This is another in a series of stories I've written for Random Lenghts News about local environmental justice issues that have parallels elsewhere around the country. At this point, there has been a very clear divergence between Long Beach, attempting to avoid confrontation with the trucking industry, and thus increasingly selling out to them, and Los Angeles, which has, after many years of pressure, decided to stand up.
Ports Part Paths On Clean Truck Plans
Long Beach Caves To Trucking Industry,
LA Seeks Change In Federal Law
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
When the ports of Los Angeles (POLA) and Long Beach (POLB) announced their joint Clean Air Action Plan (CAAP) three years ago this month, they pledged to work closely together to clean up the air at both ports, with strong messages of support from the mayors of both cities. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa struck an optimistic note, focusing on economic growth, while Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster struck a tougher tone, saying, "The costs of these [environmental] impacts are already in the system, but the wrong people are paying them,"
But when they finally got around to approving programs to deal trucks-following months of consultations with stakeholder groups-the two port plans diverged sharply, despite rhetoric to the contrary...and it was the LA plan that most aggressively sought to clean up the air, and shift the costs to where they belonged by requiring port truckers to be employees of truck companies that would bear the costs, while POLB did not.
One reason for the difference was the threat of lawsuits from the American Trucking Association (ATA), but ATA sued Long Beach anyway, along with POLA. Now the ports have diverged even more dramatically. On October 19, Long Beach caught everyone by surprise-especially community members and groups involved in crafting the initial plan-by settling the lawsuit out of court. Those involved as stakeholders were outraged by POLB's secret backroom settlement, and lack of accountability to those it loudly pledged to protect. "The Port of Long Beach violated the public trust and sold out the citizens of Long Beach by approving a worthless settlement agreement with the American Trucking Association in their lawsuit against the Los Angeles ports' clean trucks programs," said David Pettit, a senior attorney of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). who had worked with both ports on the lawsuit.
The story in this diary picks up on two aspects of my diary yesterday, "Renormalizing The Wal-Mart World". First, it's snapshot of one of the low-wage spinoffs from the world that Wal-Mart has helped shape. And second, it's directly about one of the three themes discussed within the diary, "Part 3: Dignity-The Ultimate Cost Of Low Prices". Republished from the current edition of Random Lengths News.
The Long Haul: Organizing Port Truckers
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
"I will die tomorrow if today we can form a union. I will be a happy man," said Oscar Ruiz, Teamster organizer for the ports of LA and Long Beach. It's spoken with all the intensity of a man who has lived the life of hardship of those he is struggling to organize.
Ruiz has a life story common to many port truckers. "I'm an immigrant born in Guatemala. I came to this country when I was around 12 years old," he said. "I went to junior high school and high school." It was more education than some port drivers, but not uncommon.
"I learned to drive a truck from my brother. He was a port driver. I became a port driver when I was 18."
That was 1986. Six years after the 1980 Motor Carrier Act changed port trucking forever. The act was supposed to be a progressive piece of legislation, as explained in a recent report from Demos (a progressive public policy research and advocacy organization) titled "Port Trucking Down The Low Road: A Sad Story of Deregulation," by David Bensman of Rutgers University.
"The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 was hailed by liberals and the business community alike as a triumph of policy reform," Bensman wrote. "Senator Kennedy and Ralph Nader led the reformers who charged that trucking regulation meant high rates for consumers, and monopoly profits for businesses. Large shippers lobbied Congress for an end to the rate setting and route planning which limited competition and drove up the cost of freight transport. Civil Rights organizations organizations argued that deregulation would lower barriers that impeded African Americans from gaining a just share of decent trucking jobs." Yet, Bensman wrote, "Despite these high hopes, deregulation has wrecked the drayage industry."
Ruiz came to work in that wreckage, and stayed there 14 years, through four wildcat strikes, working for dozens of different companies, always looking for one that would treat him with dignity and respect. "I never found it," Ruiz said. Blackballed for his activism, he found a union job offport, but always tried to get assignments that let him pass through the port vicinity, and stay in touch with things. Three years ago, he became a port organizer.
The Port of Los Angeles (POLA) is the nation's largest container port, followed closely by its next-door neighbor, the Port of Long Beach (POLB). Both ports have taken a considerable hit in terms of container traffic, and long-term projections have been revised downward--which is only to be expected. But note that the downward revision in the chart below (for POLA) shows no repetition of the sharp downturn we've been through:
Okay, I can maybe understand that they want to project a smooth curve, just for conceptual simplicity's sake. Besides, it would be rather presumptuous to assume to know when another recession might hit. But at the very least doesn't it seem prudent to at least present a range of future projections--at the very least a high, low and medium growth scenario? Would it be too much to ask that the port's planners--working for the largest container port in the nation, remember--do some serious homework looking at various factors that could impact future growth rates and come up with a range of possibilities? Can't they even learn that much?
Well, surprisingly, the answer is "no" when it comes to the port's main business, but their cruise ship consultants can generate some alternative scenarios (charts on the flip). But only just barely, despite the fact that a recent report discusses a rather wide range of potential impacts on future levels of traffic. All in all, it appears that POLA is still in a state of denial about the degree of uncertainty that the future holds, especially in light of more than $6 trillion in lost housing assets over the past two years--losses that are largely due to the bursting of the housing bubble, which is very unlikely to re-inflate any time soon.
In the latest edition of Random Lengths News I wrote the cover story about a nearly decade-long struggle to gain a measure of community control and recompense for the blighting of nearby communities by the commercial activity of Port of Los Angeles. The driving force for community efforts has been the China Shipping lawsuit, and the settlement that resulted from it. As part of that settlement, a mitigation fund was established. But the spending from it has not been governed by a sound overarching policy framework with a long-range vision of what needs to be accomplished. And so the original litigants are pushing forward with a plan to lay the empirical groundwork on which that long-range planning could be done. Of course, it would also involve further documenting the Port's ongoing negative impacts on the communities, which would mean more money for future projects.
In short, this is a story about the struggle to bring together community power, legal arguments, and policy expertise in a cutting-edge venture to bring about a rational community-based planning process. There are obvious parallels to what I wrote about in my previous diary about local planning for global warming, which is just one reason that this local story has implications for all of us nationwide--as well as for the future of our planet.
Dude, Where's the Mitigation?
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
On October 23, 2002, the California Second District Court of Appeal stunned the Port of Los Angeles (POLA) by issuing a stay, halting construction on the China Shipping terminal. Seven days later it completely reversed a lower court ruling, and rejected POLA's environmental review process used to approve the terminal construction. After repeated failed attempts to appeal, POLA finally entered into agreement, the "amended stipulated judgment" (ASJ) on June 14, 2004, which called for $50 million in specific payments, $20 million for aesthetic mitigation projects. With Added container fees for excess throughput, which POLA never expected to pay, this now totals $71.8 million, $30.8 million for aesthetic mitigation.
All this came about because of the hard work and dedication of a handful of local activists, who were initially laughed off, ridiculed, and ignored by POLA. Only this newspaper gave them a wider public microphone, covered and explained their struggle, and called POLA's complacent self-satisfaction into question before the Appeals Court delivered its rude awakening.
Two weekends ago I wrote a couple of diaries about the free market as a failed policy and failed idea, as well as Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine. My point was not simply to attack the notion of the free market, but to point out the necessity of doing so as part of a larger struggle for political realignment. Such a struggle requires more than discrediting old ideas, however. It requires replacing them--either with new ideas, with the rehabilitation of old ideas, or with some combination of the two.
At my day job, I write a lot about the Port of Los Angeles and its impact on the surrounding communities. It's an excellent example for what I'm talking about. The port facilitates the massive importation of consumer goods into the US, which not only involves significant exploitation of workers and the environment abroad, it also takes a terrible toll on the local communities surrounding the ports (Los Angeles and Long Beach) and the regions inland that are heavily impacted by port-related traffic. Indeed, more people in California die from the pollution generated by goods movement than die from homicides each year. These aren't industrial accidents I'm talking about. They are simply the "normal" cost of doing business. Except, of course, the businesses involved do not pay the costs of doing business. The public does.
The story on the jump is one I wrote for Random Lengths News that ended up getting supplanted by another. But it's well suited as an example of a phenomena that is all-pervasive in todays global economy, and it points to how we can start reframing that economy in terms that show what's really going on, and who's really paying the costs of someone else's fabulous wealth.
