You have to hand it to Donald Trump: no matter what kind of shit sandwich he happens to be eating at any given time (currently on the menu: getting played on the CR and the debt ceiling), he comes up with some kind of freakish distraction. Tonight it's a rant about how we're getting screwed by exorbitant tolls on the Panama Canal.
The Panama Canal! How did that pop into his febrile brain? And are tolls really up?
This is impossible to answer with precision because there's no such thing as "the toll" for transiting the canal. Rather, there's a dizzying array of tolls, fees, tariffs, and surcharges that depend on the size of the ship, the time the transit reservation was made, how busy the canal is, etc. etc.
With that understood, you can say a little bit in very rough terms. A decade ago new, bigger locks opened on the canal to accommodate new, bigger "neopanamax" behemoths. At that time, the biggest ships paid maybe half a million dollars to transit the canal.
Time passed and Panama suffered through a drought that severely cut back on traffic through the canal. By 2024 the biggest ships were paying upwards of a million dollars per transit.
Eventually the canal authorities decided to ditch the basic tariff book and move to an auction system. You and I, of course, have no insight into what effect this has had, but big shippers have been bidding for transit slots for a few months now. They know, and the upshot is that they've announced cargo surcharges that amount to half a million dollars for the biggest ships. So figure they're now paying in the neighborhood of $1.5 million per neopanamax.
Is this unfair? Well, it's an auction, so presumably it represents the true value of transiting the canal vs. the other available options (either a longer sea route or multimodal transport across the US). That's the free market at work.
But it's also a foreign country Trump can blame our troubles on, and there's nothing he loves more. Plus it has the added advantage that conservatives to this day haven't entirely gotten over the fact that Jimmy Carter gave up the canal to Panama. Remember Ronald Reagan's "we built it, we paid for it, it’s ours"?
Anyway, I look forward to a gaggle of conservative pundits suddenly becoming outraged over LoTSA and last-minute booking surcharges. Should be fun.
Iowa class battleships we designed to fit through the canal prior to the refit. The original panamax restriction was 106 ft at the beam. The Iowa sisters were 108. They squeezed in with half a foot or so each side.
I served aboard a USCG cutter that escorted Missouri from Molokai to Pearl Harbor. The cutter was more of a patrol boat at 82 feet. The Trades make the seas continuously uncomfortable to treacherous unless you are in the lee of an island. We met Missouri (under tow) north of Molokai (we were waiting in the lee of Kalaupapa) and after we gritted our teeth and dashed through 6-8 ft seas, we were pleasantly surprised at the placid sea conditions in her lee. She was literally a steel island.
🤙I saw the USS Missouri at the start of that final voyage, in Astoria. Bookends, brah.
Noice!
Puget Sound pilots have to board incoming ships from the pilot boat in the Straits of Jand de Fuca, and likewise disembark from outgoing ships. It is standard for the ships to turn broadside to the wind to allow the pilot boat to approach in their lee.
I've done that as well, as coxswain of a small boat for boardings and to climb an accommodation ladder to conduct boardings. In that particular Strait as well.
Juan de Fuca....
🤙I
Didn't he also bleet something about taking it back? For some reason there are people who took that as some kind of threat.
Pro wrestling was small-scale when I was a kid, and if the talent wanted to be outrageous or distract people they'd do things like tip over chairs or fold them up or toss them aside and maybe pound their chest and start yelling. These days I guess it's a whole lot more kinetic and flamboyant, but basically the same thing.
What trump is doing here is just randomly flipping chairs, I think. Kayfabe.
This part of his master scheme to stir up support for digging a moat in front of Mexico, from the gulf to the Pacific.
'is part'.
Two miles wide and 200 feet deep. Not just the water, all that displaced dirt piles up into a mighty and uncomplicated wall.
And we'll use Mexican water too!
Will need careful design. We don't want those illegals using the slopes of the piled dirt to launch para-gliders.
It's like a conspiracy, they'd never think of that themselves!
A wall AND a moat? That'll show those illegals!
What, no alligators in the moat? How tame...
Hmm. Maybe that Mexican project to build a rail line connecting the Pacific and Gulf might be something the US could directly invest in to double capacity and,...oh wait, Trump. Never mind.
Hadn't heard of a Mexican rail plan. Have heard of (perhaps pie-in-the-sky) plans for the Chinese to build rail across Nicaragua. Plan B perhaps after a canal plan fell-through.
There is a Ferrocarril from Santa Cruz to the gulf.
I'm sure Trump's designated Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, will calm him down and set him straight on all of this. And Canada as the 51st state. And Greenland, which he wants to acquire.
If there's failure on the diplomatic front, Trump will get Musk and all the Big Tech bros to come up with a solution involving cryptocurrency.
Indeed I would like to know how this popped into his pea brain as well because I can't imagine him writing this tweet to begin with, unless some shipping company lobbyist was the last person to speak to him.
Amazing how someone who doesn't want endless wars has all sorts of them planned even before Jan. 20. I guess if they 're in the Western Hemisphere that makes it okay.
By the way Bill Buckley supported the Canal treaties.
Trump is one of those people who's strongly held current opinions depend on whomever he last spoke to or whatever twitter post he most recently read.
+1
It's embarrassing how easy it is to manipulate him.
You know, smart Democrats ought to be able to take advantage of this. And get in ahead of Vlad the Invader, et al.
At some point in his first term, Pelosi played him in exactly that way. They struck some kind of a deal (border wall funding in exchange for the Dreamers Act, or some such) *on camera*, shook hands, and it was all win-win. Then about three hours later the White House announced, yeah, nah, what he said wasn't really what he meant.
How many infrastructure week deals did the Democrats reach with him, only to have the football taken away?
He is an easy mark, but it's always bends towards nonsense. That's how Harris got him to rant about eating dogs during the debate. Getting him to do something constructive almost always collapses into chaos.
We sure played him in November
Oh wait
I don't know which is scarier, that we have such a president for the next four years or that roughly half of America voted for him and a substantial portion of his voters cling to him like the sect they are.
Got to say, Trump's funeral is going to be a real circus. Get your popcorn now.
If it happens in the next decade. Much longer and it will be meh…
Who wrote the tweets is an interesting question, right? At least the one about the US having "a vested interest" in "secure, efficient, and reliable operation" of the canal is far too logical, measured, and literate to have been written by trump and doesn't have any of the usual trump tweet characteristics. A poster on bluesky, philco.bsky.social, spotted some parallel phrasing in stuff Elmo has tweeted and suggests, plausibly I think, that Musk wrote it.
So why would Musk have a bee in his bonnet about what it costs to ship things through the canal? Importing Chinese-made Teslas? Shipping California Teslas to the East Coast? Shipping eventual Texas Teslas to the Left Coast? Buying Maersk and running that in his spare time? Or just looking for things to get trump jacked up about? Who knows?
The one sure thing is what Harris showed so vividly in that debate-- he's like a cat with a laser pointer. Absolutely can't resist it and will follow it anywhere.
+1
It's tempting to treat Trump's tweets as the workings of a deranged mind and not take them seriously, but this one is a curious thing and does make you wonder what's going on. Who's behind it? Elon seems like a prime suspect. I'd read somewhere that the phrase "please be guided accordingly" used by Trump is a lawyerly term more often used internationally than in the US. Trump's family is not in the shipping business (as Mitch McConnell's is) so more likely some billionaire complained to Trump, who's mixing it up with a combo of old grievance and strongman aspiration.
The economic impact of higher shipping rates seems not so big. Based on this, the value of cargo on the average container ship may be in the $300 million range. Add a million in costs, maybe that's one-third of one percent (probably less) that US consumers pay. It's not nothing. But it's rounding error compared to the tariffs of 10% and 25% that Trump is planning to impose on imports.
A new wrinkle out of left field from coverage I saw this morning: one of the port operations at each canal terminus is run by a Chinese company. It's based in Hong Kong, but that matters a lot less these days and certainly not at all to trump. An almost automatic trigger for him.
So I kind of suspect Musk is getting trump jacked up to spray randomly all over the dog park-- trump is his wind-up chaos-creator toy of the moment. And it's something trump enjoys doing, and so we have symbiosis for as long as this lasts.
Freight trains do perhaps 35-50 MPH: https://www.freightrun.com/blog/post/what-is-a-freight-train
Car carriers will cruise at 18-22 MPH: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roll-on/roll-off
Neither factory is port-adjacent, which means loading a vehicle onto a truck or train to take it to a port (Oakland I assume for Teslas built in Fremont, Galveston for the vehicles being produced in Austin) then getting onto the ship. The incremental cost of the vehicle continuing its journey by truck or rail is likely lower than the combined cost of transferring it to the ship and traveling (slower and longer) that way.
At least looking at it from this arm chair.
Agree, it would make approximately zero sense to be shipping any domestically-made cars to domestic ports by sea.
Based on its current market capitalization of ~$175 billion, it would probably cost Musk $200 billion to buy it. Doable, but at some point even the Tesla rubber-stamp board would have to say enough was enough.
But ships are so 18th Century. Shirley someone with Musk's vision would find a way to push a Hyperloop across the oceans or ship megatons of freight by rocket...
I'd appreciate it if you'd leave Shirley out of it! 😝
😄😄😄
The traffic in very large ships is largely is largely container ships from Asia using the canal to reach gulf ports or Savannah. If the canal fees get to high they can always just use the ports on the blue west coast and ship east via the railroads.
Totally. Use the money you would've spent on improvements to the rail and wharf facilities at Long Beach.
Ah, but ports (and by extension the international shipping the enable) are bad... https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/12/long-beach-port-los-angeles-pollution-particulates-asthma-health-problems-supply-chain-bottleneck-covid/ et al via "port pollution site:motherjones.com" as a web search.
Didn't he try to buy Greenland? Maybe he is bad mouthing Panama before he puts in a low bid.
I wouldn't be surprised if this has something to do with this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/JW_Marriott_Panama
Former Trump Towers
We only gave up the canal *de jure*. It's still *de facto* ours, because we have a huge navy that could take it back from teeny tiny Panama in a day if they were ever dumb enough to provoke us by, say, telling the US Navy they couldn't use the canal. Let them have their tolls, it shows generosity. Every good empire needs to display largesse to the small and weak from time to time.
the Donald understands the click-bait business model driving the press and it has become a codependent relationship.
He is a goddamn bore.
You nailed it. Plus he knows how to play up his base. Plus the art of kayfabe (see above). Plus he has holdings in Panama. It's a master class in playing the entire world as though it's "The Apprentice." Seriously - I bet if anyone were to bother, you could find the blueprints there for what he's doing now.
If the 'media', ummm, sorry, secretarial corps were to actually ignore his bleatings....hahahahahahahaha. Sorry, got carried away.
We are so fucked.
I prefer Hayakawa's comment on the transfer of the canal: "We stole it fair and square."
That was my first thought as well.
Trump was evicted from his branded hotel and was in a tax dispute with the Panamanian government:
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-companies-accused-tax-evasion-panama
As always, everything is personal to him.
The media keeps taking the bait. (et tu, Kevin?) It's going to be a long 4 years if you insist on repeating every stupid thing he says. Ignore this nonsense.
There is no way to ignore things said by the President of the United States, and Kevin is doing a service to his readers by going deep on this stuff so we don't have to. Of course, if you think it should be ignored, you are welcome to do so by not reading or commenting.
+1
Yeah… sometimes when I or others post a comment here, someone replies “Don’t feed the troll”. So, you know, seems like good advice when it comes to trump!
It is possible to ignore THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. He’s a mentally ill piece of shit. Nothing new to report.
Trump is not even in office and he is already blowing Kevin's brain up. Perhaps we can stipulate that Trump is whack and not get pissed off by his various frequent and random acts of buffonery. Everyone who cares at this point about politics knows exactly what Trump is and how they feel about him. We would all be happier for it...
If that were true, we would be in a better place. But it isn't. Half the country thinks he's a genius.
Might be interesting to see how much (less?) coverage Biden got (by Kevin and elsewhere) when he was president-elect.
It's all just noise to distract. When will the infotainment media get smart? Like Nixon said "Watch what we DO, not what we SAY." The Felon can't stop talking, but he doesn't actually do much, and accomplishes less.
Pay attention to the real stuff, and let the mindless con man patter go. It's meaningless.
+10
Actually, I just looked at the web pages of CNN, the NYT and WP and none of them mention Trump’s Panama tweet.
OT: Every time I see your profile pic in Kevin's comments it makes me happy. Cutest pup ever.
Well, it's the weekend. Maybe they'll pick it up tomorrow and it will dominate the week's news. Or be replaced by some other foolishness. Look! Shiny object!
So, if Mexico builds their own version of the Panama Canal do you think trump will still impose tariffs on all goods coming from Mexico?
Couldn't be done in any kind of short term.
Doesn't matter
All they have to do is start to build it and Trump loses, and Mexico wins
Everything is about optics for Trump
Good to be reminded that Trumpism goes back to Reagan, although Trump with his short attention claim can't claim Reagan's deadly obsession with the presumed bad guys in Central America.
While viewership on left wing MSNBC has plummeted, I would still assume that most progressive bloggers will have 4 years of constant material reporting on all the horrific stuff Orange Il Duce does and every piece of excrement flowing out of his piehole and fat orange tweeting fingers (or what ever fucking social media platform he uses).
I guess I would do the same if I made a living as a progressive media person.
I think the idea that progressive media persons make a living by being progressive media persons is flawed.
In contrast, conservative media personalities can make a bundle. Sean Hannity and Alex Jones have made hundreds of millions at least.
The most financially successful progressive media persons often make their money by betraying their progressive roots. The few exceptions may be the hosts of a handful of MSNBC shows, who make million-dollar salaries, and whose days may be numbered.
Rachel Maddow at least seems to do pretty well, not as well as Hannity but rather up there: https://www.thestreet.com/lifestyle/highest-paid-news-anchors-15062420 Of course how long that lasts is very much in question. I don't watch her (or any of it really, "progressive" or "conservative") - is she one who has betrayed her progressive roots?
While I suppose he could have hidden wealth somewhere I don't get the impression Alex Jones is anything other than minor league.
As I said, MSNBC hosts do very well because TV continues to be the most lucrative of gigs for political voices. Maddow makes $25 million under her new contract and I don't think she's betrayed her roots at all. You might argue how "progressive" she actually is. She's described her politics as approximately where Dwight Eisenhower was in the 1950s. She's been an eloquent voice in supporting civil rights and decency, but she's hardly a radical. Of all MSNBC hosts, about the only one who's truly progressive in the sense of giving occasional support for ideas of the left is Chris Hayes. The median host on the network is likely to be a business-friendly host like Stephanie Ruhle or an anti-Trump former Republican like Nicole Wallace. It's an important network for Dems because there's no place else like it but its politics on the whole is centrist. (Yes, you see a lot of people of color, but contrary to common perception, their politics sticks more toward the center.)
Some testimony in the Alex Jones trial pegged his net worth at about $270 million. Maybe that's high, and maybe a lot of that's hidden. Maybe the families whose kids were slain in Newtown have a different opinion on whether he is "minor league."
If you're looking for progressives who betray progressive leanings, the latest is this guy. Cenk Uygar was too left to keep an MSNBC show years ago. Now he's a speaker at Turning Point USA and sucking up to Elon looking for a job on the Trump team. Like other onetime so-called progressives (inc. Gabbard and Kennedy), he has been "persuaded" to flip to the other side. Follow the money.
Other names I'd add include Yglesias and Klein. You could argue how "progressive" they might have been. They started out pro-Iraq War, a troubling sign to begin with, but they were ambitious voices within the Democratic party for many years but now they have far more lucrative careers since their politics turned. Most prominently now, they are critics of Democrats. That's their brand, and it's paying off for them.
I'm not sure if KRK's comment was directed at Kevin, but KD is not "making a living" off his work here, as far as I know. Again, "progressive" is a term that can mean different things to different people.
Exception to the "TV continues to be the most lucrative of gigs" is Dan Bongino, who's worth $150 million apparently. Any TV he does now is probably a small part of that.
A million dollars per transit. 10,000-12,000 containers on a neoPanamax?
So ~$100 per container?
Cost for a 40' box Shanghai to NY/NJ is, what ~$6000
Sure, invade, Great idea. They're robbing us blind.
If it nets him $10 a container somehow, I suspect he considers it a win...
Why does Donald Trump hate the American rail freight industry?
He's such an idiot. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/trump-says-he-might-demand-panama-hand-over-canal-2024-12-22/
The shortest route for ships from major east Asian ports to the eastern US is via the Northwest Passage. Maybe it would divert Trump to get him thinking about that instead of the Panama Canal.
Not sure it would be that much better-- isn't that why he's been talking about annexing Greenland? It popped up out of nowhere in the first term, and then he repeated it just today tweeting about his ambassador-designate to Denmark.
Of course he can't explain why, because in order to do that he'd have to admit that climate change is making ice-free passage through there foreseeable.
And like everything else with him, he was primed with the idea by somebody and it got lodged in his output circuits.
The idea of the US buying Greenland has been around since at least 1867.
Claiming that it a uniqely crazy Trump idea shows that you know a lot about Trump and little about history.
As to why it is Trump who is floating grand ideas for America's future, whereas the Ds are not, well you'll have to ask Obama, Harris and Biden that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_the_United_States_to_purchase_Greenland#2024
Here is the answer. As usual there's real logic behind the decision, not craziness, though (again as usual) you can spin it as craziness if you prioritize hating on Trump over America.
"
The first significant test for Cortizo's China policy came in 2021, when Hutchison Ports (PPC), a subsidiary of the Hong Kong-based corporate group Hutchison Whampoa Ltd., successfully applied for a 25-year renewal of the concessions it had over the ports of Balboa and Cristóbal. These ports are strategically located at the Pacific and Caribbean sides of the Panama Canal, which gives PPC a de facto monopoly over the porting industry around the canal.
Throughout these negotiations, Panama obliged most of PPC's terms and conditions. Paradoxically, the Panamanian government did not raise a single concern over indirect control over PPC by the PRC.
"
So essentially China has (potential) control over both ends of the canal. This can be weaponized, if required (eg war or even just trade disagreement), in various ways, from the extreme (block one or both ends of the canal by "accidentally" sinking a ship) to the subtle (execute some sort of "go slow" order) that piles up ships in the ports, generally fouling up and blocking passage through the canal.