From Ruined Chapel:
Last week, the Chinese state mining company China Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC) signed an agreement with the Afghan government to develop plans to construct a much longer railroad in eastern Afghanistan. MCC estimates the project's initial price tag would be between $6- to $7 billion dollars.
So let me see if I got this right.
We are fighting a war in Afghanistan. Spilling the blood of our soldiers, and spending 2 Billion dollars a week.
China is going to build a railroad in same country.
Mostly to get natural resources out of Afghanistan and into China.
While we in America can not even fix, maintain our rail lines.
We are not building any new lines.
China lays thousands of miles for bullet trains in China.
We will not have a bullet train in America for decades. And even if, and or when we do it will be engineered, built, and financed by a foreign country.
Probably China, Japan, S/Korea, France, or Germany.
And Americans still believe that they are superior over the rest of the world.
Amazing, simply amazing.
From Krugman today:
To be fair, though, I understand from the Times that whenever I mention in my column that WWII ended the Great Depression, the paper gets a lot of mail accusing me of being a warmonger. Amazing...
The point is that it would have been much better if the Depression had been ended with massive spending on useful things, on roads and railroads and schools and parks. But the political consensus for spending on a sufficient scale never materialized; we needed Hitler and Hirohito instead.
My comment.
This is what happens to all empires when the military/industrial complex takes over. Endless war destroys the very foundations of that society.
We were once a country that manufactured products and sold them within our borders and to the rest of the world. We only went to war to protect our trade. Today one party wants to be the world babysitter and the other one the world policeman. Neither of which is even remotely possible. Today we only manufacture wars and let the rest of the world make money off of the chaos we create.
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