America's War Against Streetcars

Before you go feeling all warm and fuzzy about GM and all the good, solid manufacturing jobs they’ve created – and kept! – thank God, for Obama’s bailout plan… you should turn a page in history, back to the dawn of the automobile age in America.

Back in the 1930s and 1940s there was a great deal of friction between the car companies and the existing mass transit companies that had gotten people around very well, thank you very much.

GM’s solution was to buy up hundreds of city trolly and electric rail systems in cities all over the nation – Baltimore, Newark, New York City, Los Angeles, Oakland and San Diego, to name only a few – in a well documented conspiracy – and to dismantle them. They were all destroyed and replaced by bus lines with, you guessed it, buses manufactured by Detroit.

Anti-Green Big Business

The automobile hegemony was firmly established after World War II when Eisenhower built the interstate highway system, paving the way for a total transformation of American society from a rural culture to a bland, featureless landscape of fast food and big box franchises from sea to shining sea, that made every city exactly like every other.

The interstate highways were the central nervous system of this Borg Empire, GM and Washington the brains.

With traffic congestion so bad, with gasoline prices so stubbornly high; with global warming and air pollution; with the boring uniformity of our concrete culture – what would America be like if the nascent speck of sand that were the trolly systems had grown into a pearl of the American city scape?

Life in the Slow Lane

New Yorkers love their subways and above-ground trains. Many New Yorkers don’t even own a car. San Francisco is world famous for their trolly system. New Orleans wouldn’t be the Crescent City without the trollies. They’re efficient, stylish, popular and timeless.

Sure, Obama is proud of his auto bailout. He’s proud of the Washington tradition of supporting the auto industry in their obliteration of the American culture and lifestyle. I wonder how he justifies that in the context of his glorious green agenda?

There was a series of major lawsuits in the 1940s against GM et al for destroying those hundreds of city trolly systems. They were all found guilty. The judge fined them each $1. That was the beginning of judicial activism.

That was the end of the American way of life.

Something Obama is no doubt quite proud of.

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