Have you ever been on New Jersey Transit’s Northeast Corridor line in a rain storm while trying to get to a 2:00pm matinee in Manhattan? Friendly advice: don’t. You’ll never make it on time.
The railway has been so neglected for years that you’re bound to get stuck somewhere. In rain, the signaling mechanism goes haywire. The trains sit idly on the tracks while your cellphone also searches frantically for a signal to tell your friend you’ll be late for the first act. (We’ll save the sucky cell phone signal in the NYC metro area for another post). The signals are not related but you do get the feeling that something has gone horrible awry that in the 21st century, you could be derailed by a signaling mechanism installed early in the 20th century. How does it happen that nothing has been upgraded in almost 100 years??
Those of us who lived through the first Christie administration saw part of the answer. Christie closed the Hudson River tunnel project that had been in the works for a long time. It would have connected Hoboken with Manhattan and alleviated the strain of hundreds of thousands of commuters through a deteriorating tunnel every day. But Christie wouldn’t have it even though federal funds had been lined up for the project. It was cancelled. But the desperate need for a new tunnel was not. I’ve been through the current tunnel that plunges under the river and ends up in the dank rat infested underlayers beneath the labyrinthine Penn Station. It makes me shudder to think about it.
The new tunnel project, called the Gateway Tunnel, has been given the go ahead, after waiting almost 10 years since Christie killed the first project. This time, the $30 billion dollar project looked like it was definitely going to happen.
It just didn’t count on Donald Trump losing New Jersey and New York in a massive landslide to Hillary Clinton in November 2016. They’re going to pay for that. Because persons who skew towards the extreme end of the narcissistic spectrum nurse their grudges and look for opportunities to get revenge.
Trump has decided that if there’s going to be a tunnel, and trust me on this, the tunnel HAS to be built, the trains are operating on borrowed time now, Trump is going to have direct control over how the money is spent. At first he tried to get Chuck Schumer to swap control of the Gateway Tunnel for his stupid, unnecessary, ineffective border wall project that is projected to cost $25 billion. Call me cynical but I suspect that Trump is lining up construction companies that will somehow manage to get some of that money back into Trump’s pockets. I know, I know, I have Trump derangement syndrome because what proof do I have that the Trump’s and the Kushners would be involved in corruption and self-dealing? 🙄
The bottom line was that the tunnel is an infrastructure emergency and Schumer wouldn’t bend so Paul Ryan did. The money for the tunnel project has been cut almost in half for the initial work in the omnibus spending bill and control of how that money is spent is in the hands of Donald Trump.
The Washington Post article on the tunnel ends like this:
the project remained on Trump’s mind, and White House aides fueled his doubts, portraying Gateway as a politically motivated boondoggle that was sucking dollars away from other administration priorities.
“You put that much money into one project, it’s going to crimp projects across the country,” Marc Short, Trump’s legislative affairs chief, told reporters Tuesday.
Matters came to a head Feb. 28, when Trump came to the Capitol to welcome the casket of the late preacher Billy Graham. As he waited to enter the Rotunda, Trump cornered Ryan, raised the Gateway proposal and made clear he would veto any bill that funded it.
The next week, after The Washington Post reported Trump’s opposition, Chao appeared before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and told lawmakers supporting Gateway that the September meeting might have been “cordial” but the president had doubts about the project. She dismissed a proposed funding scheme floated by New York and New Jersey, and tentatively endorsed by the Obama administration, that would have had state taxpayers and transit riders pick up half the project’s cost.
“They need to step up and bear their fair share,” she said.
The hearing infuriated Democrats who thought that the project remained on track after the Oval Office meeting and were blindsided by Trump’s opposition. Party leaders spent the next two weeks sparring in closed-door negotiating sessions, trying to salvage the project as GOP aides rejiggered the legislation to bring the funding under the administration’s control.
Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.), a member of the Transportation Committee, said Trump appeared intent on “screwing New York” — citing not only Gateway, but also the GOP tax bill and health-care plan.
“Look, we’re New Yorkers, I think we know better than to think anybody’s going to give you what you deserve by being nice,” he said. “They should do it because it’s important to America, and we shouldn’t have to tell them that.”
Friends, you can’t squeeze blood from a stone. NJ has had a very rough decade. The pharmaceutical industry pulled out of NJ starting in about 2007 and has left ghost towns, shuttered labs, plunging real estate values and bankruptcies in its wake. Then there was Sandy. And Christie who did nothing to solve the property tax problem while forking over hundreds of millions of dollars for a white elephant shopping complex in the Meadowlands that had gone tits up after the financial crisis. It was more important to Christie to save those investors than fund New Jersey Transit. That boneheaded move right there significantly increased the cost of traveling to NYC for Brook and me. She used to ride the train to her art lessons at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for free. But after Christie was elected, the round trip almost doubled for the adult. Imagine how it impacted the daily commuter.
Then the tax reform bill made it impossible for residents of NJ and NY to deduct their state and local taxes, which are among the highest in the nation. It’s hard to see how this is not revenge on middle class taxpayers who voted for the Democrats overwhelmingly in 2016.
I have no idea where the money is going to come from while Trump lines his cronies’ pockets with future contracts in this private-public partnership and toys with the locals while the tunnel disintegrates. That tunnel’s importance to the country’s infrastructure can’t be overstated. The whole Northeast Corridor from Boston to DC passes through it. Without it, we’ll have to revert to ferries. Goodbye Acela.
Let me note here that the vast majority of passenger trains on the Northeast Corridor are NOT the shiny, speedy Acela. They’re slow and aging commuter trains. And even the Acela can’t reach the manufacturer’s suggested top speeds because the tracks themselves are so outdated.
There is no convoluted Fox News addled word salad that justifies what Trump is doing here. The country’s most vital rail line is being compromised by Trump’s narcissistic rage and spite. That’s all this comes down to. The tunnel could collapse before a new one is built.
It’s hard not to see that as a metaphor for the rest of the country as well.
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These headlines on WaPo’s front page are indicative of something:
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March For Our Lives is today starting at 8am. You can watch it live here:
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
Most of our country’s problems can be traced back to the narcissistic rage and spite of not only Trump, but all the other Stupid White Folks of Real Amurka, some of whom are also McDucks.
I hope the demographic shift happens soon enough to save our country.
And how they were encouraged and represented in the 2016 election and after by the Media.
https://twitter.com/CleverTitleTK/status/977300901424754695
This angry white guy thing has been the press thing since 1994 and the rise of the odious Newt Gingrich. The angry white guy needs to be coddled but the angry POC needs to be put in jail.
Have you been watching MSNBC this morning? joy Reid has been remarkable. Her guests today were almost all African American. Some were activists, some were students. She gave them visibility when the rest of the media has been overlooking them and what they have to endure every day. So, so good. Damn, she deserves an Emmy.
No, I did not watch her yesterday morning but I will say though that I have watched her in the past. I wish they would get rid of Chris Hayes and give Joy his slot.
Good article. Two snaps up. 🙂
Delany Tarr: “VOTE THEM OUT”
What a response to NRA fuckers and corrupt politicians everywhere from these students. This March and today is about guns but soon it will be about incompetence, corruption, illegal/nefarious dealings, stolen elections/democracy, and REPUBLICANS!
Putin’s gremlins have their work cut out for them.
May the Ascended Madoka thwart them.
The remarkable thing and the smartest thing these students have done is to keep the Clooneys/Oprahs and such at bay.
This March is a blueprint for trump’s excesses. If he ever dares to impede or thinks of firing Mueller, we ought to do this same thing. Or when Mueller renders his evidence, and there is no impeachment, we ought to do this. But I want the ex presidents, their famous spouses and one who is the rightful owner of the WH even, the Sally Yates’, the Preet Bhararas, the McCauffreys, the fucking anti-trump republicans who would not vote for Hillary, every lawyer and law enforcement officer who cares for rule of law and this country need to be there.