does better public transportation really mean less profit for oil companies and is that what is really stopping it form happening? Mayor Nutter can't even get the two Democratic candidates to talk about urban issues, one of which is urban transportation, so I highly doubt that the northeast subway isn't being built because of the oil companies. We spend in excess of $25 bn on the war on drugs and hundreds of billions on war. some portion of that could easily pay for transit if they wanted to. here's a timely piece on the war
http://www.brainsoap.com/?inc=articl...oar&_c=columns

the indirect cost is that Transit Oriented Developments (aka cities) become less desirable places to live. Another indirect costs are like towelie's or lives that are sent off track because someone sold dime bags or got caught with some coke.

__________________
"You down wit OPM?"
Fumo: "Yeah, you know me!"

Below source might shed some light...if you have any questions or disagree..you can contact him personally...

50 Years Driving in the Wrong Direction

Taken for a Ride on the Interstate Highway System

By MIKE FERNER
The 50th anniversary of President Eisenhower's signing of the Interstate Highway Act is a good time to dust off this review of the PBS documentary, "Taken for a Ride" that I wrote 10 years ago when President Clinton visited my city during the 1996 presidential campaign.

Riding a "Presidential Special" from Columbus to Toledo on tracks that no longer carry passenger trains, Clinton crowed, "I'm goin' to Chicago (for the Democratic Party convention) and I'm goin' on a train!"

I wanted to ask him why the rest of us could no longer travel to our state capital by train; why we are the only industrialized nation on earth that refuses to subsidize its passenger rail system? And I asked a question that makes me sick to my stomach to read 10 years later: "How many more billions of dollars and how many more lives will we pay for Mideast oil.?"
Of course I never got to ask him those questions in person, but luckily, two fellow Ohioans, Dayton-area independent filmmakers, Jim Klein and Martha Olson, replied with their film, "Taken for a Ride."

Their documentary tells the dramatic story of how America's passenger trains and streetcars were systematically and deliberately killed by what we now call the "highway lobby." What makes their film so important is that it goes beyond vague conspiracy theories to name names.

Klein and Olson weave General Motors promotional films, Congressional archives, interviews with citizen activists, and Department of Justice memos into a compelling pattern of events that make it clear: we didn't get into the traffic jam we're in today by accident.

For example, "Ride" explains, the oft-scorned highway lobby was not born of fuzzy environmentalist folklore. The "most powerful pressure group in Washington," began in June, 1932, when GM President, Alfred P. Sloan, created the National Highway Users Conference, inviting oil and rubber firms to help GM bankroll a propaganda and lobbying effort that continues to this day.

Sloan, unhappy with a transportation system in which the majority of people rode streetcars and trains, not automobiles, bought out Omnibus Corp., the nation's largest bus operating company, and Yellow Coach, the largest bus manufacturer. With these, he began a campaign to "modernize" New York City's railways with buses.

With New York as an example, GM formed National City Lines in 1936 and the assault on mass transit across America began with a vengeance.

Within ten years, NCL controlled transit systems in over 80 cities. GM denied any control of NCL, but the bus line's Director of Operations came from Yellow Coach, and board members came from Greyhound, a company founded by GM. Later, Standard Oil of California, Mack Truck, Phillips Petroleum, and Firestone joined GM's support of NCL.

If you've inched through traffic on a city bus or followed one for any distance, you know why people abandoned NCL's buses for cars whenever they could. It doesn't take a rabid conspiracy nut to see the subsequent benefit to GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil.

"Ride" is most compelling when it documents how the U.S. Justice Department prosecuted NCL, General Motors, and other companies for combining to destroy America's transit systems.

Brad Snell, an auto industry historian who spent 16 years researching GM, said that key lawyers involved with the case told him "there wasn't a scintilla of doubt that the defendants had set out to destroy the streetcars."

For eliminating a system "worth $300 billion today," Snell laments, the corporations were eventually found guilty and fined $5,000. Key individuals, such as the Treasurer of GM, were fined one dollar.

The post-war boom in housing, suburbs, and freeways is a familiar story. Not so familiar is the highway lobby's high-level efforts to determine our transportation future.

In 1953, President Eisenhower appointed then-GM President Charles Wilson as his Secretary of Defense, who pushed relentlessly for a system of interstate highways. Francis DuPont, whose family owned the largest share of GM stock, was appointed chief administrator of federal highways.

Funding for this largest of all U.S. public works programs came from the Highway Trust Fund's tax on gasoline, to be used only for highways. Its formula assured that more highways meant more driving, more money from the gasoline tax, and more highways.

Helping to keep the driving spirit alive, Dow Chemical, producer of asphalt, entered the PR campaign with a film featuring a staged testimonial from a grade school teacher standing up to her anti-highway neighbors with quiet indignation. "Can't you see this highway means a whole new way of life for the children?"

Citizens might agree that highways meant a whole new way of life, but not necessarily for the better. The wrecking ball cleared whole neighborhoods for the interstate highways and public protestgrew accordingly. One Washington, D.C. activist recalls, "this was a brutal period in our history; a very brutal period."

The documentary concludes with a peek into the future, interviewing corporate sponsors of the Intelligent Vehicle Highway System, a computer-controlled vision of travel which currently receives the lion's share of federal transportation research funding.

"Taken for a Ride" is more timely today than when it was made a decade ago.

Watch it.

Mike Ferner served as a Navy Corpsman during Vietnam and is a member of Veterans For Peace, whose slogan is "Abolish War!" He can be reached at: mike.ferner@sbcglobal.net

I do agree with you on the punishment that you received for doing a trivial thing like smoking a bowl. I cannot believe the military turned you down. You should try again; they need more bodies in Iraq.

__________________
"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people".

I'm familiar with the transit system half truths but was not aware that Eisenhower's secretary of defense worked for GM. Still, the basic principle that good roads made for good defense has been true since the romans and was not a fabrication of General Motors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
This article also routinely ignores the other side of the story...as the railroads weren;t exactly mom and pops, especially in those days. the railroad industry is essentially a lesson in burdensome government regulation and the transit systems in corruption.
this is a bit more informative than the article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_City_Lines

In a Post WWII world with rapidly changing geography, buses were, in many ways, cheaper. Traction companies had been local monopolies for decades and had long since traded fare setting power for legalized monopoly. In the long run this prevented them from keeping up with inflation so they were saddled with increasing operating costs (especially ofter FDR killed the Gold Standard), static fares, and decreasing ridership. Whether you admit it or not, people had already been leaving public transportation for cars en masse. It's an environmentalists dream that everyone was forced out of their streetcars into personal automobiles. At any rate,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General...car_conspiracy

Needless to say, the article is not earth shattering and relies on conspiracy theories. I have no need to contact the author nor a desire. the railroads are a different story. Heavily regulated since the turn of the century, they were too arrogant to respond to the new competition. Worse, when they finally did, an outdated regulatory system prevented them from adapting at every turn. In the meantime, states such as PA and NJ found ways to tax them to death. At one point (I read this a coupel years ago), the Erie & Lackawanna paid $70k per year per mile to the state of NJ in property taxes on its track. Raods were government owned and exempted from taxations. the feds ran the railroads into the ground during both world wars and never compensated them. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Needless to say, none of this has anything to do with why the federal government continues not to fund subways (which are a modern, more effective version of public transportation for old, dense cities) nor does it have anything to do with race riots, corruption, taxes, bad schools, welfare or any of the host of other reasons people fled cities when they had the chance.

__________________
"You down wit OPM?"
Fumo: "Yeah, you know me!"

I did, I wrote letters to all my federal politicians and only recieved a letter back from rep.Kurt Weldon (I was living in Chester County at the time) saying he would pull strings and get me in. But the reason he stated for me not getting in was because I was diagnosed with ADD and prescribed adderall and ritalin (Amphetamines). When the recruiter asked if I had ever been arrested and I honestly stated yes and why, I was told that being convicted of a crime involving drugs was why I could not enter. I got two different story's from my local recruiter and my local congressman, which kind of killed my desire to join, and by the time I got the letter back, I had already met my girlfriend who I am still with, and starting the job that I still love to this day.

I am more concerned now with writing letters and helping kids that did the same thing I did, but don't have IT skills/money I did to help with an expungement. Basically, I am really pushing for decriminalization. Imagine if the police happened to be busting the party where Bill Clinton "wasn't" inhaling, or the rumor of Bush and coke. I can't name too many people I know who haven't tried something, and they all could have got caught just like me.

People don't realize how bad these laws can affect good people until it strikes home. I love when I hear the anti-drug crowd preach how bad pot is, then their little Johnny gets busted at senior week/college and all of a sudden that $100,000 college tuition is almost useless when every major company checks your record.

Its amazing how much these people don't realize that their own lawyer, doctor, professor may partake.

hey towelie (every time I see your avatar it reminds me of that great episode), have you seen the hsitory channels "history of cocaine?" If not, it's a must watch. It was a real eye opener for me.

__________________
"You down wit OPM?"
Fumo: "Yeah, you know me!"

In the Midwest and West, and things are way too far apart for effective public transportation. (I'd like to see the conspiracy that arranged to put the Pacific Ocean so far from the East Coast.)

Having said that, I'd like the prison system's top priority to be locking up violent people for a long time. I think there are more effective ways to punish nonviolent offenders.

No. what does it discuss?

As a matter of public record, you were quoted back in March of 2005 as saying the following regarding the PBS documentary summarized in the article I posted:

"sounds like a nice, objective look at the history of transit in america."

Link to your post:
http://www.phillyblog.com/philly/getting-around-philly/6838-video-taken-ride-destruction-public-transit-gm.html

Questions:

1) Have you even seen the documentary to render an objective opinion?

2) If so, have you considered the sources in the documentary which included congressional testimonies and extensive FBI files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act?

If you have NOT seen the PBS documentary, your commentary and selective half-truths, for all intents and purposes, can be fairly characterized as SUBJECTIVE. Your convenient dismissal of a factual occurrence by labeling it a "conspiracy" is yet another example of intellectual dishonesty.

Your dismissal of the scandal as another crackpot "conspiracy theory" contrived by tin-hat wearing crazies has no merit considering that the rulings of the Federal District Courts INDICTED the nine corporations and seven individuals that ran them on ANTI-TRUST charges of CONSPIRACY in the sale of equipment to a "nationwide combine of city bus lines." (April 9th 1947). Indeed, as your own reference to Wikipedia records :

On April 9, 1947, nine corporations and seven individuals (constituting officers and directors of certain of the corporate defendants) were indicted in the Federal District Court of Southern California on two counts under the U.S. Sherman Antitrust Act. The charges, in summary, were CONSPIRACY to acquire control of a number of transit companies to form a transportation monopoly, and CONSPIRING to monopolize sales of buses and supplies to companies owned by the City Lines.

The proceedings were against Firestone, Standard Oil of California, Phillips, General Motors, Federal Engineering, and Mack, (the suppliers) and their subsidiary companies: National City Lines, Pacific City Lines, and American City Lines (the City Lines).

In 1948, the United States Supreme Court, in United States v. National City Lines Inc. (334 U.S. 573, 596, "National City I")[4] reversed lower court rulings and permitted a change in venue from the Federal District Court of Southern California to the Federal District Court in Northern Illinois.

In 1949, the defendants were acquitted on the first count of CONSPIRING to monopolize transportation services, but were found guilty on the second count of CONSPIRING to monopolize the provision of parts and supplies to their subsidiary companies. The companies were each fined $5,000, and the directors were each fined one dollar.
The verdicts were upheld on appeal in 1951.[5]

Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Street car_Scandal


GM apologists insist that there was no deliberate attempt to sabotage the electric-railway industry, or to dismantle U.S. trolley systems, yet that was the undeniable result of their actions along with the actions of their corporate cronies and subsidiaries.

Your half-truth that many of those trolley systems were already in poor financial shape, some of them about to collapse, in the wake of 1935 federal-anti-trust legislation (which ironically, had mortally wounded many trolley companies by severing their connections to power companies - and their access to cheap electricity) fails to take into account the counter argument that many other trolley systems, particularly in bigger cities, were healthy- and getting healthier with the delivery of brand-new, ultramodern trolleys called "PCC cars" (small fleets of which are still operating in some American cities today, providing comfortable, fast, safe service to thousands of commuters every day).

Moreover, the argument that trolley systems would have died anyway is a red herring fallacy. The extensive FBI files obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and presented in the PBS documentary prove otherwise.

Indeed, one of the FBI memos shows that the wife of the U.S. postmaster general was investigated in St Louis, as co-owner of a finance company that laundered money passing from GM to National City Lines. Commissioners in a Florida city each received a brand new Cadillac - and, the very next week, voted to scrap their trolley system, replacing the abandoned cars with GM buses. Additionally, records show that there was reasonable doubt to suspect jury tampering, but NONE of this evidence was made public, either during or after the trial until it was all released under the Freedom of Information Act. This is not half-baked hearsay but facts. As Huxley stated: "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." With that…I suggest that if you have not seen the PBS documentary you should make an attempt to do so. It truly is “a nice objective look at the history of transit in America.” In fact, it is anything but revisionist since it provides testimonials (social history) and primary source documentation (FBI memos) to back up its arguments.


"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity"

~Marshall McLuhan, Media "guru"

Once again, I agree with you 100%. However, prisons are big money and they need to keep them filled even if it’s with first time, small time offenders. Its not about rehabilitation, it’s about quotas & inventory (people).

Keep up your fight and don't join the military.

__________________
"People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people".