Taken For A Ride On The Interstate Highway System
Submitted to Portside by Mike Ferner © 2006 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 protest grew 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 is a Toledo freelance writer. You can purchase "Taken For a Ride" at: http://www.newday.com/films/Taken_for_a_Ride.html *** The Importance Of Completing Chile's Beautiful Task By Michelle Bachelet http://www.ft.com/cms/s/57130788-0579-11db-bb76-0000779e2340.html Financial Times June 27, 2006 They came from all over Chile on election night in January: from affluent neighbourhoods, marginal areas, middle-class districts; they were students, workers, professionals, housewives; young and old; mothers, grandmothers, daughters and granddaughters. They wore across their chests the presidential sash, made by their own hands the afternoon of the electoral victory or bought from vendors on the street for less than $2. Their message was very clear: with a female elected president leading Chile for the first time, all of them felt that they were part of the government. Their simple, poignant gesture makes me twice as committed to them and to all the women of Chile. Women worked on my presidential campaign so that I could represent them and protect their interests; because they know that I have lived and continue to live as one of them. But this solidarity was certainly not their only motivation. As with the men who elected me, these women expect inclusive, original, consistent and consensus-based public policies. They also expect a new style of government: demanding yet accessible. This new style had its inaugural moment with the gender-balancedcabinet I soon designated. This equity has been replicated throughout the state structure, in all possible areas. Gender balance is a profound principle that is at the same time quite simple. It is the women's demand to share power. It is also their right. Gender balance is a mirror of and an ideal for any society in which equality between men and women is promoted. Therefore, I hope the gender balance that we have established in the cabinet - as well as in a large part of the government - contributes to the achievement of a greater equality of access to all levels of decision- making, having a symbolic effect on Chilean society and opening new horizons for women in the private sector, in culture, in communications and in civil society. The growing participation of women in politics will undoubtedly elevate the quality of our democracy and achieve changes in the traditional mindsets of power. Our goal is transforming these mindsets, not adapting to them. That is why I have adopted the saying: "With a few women in politics, women change; with many women in politics, politics change." Chilean women are increasingly entering the formal job market, which is fundamental for the growth and development of a country. The United Nations' millennium development goals state that without the inclusion of women it is impossible to move out of poverty. We know that in two-parent families where both parents work it is easier to break the cycle of poverty. In the case of Chile, one in every three homes is headed by a woman and therefore women's access to the workplace is not only a condition for progress but also a duty to their loved ones. Behind a poor woman there is gender inequality that worsens her poverty. That is why it is significant that in the early years of the Concertación coalition government the number of households living below the poverty line declined from 38.6 per cent in 1990 to 20.6 per cent 10 years later, while the rate of female participation in the job market rose from 29.6 per cent to 37 per cent. We now face the challenge of increasing the latter, to reach and surpass the Latin American average. Salaried employment improves women's self-perception and enables them better to resist domestic violence when it occurs. Furthermore, the workplace offers them protection when their peers or superiors support or encourage them to reject such aggression. Likewise, we should discourage women from accepting abuse in the workplace for fear of losing the autonomy that they have gained by working, or not daring to be promoted to levels of greater responsibility and higher incomes, as indicated in a recent study conducted in Santiago de Chile. A woman's access to salaried employment should take place under dignified and equal conditions. The obstacles to progressing towards this objective are many and difficult to overcome. But it is possible to resolve them through efficient and well-financed public policies. We must guarantee that women may leave their small children in competent hands when they go to work. That is why my government intends to establish a child- protection system designed to provide equal development opportunities for children during their first eight years of life, explicitly incorporating the conditions necessary for the entrance of women into the job market. We should also ensure that women receive adequate healthcare and that society as a whole takes responsibility for job-related illnesses, childcare and the cost of motherhood; and, of course, we must guarantee that women obtain dignified pensions at the end of their professional lives. The girls and young women who are entering the education system today can aspire to use their abilities and talents in the most varied areas of human activity, because they will no longer read in their textbooks that only men are the protagonists of human development, and because they will have the support of a society that no longer justifies inequalities between men and women. For them, the citizens of the future, the beautiful task that we have begun must be successfully completed. The writer is president of Chile Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006 portside (the left side in nautical parlance) is a news, discussion and debate service of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. It aims to provide varied material of interest to people on the left. To subscribe: http://www.portside.org/subscribe To search the portside archive: http://www.portside.org/archive ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> See what's inside the new Yahoo! 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