At this point. How could anyone care or take seriously anything Musk or Trump spits. It’s all lies and bullshit.
Privatising literally everything has been their end-goal with ALL of this the entire time. They plaster it with conservative talking points but this entire administration is an effort by corporate forces to dismantle public services, rights and benefits, so that if you so much want to drive to the store you will have to pay a subscription to use the privately maintained roads, so you have a credit-card reader by your faucet and toilet, so that they can tax you on rainwater you’re required to have to collect rain from your gutters. (This is real in other countries.)
The efforts towards killing public services goes way, way back and if you look at every conservative/republican legislation, it all hinges around how “bad” public services are. Public schools teaching evolution, public television for simply existing, and they’ve been massively successful and killing the regulations and oversight on things like media fairness, public health proposals, safety nets and social services, and yes they really, really want to kill our medicare and medicaid, so they can replace them with more bullshit commercial services. They won’t be happy until we stop getting paychecks we can choose how to use and we all just hand our pay right over to a number of subscription services for things they can take away if you miss a payment.
They want us poor, they want us stupid, they want an army of slaves and if they can’t get it via racism and dehumanizing some identifiable group or population, they will just settle for full on serfdom and monarchy. Now get out there and work your lord’s fields!
Lies and bullshit, but with a 50% chance of happening
I mean you have to take their words seriously because they tell you what they’re going to do. Or at the very least what they want to do.
They privatized the postal service in the UK.
It did not go well
And the railways.
That did not go well either.
Although I’ll wager it’s still more useful than the US rail system.
The reason we don’t have a US rail system is because of the constant, unending efforts by automotive industries to dismantle all plans and dreams we’ve ever had for mass-transit. And every other possible public offering or social service that we pay taxes for.
He’ll find those already government run in Russia. Perhaps he should consider relocating to that shithole and leave the United States the fuck alone.
I suggest we deport this Nazi immigrant.
To Atlantis.
I don’t think any other country wants him either, except maybe Russia.
However, he IS a big space enthusiast. Maybe there should be not one, but two Teslas floating in space?
we already have FedEx for that.
Amtrak technically is privatized. That’s why it sucks so hard.
There’s also the very real issue of rail priority: https://www.marketplace.org/2024/09/10/amtrak-spars-with-freight-train-industry-over-rules-of-the-railroad/
Yeah, I had no idea it wasn’t private. What’s the deal with that?
It was setup by the Nixon administration and that’s all you need to know
Passenger rail was faillling across the country. Pretty much every private rail company was going out of business.
Amtrak was the rescue plan. Sounds good right? Amtrak took ownership of a bunch of money losing routes across the US and were required to keep the nationwide service. No track (except northeast), no reliable government funding. Can’t decrease service. Can’t raise fares much. No way back to profitability.
The additional funding signed by Biden was the way back. Currently Amtrak is profitable on the Northeast Corridor only, and that funds the rest of the system. Even that has several choke points that are over 100 years old. They desperately need upgraded infrastructure in order to function. That funding also included increased service in a few places, to try to make it useful to someone. All too much of Amtrak is useless stuff like one train per day. Of course they’re not selling any tickets
fair
More or less it was set up to be a failure from the start
I knew it was kinda of poorly designed, I remember the rails aren’t smooth enough for commuter traffic but we did it anyway.
It’s fine at slower speeds but the track is so old that the trains can’t go very fast. Also, most of the track in America is owned by private freight rail companies which means AmTrack has to wait for the freight trains to go by and that increases the amount of time a train trip takes.
It also means the tracks owner has no incentive to keep things up enough to make the ride smooth or to allow fast trains. Cargo can be slow and bumpy
They already tried this in LA with privatizing the public transportation system back in the 50’s. The big car companies bought it all and dismantled it in favor of selling their cars.
Most of Amtrak loses money except for the NE corridor. So if you privatize Amtrak it means even worse service and eventually no trains where it is not profitable.
Same with privatization of the USPS, it just means less services for a higher price until they decide to close it altogether because email will replace letters altogether. Say good by to any privacy since all email is monitored and capitalized for marketing.
Fuck fElon Muskrat.
Not just LA, all over the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
No.
Not everything should be privatized so some asshole oligarch can have another toy.
Exactly, we have UPS, FedEx, DHL and bunch of others.
Leave USPS the fuck alone.
I’d bet he wants to take over Amtrak so he can replace it with that stupid Las Vegas car tunnel.
Or replace it with nothing, because “railways and mass transit are obsolete” (translation: “they’re hurting my car sales”).
Everything that has been privatized, has ended up costing us more for shittier service. This will not be different.
I dare say everything should be nationalized as a civil service.
In my country since the government privatized a part of postal service, the quality of service heavily declined to the point that now is almost guaranteed that they will “lose” your letter if you send it in a place that will cost too much to deliver
Same.
this is almost what has been happening in my country.
Someone punch him in the face, please
I think a much smaller object with much much greater velocity it’s referable.
The usps is a government SERVICE. These parasites look at that and say “but nobody profits from that” and somehow they just can’t let that happen.
The thing is they did generate a profit until they were fucked with by Republicans to make them look unprofitable.
There isn’t a functioning part of our government that the regressives wont destroy for private profit.
I still can’t get over the idea of for profit prisons. incentivized incarceration is beyond stupid.
Except the taxpayers benefit from it, who are the ones paying for it anyway!
What Chancellor Musk means is that no oligarch is getting rich from it, so he is unable to understand its purpose.
rip rural service
Definitely, I live in a very rural area of the country I think it might be one of the most rural places in the lower 48 states. And we heavily depend on the postal service to get things that we simply don’t have here. This will totally cripple my town and 99% of the people here will blame it on woke.
I remember seeing an interview with Margaret Thatcher where she said that rail could never be successfully privatized. Just as a reminder of how extreme Musk’s ideas are.
They more or less did that here in the Netherlands. Once the government let go, things slowly started getting worse and we’re now at the point where I’d say things are expensive, occasionally sporty and suboptimal…
Japan seems to have done it, no idea what the people over there think about its service and affordability though.
This has been a fever dream of Republicans for my entire life. Looks like they just may get it this time.
Step 1: Privatize and sell it for peanuts to fellow billionaires Step 2: Watch it crumble Step 3: Buy it back for a fortune from the very same people you sold it
E:English
I’m not sure they’ve thought past step 1 honestly.
They probably really think they can run it better.
I don’t think a national railroad company can really become profitable, that’s why I suspect this is done in bad faith
There’s no way national rail can be a profitable service, and certainly not without huge investments in infrastructure. It’s only the northeast corridor that’s profitable, but quite a few other places can be but only after huge infrastructure investments. Those investments are coming from a wholly private company.
Technically Amtrak already is a private company, but owned by the Department of Transportation. Those owners need to pony up for rail infrastructure the same way they’ve always ponies up for highways infrastructure.
