Month: February 2020

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What is AMTRAK’s Future?


AMTRAK was formed in the 1970s to take over the nation’s private railroad’s passenger network. For years those railroads had been unable to make a profit on most, if not all, of their passenger routes. It is worth noting that America was one of the few countries world wide that still had privately run passenger service.

Support for AMTRAK has been weak since its inception. Many senators and representatives from states that were either marginally served or not served at all wanted to end AMTRAK entirely. It has been recognized since AMTRAK’s inception that certain routes would pay for themselves and make a profit as well. One such route is referred to as the Northeast Corridor, Boston to Washington D.C. The trains on this route typically run at or near capacity. But the same could not be said of the long distance trains even though these trains frequently ran full. The problem was simple, in order to break even the fare charged would have been exorbitant. And some routes were eliminated for this reason, Chicago to Los Angeles via Denver and Las Vegas. Denver to Portland Oregon. Chicago to Miami are among those eliminated.

The first, and probably the most important issue, is how we and Washington DC view AMTRAK. Instead of viewing AMTRAK as a national necessity, as happens in Europe and Asia, it is viewed as an unnecessary luxury. Our national psyche desperately needs to change its view so that in falls in line with the rest of the world.

The second problem is the AMTRAK footprint and level of service needs to be expanded. Such an expansion would initially cost in the billions of dollars but in a budget that is in the trillions of dollars our lawmakers can surely figure out how to get it done. What they now see as a luxury will in the next 20 years become a necessity as the price of long distance travel rises to levels 4 and 5 times what it is today.

Fuel prices are the variable that sets the price for all forms of travel. Through fracking the U.S. has been able to extract oil from old fields that had been considered dry. But such extraction is very limited. This sort of oil extraction will soon be on the decline which means at the same time the U.S. will again be reliant on oil from foreign countries. We are a decade away from $5 per gallon gasoline prices. Airline fuel prices will also rise at the same rate or more. When that happens air travel will become prohibitively expensive for those people who can only fly once a year or less.

Rail travel will become the most cost effective way of moving people and goods from one point to another. But for AMTRAK to be a truly effective railroad, it must serve all large and medium size cities in the U.S. Presently it does not come even close to this but now it the time to act. The longer America waits to enact such travel, the more expensive it will become.

Simply put, AMTRAK must now become a national necessity and it is up to the public to demand service to their city that has no service or to demand a level of service that meets their travel requirement.

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The Perfect Democrat Candidate


Like everyone in America, I have a certain bias towards one of the many Democrats running for President right now. But to start with, I think the perfect Democrat candidate would have the following on his/her resume’: be a veteran, have held a political office either for a long time or where a large number of people were his constituency, has no skeletons in his closet or other characteristics that Donald Trump can use as a cudgel, and someone who speaks well and can hold his own in a debate. Additionally, the ideal candidate will be between 40 and 56.

There is no one now running who has all those characteristics. There are two veterans among them, Pete Buttigieg, and Tulsi Gabbard. Each of these candidates have a problem which Trump will, even improperly, use against them. Ms. Gabbard lacks name recognition and her views are largely unknown. Mr. Buttigieg is gay and as disgusting as it is, Trump will use that to whip up the prejudices of those who either do not like gays or who have a religious complaint. That, in my opinion, puts them in a poor position to win.

Tom Steyer has a great message but no government experience. For going on four years now, we have seen what someone with no governmental experience can do and that is unacceptable. The same applies to Andrew Yang.

Bernie Sanders has a good message but by describing himself as a democratic socialist makes him easy canon fodder for any Republican who feels like calling him a Communist regardless of the lack of truth. Most Americans do not understand the difference between socialism and communism. As an aside, this country has had socialist representatives.

Elizabeth Warren is faring poorly in a state adjacent to her own, New Hampshire to Massachusetts, where traditionally candidates do well. Not only is this a sign of her being unelectable but highlights a public view of her as being an intellectual elitist. She also tends to be “preachy” which most Americans find condescending.

Joe Biden is burdened with the Ukrainian controversy even though there is no truth to it. Trump has never had a problem promoting a falsehood to whomever will listen and for Biden, he can expect that to continue. In my opinion, when speaking, Biden does not come across as someone who inspires confidence.

This leaves us, basically, with Amy Klobuchar and Mike Bloomberg. I like both of these candidates. Amy is both a veteran and a U.S. Senator which checks off two of the important boxes. She is 59, slightly older but still at a younger age than her male rivals. I think her problem is simply one of name recognition and her positions.

I think Mike Bloomberg is easily the most electable of all the candidates. To start with, as Mayor of New York City, were New York City a state of its own, he would have headed the 11th most populous state in the union. He also had an extremely impressive business background having come from a middle class family to the highly success multi-billionaire he is today. Bloomberg is a very good speaker who would easily hold his own against a Trump onslaught. And finally, he has made his positions very well-known. His only downside is his age and his, thus far, inability to connect with the youth of the nation. Still, I do believe that Mike Bloomberg would win the presidency in a landslide.

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We Baby Boomers Failed Our Children


I cannot say I remember the 1960s and 70s like they were yesterday but I certainly remember them well enough. Those we years of turmoil as our nation was transformed from that of our parents, the great depression, World War 2 and Korean War. They were the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” generation. And Tom Brokaw later described them as the “Greatest Generation” although I have reservations about that, I am also not about to dispute it.

As children of the “duck and cover” generation, always fearing the Russians (the USSR) was going to drop a nuclear bomb on us, we suffered through monthly drills and air raid sirens. We also were witness to the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States altered so that it now contains the phrase “under God.”

By the time we were old enough to see what was going on around us and digest it, we knew we did not like what we saw. The first thing to show itself was racial inequality. A group called the “Black Panthers” emerged whose mission was to protect the black neighborhoods from the all white police and others who felt it their mission to keep the black man in his place and if that meant cracking a few skulls, so be it.

At the same time Martin Luther King was forming peaceful marches to protest segregation even though the Federal Courts had outlawed such things in 1954, it persisted in the south where “Jim Crow” rules still dominated the cityscape and rural areas as well.

By 1965 the Vietnam War was beginning to ramp up to its height in 1969 and 1970. College students questioned the government’s reasons for our fighting such a war in the first place. They had rightly seen such an act as one of Imperialism which the North Vietnamese had been shouting for decades, going back to when the French were the occupying country.

The mid-60s also saw the rise of the women’s rights movement. Women were fighting both to throw off the yoke of government control of their bodies, birth control and abortion, as well as equal pay for equal work. They tried in vain to get an Equal Rights Amendment added to our Constitution. The argument from those opposed was the old refrain that there were laws in place which guaranteed their right to equal pay.

Then, finally, there were the hippies who found their leader in the former Yale Professor Dr. Timothy Leary. Leary extolled the virtues to using LSD even though he logic was without merit, he more importantly brought into public view a group of people who wanted to dress as they pleased, have sex as they pleased, and live however they pleased without being condemned by society.

For each of the above movements, and others I have not mention, partial success was achieved. In 1973 the US Supreme Court ruled abortion both legal and the right of every woman to decide. This also included birth control which women had been fighting for since the early 1900s when Margaret Sanger in New York City set up the first women’s health clinics in the lower east side of that community. For efforts she was shunned for her activities, even though she was a trained nurse, and then jailed for sending birth control literature through the mail and finally run out of the country in the late 19teens. Seventy years of struggle is now under attack as states have gotten the Federal Government to stop funding of Planned Parenthood and at least two large states, Texas and Missouri, have limited the number of Planned Parenthood in each state to one.

As for equal pay, women still only get about 75 cents on the dollar for doing the exactly same job at the exact same level as men.

Where people of color are concerned, they are part of the lowest income per capita in the U.S. and, of course, among the least educated and therefor the most incarcerated. Prison populations frequently approach 50% a black population in spite of there being 13% of the total U.S. population. They are still under attack by the white population.

Our imperialistic tendencies appeared once again in 2002 when President Bush declared war on Iraq under the false premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They knew going in, however, that he did not but they felt he was part of a grand conspiracy with Al Qaeda to attack the U.S. There was no proof to support such a supposition.

And during the decades of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, it was the baby boomers who were in the halls of congress, in the board rooms, and in positions of great influence. It was our responsibility to continue and improve upon the changes and challenges which began in the 1960s and 70s.

But as I, a member of the baby boomers, look back over those decades I can only conclude that we have failed the succeeding generations, the Gen X’ers, the Millennials, and the Gen Z’ers. Our legacy to them is a failing health system, out of control global warming, poor distribution of the nation’s wealth, and an attack of women’s reproductive rights that we should have foreseen and been ready to beat back. We did neither.

And worst of all, children in schools today, even though their numbers a far fewer than the baby boomers, are going to overcrowded crowded classroom headed by underpaid teachers, and sometime under-educated.

It is now up to Gen X and the Millennials to right our wrongs, to re-energize movements started in the 60s to meet the demands of today’s society and to secure the future to our children and our grandchildren.