President Biden has a serious deadline on Monday —and not many people are talking about it.
U.S. railroad labor talks have hit a dead end —115,000 workers may go on strike unless the Biden Administration intervenes. Biden must appoint a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) before 12:01 AM on July 18th or risk a potential rail shutdown.
A White House official told Reuters the administration “is going through the standard process that has been used in the past when considering a PEB.”
No further comment was provided.
The unions have worked without a contract since July 1, 2019 —so they are rightfully miffed.
Failure to act and disarm the dispute will put even more strain on an already tenuous supply chain. Additionally, the ongoing gas crisis complicates nearly all types of transportation.
Hey —who’s in charge of this stuff, anyway? Oh, that’s right: Pete Buttigieg.
So, where is he?
Former Mayor Pete is currently focused on making roads a lot less racist than they are today; he’s launching a $1 billion dollar initiative to build racial equity into America’s roads.
“There is racism physically built into some of our highways,” Buttigieg said, while discussing the Reconnecting Communities program that was funded by the infrastructure boondoggle.
“Transportation can connect us to jobs, services and loved ones, but we’ve also seen countless cases around the country where a piece of infrastructure cuts off a neighborhood or a community because of how it was built,” Buttigieg says.
“This is a forward-looking vision. Our focus isn’t about assigning blame. It isn’t about getting caught up in guilt. It’s about fixing a problem. It’s about mending what has been broken, especially when the damage was done with taxpayer dollars.”
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis calls the effort “woke-ification” of federal policy.
“There’s trees they’re putting in, they’re saying that highways are racially discriminatory, I don’t know how a road can be that,” DeSantis says.
“Why the mayor of a Midwestern college town was somehow qualified to be transportation secretary remains a mystery that may never be solved,” The Washington Examiner posits. “While Buttigieg is not to blame for many of the transportation problems facing the country (Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Interior did far more to cause high gas prices, for example), he has not offered any real solutions either.”
This administration is certainly short on those.
