Elon Musk suggests the U.S. should privatize the Postal Service and Amtrak
Elon Musk suggests the U.S. should privatize the Postal Service and Amtrak
During a remote appearance at a technology conference in San Francisco, Musk told attendees the U.S. should privatize "as much as possible."
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.
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!
Lies and bullshit, but with a 50% chance of happening
I mean you have to take their words seriously because they tell you what they're going to do. Or at the very least what they want to do.
I suggest we deport this Nazi immigrant.
I don't think any other country wants him either, except maybe Russia.
However, he IS a big space enthusiast. Maybe there should be not one, but two Teslas floating in space?
To Atlantis.
fuck no, nationalize spacex and starlink
This but unironically.
Can you imagine a presidential candidate running on the platform of seizing the assets of the billionaire class? They would transcend political parties, they would unify the nation and people would finally gain something from our politics.
And they would probably be found with thirty bullets to the back of the head and it would be ruled a suicide.
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/
Elon Musk should privatize his face
I disagree. He should make it more accessible to the public. Physically accessible.
No shit, I'm so tired of seeing it
No.
Not everything should be privatized so some asshole oligarch can have another toy.
I'd bet he wants to take over Amtrak so he can replace it with that stupid Las Vegas car tunnel.
Or replace it with nothing, because "railways and mass transit are obsolete" (translation: "they're hurting my car sales").
Everything that has been privatized, has ended up costing us more for shittier service. This will not be different.
I dare say everything should be nationalized as a civil service.
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.
Not just LA, all over the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
He'll find those already government run in Russia. Perhaps he should consider relocating to that shithole and leave the United States the fuck alone.
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.
The thing is they did generate a profit until they were fucked with by Republicans to make them look unprofitable.
There isn't a functioning part of our government that the regressives wont destroy for private profit.
I still can't get over the idea of for profit prisons. incentivized incarceration is beyond stupid.
Except the taxpayers benefit from it, who are the ones paying for it anyway!
What Chancellor Musk means is that no oligarch is getting rich from it, so he is unable to understand its purpose.
In my country since the government privatized a part of postal service, the quality of service heavily declined to the point that now is almost guaranteed that they will "lose" your letter if you send it in a place that will cost too much to deliver
Same.
this is almost what has been happening in my country.
Someone punch him in the face, please
I think a much smaller object with much much greater velocity it's referable.
I remember seeing an interview with Margaret Thatcher where she said that rail could never be successfully privatized. Just as a reminder of how extreme Musk’s ideas are.
Thatcher's successor, John Major, oversaw the privatisation of British railways between 1994 and 1997.
It only took 30 years for them all to completely collapse in 2024.
British Rail Service is so bloody expensive as well. Seems like you guys have these, essentially, per-track monopolies.
They more or less did that here in the Netherlands. Once the government let go, things slowly started getting worse and we're now at the point where I'd say things are expensive, occasionally sporty and suboptimal...
Japan seems to have done it, no idea what the people over there think about its service and affordability though.
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.
rip rural service
Definitely, I live in a very rural area of the country I think it might be one of the most rural places in the lower 48 states. And we heavily depend on the postal service to get things that we simply don’t have here. This will totally cripple my town and 99% of the people here will blame it on woke.
What a surprise given the fuckery he pulled with Hyperloop and California high speed rail
This has been a fever dream of Republicans for my entire life. Looks like they just may get it this time.
Step 1: Privatize and sell it for peanuts to fellow billionaires Step 2: Watch it crumble Step 3: Buy it back for a fortune from the very same people you sold it
E:English
They want to eliminate or control the Postal Service so that they can eliminate mail-in voting. Their added bonus is padding the pockets of fellow millionaires and billionaires.
Privatize deez nutz, bitch
we already have FedEx for that.
It's time to strike some fear in Elon's heart. He's fucking around, he's going to find out.
Don't do that. Grrmany did. Did not end so Well.
This is exactly the shit that will give permanent erections to the cons.
And people should not call this shit "Trumpism" - this is who the Republicans are and what the Republican project has always been. They HATE the idea of a functioning society for all. Next up, we're going to hear how education should be handed over to the Devos family. You know, for "choice".
The post office would take an act of congress.
Nah, not anymore, just an XO and the little fascists will make it happen.
Whole lotta shit happening right now that should take an act of congress. Seems to make no difference.
Both would, actually. They are independent quasi governmental corpirations.
And a constitutional amendment.
It wouldn't need a constitutional amendment. The constitution says they can, not they must, run a postal service
As long as they pay out the full pension to all the employee's. After every postal employee's pension is fully funded.
Lol, you know they wouldn't
Of course not. Its been the dream of these scumbags for decades to get their hooks in to all that pension money and screw over the postal workers. They forget the term going postal exist for a reason.
Ffs. Not everything fits cleanly into a for-profit model. Health care, postal service, and public transportation are great examples.
This is how we know that billionaires are grifters far more than they are economists.
Yeah but healthcare, mail, and transportation are things people need to survive. That's means you can jack that price up all you want and the customer can't do anything about it. Infinite money baby!
my personal conspiracy theory is that Amtrak exists solely to make train travel look bad, driving up private car sales.
I had a long career in ecommerce and the amtrak website has been annoying to book train rides on for the entirety of its existence. It would be trivial to improve it in any number of ways but it's got (and maintains) the design patterns of a captive audience portal like ssa.gov instead of doing anything that removes barriers to purchase.
While it's possible they have just had the same not very good at their job person for the entirety of the sites history (decades now) i very much doubt it. The company's site today gives the same feel as when it started; they really don't care if you buy a ticket or not and they aren't really going to do much to help you do it.
I can get on board with this theory. They're also insanely slow and nearly as expensive as air travel. I understand some of this is due to the rail network and who owns it, but it still seems like Amtrak hasn't improved one bit since the 1950s.
Acela is not at all bad. It’s not very fast, but it has service every hour or so traveling at least as fast as a car on equipment from the 1990s.
Lots of places would benefit from modern equipment from the 1990s and regular service
I used them once to get from Tampa to Miami. It was fine. We got there over an hour late. I wouldn't really want to take a longer trip.
You aren’t wrong, BUT Amtrak does a decent job maintaining their trains and service despite the odds.
Amtrak recently received a huge infusion of funding under biden so of course trump wants to kill it.
i do like the trains! The Coast Starlight is amazing and the view from the observation car is just heaven.
The Empire Builder is another good train although the scenery on that route can't compare with the west coast.
The conspiracy theory isn't that the automotive industry makes them look bad, it's the rail owners.
Real: Amtrak doesn't own any rails, they lease them and legally are supposed to have right of way on tracks unless the owner/operators of the rail currently have their own train that's too big for the bypasses.
Conspiracy: Rail owners make Amtrak experience so painful that it drives down usage so Amtrak runs fewer and fewer trains, so they can be less of a nuisance to them or outright get rid of the service line and they get to completely ignore Amtrak
try it. no one will use it then.
Right. And people will die because of it. That's the problem, my friend.
If you live in a small town, your meds might come by mail. Your pension check too. That kind of mission critical thing. And that absentee ballot? Yeah, no, that's not gonna arrive on time.
Of course one could build alternative services. But in the meantime, at least, it will ruin a lot of things that are working properly right now. That is the point. That is the objective.
AmTrak is a hill I am willing to die for on.
How bout we increase funding to those things instead. No one should be competing with either of those services.
No one asked you, prickasaurus rex. Go back to your hovel and tweet angrily at the news like a good boy
He doesn't understand the second 'S' in USPS. Stable genius.
Don't you DARE touch my trains.
"Did somebody touch my
boatstrains? WHO TOUCHED MYBOATSTRAINS?!"
Nationalize Amazon.
Vital US services shouldn't be privatized! You remember when firefighting companies extorted people to put out fires? If you didn't have their symbol out front or weren't current on your payments, they would just watch your home burn down...
Sounds like “somebody” is about to launch Xmail and AmtraX, coincidentally of course
tl;Dr fuck off and eat shit, idiot
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Amtrak is private, though. It's publicly subsidized, but it's not a government agency AFAIK. Same for the post office. Part of the problem with Amtrak, though, is that the state of passenger rail in the US is still down in the septic tank, largely due to almost 100 years of government subsidized car-centric development and heavily subsidized air transit development. You'd have a very hard time attracting private investors interested in a conventional passenger rail mass transit scheme, I think.
Also, everybody benefits, even this fucking douche, when public transit is high quality and affordable. Even if a private company did offer high quality, affordable mass transit, the insatiable drive for ever increasing profits will eventually cause them to enshittify one or both and put us right back here. This is really just another attempt to transfer public wealth into private portfolios, though it's a little more of a joke compared to privatization efforts in Europe because we basically haven't been investing at all in public transit for the last fifty years
USPS is not publicly subsidized. All of their operating costs come from the services they sell.
It's quasi-public, which is weird. It is subsidized, but just barely (they have like 95% farebox recovery), so i don't think it's even responsible to call it subsidized like road and air travel.
I bet if there was enforcement of train priority laws, they could even be a revenue generator. Philosophically, I dont think they should be, though.
Edit: lmao, at those rates, Amtrak is less publicly subsidized than a lot of fortune 500s
I'd be cool with Amtrak turning profit as long as the revenue was always re-invested into better train sets, better routes, more frequent service, cheaper tickets, employee pay and benefits, etc etc, and never just routed to rich fucking assholes who already have more than they know what to do with.