The piece is paid content.
Now, for some background - The first thing that you have to know is that SSA is the Longshoremen company that is doing the protest.
There is a lot more to this union action than meets the eye.
The Longview port is also a coal terminal. Right now, the coal is on hold for a permit paperwork violation.
While the Longview coal terminal is on hold, SSA, the company that is protesting the grain shipments from Longview, are pushing hard for a terminal of their own in Whatcom County, in a special economic zone that will have little to no local oversight. That terminal will be a “Gateway” terminal. In case you aren’t familiar with Gateways, they are part of the UN Agenda 21 Wildlands project. They are also what Patty Murray’s bill, S.942 are intended to fund. You know, the multi-modal infrastructure projects that Obama keeps saying that we need? Anyway, the only real profit on coal is in the terminals and SSA wants it all.
SSA is fully owned by CARRIX, the largest cargo handling company in the world. Goldman Sachs is the majority stockholder of CARRIX. The rail company that will carry the cargo to the Gateway terminal is BNSF, Warren Buffet’s company and the coal is owned by Peabody, from the Powder River Basin. It’s sub-bituminous coal supposedly headed to China, except that China says that no one should count on them for any long term purchase contracts.
The pressure to build this terminal has come straight from the White House. Richard Trumka, as the former head of the United Mine Workers, wants this badly, but the project may be running into some problems.
Oh, and did I mention that the husband of the WA State Senator, Patty Murray, has been a life time employee of SSA?
There is so much more to this story than what I have written here. It has torn the Democrat party in two, the unions vs the environmentalists and has caused problems for the GOP, who were tight with the Building and Industry people and were supporting a Democrat project for the alleged jobs.
It turns out a union can go so far that even the current National Labor Relations Board can't turn a blind eye. A grain operator at the Port of Longview in Washington state was hit with a violent strike yesterday by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Longshoreman walked out at nearby ports in Tacoma and Seattle. According to police reports, some 500 longshoreman broke in at about 4:30 a.m. Thursday morning and held six security guards hostage for two hours while the protesters rampaged through the facility. They cut brake lines on railroad cars and spilled grain from boxcars.
The grain terminal under attack is owned by EGT, LLC, which is a joint venture of U.S., Japanese and South Korean companies. The consortium built the facility for $200 million and announced it would employ non-union longshoreman to save $1 million a year in operating costs. Contract negotiations between EGT and the union broke down earlier this year. The facility has been under physical assault since July.
...There is some concern that the strike against the two big ports could spread to other important U.S. points of entry if ILWU shops begin slowdowns in sympathy with the union in Washington state. If that happens, the events yesterday will become a national issue demanding the attention of a President who is desperately trying to hold his union base together. This one is worth watching.