CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Edwin
Black on the Oil Addiction Corporate Crime Connection
20 Corporate Crime Reporter 44(1), November 10, 2006
Over 100 years ago, all of the cars in America were electric cars.
In the 1930s, a criminal conspiracy by General Motors, the oil and tire companies – destroyed the nation’s electric trolley system.
Thomas Edison and Henry Ford collaborated to replace Ford’s internal combustion engine with lighter weight electric cars – but at the moment of truth, someone sabotaged Edison’s batteries and torched his laboratory in Orange, New Jersey.
Edwin Black, author of a number of best selling books including IBM and the Holocaust, now claims that our addiction to oil is due in part to corporate crime and collusion.
In a new book, Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed Alternatives (St. Martins Press, 2006), Black documents a little known history of how we ended up in our energy pickle.
Black is a committed anti-Nazi who has dedicated much of his work to exposing the hidden history of how U.S. corporations – including IBM and General Motors – propped up the Nazi regime.
That’s why it comes as a surprise that one hero of Black’s new book is Henry Ford.
“Ford is a hero in this book,” Black said in a recent interview with Corporate Crime Reporter. “Not a hero that I necessarily like, because right after the time frame of this book, Ford became the biggest anti-Semite in the world.”
Black says that after Ford beat back the electric car monopoly at the turn of the century and won the right to mass produce his Model T, he realized that he had made a mistake.
“Although Ford had won the battle, he had lost the war,” Black said. “Henry Ford realized that he was delivering the soot and smoke and medical danger of the internal combustion machine which had been well documented. Ford decided to join forces with Thomas Edison and return this country to clean electric. From 1912 to 1914, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford undertook a secret project which was not described in any of the many books and treatises on Henry Ford or Thomas Edison.”
According to Black, Edison’s new battery, which was the lynchpin for the new project, would work perfectly fine in Orange, New Jersey.
But then when Edison would ship the battery to Detroit, it would fail to work.
“He would ship them a third, fourth, fifth time – and they would not work in Detroit,” Black said.
“According to the Edison people, it was clear – there was tampering with the batteries,” Black said. “There were false engineering reports. There was false testing. There was an effort to subvert the electric vehicle in favor of those who were pushing for the internal combustion machine. Ultimately, there were so many problems that could not be resolved across this half continent from New Jersey to Detroit that the project was abandoned.”
“And when Edison said that he would somehow make a tamper proof battery and make this come alive again – overnight his entire lab complex burned down in a flash fire. This despite the fact that all of the rooms were fireproof. There was a fire brigade on the premises. And all of these buildings suddenly overnight burned down. This despite the fact that Edison had the most advanced fire-resistant complex in the United States.”
Black
says that this was the “end of the beginning of clean electric vehicles
in this country.”
Black also spends a good part of his new book documenting what many consider
the corporate crime of the century – the conspiracy to destroy the nation’s
electric mass transit trolley system.
Black says that he is the first to “publish the true details, from moment to moment, city to city, of what happened.”
“I did this by getting access to hundreds of pages of FBI documents,” Black said. “I obtained the company records. I obtained the judge’s handwritten personal notes, the trial transcripts, the depositions.”
“The FBI investigated and found that General Motors headed up this conspiracy,” Black said. “It started up small, in places like Galesburg, Illinois and Beaumont, Texas. But it eventually reached Baltimore, Tampa, Los Angeles – 40 cities. And hundreds more were targeted. General Motors was prosecuted and found guilty on one count of this criminal conspiracy. And they paid a fine. And the fine was $5,000 for all of the millions of dollars in damage they had done to 40 cities. And their executives were also indicted and convicted. And they also paid a fine – one dollar each.”
(For
a complete transcript of the Interview with Black, see 20 Corporate Crime
Reporter 44, November 13, 2006, print edition only.)
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