Brave CA Truckers’ Blockade Protests Dems’ Shutdown of 70,000 Necessary Truckers’ Business
Leftists in California have succeeded in pushing through a law that essentially makes private or contractor trucking businesses illegal in California. Yes, you read that right. In the midst of a steadily worsening food and supply chain crisis, California just put 70,000 truckers out of work. Fortunately, a group of brave truckers is standing up against this authoritarian insanity by blockading a major California seaport—yesterday was the third straight day. These Americans should be getting the attention and praise that the Canadian truckers did a few months ago. We need more patriots like them.
Reuters via Yahoo! News yesterday:
“Independent truckers protesting California's new ‘gig worker’ law blockaded California's No. 3 seaport for the third straight day on Friday, stranding cargo at the state's top agricultural trade hub and adding to U.S. supply chain headaches.
Truck gates at all four Port of Oakland marine terminals remain closed to truck traffic on Friday. Oakland International Container Terminal (OICT), which handles about 70% of port cargo, restarted some work on ships, a port spokesperson said.
Oakland port truckers began actions against the law formally known as AB5 on Monday. They picketed and parked tractor-trailers to choke terminal gate access, grinding trade through the eighth-busiest U.S. container seaport to a virtual halt on Wednesday.
Idling the 2,100 trucks that ferry goods at the Northern California seaport each day is hindering exports of fresh beef and pork.”
What Reuters and Yahoo did not explain, because they are leftist hack propaganda machines, is that the truckers are doing this because tens of thousands of them have just been put out of jobs by the new law essentially banning small trucking businesses. Some 70,000 truckers were put out of work by the law. If you haven’t realized by now that the Democrats are trying to create a food crisis, pay attention. They shut down a massive amount of necessary supply chain for ideology. You don’t do that on accident.
And if you think that this only affects California, think again. With a massive percentage of California’s truckers out of business, the supply chain shortages we are seeing are likely to devolve quickly into a crisis. This is a problem for New Yorkers and Arizonans and Californians alike. If your grocery shelves start to look emptier than Joe Biden‘s head you may well have Democrat elitists in California to thank.
And the Supreme Court was its usual cowardly self, refusing to take up the California Trucking Association lawsuit.
Truth Based Media reported back on July 5:
“The California Truckers Association is warning that 70,000 independent truck owner-operators will be taken off the roads of California later this week as a draconian new law, “AB-5” kicks in: (emphasis ours)
In addition to the direct impact on California’s 70,000 owner-operators who have seven days to cease long-standing independent businesses, the impact of taking tens of thousands of truck drivers off the road will have devastating repercussions on an already fragile supply chain, increasing costs and worsening runaway inflation.
The new law, passed and signed by Democrats, essentially outlaws independent contractors from operating transport trucks in the state of California. When it goes into effect later this week — after the US Supreme Court refused to intervene last week — California will be hit with a ‘truckpocalypse’ shutdown of transportation capacity.
While some transportation companies maintain full-time employees to operate long haul rigs, many drivers are ‘owner-operators’ who own their own trucks and who pick up contract jobs from the hundreds of shipping and transport companies that operate in California. These owner-operators pay their own taxes, buy their own health insurance and cover their own fuel costs. California Democrats, however, think that independent freedom for truckers should be criminalized, since they want all drivers to be union workers in corrupt union organizations that Democrats routinely use for money laundering operations. . .
Not only do transport trucks carry food and consumer goods in and out of California, they routinely distribute ocean freight containers from California ports to inland destinations. The containers move from ships to trucks, and those trucks take them to retail distribution hubs or domestic manufacturers for offloading.
Under California’s new AB5 law, the logistics challenge of receiving good carried by road are going to be a nightmare. Added to this is the fact that Union Pacific railroad is already slashing the number of rail cars it carries for existing customers (such as CF Industries, a fertilizer manufacturer), which means railroads have no excess capacity to pick up the slack from trucking.
America’s logistics infrastructure is crumbling. And with diesel engine oil additives in short supply and expected to run out in about 7 weeks, a huge question looms over America: How will food, coal, spare parts and consumer goods get delivered anywhere?”
How indeed? The report may be a little melodramatic in its wording, but don’t get too complacent. I previously reported on how around 100 food facilities had been partially or completely destroyed since Biden became president, including fires that killed millions of poultry. You may not see the effects as a massive catastrophe this week or even next month, but don’t be too sanguine about next year or this winter.
I don’t say this simply to be negative. I say this because I want to celebrate the necessary courage of the truckers who are standing up against this tyranny in their blockade protest. In the short term they may be blocking some supplies from getting in, but in the long-term they are fighting for the very lives of Americans. They are fighting to stop an induced famine from occurring in what should be one of the wealthiest nations in the world. There are very few of us who are willing to take big risks to stand up to tyranny, and these truckers deserve all of our admiration and support.