what the country — and the world — look like at the end of the Biden-Harris term. There are multiple catastrophes happening all at once. It’s impossible for anyone to deny that the world is a measurably worse and more dangerous place today than it was when they took office. Everyone knows it. Even Kamala Harris knows it. It’s why she had to duck the first question of the presidential debate, when she was asked whether Americans are better off now than they were four years ago.

This is the Biden-Harris “legacy.” It’ll either end in January, or inevitably, these people will lead us into a major catastrophe that we can’t come back from.