The Car Economy

"With cars, you can go where you want to go when you want to go. But they also have the most environmental impacts, the most social impacts and the greatest cost to our system - to park it, to enforce it, to run it, to import the oil. All of these things have severe impacts that we really just can't sustain anymore. The other modes have their limitations, too. As a pedestrian, you can only go so far. As a bicyclist you can go a little bit further, as a transit rider you can go furthest, but you can't go where you want to go all the time. There's got to be a way to link all these modes. When you add in car-sharing, bike-sharing and taxis, all of a sudden you have this menu of options that you can use, just like you would a car, without all the impacts."
-- Timothy Papandreou

"In the early 1920s when every US city of more than 5,000 residents had at least one streetcar line, households spent an average of just 3 percent of household income on transportation. Today families spend an average of 19 percent."
-- Privatizing The Cost Of Transportation

The anti rail crowd arguments don't stand up to scrutiny. Good public transit saves society and individual families money and it gets cheaper the more people use it. Cars, on the other hand, cost more the more they are used.

Taken For A Ride

The anti-transit cabal

The Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation are the sources and for many of the rail v. bus "studies" cited by Sykes, Belling and Walker. They have an agenda. Take a look at who is connected.

The Kock Family lies at the center of the web. They use libertarian doublespeak to argue for disemboweling government regulation so that they can gain special financial advantage by keeping America addicted to oil and automobiles. The people most victimized by the intellectual dishonesty of these organizations are disenfranchised white middle class males who have been brainwashed into supporting political movements that give power and money to these big oil industrialists.

David and Charles Koch own virtually all of Koch Industries, an oil, natural gas, and land management firm and the second largest privately owned company in America. based on an annual ranking of the world's wealthiest people compiled and published by Forbes magazine on March 11, 2009, David and Charles Koch are tied for being the 19th richest person in the world, each with assets in excess of 14 billion. Their father was a co-founder of the John Birch Society.

Please support rail mass transits, but don't forget to purchase your pins to aide identification at our next public meeting. To fully understand this comment, view the John Birch Society link.

The State of The County

Walker - the blind.

Walker is blind to the future, perhaps that is why he stand in front of a 48 star flag on the Milwaukee County web site. Apparently he thinks he is living before August 21st, 1959.

The County Executive reveals his inability to be either pragmatic or capable of empirical thought through his transit policy. Perhaps this is the product of believing at face value reports produced by the big oil funded Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation. The public should be suspect of these "Libertarian" organizations funded by people seeking their own advantage regardless of the impact on the health and welfare of our society. After all, the Laissez-faire society these "think tanks" advocate is the perfect place for keeping the lower and middle classes under the thumb of big oil.

Walker's ideological posturing has been an impediment to the progress of Milwaukee County. He is a roadblock to fixing the problems at Milwaukee County. This is why the Milwaukee County continues to decline under his "leadership." As the 'ol Harry Truman quote goes: "How many times do you have to get hit over the head before you figure out who’s hitting you?”

Good transit brings wealth to communities. Transit is a logical and necessary investment in a world of increasing population, diminishing oil supplies, and climatic change.

The below PBS NOW episode features a conservative Mayor with vision. An example to show that not all conservatives are blind to the future.

An example to be emulated

If it works in a car centric place like Charlotte, NC; it can work in Milwaukee.

Reconnecting America's Jeff Wood presents a slide show about Charlotte's transit system

Slideshow

International monetary policy -- thinking out of the box.

One of the problems that contributed to the Great Depression was a breakdown in international trade. One boost to international trade, as shown in the Euro zone, is a shared currency and the elimination of exchange rates. One achievable possibility would be to synchronize monetary policy between the Euro, Canadian Dollar, US Dollar and the Yen. I.E. 1 Greenback = 1 Loony = 1 Euro = 100 Yen.

This would increase trade between the participants and build a exchange rate free trade zone among relative equal nations.

Recent world events have shown us that our economies are truly closely linked. The myth of separateness is refuted by the daily interactions between our stock markets, exchange rates, and banks.