President Signs High-Speed Rail Transit Bill

President Obama signed into law today a rapid transit bill designed to rejuvenate what he called “the same tired and inadequate mass transportation between our towns and cities that we had 30 years ago.”

At a ceremony in the White House East Room, the President, watched by a large crowd of Congressmen, labor officials, and Representatives of the railroad industry, noted that advances in rail transportation have been negligible that “an astronaut can orbit the earth faster than a man on the ground can get from New York to Washington.”

He said he hoped that the measure would bring ground transportation up to the level of efficiency achieved by air travel. “By 2025,” he noted, “we will have 75 million more Americans in this country, and those 75 million will be doing a great deal more traveling.”

The Bill authorizes the Commerce Department, in conjunction with private industry, to undertake immediate research, development, and demonstration projects involving highly advanced railway passenger systems - including conventional trains capable of speeds of up to 150 miles per hour and futuristic underground subways capable of up to 400 miles per hour.

The major demonstration project will be in the so-called Northeast Corridor between Washington, New York and Boston.

The main emphasis will be placed on improving the speed and attractiveness of conventional rail travel. However, other modes of surface transportation, such as vehicles traveling on a cushion of air, and vehicles propelled through tubes by turbine-driven air, will also be given serious study.

Obama also announced what industry sources had been indicating for the past few weeks: The railroads participating in the projects would complete final specifications for new, high-speed railway cars in the next fortnight.

The President also predicted that the first of the new cars would be delivered by the Fall of 2010. At that time, industry sources have estimated, Amtrak will inaugurate 125-mph service between Washington, New York and Boston. At the same time, the passenger rail service is expected to inaugurate service using high-speed trains powered by gas turbine engines along non-electrified routes.

The Problem with Authorities

A system run by “experts” too easily gets the blame for issues it cannot control

An authority, I learned in my first urban politics class, is an organizational entity that is entitled to many of the powers of local government without having to be subjected to the democratic processes that arbitrate the work of municipal agencies. During the progressive era of the early 20th century, advocates for a new brand of government argued that politicians were too easily influenced by private interests and money, and that as a result they were incapable of making efficient and appropriate decisions about the use of municipal funds. The first public authority was the Port of London Authority, formed in 1908, and the Port of New York Authority was one of the first in the United States, created in 1921. Both operate independently of elected government, with the capacity to make decisions without being concerned by the will of voters.

After the merger of its three subway networks, New York’s municipal transit system was managed by the city’s Board of Transportation, but in 1953, the city decided that year to transfer bus and subway assets to the New York Transit Authority under the assumption that this “public-benefit” corporation would be able to better manage the transit system’s finances and run the network more effectively than had the municipal agency. That authority, however, didn’t have sufficient strength to maintain New York’s once-ambitious subway expansion plans, so in the late 1960s, Governor Nelson Rockefeller orchestrated a state takeover of the system by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which had been formed only three years previously to manage failing commuter railroads.

The story of what happened next is well-known: the transit system had a brief period of expansion in the early 1970s, it then headed quickly towards death in the late 1970s and early ’80s, and since has pulled off a remarkable comeback once agency head Richard Ravitch developed a major capital plan. One could argue that today’s New York City transit system is better than it’s ever been, and construction on the Second Avenue Subway, Long Island Railroad East Side Access project, and 7 Line extension are all underway as I write.

It could be argued, then, that it was a good idea to place decision-making on the transit network’s future in the hands of an authority.

Today the MTA faces a major budget crisis because tax revenues haven’t fallen in line with expectations because of the recession. The result is an inability to pay operating expenses, and the likely consequences are major fare increases and service reductions. It’s not necessarily the fault of the authority that these problems are occurring. After all, city agencies are also having to cut their services.

The separation of management - the MTA - from financing - the state government - is the obvious consequence of a public-benefit corporation that lacks complete control over its funding. Unlike the Port Authority, whose funds come from operating revenues, bond releases, and direct grants from state and federal governments, the MTA relies on dedicated taxes that fail to produce enough revenue from time to time. It must ask the state government to provide it additional sources of tax revenue when it faces a troubling economic environment.

The fact that the MTA is an authority without self-financing makes it uniquely vulnerable. That’s because while it depends on decisions by state politicians for funding, those same lawmakers can point to the MTA for blame when funding the subways and buses becomes a problem. In other words, though the state is responsible for the adequate funding of the authority in fiscal emergencies, the state legislature doesn’t have to take the blame for the failure of the agency to produce a balanced budget - it can simply heap criticism onto the MTA, which has no power to raise taxes itself.

I do not necessarily think that transferring the MTA back to politics - putting it in the hands of the State Department of Transportation, for instance - makes the most sense.

Simply put, it is frustrating to watch New York legislators hem and haw about solving the MTA’s financial problems by blaming the authority for being “irresponsible” when these politicians know full well that the MTA’s finances have been under their supervision for decades, and that a budget crisis such as is now being faced was the inevitable consequence of a recession. The irresponsibility here is these legislators’ attempt to shift the blame to the MTA.

Declaration by Citizens Against Atlantica

Atlantica, the International Northeast Economic Region (AINER), is charting a course towards breaking down barriers for big business in Atlantic Canada, Eastern Quebec, and the Northeast United States. While Atlantica acknowledges economic distressed regions of Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, it seeks to perpetuate local economic hardship in these regions by lowering minimum wage and concentrating economic wealth in a proposed Atlantica triangle. This proposed triangle includes Connecticut and spreads to the three points of Boston, Albany and New York. Proponents of Atlantica, Atlantic Canada's business elite and their policy research arms, blame 'too much government' as economic burdens in our region when in reality it is the cheap sell off of our public resources, privatization of our public services and other concessions for large corporations.

Barriers slated for dismantling by the proponents of Atlantica include our national sovereignty, our labour rights, our natural resources, our environment, and our health.

Large business interests and federal government congregating in closed meetings of various kinds are working towards harmonizing Canadian and American regulations. These business interests are also looking to harmonize standards that govern and protect our precious natural resources, energy, environment, and health. These meetings include strategic allies in the government but exclude unions, environmental groups, and other civil society groups. Atlantica is flying in under the public radar with the media virtually silent on the big business plan.

Atlantica threatens our national sovereignty. The "Smart Regulations", another shorthand jargon meant to deceive the public, was initiated by the Paul Martin government. "Smart Regulations" was a move to harmonize regulations between Canada and the U.S. to suit trade and development interests. Such regulation harmonization would hinder Canada from setting its own regulations around health, food safety, the environment, and several other jurisdictions. Besides harmonization of regulations, proponents for Atlantica want an expansion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to include removing non-tariff trade barriers between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico. Removing non-tariff barriers to trade means removing any public institution, piece of legislation or government regulation that threatens a corporation's profit.

Atlantica threatens our workers. Proponents of Atlantica, Atlantic Canada's business elite, are calling for scrapping minimum wage, restricting access to employment insurance, restricting the ability of workers to organize, and decertifying unions. The largest sponsors of the "Reaching Atlantica" conference, including the Bank of Montreal and Irving Oil, want "labour market flexibility", which really means control to dictate hours, wages and working conditions of workers. As costs of living continue to rise, proponents of Atlantica deplore increasing wages saying that it would result in businesses relocating to more business friendly environments. Essentially, the Atlantica masterminds are suggesting the opening of sweatshops and the abandonment of living wages in our region. Also, Atlantica proponents hail the U.S. welfare-to-work program, which would provide a readily available pool of cheap labour for their businesses.

Atlantica threatens our natural resources. The current U.S. administration is relying on Canadian energy to fuel America's costly military forays and economic expansion. Invading Canada would be a harder sell than invading Middle Eastern countries for energy and natural resources. Instead, Atlantica proposes to solve that problem for the U.S. by creating a mutual benefiting continental energy and natural resources pact. Canada is also under pressure to sell its water to the U.S. through diversions and bulk water exports. Atlantica would sabotage policies that would protect our precious natural resources and water. Resource-based sectors like agriculture, forestry and fisheries that have been the economic backbone of many Atlantic Canadian communities. For many years, Atlantic Canada has already suffered major closures and economic setbacks due to unfair trade policies that favour large businesses. Atlantica would further threaten our natural resource sectors, leaving them even less economically and environmentally sustainable.

Atlantica threatens our environment. Atlantica proposes a transportation revamping of the area including building a highway from St. Stephen, N. B. to New England, to Cornwall Ontario, and finally to Montreal. Also proposed is the upgrading of the Halifax port to accommodate Post-Panamax-sized cargo ships. The environmental impacts will no doubt become afterthoughts and of little consideration when trade barriers such as effective environmental impact assessment and environmental protection regulations are reorganized into ineffectiveness under the "Smart Regulations".

Atlantica threatens our health, education and social programs. Atlantica would promote a privatized healthcare and education system, and thus a greater lack of access to healthcare and education as seen in the U.S. Health Canada's proposed changes espoused in the "Smart Regulations" would let companies off the hook for proving their new foods, drugs and technologies are safe. The public would be left with the burden to prove that a product is unsafe, which would most likely occur after harm had been done, possibly irreversible harm. Health Canada's role would change from harm prevention to damage control. Proposed regulation changes would also erase our right to sue the government for regulatory negligence. The proposed changes are a result of very powerful corporate lobbying while scientific experts warn that the precaution principle must be taken in regulating the industries providing biopharmaceuticals, genetically modified foods, animal to human transplants and cloning products and services. While the European Union is strengthening the precautionary approach in its regulations, Canada is following the U.S. in the opposite direction towards relaxing regulations that allow large corporations to get their new products on the market more rapidly. Atlantica proponents want to participate at the annual New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers Conference where they can lobby for the removal of social policies that interfere with corporate profit making including harmonizing Canadian and American health regulations and standards, increasing private sector involvement in Canada's public healthcare system, and privatizing our universities.

The clear winners of this Atlantica nightmare would surely be large corporations. The losers would be the public, left to console with unaffordable and inaccessible essential public services, the sell off of non-renewable natural resources, smaller wages, precarious working conditions, higher unemployment and poorer health. Instead of solving problems of economic distresses and poverty in Atlantic Canada, Atlantica would exacerbate such problems and further economically marginalize those most affected by unfair trade, contaminated and unhealthy environments, poor labour conditions, and meager social policies who tend to be women, youth, children, and senior citizens.

Considering the aforementioned items, we, the undersigned, condemn Atlantica because of the harm that this big business initiative would place on our economy, social programs, workers, environment and health. We also condemn the "Reaching Atlantica: Business Without Boundaries" conference by the proponents of the Atlantica Initiative held June 8-10 in Saint John, New Brunswick, which had the goal of realizing Atlantica. Instead, our vision for addressing the economic problems facing Atlantic Canada involves:

* A participatory democratic process where all sectors of society are able to give input and make decisions on future social and economic public policies. The interests of Atlantic Canadians must be placed first and foremost before the interests of economic elites in solving local economic problems.

Iraq in Fragments

We caught this movie on the weekend at the Irish Film Institute (IFI) annual doc film fest, Stranger Than Fiction.

The occupation of Iraq has been a disastrous failure and the country has descended into bloody civil war fueled by ancient and irreconcilable sectarian and ethnic tensions....or at least that's what I'm reading in the The Irish Times these days. Why does the Western media repeat this mantra with such dedication? Iraq in Fragments addresses the issue of ethnic divisions in Iraq. This movie is "an opus in three parts," in which Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds tell the story of life in their area. Under American occupation ethnic tensions in Iraq have been carefully nurtured, the result of "divide and conquer" policies enacted by Viceroy L. Paul Bremer III and the now defunct American Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). This movie is a powerful documentation of the hopes and frustrations of an occupied nation, and their struggle for freedom.

The corporate press have been very consistent in their message. "We are losing the war; the war is bad." That I can read everyday for the price of a newspaper. The implicit message is that if we were winning the war, the war would be good. This was essentially the message in 2003 and that message continued, even throughout the period when American justifications for aggression where exposed as "a pack of vicious lies" (George Galloway). "We are winning the war; the war is good." That story did not last long. It became overwhelmingly obvious, not long after John Kerry lost the 2004 election by refusing to speak against the occupation, that opposition to the war in the United States was in danger of getting out of hand. People were starting to get really pissed off and some of them might even come to the wrong conclusions. That is when American planners changed strategies. The corporate media was not far behind. It was clear to everyone that the occupation had not brought Freedom & Democracy to Iraq. Worst of all, it had not brought prosperity to the United States, which had always been the most crucial justification. If the occupation had not brought democracy to Iraq, then we must be losing the war! There is no other conceivable explanation. "We are losing the war; the war is bad." There is no concept of war being bad on its own terms. There is no space for public discourse that opposes American imperialism, regardless of whether it is winning or losing. This is the logic of a rigid and strictly controlled ideological system. By definition, America always seeks democracy; its enemies always seek to destroy it. When Saddam Hussein was an official ally, his regime was by definition democratic. When the evil bastard turned against us, he became undemocratic. When he used the weapons we gave him to kill Kurdish people he was democratic. But later, when he became undemocratic, his previous actions became war crimes, the very thing American foreign policy had been seeking to abolish all along. The new puppet regime we have installed post-Saddam is of course democratic. The real goals of American aggression remain hidden in the fog of war.

In the world of public relations, we are losing the war, not because of our own actions, but because of our inability to unite the country under one central government and one national Iraqi constitution (written by us, enshrining American corporate access to vital resources). This is our cross to bear. This is our burden. If only they would listen to reason, but instead, the Shiites and Sunni are too busy going to mosque and counting bullets. This is our failure, despite our best intentions. The risk of civil war in Iraq has been exaggerated to justify the continuing military occupation, thereby giving our messianic leaders time to draw up some sort of coherent plan, an "exit strategy" if you will, that can ensure American interests in the long run, thereby "stabilizing" the region. We have dug a large hole and we are losing the war. The only logical thing to do is keep digging. In the lexicon of the US State Department a country is only "stable" if it is under direct American control. Therefore the Bolivarian Revolucion in Venezuela, which has increased standards of living drastically by strategic nationalization, has "destabilized" the region by diminishing American control over the domestic economy. Destabilization is of course a very bad thing. President Bush has bravely warned undemocratic forces in South America that further "destabilization of the region" will not be tolerated.

The corporate media quickly turned on the war. Certain American planners turned on their own war in order to control criticism of it. This is in essence the role of the Democratic Party. But the media in general were quick to turn on a war that they felt they could no longer justify to the public, at least not as belligerently as before. The Democratic Party controls dissent in the United States by creating the illusion of opposition. The corporate media control dissent by framing the scope of criticism, to ensure that anti-war sentiment stays within acceptable frameworks. Larger conclusions about the nature of war and capitalism and colonialism are never drawn. The war is bad because we are losing it; our altruistic goals have been thwarted by al-Qaeda and France. The war is bad, we agree, not because 650,000 Iraqis are dead, not because over 4 million people have been forced to flee their homes, not because the occupation violates international law, not because the neoliberal policies we imposed have devastated their economy, not because we have destroyed a nation, and certainly not because we are unwelcome. The war is bad because of our inability to convince the locals to embrace the democracy we have granted them. The Pax Americana, conceptualized by Dick Cheney and The Project for a New American Century, will "Americanize" the Middle East and grant the troubled Arabs peace & stability.

The truth is that sectarian sentiment in Iraq is easily eclipsed by near-universal opposition to the American occupation of their homeland. This is the unacceptable truth Iraq in Fragments crystallizes in every frame, making it overwhelmingly unpopular at Young Republican meetings across the country. Despite the disparity of the stories, the film flows with a wholeness that is both grand and intimate in scale. "What this movie shows, you will never see on the evening news" (Michael Moore).

Globally, the term democracy is vaguely understood to mean some kind of self-determination. The American occupation of Iraq may be many things, but it is almost certainly not self-determination. The global population, especially the "global south," tend to define democracy as freedom from corporate globalization. This translates very clearly to freedom from American hegemony and the Monroe Doctrine more specifically. In the early 1960s a great wave of global altruism swept across the United States and so we occupied Vietnam as the shining example of our dedication to global peace & justice. When the Vietnamese resisted the occupation of their homeland, they were resisting democracy. Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese chose to organize themselves into armed militias. They fought day and night, from village to village, with very few weapons, against the very people who had only come to give them democracy. To protect them from communism. To protect them from themselves. We bombed them to protect them. It was for their own good. The ungrateful South Vietnamese. The Viet Cong. The people we were there to protect. The people that we fought against. The people that with few resources defeated the most powerful military machine in human history...they overwhelmingly supported American involvement in South East Asia, according to all creditable American news agencies at the time.

Unfortunately some violent and cynical malcontents in Iraq have chosen to take up arms against our selfless occupation of their homeland. If only their ancient and petty sectarianism would end so that they could stop and enjoy the Mesopotamian paradise we have created for them! It is sad that they fight each other, but what more can we do? We have already rebuilt their country from top to bottom. In city after city across the nation. We have given them state of the art architecture and technology. Hospitals and schools and apartment buildings. We paved every road. We fed every child. We have eliminated all forms of poverty and hopelessness with dynamic and expansive social programs, investing heavily in local community projects, rejuvenating public space and municipal democracy. We promoted a pluralistic and cosmopolitan society by retaining and enhancing a vast civil service. The Iraqi people did not go a day without a single utility. Every man, woman and strong lad are employed by the strong and dynamic economy we nurtured in every sector, diversified with sustainable development. We have restored their infrastructure and their sense of self worth. We have given them democracy, we have safe guarded their national treasures and we have respected their history and culture.

But sadly they still fight among each other like savage children, despite the best efforts of their American benefactors. "We are losing the war; the war is bad," but what more could we have done?