The Longshoreman Strike

international shipping. They have a basically that they are a key cog in this whole machinery. If they don't work, goods can't come into ports along the East Coast. Now they are striking. They are demanding a seventy seven percent wage increase over six years, a complete ban on automation at ports on the East Coast and the Gulf Coast

as they're negotiating a new labor contract. This is in an economy that's already been wounded pretty seriously by inflation over the last four or five years, in the middle of a presidential election. This is a alarming thing. Okay, this is something that could really seriously harm the economy, esp Right after a massive natural disaster has devastated large swaths of North Carolina and Georgia. Now they're sort of

these dueling critiques. You have traditional conservatives who hate labor unions all the time, and I don't know that I am part of that. I've always been a little bit more. I guess this is the thing I've struggled with. I recognize that labor unions benefited working class Americans by improving their wages, improving their hours, improving their conditions of employment over the course of American history. The concept of the

weekend is a pretty nice one. And I recognize that the decline of union labor and union manufacturing jobs in America has been part of the economic decline of the middle class and the lower socioeconomic classes in this country. That real wages have not grown, real wages have gone DOWNENNI you know, millennials and Gen z are going to do worse than their baby boomer parents for one of the first times in American history that a succeeding generation

is going to do worse economically than their parents. The millions of manufacturing jobs in America that have moved away from America to other countries, to Mexico to China wherever. These are all really bad, and you have this sort of bizarre, unholy alliance of basically elite capitalism that has always hated labor unions, never likes them. They don't want to pay workers more, they want to keep more profits

for themselves. So they figure, well, if I can get the same work done rather than a labor union, a labor union represented worker in America, who's going to make you know, the today equivalent of you know, twenty five dollars US, Or I can have this go to Mexico or China and pay workers the equivalent of five dollars per hour US. Yeah, I know what I'm going to do or what I want to do. So I feel like this is my problem, is that I like labor unions, but I feel like I only tend to like them

in theory. When I'm actually approached with real live labor unions, I get kind of grossed out with the actual, real life manifestation of them. And this is where I kind of get to when I'm looking at the International Longshoreman's Association the ISLA, So the International Longshoreman's Association is the labor union that kind of controls shipping, et cetera at ports along the East Coast and the Gulf Coast. And they're already very well compensated. These guys are making like

three nine bucks an hour as longshoreman. Some of the senior guy, I mean, some of the senior guys are making you know, two hundred grand a year being a port worker. A lot of these are jobs that could be automated that other countries have completely switched over to automation, where we've been insisting on just keeping humans doing these jobs. Now,

I am not crazy about automation replacing human work. And I you know, they're already people starting to rumble about the idea of you know, AI powered cars and trucks replacing human truckers over the next ten years. Uh, there's debates about this in Sacramento, and uh initiative initiatives to ban you know, uh, non human trucking. And I do think things. I'm not a total sort of libertarian when

it comes to this. If human beings are doing a job, you cannot just snap your fingers and immediately overnight just lay off all the human beings doing those jobs. When automation becomes more sensible. This is, these are human beings. There can be a general transition towards there. There has to be a slower and slower transition towards automation when it makes sense. It can't happen just overnight. So I'm

sort of sympathetic. At the same time, we are paying these guys for work that genuinely can be done by machines faster, better, cheaper, without the threat of a strike. Also, the ILA itself has a long and somewhat notorious history of connection with the mafia, with mobsters, with organized crime. That is unfortunately part of their history. The mafia has always, you know, the mafia has always tried to have connections

with the organized crime. It's allowed them to get protection money, it's allowed them to control construction projects, it's allowed them to stop construction projects, allowed them to have all kinds of political power and influence. Labor unions have consistently been a thing that organized crime in America has sort of

flocked to. And this is not ancient history necessarily. There's a piece in National Review by Dominic Pino who writes, most people are aware of the historical mafia connections of the International Longshoremen's Association. The East Coast Dock Workers Union on the Waterfront, starring Marlon Brando, came out in nineteen

fifty four. Many of the mafia connections to transportation were laid out by congressional committees in the fifties and sixties than by prosecutors in the major mafia trials in the eighties and nineties. But here's here's something from extremely recently, Okay,

from twenty eighteen, here's one account. The Superior Court of New Jersey appelad Division denied the emergent motion by Frank Ferrara for a stay of the Commission's revocation of his registration to work as a maintenance man, penning his appeal. Ferrara's registration was revoked after the Commission found that he had associated with the following organized crime figures who had been convicted of racketeering activities. Pasquale Patty the clubber Falcetti Senior,

a soldier in the Genevezi crime family. Andrew Gigante, an associate of the Genevezi crime family and the son of the crime family's late boss, Vincent the Chin Gigante, Carmine Little karm de la Kava, a soldier in the Genevesei crime family. The Commission further found Ferrara had committed fraud, deceit misrepresentation in connection with a sword interview in which he falsely denied associating with anyone who's a member or

an associate of an organized crime group. In addition, the Commission found that for ours presence in the port was a danger to public peace of safety. So you got that That's just one example. Pino has like a bunch of different examples of different associations by Longshorman members who were totally mobbed up. Anthony pan Zzi, the third of Brooklyn, New York. He was affiliated with. He was associated with

the careers of offenders of convicted racketeers. Anthony Sonny Chacone, a coppo in the Gambino crime family whose crimes involved the domination of il a Local one eight one four the same local river So Anthony pan Zizi, an associated with the Gambino crime family, Joseph scoops Licata, a coppo of the Philadelphia Bruno Scarfo crime family, and Jerry Balzano, a soldier of the Cavalcante crime family. Okay so these

are all a bunch of cases. He's lined up like four or five cases of mobsters associated with the long Shoreman's Union from twenty eighteen. The head of the president of the long Shoreman's Association is this guy who's making seven hundred thousand bucks a year, walking around with like gold chains on, you know, has a yacht, brags about how he can cripple the whole country. These are not,

you know, savory characters. The reality of who these long shoremen are as far as their union is kind of CD more than kind of CD, and their willingness to strike and thereby cripple American manufacturing to get you know, their their initial demand, and granted it's an initial demand, it's a negotiation. You shoot for the stars, and you shoot for the moon and hope you land among the stars. Shooting for a seventy seven percent pay increase. What industry

is getting a seventy seven pay increase in this country? Now, on the other hand, there's a part of me that thinks this I think part of why people get Let's set aside the striking aspect, Let's set aside the mobbed up aspect. What are they asking for? They already make decent money, they want more. I think part of our resentment and the resentment people on the right feel, is this resentment of nobody else in America's got this good of a deal. What the hell are these guys doing

pushing for such a big pay increase. Maybe it's because a lot of the rest of America is getting screwed. I guess I don't blame these guys for living out what a lot of other Americans should be living out. These guys acknowledge. Yeah, prices for everything has gone up, cost of living has gone way up. You know, a lot of these guys living in New York, New Jersey, these are not cheap places to live. And they're saying, hey, you know, I signed up to be a dock worker.

I got a thirty year mortgage on my house. If you replace my job with automation, how am I paying my mortgage. I'm a dock worker. It's not like I got other you know. It's not like I can go be a computer programmer tomorrow. It's not like there's a

green technology just automatically waiting for me. And that's always sort of the attitude that I think real strict libertarians have is that, well, when an industry becomes obsolete, you got to immediately replace all the human beings working in that obsolete industry, replace all the human beings with automation.

Because it's economically it economically doesn't make sense, all right, But what do you do about this human being who might have again a mortgage that those payments aren't going away. He's been doing this for the last fifteen years. It's not like you can snap your fingers and this guy automatically gets a job doing something else. I mean, this guy could be this human being with a human being family might be massively worse off as a result of this.

So I guess I feel conflicted. On the one hand, I can see yet some of these long shortmen, I mean, the union that represents them has had all these historic ties to the mafia. There's a lot of problems there.

The terms of what they're asking for do seem extreme, and using their striking power at a time to using their striking power in this kind of a disruptive way that's going to disrupt the whole economy that, I mean, the head of the union's bragging about how he can cripple the entire United States, he can bring the entire country to its knees. I guess that really ticks me off.

There's a big part of me that ticks me off that where that attitude, that behavior, and President Biden's total nonchalance about it, which we'll talk about in the next segment, really ticks me off. But on the other hand, you know, this guy's representing all these workers. The Longshorm Union is representing all these workers. He wants all of his workers to still have jobs. He wants all of his workers to still be able to make money, and he wants them to make more money. I mean, he's using the

tools that are at his disposal. And if every worker in this country had been able to fight like that to prevent manufacturing jobs from leaving the United States over the last forty years, to prevent jobs moving to China, jobs moving to Mexico, et cetera, I mean, maybe we needed more, you know, maybe maybe we needed more guys named you know, Lou and Moose and Rocco, you know, handling these kinds of negotiations to stop big, huge corporations

from moving good paying, middle class American jobs out of the United States. Maybe we needed more of that over the last forty years. I don't know, and I guess it's a thing of if you want the middle class to grow, if you want labor to be paid well, if you want real wages in this country to go up for the middle class, maybe you need some guys

like this who are pushing for people to make more money. Now, when we return, I want to talk about Joe Biden's idiotic posture through all of this, which really I think shows his disconnection from reality and where Senile Joe is really harming this country. That is next on the John Girardi Show. Some of you may have remembered this clip. I played this on air about a week ago on

September twenty ninth. I guess, so a couple of days ago, President Biden is going to It looks like this was on his way back to Rehobeth for you vacation weekend, because every weekend when you're president Biden is vacation on the beach weekend essentially. So he's getting out of a

big black suv and walking to a plane. He's on tarmac somewhere, got Secret Service agents around him, and there's some press on the tarmac and they're yelling to him, and they're they're trying to ask him about the Israeli strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, which is one of several Iranian proxies that have been attacking Israel, and President Biden had this bizarre exchange, mister President, will you deploy

more US troops in the Middle East? Mister President hukung to fall any comment on the strikes and Yem and mister President, that is strikes. We got set the stroke. We collective party never I think they'll show the start. So if you didn't catch that, the reporters were asking him about the Israeli strikes against the Houthis, and President Biden said, I think they'll settle the strike. I've talked to both sides and I'm pretty sure the strike will

be resolved soon. So they were asking the President about Israeli missile strikes against Yemen, and President Biden thought they were talking about the Long Shortman's strike, the labor union strike, or hopefully he was thinking about the Long Shorman union. I don't know, maybe he was just saying generic kind of things that he say that he would say for any kind of big labor union strike. I've talked to both sides, and you know, I think the strike will

resolve itself soon. I'm hopeful it'll resolve itself soon. So his classic example of Biden being flat out senile, not understanding what the reporter was saying, and spitting something back. And this is this is Biden. He's If you read through sections of the her transcript, you can just see anyone who's dealt with an older relative can understand this.

They're not able to hear the question, process the question, respond in a responsive way to your question with the speed and alacrity that any normal functioning adult can do. And sometimes they get it wrong. Sometimes it takes them a while to understand what you're saying. They're probably a little hard of hearings, so you got to repeat yourself. That's the stage he's in and the posture Biden has

taken to this strike by the International Longshoreman Association. So this is, you know, the labor union representing dock workers all over all up and down the East Coast. A huge cog in American shipping could cause big supply chain disruptions. If American shipping has to go from the East Coast to the West coast, instead, if you've got to go through the Panama Canal or however it is that you're going to get into the United States instead, it's going

to cause huge disruptions, huge costs. And what President Biden has basically said is I'm not going to invoke the Taft Hartley Act. Now, what is Taft Hartley. Taft Hartley is a tool that President Biden has in his toolbox to fix this. It is a law that Congress passed over Harry Truman's veto actually, and basically what it does is it allows the president when there's a major American labor union, it allows the president himself to intervene in

a big worker's strike. It allows him to go to court to direct the Attorney General to basically get an injunction to stop the strike, force the two parties to come back to the negotiating table with federal mediators. So basically, for any kind of strike that poses real threats to the national interest, which I don't know, all us shipping on the East Coast, Yeah, that's in the national interest.

In the middle of a hurricane, in the middle of you know, a devastating hurricane recovery that has left a bunch of North Carolina and Georgia in chatter, you know, in tatters. This would probably be a good time for President Biden to intervene and stop a strike and the harmful effects of a strike. It doesn't mean that union loses, It doesn't mean that labor, it doesn't mean that management wins. It does mean, though, that everyone has to get back to work. We have to get back to the negotiating

table and get this resolved now. Organized labor has never liked this bill, this law, never liked it. They realize they have more power, more weight, more leverage if they can just strike without having something happen that can force them back to the negotiating table. They know they have more leverage and can get more if they have the effective power of knowing you want to keep crippling the United States economy, we'll do it. We don't give a crap.

And for President Biden to just take the position, oh no, I'm not gonna invoke it. It's the most lazy pro union position humanly possible. And it's this dismissive. I've just got the sense that the White House discussions on it just sort of went nowhere. Biden knows it still rattling around in his brain. Probably what it is. He knows enough about labor unions and labor union policy from his thirty whatever years is VP and Senator and president. Now

he knows what it is. He's got it rattling around his head. He knows organized labor doesn't like it, and so he just does the most reflexively pro labor union thing he possibly can. And I gosh, I kind of

think that's a really terrible thing to do. I think that's especially like right at this precise moment, when devastating hurricane North Carolina and Georgia, a somewhat lackluster federal response, a lot less media scrutiny of that federal response as compared with the federal response to say, Hurricane Katrina, and I and just this, No, we just do what the

labor unions want. I honestly wonder how that's going to play out in North Carolina and Georgia, two of the three most important states in this whole election coming up when we return the disappointing problem of every Republican first lady being pro choice. Next on the John Girardi Show, Well, in another disappointing round of taking it on the Chin

on the part of the pro life movement. Milania Trump, President Trump's wife, released this memoir in which she gave a full throated defense of abortion rights and talked about how abortion should be legal and a bunch of the normal, obvious cruddy arguments in favor of legalized abortion. Blah blah blah blah blah. I don't know how many of you have noticed this. I have noticed this. Every single first lady since Rovy Wade has been pro choice Republican Democrat.

Every single first lady since Rovy Wade has been pro choice. Richard Nixon's wife, Gerald Ford's wife, Jimmy Carter's wife, Nancy Reagan, George H. W. Bush's wife, obviously, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush obviously, Michelle Obama, and now we learn Malania Trump, and of course Doug M. Hoff is more than you know, slightly uh pro choice. Oh oh, and Jill Biden too. Okay, sorry, no,

I forgot for a second that Joe Biden was president. Okay, So every single first spouse since again, you know, since rov Wade, since Rovi Wade nineteen, every three, every single first lady has been pro choice, including all the Republican wives now this in itself, one might say, is irrelevant. Who cares? You know, the first lady doesn't have any power. First lady doesn't have any responsibility. She's just the president's wife. Who cares? I care? I think it kind of matters,

and just you know, it matters in this way. Just talking about marriage, I think most of the presidents and most of the first ladies have had what looks like, on the outside, fairly healthy looking marriages. Barbara and George H. W. Bush were married for a bazillion years. George and Laura Bush seemed to like each other. Other presidential and first lady marriages not so sure. I really don't know the dynamic between Donald and Millennia. Lania does seem to care

about him. I I don't know. I don't know how that works with you know, the third wife, and you know, fairly credible timelines and reports about Donald's infidelity even within that marriage, certainly within his prior marriages. And god knows what's the dynamic between Bill and Hillary. But you know, i'd like to say many you know, Nancy and Ronald Reagan seemed really to love each other very deeply. I guess I don't know much about Gerald and Betty Ford

or Pat and Richard Nixon. But let's let's concede that many of the presidential marriages were more or less healthy marriages, and even in the ones that weren't healthy, involved a kind of meeting of minds on a lot of things. Bill and Hillary Clinton. God knows what that dynamic is, but at the very least it does seem that they have a meeting of minds when it comes to politics. I think most healthy marriages involve two people who think

really similarly about big picture stuff. I look at my marriage, which I would say is very healthy marriage. My wife and I love each other very much, and we're pretty darn happy being married. We have this little joke with each other where we sing this. We have this song that we sing sometimes where at the end of a hard day, I'll sing, I don't like this part of work, and I don't like that part of work, and I

don't like this, and I don't like that. I don't like this, and I don't like but I like you. You're the one that I like. I don't like anybody else. You're the only one that I like. Everyone else can take a hike. So this is a song that I made up one day when I was frustrated about things and was talking to my wife, like, Yeah, you're like the one person who consistently always makes me happy, and when you have a healthy marriage, you think alike on

probably a lot of things. I feel like my wife and I have known each other for so long, like we've known each other. I mean, we're I'm thirty seven now. Holly was a year behind me in school, so when we met, I was nineteen and she was eighteen, And we've been kind of dating pretty much ever since we met, dating slash married ever since we met. So I've just been hanging out with Holly, you know, almost every day for at this point, about eighteen of my life, thirty

seven years on this earth. And when you hang out with someone that long, you tend to kind of shape their personality. You have an influence on each other's personalities. You know, we've just been hanging out together since we were teenagers. We kind of know what the other thinks.

I can't tell you how many times it's happened that I've read a news story or I've seen something, some event has happened, and I think I know exactly how Holly is going to react to this, and I tell her about it, and she was thinking I was thinking the same thing. I saw that news story, and I knew that you were going to react the exact same way. And it's this wonderful thing where it's like, yes, well, we can read each other's minds before we even see

a thing. So in a happy marriage, I think that's true, and you care especially you know, you might not agree on every tiny little thing. And there are some famous examples of marriages of political opposites. James Carville and Mary Madaline are kind of the classic example. But I think it's hard to be married to someone if you're a hard line conservative who really firmly believes in a lot

of like ethical beliefs surrounded in Christianity. I think it's really hard to be married to a really hardcore liberal who believes in a very different kind of ethical worldview from you. And where that ethical worldview is manifesting itself in politics and how you vote. I don't know how those two things mix. I find it very difficult to

understand how, but apparently it happens. I mean, look, if only men voted, Donald Trump would win in a landslide if only women voted, Kamala Harris would win in a landslide. There are clearly marriages out there where the wife is voting one way and the husband's voting another way. I don't understand how that works. I can't fathom how that would work. But I do believe that in most healthy marriages there is this kind of sympathy between husband and

wife on the big things. And that's why I really hate it that literally every single Republican first lady has been pro choice, because you know what I think it means. I think, deep down, I'm not sure that we've had one pro life president. I think we've had presidents who did pro life things. I think Donald Trump did pro life things, but I don't think he was sincere about any I don't know, And by the way, I guess,

you know, hey, he overturned Robie Wade. I guess there's a part of me that doesn't care if he was sincere about it or not. I am now caring about his sincerity because he seems to be completely changing all of his views, or many of his views. But you know, in the Conservative coalition, we've always had kind of three

interests at place, So the historic Reaganite coalition. You had military hawks who wanted to keep being hawks after the Soviet Union collapsed, and we've seen how disastrous that's been.

You have economic libertarian leaning people who want to represent business interests, and these are the people who, working with both Democrats and Republicans, have managed to ship millions of manufacturing jobs out of the United States and hollow out the middle class in the United States such that millennials and Gen z are the first generation to do worse

than their parents. And then you've got social conservatism, where social conservatism has all the voters but doesn't have any money right, and they don't have any big picture global geopolitical ambitions. They don't have huge businesses with tons of money to help fund politicians. All they have are voters. Voters who crawl over broken glass to vote for Republicans

every two years. You know who I mean? Like again, for all the ways in which Trump is sort of poopooing pro lifers, who is the one group of voters that never misses an election, who will crawl over broken glass to vote in a primary election for the local county dogcatcher And ask first if the dog catcher candidate is pro life, pro lifers, social conservatives. They're the most

reliable vot voters in the whole freaking world. And the fact that every first lady has been pro choice indicates to me maybe all these Republican presidents are faking it all the words they say about the dignity and sanctity of human life. And I say that because of the anemic results we've gotten from so many Republican presidents. Ronald Reagan, Okay, the Mexico City policy was good. Antonin Scalia was pretty good. He also gave us Anthony Kennedy and Sandrade O'Connor, who sucked,

Who kept Roe V Wade on the books? George H. W. Bush, Yeah, he gave us Clarence Thomas. He also gave us David Souter, who sucked immediately sucked, became a hard left vote on the court, immediately kept Rovy Wade on the books for an additional twenty years. George W. Bush tried to, you know, nominates the squish. John Roberts tries to nominate Harriet Myers. God knows what she would have been. She had Sandra

Day O'Connor written all over her. I think, and got so much backlash from conservatives, he had to, with his tail between his legs, withdraw her nomination and only then nominated the glory of his presidency, the crown jewel of his presidency, sam Alito. The single best thing George W. Bush ever did was nominate sam Alito to the Court. And then here's President Trump, who accomplished a ton of great pro life things in his first term. Not everything, though.

His unwillingness to get rid of the Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci's of the world really bit him in the butt during COVID and allowed the United States to keep funding federal research using the bodies of aborted children. And now he's running for president saying, oh, no, we don't support any he kind of restrictions on abortion on the federal level. No, no, no, no no. My administration will be great for women in their reproductive rights quote Donald J. Trump.

Now he's kind of running away from the abortion issue on a number of fronts because it's not popular anymore. So he was immediately willing to abandon it because I don't think any of these Republican presidents actually give a crap about it, And that's what frustrates me. You know, my kingdom for one Republican president someday who actually cares about this When we return. Some exciting stuff happening it Right to Life Essential California. I just want to highlight

that is next on the John Girardi Show. So there's a lot of stuff going on with us a right to Life. I don't talk about it too much on John Girardi Show, but I thought i'd just let you guys in on this. So if any of you are going to the Big Fresno Fair, go over to the Commerce building and say hello to the folks over at Right to Life of Central California. We've got a booth right there in the Commerce building. We've got literature, we've got fetal development models, we've got all kinds of cool

stuff you can learn more about what we're doing. We've got information about Right to Life Radio, which happens every Saturday morning nine to ten on Power Talk here in Fresno. And we're right near the Republican Party booth. So you can go over there to the Fresne County GOP. You can say hi to them. Just mosey on over to us, say hello. So we've got anyway say hello to us.

We got a lot of cool stuff. And by the way, if you want to volunteer at our booth, we still have some times at the fair that we need to get filled. If you want to volunteer at our booth, give us a call. This is Aeron, So this is where are we now right now, it's Thursday nine almost seven. Give us a call at Right to Life tomorrow morning. Five five nine two two nine two two two nine. If you come volunteer at our booth, we give you free parking, We give you a free ticket. It's a

great deal. You hang out at our booths for a bit and then you can go enjoy the fair. So anyway, get in touch with us five five nine two two nine two two two nine or an email us at info at RTLCC dot org. That will do it. Thank you guys so much for listening to the John Juraradi Show.