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April 13, 2002
Anne Winkler-Morey
Why
I Didn't Organize
a Passover Seder This Year
April 12, 2002
Nancy Stohlman
Live from East Jerusalem:
International Nonviolence
Brian
J. Foley
Defeating
Evil
Olivier Audeoud
Did the US Break
the Laws of War?
Rep. Ron
Paul
The
Middle East Quagmire
Michael Colby
Republican Porn:
Oiling Up the Caribou
John Chuckman
Tom
Friedman's Fabrications
April 11, 2002
Patrick Cockburn
Battle of St. Petersburg Zoo
Jeff Halper
After
the Invasion:
Now What?
Falk / Krieger
Taming the Nuclear Monster
Steve
Perry
The
Good Life of
Nellie Stone Johnson
Nick Ring
Efficiency and Occupation:
Terrorism vs. Taylorism
Alexander
Cockburn
From
the West Bank to BBQ
to Old Sparky, And Beyond
April 10, 2002
M. Junaid Alam
Blaming the Victims:
Hating the Palestinians
George
Monbiot
World
Bank to West Bank
Fran Schor
US-Sponsored State Terror
David
Vest
Political
Color Schemes
Jack McCarthy
Florida State Radicals:
The Berkeley of the South
Rises Again
Doreen
Miller
A
Tale of Two Warring Tribes
Michael Neumann
Israelis and Indians
April 9, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
Colin
Powell's Table Talk
Matt Vidal
Thomas Friedman,
Another Wasted Pulitzer
Ron Jacobs
Buyer
Beware
Robert Jensen
I Helped Kill a Palestinian
Vijay
Prashad
Memories
of Barbarity:
Sharonism and September
Wayne Madsen
Anthrax and the Agency:
Thinking the Unthinkable
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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April 14, 2002
General Motors:
Backwards Into
the Future
by Ralph Nader
Once again, General Motors shows how it can go
backwards into the future. Its average new motor vehicle fuel
inefficiency has been getting worse in recent years. Now it
wants to unbundle many of its vehicles by dropping standard
equipment side air bags and anti-lock braking systems (ABS)
and charging its customers more for these life-saving
devices as options.
So the new GM is like the old GM which
charged customers in the Sixties and Seventies extra for seat
belts and airbags respectively until federal law required or
induced their standard installation.
Unless car buyers change GM's mind by
showing their displeasure and moving away from GM to another
manufacturer that builds these safety systems as standard equipment,
GM's directive will have the following consequences:
1. Car buyers who opt for the options
will have to pay two to three times as much. Once a feature
ceases to be standard equipment, it costs more to manufacture
in more limited quantities. Also car makers routinely overcharge
consumers on options to begin with.
2. More lives will be lost, because these
features will not be on all cars. To those rigid ideologues
from the right who would leave such matters up to choice, I
would ask if they would include seat belts, doors and padded
dash panels under their ideology. The whole principle behind
mandatory safety standards is to put a safety net under all
vehicles sold, just like a good fire code does for building
construction.
3. General Motors is exposing itself
to losing more product liabilitylawsuits. Actively removing
a safety feature from standard equipment straightens the argument
by innocent, injured motorists that GM knew better and acted
recklessly by deleting a clearly feasible "crashworthy"
safety feature.
According to USA Today, GM expects to
save about $100 million a year on this move from standard to
optional for ABS and side airbags. Last year GM grossed over
$177 billion, by comparison. How many lives and injuries is
that ill-advised decision going to cost motorists and eventually,
in dollars, General Motors.
USA Today, in its report, seemed to lay
this decision at the feet of GM's Product Chief, Robert Lutz,
instead of the usual bean counters. I hope this is not the case.
Lutz is a free-thinking former Chrysler
executive recently brought in by GM bosses to shake up the staid
or stagnant corporate culture and put exciting engineering functions
and designs on the road. I held a joint press conference with
Mr. Lutz about a decade ago to celebrate Chrysler's winning
our celebrity buyer race by being the first to place air bags
as standard equipment in automobile models affordable to middle
class buyers. Celebrities such as Phil Donahue, Paul Newman,
Dear Abby, Steve Allen and Bill Murray had pledged to buy such
a vehicle and did.
It remains to be seen what the National
Highway Safety Agency (NHTSA) will say about what Clarence Ditlow,
the director of the Center
for Auto Safety, called a "retreat from safety."
It remains to be seen also whether GM will start a race to the
bottom by other auto manufacturers who see greed and callousness
in their "strategic planning" process.
Consumers can vote with their feet and
send a signal to these companies not to follow GM into the pits.
In the meantime, any citizeninterested in safer roadways can
convey his or her displeasure by writing to GM at GM headquarters,
Detroit, Michigan or by logging into the company's website
-- http://www.GM.com.
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