Environmentalists in California planned the destruction of the trucking industry in an attempt to force them to go electric as impractical or impossible as that would have been. Unions wanted to force truckers into unions.
What is happening now in California ports is in part due to the collapse of the California trucking industry. It is what the Left wanted but they planned it to take place slowly, but then the pandemic hit and their destructive plan exploded too soon.
The one-party state officials can do anything they want, and what they want is extreme far-Left policies, no matter the consequences.
There are many reasons for the supply chain issues from China’s energy shortages to the global economic woes, fuel costs, worker shortages, but another important issue concerns truckers.
Biden said he would take care of it during his town hall on Thursday night and still hasn’t done a thing. He won’t do a thing. He never does anything and it’s unlikely he even understands what is going on.
THE STORY
Journalist Daniel Greenfield writes, “2019 was described as a “bloodbath” for the trucking industry with 640 trucking companies across the country filing for bankruptcy in just the first half of the year. Thousands of truck drivers were left unemployed. Many went into the expanding last mile delivery business, some as contractors for Amazon. But California truckers and businesses had their own special woes.”
“It’s a result of AB5 signed into law by Governor Newsom. It forced freelance contractors to be treated as employees who had to join a union. The gig economy pushed Proposition 22 to exempt them. But since then, a Democrat judge blocked it falsely claiming it was unconstitutional, Greenfield explained.
The law crushed industries like journalism and including the trucking industry.
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Last year, the California Air Resources Board issued a press release boasting that it had taken a “bold step to reduce truck pollution”. The bold step required switching to electric trucks.
“We are showing the world that we can move goods, grow our economy and finally dump dirty diesel,” Jared Blumenfeld, California’s Secretary for Environmental Protection, sneered.
Greenfiled writes, “While the ultimate truck ban was scheduled for 2045, an initial phase-in of 5% to 9% begins in 2024. Last year, California’s DMV began refusing to register thousands of trucks with an estimated 100,000 trucks under threat. With “green” trucks costing $70,000 more, this was a non-starter for already troubled independent owner-operators and even larger companies.”
California Democrats and their environmentalist special interests had set out to crush the state’s ports and trucking industry. It just happened too quickly.
“Business at California’s ports dropped during the pandemic. The loss of traffic convinced trucking companies and owner operators who were already battered by AB5 and the green truck ban that it was better to just downsize or pull out entirely. And when port activity rebounded, there was a huge hole in the delivery infrastructure that backed up the entire system,” Greenfield explained.
California leftists will not change their regulations, even under this collapse. These leftists put ideology and irresponsible use of power before all else.
It’s going to continue getting worse.
Florida offered their ports, but that would send barges through the Panama Canal, which we stupidly gave away.
“But much of our imports and exports still depend on the California bottleneck that begins with Communist China and ends in Communist California,” says Greenfield.
The commie-to-commie, China to California, pipeline was always doomed. Commies won’t stop until we live in a wasteland. They can’t learn from their failures because all that matters is the ideology and they believe in it.
The radicals in Sacramento have us all hostage.
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