> Our most tragic loss IMHO is our entire
> industrial economic base to the third world.
> Building an empire may well turn out to be
> the only way to remain a superpower. That
> empire may be one of capital rather than
> military ventures - if we have enough
> capital left.

The problem with this argument: The railroads have never been busier and are hauling almost as much freight as possible with fewer track-miles and fewer personnel. Just remember that the entire industrial base you lament--coal mining, steel making, ship building, steam railroads, cotton mills, shirtwaist factories, etc.--was built on the backs of huge numbers of wage slaves condemning themselves to a future of black lung disease, asbestosis, white lung, dismemberment, etc., working for wages that no self-respecting hamburger-flipper at McDonald's or drug dealer on a city street would take today for the hazards. Crushed your leg? Have a gold watch and a nice life. Cotton dust got your lungs? Move over for the new kid.

Frankly, I'm not lamenting the loss of 1978 Chevys and Fords and Caddilacs, nor do I want to go back to the "good ol' days" of boys picking slate out of the coal runnings or twelve-year-olds in the cotton mills.

This is not the place for a huge economics discussion, nor a discussion on NAFTA or whether jobs should be exported to lands where the dangers I described above still are often the norm. But to my eyes, there is precious little difference between someone in Tennessee buying steel from Pennsylvania or from Brazil--your dollars still leave your home town. A rising tide lifts all ships; our only real responsibility is to assure that the other ships don't have holes (as in, the profits going to a dictatorship or communistic economy rather than the workers, as is too often the case). Meanwhile, I doubt the railroads hauling shiploads of containers and highwayfuls of UPS and J.B. Hunt trailers rather than trainloads of LCL boxcars are complaining.


LNER4472-NOSPAM-@bcpl.net

James,

I am hoping to be there for the members picnic in september. What kind of lettering will she have at that time? Edaville?

Ted Miles


ted_miles@nps.gov