Now that General Motors is facing financial ruin and seeking a federal bailout, Harvey Wasserman argues that before it receives any help, GM must redress its participation in the conspiracy to destroy America's mass transit system.
"Bail out General Motors? The people who murdered our mass transit system? First let them remake what they destroyed.
In a 1922 memo that will live in infamy, GM President Alfred P. Sloan established a unit aimed at dumping electrified mass transit in favor of gas-burning cars, trucks and buses. GM [had] lost $65 million in 1921. So Sloan enlisted Standard Oil (now Exxon), Philips Petroleum, glass and rubber companies and an army of financiers and politicians to kill mass transit.
GM has certainly proved itself unable to make cars that can compete while healing a global-warmed planet. So let's convert the company's infrastructure to churn out trolley cars, monorails, passenger trains, truly green buses."
FULL STORY: GM Must Re-Make the Mass Transit System it Murdered
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City of Albany
UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies
Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
Chaddick Institute at DePaul University
City of Piedmont, CA
Great Falls Development Authority, Inc.
HUDs Office of Policy Development and Research