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the licensed triumphs of neoliberalism...,
2011-02-07 13:54:40
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the barry doesn't fall far from the shrub...,
2011-02-12 13:00:47
the am-siberian:
Vice President Joe Biden Tuesday proposed that the US government infuse $53 billion into a national high-speed rail network. The announcement was met immediately by deep skepticism from two House Republicans ...
House Transportation Committee Chair Rep. John Mica (R) of Florida said previous administration grants to high-speed rail projects were a failure, producing "snail speed trains to nowhere." He called Amtrak a "Soviet-style train system".
This is a funny thing to say, because American firms and the US Government were in large part responsible for building what became the Soviet train system. Hell, Americans sacrificed their lives protecting that railway from the Bolsheviks - who were the ones attacking trains as the running dogs of the reactionary capitalist bourgeois. Up until 1922 Americans serving in our Russian Railway Service Corps were running those trains and fixing the bridges that said revolutionaries were blowing up. And for all that, when the commies finally stopped dynamiting the tracks and started running the system themselves it served as one of the few economic linkages between the Soviet block and the West, facilitating what little free trade survived Stalinism. A patriot like Rep. Mica would, you'd think, be vaguely familiar with the fact that it was Americans who built the longest rail line in the world, and paid in blood and treasure to protect it. The Soviets inherited an American-style train system, not the other way around.
:: posted by buermann @ 2011-02-10 13:17:17 CST |
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