Back in 2008, after the usual flak campaigns from the forces of cars-first, the U.S. Congress decided to spend $2.6 billion per year to keep Amtrak, our ultra-pathetic gesture at a modern national railroad, the entity that does not even own its own tracks and deploys duct-taped rolling stock from the 1960s, operating from 2009 through 2013. Total federal train spending over those five years? About $13 billion.

At about the same time, Congress also decided to spend $25 billion on low-interest (which probably means zero or even negative interest — I haven’t been able to locate a disclosure of the terms) loans to private corporations, in order to stimulate so-called “alternative” automobile manufacturing.

This give-away, titled the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, comes, of course, on top of the scores of billions the U.S. public spends each and every year building and maintaining roadways for automobiles.

As they eagerly suck in this additional public subsidy, automotive capitalists, meanwhile, are enjoying expanding profit margins and cash flows.

Par for the course.

In case you missed it, China’s state capitalists are now saying that they are pushing to be manufacturing 40 million automobiles a year by 2020.

It will be interesting to see if capitalism makes it that far without the onset of the mother of all depressions.  Personally, I doubt it.

But this news is extremely important, nonetheless.  Not only does it support the thesis that few things can boost corporate capitalism like cars, but it is also an enormous indictment of China’s worst-of-both-worlds overclass.  If their efforts come to fruition, they will spell catastrophe for the Chinese people.

Of course. GM is now promising the next round of Volt hybrids will include a minivan model. Of course.

Capitalist priorities don’t change. “Mini car, mini profit,” as Hank Ford II once incautiously admitted in public.

And past capitalist priorities built this cars-first network of towns and strip malls and exurbs. Cars-first transportation, thanks to the sheer nature of automobiles, radically balloons all these spaces. All the ballooned spaces in turn require not just cars, but big cars, as traveling at high speeds over rough, crossing roads makes tiny cars especially dangerous to their occupants.

So, of course. Mini-vans and pickups will continue to to devour a huge chunk of the insane amount of energy we continue to squander on transportation in corporate capitalist America.

Note: Dig the “gas 2.0″ source here. These guys think new cars and allegedly “new” fuels for them somehow amount to a “world coming to terms with its oil addiction.” Of course, of course.

Today, we get news of the latest Obama bailout of corporate capitalists. Today, it comes in this form:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration has reached a deal on a $773 million environmental trust, the largest of its kind in U.S. history, to clean up dozens of former General Motors sites spread over 14 states, officials said Wednesday.

The funds will target automotive sites containing hazardous waste that were left shuttered by the auto giant’s bankruptcy last year. About half of the 89 sites covered by the trust are in Michigan and others are in Indiana, New York and Ohio.

At GM’s abandoned Massena, New York complex, the pool of PCBs is so deep it has not yet been (and possible could never be) even measured, despite decades of controversy.

One effect of this toxic lake? “[New York] State-conducted studies have found PCBs in the breast milk of nursing Mohawk mothers and in their infants.”

All this and more (dig the name of the bankrupt corporate shell of the “old GM” — Motors Liquidation Company (MLC) — where’d the “General” and the “GM” go, boys?) is interesting in its own sordid Obamian right.

But permit me to enlarge: The more general point is that manufacturing automobiles is inherently energy-, materials-, and toxics-intensive. “Green car” is an oxymoron, whatever motor ones stick in.

Not as a way of restoring the corporate capitalist economy, of course, but as a way of restoring corporate profits.

According to Automotive News, the latest overclass constituency to confirm that its conventional flows of surplus wealth have been brought back online is the nation’s largest used-car sales overlord, CarMax:

CarMax Inc., the nation’s largest used-vehicle dealer group, said today it posted solid revenue and profit growth in its most recent quarter amid continued strong demand for used cars. Net income grew to $107.9 million for the quarter ended Aug. 31, up 5 percent from the same quarter last year. Revenue jumped 13 percent to $2.34 billion.

CarMax shares jumped nearly 7 percent in morning trading, to $25.75, near its 52-week high of $26.50.

And, of course, a government bailout program provided the catalyst:

Even though the cash-for-clunkers program didn’t apply to used vehicles, Carmax said it increased traffic at its stores.

The average selling price for used vehicles was $18,084 for the quarter, up 5 percent from $17,185 during the same quarter last year.

Its finance arm, CarMax Auto Finance, reported income of $52.6 million compared with a $72.1 million profit in the same period last year. The year-ago period’s income was boosted by $36.2 million in one-time items.

Never let it be said that this country doesn’t take care of its used car corporations!

Ralph Nader is not, and never has been, a serious critic of cars-first transportation.

For a few paragraphs, he came close. In Unsafe at Any Speed, Nader opened by calling “the automobile tragedy” “one of the most serious of [all] man-made assaults on the human body” and suggesting that its proper solution involved “the great problem” of “how to control the power of economic interests which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and technology.”

What readers of Unsafe quickly learned, however, is that by “the automobile tragedy,” Nader meant not the dominance of the automobile as a mode of travel, but merely its lax regulation. The evil, in Nader’s telling, lies not in the machine itself, but merely in its sloppy, unsupervised implementation.

As to the “economic interests” behind the scenes, Nader has never explained them in any detail, preferring instead to suggest that the existence of a toughened-up National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the agency Nader helped cajole into existence, could, despite the telling inclusion of the word “Highway” in the organization’s very moniker, someday be enough to dispose of the problems they create.

Alas, things have just taken a major turn for the even-worse with Ralph (for whom I thrice voted, btw) on this crucial topic.

In an essay titled “Safer at Most Speeds,” Nader calls on us to “celebrate some goods news.” The good news at hand, in Ralph’s view? Only 33,808 people died in automotive collisions last year in the United States!

33,808 deaths?  Good news?  WTF?

But wait. Not only does Ralph ask us to “celebrate” that our technologically optional, ecologically insane, but capitalistically bountiful transportation order is still killing a 9/11′s worth of people every month in its crashes alone, but he adds insult to injury by inexcusably exaggerating the contribution made by safer cars.

In reporting the basic numbers in question, Nader says this:

Since 1966 when the motor vehicle and highway safety laws were passed by Congress—led by Democrats but with significant Republican support—the fatality rate dropped from 5.49 percent (50,894 lives lost) to 1.13 percent in 2009 (33,808 lives lost.) This large live-saving reduction occurred while absolute vehicle miles traveled increased more than threefold in those intervening decades.

Now, of course, any skilled reader ought to see this and immediately ask: “Percent of what, Ralph?”

It turns out that the baseline for the percentages Nader reports is the official NHTSA tactic of reporting automotive fatalities as a number of deaths per 100 million miles driven in the United States.

As Nader certainly knows, this is seriously deceptive.  What matters in judging the comparative danger of driving is not properly described by dividing total deaths over all the miles driven by everybody.  Such a statistic says nothing about the source of the total number of miles being driven.  Is the population growing while everybody drives the same amount as always?  Or are people also driving more and more miles per year?  Without incorporating those facts into the comparison, it remains impossible to assess what really matters, which is the changing risk of death for the average driver driving the average number of miles.

And, as Nader surely knows, the plain fact of the matter is that the average number of miles driven annually per U.S. driver has risen by about 50 percent since the early days of the NHTSA.

What that means is that the relative fatality decline Nader and the NHTSA (and the automotive-industrial complex) would have you celebrate is not nearly as big as he and they would have you believe.

Think about it: If your chances of getting killed by any activity drop fivefold, but you spend fifty percent more time doing the potentially lethal activity in question, you are not five times safer than you once were. More like three.

Shame on Ralph for helping obscure this elementary reality.

And that, alas, is hardly all.

Another problem with trumpeting the official “safety” stats is that these are not only intentionally bogus, but deal only with killings and only with crashes.

In reality, as the great Ralph Nader again knows full well, for every person killed in a car crash, there is at least one other who is severely injured, suffering life-shattering disabilities. As the authors of one study explain, “Persons injured in these crashes often suffer physical pain and emotional anguish that is beyond any economic recompense. The permanent disability of spinal cord damage, loss of mobility, loss of eyesight, and serious brain injury can profoundly limit a person’s life, and can result in dependence on others for routine physical care.”

And what about things like air pollution and obesity?

As “absolute vehicle miles traveled increased more than threefold,” automobiles had to become three times less polluting than before merely to keep air quality the same for a burgeoning population. That has arguably happened. But so what? Aren’t we still willfully sacrificing many more thousands of lives a year to this other inherent aspect of “the automobile tragedy?”

And, finally, isn’t there a pretty serious connection between the exorbitant amount of time Americans spend sitting in cars and the growing epidemic of weight-gain in the society? Recent studies suggest that as many as 400,000 Americans die each year from the worsening imbalance between caloric intake and burn-off. Even if cars-first travel accounts for only ten percent of that problem, that would mean another 40,000 annual deaths are caused by the phenomenon Nader wants us to celebrate.

The fact of the matter, of course, is that not only do automobiles remain a supreme danger to life and limb in the United States, but, in the age of peak resources, they are simply an outdated pipe dream. This planet cannot for much longer sustain the daily use of hundreds of millions of 2-ton metal-and-plastic grocery fetchers, profitable monstrosities that spend 95 percent of their lives parked.

It is certainly true that individual cars have become somewhat safer to operate and breathe near. How much of that is due to the NHTSA and how much due to the simple globalization of the auto industry, which presses car makers to comply with more standards and offers buyers more choices, remains highly debatable. The answer is probably “some of each.”

But to call for any kind of celebration of matters automotive at this point in human history is simply unconscionable. Save the party for the day when we finally begin a serious public analysis of our dire and rapidly worsening transportation conundrum and the economic power structure driving us toward Carmageddon.

Saturday, I linked to Nissan’s stunningly dishonest attempt to make buying a $33,000 coal-burning 2.75-ton metal, plastic, and lithium contraption for fetching groceries look like an act of concern for the planet and its endangered species.

That particular trick exploits the well-meaning but lazy and woefully under-informed.

Meanwhile, while watching a football game this weekend, I encountered this other car-pushing tactic.  If this society survives cars-first transportation, our grandchildren will one day guffaw in disbelief at the militant interlocking stupidities in this stinking propaganda turd:

This ad targets the completely and proudly uninformed.

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.

Forty-one thousand dollars. Time required to recharge the massive battery pack? Unless you are an early buyer who gets gifted one of the federal government’s $2,500+ home super-chargers (or buy one yourself): ten hours. Ten hours plugged in to move the thing “up to” 40 miles on electricity. That “up to” is there because using the stereo, lights, heater, or air conditioner — using the car, in other words — will reduce the all-electric range.

All this for a mere year’s worth of full-time exploited labor (more than that for women), or the price of three compact all-gasoline cars that get roughly the same gas mileage and make no huge new demands on the Earth’s limited supply of lithium.

Said it before: ROFLMFAO.

Deluded + Dangerous + Demagogue

Meanwhile, as to his skills as an analyst and predictor of how the United States works, I’m afraid old Amory gets a solid F.

Compare:

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Of course, the secret to Lovins is that he’s always been trying to position himself to become a new-age tycoon.

In any event, when you hear this man’s name, you know you’re standing in a steaming heap.