Daniel Greenfield October 25, 2021 @ Sultan Knish Blog
After
a long cross-country flight, I made it out of LAX and into an Uber. I
wasn’t in the mood to talk, but the driver was. And hearing that I was a
journalist, he wanted to tell me a story. I’ve heard a lot of stories
over the years, but this may have been the most important one I let go.
He
hadn’t always been driving an Uber at 11:30 at night. Not all that long
ago he used to have his own business with 7 trucks before he was
bankrupted by California’s insane regulations.
I
listened, but didn’t pay enough attention. The impact of California’s
Democrat legislative supermajority on truckers was just another data
point alongside what was happening to freelancers of all kinds and a lot
of small businesses. Stories like this were everywhere and there was
little interest in them even in conservative circles outside the
tarnished golden state.
Back then we still lived in a world where
you could walk into a thousand stores with fully stocked shelves.
People ordered from Amazon and expected its burgeoning last mile
delivery service to make products magically appear overnight. Just in
time inventory systems were more efficient and any day now products
would be delivered by self-driving cars or aerial drones.
2020 and 2021 have given this Big Tech fantasy world and the rest of us a good kicking.
The
massive supply chain mess that’s leaving stores empty and orders
unfulfilled doesn’t have a single point of failure, but dozens of them.
China’s
energy shortages,
the overhyped predictive powers of Big Data, the fragility of the
global economy, fuel costs, and welfare state worker shortages are all
players. But California’s truck bans are a key link in the great failure
chain.
While I was riding home that night, California trucking
companies were going bankrupt at a rapid rate. Few outside the industry
were paying attention or understood what that might mean.
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.
Two years ago, Governor Newsom signed the
Democrat supermajority's Assembly Bill 5 into law. While AB5 was billed
as a crackdown on Uber and Lyft, forcing the companies to treat l
freelance contractors as employees, the gig economy companies pushed
Proposition 22 so that they were the only ones exempt from the law. (A
Democrat judge has since illegally blocked the approved ballot measure
while falsely claiming that it was unconstitutional.)
AB5 however
was less about Uber than it was about outlawing freelance employees in
order to force them into unions. The union power grab inconvenienced
Uber and Lyft, but crushed freelance workers in a variety of fields
including journalism. One of the fields was trucking.
Over the
summer, the California Trucking Association actually went to the Supreme
Court to fight AB5 and allow owners and operators to use independent
contractors. The CTA listed 70,000 owner operators. In the years since
AB5, Ubers have become scarcer and more expensive, which is what the law
was actually designed to do, but the consequences to the trucking
industry have been far worse albeit invisible to most people until now.
While truckers are still protected from AB5, many in the industry are
not willing to bet their future on SCOTUS.
AB5 was not only the
assault on the trucking industry by California Democrats who were
aggressively trying to unionize the industry and to impose environmental
regulations on it.
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.
Jared and California certainly showed the world something.
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.
That was part of the plan.
California Democrats
and their environmentalist special interests had set out to crush the
state’s ports and trucking industry. Had everything gone as planned,
this would have been a slow and gradual process. Costs would have crept
up and deliveries would have fallen off without an immediate
catastrophic impact. But then the pandemic and its consequences arrived.
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.
Biden called for ports to operate around the clock, but
that’s not going to magically bring back thousands of trucks or
truckers. California Democrats still haven’t changed their regulations
and without that, there’s no incentive or even legal structure that
would allow trucks to operate.
The resulting disaster is likely
to accelerate the ongoing shift of shipping from California ports.
Democrats imposed their green shakedown not only on truckers, but on
shipping. With companies moving to Texas, Houston was already becoming a
more appealing alternative. It’s now at capacity as everyone is looking
for alternatives to the California economic disaster area.
But
much of our imports and exports still depend on the California
bottleneck that begins with Communist China and ends in Communist
California. The red-to-red pipeline has savaged our economy and wrecked
imports and exports. Newsom’s survival and the Dem legislative
supermajority which passes more extreme leftist regulations every
session means that things will only get worse. A radical party that
actively seeks to dismantle the economy is in power in Sacramento and
its regulations have the ability to hold our entire economy hostage.
What happens in California unfortunately doesn’t stay there unless it’s waiting on a ship.
Tags:
California,
Democrats,
recent
About Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield is a journalist investigating Islamic terrorism and
the Left. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz
Freedom Center
