Reply #32: Sorry but hybrids change nothing; they perpetuate the status quo both... [View All]

[newswolf56]

economically and environmentally. The basic problem is that transportation in the United States is increasingly unaffordable to the very people who need it most: working families. Hybrids -- now or ever -- cannot possibly alleviate the problem.

This is because only the rich can afford hybrids. The typical hybrid sells for about $30,000 -- which is more than the U.S. worker (at an average of $13 per hour) makes in a year. This means the typical American worker is still stuck trying to feed a gas-guzzler on ever more expensive fuel -- still abandoned by the politicians to fend for himself/herself in coping with the industrial world's worst, least efficient, most expensive and most savagely discriminatory transportation system.

Once again, I am astounded how otherwise intelligent people who claim to be Leftists are intellectually crippled by a hopelessly bourgeois, hopelessly PollyAnna ignorance of class-struggle and its ever more vicious economic realities. This ignorance is THE underlying reason we lost the 2000 and 2004 elections.

Given the always-malevolent reality of capitalism, the cost of hybrid cars will only go UP as fuel prices skyrocket. (Remember how the prices of fuel-efficient cars soared during the 1970s?) Meanwhile -- because what is really happening this time is the total and permanent collapse of the U.S. economy -- wages will continue to decline and employment will continue to dwindle. The hybrids will therefore remain forever beyond the reach of the very people who need them the most.

The fair, just and environmentally sustainable solution would be to build genuine mass transit -- transit that's powered by electricity and runs on rails. But that will never happen -- precisely because it IS the fair, just and ecologically sane solution: fairness, justice and ecological sanity is an absolute impossibility in any economic system based on principles derived from Yehvehistic religion. Note how -- even though the federal government set aside huge sums for mass transit construction during the 1960s and 1970s -- nothing was built. The funds were instead ignored and obstructed (and sometimes even stolen) by state and local politicians, then siphoned off by Congress to finance the gargantuan military buildup gleefully undertaken by the leaping-chimp Reaganoids. The money was never restored during the '90s: Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council peerage were as opposed to mass transport as Reagan was. And because of today's federal deficit -- also because both parties remain equally hostile to mass transit -- those sums will never, ever be available again. (Because of skyrocketing land costs -- a true yardstick of the growing worthlessness of the U.S. dollar -- no such system could ever again be built even if the desire to build it were there, even if the DemoPublican politicians were willing to stop subsidizing the Oil Barons and the Automotive Lords.)

So instead of building public transport, obscene sums of money will be spent on status-quo baubles: hybrids -- vehicles only the rich and super-rich can afford, exceptionalist projects that make a big public relations splash ("see how technology is going to rescue us once again"), brightly colored possessions to wax and polish and flash like grotesquely oversized finger-jewels, perks that benefit only plutocrats, helping the oligarchy consolidate even more of its stolen wealth.

What is essential -- that is, if we are going to survive the oncoming collapse -- is not a new product but a new paradigm.



Edit: minor correction I thought I had made before posting.