Sadly for those forwarders that have sat on their hands, they literally have three months to prepare themselves for 100% screening or their businesses could face dire circumstances. Small forwarders especially may have to hand their customers over to friendly competitors and become commission agents. Others will have to sub-contract handling and security out to third parties. Last week one of the largest multi-national transportation companies in the world approached us asking if we could take over their handling and screening. The cost for them to set up another division such as we have within our own small company was simply too great. We are just awaiting approval from TSA that our program designed to handle this freight will absolutely comply with their regulations. Once we are given the green light we will this corporation will sign the contract and freight will immediately start being delivered to our Los Angeles, Atlanta and New York terminals.

If we were asked the question three years ago that there was a commercial opportunity by investing staff and equipment to screen freight, we would have said the airlines will probably throw in screening for nothing. By their actions only large forwarders that could present freight in ULD’s would exercise the option to handle their own screening. How wrong we were holding this view. Airlines don’t really want a bar of it unless it is at a commercial rate and even then they are well aware their terminals are not designed for holding and inspecting freight. If a multi-national sees only costs and ongoing problems a company such as ours with its commitment by way of specially trained staff and adequate equipment there must be opportunity. Thanks to Peter Lamy, Zachary Zemby and Jeremy Vergara we have a wonderful chance to have a division which will add dollars to our bottom line instead of being a cost center. The new machines we have just purchased from Rapiscan will allow us to handle mega-tons per day in all three terminals. Roll along August 1st; we are ready!

If Wal-Mart’s retail expansion into China comes to a grinding halt, I would dance for joy. If China stops Caterpillar from selling earthmoving machinery because only local manufacturers can be considered for government contracts, too bloody bad. If Google finally gets booted out of China, what were they really expecting in the first place when they entered the market? The world has known for sixty years, there is no such thing as freedom under communism. Crying foul, when even little guys like me have always accepted that China is a barbarous nation of cheaters, liars and stealers is nothing but laughable.

China is never going to open up and now that we have handed our technology advantage to them on a silver platter, the simple fact of the matter, there is nothing much more they need from us anymore. They can probably make a Caterpillar D10 bulldozer cheaper and better than Caterpillar thanks to Caterpillar moving some of its manufacturing/supplier base to America’s greatest enemy. The Chamber of Commerce and many of its members have sold their souls to the devil. Now the shoe has been firmly planted on the other foot, there is no going back. To all those ass-wipe who took glee is selling America down the river, you’ve made your bed, now lie in it! My only recommendation is the quicker we place tariffs on all the Chinese junk still flooding into our market, the better. We need to be shot of our so-called dependence on a country that in reality is the antipathy of what America stands for in every way.

Much of the scrap metal is remade into steel rolls which return to America only to be sold at below market prices. It has a huge effect upon the locally made product being able to be sold at all let alone a competitive price because the Chinese literally dump the steel into our market. Again, when you consider the cost of shipping to and from China it beats me why steel mills here cannot absorb the millions of tons of scrap metal and manufacture the steel in America. Maybe then we could start give China back some of their own medicine and start dumping it into the Chinese market.

Growing up in New Zealand the only quality towels we would buy were the American-made Cannon brand. It is now almost impossible to buy an American produced towel in this country anymore. Why do we export cotton only to have it shipped back in finished form? Turning cotton into fabric and then into towels is literally 100% accomplished by machine so the differential in manufacturing costs between China and the United States would be negligible. However there would be huge savings removing the international shipping costs and the consequent delay in getting the finished goods to market that I believe the American-made towels would actually retail cheaper than the imported equivalent.

Presently the insult to injury affecting our exports is a shortage of containers due to the shipping lines reducing capacity. Shipping lines need exports of value to start entering the westbound trade. Shipping commodities of little value is not a solution for export growth. In fact because scrap is a twelve month a year export with containers being loaded close to port, shipping lines are not interested in the time consuming and costly job of positioning containers to inland points for manufacturers entering the export business. Ships are great pollutants in port and at sea. For the sake of our environment more than anything else, international trade should be about moving goods that are needed, not crap that isn’t. Add to this, returning to a philosophy of making as much as we can in America for our home market made good sense. No American city would be allowed to emit pollution like its Asian equivalent.