Every spring there's talk of strikes and shutdowns. The rumours spread through the trucking message boards like wildfire. And then nothing happens. Just like nothing will happen with this one.

 

That's exactly what I was thinking.

All talk, no action. If we could ever get really organized and all on the same page, we could shut this country down, but it will never happen.

If I really thought anybody else would join me, I'd pop the valves on this sumbitch and walk away, but nobody is going to join me. It's every driver for him/herself anymore.

 

Except it's not. It's opening the border for mexican drivers who carry international freight.

Sounds like a GREAT idea!:roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll: :roll:

Only to the uninformed.

Except that's not what they're doing

Incorrect, every company and driver must pass strict standards to be able to cross. This includes being able to speak english and understand english directions.

All 300 of them? There are currently a measly 300 authorized to cross the border.

Wrong wrong wrong. 300, not 17,000 are currently authorized. Everything else is plain wrong

Complete and utter bullshit. Every mexican truck will go through a scanner, I can guarantee that. They must comply to all safety regulations before they can even think of crossing the border.

They have to comply with all the rules we do, and more.

How do they have lower overhead? They must have insurance with an american company. They are not illegal aliens.

nope

NAFTA is an extremely successful treaty. If anyone says otherwise, they're either a fool or ignorant of the FACTS.


As a trucker that comes into the states legally and does not break any laws, I can tell you guys what this person has been posting for the past few weeks is complete bullshit. They can bring in international freight, and american truck drivers can go into mexico with international freight. They are approved on a one-on-one basis(drivers AND companies). They must have a legal liscence, american based insurance, and can only touch freight either coming from or going to America.

This article is nothing but hate-mongering. If you changed everything from "mexican" to "canadian", what would happen then? The mexicans can and will do exactly what the Canadians do. I don't see everyone getting upset that Canadians are crossing the border?

 

I'll do it. I'll shut down for those days.



Now wouild anybody like to sit in the dentist chair during those same days??? Root canal anyone? I can hear the drill now... :shock:

 

You can write the author Frosty Wooldridge directly at [email protected]

In the meantime, I will contact him myself to verify his sources.

I think what happens to us when we drive is that we know little else about the world around us except the truckstops, the TV rooms, the loading docks, and C&W music on the Sirius. This doesn't really give you a perspective on what's happening on the little streets far away from the interstate.

There is a RACE WAR brewing along the southern border of the country, and it might be wise to prop open those itchy eyeballs and look around.

"Gang mayhem grips LA"

Quote from article below:
'All of the signs are there that a racial war is going to explode in this city,' says Khalid Shah, director of Stop the Violence. Memories of the 1992 Rodney King riots, which claimed 53 lives, remain fresh, but Shah believes that worse is ahead. 'It will be 10 times bigger than what happened after King. You are looking at an event which could not only paralyse an entire city but an entire state,' he warns.


TEXT:

A bloody conflict between Hispanic and black gangs is spreading across Los Angeles. Hundreds are dying as whole districts face the threat of ethnic cleansing. Paul Harris reports from the epicentre of America's new urban warfare for THE GUARDIAN UNLIMITED (U.K.).

Sunday March 18, 2007
The Observer


Father Greg Boyle keeps a grim count of the young gang members he has buried. Number 151 was Jonathan Hurtado, 18 - fresh out of jail. Now the kindly, bearded Jesuit mourns him. 'The day he got out I found him a job. He never missed a day. He was doing really well,' Boyle says.
But Hurtado made a mistake: he went back to his old neighbourhood in east Los Angeles. While sitting in a park, Hurtado was approached by a man on a bike who said to him: 'Hey, homie, what's up?' He then shot Hurtado four times. 'You can't come back. Not even for a visit,' says Boyle, who has worked for two decades against LA's gang culture.

Boyle's Los Angeles, where daily slaughter is a grim reality, is a world away from the glamorous Hollywood hills, Malibu beaches and Sunset Strip - the celebrity-drenched city that David Beckham and Posh Spice will soon make their home.

Boyle's Los Angeles is where an estimated 120,000 gang members across five counties battle over turf, pride and drugs. It is a city of violence as a new race war escalates between new Hispanic gangs and older black groups, each trying to ethnically cleanse the other. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who has referred to his city as 'the gang capital of America', has launched a crackdown on the new threat.

The latest front is the tiny strip of turf known as Harbor Gateway, a nest of streets between malls and office blocks. It was here, just before Christmas, that Cheryl Green, a 14-year-old fond of junk food and television, died. At school she had just written a poem beginning: 'I am black and beautiful. I wonder how I shall live in the future.' She never found out. As she stood on a corner talking with friends, two Hispanic members of the neighbourhood's notorious 204th Street gang walked up and opened fire, killing Green and wounding three others. They were targeted because they were black. Traditionally the outside view of LA gangs has been of black youths like the Bloods and the Crips and their countless subsets. It focused on the streets of Compton and South-Central and the culture of gangsta rap. But Hispanic gangs are in the ascendant, spreading across America.

They have names such as Mara Salvatrucha, La Mirada Locos and Barrio Van Nuys, and now the 204th Street gang - who made it clear that they will kill innocent girls to force black families off their turf.

Last year there were 269 gang-related killings in LA. Gang-related crime leaped 15.7 per cent last year, as most other types of crime fell. Hate crimes against black people have surged. With a rapidly growing Hispanic population, LA's gang culture is shifting. It means that being black in the wrong neighbourhood can get you killed.

Green's murder was the latest in a line of killings by the 204th Street gang. In 1997, 11-year-old Marquis Wilbert was killed on his bike. In 2001, Robert Hightower, 19, was killed. In 2003, Eric Butler, 39, was shot dead trying to protect his daughter from being harassed. There are streets that blacks have been forbidden to cross.

Green's death brought the gang war between 'brown and black' to public awareness. Next week a summit will be held called the Black and Brown Strategy Meeting which aims to head off a race war. 'All of the signs are there that a racial war is going to explode in this city,' says Khalid Shah, director of Stop the Violence, one of the groups organising the meeting. Memories of the 1992 Rodney King riots, which claimed 53 lives, remain fresh, but Shah believes that worse is ahead. 'It will be 10 times bigger than what happened after King. You are looking at an event which could not only paralyse an entire city but an entire state,' he warns.

Green's death sparked Villaraigosa's crackdown. The police took the unprecedented step of publishing a list of the 11 worst gangs, including 204th Street. They vowed to go after them with police, FBI agents and injunctions to prevent members meeting. An extra 50 police were assigned to anti-gang duties in San Fernando Valley. In south LA, a team of 120 detectives and 10 FBI agents has been set up. An extra 18 officers have been put into Harbor Gateway. But Angelenos have seen it all before. The city's history is littered with anti-gang initiatives, and what the new effort shows is just how widespread the gangs have become. They have spread into the San Fernando Valley, an area previously famed for suburban prosperity. Last year one area of the north Valley saw a 160 per cent rise in gang crime.

Publishing the 'hit list' could backfire. In the warped gang sub-culture, being on the list is a badge of pride. The lesson of the 204th Street gang seems apt. They number only a few dozen members in a tiny strip of city that was open fields half a century ago, but killing blacks has propelled them from obscurity to enviable notoriety.

'Putting out a list was a bad idea. Groups that don't make the list will want to be on it. They don't exactly think rationally,' said Alex Alonso, a gang historian who has testified in more than 100 court cases.

Yet there is hope. Alfonso 'Chino' Visuet, 23, was sucked into the gang life as a teenager. There was the lure of excitement and riches, the push of a difficult home life. 'People who join a gang are always running away from something. They flee to the gang,' Visuet says.

Visuet is not running any more. He works for Father Boyle's Homeboy Industries (homeboy-industries.org), a project that helps people leave gang life. It provides jobs, an education, pays to have gang tattoos removed and gives counselling. It aims to remove the circumstances that lead to crime: poverty, abuse and unemployment. It is staffed almost entirely by former gang members and has spun off a bakery, a silk-screen printers and a restaurant. 'You have to address the lethal absence of hope. I have never seen a hopeful person join a gang,' Boyle says.

It worked for Visuet. He starts college this autumn and wants to be a probation officer. 'I was on the edge of doing something that would ruin my life, either by doing violence or having it done to me. That's over now,' he says.

For the moment it is organisations like Homeboy Industries that pick up the slack. Father Boyle has a catchphrase: 'Nothing stops a bullet like a job.' But that can be a hard message to get across in a city whose political classes see gangs as primarily a police issue. That is not the way it is on the street.

Visuet despairs at the conflict. 'A brown gang member now just sees a black gang member. What they don't see is how that person comes from the same place they do. They might have a mother who is an alcoholic as well or a father who beats on them. They have the same story,' he says.

Boyle and others have mixed feelings about the crackdown. The road to LA's problems is littered with failed plans and policing, and incompetence. Over the past decade the main anti-gang scheme, LA Bridges, has spent more than $100m yet keeps no record of whether those it helps leave gang life or return to it.

Then there is political scheming. The list of 11 gangs, critics say, was drawn up deliberately to present a 'balance' by covering the whole city. Politicians use the presence of a high-profile gang to act tough on law and order and police chiefs use it as a way of upping manpower. 'It is a ridiculous list,' says Alonso.

LA is a city of two worlds - Hollywood and gangs. On a two-lane highway that roars through the middle of Harbor Gateway, a few hundred yards from where Cheryl Green was gunned down, there is a billboard for a new TV show called Sons of Hollywood. It shows three rich young men against a backdrop of palm trees. It claims to be a 'reality' show, but for most of the impoverished, racially torn citizens it is nothing more than a fantasy.

[/b]

 

I've read some things about Boyle. The guy is a saint, make no mistake.

However, what does the gang activity in L.A. have to do with a racist call to action for truckers to blockade state capitals. Once again, I can understand the concern and I think if someone could pull something like this off, the politicians would certainly have to listen. But the message is lost in the hateful diatribe and he ends up as just another racist with nothing to say.

 

Let's not confuse drug related gang activity with a "race war." There is a huge difference, and most gangs fall along the lines of color.

Shebear, I think you are doing us a disservice by thinking all of us are uninformed about the world. We all have access to news on radio, TV, and sattelite broadcasting, not to mention the Internet. There is no shortage of information. Only a shortage of interest.

If you think our industry is going to be less regulated and allow substandard drivers, no matter what the skin color, you're wrong. There are constant efforts to tighten up already existing regs, and the government watchdogs are not going to let go of those efforts.

Anyone who wants to drive a commercial vehicle in the US will have to conform to our laws, just as anyone wishing to drive a commercial vehicle in any other country will have to conform to their laws. Doesn't matter their country of origin.

 

What a load of sh*t, the American tuck driver can't agree on anything let alone a national strike/work stoppage.
Don't make me freekin laugh. :lol:

 

If she thinks that the first article she posted is the truth, she is the one who is mis-informed of the facts.

 

I like to distance myself from people who are obviously racist, and want to believe whatever they believe.

What sources? He doesn't state any whatsoever in his article. His article is pure opinion, nothing more. Take it at that.