Among one of the worst and ongoing Biden administration scandals is the continued supply chain crisis facing the country. Before the holiday season, these issues manifested in out-of-stock items like toys, electronics, and other large equipment. Since that time, the problems have morphed into empty supermarket shelves and more delayed shipments of miscellaneous imported goods.
There’s a new phenomenon, however, putting a further dent into the fix to the supply chain problem. Ongoing for months now, in the county of Los Angeles, has been a string of continued looting and robberies of shipping containers parked in rail yards and along various rail lines waiting to be transported.
The damage is devastating, organized, and touches on numerous invaluable products:
Keep hearing of train burglaries in LA on the scanner so went to #LincolnHeights to see it all. And… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, @UPS boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pens. Cargo containers left busted open on trains. @CBSLA pic.twitter.com/JvNF4UVy2K
— John Schreiber (@johnschreiber) January 13, 2022
The big question, now that we know what’s happening, is why isn’t anyone doing anything about it? Union Pacific, the largest shipping operator in the area, has threatened to leave California over the inaction and continued losses.
The LA County district attorney, a left-wing soft-on-crime hack, seems disinterested in prosecuting anything:
Medical equipment, designer handbags, luggage, throw pillows, airline parts, children’s artwork, even a new wine fridge – all those items and more have been found stolen off Union Pacific trains and discarded alongside the tracks in East LA.
Images of thousands of stolen and discarded packages alongside the Union Pacific train tracks near Union Station have people around the world asking – how does this happen? Apparently, it’s a near perfect storm of an ongoing train robbery problem, the pandemic, and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s policy of no-cash bail arrests.
“I have been with Union Pacific for 16 years, and I have never, ever seen this situation to this degree,” said Lupe Valdez, the company’s senior director of public affairs.
Valdez says, on average, 90 of their containers are compromised each day. But between October 2020 and October 2021, train robberies have picked up exponentially by a whopping 356%.
Why does this continue? Because the county of Los Angeles, and the Biden Justice Department, have allowed it to continue since last year.
Writing in National Review, famed former US Attorney Andrew McCarthy explains why this is a pertinent case for federal law enforcement and deals directly with interstate commerce and international commerce:
Why is it happening? Because George Gascón, the paradigm “progressive prosecutor” who is L.A.’s elected district attorney, follows no-bail and wrist-slap policies, with burglary and grand-theft cases routinely pled down to trespassing, with no-incarceration sentences. Reminiscent of the high-crime 1970s, the criminals are back on the street, and back to the tracks, before the cops can finish the paperwork . . . if they bother to make arrests at all, given the pointlessness of the exercise.
Obviously, Gascón and, in general, California’s state government are disastrous. But what is the federal government doing about this? In many crime situations, the feds can seem superfluous, muscling in on matters that are chiefly local concerns. Here, however, we are talking about interstate and international commerce, the very foundation of federal criminal jurisdiction.
If addressing this outrage is a priority of the Biden administration’s interim U.S. attorney, Tracy Wilkison, that is not evident from her office’s website (which catalogues press releases issued in recent cases that the office deems its most significant) or its Twitter feed. If we visit the Twitter feed of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, we are urged to provide any information we may have about the Capitol riot, and we are reminded that Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” But we are not told what, if anything, the bureau is doing about the train robberies.
You would think, perhaps, that the Justice Department at the direction President Biden would be doing anything and everything to fix problems hampering the supply chain. This train robbery issue has been happening since October of last year, perhaps earlier, and it’s only gotten worse. Where is Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Transportation, hammering this issue and providing federal support?
This is another instance of a real problem facing the country that Biden and his party seem entirely disinterested in. Democrats run the state of California and the city of Los Angeles, and they allow this to continue unabated. Democrats run the Justice Department and have the full power of federal law enforcement at their disposal, yet they do nothing.
Where is the Biden administration on this issue?
Union Pacific, the rail operator, has done what it can but it’s on the verge of more drastic measures to avoid LA county altogether:
Union Pacific has increased its enforcement and patrols, and has put drones to work, but now they are looking into diverting trains so they don’t pass through Los Angeles County at all.
“We are making arrests, but what our officers are seeing on the ground is that people are basically being arrested, there is no bail, they come out the next day and come back to rob our trains,” Valdez said.
Union Pacific’s chief has a meeting with the LAPD next week, and last month, sent a letter to Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, calling this a “spiraling crisis” and imploring his office to hold criminals accountable.
This is the chaos and anarchy that the country has devolved into and Biden at the helm is incapable of putting an end to it. One phone call to the LA county district attorney and this could end today, but it won’t happen. Instead, the FBI and Attorney General Merrick Garland are busy covering for anti-Semitic terrorism and opening an entire unit to fight domestic terrorists, but are unconcerned with real issues right in front of them.
What about the economic terrorism being perpetrated on the American people by the ongoing attack on our supply chain?
Again, another failure of Biden and Democratic officials in the state of California.
