LENO: You mentioned infrastructure. Why is that a partisan issue? I live in a town, the bridge is falling apart, and it’s not safe. How does that become Republican or Democrat? How do you not just fix the bridge? (Laughter and applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: I don’t know. As you know, for the last three years, I’ve said, let’s work together. Let’s find a financing mechanism and let’s go ahead and fix our bridges, fix our roads, sewer systems, our ports. [You know], the Panama [Canal] is being widened so that these big supertankers can come in. Now, that will be finished in 2015. If we don’t deepen our ports all along the Gulf — places like Charleston, South Carolina, or Savannah, Georgia, or Jacksonville, Florida — if we don’t do that, those ships are going to go someplace else. And we’ll lose jobs. Businesses won’t locate here.
Note: The president was talking about deepening our ports along the Gulf, and yet he only referenced cities along the Atlantic Ocean coastline. He might be talking about states numbers 58 and 59. He has visited 57 states, but last I knew he hadn’t visited 58 and 59.
Okay, here is another problem.
Punta Colonet is a small Mexican Pacific coastal village located approximately 150 miles south of Tijuana in Baja California. The Mexican government has announced that it will build a new Pacific seaport at this site. According to Mexican government reports, the port will be designed to handle six million containers annually at final build-out. In terms of processing volume, it will be larger than the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach combined. When completed, the site is projected to encompass an area of more than 27,000 acres, or slightly more than 42 square miles. It will be the third largest seaport in the world, behind only Singapore and Hong Kong. It is estimated that between 90,000 and 200,000 people, a small city, will be needed to operate the port facilities. (1)
President Obama has been pushing to complete the NAFTA agreement which lets all North American trucks travel throughout all of North America. This means that ships from Asia will off load their containers in Mexico and have Mexican truckers deliver their products all over the United States. You may ask why, well there are several reasons.
1. Mexican dockworkers and truckers will be paid a lot less than US workers.
2. It probably takes an extra 8 to 10 days round trip to reach a port in the Gulf of Mexico or on the Eastern Seaboard.
3. You could have an additional 7 day delay going through the Panama Canal.
4. It costs anywhere from $50,000 to $250,000 for container ships to go through the Panama Canal times two for a round trip.
It is just a lot more economical for ships to off load on the West coast of Mexico, then in the Gulf of Mexico or the Eastern seaboard. They could just as easily off load in Los Angles, but then you have the high cost of American wages compared with Mexico.
One thing that has always amazed me is the political position of unions. I don’t know about the Longshoremen, but the Teamsters supported Obama for president (2), the person trying to put most of them out of a job. Go figure.
(1) http://www.abqjournal.com/biz/0294376619biz03-02-09.htm
(2) http://www.teamsterslocal743.com/?zone=/unionactive/view_article.cfm&homeID=261237
Are we ever going to return to basic intelligence? Probably not, any group of people so stupid as to elect BO as president, not once but twice is pretty indicative of a failed society.
Our problems can be summed up as CLAPS.
Corruption
Liberals
Apathy
Political Correctness
Stupidity
And I bet you thought Clap was just a common human sexually transmitted infection caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae.
Ray R Barmore
San Diego California
raybarmore@gmail.com
Skype: barmore4
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God in America