Our of Stock: Supply chain crisis

[Ed Pawlowski]

Frank brought this up this morning. I'm only 20 minutes into it and they give a very good explanation of how interdependent we are around the world. Worth watching

Available on many sources

[rbowman]

Yup. And our masters brought it all upon us -- I'm sure as hell am not going to say 'we'.

The cat is concerned about the shortage of wet cat food. Supposedly one of the factors is problems obtaining aluminum to make the cans.

It doesn't differentiate between primary and secondary smelters. The page doesn't even list Kaiser's Mead smelter. I used to haul recycled cans in there from as far away as LA.

Smelting aluminum requires a lot of electricity and the Mead smelter near Spokane was positioned to use the abundant supply from Bonneville Power.

Then came energy deregulation which promised to reduce electricity costs. It did not, in spades.

The takeaway paragraph?

"When the dust settled from the profit-sharing case, another white knight appeared at the plant gates ? Glencore, one of the largest commodities-trading companies in the world, bought the Columbia Falls smelter in May 1999. The aluminum plant had at least one good full year of production under Swiss ownership before it was taken down by a power market deregulation scheme that resulted in power prices increasing by

2,000% or more. In the end, the plant joined eight other Pacific Northwest aluminum smelters that never recovered from the West Coast Energy Crisis"

It was so bad the local pulp mill brought in diesel generators to roll their own. That lasted for a while but now the former mill is yet another potential Superfund site:

(the photo is not accurate. Some, but not all of the structures have been demolished. It doesn't show well but watercourse in the upper right hand corner behind the settling ponds is the Clark Fork of the Columbia)

Luckily China was able to supply cheap aluminum -- until they weren't.

Were it applicable I don't think it would be a stretch to describe the corporate decisions of the last 40 years as treason. However in the Globohomo world corporations owe no allegiance to the country hosting them.

I read that shortly after it came out and it has proven to be quite accurate. As an early example of corporate activism ITT helped finance the overthrow of Allende in Chile

You can't make this shit up. when I read the latest breathless report about Zelensky, my response is "I'm suddenly supposed to believe people who have been lying throughout my entire lifetime?"

[danny burstein]

[snip]

That whole "Freedom Trucker Convoy" that we had in the US (and also Canada) reminds one, it does, of how the CIA used _exactly_ that tactic, namely coopting the truckers, in their program to destabilize Chile...