A study on gasoline cars reveals one of the biggest corporate frauds and subsequent environmental disasters inflicted on human society. Three different issues are intertwined in this story: the promotion of gasoline-powered transportation through

(a) the murder of mass public transport

(b) the genocide of electric vehicles and

(c) the creation of neighborhoods on the outskirts of American cities to make car ownership a vital necessity.

America's love affair with the automobile was an outgrowth of all three of these issues, beginning with a massive conspiracy to murder electric vehicles, helping to murder mass transportation, and forcing Americans to own a private car.

Like most other stories, this one begins in the early 20th century, when the United States was busy industrializing, when mass transit based on rail and streetcars met much of the nation's needs. Of course, at the same time automobiles evolved rapidly, but gasoline-powered transportation, whether by private car or mass transit, was less successful. Nearly all local and intercity rail transportation in the nation was electric, and electric cars were rapidly gaining ground on their gasoline-powered rivals. By 1900 almost 40% of all American cars were electric and they were so popular that New York City had a fleet of electric taxis.

Electric cars outperformed their gas-powered rivals, and people liked them because they didn't have the smells, noise, or vibrations of gas-powered cars, were easier to drive, and didn't require a starter crank or gear shift. The NewYorkTimes noted that especially women preferred them due to the absence of smoke and foul-smelling fumes, especially when refueling (1) (2).

It seemed certain that electric vehicles were going to be essential in the future but then, in just about three years, the transportation landscape irreversibly changed and electric vehicles, like dinosaurs, underwent a change fatal weather and died. It's tragic that electric cars were done away with so early in their lives. If this transition had been allowed to take place early on, we would now have over a hundred years of intensive battery research and development, and incalculable benefits to the global environment.We can only guess at the possible outcomes. For example, a few years ago a Chinese high school student designed an electric hovercraft as a car replacement that did not require expensive paved roads. This VW Aqua won an international award.

At that time, General Motors (GM) and the main oil companies were facing a multiple crisis. The automobile market had already become saturated and sales were so minimal that in 1921 GM alone lost more than $65 million and was on its way to disappearing. The revenues and profits of the oil companies shared that bleak future. Realizing that their only hope of salvation was to eliminate their only rival, mass transit, GM and his friends hatched a plan that would forever change the course of the American economy, transportation culture, and society. . One hundred years ago General Motors, John Rockefeller, and a few close friends used vast amounts of money and all manner of deception, coercion, and intimidation short of murder to single-handedly wipe out the American electric car and train industry by buying and destroy the rolling stock of nearly 1,000 railroads and streetcars in the United States so that gasoline-powered vehicles can be sold instead, while at the same time virtually killing mass public transportation (3).

According to the company's own files, GM created a secret special division that was charged with the task of exterminating mass transportation, replacing it with gasoline propulsion, and eliminating all traces of electric vehicles. GM was at that time an enormously powerful company that had great financial influence in the banking system and therefore in the railroads that required support and financing from the banks. They threatened each railroad with complete withdrawal from all lucrative freight business unless the railroad company replaced its electric locomotives with GM gasoline-powered units. Through all kinds of extortion they tried to force local transportation systems to abandon local streetcars and buy GM gasoline buses. According to US Justice Department files, GM executives visited the banks used by the various railroads, offering them millions in additional deposits and other rewards in exchange for financially threatening their railroad customers to persuade them to abandon their systems. electric and switch to GM gasoline vehicles. GM's threat to these banks was to withdraw all deposits if they refused to cooperate (4).

In every case where this conspiracy succeeded and local streetcars were converted to gas-powered buses, GM not only bought up and crushed electric vehicles, but ripped up all the tracks and redistributed the rights-of-way in a way that was virtually impossible to rebuild these systems. In cases where their efforts failed, GM formed numerous holding companies with their invisible friends and tried to buy and convert the railroads themselves. According to FBI files, when the rail systems could not be bought, GM instead bought the rail officials, bribed them with large amounts of money and new cars, and used threats and extortion in surprisingly uninhibited ways. . GM also sponsored and financed corrupt officials in many municipal elections, which would later vote to sell its local electric rail system to GM. Most of all this was done on behalf of a holding company called National City Lines, which was jointly owned by GM, Standard Oil, and Firestone Tires. Each time these rail systems switched from electric to gasoline they experienced a rapid and huge decline in revenue, as passengers abandoned the slow and smelly gasoline buses, and bought cars, which was part of the plan.

One stumbling block was that many local electric streetcar systems were owned by the regional utility, which used its own surplus electricity for public transportation systems, and in this case GM had no influence. To remove this blockade, GM and its unseen staff pressured, bribed, and blackmailed the nation's elected politicians into passing new legislation that would prohibit "regulated" public electric companies from operating "unregulated" businesses such as electric streetcar and electric systems. of trains. This clever legislative trick forced utility companies to put all their electric train systems up for sale, all of which were immediately bought up by GM and its holding companies and thrown away. In this way and with other tricks in three years GM had dismantled virtually all of the 1,000 electric railways and streetcars in the United States after purchasing and shredding for scrap all their rolling stock, which it replaced with gasoline-powered units manufactured by GM (5).

Of course, there were court cases that tried to address the many illegalities and federal prosecutors who accused GM of waging "a carefully and deliberately planned campaign to take away from the American public its most important and valuable utilities." But American judges proved to be as easy to buy as politicians, and the matter finally died in court with General Motors fined $5,000 and fines $1 each on GM Treasurer H.C. Grossman and others. people. Over the years GM has defended what it did and blamed suburban sprawl and the resulting increase in private car sales, as well as declining ridership on electric public transportation, ignoring the fact that GM itself was responsible for all of it. Wikipedia covers these facts in some detail, the only reservation being the claim that this is yet another irresponsible "conspiracy theory." But, as usual, if we read Wikipedia and assume that everything it claims to be false is actually true, we'll have a pretty accurate picture.

But GM wasn't done yet. At that time most people who wanted a car and could afford it had already bought one, but an even bigger problem was that even with a car there was nowhere to go. There were not many roads and the good ones were practically non-existent; the most common driving experience was getting stuck in 2 feet of mud with no help in sight. To remedy this lack of infrastructure, GM and its friends heavily pressured, harassed, and bribed the state and federal governments to build highways. They were very successful. The US government embarked on a widespread program of building interstate highways across the country. One of the biggest lies in American history textbooks is the tale that this vast highway-building program was undertaken "because of the war effort, to protect the country" in an unspecified way.

At the same time, individual states were persuaded to abandon all investment (and maintenance!) in railways and other means of public transportation, thus sacrificing the good of the nation, and instead spend enormous amounts of public money on roads that were only useful to those with private cars, leaving everyone else at home with nowhere to go. This unscrupulous sabotage of America's transportation infrastructure by auto and oil companies demonstrates the near-criminal ability of private corporations in a fascist regime to effect sweeping changes in public life and culture without having to accountability or without public debate and without public opinion even being aware.

GM didn't just undermine the nation's public transportation and replace it with a highway system for its private cars. There remained the problem of encouraging or forcing people to buy cars. In any major European or Asian metropolis a private car is unnecessary as these cities have exemplary urban planning, designed for people and not cars, with high residential density, excellent public transport and no artificial segregation of the cities. basic functions such as living, working and shopping. There is plenty of evidence that the United States took a very different path because the automakers and oil companies infiltrated the civic planning faculties of America's top universities and then funded the urban planning philosophies that were to make automobiles were necessary. The result was that American (and Canadian) cities were planned, designed, and built primarily, if not exclusively, to make private transportation mandatory. The rest of the world was not seduced, which speaks volumes in its favor. European and Asian cities are still much more livable and pleasant than any American city. Non-travelling Americans cannot imagine how easy and pleasant life is in these cities, their limited experience only allowing them to conjure up the images of life that appear on billboards in a mall.

Suburbs are an invention created in the United States and Canada, they only exist there. They are fully designed to keep places of work, shopping, and residence not only physically segregated, but sufficiently disaggregated that even good public transportation is rendered ineffective or useless, forcing hundreds of millions of people to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. of billions of dollars in private transport solely for the benefit of car manufacturers and oil companies. American-style urban planning, the creation of residential areas on the outskirts of cities, was one of the most perverse anti-social plans ever conceived by American capitalism.

In many American cities it is impossible to live without a car. Economists from Harvard and Berkeley did a study called the "Equal Opportunity Project" that found a significant negative correlation between residential segregation and the ability of the poor to move up. In part this separated the rich neighborhoods from the poor, in part because in America's designed cities basically everything is very far from everything else, making an efficient public transportation system almost impossible. The most important consequence is that low-income working people are left to fend for themselves. There may be jobs, but without public transportation and without a car, they literally cannot get to them (6).

Unfortunately, this farce of urban planning is being imported around the world to unsuspecting planning students from other nations. China is being corrupted by those "values" of American urban planning that only benefit companies like GM, as in the case of Shanghai's Lujiazui or Nanjing's lovely new University City, which are visually appealing but impossible to live without. car, since everything is too far from everything else and public transport fails to cope with that situation. If China continues on this path, its cities will increasingly suffer from the typical American social problems of poverty, blighted areas, unapproachable shantytowns and uncontrollable traffic.

The following quote is so persuasively true that every citizen should have it on record:

General Motors rejects electric cars

In 1990 the state of California passed new anti-pollution legislation that required the production and use of zero-emission vehicles in the state and stipulated that if car manufacturers planned to sell their products in California, 10% of those sales they would have to consist of emission-free vehicles, that is, electric cars. The state did not attempt to provide solutions to all driving problems or meet all possible needs of all motorists. The objective of that law was to initiate the process to eliminate pollution from gasoline cars and thus directed attention to the broad and easy sector of those who have a car, the 70% of urban dwellers who have to make a round trip less than 50 kilometers a day. Recognizing that nearly every conceivable place could have the electricity needed to recharge cars, California planned for short-distance use of cars that could be recharged at home and at work.

Based on this approach, the state rejected the auto industry's demands to first build a vast network of charging stations and refused to allow car manufacturers to impose the cost of developing their industry on the public sector. He simply said, “If you want to sell cars in our state, 10% of your sales have to be zero emission vehicles. How to achieve it is your problem. California certainly got it right, its approach was commendable, and it succeeded…for a time. Every company created versions of electric or hybrid cars that ticked all the boxes and some like the Prius were huge successes. GM's contribution, the EV-1, was a simple car powered by basic lead-acid batteries and with a range of only 100 kilometers, yet enough for the daily commute of most of the state's urban motorists.

But GM and its friends in the oil companies violently opposed making electric cars mandatory, and as a surreptitious first step toward forcing the law to be repealed, GM refused to sell the EV-1 car to customers, instead only he rented it to retain ownership of the vehicles. So GM, the oil companies, and other auto-related companies lobbied, intimidated, bribed, and eventually sued the California government to repeal the legislation, and the US government, led by President Bush, finally joined in. to legal action. Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, had been president of the Alliance of American Automobile Manufacturers, and White House staffers such as Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, and other federal officials had previously been executives or directors of oil and automobile companies. The US government once again served the short-term interests of the corporate elite at the expense of the more beneficial, long-term interests of the nation.

GM and other companies created lobby groups to lobby against electric cars by posing as citizen action committees even though they were funded by the auto industry. Intense and constant pressure was brought to bear on California to repeal zero emissions laws until the state finally capitulated. As soon as that happened GM took all its electric cars back and scrapped them, so for the second time GM killed the electric car. GM later blamed it on low demand, but electric cars were so popular that drivers handcuffed themselves to them to prevent GM from taking them away.

After this the US auto industry, led by GM, launched a vociferous propaganda campaign to remove electric vehicles as much as possible from the public mind and government attention, and used the promotion of battery development fuel to hydrogen as a fraudulent diversion. Hydrogen is far from being a viable alternative for widespread public use today and has many distribution and safety issues. Some manufacturers have created experimental models that they hope to produce, but we are still decades away from any useful reality.

There was another issue related to the capacity and autonomy of the batteries. GM's early EV-1 model used simple lead-acid batteries without problems, but foreign automakers (Toyota's RAV-4) were already using nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) batteries that allowed longer distance travel. Just at that time a company called Ovonics had developed a new NiMH technology that increased the range of electric vehicles to as low as 400-500 kilometers between charges, making private electric transportation possible on a massive scale. GM immediately bought, at a very high price, the exclusive worldwide patent rights to this NiMH technology, locked it away, and refused to license any company to produce these automotive batteries. GM later sold those patent rights to US-based Texaco-Chevron Oil, which still prevents access to this technology today. The NiMH battery has proven to be the best for plug-in electric cars, but manufacturers have been forced to use lithium technology (which is about six times more expensive and has no recycling value) due to GM's efforts to prevent electric cars become a reality. And so, for the third time, General Motors managed to kill the electric car (7). In 2018 GM did it again by killing Volt, Cruze and Impala, claiming that the public prefers SUV models (8).

One of the main challenges is that car manufacturers make much more profit financing the purchase of cars and the sale of spare parts than they do with the sale of new vehicles. Before its bankruptcy, GM made three times as much profit from its auto parts and financing divisions as it did from auto manufacturing and sales. Car dealerships share this model in which service and parts sales make up less than 10% of revenue but 50% of profit. Since electric cars have perhaps only half as many spare parts as gasoline cars and very few moving parts (almost none of which break or need to be replaced regularly) they are more reliable and require far less maintenance or service than electric cars. gasoline vehicles. These factors would wipe out a significant chunk of revenue and most of the profits of both manufacturers and their dealers, and would force a massive reorganization of the entire auto and transportation industry, not to mention the extermination of most of major oil companies.

It's clear that electric vehicles are a threat to both car manufacturers and the oil industry, who will stop at nothing to prevent a resurgence despite the vast environmental and social damage inflicted by both companies' products. In addition to being extremely polluting, gasoline cars waste a lot and are inefficient when it comes to converting energy, since they mainly produce friction and wasted heat, and 65% of fuel energy is lost in engine and transmission inefficiencies. driveline, and another 20% is wasted at engine idling. Only about 15% of the energy from the car's fuel is used to propel the car or run accessories like the air conditioner. For every dollar spent, electric vehicles can travel twice as far as gasoline-powered ones.

Electric cars are an existential threat to international bankers, who are the true owners of most of the major oil companies and who in one way or another control much of the world's oil extraction and distribution, as well as having strong interests in car manufacturing. Witnessing the electric car craze is like watching in slow motion the approach of your own funeral procession, which seems to be unstoppable. These bankers cannot control the production and distribution of electricity because there are too many electricity producers, most of them are local or provincial governments that will not sell their infrastructure, and electricity is already widely distributed to almost every place imaginable. If these few extractive vampires cannot control the world's fuel sources, if nations turn to electric cars powered by NiMH batteries or a new equivalent and centrally generate their own electricity, our international bankers will suffer total losses in the trillions of dollars. Dollars.

I previously indicated that hydrogen is far from a viable alternative to automobile fuels, as it has many serious safety and distribution problems, but that's not really the problem. Driving the frenzied drive for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is the fact that the only useful source of hydrogen in the amounts needed to fuel cars is oil, or more precisely, natural gas (methane). ). If these few people can force the conversion from gasoline to hydrogen, not only will they prevent the impending massive and costly restructuring of the auto industry with the switch to electric cars, but they will forever continue to control the entire fuel production and distribution system for vehicles. They are so desperate that Toyota has been forced to offer unlimited use of its thousands of fuel cell patents without license fees until 2020, hoping to jump-start the process, in their words, hoping to "stimulate the development and the introduction of innovative fuel cell technologies'. This small group of wealthy bankers is forcing and financing a huge campaign to get all possible parties to cooperate in what they have called "an unconventional collaboration" in an attempt to make the process so fast that it overwhelms and kills other parties. forms of electric cars.

There is also the aspect of economic and political control, which is not trivial. The small cabal of European bankers and industrialists who own most of the world's international oil companies are known to say that "if you control the oil, you control the world's economies, and if you control food, you control the world's populations." That is what is at stake, not just their oil profits, but their political and economic control of nations, which is seriously threatened by the abandonment of oil fuels. Think of the ferocious economic attack on Russia and Venezuela in late 2014 and into 2015 by plunging the price of oil almost exclusively to collapse Russia's oil-based economy. These “sanctions” would be just as successful if the world switched to methane-based hydrogen car fuel, but they would be useless with electric cars.

The issue is even more serious than the mere control of the economies of other nations. Remember once again that the US military claims to be intent on achieving "total domination," one of the reasons the Americans have made such a fuss over China's military installations on islands in the South China Sea. The US military has relied on the power of its naval fleet to cut off China's oil supply routes in the event of war, and a Chinese military presence in that area could impede US dominance of the sea lanes. An army without fuel is not an army; all their ships and planes stand still and their weapons are useless, as Japan found out in 1940 when the United States engineered a total oil embargo on Japan, setting off the attack on Pearl Harbor. But more important than that, if China goes all-electric, its domestic oil supplies could be enough for the military, denying the United States a significant advantage. Thus, the drive for hydrogen fuels is as much about political and military dominance as it is about banker profits.

In terms of environmental effects, producing hydrogen from methane is more damaging than driving gasoline cars, since the process of extracting hydrogen actually releases more CO2 into the atmosphere for every liter you the combustion of gasoline. Also, hydrogen is much less efficient than direct battery power and fuel cell cars will be nearly twice as expensive as pure electric cars. The only advantages of a fuel cell are the possibility of a longer range and a shorter refueling time, but there is no doubt that over time the development of the battery will eliminate these differences.

Another problem is that for at least the last 40 years the main scaffolding supporting the US dollar is the fact that the world's oil price is pegged exclusively in US dollars. If the world moves fully and rapidly towards the electric car, the price of oil will crash and the US dollar will go immediately as it settles in value at about $0.30, making the US the richest banana republic in the world. It's such a sensitive issue that when the United States agreed to pay Saudi Arabia much higher oil prices in the early 1970s, one condition was that all oil be priced and sold exclusively in US dollars, or, otherwise, "it would be considered an act of war."

Afterword: America's love affair with the automobile

An important part of American mythology revolves around the so-called America's love affair with the automobile”, which was presented as an exciting, if somewhat quirky personal expression of an independent, freedom-loving America in which cheap mass transit did not evolve due to American individualism and desire for freedom. But this historical account is false. America's current "car culture" was the result of a massive conspiracy engineered by the oil and car oligarchies and, like consumer society, was imposed on an unsuspecting nation through deception and propaganda. Most of the truth has been erased from historical records and replaced by a "feel good" fairy tale. After trashing mass transit systems, the automakers led by GM created a wide array of mythical tales to justify and praise the system they had created.

For generations the American people were congratulated for their individualism, their spirit of adventure, and their love of freedom and independence, and for the decisions they believed they had made, even though others had made them for them. Here [in the United States] as in no other market it is very true that the capitalists sold "not so much products as the emotion itself and psychologically related the act of buying a car with false feelings of confidence, freedom, happiness, empowerment and independence, with which linked the very identity of Americans to the purchase of a car ». And, of course, Americans today export this same flawed propaganda to the world in the name of universal values ​​and the will of God.

Annex: Chronology of the electric car*

1832-1839

Scottish inventor Robert Anderson invents the first rudimentary electric carriage powered by non-rechargeable primary batteries.

1835

American Thomas Davenport is credited with building the first practical electric vehicle, a small locomotive.

1859

French physicist Gaston Planté invents the rechargeable lead-acid battery. In 1881 his compatriot Camille Faure will improve the capacity of the accumulator to supply current and will invent the basic lead-acid battery used in automobiles.

1891

William Morrison of Des Moines, Iowa, builds America's first successful electric car.

Thomas Edison and an electric car. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institute.

1893

Various makes and models of electric cars are on display in Chicago.

1897

The first electric taxis roll out on the streets of New York City at the beginning of the year. The Pope Manufacturing Company of Connecticut becomes the first large-scale manufacturer of electric cars.

1899

Because Thomas Alva Edison believed that electricity would power cars in the future, he set out on a mission to create a powerful and long-lasting battery for commercial automobiles. Although his research improves the alkaline battery, he eventually abandons the research a decade later.

1900

The electric car is booming. Of the 4,192 cars produced in the United States, 28% run on electricity, and electric cars account for about a third of all cars on the road in New York City, Boston, and Chicago.

The Ford Model T.

1908

Henry Ford introduces the mass-produced, gasoline-powered Model T, which will have a profound effect on the American auto market.

1912

Charles Kettering invents the first practical electric automobile starter. Kettering's invention makes gasoline-powered cars more attractive to consumers by eliminating the unwieldy manual crank start and ultimately helps pave the way for the demise of the electric car.

1920

During the 1920s, the electric car ceased to be a viable commercial product. The decline of the electric car is attributed to several factors, including the desire for vehicles that cover long distances, its lack of horsepower, and the availability of gasoline.

1966

Congress introduces its first bills recommending the use of electric vehicles to reduce air pollution. A Gallup poll indicates that 33 million Americans are interested in electric vehicles.

1970s 1970s

Concern over rising oil prices, which peaked with the 1973 Arab oil embargo, and the growing environmental movement spark renewed interest in electric cars from both consumers and manufacturers .

1972

Victor Wouk, the "Godfather of the Hybrid," builds the first full-size, full-power hybrid vehicle from a 1972 Buick Skylark provided by General Motors (GM) for the 1970 Federal Clean Car Incentive Program. Subsequently, the Environmental Protection Association ended the program in 1976.

CitiCar by Vanguard-Sebring.

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— nyx ♒ | in a bunker /lh Sat Jun 05 10:25:45 +0000 2021