A Lesson in How Corporate Greed and Collusion Impacts Quality of Life in Our Cities

In the early 1920s, Los Angeles had the largest and most effective trolley car system in the United States, the Pacific City Lines. I rode the electric “red cars” as a kid growing up in LA during the late Thirties and the Forties. The demise of this popular system had little to do with consumer preference for buses, or even automobiles (which few people could afford). It was the result of collusion between the producers of oil, rubber, buses, and, ultimately, automobiles.

Pacific Electric Red Cars on Terminal Island awaiting destruction

With financing from these special interests, over 100 electric surface-traction systems in 45 cities including Baltimore, Newark, Los Angeles, New York City, Oakland and San Diego were purchased and converted into bus operation. Several of the companies involved were convicted in 1949 of conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce. For this conspiracy, each of the companies was fined $5,000. The bargain gained Los Angeles and other cities victimized by the scheme choking smog and other forms of air pollution. Today, America’s dismal record on implementing mass transit and controlling air pollution can be traced directly back to collusion on the part of Standard Oil, Firestone Tire and Rubber, General Motors, and other business operations interested in putting the "rubber to the road."

Los Angeles From the air

Toxic 100 Air Polluters

The Toxic 100 Air Polluters index identifies the top U.S. air polluters among the world's largest corporations. The index relies on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Risk Screening Environmental Indicators (RSEI), which assesses the chronic human health risk from industrial toxic releases. The underlying data for RSEI is the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), in which facilities across the U.S. report their releases of toxic chemicals. In addition to the amount of toxic chemicals released, RSEI also includes the degree of toxicity and population exposure. The Toxic 100 Air Polluters ranks corporations based on the chronic human health risk from all of their U.S. polluting facilities. The top ten polluters are listed below.

Bayer Group

ExxonMobil

Sunoco

E.I. du Pont de Nemours

Arcelor Mittal

Steel Dynamics Inc.

Archer Daniels Midland Co. (ADM)

Ford Motor Co.

Eastman Kodak Co.

Koch Industries

Full list of Toxic 100 Air Polluters

from the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), U. Mass.

The same clear glory

Smog is again blanketing the Chinese capital the day of the Olympic Games opening ceremony, despite it being declared a public holiday, with fewer cars on the roads. The Olympics venues in the centre of the city are barely visible from even a few hundred meters.

Full Moon

Isolate and full, the moon floats over the house by the river
Into the night the cold water rushes away below the gate
The bright gold spilled on the river is never still
The brilliance of my quilt is greater than precious silk
The circle without blemish
The empty mountains without sound
The moon hangs in the vacant, wide constellations
Pine cones drop in the old garden
The senna trees bloom
The same clear glory extends for ten thousand miles

Tu Fu, One Hundred Poems from the Chinese.