harmonicminer

I told the story before of how certain “community activist” organizations want to make it essentially impossible for individual truckers (which include many “minorities” who scrimped to buy their own trucks) to operate at the port of Long Beach, by imposing unrealistic emissions goals, under the guise of protecting asthmatics.

Now, it seems that a judge has ruled against the individual truckers, as represented by an independent trucker’s organization, the American Trucking Association, by upholding new, much more restrictive emissions goals.

Port of Los Angeles: Judge upholds clean truck provision

The industry group that challenged Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa‘s clean truck program at the Port of Los Angeles said Friday that it would appeal a federal court ruling that upheld the initiative in its entirety.

Thursday’s decision, issued by U.S. District Judge Christina Snyder in Los Angeles upheld the harbor department’s right to require concession agreements for each truck that carries cargo through the port. Those agreements are a cornerstone of the mayor’s clean-air initiative to replace older diesel trucks at the port with newer, cleaner-burning ones.

Read this next bit carefully.  It is key to understanding what’s behind this.

Snyder upheld one of the most controversial components of Villaraigosa’s clean-port initiative, the requirement that any truck driver carrying goods in and out of the harbor must be employed by a trucking company. That provision was aggressively sought by the Teamsters union and was viewed as a way of making it easier for truck drivers to organize.

Change to Win, a labor coalition that backed the provision, contributed $500,000 to a voter-approved telephone tax measure crafted by Villaraigosa in 2008. That contribution arrived less than three months before the concession agreements were approved by the mayor’s appointees on the harbor commission.

In other words, the Teamster’s union doesn’t like private truckers competing with them.  Democrat politicians are beholden to the unions.  So while leftist community groups who also supported this initiative continue to bash presumed-to-be-evil corporations, they are about to join the unions and Democrat politicians in demanding that truckers at the harbor be employed by one, because that provides the deep pockets from which concessions can be demanded, and gives a target for the unions to organize against.  Unions have little success organizing private entrepreneurs who are self-employed, after all.

The judge also said the employer requirements would ensure that truck drivers work for companies that have enough money to maintain a new fleet of cleaner-fuel trucks.

Yep.  And what do you want to bet that when the lefty community groups finally drive out the private truckers in favor of some corporate trucking firm (which the unions can control), that same constellation of the unions, Democrat politicians and lefty community groups will then bash the corporation for all sorts of imagined infractions and misdeeds.

In the meantime, of course, those private truckers are likely to be looking for work elsewhere, since their trucks won’t meet the new standards.

Everybody wins here.  The community organizers can feel all virtuous at driving out the “dirty” trucks (despite the fact that Souther California’s air is cleaner than ever already), the unions get control of another slice of the industry, and the politicians get another corporation to regulate and tax.

Everyone wins except the small trucker, that is, who can basically go pound sand.

UPDATE:  and these are often the same people who resist new Walmarts, claiming their great love for the small businesses they supposedly replace.  Oh, I forgot:  Walmart is not a union shop.  If it was, there wouldn’t be a mom and pop store left in the USA, most likely, between the community activists and the unions falling all over themselves to drive out the mom and pops, who obviously couldn’t compete.

The previous post in this series is here.

Thomas Sowell has been writing a multipart series based on his book titled “Dismantling America.” I consider it to be required reading for anyone wanting to understand what’s been happening in and with our government, not just lately, but for several decades.  Here is the fifth video in a series introducing the book.

Once again, Charles Krauthammer connects the dots.   While the Washington Post is as reliably liberal/left as the New York Times, I don’t think this editorial would have appeared in “the newspaper of record.”  Kudos to the Post for publishing it.  Now, if only it required its staff to read it.

Liberalism under siege is an ugly sight indeed. Just yesterday it was all hope and change and returning power to the people. But the people have proved so disappointing. Their recalcitrance has, in only 19 months, turned the predicted 40-year liberal ascendancy (James Carville) into a full retreat. Ah, the people, the little people, the small-town people, the “bitter” people, as Barack Obama in an unguarded moment once memorably called them, clinging “to guns or religion or” — this part is less remembered — “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

That’s a polite way of saying: clinging to bigotry. And promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

— Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

— Disgust and alarm with the federal government’s unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

— Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

— Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become “ungovernable,” last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.

What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card. When the Tea Party arose, a spontaneous, leaderless and perfectly natural (and traditionally American) reaction to the vast expansion of government intrinsic to the president’s proudly proclaimed transformational agenda, the liberal commentariat cast it as a mob of angry white yahoos disguising their antipathy to a black president by cleverly speaking in economic terms.

Then came Arizona and S.B. 1070. It seems impossible for the left to believe that people of good will could hold that: (a) illegal immigration should be illegal, (b) the federal government should not hold border enforcement hostage to comprehensive reform, i.e., amnesty, (c) every country has the right to determine the composition of its immigrant population.

As for Proposition 8, is it so hard to see why people might believe that a single judge overturning the will of 7 million voters is an affront to democracy? And that seeing merit in retaining the structure of the most ancient and fundamental of all social institutions is something other than an alleged hatred of gays — particularly since the opposite-gender requirement has characterized virtually every society in all the millennia until just a few years ago?

And now the mosque near Ground Zero. The intelligentsia is near unanimous that the only possible grounds for opposition is bigotry toward Muslims. This smug attribution of bigotry to two-thirds of the population hinges on the insistence on a complete lack of connection between Islam and radical Islam, a proposition that dovetails perfectly with the Obama administration’s pretense that we are at war with nothing more than “violent extremists” of inscrutable motive and indiscernible belief. Those who reject this as both ridiculous and politically correct (an admitted redundancy) are declared Islamophobes, the ad hominem du jour.

It is a measure of the corruption of liberal thought and the collapse of its self-confidence that, finding itself so widely repudiated, it resorts reflexively to the cheapest race-baiting (in a colorful variety of forms). Indeed, how can one reason with a nation of pitchfork-wielding mobs brimming with “antipathy toward people who aren’t like them” — blacks, Hispanics, gays and Muslims — a nation that is, as Michelle Obama once put it succinctly, “just downright mean”?

The Democrats are going to get beaten badly in November. Not just because the economy is ailing. And not just because Obama over-read his mandate in governing too far left. But because a comeuppance is due the arrogant elites whose undisguised contempt for the great unwashed prevents them from conceding a modicum of serious thought to those who dare oppose them.

via Power Line More at the link.

We missed an important moment at the Miss Universe pageant on Saturday night. The outgoing Miss Universe made a little political statement on her final catwalk that was visible to Venezuelans but probably no one else, holding up an obsolete seven star pre-Chavez era flag. She did it to signal distress in her country, and nowhere is that move evident than in Venezuela’s violent crime. This week the news came out that Caracas is the most violent city in the world, a distinction it holds over Kabul, Baghdad, Sao Paulo and Ciudad Juarez.