There's a perfect storm brewing right now in the USA for a massive earthquake in the economy. We have a very low reserve in fuel supply right now. Certain areas in this nation are running with less than a week of diesel fuel in reserve. Then throw in the holiday season rush with higher fuel demand and prices. Then a possible strike in the railroads. If I were a logistics manager right now I would be buying malox by the gallon along with tums by the case. Oh yeah throw in a nationwide shortage of Def and for the ultimate kick in the butt effective Jan 1st California is stupidity banning about 25 percent of all OTR trucks from their state for being to old. The trucks they are banning haul about 70 percent of all meat and produce into and out of California.

OT - The entire world economy is like a sinking ship with no lifeboats and few effective life jackets, and we are all trapped on it. It did not hit an iceberg, it is sinking from rust and rot. The passengers are busy fighting over the crumbs of an economic pie baked in 1945. But there is an abundant supply of toilet paper, printed in pretty colors with currency denominations of all the bankrupt countries that issued it. When people experience difficulty getting food or fuel they may finally start to pay attention to the dire financial situation.

For a really interesting look at the government money printing the last couple years see the video "We're Freakin' Doomed" by Mike Maloney. He is a precious metals dealer, but this appears to be based on good information. It is a very interesting presentation done with the government's own charts and numbers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKBGuyMMjzk

And keep in mind that in the last year or so the Social Security Administration has pushed the "Trust Fund Depleted" date of Social Security from 2041, back to 2039, and then 2037. When it is depleted they intend to fund the payments as general debt.

This is part of why the unions might need to go after a 30% annual raise just to stay even.

And everyone else is on a sinking ship with no lifeboats............

PC

Kinda restarting this thread, But what are you guys' thoughts on Lance Fritz resigning and shareholders pushing for Jim Vena at UP

What I have read was the Fritz was antagonistic toward employees.

I haven't heard anything that Vena is much better, though he would have to work at it to be worse.

Vena was one of the co-founders of PSR. If Fritz was antagonistic with employees. Vena will be even worse

Where's E. H. Harriman now that we need him?

Phil Mulligan

UP is Anschutz from A to Z, it looks like he has decided to double down on the cost cutting. I can still remember the "Phuck Phil" employee commentary on the sides of Rio Grande coal hoppers in the 1990s.

Watch for Blackmon Auctions to list a 4-8-4 and 4-8-8-4 later this year...... they sell a lot of surplus UP stuff.

Howard P.

Think you mean watch for them to make a trip to Silvis in the near future

I'm anticipating that some people of "conservative" leanings may come out defending "capitalism" like it's some sort of religion to them. As a corollary, they may take to calling anything critical of our system "socialism."

The problem is, our capitalist system has devolved, been dumbed down, to where it's about money and nothing but money. Employees, the public, and even customers are at best secondary considerations, or at worst are impediments to even more profits.

It wasn't always like that. Business owners, even of major corporations, pursued profit of course, and could even be quite aggressive about that, but they also saw themselves as builders, as citizens, and they took pride in that. That's why factory buildings were built of brick with the company name carved in stone, and sometimes also set into tiles in the bricks of the smokestacks they had. The owners expected to be around for a while.

Today you're lucky to see a plant made of tin, with a plastic sign. That sign's important, because the company itself isn't. The plant may have been built by ABC Co., then sold to hedge funder guys at XYZ Inc., and now is owned by PFFFTT, LLC, which has closed the plant and is moving everything to China.

Capitalism used to be symbolized by people like Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford. Today the more proper character is Henry Potter, the villain from "It's a Wonderful Life."

Our system just ain't what it used to be.

It's not just railroads, it's everything of any size.



The article this is from, and another one from The Atlantic, are a bit lengthy, but worth reading.

https://newrepublic.com/article/154944/ ... revolution

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... gs/602188/

Another quote from that New Republic article worth reading--again.



My own take on things--

In the land of opportunity, opportunity is running out.

It's running out because we are dealing with both a technically mature economy and what is probably a super saturated economy.

Let's tackle the technical side first.

Who among us would think it was a good idea to build another car, in particular another gasoline or diesel car? In particular, in view of the huge investment that would have to be made in designing and building and testing prototypes, and then the plant to build the new cars in quantity, could you offer something better than what's already available from Ford, Chrysler, GM, Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volkswagen, Nissan, Kia, and all the rest?

Could you build something more fuel efficient? Could you build something safer, overall better, than anything from anybody else, better enough to be competitive?

And even if you did, would it be enough? Would it improve the driving experience enough?

One thing that used to be a big selling point for cars was that they got you places faster than a trolley or bus. Well, today you can buy a Corvette or other road rocket that can launch you into high speed rail velocity and cruise at it all day long (though you're going to have to stop for gas really often). But can you use all that speed?

In reality, when you get on the highway, you will either get stuck in traffic with everyone else, or, if you do have something resembling an open road, you'll likely draw unwanted attention from the Highway Patrol.



Source (and a cool video, at least I think so!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J-wuKfp-Pk

Expanding roads doesn't seem to work too good anymore, either. Bigger roads seem to make for bigger traffic jams, and even in open country, you aren't getting anywhere faster than you did when the first parts of the Interstate system opened back in the 1950s.

We should have listened to General Electric instead of General Motors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6dltiZMlaU

More thoughts on some things--

One of the things a lot of returning veterans did in the postwar era was to go into business for themselves. Many of these businesses were diners, roadside restaurants, an icon from the "goodle days" of the 1950s, or more properly, the whole period between the end of WW II and the Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Our population has multiplied to almost triple what it was then, and that would suggest we should have a lot of roadside places like that now, and we do--but they all are named McDonald's and Waffle House.

I can remember independent grocery stores; a next door neighbor and his brothers ran one just up the street from my house when I was a kid. There were at least two others nearby, and an A&P Supermarket, too (my dad worked there, by the way.)

(And how many of us recall A&P, officially The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, with roots going back to before the Civil War?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%26P

All are gone now.

Where I currently live, there are very few independent grocery stores. All are parts of chains (Wal Mart, Aldi's, Martins, Food Lion, etc.). The few independents that are around are in some kind of backwater places, like at a crossroads community about six miles from me, but which feels much further off, (it has one corner grocery, a couple of churches, a post office, and perhaps 30 houses) Another is a former convenience store at trailer park on a former main road that was bypassed some years ago with a four lane highway, and a third is another little crossroads place that is even smaller than the first one mentioned. All are in places where the big corporations don't think it's worth going to.

When you look at things through this lens, it makes sense that corporations, in particular those run by these funds, would act this way. It's logical if money is your only goal.

Really, think of how hard it is for a railroad to compete these days with subsidized roads and a public that thinks your industry has been obsolete and is even government subsidized when it isn't? Wouldn't this seem like a part of an economy with limited, even shrinking opportunity? Wouldn't it make sense to go out of business while taking as much out of the business as you can before you fold up?

Doesn't this look a lot like what we are seeing in the railroad industry, and others was well?

There is an interesting column in the April issue of Trains by Bill Stephens, entitled "Union Pacific has lost its way." He lays blame right away on UP's goal of an operating ratio of 55%. He relates, as an example of that goal, that the Sunset Limited is Amtrak's worse performing long distance train. Amtrak claims that the reason for its poor on-time performance, is the fact that UP runs trains that are longer than the length of the sidings.

I blame the almost unattainable goal (in my opinion) of 55% O.R. on Wall Street. They demand ever higher returns each year and corporations demand ever more cost savings from their managers every year. Which means, even lower head counts. I read that an investor group owning just one percent of UP's stock, forced Fritz out.

America has entered a new era of Robber Barons, it's as simple as that.

I was disappointed not to know any of the Robber Barons listed at the bottom of that Wikipedia page.

Interesting page...well worth reading. Ross Rowland

First, I appreciate that, so far, the corporate defenders are not commenting; I'd like to hope they are considering what I have had to say with some seriousness!

Anyway, one thing my mom taught me was that I shouldn't criticize too much unless I had an alternative to propose.

As noted, a lot of this is at least partially due to the corporation model. Corporations actually go back to Colonial days; The East India Tea Company was one such firm (and in a way a predecessor of today's multinationals). Some of the 13 Colonies were also privately incorporated; essentially they were real estate development projects.

Frankly, I think corporations are undemocratic. Think of how voting takes place in one, with stock. Would a stockholder with 10,000 shares be ten times smarter, ten times a better person than a stockholder with only 1,000 shares? If not, why do we give him or her ten times the voting rights?

It's a classic case of "Might makes right." We know that's often not a good approach.

An alternative might be to outlaw corporations--and automatically, at the same time, make them cooperatives.

The two have a lot of similarities, including limited liability provisions for the shareholders and officers, ease of changing ownership with stock that doesn't change the identity of the enterprise (a partnership becomes a completely new entity when partners come in or leave the partnership, with complications in things like business registration), and distribution of profits or losses according to stock ownership.

The key difference is in voting. In a cooperative, you get one vote per stockholder or proxy for a stockholder; stock ownership doesn't come into this at all. In effect, it's how we vote in this country (or are supposed to, anyway). If it's good enough for the grand enterprise that is the United States of America, it's good enough for a company!

We have a lot of companies that are cooperatives. They include grain elevators (usually owned by farmers), food processing companies (also owned by farmers who provide the food for processing; I had a plant owned by such a cooperative right down the street from where I live), some electric companies, and credit unions (in effect banks that are owned by their depositors). If you have an insurance company with "Mutual" in its name, it's owned by the policy holders that are also its customers. (My wife worked for one for 12 years; it's still there, in Martinsburg, W.Va., only about 12 miles from my house, and well into its second century.) No doubt there are others; the controversial Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has commented that her district, which is part of New York City, has "hundreds" of businesses organized as cooperatives.

It's not like that approach is a total stranger in the land of free enterprise.

That's one approach.

Another might be to look at whether some companies have gotten too big, becoming monopolies. Maybe we need to break them up. (Hello, Teddy, can you come back for a while?)

Finally, in the case of railroads, maybe some sort of nationalization program might be in order. Some might get a fainting spell at that idea, but consider what the hedge funders want for returns--and look at how I and at least one other person here think maybe those rates of return just aren't possible without cannibalization. With the right terms--say a lease with a guaranteed return of 6%, or outright purchase, or some mixture of the two--we could take a "problem" out of the hedge funders' hands and do better work without having to worry about those unattainable profit levels. (The hedge funders could then play their games with stock manipulation, and we wouldn't have to worry about paying for it, at least at the operating level.)

These are just ideas, and maybe they're just so much hooey, but then again, what we have now is not serving us well, not at all.