Teamsters initiate campaign to get DOT chief Mary Peters fired over Mexico truck plan
MARY PETERS
The Trucker Staff
2/7/2008
WASHINGTON — The National Brotherhood of Teamsters has launched a nationwide grassroots campaign to get U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters removed from office.
The Teamsters want the action taken because they allege that Peters “unlawfully” opened the border to unsafe trucks from Mexico.
“It’s a disgrace that Mary Peters is still in office,” Teamsters General President Jim Hoffa said. “She has broken the law and defied the will of the American people by exposing them to dangerous trucks from Mexico.”
The Senate voted 75 to 23 and the House voted 411 to 3 to keep the border closed to Mexican trucks.
The legislation became law on Dec. 26, 2007, as part of the Omnibus budget bill.
U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., and other congressmen said the bill was drafted to stop the cross-border program, while FMCSA contends the provision’s language doesn’t say that.
In fact, Dorgan said continuing the program despite the legislation was “both arrogant and wrong.”
The DOT contends the law only covers programs that the DOT might want to establish in the future, not ongoing ones such as the cross-border program. The language was in the $555 billion bill to fund the Iraq war and to finance the federal government through September.
In response to the Teamsters’ “Fire Mary Peters” campaign, FMCSA spokesman Brian Turmail said, “it’s the kind of thing people do when they don’t have the facts on their side and keep losing in court.”
According to a news release on the Teamsters’ Web site, the campaign to remove Peters includes:
• A Web site, www.FireMaryPeters.com, with blog, downloadable “Fire Mary Peters” windshield signs, recommended actions and an e-mail component urging people to ask their elected representatives to find Peters in contempt of Congress
• Posters and floor graphics now up in the Navy Yard Metro stop near the Department of Transportation (DOT) in Washington
• An anonymous hotline set up to report additional transgressions by Peters
• A leafleting campaign at the Metro stop, where DOT employees will be handed cards asking them to call the hotline to report other laws that Peters has broken
• “Fire Mary Peters -- She Breaks the Law” bumper stickers mailed to thousands of Teamsters and others
• “Fire Mary Peters” radio commercials to air on WTOP, a radio station in the Washington, D.C. area, and nationally on the Air America radio network, and
• “Fire Mary Peters” Web ads on “key political sites” in Washington and Arizona, Peters’ home state.
The Teamsters “will argue in court on Feb. 12 that Peters broke federal laws aimed at ensuring American motorists aren’t endangered by allowing Mexican trucks on U.S. highways,” said the Teamsters release.
The case will be heard in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
The Teamsters said the union is supported by CONATRAM, the federation of Mexican truck drivers. “They fear it will devastate their industry, just as U.S. agribusiness wiped out Mexican farms after the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement,” the Teamsters release stated.
The “Fire Mary Peters” campaign has a special focus in Peters’ home state of Arizona, where letters and bumper stickers have been mailed to thousands of Teamsters.