When I was a young man living in London, a city with about 8 million people then, it was never necessary to buy a car. I could get anywhere in London or its suburbs very easily by bus, trolley car, tram or train.

My little suburb had three train stations serving five major terminals in London. Electric trains were going to London and coming from London about ten times an hour, and that was just from my nearest station. And they were on time. When I began to go to work I took a train to the station nearest my work place. I was never late. Nobody could say as an excuse that the train was late. A few years later I needed to go by train to a terminal and change to another train and then catch a bus. Same applied. Never late. You got to know the people on the train and bus too.

For longer journeys you would go to London and get on a steam train to your far destination. A train like the Flying Scotsman for example, and go north at 100 miles an hour.

I never owned a refrigerator in England. I didn’t know any people who did when I was a young man. We shopped every day for fresh food. Shelf life by chemical means was not of paramount importance. And once again I could go everywhere in town by electric tram, or electric trolley bus or diesel bus. Never had to walk more than a block to get to the store of my choice, when I knew the numbers of the buses or trams.

Here, people tell me it’s a three hour drive to some place I mention, and I understand. There and then they would say things like, catch the 49 bus at Streatham common garage, get off at Crystal Palace and catch the trolley to Anerley station and the train goes from there right to where you want to go.

Here and now they tell me how long the drive will take, for someone not in a Nascar race. The car rules, and this has brought about many unfortunate circumstances. You may not know that this rule of the car was not an accident. It was a deliberate plan by those nice guys who have just gone bankrupt, karma rules too, General Motors.

Even in America, when my mother was a young woman in her twenties the American public were able to use large networks of electric street cars, trolleys and trains, cross country and in elevated railways in town.

So, what happened? Well between 1920 and 1955 General Motors bought up more than 100 mass transit electric powered systems in 45 cities and then allowed the systems to decay while General Motors replaced the electrical transit systems with diesel powered buses, their products. The buses were less efficient and much dirtier to operate as far as pollution.

You may have heard of some of the cities where this trick was perpetrated: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles for example. Los Angeles in fact had the largest electric/rail mass transit system in the United States. Now it’s automobile city and I was stopped twice for walking there as a faintly suspicious character.

But the law, American fashion, caught up with General Motors and in 1949 it was charged and convicted of criminally conspiring to replace electric mass transit with GM-manufactured diesel buses. The court found them guilty and fined GM $5,000 and forced H.C. Crossman, the GM executive responsible for carrying out GM's policy, to pay exactly $1. That’s why I said American fashion. The big guys don’t have the same laws to obey as the little people.

This takeover of the public transport system simply because it made more profit for General Motors points to one of the problems of our corporate ruled economy. The ONLY reason an executive has to give to shareholders for any project is that it is sure to make a profit. The seven generations rule of the Native Americans does not apply. Immediate short term goals can override common sense, honesty and ethics, where they exist.

But there is more. Every domino that falls knocks down other dominoes. Every action in business can produce a long term chain reaction that nobody has considered.

We are now becoming concerned about the environmental impact of our transport systems on the global warming effect and pollution of the atmosphere. Those electric transport systems that General Motors deliberately sabotaged had much less of an environmental footprint as we say today. And many of those systems used metal tires or wheels that ran on metal rails and did not produce the pollution of rubber tired vehicles, not to mention the pollution from oil based fuels.

You must remember some of my abusive remarks about the scum balls in the Sloan Kettering Institute for Cancer Research. Many people who know the name are surprised to find that Sloan and Kettering were General Motors executives whose major role in life was to find profit making systems for their employer. And they did. And in an area that affected everybody who drove a car.

In 1922 General Motors discovered that adding lead tetraethyl to gasoline immediately increased the horsepower output of the engine. Well there was a minor concern about the dangers of lead vapor inhalation from exhaust gases, so the Bureau of Mines did some testing and discovered that inhalation of lead was harmless. Since that is not so it is pretty clear that General Motors used its dollar leverage to get the result they wanted to hear.

Then, Charles Kettering of the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Institute for medical research, who as I have said ad nauseam also happened to be an executive of General Motors, entered the picture.

By one of those strange coincidences that follow really big money around, the Sloan Kettering Institute began issuing reports stating that lead occurs naturally in your body and that your body has a natural way of eliminating low-level exposure.

Sloan Kettering has a strong business association with The Industrial Hygiene Foundation and PR giant Hill & Knowlton. PR always worked in this country, at least until the Internet arrived. Sloan Kettering opposed all anti-lead research for years. As is usual in health matters in America the bad guys are filthy rich, unscrupulous and organized, and the good guys are working alone or in small groups that nobody listens to because the big guys control the media and the research dollars. By the time I came to America in the 70s, 90 percent of our gasoline was leaded.

Finally it became too obvious to hide the fact that lead was a major carcinogen, and leaded gas was phased out in the late 1980s. Sloan Kettering wasn’t closed for their lies about lead any more than for their lies about Laetrile. Different laws for the big guys and the little guys. But from 1922 to the late 80’s is over 60 years. And during those 60 years about 30 million TONS of lead were released as vapor for the American public to breathe in. What an advantage to the health of the privileged American public.

And that isn’t the end of it either. The chain goes on. I will mention just one more link. Rubber dust from tires hitting the asphalt. Do you happen to know anyone with asthma?
The steel wheeled, steel railed, electric public transport did not produce any dust that could cause respiratory problems.

Remember I said that Los Angeles was served by the largest electric/rail mass transit system in the nation. The Pacific Electric Railway ran more than 1000 trains per day over 760 miles of rail lines to outlying stations carrying light freight as well as passengers. Its last line, to Long Beach, was abandoned in 1961. And by another coincidence that occurs around big money, that was the first year in which the ingredients of smog were first identified in L.A.'s air.

Everybody and his brother in the health field have written about the global warming impact of fossil fuel consumption. Some have written about the lung cancer connection from diesel exhaust. But now a very serious problem has been identified in the scientific and even the medical literature, lung damage from the inhalation of tire dust.

Whenever a weight bearing rubber tire rolls across asphalt or concrete tiny fragments of rubber break off and enter the air. And as the Bureau of Mines and Sloan Kettering plugged the harmlessness of lead in gasoline so in the 70’s and 80’s scientists employed by the tire companies and their friends in the Environmental Protection Agency concluded that these tire fragments were too large to enter the human lung and so were no threat to health.

But this year we have seen research by allergy specialists who were not employed by the tire companies. This research shows that about 60% of tire dust fragments are so small that they can enter into the deepest part of the lungs. Here the latex rubber in the dust can cause all kinds of allergic reactions from runny nose, conjunctivitis, hives, bronchial asthma and sometimes anaphylactic shock.

Over the last 20 years deaths from asthma and asthma itself have increased dramatically, especially among children, and medical people have been looking in vain for the cause. Well, there is a pretty strong candidate to be considered, tire dust, brought to you by your friends at General Motors and their buddies.

Incidentally you probably know someone allergic to latex rubber since about 17 million Americans have allergic reactions to latex, particularly among those who handle it continuously like health care workers who wear it as gloves and handle it in tubes and sheets.

Not quite finished with General Motors yet. It’s obvious that the number of tires manufactured has been increasing steadily during the 20 years of increasing asthma. It’s also true that the proportion of latex in tires has been increasing and more tires are being made as radial tires. Tire dust from radial tires is finer than that from bias ply tires and can enter the deepest part of the lungs more easily.

We had the scientific estimate of 30 million tons of lead released as vapor, courtesy of General Motors and their buddies. Can we quantify the amount of tire dust. Well yes we can.

In 1974, tire industry scientists who have no incentive to exaggerate, estimated that 1.3 billion pounds of tire dust were released by tire wear in the U.S., or about 6.5 pounds of dust released from each tire each year. I have to remind my overseas readers every time that an American billion is one thousand million. A thousandth of a British billion.

So the estimate is simple to do. In 1995, there were an estimated 280 million tires in use in the U.S If each tire releases 6.5 pounds of dust per year, tire dust released in 1995 would total 1.8 American billion pounds. In Los Angeles alone, at least 10,000 pounds of tire dust are released into the air each DAY.

It is a pretty serious matter that the General Motors legacy of tire dust pollution kills about 60,000 Americans a year. But there is a much more serious matter to examine. I have written many articles showing how private corporations have brought about tremendous changes in public life and culture without any accountability and without any democratic debate. DuPont, Monsanto, Hearst newspapers and on and on. Continuing to allow them to call the shots is obviously not in the public interest and people need to know why.
For decades the public could be kept in ignorance of important facts.

Right now for example there are only six corporations that control the TV and newspaper and magazine business in this country. There used to be dozens. What these people want you to see and read is what you see and read: calamities, inane news about brainless celebrities and who is sleeping with or jilting who. The stuff important to your health and even survival is not in those media.

I am thankful for the Internet and its offshoots. It is the only way that democratic action is going to be possible. When a certain Middle Eastern government recently issued a statement that there was no upheaval about the election in their country and that foreign journalists would be expelled for lying, it was Twitter people from that nation, using their cell phone cameras and electronic ingenuity that showed the rest of the world that it was the government that was lying. Nobody would have known without the Web. The National Security people here asked Twitter not to close for maintenance at their usual time because of the importance of the news coming through from national Tweets.

And a tiny example of my own. I love fireflies. This year I have seen none in my garden right at the end of June when they usually thick. I am on Twitter. I Twittered those following me and whom I follow to check if all was well elsewhere. I received Twitters from all over the States and from Liverpool, England and South America, from people who too loved fireflies and told me of how they were doing there. It took ten seconds to ask and I received dozens of answers from Johnnies on the spot. That same system could be used to keep people in touch and debunking the lies of their authority figures.

And governments are becoming afraid of the possibility of truth being available to their subjects. Remember what V says, "People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."

A nod is as good as a wink to a blind gargoyle. The corporate controlled media are not where you will find the facts you need to know. They will just tell you what they want you to believe, which will NEVER be in your best interest. Use the Web.