Marc E. Elias
This is nuts.👇
Supply chain issues could lead to shortages in paper used for everything from ballots to “I voted” stickers for years to come.
Commenter
Kim Palismo
Due to paper mills closing & others converting to make packaging instead of fine papers during pandemic, there's a paper shortage. Worst I've seen in my 38 yrs in print industry. What took 2 weeks now takes 4 - 12 depending on the product.
The two major things responsible for this, are consolidation in the industry, and offshoring production.... been going on for years and years. Sound familiar?
Many fine paper, used for high end reproduction, doesn't even exist today.
@corlin I'm absolutely stunned by those numbers. How is this not a monopoly? Why haven't they been hit with anti-trust suits? This is so messed up.
Ever since Robert Bork completely guttered anti-trust laws. By changing the meaning, of harm. These buy outs, shut downs and mergers were all perfectly legal.
No this was not the intention of the original laws. This was done by one man, and the foundation he funded. All anti-trust cases since are extremely hard to prove, and most don't come to court.
It's not just broken, the law is totally unenforceable today.
@Jezibaba
They promoted a deranged conspiracist named Robert Bork – Nixon's solicitor general – who advanced a truly bizarre theory of antitrust.
Bork was a conspiracist, whose book "The Antitrust Paradox" maintained the historically unsupportable nonsense that what Sherman, Clayton and the other legislators behind America's antitrust laws really wanted was to block "harmful monopolies" and leave the "efficient monopolies" to grow and rule, as benign kings:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/09/rest-in-piss-robert-bork/#harmful-dominance
@corlin watching the oil companies take over the legislatures in Louisiana and Alaska none of this should surprise me. There's no way our corporate overlords would have allowed that kind of attack on their agenda survive.
To chime in here: A lot of paper companies were also timberland and lumber companies. They've merged into a couple holdings firms, or completely restrategized due to market impacts. Over time, some (larger) timber companies restrategized to real estate. St Joe Paper Company here in FL is an example. They're now St Joe Land Company. Holding the timberland for "conservation" is a better investment for them until the real estate became enticing to developers.
@agitated_trash oh, the tangled web we weave. So many fingers in the pie. Conservation. *scoffs
@Jezibaba
Yep.
Financialization hit the paper industry very hard. In the gogo 80s America went from having approximately 1,500 papermills, down to about 45 in 10 years. Now we have three conglomerate that own all the paper mills.
All Thanks to Wall Street hedge funds.