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Rather than spending millions to lobby Congress to stop increasing gas mileage standards - something that can be achieved using off the shelf technology - Ford would rather lay off employees and not create cars that anyone wants.

Actually, It's time to get real about this. There are too many autos for the number of buyers out there. It's time for people to stop investing in this capitalist system in which inequality is a permanent feature. It's one thing to take the view that things are rough, but they will get better. It's another to take the view that 'riches for the strongest' is the natural state, which will always be with us. Folks hold to the latter view, but pretend not to.

I don't hold to the latter view. Things are rough, but not because nature dictates that it be so. (One could be charitable and take the view that nature itself has been perverted. Therefore, The environmental and social destruction that capitalism is doing 'is' natural. But the Cause and Master of nature will not, at the end of a long day, allow his design to be replaced.) People must be free to choose their course, while the time for that is with us. To be free to choose, one must be free to act as one wishes, within limits, since that freedom impacts on one's beliefs. When we are finished indicating whether we want to exist or not, those who desire to 'live' on a peaceful, non polluted planet will receive whatever help they need in getting there, free of hindrance from those who are weak, who are no longer around to prey on others.

Buzz Hargrove might want access to Chinese markets, but others say that's just not going to happen, and they point out that Buzz knows it. He's just playing politics they say. (He certainly likes to do that.) I believe the argument is that if you think you can twist China's arm on autos, you will find it has a lot more power to twist your arm a lot harder on many more things. Our capitalists should know. They pick up and move their factories to China, and places like it, at the first hint they might find it 'more' profitable for them to do so. (Profitable isn't good enough.) Bosses feel no genuine loyalty for their workers. That would be inconvenient, for one thing. Then again, Workers who ignore the destruction that capitalism does, just because they are safe for the moment, show no loyalty to their own class.

I recall a figure of 200 million coastal Chinese being affluent, by the way. The Chinese government, much beloved by international capital, doesn't give a crap about the rest of it's people. (Yahoo, Microsoft and now Google are perfectly content to do business with that kind of government. Their search engines filter out unauthorized sites linked to words like 'Tibet', 'Dalai Lama', 'freedom', 'democracy'.) So while 200 million Chinese makes for a good sized market, I don't know how soon the rest of China will be able buy stuff.

We don't need more cars, or globalization, or roads and (bilge dumping) ships on our warming oceans. We need more attention to localization and to non polluting sources of energy and fuel. We need to lose our money system - completely. We need to pull together. And we need to loose democracy (not the freedom to talk about it), from which all of the above chaos and destruction derives. Democracy is not what this or that person or group says it is. 'Democracy' means 'rule by humankind, alone'. It is what we see, since we are running the show - for now. And it doesn't work.

We can't fix the problems we have created. As individuals we can care, although not enough of us will do so to make the difference. That help will have to come from elsewhere.