60 Minutes1968

Himself - Correspondent:
In 1944, the trolleys had begun to disappear. It wasn't progress, and it wasn't suicide... it was murder by conspiracy. That was the conclusion of a federal jury, upheld on appeal. The way it worked was that General Motors, Firestone Tire and Standard Oil of California and some other companies, depending on the location of the target, would arrange financing for an outfit called National City Lines which cozied up to city councils and county commissioners and bought up transit systems like LA's. Then they would junk or sell the electric cars and pry up the rails for scrap, and beautiful modern buses would be substituted - buses made by General Motors and running on Firestone Tires and burning Standard's gas.