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!
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.
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
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.
fuck no, nationalize spacex and starlink
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.
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.
You know who wants to replace the postal service? Amazon. They have delivery vehicles, lockers, and so on. They have been building towards it for years. I’m sure an attack on the postal service would leave Amazon on top, and I bet it’s a plan in the works.
As for Amtrak, maybe musk wants to swallow it up with his boring company.
Actually they don’t, they want to replace fedex and UPS.
No one wants the business of daily letter service.
What people who want to gut the postal service don’t understand is that it’s a fucking service.
The USPS does last mile delivery for all courier agencies. FedEx and UPS won’t pay a driver to deliver your dildo out to your cabin in bumfuck Nebraska, but the USPS will, along with your tax documents, bank statements, and anything else you need.
If you get rid of USPS, you’re cutting anyone who isn’t in a major city off from not only packages, but critical documents.
It is insane to me when people complain about the failure of a public service to turn a profit as if that’s some kind of bad or unexpected outcome.
Services cost money to operate for the benefit of those using them. That is literally the point.
Yes, the Republican con has been to compare government to a household budget and/or corporations, and it’s just so very stupid.
