Ben Reply:
September 11th, 2010 at 6:06 am

And thanks to the John Roberts, Inc. Citizens’ United Supreme Court decision, these oil companies can give unlimited donations to federal candidates. Most of us, on the other hand, are left to posting on blogs such as this to try to influence people.

D. P. Lubic Reply:
September 11th, 2010 at 1:46 pm

I’ve been observing this, and just thought to comment upon it–I may be wrong, but somehow it seems to me our opponents do not seem to be able to laugh. Now, not everybody here does so, but I’ve tried to put in a bit of humor and reflection now and then, just for fun. Jimsf, in another post, brought up a caboose photo, partially as a reaction to what is sometimes the interminable grumbling about Bechtel and Parsons-Brickerhoff, and I do appreciate Yes On’s “Nothing a few billion can’t do!!” above. Yet, most of what we see in oppositon comments essentially involves badmouthing rail people and calling us names. (OK, I did say one poster here needed to take his liver pills, but that could be intended as much an admonition to lighten up as anything else.) I had some posts to the Palo Alto online site, clearly stating from the outset that I was an outsider, and I was essentially told I didn’t know anything–maybe I’m a bit ignorant of Palo Alto, but I’m not too much so about railroads, or America in general.

Either the opposition is very scared, or they take themselves too seriously.

P.S.: Re: Wendell Cox: I have a contact in Chicago who is in the passenger rail advocacy biz there, and he has said Wendell Cox has “lost it” ever since an extension of the St. Louis light rail line was built in his neighborhood. . .I don’t know what he meant by that, but I have noticed that Cox sounds more and more ridiculous of late (last couple of years or so); before, he just sounded arrogant and misinformed, now, well, he’s different somehow, can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s there.

Has anybody else noticed this? And of course, Robert has noticed that Randall O’Toole seems a little strange, too.

Spokker Reply:
September 11th, 2010 at 1:51 pm

And then you become what you despise…

Alon Levy Reply:
September 11th, 2010 at 5:37 pm

Of the big players in transit – construction companies, contractors, construction unions, rolling stock manufacturers – very few are invested just in transit. The people who do construction will build anything, which is why you see a lot of lobbying for infrastructure in general but not for rail in particular. The rolling stock vendors sell a variety of goods, many of which are quite polluting. The only vendor that specializes in trains is Bombardier, which is too small to endow a large hackhouse thinktank by itself.

jimsf Reply:
September 11th, 2010 at 5:56 pm

I’d love to line up some some large corporations and get them to do stuff… lets see, so far I have the toll free numbers for… comcast and pge customer service. I’ll volunteer to make the first two calls.

Spokker Reply:
September 11th, 2010 at 9:49 pm

What do you mean?

What did they say that implies “dog ate my homework?”

YesonHSR Reply:
September 11th, 2010 at 6:17 pm

Its pocket change for ours too!! its just not a big priorty and is attacked as boondoogy by the right wing types..the AIG bailout was 90 billion and read somewhere we might get “stuck” with 12 -15 billion of that…and thats the amount we have to claw and hope and beg for the project…ya just want to scream!

D. P. Lubic Reply:
September 12th, 2010 at 7:01 pm

I won’t comment on California itself, as I don’t live there. I will say the Repugnant Ones have essentially lost my vote here in West Virginia, and this is speaking as an idependent who has never voted a straight ticket.

Jim says he doesn’t think California and the nation have been totally ruined yet. I don’t think so either, but I would argue we are pretty close to it, and I would also argue that this is because both parties have never been serious about energy independence, and have never been serious about oil dependence. Part of this has been generational (as discussed previously), and part of it has been cowardice (politicians who do not want to challenge the electorate to a higher standard, or a change of lifestyle that in this case means deemphasising cars, because they are afraid they will lose their nice jobs if they do.) This change has been necessary in my opionion since the first oil crunch in 1973. It has only gotten worse since then.

In recent years the Democrats seem to be gradually coming around (the initial $8 billion for HSR last year would have been unthinkable until Obama came in), and the recent infrastructure bank would likewise have been unimaginable under a Republican administration. They have since gotten cold feet about deficits, but I think the case can be made that we need to run deficits to get out of the physical fix we are in, which in many ways is reminiscent of WW II. I’m referring to how we are essentially vulnerable to energy disruptions because we rely too much on cars and trucks, and we do not have enough alternatives. Expense was not object in WWII, because national survival was at stake. I think we are in or close to such a state now, and on top of that, our dependence feeds our enemies.

What do we get from the Repugnant Ones? We get “drill, baby, drill.” I forget the exact breakdown of how much oil is where (i.e., off shore vs. ANWR), but I do recall the total figure was estimated to be 79 billion barrels (bbs). We currently use 7 bbs per year, which means, if we cut off all imports and ran on our own (and assuming this figure is correct and there are no other changes), we would use it all up in 17 years. What would we do in year 18?

On top of this, the bulk of the oil consumption in this country–65%–is used for transportation. About 48% is for gasoline alone, and the trucking industry consumes about 6% in diesel fuel (rail, air, and water account for another 6% each). This means that 54% of of our oil consumption is for motor fuel; our highway system is our Achilles heel. Al Gore was right, the internal-combustion automobile has to go, or at least be very much deemphasised, although not for the reasons he suggested.

Again, what do we get from the Repugnant Ones? “Amtrak costs too much,” “people will never give up the freedom of the personal car,” “the market must decide” (this last one is particularly laughable, considering how the “transportation market” is such a rigged game with all those hidden subsidies out there, including the costs of what amounts to a couple of oil wars).

I’m even steamed at the Repugnant Ones for their talk of “lower taxes” and “less government regulation.” Now, I’m not one for excessive taxation, and regulations can cause problems and increase costs, but ideally, everybody will be working under the same rules, and so that shouldn’t matter too much. I will rely on the “testimony” of a friend of mine who used to work for the US Park Service in Harpers Ferry, W.Va.

Kyle was one of the rangers in Harpers Ferry who dressed in Civil War era clothes to tell stories about Hapers Ferry and the John Brown raid, the effect being to enhance the feel of being back in the 19th century.

An aside, just for fun: I once ran into Kyle at a pizza place in nearby Charles Town, W.Va. (Charles Town is named for Charles Washington, brother of George Washington, and would be the site of John Brown’s trial and execution, dramatized in the play and film, “The Anvil;” many years later, the same rooms in the same courthouse would be the the site of the trials of mine labor union leaders in the early days of the United Mine Workers in the 1920s, which are mentioned in the postscript of the John Sayles’s film, “Matewan.”)

Kyle, dressed in his Civil War era garb, went to pay his bill, and the girl behind the counter asked him, “Sir, do you know where we can find some vintage clothing? We’d like to have a fifties night here.”

Kyle replied, “Aw, gee, I don’t know anything about vintage clothes, I just wear these, I just work in these.”

To which I added, “Kyle, Kyle, you’re in fifties clothes now–the 1850s! You’re only off by 100 years!”

Back to our original direction–Kyle told me that Harpers Ferry was a boom town in 1859. This was due to a government-fun armory (musket factory, which was the object of John Brown’s raid) in which the skilled employees of the plant were making wages on the order of $30 a month at a time when the average American farmer had a cash income of only $125 for a whole year. That was a lot of money flowing into Harpers Ferry, and a lot of businessmen opened up places to try to get some of it. These included bakeries, pharmacies, boot shops, dry goods shops, and other places, including lots and lots of saloons. The business situation was very competitive; Kyle said the average life expectancy of a a business was only about 6 months.

Now, jumping ahead about 150 years to today, if you spoke with someone in the Small Business Administration at least until relatively recently, you would have been told that on average about 50% of all small business startups would fail in the first year, and up to 90% would fail in the first five. The first part of that statement works out to a 6-month life expectancy in 1859–and in 1859, there was no income tax, no sales tax, no minimum wage law, no overtime wage law, no child labor law, no Social Security tax, no Medicare tax, no building code, no health code, in short, “no nothing”–and the business failure rate was the same then as now, if not worse.

What this tells me is that success or failure in business relies more on the gifts and abilities of the management and a bit of luck in being in the right place at the right time. It also tells me that the Republican party, as an institution and in many of its current members, is ideologically blinded, almost if not to the point of delusion. Their failure to recognise real conditions makes them truly incompetent at best, and dangerous demagogues at worst.

I was registered as a Republican for 10 years, but I see no one from that party to vote for today, at least where I live.

At the same time, I don’t think anyone here thinks a Democratic monopoly is any good either, for the same reason monopolies are never good. For all these reasons, I think at the very least, we need a third party, and perhaps a fourth.

OK, OK, I’ll get down off my soapbox for now. . .and thanks for puting up with me. . .

adirondacker12800 Reply:
September 12th, 2010 at 12:25 pm

Shipping it to a Gulf Port is cheaper. Ships are realllly reallly cheap way to move commodity goods. The Gulf coast is rich with railroad connections unlike the mainlines going over the Rockies. And if you listen to the I-69 conspiracists, Walmart is going to be unloading ships in Mexico because even though unloading containers is really really cheap it’s even cheaper in Mexico. They are gonna run out of cheap port before they need four freight tracks.

Robert Cruickshank Reply:
September 13th, 2010 at 10:29 pm

The last two years have been particularly good years for strawberries, at least for the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm we get ours from up in Watsonville. Delicious.

Anyhow, yes, the situation jimsf describes is nuts.