Get On the Bus

Local community action is what’s most needed today. By Shaun Bartone, editor.

During WWII, when the Nazis controlled Germany and most of Western and Central Europe, the German car companies—BMW, Porsche/Audi, Mercedes Benz, Volkswagen—were financial supporters of the Nazi regime. Today, it’s Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, the electric car company, who is carrying out Project 2025, the complete dismantling of the US federal government and the US Constitution, and with it, civil rights, human rights, and climate action policies. It is Elon Musk, the richest man in the world who earned his billions from Tesla, who is instituting the fascist regime in Washington. Which leads to the question: Why are automobile manufacturers so often associated with fascist regimes? 

Truly sinister is the book’s description of a secret meeting early in 1933, when Hitler addressed two dozen of the nation’s wealthiest business leaders. Relying on archival research, the author says that Hitler offered a deal: If they’d support his continuing rise to power, he’d ensure the political stability the tycoons needed to keep raking in profits. He’d do it by smashing the labor riots that socialists and Communists were planning to stage. But to do that, Hitler’s almost-bankrupt Nazi party needed lots of cash to enable victories in the upcoming parliamentary elections, after which there would be no more elections, he promised. That night, the tycoons gave Hitler what he needed – so they’d get what they needed. (Review of Nazi Billionaires, by David de Jong, in the Detroit Free Press.)

Part 1: CARS CREATE BILLIONAIRES 

I pondered this question for a long time until it became clear: cars create billionaires. Billionaires make their money selling cars, drilling for oil that is refined into gasoline to burn in cars, building highways that support suburban sprawl, selling car loans and auto insurance and all the other costs that follow from car ownership. Indeed, it’s become widely known that Tesla is Elon’s cash cow; that’s how he makes most of his billions. All of this auto-dystopia is funded by billions upon billions of dollars in taxes from the federal government’s DOT Highway Division, built on the backs of the working class.

And billionaires automakers HATE public transit. They hate buses, they hate trains and light rail systems, they hate making any urban design accommodation for walkers, bikers, bus riders, wheelchair users, or micro-electric vehicles (e.g. scooters) that share the streets with cars. And again, Musk is the perfect example of this. We now know that he started The Boring Company, to put an underground highway system through Los Angeles, because he wanted to convince California politicians to stop funding the light rail and high-speed train projects that would serve Los Angeles and connect it with the northern California. So he could sell more Teslas.

Beginning in the 1920s and 30s, automakers bought up streetcars, bus and train systems around the country and tore up the tracks, so they could sell more cars. Streetcars, buses, trains, and other collective forms of transportation, were in direct competition for urban space for cars. So the automakers destroyed those forms of public transportation. By the 1970s, most of the bus and rail systems connecting US cities were gone. What remained of public transit was defunded and chronically underfunded so that transit systems became more inefficient, expensive and useless for the working class.

But what about electric cars? Aren’t they the answer to the climate change problem? If we electrify the entire automotive system, won’t that solve all our climate and air pollution problems? Again Musk and Tesla are the best example of why that is a complete obfuscation and outright lie. No, electric cars are not the answer in any way to our climate change problems. Because electric cars also create billionaires. And as we’ve seen, electric cars created the most Nazi-aping and destructive billionaire fascist of the 21st century. 

The other consequence of destroying public transit and making people dependent on cars instead is to create DEBT. Not only do car companies want to sell you a car, they want to sell you a car loan to make sure you are so mired in debt, while you’re locked into a form of transportation that you really can’t afford. So you will have to work harder, longer, with more of your wages enriching the billionaire bankers and automakers. You get an auto loan that gets you a car so that you can drive to work to pay off the auto loan. And in the end, you have nothing to show for it, dead broke. Except that you made the richest people on the planet, the automobile manufacturers, oil companies, and lithium mining companies, even richer and more powerful than ever. 

So why do auto billionaires hate public transit? It’s not only that public transit competes for urban space with their golden calf, the automobile, it’s that governments—local, state and federal—TAX billionaires in order to fund public transit. In Massachusetts, citizens voted to pass the Millionaires Tax, a 1% tax on individual incomes over one million dollars, in order to pay for what? Public transit. Billionaires want to give themselves the biggest tax cuts they can gouge out of the working class by not paying for public services like buses and trains.

Part 2: GET ON THE BUS

(Part 2 coming soon)