disinformation | cars & conspiracies

Welcome to Disinformation | July 06, 2003

Abuse Your Illusions - the follow-up to Everything You Know Is Wrong & You Are Being Lied To is in the store and every bit as essential. The long-awaited Disinformation DVD is in too!
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U.S. Weighs Military Intervention in Liberia
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What The European Papers Say
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Violence Mars Nigerian Strikes
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Religion in the News: June 2003
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cars & conspiracies
by Preston Peet (ptpeet@cs.com) - October 18, 2000

Racing up the deserted late-night beachfront highway, with the T-tops removed, in my old hometown in Florida, in what had been my big 4.9 Litre Turbo Trans Am, I felt alive.

I had exploded the original Turbo-charged engine, and replaced it with a 500 cubic-inch Cadillac engine. It was fast, it was fun, and I can still remember the pit in my stomach when the cop who pulled me over that night pointed out the black, greasy spooge coating my license plate, rendering it completely illegible.

"That's spewing out of my tailpipe?" I thought disgustedly. "Yuck."

"Given the spectacular advance in automobile technology over the century, there is just no reason, other than for pure criminality, why have we been forced to live and die with big, gas-guzzling, polluting automobiles," wrote Russell Mokhiber, and Robert Weissman in Corp-Focus (July 25th, 2000), their online corporation-watching newsletter They were reviewing a book by Jack Doyle, titled Taken For A Ride: Detroit's Big Three and the Politics of Pollution (Four Walls, Eight Windows Press, 2000). After reading the book, they found that it was easy to believe that "the automobile companies are criminal outlaws."

Beginning in 1916, "a coalition of rubber, trucking, steel, and paving companies, but most of all the automobile industry, worked government to transform America," writes researcher Mark Ledbetter.

GM at the fore, this coalition worked to destroy the electric trolley transportation systems used by those people who couldn't afford �Eor didn't want �Ecar.

After failing to convince the trolley companies to voluntarily switch to their fossil-fuel burning, rubber-tires rolling, steel-made buses, the coalition recruited "small-time bus operator" Roy Fitzgerald to buy up the smaller city trolley lines, and replace them with his buses, as the National City Lines. Most US electric trolley lines were torn up, paved over, and forgotten as national Good Roads were built for cars, and more polluting, less efficient buses became the normal public transportation.

In 1949, GM, Firestone, Standard Oil, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks were all found guilty of violating anti-trusts laws, in a conspiracy to kill off the trolleys. They were all fined US$5,000, and the various corporate heads were fined US$1 (one dollar) each. This wasn't even a slap on the wrist, much less a real message to cease their evil ways.

Mokhiber and Weissman report that in 1969, Los Angeles City Attorney, and clean air advocate Kenneth Hahn, protesting the closure of a federal grand jury investigation into the automobile industry for having conspired to stifle clean air technology, wrote these words: "The Presidents of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler should be brought to trial right here in Los Angeles. The big manufacturers all conspired. If one wouldn't put on the devices, the others wouldn't either." Federal prosecutors tried to bring indictments, but the auto makers hired a corporate fix-it guy, who got them off without a scratch.

One Web site for fix-it-yourself car-owners reports that the auto industry has had clean-air technology since 1963, with the US introduction of Positive Crankcase Ventilation, (PCV). Alongside PCV came the barrage of "drive to freedom" propaganda promoted by the US auto industry, whose profits reached US$390 Billion in 1997 alone.

"Have car will travel" - the American dream, has become nothing more than stuck-in-congestion, building more roads to relieve congestion, leading to more traffic as there are more roads. Hence, more congestion, every bit of it spewing out carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and oxides of nitrogen, cluttering up our breathing air, ringing the inner-cities with a demarcation line of smog.

If somehow we could show all the greedheads and leadfoots their lungs, coated like my license plate was, perhaps that might give us some breathing space, to solve the other problems we have to solve without worrying if we'll simply have enough air.

The Conspiracy Revisited Rebutted
Louis Guilbault disagrees strongly Van Wilkins essay stating that there "was no conspiracy" in the killing off of the trolley, stating that indeed "it was a big, nasty conspiracy" by the Big Three auto manufacturers.

GM & The Red Cars
This essay by Stanley Martin Schwarz purports to convince the reader that GM (and other auto companies) were not actually involved in a conspiracy to do away with clean, electric public transportation: the conspiracy is a myth. Hmmm.

Taken For A Ride
This article by Robert Weissman and Russell Mokhiber (July 25th, 2000), who put out the online newsletter Corp-Focus, outlines a few of the attempts by various consumer advocates (and believe it or not, that rare breed - the honest politician), who tried to bring the auto industry into court to answer for their "anything for the profit" ways of promoting the use of automobiles in America. This is a great article to get a basic understanding of just how little the auto industry cares if it has a human race to sell cars to in another 100 years. Scroll all the way down the page, checking the dates as you go, as there are often new additions here.

The Great Smog Conspiracy 25 Years Later: Is History Repeating?
This article by Steven T. Taylor (1994) gives us a look at auto industry power gambits, on the 25th anniversary of the "Great Smog Conspiracy." For at least 15 years the auto industry conspired to keep innovation to a minimum, at least in terms of real advances and pollution controls implementation.

Emission Controls: Non-Electric
If you want to know about emission controls, this is the place to go. From Autosite.com, this guide will allow one to really get into the advances in keeping pollutants of the internal combustion engine form spewing into the atmosphere. Quite educational, although some statements as to the efforts of car manufacturers to ensure their engines were running at optimum cleanliness had me wondering at times.

Livability & Auto-Dependency
This dissertation by Dom Nozzi outlines some of the problems with building cities at car-scale, not people scale.

Transportation Definitions
This has nothing to do with the auto industry conspiring to pollute the world with dirty, smelly automobiles, but it is about transportation, including car. This page is fairly funny, and I laughed once or twice, so it gets four pyramids.

US Auto Culture & The Environment
Come see just what the auto industry impact on our environment is, and what the auto industry has done to make sure this changes as slowly as possible.

Taken For A Ride: POV Press Release
This is a synopsis of Taken For A Ride, a film by Jim Klein and Martha Olsen (not the book by the same title released in 2000, and discussed above), detailing the killing off by the Big Three auto makers of the electric trolley systems across America.

Critical Mass
This concise article by JL Ritter (April 21st, 1997), a graduate student in Los Angeles, California, details the death of the trolleys. The auto companies, while complaining and dragging their feet over cleaning up their act, have wasted millions and billions of dollars over the years fighting clean air legislation, rather than simply trying to fix the damn problem of pollution emitting car engines.

Database From Hell: Steam
For those steam engine enthusiasts out there in Cyberland, this is the place for you! These people know what they are talking about it seems like to me, who's all thumbs when it comes to mechanical repair skills. Auto shop? Never took the class, but got beat up once or twice by kids who did.

The Conspiracy Revisited
This interesting essay by Van Wilkins puts forth the theory that there wasn't actually a conspiracy to do away with the electric trolley systems, but rather a "very complex set of circumstances," that the auto industry only played a small part in.

The Automobile: Autonomy & Evil
This garbage from the tailpipe is pollution, says this essay by Andrew D. Altman (1999). Altman graphically illustrates the filth produced by cars.

Henry Ford Creates A Jewish Conspiracy
This is a very interesting article that has nothing to do with auto manufacturers conspiring to sell cars, or pollute the atmosphere, with anything but hot air and slanderous notions. Rather it is about a conspiracy promoted by the Father of the modern car, Henry Ford, racist bigot that he was.

MTS Proves Reason Magazine Wrong
In this refutation of a series of Reason magazine articles that ran from mid 1989 to mid 1991, Akos Szoboszlay, President of the Modern Transit Society (MTS) makes an impassioned defense of the possibilities of clean, profitable, electric mass-transit. Szoboszlay outlines various proofs of conspiracy on the part of the auto industry to take over and then do away with the old, pervasive, efficient trolley systems.

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