NEWS

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 … Read more

The other day, I said that the Deepwater Horizon blowout would lead to six months of scapegoating and posturing about “our concern,” then yield to a renewal of deep-water oil drilling. Yesterday, President No-Change passively admitted the same: We owe all those who’ve been harmed, as well as future generations, a full and vigorous accounting … Read more

In his 2006 State of the Union speech, George W. Bush “admitted” that “America is addicted to oil.” Today, Barack H. Obama, speaking in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, concurred with the now-official diagnosis of what ails the nation: “We know that our dependence on foreign oil endangers our security and … Read more

Ivan Illich was certainly one of history’s greatest Catholic priests, right up there with Bartolome de las Casas, Oscar Romero, and Gustavo Gutiérrez. Take a look at what Illich had to say about the sanity of cars-first transportation, and you see why the CIA spied on him and tried to have him ex-communicated by Rome: … Read more

By now, it’s been abundantly revealed why our current president admires Ronald Reagan: affection for fairy tales. To wit, this amazing piece of Reaganesque wishfulness in President Obama’s 2010 Earth Day speech: obama fairy tale Think about it: roughly a century and a half ago, in the late 1850s, the Seneca Oil Company hired an … Read more

rom Mike Flugennock, an apt image of the wages of Obamania: spill cartoon “We still need more oil, we still need more gas.” -Barack Obama, speaking on Earth Day

One logical effect of the corporate capitalists’ century-long cars-first transportation dictatorship in America has been the thorough intimidation of even its most ardent critics. With that in mind, see if you can guess what the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition agrees to call the reality depicted in this photograph: To quote the SFBC: According to a … Read more

Car marketers (a.k.a. corporate capitalists) peddle their monumentally wasteful and dangerous products as indispensable bundles of joy and comfort. Curious then, how the three happiest countries in the world rank in the motor vehicles per capita department: Denmark: #1 in happiness, #28 in automobiles per person Switzerland: #2 in happiness, #15 in automobiles per person … Read more

The Buffalo-Bill-in-a-K-Mart-suit at left is the eminent Randal O’Toole, a “senior policy scholar” specializing in transportation issues at the unintentionally hilarious Cato Institute. Cato, you might know, is the “think tank” and lobbying group that says its mission “is to increase the understanding of public policies based on the principles of limited government, free markets, … Read more

Mainstream environmentalism is very often as bad as the disease it thinks it’s busy curing. Unwilling to risk their funding by attacking capitalism, the big green groups ignore as many hard facts and propose as many impossible solutions as worshipers of “markets” and technology. Take the case of Opportunity Cost of the Tar Sands, the … Read more