The Obama Administration was gung ho to brag about the GM IPO last year. But if I’m not mistaken, this is the first time the White House has bragged nationally about jobs created thanks to the auto bailout.

The White House appears to be calculating that by getting the UAW to support the NAFTA-style trade agreement with South Korea (KORUS), it can avoid any discussion of the jobs that will be outsourced as a result of the agreement. Their big accomplishment, then, has been changing the original 2007 agreement enough to get the UAW–and Ford–to buy in.

Our love affair with our cars has also been fueled by the devious actions of a few major corporations. The once ubiquitous electric streetcar was driven into the ground by colloboration of Big Oil and Big Auto. It wasn’t a fair fight.

In the coming months, there will be a series of articles on the Seminal called “Driven to Destruction.” It will unearth some of the sordid history of how the country became so car-dependent, how this dependency has become harmful in so many ways, and how we can begin to move forward to a more sane and sustainable system of transportation.

Carjacked joins a hefty body of literature critiquing our automotive transportation system, including my own work Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile, released in 2000. Do we need another critique of car culture? My answer is a resounding yes. While such books all tell us about the problems cars cause and about better, greener, more economical and socially just approaches to transportation, what they say gets swamped by the ongoing tsunami of marketing messages that coax us to embrace automobiles. As the authors of Carjacked write, this relentless marketing leads us to “take the car for granted as a social good, which renders it nearly invisible as the source of a range of problems.”

Vice President Joe Biden is set to make an appearance in his home state of Delaware today to make an announcement that Fisker Automotive will be purchasing, retooling and opening up operations in a shuttered former General Motors facility in Wilmington. From the Washington Post: Vice President Biden will make the announcement that Fisker Automotive [...]