Month: August 2023

By Todd Maiden of FreightWaves,

A hedge fund with an integral role in Yellow Corp.’s bankruptcy proceedings is pushing for shareholders to have a bigger say in the company’s upcoming liquidation.

MFN Partners, which amassed a more than 40% stake in the now-defunct less-than-truckload carrier during July, sent a letter to the company urging several changes.

Meet MFN Partners: the unknown hedge fund that quietly bought up 42% of YELL stock in the past few days pic.twitter.com/Z6A7aFB6bF

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 1, 2023

The firm said it has proposed a candidate to fill one of two board seats that were vacated the day Yellow filed for bankruptcy. The individual was not named. MFN said the candidate has “deep and relevant experience in structuring, implementing, and/or overseeing value-maximizing transactions in special situations to the Board.” It said it would put forth another candidate in the near future.

Yellow’s former chairman, Matt Doheny, left the board to assume duties as chief restructuring officer during the bankruptcy.

Boston-based MFN has also asked the company to consider an incentive program to retain key employees during the liquidation and said it called on the U.S. trustee overseeing the proceedings to form an official committee to protect shareholder interests.

In addition to its equity stake, MFN is one of Yellow’s bankruptcy lenders. The firm was recently named as one of two lenders that will provide the company a $142.5 million debtor-in-possession (DIP) financing package. Miami-based hedge fund Citadel is providing $100 million in financing, with MFN providing the remainder as well as a delayed draw of up to $70 million if needed.

The DIP deal presented by Citadel and MFN beat out an offer from Apollo Global Management (NYSE: APO), which was said to be the only viable offer available at the time of Yellow’s bankruptcy petition. Citadel entered the fray when it bought the $485 million term loan Apollo had with Yellow.

MFN is banking on a successful auction process as its lien position is junior to secured lenders and any proceeds left over after unsecured claims are met would be split among equity holders.

A key determinant will be the success the company has at marketing and selling a portfolio of roughly 170 terminals it owns. Former competitor Old Dominion Freight Line (NASDAQ: ODFL) set the floor for the value of those properties with a $1.5 billion stalking horse bid earlier this month.

Shareholders are hoping that Old Dominion’s offer will be topped by other suitors before or during the auction process. In addition to maximizing the proceeds on the real estate sales, shareholders are eager to see what the company’s fleet of trucks and trailers brings in. The company has valued those assets at approximately $900 million.

Yellow owes the U.S. Treasury $737 million from a controversial COVID-relief loan provided to the company in July 2020. The $400 million second tranche of the program, in which the Treasury holds first-lien position, was used to replace equipment. The bulk of the purchasing took place in 2021 and likely represents the latest models in Yellow’s fleet.

The Treasury also holds 30% of Yellow’s equity. It received those shares in addition to collateral at the time the loan was made.

Yellow listed secured debt of $1.2 billion in its Chapter 11 petition with total liabilities of $2.2 billion. Its unsecured claims include those from the pension funds, which have said in the past they are due billions from prior concessions made to the carrier to keep it afloat. In its recent quarterly filing, Yellow noted potential withdrawal liabilities from ceasing contributions to multiemployer pension plans in excess of $6.5 billion.

Counsel from Central States Pension Funds is chairing a recently formed unsecured creditor’s committee.

The rising mismatch between electric vehicle supply and demand is showing up at car dealerships as unsold EVs stack up. Dealerships tell Bussiness Insider that EV supply from automakers has been turned away as demand cools. 

Rising EV inventories and a Tesla-fueled price war could signal the beginnings of a pause in growth for the EV market. 

Scott Kunes, the chief operating officer of Kunes Auto and RV Group, which sells Detroit brands and Nissan and Mitsubishi in the Midwest, said: “We have turned away EV inventory.” 

Big Detroit brands are “asking us to make a large investment” in these EVs, Kunes added, “and we just want to see some return on that investment.”

A recent report from Cox Automotive shows automakers such as General Motors, Ford, Hyundai, and Toyota have more than 90 days’ worth of unsold EVs at dealerships in July. That’s about 92,000 EVs sitting at lots, more than three times the number compared with a year ago. New vehicle inventories are up about 74% from a year ago. 

“It’s not just that these vehicles are expensive — which they are. We’re talking about a much more nuanced lifestyle change,” said Sam Fiorani, the vice president of global vehicle forecasting at AutoForecast Solutions.

Fiorani said some lifestyle changes include 20-30-minute charges and range anxiety. He said, “It’s hard for the average customer to make that leap while spending an extra $10,000.” And not just the price but also the highest interest on new auto loans since 2009. 

Several dealers previously told Insider:

As a result, one East Coast Ford dealer told Insider they were only declining allocation of electric cars from the automaker. Another in the Midwest said Lightning orders were piling up uncompleted, leaving those customers with time to pick a different EV. One Hyundai dealer on the West Coast said they were also passing on EV-specific allocation, while another Hyundai dealer told Insider he anticipated having to turn away EVs soon.

EV demand might have plateaued while major automakers are still ramping up production. By 2026, the US market is expected to have 90 new EV models, according to AutoForecast Solutions. We suspect many brands will suffer with profitability. 

Authored by Ethan Brown via RealClear Wire,

On June 2, the U.S. Department of the Interior blocked oil and gas leasing for the next twenty years within a ten-mile radius of Chaco Canyon — the site of a Puebloan civilization in now-northern New Mexico dating back over a millennium. Despite some support from people within the Pueblo tribes and Navajo Nation which surround the land, the vast majority of Navajo leaders have opposed these drilling restrictions. It’s essential that climate advocates hear them out.

Between high-profile cases of extractive industries seizing and polluting Indigenous land and the fact that climate change exacerbates the many environmental and economic challenges facing Indigenous communities, the climate movement routinely finds common ground with Indigenous people. But recently, the two groups have found themselves at odds. The Yurok tribe recently succeeded in an effort to have four hydroelectric dams removed from the Klamath River in Northern California, where renewable energy production was disrupting salmon runs. A majority of Alaska Native communities supported the now-approved Willow drilling project in Alaska despite the project’s significant carbon emissions, harm to wildlife, and a viral TikTok movement that spurred a #StopWillow petition with 5.1 million signatures. This conflict over Chaco Canyon drilling could drive yet another wedge between climate zealots and Indigenous people.

Collaboration with these tribes is vital to the climate movement — Indigenous communities have centuries of knowledge regarding environmental stewardship, and often view nature as sacred. Their leadership can help ensure the most sensible and effective climate solutions get implemented. If climate advocates want Indigenous support, we have to listen, build trust, and support their goals too.

Navajos are no stranger to climate change. The American Southwest is experiencing its worst drought in 1,200 years, and peer-reviewed research in Science found human-caused climate change accounted for 47% of 2000-2018 drought severity. Navajos have been hit especially hard — Navajos use 8-10 gallons of water per day (about a tenth of the average American), and 30% of Navajos have no running water.

So when they express opposition to a drilling ban on their land, we can trust they’ve weighed the pros and cons. Within the Navajo Nation, 35.8% of households have incomes below the federal poverty threshold, and about 10% live without electricity. The Chaco Canyon drilling ban would strip an energy source from the Navajo Nation, and could cost Navajos an estimated $194 million over the next two decades.

Knowing these challenges, there could be opportunities for dialogue. Navajo land has an abundance of solar, wind, and geothermal resources. Rather than banning an energy source, the U.S. could prioritize offering technical or financial support for projects that allow Navajos to capitalize on clean energy, generate needed electricity, and even export to major cities to earn revenue. In 2020, 62% of newly installed renewables for power generation were cheaper than the cheapest fossil fuel alternative, so economically, clean energy might offer a win-win.

But if Navajo leaders are committed to drilling in Chaco Canyon, climate advocates ultimately shouldn’t dwell on it. While individual projects are important to debate, the big picture is far more important. No Indigenous community’s primary goal is fossil fuel extraction or hydroelectric dam quashing. Most communities’ key political mission is full nationhood and self-determination. In fact, it is written into Navajo law that the “ultimate goal of the Navajo Nation is self-determination.”

In addition to its moral and practical advantages, respecting Indigenous communities’ autonomy brings significant climate benefits. A 2019 Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services report found that while environmental decline is accelerating in many Indigenous communities, it has been “less severe” than in other parts of the world. Indigenous people steward about one fifth of the world’s tropical and subtropical forests, which sequester carbon and mitigate global temperature rise.

Colonization, on the other hand, drove land use changes that worsened climate change. In 1840, European colonizers started confiscating land from the Māori tribes in New Zealand to chop down their forests for timber, leading present-day New Zealand to have at least 60% fewer forests than before. In the late 1800s, French colonizers in North and West Africa banned locals from practicing subsistence farming, requiring them to chop down their forests for cotton plantations and other crops. Concurrently, British colonizers cut down most wildfire-resistant oak and deodar forests in India and replaced them with large-scale pine plantations for resin. Now, these dry pine needles are responsible for wildfires every summer.

And in the early 1900s, American colonizers brought nonnative drought-resistant grasses to Maui for livestock feed. These grasses spread across the island and exacerbated this month’s fires which were the deadliest in modern U.S. history.

Land use change, principally deforestation, contributes 12-20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. If Indigenous self-determination could right some of these ecological wrongs, we shouldn’t resist that.

Smartly, climate leaders are now looking to Indigenous communities for guidance, welcoming more than 300 members of the Indigenous Peoples Caucus to last year’s UN Climate Change Conference in Egypt. That collaboration only works if climate leaders listen to challenges facing Indigenous communities too. If the climate movement only spotlights Indigenous perspectives when it’s convenient, that defeats the purpose of listening to them in the first place.

Climate advocates should absolutely voice concerns over projects and seek win-win solutions, but strong-arming Indigenous communities in the name of climate action is a different story. Big picture, the climate movement is best served by embracing Indigenous peoples’ land management knowledge and supporting their efforts for self-determination.

Ethan Brown is a Writer and Commentator for Young Voices with a B.A. in Environmental Analysis & Policy from Boston University. He is the creator and host of The Sweaty Penguin, an award-winning comedy climate program presented by PBS/WNET’s national climate initiative “Peril and Promise.” Follow him on Twitter @ethanbrown5151

Diesel prices have been supercharged this summer, but as Bloomberg’s Jack Wittels warns, the moves seem out of kilter with the relatively mundane fundamental drivers, creating the risk of a correction. Then again, it could just be a repeat of last year when diesel prices went suborbital due to lack of refining capacity, and led to a cash bonanza for refiners.

Benchmark diesel futures in northwest Europe are currently worth about $35 more than ICE Brent, more than double the seasonal norm. This price difference — known as the diesel crack, or margin — has been on an almost solid bull-run since late May.

As Wittels notes, such a dramatic price move, up or down, is extremely rare; not even Covid triggered this kind of swing in Northwest Europe’s diesel margins. Excluding last year — when Russia began its invasion of Ukraine — there hasn’t been anything like it in at least a decade.

The forces behind this upward surge come more from the supply than the demand side. However, key factors, such as refinery issues and OPEC+ cutting output, essentially fall into the category of ‘normal problems’ when it comes to oil markets.

To be sure, this rally is beyond normal and it has taken place despite demand having “been weak, with OECD diesel usage falling 240k b/d y/y during Jan-Jun and China’s appetite likely unchanged y/y,” according to Bank of America, although one look at diesel and one would leave with just the opposite conclusion!

Still, Wittels cautions that the bullish narrative is starting to look stretched. Money managers reduced their net-long positions in ICE Gasoil futures, albeit from a high base. And after jumping above $40 a barrel, the ICE Gasoil crack has now come off to about $35.

By Rachel Premack of FreightWaves

Yellow, the third-largest trucking company in the less-than-truckload sector, filed for bankruptcy on Aug. 7. Now its former competitors are in a bidding war for its terminals and trucks.

The company’s collapse put some 30,000 employees out of work, including 22,000 Teamsters members. That’s an uncomfortable reality for those celebrating what appears to be a comeback for organized labor: the Teamsters’ ratification of a “lucrative” contract for its 340,000 members at UPS; the historic strike among Hollywood writers and actors; and hard-line leadership at the United Auto Workers who are seeking new labor agreements with a 40% pay increase. A 2022 Gallup survey found that U.S. approval of labor unions has hit its highest point since 1965.

For former Yellow employees, the much-ballyhooed comeback of unions, strikes and workers doesn’t quite apply. 

It may be satisfying to place all of the blame on Yellow’s shutdown on Teamsters, whose leader appeared to only begin negotiating with the company when it was likely too late to reverse the exodus of customers. 

However, trucking insiders and outsiders are increasingly pointing fingers at Yellow management or its hedge fund backers. 

No party is unimpeachable for Yellow’s shuttering. And with only two unionized trucking giants left, it’s unclear how the revival of union organizing and hard-line labor leadership will affect America’s $800 billion trucking industry and its 2 million truck drivers. 

“You have a highly financialized, debt-driven, short-term company that is then pushing for more concessions, setting up a paradigm in which we think, ‘OK, well, why couldn’t the Teamsters just save these 1,000 jobs to protect the other 22,000?’” Rana Foroohar, global business columnist and associate editor at the Financial Times, told FreightWaves. “From the Teamsters standpoint, in the current system, if you give an inch, they take a mile.”

Yellow said its restructuring program would save the company. Outsiders disagree.

Trucking experts told FreightWaves in recent interviews that Yellow did have a chance to survive. However, the company’s One Yellow plan, which aimed to merge its four disparate trucking networks, was probably not the answer to the long-suffering firm’s woes. 

Yellow acquired several large competitors in the LTL space during the 2000s, miring the company in significant debt ahead of the Great Recession. At the end of 2007, according to its annual filing, Yellow had more than $822 million in long-term debt. That grew to nearly $1.5 billion by the end of 2022. 

This massive liability had long prevented Yellow from investing in new equipment or technology, experts told FreightWaves. However, Yellow was adamant that the One Yellow restructuring would save the company. 

“Early in 2023, when no one rationally believed IBT leadership would seek to destroy Yellow, killing 22,000 of its own members’ jobs in the process, Yellow’s future into 2024 and beyond was not in question,” a Yellow  representative said in an emailed statement to FreightWaves.

One Yellow was supposed to cut costs and boost freight volumes for the trucking giant. Matthew Doheny, Yellow’s chief restructuring officer, said in an Aug. 7 document that Yellow anticipated that One Yellow “would grow EBITDA starting next year at $450 million to over $700 million within three years of implementation.” The plan did seem to please Yellow’s lenders; Doheny wrote that Yellow was beginning to refinance some of its lending requirements, which would have given more liquidity to the LTL carrier. A Yellow representative said the company had retained bankers to begin refinancing. 

Some weren’t convinced by the strategy. Satish Jindel, president of transportation research firm SJ Consulting Group Inc., told FreightWaves that no other LTL carrier has the super-regional model Yellow proposed, making the untested model dubious.

“Ultimately, the company needed to be smaller,” J. Bruce Chan, a transportation analyst at the investment bank Stifel, told FreightWaves. “There are some differences of opinion over how that should have happened. The plan for Yellow, vis-à-vis their change of operations, was to integrate four networks with distinct operations and ultimately distinct cultures. That’s really where they went wrong because integrating cultures is very challenging. In that way, they destroyed a lot of value. What could have been done potentially is to shut down certain parts of the network or to sell off other parts of the network in order to fund the operations [remaining].”

A Yellow representative said One Yellow “already accounted for parts of the network that made more sense to divest than integrate.” She added that the plan would have addressed the debt that resulted from these acquisitions, which occurred under different management and a different board of directors. 

“Arguments that prior acquisitions were a reason Yellow is now in bankruptcy has the entire situation backwards,” a Yellow representative said. “The IBT prevented Yellow from fixing these issues by refusing to negotiate — or to even meet to discuss — aspects of One Yellow on which IBT approval was necessary.”

Even if the integration plan was the best path for Yellow, the company did not solidify the necessary flexibilities in its 2019 labor agreement with Teamsters to make consolidating networks possible. A Yellow representative said these other changes could not be approved at that time because the plan was still in development.

“It was a bad bargaining decision to not create more flexibility with workers,” Aaron Peck — who is the CEO of Mothership, a freight booking platform that works with LTL companies — told FreightWaves.

Through its 2019 agreement, Yellow was able to complete consolidation in the Western U.S. in 2022. However, supplemental agreements in other parts of the country thwarted Yellow’s plans. A key sticking point for Teamsters was Yellow’s insistence that it would need to convert nearly 1,000 Yellow linehaul truck drivers into a “utility driver” role. Former Yellow employees previously told FreightWaves that the utility driver role would not only be a worse kind of job, but offer less pay, which a Yellow representative disputed.

“IBT leadership made mountains out of molehills: in total, 1,000 out of 6,000 line haul drivers would have been impacted,” a Yellow representative said. “Keep in mind that 400 Holland drivers were already performing ‘utility’ work, so the company was really only asking 600 additional drivers in the network to handle utility work. This is a practice widely used within the industry and drivers would have the chance to exercise their seniority to ‘bid’ on these jobs. As a result, the work would likely have gone to the most junior drivers who did not have seniority.”

Yellow previously offered the equivalent of an $11 hourly wage increase in pay and benefits if Teamsters accepted the company’s One Yellow plan. A Yellow representative said this was not their best and final offer and would have negotiated further, and said that they were not asking for concessions from Teamsters. Teamsters previously said they had already given $5 billion in concessions to Yellow since 2009.

‘Too little, too late’

Chan said Teamsters’ refusal to negotiate on a proposed change of operations was ultimately the “trigger point” for Yellow’s bankruptcy, but it wasn’t the fundamental reason. Yellow’s debt prevented the company from investing into technology or equipment. Partially as a result of that, Yellow struggled with pricing and service levels. The company’s revenue per shipment was typically much lower than its peers, including other unionized ones.

The Yellow representative said that the company would “still be in business today and for years to come” had Teamsters negotiated. 

On July 18, following months of the Teamsters’ refusal to negotiate and the company’s previous request to defer payments, Yellow ultimately missed a required contribution to its pension and health care funds. Teamsters shortly after issued a notice of a strike as early as the following week.

Doheny of Yellow wrote in the Aug. 7 document that Yellow warned Teamsters that a strike notice would “irreparably harm” the company. And it did; on the Monday before the strike notice, Doheny wrote that Yellow hauled around 40,000 shipments. By Friday, Yellow counted “near zero” shipments.

Ten hours before the threatened strike, Doheny said Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien offered to secure a 30-day extension on Yellow’s health and pension obligations. That avoided a strike, but Doheny wrote this was “too little, too late.” The loss of customers sparked a sort of bank run on Yellow, Peck said. Yellow’s customers had mostly fled and the lack of incoming freight bills would push Yellow to the edge.

“The Union’s threat of a strike was the final straw that sealed Yellow’s fate,” Doheny wrote. “At bottom, after the catastrophic harm he had already deliberately caused Yellow, after his belligerence, after his months long refusal to engage Yellow’s management in a good faith effort to save the jobs of Yellow’s 30,000 employees, including its 22,000 Teamsters, Mr. O’Brien’s last second outreach amounted to little more than meaningless showmanship, and was an insult to all of Yellow’s employees who have now lost their jobs and to all who fought so hard for so long to save Yellow.”

Doheny’s sentiment was reflected in an Aug. 7 press release from Yellow that announced the company’s shutdown. The company said Teamsters forced Yellow into bankruptcy. 

“Yellow considered all angles but in the end determined that business was lost and not recoverable,” a Yellow representative said in a statement to FreightWaves. 

In an Aug. 7 statement, the Teamsters hit back at Yellow’s assertion that the union led to the downfall of the company.

“Teamster families sacrificed billions of dollars in wages, benefits, and retirement security to rescue Yellow,” O’Brien said in the Aug. 7 release. “The company blew through a $700 million government bailout. But Yellow’s dysfunctional, greedy C-suite failed to take responsibility for squandering all that cash. They still don’t.”

A Yellow representative said the $700 million loan, which was issued in 2020 as part of the CARES Act, could only be spent on pension, health and welfare payments for union employees and modernizing Yellow’s fleet of tractors and trailers. A June Congressional report concluded that this loan was a mistake in part due to Yellow’s “precarious financial position at the time of the loan.”

Teamsters ultimately sacrificed some 22,000 union jobs, and it was apparently because the union no longer trusted management 

If Teamsters viewed Yellow management as consistently shoddy, that would be one reason why the union may have been OK with letting the company shutter. 

“They lost confidence in the management,” Jindel told FreightWaves. “I would rather take a chance with other companies where I have some trust in what they’re doing. 

“If I am in a car and I’m with you and you’re heading off a cliff, it doesn’t matter how much money you give me to ride in the car,” Jindel added. “I am going to get out of the car.” 

A Yellow representative said Teamsters would have “no rational basis to believe that about management.”

“(T)he current Yellow management team, commencing with Darren Hawkins’ promotion to CEO in 2018, had been working on One Yellow for nearly 5 years and was fully ready to implement the final stage — the network optimization — when that was stopped by the IBT leadership,” a Yellow representative said.

Since the Great Recession, Yellow workers have struggled to receive similar pay and benefits as other unionized truck drivers. Most stinging to these employees may have been the underfunded pensions. Former Yellow employees previously told FreightWaves they had to scrap their retirement plans as a result. Some drivers estimated that they would earn $1,000 less per month in retirement. 

“We have a lot of people who can’t retire now,” Pete Boese, a South Bend-based truck driver who previously worked at Yellow, told FreightWaves in July. “The pension is a pretty big deal.”  

Labor experts speculated that Teamsters figured Yellow would never be in the financial position to ever deliver these benefits back to employees. The union likely wouldn’t want to have a massive chunk of its members with significantly worse pay or benefits — or for potential new union shops to see such disparities in Teamsters’ portfolio and to pass on organizing with them. 

“You want UPS to be your model,” Steven Greenhouse, a former longtime labor reporter at The New York Times, told FreightWaves. “You wouldn’t want a very modest contract with Yellow to be your model.”

Greenhouse added that a rational union labor may agree to modest pay bumps to keep a company alive. However, Greenhouse said Teamsters likely believed that Yellow’s chances of survival were weak.

Other labor experts agreed with this assessment. 

“The union and anybody in that position has to make a calculation whether or not you have confidence in management,” Marick Masters, a business professor at Wayne State University in Detroit, told FreightWaves. “Yellow had been granted loans to help it along, but nothing seemed to have worked.”

Such decisions may be prudent for a union that is looking to build its base and maintain high standards among its members. However, they’re less appealing when you’re on the other side of things — namely, any of the 30,000 people who used to work at Yellow. 

“It’s the individual workers who are losing their jobs,” Cornell University’s Kate Bronfenbrenner, who is the institution’s director of labor education research, told FreightWaves. “Many of them might say half a paycheck is better than no paycheck.”

A Yellow representative said Teamsters “sacrificed” Yellow as a warning shot to other firms. 

“Yellow would have been one of the greatest business turnaround success stories if IBT leadership did not maliciously stop it, harming their own members in the process,” a Yellow representative said. “Instead, the Teamsters chose to destroy Yellow to serve as a warning to other companies to get better future deals. Yellow and the 22K employees IBT leadership were supposed to represent were sacrificed.”

Unions are becoming bold in a way we haven’t seen in decades. It’s unclear how that will affect truck drivers.

It’s curious whether the shutdown of Yellow is an exception to the rule or if even more union trucking fleets will shut down as the leaders of labor organizations become more militant. 

One reason why we probably won’t see many more shutdowns as massive as Yellow is, well, there aren’t many large unionized carriers left. ABF and TForce are the two largest, nationwide trucking companies with unionized workforces. They represent a collective 16,400 Teamsters members. Both companies saw Teamsters negotiations this year conclude without much hubbub. 

“Yellow management and the financiers who pull the strings continue to blame union contracts for their demise,” O’Brien said in an Aug. 7 statement. “The fact is, Teamster-represented companies like ABF and TForce Freight are not only able to fairly compensate workers, they are also wildly profitable. The Teamsters successfully and continuously negotiates strong contracts to preserve the integrity of our members’ work and ensure they are justly compensated.”

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A Yellow representative said the closure of the trucking giant has left many employees unlikely to find new union work.  

“Had IBT leadership been willing to negotiate, employees would still have jobs, seniority, health care, and more money in their pockets,” the representative said. “Instead, they’re looking for new work in an industry where unionized company market share was just cut in half and the prospect of more than a handful of former Yellow employees securing new union jobs is unrealistic.”

As the number of union companies wears away, that leaves those still remaining at risk, Jindel said. Union companies have, by nature, less flexible workforces than their nonunion competitors. Even if those nonunion companies pay the same or more as their union counterparts, flexible work rules allows non-union fleets to reallocate workers where it suits them. That’s a key advantage for those firms, albeit one that union supporters say leads to worse quality of life for workers.  

Some labor experts believe that Teamsters is scheming to unionize more trucking fleets. They believe it’s unlikely that Teamsters would have allowed Yellow to shutter if there wasn’t something else in the works to replace those members. As Chan pointed out, even amid the ongoing freight recession, employee truck drivers are still demanding — and winning — better conditions and pay.

But organizing labor unions in the United States, whether or not it’s in the trucking industry, is challenging. Even if the Teamsters union believes that it will be able to add a new trucking fleet to its membership, the laws of the U.S. are stacked against it. 

“Corporations fight harder, more vigorously, more ferociously against unions and unionization efforts than companies in any other industrial nation — whether it’s Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Chile, France, Germany or Britain,” Greenhouse said. “In those countries, it’s not all out war when workers seek to unionize. With Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s and Apple, it’s all out war.”

So far, the companies that have bid so far on Yellow’s assets are not unionized. That may change. Or it may ultimately indicate where the trucking industry is flourishing.

Zelensky’s office has claimed Pope Francis has become an “instrument of Russian propaganda” due to his comments this week given by video feed to Russian Catholics at a church in St. Petersburg. 

On Tuesday we featured Francis’ comments and the controversy they unleashed. The Vatican later sought to clarify that the pontiff intended to merely “encourage young people to preserve and promote what is positive in Russia’s great cultural and spiritual heritage, and certainly not to exalt imperialistic logics and governmental personalities, cited to indicate certain historical periods of reference.”

Mikhail Podoliak, a top aide to Ukraine’s President Vladimir Zelensky, has charged the Francis is playing into Putin’s hands with what is a “destructive discourse for contemporary humanism” – according to a fresh interview given Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published Wednesday.

The pope had praised great leaders of Russia’s past, extolling the young the remember these positive examples, and invoked figures like Tsar Peter I and Catherine the Great.

Podoliak claimed that Pope Francis parroted Kremlin talking points which are by design intended to motivate Russian forces which have invade Ukraine. “The Pope exalts them and [President of Russia Vladimir] Putin uses them to eliminate our identity,” he asserted.

According to more from the Ukraine presidential adviser:

“If we evaluate the Pope’s phrases with an open mind, we’ll see that they are an unconditional encouragement of aggressive imperialism, a praise for the bloody idea of the ‘Russian world,’ which implies brutal destruction of freedoms and the lifestyles of others,” Podoliak said.

…“It seems that the Pontiff, once again, has served as an instrument of Russian propaganda.”

On Tuesday, when the clip of Pope Francis’ words given virtually went viral, Kremlin praised the remarks, saying it is “very good that the Pontiff knows Russian history, which is deeply rooted.”

The Pope has of late tried to mediate peace in Ukraine, but to no avail. Kiev is likely now more distrustful than ever, also after Francis heaped criticism on arms makers from Western countries for fueling the bloodshed in comments from months ago.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell froze up on Wednesday in the second recent incident involving cognition.

After being asked about running for reelection in 2026, the 81-year-old McConnell mumbled something, stared off into the distance, and then couldn’t recover despite an aide repeating the question. The aide then ended the event.

Watch:

BREAKING NEWS: Sen. Mitch McConnell appearing to have another scary episode in the media gaggle in Covington today. Aides had to step in to help him out and repeat questions. He was eventually lead away. We’ll have the full video on @WLWT pic.twitter.com/q9ex5MHxLV

— Hannah Thomas (@HannahPThomas) August 30, 2023

Four weeks ago, McConnell stopped speaking during a weekly GOP leadership news conference and was also escorted away. 

Flag: McConnell just stopped abruptly during his opening statement during the gop leadership presser and appeared to be unable to restart talking. He then stepped away and walked away with Barrasso: pic.twitter.com/f1kFUjggzm

— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) July 26, 2023

McConnell’s first freeze came days after he tripped and fell at the Washington DC airport.

Houston, we have a problem…

The average age in Congress has increased sharply over the past several decades. Whereas in the 1980s, only about 5 percent of Congress was over 70, now almost 25 percent is.https://t.co/cGpuf0YBIZ pic.twitter.com/g4R62LkKND

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) July 27, 2023

Authored by Pete McGinnis via RealClear Wire,

Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex. It’s rather like the old “military industrial complex,” which was shorthand for the military, private companies, and academia working together to achieve U.S. battlefield dominance, with the R&D funded by the government that buys the final product.

But the censorship industrial complex builds algorithms, not bombers. The players aren’t Raytheon and Boeing, but social media companies, tech startups, and universities and their institutes. The foes to be dominated are American citizens whose opinions diverge from government narratives on issues ranging from COVID-19 responses to electoral fraud to transgenderism.

When first exposed a few months ago, many of the actors and their media defenders perversely claimed that they, as private entities, were acting out of concern for “democracy” and exercising their own First Amendment rights.

However, the records and correspondence of an advisory committee to an obscure government agency tell a different story. The Functional Government Initiative (FGI) has obtained through a public records request documents of the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The committee was composed of academics and tech company officials working with government personnel in a much closer relationship than either they or the media want to admit. Several advisory committee members who appear throughout the documents as quasi-federal actors are among those loudly protesting that they were private actors when censoring lawful American speech (e.g., Kate Starbird, Vijaya Gadde, Alex Stamos).

But the advisory committee members met often and worked so closely with their government handlers that the federal liaison to the committee regularly offered members his personal cell phone and even reminded them to use the committee’s Slack channel. Your average concerned citizen doesn’t have a Homeland Security bureaucrat on speed dial.

What were they working on? CISA’s “Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-information” (MDM) subcommittee discussed Orwellian “social listening” and “monitoring,” and considered the government’s best censorship “success metrics.” Who was to be censored? CISA was formed in response to misinformation campaigns from foreign actors, but it evolved toward domestic “threats.” Meeting notes record that Suzanne Spaulding of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said they shouldn’t “solely focus on addressing foreign threats … [but] to emphasize that domestic threats remain and while attribution is sometimes unclear, CISA should be sensitive to domestic distinctions, but cannot focus too heavily on such limitations.” So CISA should combat “high-volume disinformation purveyors before the purveyor is attributed to a domestic or foreign threat” and not worry so much about First Amendment niceties.

More telling is the group’s attitude toward what it called “mal-information” – typically information that is true, but contrary to the preferred narratives of the censor. Dr. Starbird wrote in an email, “Unfortunately current public discourse (in part a result of information operations) seems to accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms …” Therein lies a dilemma for the censors, as Starbird wrote: “So, do we bend into a pretzel to counter bad faith efforts to undermine CISA’s mission? Or do we put down roots and own the ground that says this tactic is part of the suite of techniques used to undermine democracy?”

It is chilling that there is no consideration of whether the information is true or of the public’s right to know it. “Democracy” in this formulation is whatever maintains the government’s narrative.

Accordingly, the group discussed recommendations for countering “dangerously inaccurate health advice.” It contemplated the roles of the FBI and Homeland Security in addressing “domestic threats,” and a CISA staffer felt the need to remind the subcommittee “of CISA’s limitations in countering politically charged narratives.”

CISA couldn’t censor all the people the advisors wanted. And it could face the same outrage that greeted President Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board, led by singing censor Nina Jankowicz. Americans didn’t want that body deciding what they could say, and Biden shut it down within three weeks. CISA’s advisers were acutely aware their work could be conflated with that of the DGB, and even considered changing the name of the MDM subcommittee. Dr. Starbird noted in an email that she’d “removed ‘monitoring’ from just about every place where it appeared” and made “other defensive word changes/deletions.” Similarly, Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde “cautioned the group against pursuing any social listening recommendations” for the time being.

The group also sought cover from outside and inside the government. They spent an inordinate amount of time talking about “socializing” the committee and its work – something DGB apparently hadn’t done. And like a partisan campaign, they looked for natural allies. Meeting notes record that they sought to “identify a point of contact from a progressive civil rights and civil liberties angle to recruit as a [subject matter expert].”

A government committee that seeks partisan allies, obfuscates its purpose, and can’t even be honest about the nature of its members’ participation is going to sort out online truth for Americans? Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex.