As Predicted, Electric Cars Foundering: GM Shuts Down the Volt

– by Anthony Wile

Anthony Wile

So GM has halted Volt production and laid off 1,500 workers. Government Motors announced on Friday that it has temporarily suspended the production of GM Volts. Here's a report, courtesy of TheHill.com:
General Motors has temporarily suspended production of its Volt electric car, the company announced Friday. GM, which is based in Detroit, announced to employees at one of its facilities that it was halting production of the beleaguered electric car for five weeks and temporarily laying off 1,300 employees.

 
A GM spokesman told The Hill on Friday that production of the Volt would resume April 23. "We needed to maintain proper inventory and make sure that we continued to meet market demand," GM spokesman Chris Lee said in a telephone interview.
We've just written two fairly critical articles about global warming and electric cars. It's not really a "craze," in fact. In my estimation, it's a power elite manipulation. You can see the articles here:
VIDEO: The Volt – What a Wonderful Car!
VIDEO: Bieber's Fisker Karma and Elite Gift-Giving
Here at the Daily Bell, we cover the elite's dominant social themes, those fear-based memes that attempt to frighten Western middle classes (especially) into giving up power and wealth to globalist solutions such as the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, etc.
The necessity for electrical cars, in my view, was one such meme. And these "themes" are not merely hypothetical. You believe in these memes at your own risk; they may not come to fruition in the manner you are led to expect.
Here's a standard justification for what's going on and why GM chose to be an electric car pioneer. This quote comes from an article posted at AOL/autos entitled "The Day the Electric Car Died":
But this is 2012, not 1912. Oil is getting more expensive, harder to get, and dirtier. At the same time, we need to cut global warming pollution from cars by 80 percent or more by 2050 to help avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Given the challenges we face, nearly all major stakeholders, including automakers, government agencies, and energy and climate experts agree that a large-scale market for electric-drive vehicles is essential for reaching long-term global warming and oil reduction goals.
Let's deconstruct it a little bit. Oil is indeed getting more expensive, but I would argue that is because of a combination of increased taxes and tension in the Middle East, plus the usual manipulation of supplies.
As far "climate change" goes, well ... let it go. Hard to keep track of it anyway. And when did the term change from global warming anyway? That's a bit weird, in my view.
It tends to confirm the idea that Western media is controlled by about ten companies – and who knows the disposition of THOSE shares. In other words, a very few people could be controlling the pie.
Global warming is not working out, not making believers of enough of the masses – well, change the name. Rename the promotion and re-start it. That seems to have been what has happened.
But think of the power! A few people in charge of this promotion can rebrand it across the gamut of Western media's platforms, essentially reconfiguring the meme for about one billion people. Wow. That's clout.
But in the era of the Internet Reformation, all of that clout cannot compete against the information that has been unleashed electronically explaining the elite matrix under which humanity continually labors.
Yes, there is Anglosphere power – Jewish and Catholic (Vatican) elites, along with other religious, corporate and military elites. The modern conspiracy gathers its clout via the enormous wealth generated by central banks it controls.
But many of the dominant social themes they have counted on to control populations and move the world toward their goal of global governance have been undermined by the 'Net.
In Afghanistan, the war to conquer the Pashtuns has not gone well, nor have the Pakistan Punjabis been cowed. The whole idea of regulatory democracy for the masses has come under attack, and monopoly central banking as well. The European Union is splitting at the seams.
Global warming, a meme that is most precious to the elites because it paves the way for other control-and-domination facilities, has been almost destroyed in the public by the leaking of emails showing the evidence establishing it was manipulated by scientific and political proponents.
Of course, this doesn't stop the elites from continuing on with their themes and sub themes. Electric cars are just one sub theme of the larger promotional agenda. The idea is to substitute command-and-control transportation for long-range vehicular freedom (oil-and-gas based).
In the brave new world of electrical transportation, the elite's control over your movements is limited only by its collective imagination.
Didn't pay your parking tickets? Suddenly, you'll find you can't "charge up" – even in your own garage. Owe taxes to the civil authorities? You'll find the same thing happening. Trust your travel to the "grid" and suddenly you're not in charge of your own energy supplies.
The so-called "smart meter" movement is part of this as well. The idea is that you can monitor your energy use more effectively via smart meters. But smart meters also make it far easier for the power company to monitor YOU. This – and its high costs and allegedly health-damaging side effects – is probably why so many are rejecting smart meters, another setback for the powers-that-be.
Make no mistake: The halting of Volt production is a setback as well. The idea of electrifying the population with tiny, dangerous, low-range vehicles is again foundering, as it did in the 1970s. This was supposed to be the decade of the electric car. But it's not looking that way. Here's some more from the article:
The Chevy Volt has come under criticism from Republicans in Congress because of reports of its batteries catching on fire during testing. President Obama gave the electric vehicle a vote of confidence in a speech to the United Auto Workers union this week, promising he would buy a Volt "five years from now, when I'm not president anymore."
But Republicans have argued that the Volt was being pushed by the Obama administration for political reasons instead of consumer demand. "Is the commitment to the American public or is the commitment to clean energy, that we are going to get there any way we can?" Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) asked in a hearing in the House in January about the Volt's reported battery fires. "When the market is ready ... it won't have to be subsidized," Kelly said.
The article also points out that Chevy has tried to tie the Volt to the effort to reduce dependence on foreign oil. "This isn't just the car we wanted to build ...This is the car America had to build."
Actually, America didn't build anything. People built the Volt at the behest of a manipulative power elite that likely sees the electric car craze (which it initiated) as a way to increase control over those pesky masses that keep getting in the way of the pristine world of elite desires. (Desires apparently, according to the Georgia Guidestones) that include removing some six billion of them.)
As we always try to point out, there is likely plenty of oil and gas in the world. The scarcity is not natural but artificial, created to ensure the success of various power elite scarcity memes – one of them being the necessity of "converting society" to electric travel.
Here's a last point: There's nothing wrong with electric cars, so long as the market itself is creating the demand and stimulating the supply. But it's hard to make out even a glimmer of market-based orientation these days between the tax rebates to consumers and government funding to producers of these boondoggles.
What the elites are finding out in this era of free-flowing Internet information is that it is extremely hard over time to control the marketplace – let alone individual products that are not based on legitimate supply-and-demand. Such setbacks, as they occur, have ramifications that go well beyond the Chevy Volt itself.