As a dominant form of transportation, the automobile is dead. So is GM, which now stands for Gone Mad.

But the larger picture says that the financial crisis now enveloping the world is grounded in the transition from the automobile---and the fossils that fuel it---to a brave renewable world of reborn mass transit and green power.

If GM lives in any form, it must be owned and operated by its workers and the public.

But the larger transition is epic and global, based on a simple structural reality: the passenger car is obsolete. Auto sales have plummeted not merely because of a bad economy, but because the technology no longer makes sense.

Franklin Roosevelt took GM over in 1943-5 to make the hardware to beat the Nazis. Barack Obama should now do the same to beat climate chaos.

Make streetcars, not passenger cars.

Hybrids are too little, too late, with problems of their own. Solar-powered electric cars will help phase out the gas guzzlers.

But in the long run, the automobile itself needs to be dismantled and re-cycled, not retooled or rebuilt.

Yes, the National Labor Relations Act says workers have the right to organize and join unions. Yet a new study shows that growing numbers of them risk being fired for attempting to unionize.

In more than one-fourth of the union organizing campaigns since 2000 among workers covered by the law, some of the workers were illegally fired for being pro-union, according to the study by economists John Schmitt and Ben Zipperer of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The latest yearly figures, for 2007, show that about 30 percent of the campaigns involved illegal firings.

The number of workers fired was relatively small – no more than 1,500 overall per year. But that included an estimated 20 percent of the activists and organizers in particular campaigns. What’s more, the threat of being fired undoubtedly kept many workers who otherwise would have supported unionization from doing so.

Not counted, either, were the unknown number of workers who were fired but didn’t raise complaints because of the lengthy legal process involved and the meager settlement they could expect – at best, reinstatement and back

Tell Rep. Tiberi: Impeach Jay Bybee. Jay Bybee wrote memos giving the Bush administration legal cover to undermine the Constitution. He should not be a federal judge. When presidents and federal judges take office, they must swear to support and defend the Constitution. But federal judge Jay Bybee worked long and hard to undermine the Bill of Rights — and to make sure that President George W. Bush could do the same.

On March 2, the Justice Department released a series of legal memos, some authored by Jay Bybee, that gave the Bush Administration legal cover to wiretap Americans without court approval, to send prisoners oversees where they were likely to be tortured, to use U.S. military forces for domestic purposes, and a number of other actions that previously would have been considered unconstitutional.