This is what high speed rail looks like in southern Fresno County. A guy I know shot this from acrop duster. The government forcibly took people’s land, and they haven’t been paid yet. These are my friends and neighbors.
They are building a train slower than Amtrak that will run from Merced to Bakersfield. You non-Californians may be asking, yourselves why it will link two cities that you have only vaguely heard of. Well, kids, the answer is that there is absolutely no reason at all to do this except to make friends and donors of California Democrats rich, and expand political corruption.
The San Joaquin Valley is the Appalachia of the west, and this money that is being burned for this damn train could actually help struggling, immigrant dominated communities - especially regional transportation projects. But they don’t care. SF and LA could give a shit if we wither away and die. (A D from a rich Bay Area community is pushing a bill that will prohibit cities from giving tax incentives attract jobs, which has been a key to Fresno’s escape from chronic double digits unemployment) They won’t help us, and they want to strip us of the tools we have used to help ourselves).
To my LA and SF friends, if you look inside yourself you know it’s true. We are seen as the hot, shitty center of California filled with a bunch of retrograde rednecks who deserve to be abandoned by California’s prosperity. We don’t do much here; we just feed you. Those Amazon jobs we got look pretty fucking good when the alternative is picking fucking tomatoes in the summer and citrus in the winter.
This is why I fucking hate the Democratic Party. I don’t agree with all that the Republicans are about, but these fucking Democrats need to be thwarted. Maybe if I lived in Alabama where the Rs are the ones who fucked everything up, I’d feel differently. But all the villiany and corruption here is from the Ds.
Rant over. Sorry. A client told me he doesn’t want me to do the meanest thing I have ever had the opportunity to do to another attorney, and I am bitter about it. But I work for them. They are better people than I am.