Is $4.06 a gallon Fair?
Right now Chico and Chicago have one thing in common; both have $4 gallon gasoline. There are experts predicting that it will reach $5 by summer. If it keeps going up, the Republicans won't have to worry about the White House or Congress, because there will be such a groundswell of resentment about this that most people will strike out against who they see as causing this mess.
ohotos by Gary D. Brune copuright (c) 2008
California has historical precedent for such a reaction. Starting in the late 1800s, Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins, four men who became known in California as the Big Four, set up the Southern Pacific Railroad, the first major thoroughfare to run the length of our state. They took advantage of this effective monopoly to control business, charging whatever the traffic would bare to anyone who wanted to ship goods across the state.
If the farmer or businessman could not pay the confiscatory shipping costs, their goods rotted in the field or gathered dust in their facilities. These egregious practices led directly to the 1910 reform movement in California, whereby regulation demanded by the people stopped the strangulation by the Big Four and lead to California's golden age.
While Stanford University and the Mark Hopkins Hotel still remain as reminders of this time, what is more important is what this portends for the future. The people of the United States will not take the egregious gasoline prices forever and will demand reform. They will have no choice.
When it costs more than $40 to fill the 8.7 gallon tank of a Smart Car, we will see the amount of traffic Director John ford illustrated in The Grapes of Wrath. As it is, poor people like me cannot afford to buy the vehicles currently available. But when more well to do people can't afford to fuel up their cars to go to work, then all hell will break out.
It was nearly 100 years ago that the reform movement broke out in California and across the country. Some people never learn, do they?
