$25 billion? so like a 5% cut of our yearly military spending?
fuck this country
i literally can't take any argument farther than 4 years seriously like what if you just eat shit next time and the next person just undoes it before it get done
like kinda in general due to the whole eco colapse that is happening but like politics in special like i don't believe that any plan that is bigger than the duration of the terms is a real thing other than a bait
I love how the target date is always 2035, which gives future Presidentissimo Tom Cotton plenty of time to cancel these plans
Amtrak is already somewhat nationalized -- It's a for-profit corporation with stock, but the Department of Transportation owns all the stock.
Under workers‘ control and management. The bourgeois state doesn’t run its nationalized industries in the best interest of our class.
yeah but those trains are used for carrying the organs of dead kicking screaming weegers, big difference
Yeah without their efficient, mass transit rails how else would they be able to spread the China virus so easily?
lmao imagine wanting to expand amtrak and not just building an entirely new high speed rail network
Amtrak doesn't own any of its track besides the northeast corridor. They just run the trains.
It's literally impossible under federalism. To have nice things requires democratic centralism.
Thats a nice map, I approve of this plan, it'll never happen under capitalism though.
Capitalism prevents a lot of things, but rail networks aren't one of them. This is totally possible under capitalism.
Under the democratic party as it currently exists? No chance in hell
It is not possible in an era of capitalism dominated by oil & car cartels.
Very possible under less dumb capitalism, Japan and France have great high speed rail.
I was looking at rail in Australia the other day and a train from Brisbane to Melbourne takes 26 hours while a car only takes 15 and a half hours :/
Although to be fair we don’t have the population density to make it as economically viable as other countries but it should still be better.
In France, if you want to go to or from Paris, you're golden. If you don't, well, it's gonna take ten hours and you may be going through Paris anyway.
I knew someone who would take a 6 hour direct TGV to a southern city. The line got cancelled and now she has to switch in another major city that's not Paris, but the layover if short and she misses her connection if the train is too late. So now she builds in a buffer of two hours, but that just adds to the time she's travelling. And neither of the two trains are TGV.
Both the democratic party and the republican party in their current forms are entirely a product of capitalism in the imperial core. Donors make policy. Politicians do theater.
I mean there's a lot that could be done in one term that would help future infrastructure planning assuming it could actually make it through our totally broken congress, just gotta frame it as upgrading our decaying infrastructure and job creation. Once the ball gets rolling on something like that one would hope, anyone wanting to derail such efforts could be attacked for wanting to take away jobs. Hell could even make an argument for such an effort to be weakening national security. IDK, I already voted PSL but this is the sort of thing that his campaign could have been focusing on instead of just being Not Trump
assuming it could actually make it through our totally broken congress
An unsafe assumption to say the least, dems are gonna lose 2022 hard
just gotta frame it as upgrading our decaying infrastructure and job creation
The last time dems tried that, Republicans accused them of ignoring the "reality" that there aren't enough "shovel ready jobs", the dems then filled their pants with doo-doo and started crying on the ground, so nothing happened
The dems are conservatives, they believe in austerity and the financialization of the economy, infrastructure is an occasional trendy talking point, nothing more
Yeah it really does feel like they have no interest in actually winning power, they are entirely comfortable in being the minority toothless "opposition" party and coasting along on corporate donations while crushing any sort of populism even when it would help them.
You make a pretty good argument that they don't actually support it.
They're ideologically and politically incapable of even attempting to start long term projects
The LA, Measure M was passed in 2016. This approved a ton of rail projects, some of which aren't scheduled to finish till 2040. I think it's possible. But projects going across countries and states do get more complex
Eh, the trains are probably gonna be trash and outdated long before 2040, but yes the only conceivable long term projects are happening at local and state levels, nationally it's never gonna happen, other than the pentagon with some $10 trillion dollar AFV powered by a Tesla engine that's specifically designed to run over civilians and then crash into a lake
no, we are america and obviously we need to one up china. 4 years nationwide highspeed rail. put a big american flag on the trains and get people jerking off to the idea of beating china at something good
The average American cannot get past their fetishization of airline travel for long distance, tragically. I had a 45 minute argument in defense of Amtrak/long-distance rail with my roommate as we were driving across several states to PA and we actually wound up getting lost/sidetracked because she kept saying "I just don't understand why anyone would choose to ride a train from Chicago -> LA when flying is the same amount of time & better" and I nearly killed both her & myself in an American tradition - vehicular manslaughter.
The teleprompter just has a picture of a hotdog, because Joe knows that when you eat a hotdog, you have to "chew chew".
tbh chicago should just be the capital of america. its such a choice location for all kinds of major transport. also the socialist implications are cool
Wait, how is the UK spending £90 billion (120 billion in USD) to build a single 100-mile high-speed line from London to Birmingham, if you can build a massive network criss-crossing the US for $25 billion? Either that's an extreme underestimate and it's going to be more like $5 trillion, or most of the HS2 money is being spent on cocaine.
the key is "high speed" which Amtrak is not. UK has to build the infrastructure from scratch.
The US still have a lot of rail infrastructure from the gilded age and big monopolist eras, im assuming that they're just going to refurbish those lines for high speed rail. I have no idea how that's supposed to work though.
They didn't say anything about high speed homie. These are gonna be $1000/ticket luxury sleeping cars, not mass transit.
They're really going to spend 25 billion polishing the rust off of railroad from 1916 aren't they
Close, there charging $25 billion for plans about how to best polish 100+ year old railroad tracks (that the state owns and will need to gift to Amtrak).
Oh yeah? How did Obama/Biden's last proposal in 2009 go? That's right, only a fraction of the funding ($11bn) got approved, and only a fraction (15%) of it was spent at all. And none of it on high-speed rail.
Not true. California got a lot of it, and is spending it on HSR.
Wisconsin got a bunch of funding too and literally had already gotten trains built and delivered until Scott Walker sent the money back. The trains are just sitting in a yard in Indiana, painted badger red and everything.
Wisconsin got a bunch of funding too and literally had already gotten trains built and delivered until Scott Walker sent the money back. The trains are just sitting in a yard in Indiana, painted badger red and everything.
Truly, democracy is the best system of governance.
Lets see, one way ticket Philly to New York. That'll be $911 plus tip.
wtf is going on with this map? It's listing the Cascadia line ( Eugene OR --> up to BC) as a new corridor, when that line has been around for years?
