June 23, 2008 (LPAC)--Around the time gasoline passed $4 gallon, LaRouche PAC received reports of truckers abandoning their rigs by the side of the road. Some left their rigs at gas stations, with the keys still in the ignition. One trucker confessed, “I feel like putting a bullet in someone every time I fuel up…Three more weeks, and I’m finished.”
Larry Daniels, the Founder and President of the American Independent Truckers Association (AITA), called the abandonment of vehicles “an act of irresponsible desperation. You are walking away from everything you own…When they walk away, there is nothing they are being relieved of.” In the wake of the recent phase of speculation-driven hyperinflation, starting on January 1, 2008, there has been an average of 750 trucking companies going out of business every week. The hardest hit are independent, owner operators, who own their own rigs, contract their own business, and buy their own gas. With diesel soaring at $4.64 p/gallon, and interstate drivers paying $900-$1,000 each time they fuel up, the system of transporting basic goods is breaking down fast. Some in the industry are hoping to quell their own desperation by sharing the costs of fuel with increasingly desperate distributors and consumers, who are the same people whose food, alone, has traveled an average of 1,500 miles to reach them.
Without implementing LaRouche’s call for federal action, we are literally moments away from Weimar, Germany. A Missouri interstate trucker had to cancel a recent meeting with an LPAC representative because he was caught up trying to renegotiate a contract. The price of gas had increased so much from the time the contract was signed to the date of delivery, that the distributor could no longer afford the shipment and tried to back out of the deal.
In California, LPAC organizers reported that people on the streets were shocked that there aren’t fuel riots in the U.S., unlike parts of Europe, South East Asia, and Africa, where protests foreshadow much greater chaos. But we’re at a breaking point. Daniels recalled how truckers have been able to adapt to the economic downturn in the past, but it has reached a point with hyperinflation where they no longer make a living. U.S. truckers are now paying upwards of $0.70 per mile in excess fuel costs, with cross-country truckers paying upwards of $5,300 per week on fuel. As Daniels said, “They can’t do it. They can’t send money home to mama to pay rent. All he can do is hope...There is that eternal optimistic hope, but with the political environment in Washington, it won’t happen.”
It should be obvious to anyone who is still thinking, that the failure to implement LaRouche’s HBPA at the federal level has been the key factor in promoting the still-accelerating hyperinflationary crash, now threatening trucking, consumption, and basic supply lines. The solutions are plain to those who know we can not “adapt” to a disintegrating economy: Pass LaRouche’s HBPA; eradicate the speculators and reestablish the grounds for a productive economy with a two-tier credit system; and the U.S. must approach Russia, China, and India with a proposal to reestablish a fixed exchange rate system. That is how we proceed, if we wish to lower fuel prices to Bush’s IQ.
