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they are free to accumulate through legal tricks by means of corporations without paying their share of taxes; unless they are free to dominate the rest of us without restrictions on their Wnancial or economic power; unless they are once more free to do all these things, then the United States is to have its Wrst general sit-down strike—not of labor, not of the American people, but of the sixty families and of the capital created by the whole American people of which the sixty families have obtained control. If the American people call this blu¤, then the America that is to be free will be a democratic America, a free America. If the American people yield to this blu¤, then the America that is to be will be a big-business Fascist America—an enslaved America. —Harold Ickes served as FDR’s secretary of the interior. The ProWt in Highway Slaughter Ralph Nader may 1966 [Editor’s Note: In all the controversy over General Motors’ private investigation of Ralph Nader—the young attorney who is one of the automobile industry’s severest critics—little detail has been revealed in the mass media about his speciWc charges that the industry bears responsibility for an appreciable part of the slaughter on the nation’s highways. The following is a condensation of Mr. Nader’s testimony before the Senate subcommittee on automobile safety.] Under present conditions there is little economic incentive for the automaker to concern himself seriously with automobile casualties and collisions—for the costs and penalties are not upon him. Actually, the more cars depreciate through collisions, the greater the demand for new and used cars. Only when there is a real threat of cost or other adverse feedback, as in the mass litigation over the 1960–’63 Chevrolet Corvairs, does a manufacturer take notice and correct, as General Motors did for the Corvair rear suspension system after those four tragic model years. But such feedbacks are very infrequent and, until the Corvair cases, never on a mass basis. Neither do automobile collisions and injuries threaten the economy generally—at least there is no felt threat to the economy as there would be if, for example, a pest attack destroyed most of the cotton crop. For the costs of the highway epidemic are essentially economic demands feeding a vast highway accident service industry composed of medical, hospital, police, legal, insurance, repair, and administrative services. To put it squarely, death on the highway produces incomes and proWts for hundreds of thousands of people and companies. It is a multibillion-dollar industry whose dynamics are hardly about to be in the direction of self-liquidation. The energies of Nader / The ProWt in Highway Slaughter 37 lawyers and physicians (to choose the skills ideally most subject to professional standards of conduct) are so taken up in the care and handling of post-accident problems that they have had little time, even if they had the inclination, to exert e¤ective and sustained e¤orts toward prevention of collisions and injuries. Thus, the economics of the highway accident industry and the operational health of the highway transport system do not breed self-correcting forces and the attention of government that obtains to a substantial degree in other forms of transportation. This condition has made the annual toll of 50,000 dead and millions injured the most expendable horror of our technological society. In America, life is cheapest on the highway. How tragic are the results and how costly is the impact on purchasers of America’s largest consumer durable. The car buyer pays more than $700 (according to a study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, and University of Chicago economists ), when he buys a new car, for the cost of the annual model change which is mostly stylistic in content. Consider how much safer today’s automobile would be if over the past two decades the car buyer received annually a substantial safety advance—both in the operational and crashworthy aspects of his automobile—for that $700 payment. Instead, cars are being built which, standing still, can kill adult and child pedestrians who fall or are inadvertently pushed into their sharp points and edges. And passengers can die in collisions at speeds as low as Wve miles per hour. Is it any wonder that, at present rates, at least one out of every two living Americans will either be killed or injured (disabled beyond the day of injury) in an automobile...

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