what's good for General Motors is good for America

Миша Вербицкий пишет:

Американские автомобильные компании скупали у государства за бесценок трамвайные линии, замаскировавшись под частных инвесторов, желающих вложить деньги в общественный транспорт, и после этого уничтожали. Это документировано подробно в разных исследовательских книгах (последней книге Шлоссера есть ссылки например). На федеральном уровне об этом было известно, но Эйзенхауэр считал, что общество, где у всех автомобиль, меньше подвержено коммунизму.

Indeed. Надо обладать сверхъестественной какой-то тупостью, чтоб не понимать, что плачевное состояние, в котором находится общественный транспорт в Америке, в комплексе с пролиферацией уродливой субурбии и соответствующего образа жизни, суть результат многолетней целенаправленной деятельности нефтяного и автомобилестроительного лобби и потакания им на федеральном уровне. Достаточно сделать в гугле поиск нa eisenhower+streetcar+destruction, чтоб в этом убедиться. Вот, например:

General Motors' investment of vast amounts of capital and energy in manipulating public opinion and state law may seem unprecedented, but this is, after all, a company's whose executives could proudly proclaim, "What's good for General Motors is good for America." Indeed, GM's campaign against electric cars has an eerily similar precedent.

In 1922, when only one in 10 Americans owned a car, GM launched an undercover campaign to destroy the then-dominant public transportation system. The campaign, which took 30 years to fully implement, focused on the country's clean (powered by electricity) and safe (accidents were infrequent) streetcar system.

GM, in partnership with Standard Oil of California and Firestone, began by buying the largest busmaker in the U.S. It then secretly funded a company called National City Lines, which by 1946 controlled streetcar operations in 80 cities.

Despite public opinion polls that, in Los Angeles for instance, showed 88 percent of the public favoring expansion of the rail lines after World War II, NCL systematically closed its streetcar systems down until, by 1955, only a few remained.

. . .

Destroying the rail lines and replacing them with buses was only the first step. If private cars were going to dominate American transportation, they needed new roads to run on. GM also stands behind creation of the National Highway Users Conference, otherwise known as the highway lobby, which became the most powerful pressure group in Washington. GM promotional films from the immediate postwar years proclaim interstate highways to be the realization of "the American dream of freedom on wheels."

А вот что пишет на эту тему восхитительный Хомский:

Apart from the regular bombardment of the senses through advertising and media portrayal of life-as-it-should-be-lived, corporate-government initiatives are undertaken on an enormous scale to shape consumer tastes. One dramatic example is the "Los Angelizing" of the US economy, a huge state-corporate campaign to direct consumer preferences to "suburban sprawl and individualized transport -- as opposed to clustered suburbanization compatible with a mix of rail, bus, and motor car transport," Richard Du Boff observes in his economic history of the United States, a policy that involved "massive destruction of central city capital stock" and "relocating rather than augmenting the supply of housing, commercial structures, and public infrastructure." The role of the federal government was to provide funds for "complete motorization and the crippling of surface mass transit"; this was the major thrust of the Federal Highway Acts of 1944, 1956, and 1968, implementing a strategy designed by GM chairman Alfred Sloan. Huge sums were spent on interstate highways without interference, as Congress surrendered control to the Bureau of Public Roads; about 1 percent of the sum was devoted to rail transit. The Federal Highway Administration estimated total expenditures at $80 billion by 1981, with another $40 billion planned for the next decade. State and local governments managed the process on the scene.

The private sector operated in parallel: "Between 1936 and 1950, National City Lines, a holding company sponsored and funded by GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil of California, bought out more than 100 electric surface-traction systems in 45 cities (including New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Tulsa, and Los Angeles) to be dismantled and replaced with GM buses... In 1949 GM and its partners were convicted in U.S.district court in Chicago of criminal conspiracy in this matter and fined $5,000."

Какие, право, сволочи. И при этом непрерывно вещают о "свободном рынке". А что? Пипл схавает и добавки попросит.