I'm cautiously optimistic that the burger empire will embrace HSR like the rest of the advanced world. America's competition is no longer the Soviet Union, but China.
I’m not optimistic that that will happen under the next Biden or Trump administration. US corporate media avoid mentioning China’s HSR, but they can’t keep things under the rug forever.
Media is having hard time explaining away China's concrete results across several sectors.
While China was investing and developing, our dear leaders in US and EU stole the money and now sitting with dicks in their hand looking to the working losers to pay up again to "compete" with China.
I’m not sure which bootlickers you mean—the politicians? Many of them are wealthy in their own right, and almost all of them rely on wealthy donors to get into office and to hold it. It’s one big club, and we ain’t in it. [Princeton] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
Working class boomers lived in a unique moment in world history, which will almost certainly never recur, but they didn’t know it and still don’t. That unique moment was post-WWII America, when the rest of the industrial world was destroyed by war, the New Deal/Keynesianism/US labor militancy had not been completely crushed yet, and the socialist alternative to capitalism in the Soviet Union was looking like a viable alternative to capitalism still. These factors, combined with US colonialism/neocolonialism allowed the US working class to have super-profits never seen before or since, but the Boomers assumed that this was and would always be the new normal.
The super-profits stopped going to working class boomers a long time ago now, except for some who are still on fat pensions or who didn’t get fucked by the 2008 crash and continued to manage their investment portfolio well and didn’t get wrecked by medical costs.
The profits are going to fewer & fewer as companies get more & more consolidated, and as our neocolonialism begins to falter along with our global hegemony. Even the lower end of the petit bourgeois are feeling economic precarity nowadays: The Nation, 2017: Trumpism: It’s Coming From the Suburbs
I'm not that optimistic, because "construction costs" in US are a big problem. As the line is announced, the land prices skyrocket and the government have to pay multiple times the old value to buy get the land.
You aren't wrong, I mean just looking at how it is making just getting a home while those homes are treated like Wall Street stocks. But the longer that the shit gets pushed out, the more it will cost anyway. Especially as private corps are literally buying up everything. So the corps should be just forced out without pay period. And the only people that should get paid anything are actual people and not the fake persons that we allow corps to be legally seen as. Only other exception would be if land is native land, and plans for shit should be forced to not go through it.
Are the ideas above legal? Hell no, but fucking corps aren't people and they already get their money from fucking over people and from getting all the tax cuts and exemptions for everything anyway. We have already been letting corps own the current rail lines and is a shining example as to why they should be purged for the benefit of the people.