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ILA Union Gives Trump ‘Full Credit’ for Helping Secure Labor Contract with Port Employers
Mike Schuler January 9, 2025
The International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) is crediting President-elect Donald Trump with helping to secure a landmark six-year master contract agreement with the US Maritime Alliance (USMX), averting a potential shutdown of East and Gulf Coast ports.
The breakthrough came after a crucial intervention by President-Elect Donald Trump during a December 12th meeting at Mar-a-Lago.
ILA President Harold J. Daggett, accompanied by Executive Vice President Dennis A. Daggett, met with Trump for two hours to discuss the negotiation impasse with USMX. During that meeting, Trump reportedly directly contacted USMX officials and later took to Truth Social to publicly back the union’s position.
The agreement, which protects the jobs of 85,000 ILA members, addresses one of the maritime industry’s most contentious issues: automation. While specific terms of the agreement remain confidential pending ratification by both ILA rank-and-file members and USMX stakeholders, the two sides said the new contract “establishes a framework for implementing technologies” while safeguarding existing ILA positions.
“The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt and harm it causes for American Workers,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, criticizing the push for automation. “Foreign companies have made a fortune in the U.S. by giving them access to our markets. They shouldn’t be looking for every last penny knowing how many families are hurt”.
The agreement prevents what would have been a devastating coast-wide strike at ports from Maine to Texas, scheduled for January 15th.
ILA President Daggett hailed the new agreement as a victory for organized labor, crediting Trump’s intervention as the decisive factor in securing worker protections. “President Trump gets full credit for our successful tentative Master Contract agreement,” Daggett stated, characterizing Trump as “one of the greatest friends of Organized Labor.”
https://gcaptain.com/ila-union-gives-trump-full-credit-for-helping-secure-labor-contract-with-port-employers/
General Research #23075 >>18802004
TIKTOK: CHINESE “TROJAN HORSE” IS RUN BY STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIALS
https://www.mintpressnews.com/tiktok-chinese-trojan-horse-run-by-state-department-officials/284353/
Amid a national hysteria claiming the popular video-sharing app is a Chinese Trojan Horse, a MintPress News investigation has found dozens of ex-U.S. State Department officials working in key positions at TikTok. Many more individuals with backgrounds in the FBI, CIA and other departments of the national security state also hold influential posts at the social media giant, affecting the content that over one billion users see.
While American politicians demand the app be banned on national security grounds, try to force through an internet surveillance act that would turn the country into an Orwellian state, make clueless statements about how TikTok is dangerous because it connects to your Wi-Fi, it is possible that TikTok is already much closer to Washington than it is to Beijing.
STATE DEPARTMENT-AFFILIATED MEDIA
General Research #25696 >>20950956
Real Estate Investor Says Nobody Wants to do Business in New York City Following Trump Verdict
by Mike LaChance May. 31, 2024 10:15 pm
Real estate investor Grant Cardone appeared on the fox Business Network this week following the Trump verdict and said that it is going to have far reaching effects on the city’s economy. He suggested that nobody (including him) wants to do business in New York City anymore because they no longer trust the political and legal system there. Cardone says that the people who are invested in his company wouldn’t even allow him to do business there. From FOX Business: “If they can do this to Donald Trump, a former president, regardless of how you feel about the politics, if they can do this to a former president, what can they do to Grant Cardone? What can they do to any other businessman?,” the Cardone Capital founder also chimed in Friday on “Varney & Co.”
Cardone recently pulled his business out of the Empire State and cautioned that Trump’s legal troubles — including a previous $355 million fine in a New York civil fraud case in February — would “wreak financial havoc” on the city.
“I have 15,000 investors with me at Cardone Capital. We’ve raised $1.3 billion. If I went to them today and said, ‘I want to invest in New York City,’ they would not give me money to do that,” the investor argued.
“That’s one of the greatest cities on planet Earth. And nobody wants to go there and do business,” Cardone continued. “I blame the legal system. Clearly, the political system has been weaponized.”
New York City is already struggling under the weight of crime, reduced revenue due to people leaving, and the border crisis.
Now they are also going to deal with fewer investments from people just like Cardone.
This situation is going to have an impact on NYC that will last a long time and in ways that cannot even be seen yet.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/05/real-estate-investor-says-nobody-wants-do-business/
Video (3:13)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1w_bGdJY1Q
Just this so far:
California wildfires: Now for the arsonists and looters …
By Monica Showalter January 10, 2025
My young niece came by my home in San Diego yesterday as a refugee from the fires in Los Angeles. She got out safely, drove down, and was going to stay in the city until Tuesday, when her classes at University of Southern California restart.
After all, the air was very bad in Los Angeles, and residents in her part of West Los Angeles had to boil water owing to the water reservoir levels being so low. There was a high risk of gas and electrical shutoffs and a risk of communications disruptions owing to the fire on Mount Wilson, where the local television and radio stations have their gargantuan antennae.
The one thing she was worried about, though, was looting. The fear seems to be all over among Angelenos, and the cops report they are catching some.
The residents with homes that survived the burn are seeing them in action on their ring cameras – an unimaginable coda to the nightmare they have already been through:
🚨Looters in LA are wearing fake fire department and utility company uniforms.
Some residents are hiring private security to watch their homes as looters run wild.
At least 20 looters have been arrested so far. pic.twitter.com/D9mWehk63P
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) January 10, 2025
What's more, the cops think there's a connection between organized looting operations and the sudden spate of arson fires. Much of the fire activity might just really be about robbing and looting homes.
Organized crime of this kind takes a long time to take root, but once it does, it's very difficult to stop, even with a non-woke district attorney now elected over the freakish George Gascon who had been in place earlier. So the activity continues:
LAPD arrest man suspected of purposely starting the Kenneth Fire in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles.
The man is suspected of arson and causing the fire that has consumed 1,000 acres in the affluent West Hills, Calabasas and Woodland Hills neighborhood.
pic.twitter.com/1bl57FlwyK
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) January 10, 2025
LAPD arrest man, suspected of arson for causing the Kenneth Fire, which has destroyed 1,000 acres.
“They believe that someone did intentionally set it. This is now officially an arson investigation.”
🎥 @CollinRugg
pic.twitter.com/rVgjyArfxi
— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) January 10, 2025
BREAKING: LAPD Arrest Arson Suspect for Allegedly Setting Kenneth Fire
LAPD have arrested an arson suspect on suspicion he started the Kenneth Fire.
The suspect was detained in Woodland Hills shortly after a resident called 911 to report someone trying to ignite a fire on… pic.twitter.com/dKK9rbyTFQ
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) January 10, 2025
Gutfeld had the usual clarity about what needs to be done and why:
when lawmakers warn looters they will be arrested, its like warning people who leave work without an umbrella that they could get wet. the risk is usually accepted by the mindset. in a just world, when people take advantage of a horrible situation - punishment must be far…
— GregGutfeld (@greggutfeld) January 10, 2025
In yet another disturbing dimension to the story, the looters may be mainly foreigners imported in either through lax immigration loopholes or Joe Biden's open borders:
As for the wretched creature picked up by residents, he's probably here illegally, given his United Nations-issued card, meaning, it's an imported problem from Joe Biden's open borders:
NOTE; GPS—5 cell phones on his person! Suspect had a United Nations prepaid debit card.
🚨 Homeless man with ‘flamethrower’ busted in connection to LA’s Kenneth Fire after residents detain him 🚨https://t.co/dvPBo4Ywr5 pic.twitter.com/OC8y5ZccK9
— Tony Seruga (@TonySeruga) January 10, 2025
Which raises questions about who let these thugs in. As if the open borders allowing all comers to come in weren't bad enough in all the rapes and murders illegals cause, now it's the spearhead of the arson and looting going on in Los Angeles by a foreign invasiion force.
If this isn't enough to drive residents to change their government, what is? Importing an arson-looting force from abroad to sack our cities as invaders is an outrageous dereliction of duty by leftist government leaders.
The plague of illegals continues, this time landing on Los Angeles, but this won't be the last city so targeted.
More:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/01/california_wildfires_now_for_the_arsonists_and_looters.html
Bayonet requires neither the building of a gallows nor finding a tree/streetlight
Here comes the Navy’s laser fleet
Jared Keller Posted on Jan 12, 2023
The Navy has now taken possession of a half-dozen new laser weapons for integration onto surface warships, officials said on Wednesday.
Speaking at the Surface Navy Association’s annual conference in Virginia about the Navy’s future DDG(X) surface combatant vessel, Rear Adm. Seiko Okano, program executive officer for integrated warfare systems, revealed that the service has now received one High Energy Laser with Integrated Optical-dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) weapon system from defense contractor Lockheed Martin, and seven Optical Dazzling Interdictor, Navy (ODIN) systems from Government developers at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Dahlgren, VA.
Those systems “are now being integrated onto ships,” as National Defense magazine reported from the SNA conference.
Developed under a 2018 contract with Lockheed, the HELIOS consists of a 60-kilowatt laser and optical dazzler package designed to knock out unmanned aerial vehicles, “burn the boats,” and disrupt both airborne and shipborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance sensors, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The lower-power ODIN laser dazzler provides “near term” capabilities to disorient and neutralize aerial drones and knock out a variety of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, per CRS.
As swarms of drone aircraft, watercraft, and anti-ship missiles pose growing threats to surface vessels, laser weapons systems will prove an ideal low-cost, near-unlimited ammo countermeasure to deter potential attacks.
Speaking at the same SNA panel as Okano, Rear Adm. Fred Pyle, the Navy’s director of surface warfare, stated that the service is “going to continue to invest with directed energy to get to those higher levels so we can move beyond self-defense and get into more warfighting missions.”
“Move beyond self-defense” likely means upping the HELIOS from its current 60-kW output to something more in the range of 120 or 150 kW.
News of the Navy’s laser surge may come as a surprise to some observers given that the service accepted delivery of its first HELIOS system just two years ago and showed up installed on the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer USS Preble as recently as August 2022.
But as Janes noted in April, the service’s fiscal year 2023 budget proposal designated its wide-ranging Navy Laser Family of Systems, which the HELIOS falls under, as “an accelerated acquisition initiative to provide near-term, ship-based laser weapon capabilities,” highlighting a push to field laser weapons to surface warships as soon as possible.
Despite this push, it’s unlikely the fleet will see the rapid fielding of lasers this fiscal year: the Navy’s budget request called primarily for further at-sea testing of the HELIOS following the successful integration of the weapon system aboard the Preble last year.
Officials previously stated that the DDG-51’s Flight III design is summarily flawed in that it focuses most of its electrical power generation on the AN/SPY-6 Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR), making the service’s fleet of Flight IIA destroyers the choice platform for laser integration.
“[W]e are out of Schlitz with regard to power,” as then-Navy director of surface warfare Rear Adm. Ron Boxall put it back in 2019 in reference to the AMDR to the Flight III hulls. “’We used a lot of power for that and we don’t have as much extra for additional functions.”
While the Navy may struggle with long-term integration into those newer Flight III destroyers due to power generation, service officials hope the new DDG(X) surface combatant discussed at the SNA conference will manage to solve the power generation problem.
More:
https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/navy-laser-helios-acquisition-fielding/
Related:
Report to Congress on Navy Shipboard Lasers
U.S. Naval Institute Staff July 3, 2024 11:26 AM
40 page downloadable doc at source
https://news.usni.org/2024/07/03/report-to-congress-on-navy-shipboard-lasers-8