"Between 1936 and 1950, National City Lines, a holding company
sponsored and funded by GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil of
California, bought out more than 100 electric surface-traction
systems in 45 cities (including New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis,
Salt Lake City, Tulsa, and Los Angeles) to be dismantled and replaced
with GM buses... In 1949 GM and its partners were convicted in
U.S.district court in Chicago of criminal conspiracy in this matter
and fined $5,000."

http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/19/generalmotors.html

see also    http://www.bilderberg.org/ncl.htm

Ironically, GM no longer makes buses.   Or good cars for that matter.

On 23-Apr-06, at 10:00 PM, Automatic digest processor wrote:

> 6.  In the 1950s (I think) the oil industry in this country took an
> active
> role in wiping out public transit to force people into cars.  (I'm not
> making that up - it's not just anti-car scuttlebutt!)  This took
> the form of
> buying municipal bus companies and then shutting them down. This
> helped get
> Americans dependent on doing everything in cars, with the housing
> patterns
> that followed.
>