Under its state capitalist regime, China has certainly managed to capture a serious chunk of the world’s wealth.  Unfortunately for China and everybody else, thanks to the imperatives of the economic system its market-Stalinist overclass has adopted, it has also managed to build its way into the cars-first dead end.  Apparently, there has been a 9-day-long traffic jam in the Beijing suburbs this summer…

Under the brilliant leadership of Mayor Richard M. Daley, in 2008, the City of Chicago leased the right to collect money from the city’s parking meters to Morgan Stanley, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and Allianz Capital Partners.

Turns out that, during the life of their 75-year lease, these capitalists will collect at least $11.6 billion from Chicagoans, and, from that $11.6 billion, will likely net a profit of $9.58 billion before interest, taxes and depreciation. That profit will be more than 8 times the $1.15 billion Chicago received from the coalition of vultures.

As Bloomberg Business Week puts it:

The deal illustrates how Wall Street banks, recipients of more than $300 billion in taxpayer bailouts in the worst credit collapse since the Great Depression, are profiting from helping states and cities close record recession-induced deficits by selling bonds and leasing public properties.

With “help” like that, who needs harm?

General Motors now offers to sell you a partially electric-motored car for $41,000. Nissan will sell you an all-electric one for $32,780.

If you are among the few who could even think about forking over that much money for an automobile, here are four questions about what you’re buying:

1) Isn’t it ostrichware? As the smug owner of the Prius pictured at left shouts through his/her vanity plate, isn’t your main motivation for buying a Volt or a Leaf (and Big Brother must be laughing his ass off at that name for an automobile!) to make yourself feel that you’ve thereby done your part to help confront and reform the institutions that are imperiling humanity’s energy and ecological future? And isn’t that a rather pathetic conclusion to draw? Buying a 3,500-pound box of steel, plastic, and lithium is somehow a serious contribution to making a sustainable world? Really?

2) Are you sure it’s not vaporware? The outgoing CEO of GM once said he knew GM “had to have an electric car,” and, by that, he meant he knew it was an important gesture to show that General Motors is changing. No serious analyst of electric cars thinks they will comprise more than ten percent of the U.S. vehicle fleet in the foreseeable future. In fact, it isn’t at all proven that they even could, given their radical demands on our decrepit electricity-transmission infrastructure. So, have you asked yourself whether, by buying an electric car, you might actually be volunteering to serve as a useful rolling distraction on behalf of our corporate overlords, whose intent is to ride cars-first transportation for as long as they possibly can?

3) Where’s your theory of transition? It is inherently un-serious to presume that an individual purchase of any product — not to say a two-ton grocery-fetcher — equals a real contribution to getting humanity decently and humanely across the coming energy transition. No proponent of the electric car ever talks about this, for the excellent reason that cars-first transportation is simply not even imaginably sane, given what we’re up against.

4) Who will fix your crashed Volt or Leaf? What will happen when your battery pack sheers off your frame in a rear-ender? How much will you have to pay to insure against that event and others like it?

It’s mildly entertaining to watch the right wing in the United States lose the rest of what little was ever there in terms of its mind. Certainly, their ability to say the most ridiculous things and still obtain some news coverage goes far toward showing the continuing usefulness of Herman and Chomsky’s classic, Manufacturing Consent.

Dan Maes, the Republican-Wing-of-the-Business-Party’s candidate for Governor of Colorado, is apparently going around saying that pro-bicycle activism is not only an effort to — horror of horrors! — influence “the attitude” of our fellow citizens, but also “part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty.”

Yes, please!

Meanwhile, the perpetuation of cars-first transportation is, of course, held by Maes to be the very embodiment of personal freedom and, one supposes, a timeless and undiscussable requirement of democracy.

Ruling social classes age. After they get their boots squarely on enough necks, they begin to flatter themselves for it. Eventually, as memory of reality recedes, senility sets in, and they lose the capacity to do anything creative or flexible or realistic. Boondoggles become the only game in town.

The U.S. overclass entered into terminal dementia beginning in the late 1970s, and is now utterly braindead.

Consider this post from the editors of Investor’s Business Daily. In it, the IBD editors rightly disparage the Chevy Volt as a hopeless boondoggle.

But they also manage to say that the Volt is the product of “government stupidity,” rather than capitalists’ long-standing and utterly unchallenged dictatorship over transportation policy in the United States:

It wasn’t exactly Michael Dukakis riding in a tank wearing a Snoopy helmet, but it was close. President Obama, who reportedly hasn’t driven an inch himself since taking office, visited a GM plant in Hamtrack near Detroit on Friday to drive a Chevy Volt 10 feet off an assembly line. It was a perfect image, as the American economy is being driven off a cliff by this White House.

The administration, at taxpayers’ expense, has labored mightily and brought forth an Edsel that needs to be recharged. If a camel is a horse designed by committee, the Chevy Volt is a car designed by government. It is a perfect example of industrial policy run amok, of what happens when government picks winners and losers. Without heavy subsidies and government ownership, it never would have been built.

Aside from being absolutely false — the Volt was designed by GM, of course, the self-flattering blindness on display here is simply epic. Whatever one thinks of the cliche about camels being bad horses, the inarguable fact is that the automobile is capitalists’ idea of a horse, with all that implies about capitalists’ idea of energy efficiency and safety and sustainability in human mobility systems.

As this shows, our out-of-control moneyed overlords are so far gone on their own BS, they can’t even tell when they’re plainly tying their own nooses. The Chevy Volt is a sign of corporate capitalist dominance and desperation, as is market-worshipper Barack Obummer’s sponsorship and pimping of it.

If the public ever gains control of transportation policy, we will have to show these heedless murderers what government’s real idea of a horse is.