There's a private equity company that got into the Jones Act shipping (US coastal trade) trade by doing the shell company game the way that Private Equity does, with a twist that this company is just rotten with a layer of beltway insiders on top of it... has failed. No matter how many layers of company titles you have, you still gotta produce, and if the shell company staff don't get along... things implode.
Marshals came and turned the lights off for most of the units they bought at auction from Morty the rich asshole.
For background, Morty's story is that he's a bad person. A shit born with daddy's checkbook in hand who himself rode his father's tug and barge company into the ground. Morty is a foul human being and is hated by everyone...and is a spoiled little tyrant degenerate who got what he deserved, which is to lose everything... that being said, his former employees, toxic themselves, some of them, but mostly decent people living with PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome from exposure to Morty, are victims. There were plenty of middle aged guys working who had to start over somewhere else very late in life when the company cratered. It's really hard to Rise And Grind to reestablish yourself when you're at the tail end of a career that is enormously wearing, physically.
Strangely enough, my employer, who also runs a multigenerational family-owned shipping company, is doing just fine. Being a decent human being and having a family policy where every son starts out by sweeping floors, cleaning toilets and taking their turn working their way up from deckhand to management has something to do with that.
But, sadly, this batch o' bankers and investors is in a bad way at the moment. Infighting and what seems to be a contest in backstsbbing and who can fuck each other over more. At least it looks like that from the outside. As a result there's some skilled mariners headed out hat-in-hand looking for work this week.
So, the bad is bad. I hope one of the bigs with actual shipping experience rather than a combo of investing and lobbying experience will either buy some of these big boats or get hired to right the ship.
I just don't think it's possible to own a maritime business without longevity being the first or second priority. If, as the saying goes, the purpose of business is business, than making MORE money over time, vs short-term gains, tortoise v. hare style, isn't antithetical to good business practice. But good luck explaining that to the scumbag circus out there.
Now the good. But first, more bad.
US shipyards are in a bad way. Obsolete tech, minimal automation, insane labor costs (a moderately experienced shipyard worker is at least journeyman-level equivalent in 2 or more skilled trades and thus can just work in one of those trades, so they need to be paid!). It costs 3-5x more to build a ship in the US than it does in Asia, but ships that travel between any US ports MUST be American built and American crewed, per the Jones Act, our cabotage laws.
This is done because we NEED to know how to build ships as a nation (we currently suck at it, which is a massive gaping nightmare), and we REALLY NEED people who know how to crew them. We're currently about 100 fleet oilers (ships to run fuel for military use) short of what we'd need in a major war just to keep the lights in and bellies full. The beltway neocons, scumbags like senator Mike Lee, are screaming bloody hell because our present admin was able this year to put 10 civilian tankers on retainer as willing to jump in if ordered to help. Senator Scumbag wants to import 3rd world foreigners and foreign companies to move all our oil, food and goods, internally and externally, including taking over our military's logistics, and getting the US out of moving things by sea as a trade.
Imagine just the 1000+ tugs on the Mississippi and connected rivers, moving oil and goods into the midwest and grain and beef out, all controlled by Europeans and Asians along with ADM and a few big ag companies that fly in Indonesians Indians and Pakistanis and hand over the keys to our food and energy so they don't have to pay lower- and middle-middle class wages to American mariners, or buy boats from American shipyards.
Yeah. That's not even the least bit exaggerated. It's that fucked up. No security as a nation, whatsoever. No knkwledge of how to build a ship. A bunch of foreigners, some of whom are hostile to our interests, in charge of our oil and our food supply.
So, that's the bad part of the good part.
Now, the good part: with our shipyards being in a bad way, one of the Korean megashipyard conglomerates, who can build damn fine ships damn fast, bought the Philadelphia shipyard, one of the only 3 (!) American shipyards that can build merchant ships.
Well, for values of 'American.' It was owned by a billionaire family of Norwegians as one of their several shipyards globally, then spun off with the usual shell games that bankers get all on about... but still owned by Europeans, titles aside. Like most of our shipyards. Newport News is BAE, the Brits. Great Lakes has Fincatieri, Italian. Philly had Norway, now Korea. You get the idea.
But, Hanhwa Philly, now, is looking interesting. They're almost done with building 5 schoolships for our maritime academies, which double as disaster relief ships at need. After that I think they've got a couple of containerships on order for the Hawaii/ Alaska and Puerto Rico Jones Act service.
Hanhwa, on sealing the deal, is gonna throw 8 figures into modernizing and expanding the yard, which means local jobs and vocational training for Americans, and immediately put orders for over a dozen ships on the books, including building the infrastructure and training to build Liquified Natural Gas carriers, something the US currently can't do.
This is huge.
Now, I have no idea if any of these ships will enter Jones Act service, although I assume some if not all will. More than anything else, it's the institutional knowledge that is the treasure here. Hanhwa is going to have to fly in experienced people to teach, and I'm ok with that. Aside from the international relations aspect, which has something to do with Korea wanting to cement ties and placate president Trump, it's also a good way to keep America invested in Korea's security too.
I hope Japan is watching.
Anyways I'm much too retarded and willfully ignorant to really discuss such things at length. Still, it's a big step forward, and if we can put a boot on the insanely anti-American neocons' necks and enjoy the music they make trying to breathe, perhaps we'll be ok.
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