[lbo-talk] America today

[andie nachgeborenen]

Actually "conspiracy" -- in the literal, criminal sense -- is more apt than "design," and this depdates 1980s GOP talk about starving the beast. In the 1940s,  GM,  Firestone SOCal and Phillips formed a shell called National City Lines that bought up and then tore out the streetcar systems in 100 + cities in order to sell them GM buses runnung on Firestone tires and burning Standard Oil and Phillips (etc.) gas. GM was convicted of criminal violation of the Section 2 (I think of the Sherman Act, monopolization -- even thought this was a conspiracy, it wasn't a conspiracy in restraint of trade as interpreted by the courts), and GM was fined $5000m that's right, $5000, and each GM exec involved was fined $1. The court could have ordered GM to put the streetcars back, but reasoned that the cost to GM would have been prohibitive. Thus we have no streetcars. Some of the systems, the horse-drawn ones, were outmoded anyway, but the tracks were usuable, I think,

 for an upgrade to electric streetcars. So there you have it, what is arguably the crime of the last century. $5K in fines, incalculable damage to the public interest.

--- On Mon, 9/22/08, Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com> wrote:


> From: Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] America today
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Monday, September 22, 2008, 8:56 AM
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Jim Farmelant <farmelantj at juno.com>
> The MBTA, in my experience,
> seems to be one of the worst mass transit systems in
> any major US cities, and is a complete joke compare
> 
> [WS:] Have you been to Baltimore?  Its transit system is a
> joke comparing to that in Boston.
> 
> Another point, mass transit system in most US cities does
> not work well by design rather than by accident.  It
> suffers from the same syndrome as the rest of the
> transportation infrastructure in this Repug-infested
> shithole aka US of A - defunding of public services (aka
> "starving the beast") in the aftermath of the
> reagan "revolution."  The only difference is that
> mass transit system suffers more than the rest of
> transportation  infrastructure because it serves the
> subpopulation that has the least power - ethnic minorities
> and the working poor (I call it "transportation
> apartheid.")  But the road system also sucks comparing
> to that what Western Europe has - it just sucks relatively
> less than mass transit system.  The only transportation
> system that does not suck in this shithole is that serving
> its corporate owners (e.g. limo services, private jet and
> helicopter services, etc.)
> 
>  Wojtek 
> 
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> "When a candidate for public office faces the voters
> he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose
> chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite
> incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any
> save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done
> in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of
> what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate
> must either bark with the pack or be lost. [...] All the
> odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious
> and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the
> notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency
> tends, year by year, to go to such men." - HL Mencken
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> 
>       
> 
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