Obama spends $600 million on rail projects that benefit private companies

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• For your listening pleasure:

  http://youtu.be/J6TcpfBHlbs

  • merci, et pour le plaisir des yeux
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lafvC8seF6U&list=TLLVdnFZMdiIukNrZihXcpXwpM3ZqsVOQp

• Well Looks like Obama is now an engineer on the crazy train too....wooooooooooooo...woooooooooo...

• And in my area, Amtrak shares those lines and is definitely the red-headed stepchild. One train leaves here headed north @ 7am daily. The east west one runs every other day, also @7 am. Westerners especially don't get that everyone here drives because their is no alternative!

  • That was supposed to be Easterners. Damn kindle! Referring to them not even learning to drive because they have alternatives.

    • Also they don't know how to eat tacos.

      • They don't even know what a taco IS! Deprived childhoods.

• I work with the Union Pacific Rail Road and an average engine costs them a cool million four or five; an average mile of track costs about one and half times that and yearly maintenance on that track about a quarter of that. It costs a lot of money to run your average rail road. I think they get in bed with the devil mainly to stay in business; after all, "0" is taking their paydays away from them every day the EPA's doors stay open!

• I've got no problem with this in general, as long as the spending is reasonably justified as an actual investment and not just paying off buddies (always a questionable proposition with politicians, and in this case more than most.) By which I mean, it will result in actual increased commerce and business, which benefits everyone.

  Besides, 600 million? These days, that really is peanuts . . . for railroads anyway. Building a railroad is a little more expensive than building a website.

  Especially if you want it to actually run.

• And also one of the reasons the Keystone Pipeline will never be built, Quagmire's secondary puppet master Buffet is making a killing shipping oil over rail lines we just paid for, thanks to crony capitalism.

  • Right, and because transporting oil by train is much safer and cheaper than by pipeline! /sarc

  • Capitalism is made up of strictly voluntary human interactions.
    When the ruling class is allowed to regulate these otherwise voluntary interactions in order to take profits, it becomes corporatism.
    Corporatism forces voluntary human interaction underground, where capitalism is known as the Black Market.

    I was trying to stick this into the pope thread, but...

  • Bingo!

    • please don't censor me, but I think these corporations are greedy gold thieves.
      and look who's the lead corporeal greedy gut.

      • Corporate Greed. (Who said that?)

        • Hoffa? :)

          Edit: Vanderbilt, Crowley, Hurst, Du Pont?

• I'm sure Honolulu's beleaguered rail project that keeps getting caught up in court because people are doing shady things to get it built, thus leaving millions of $s in materials and equipment to rust out in the open, is one project.