Thread: Bush team raises dangers on highways

Dave Zweifel: Bush team raises dangers on highways
By Dave Zweifel
Mar 12, 2007

Apparently, the mix of trucks and passenger cars on our highways isn't already dangerous enough.


While semis and cars keep smashing into each other with alarming regularity from here on the South Beltline Highway to the interstates on the edges of our biggest cities, the Bush administration has now seen fit to open the doors to even more truck traffic.

By the end of April, Mexican truck companies, which have been limited to a 25-mile commercial zone in the Southwest, will be free to travel from Mexico throughout the United States and back.

The Teamsters Union, understandably, is livid over the U.S. Transportation Department's decision to lift the restrictions on Mexican trucks.

Mexican drivers, according to the Wall Street Journal, are paid about a third to 40 percent less than are U.S. drivers who belong to the Teamsters. The newspaper predicted that the Bush administration's decision will be a boon for U.S. business with production lines in Mexico. Allowing the Mexican trucks means those businesses won't have to shift cargoes to American trucks at the border. Coupled with the lower pay that Mexican drivers earn, that will save those companies hundreds of millions.

Thus, yet another way U.S. policy has made it easier and more profitable for American companies to switch relatively high-paid American jobs to cheaper foreign lands, all in the name of "free trade." It's free all right, except for the American worker.

Jim Hoffa, president of the Teamsters, accused President Bush of being "willing to risk our national security by giving unfettered access to America's transportation infrastructure to foreign companies and their government sponsors."

His real pique, though, is the threat to U.S. wages. American truckers average about $40,000 a year in income. Turning the roughly $198 billion worth of goods the United States imports from Mexico over to Mexican drivers could result in a big hurt for Hoffa's union truckers.

Just as bad, though, is that the decision means yet more trucks on U.S. highways, trucks that as recently as two years ago were declared by the Transportation Department to be substandard.

Instead of addressing the growing crisis on our national highways, the federal transportation people are taking steps that will only make this volatile mix of trucks and cars worse.

There is no doubt in my mind that Bush is a traitor.He has violated the oath he took and has shown us that his real allegiance is to Mexico and the buisness that profit from this action.We Americans must fight back and take back our country.Abraham Lincoln said a nation divided cannot stand.