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    Biden pledges billions to rebuild cities ‘torn apart’ by highways decades ago

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    Joe Biden hailed the beginning of $3.3bn in infrastructure spending on US projects on Wednesday “to right historic wrongs” with efforts to reconnect city neighborhoods riven by interstate highways that plowed with particular impunity through many Black, brown, Asian American and Hispanic communities decades ago.The US president was in Milwaukee, where he traveled to announce new infrastructure investment and officially open his election campaign’s Wisconsin office in the vital swing state.Democratic party campaigns in Wisconsin are typically run from the state capital, Madison, whereas the Biden re-election campaign has picked Milwaukee, the more industrial and diverse city on Lake Michigan, where 40% of residents are Black. The Republicans will hold their convention in Milwaukee in July.Biden is striving to make an impact on the campaign trail in a number of swing states this week after his fiery State of the Union speech last week.He travels to Michigan on Thursday, part of the “blue wall”, along with Pennsylvania, where Biden was born and has made more campaign trips than any other state.Donald Trump flipped all three states to win the White House in 2016, but Biden took them back four years ago and almost certainly needs to hold them if he is to secure a second term.Biden and Trump unofficially clinched their parties’ respective nominations on Tuesday night after more primary wins, and expect to be officially anointed at their party conventions this summer.The rare presidential election rematch, the first since 1956, comes while Trump is due in court later this month for the first-ever criminal trial of a former US president, with more to come as he faces 91 criminal charges across four cases at federal and state levels.On Wednesday, the White House declared that $3.3bn in federal funding is being allocated in more than 40 states, originating from the Biden administration’s 2021 infrastructure legislation, to help areas “divided by transportation infrastructure decades ago and [that] have long been overlooked”.Biden announced a $36.6m federal grant on his Milwaukee visit to upgrade sidewalks and create cycle lanes, greater access to mass transit and more greenery in the South 6th Street area of Bronzeville, a historic majority African American neighborhood.Biden said the construction of interstate highways there led to the demolition of roughly 17,000 homes and 1,000 businesses, disproportionately impacting Black and poor neighborhoods in the 1960s, with a losses of prosperity and opportunities “that still reverberate today”.He pledged “to right historic wrongs and, in the process, deliver environmental justice to disadvantaged neighborhoods”.The US transportation department estimates that at least a million people and businesses in the US were displaced by decades of harmful urban renewal projects in the buildout of the federal highway system, a statement from the White House said.Biden said: “The story of Bronzeville here in Milwaukee is one we see all across the country. Our interstate highway system laid out in the 1950s was a groundbreaking connection of our nation, coast to coast … but instead of connecting communities, it divided them.”He added: “These highways actually tore them apart … along with redlining, they disconnected entire communities from opportunities, sometimes, in an effort to reinforce segregation.”Biden also took a jab directly at Trump’s conduct in dealing with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, when he was president.“My predecessor failed at the most basic duty any president owes the American people – the duty to care,” he said.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      ‘I’ve got to get out and tell people’: Pete Buttigieg on his road ahead

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      Interview‘I’ve got to get out and tell people’: Pete Buttigieg on his road aheadDavid Smith in Washington Can the US revitalise its infrastructure? Is the US ready for a gay president? And does Buttigieg still plan to run one day?From Pete Buttigieg’s old office in South Bend, Indiana, you could see the hospital where he was born, churches built for Irish and Polish immigrants and a factory that made cabinets for Singer sewing machines. “This was the Silicon Valley of its day,” the then mayor told the Guardian in February 2019.Nearly four years later, Buttigieg is occupying a loftier perch. As America’s transportation secretary, his framed photograph sits alongside those of Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris in the lobby of the Department of Transportation. The building is located in Navy Yard, a neighbourhood on the Anacostia River that is home to the Washington Nationals baseball team.Too much, too young? Mayor could become the first millennial presidentRead moreButtigieg has gone from running a city of 100,000 people to a department whose budget is bigger than the gross domestic product of most countries. “As mayor, of course, I worked on a broad range of issues – anything that happened in the city was my concern,” he recalls in a pre-Christmas interview with the Guardian in Washington.“But here you work with a daunting scope and scale. The scope ranges from commercial space travel to the oversight of our Merchant Marine Academy, so not just planes, trains and automobiles, but everything in between.”The meteoric rise helps explain why Buttigieg is widely seen as potential presidential material in 2024, 2028 or beyond. He speaks eight languages, had spells at Harvard, Oxford and McKinsey, became a mayor before he turned 30 and did military service in Afghanistan. He won the Democratic presidential caucuses in Iowa in 2020 but, perhaps more importantly, knew when it was time to step aside so the party could unite around Biden.Now Biden is 80 and Buttigieg is 40, until his next birthday on 19 January. Some Democrats yearn to see generational change, especially if Republicans nominate Ron DeSantis, the 44-year-old governor of Florida, for president in 2024. The Politico website recently highlighted the activities of his allies in a “dark money” group and political action committee under the provocative headline “Pete’s campaign in waiting”.But part of Buttigieg’s formidable communication skills is a refusal to take such bait. He insists with AI-worthy precision: “I have my hands more than full with my day job and one job at a time is plenty. And it’s a great job and I have a great boss and I’m proud to be part of this team.”The day job undeniably offers a lot to chew on. American infrastructure ranked just 13th in the world in 2019, according to the World Economic Forum. This was the nation that erected the tallest and most beautiful skyscrapers, built an interstate highway system and put a man on the moon. But in recent decades there has been a sense of turning inward – of decline and neglect – as Asia and Europe raced ahead with gleaming airports and faster trains.Where did it all go wrong? One answer is President Ronald Reagan, an arch exponent of laissez-faire capitalism who memorably declared that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”Buttigieg, who is unapologetically from the government and here to help, says: “The beginning of the Reagan era brought about a vicious cycle of public trust, where resources were stripped away from the government. It became harder for government to deliver for people and then those policy failures reduced trust in government, which made people more reluctant to trust their taxpayer dollars to government, which meant even fewer resources and even worse results.“The cycle of disinvestment has been accumulating for essentially my entire lifetime and part of what’s so exciting about this moment is a chance to re-establish public trust by making big investments to get big results to build public confidence in the things we can do together through good public policy and good public investment.”Biden, openly critical of Reagan’s trickle-down economics, set about changing the paradigm. After long negotiations with Congress, including late-night phone calls and several declarations that the deal was dead, he last year signed a trillion-dollar bipartisan infrastructure law.‘Glad to have a president who can ride a bicycle’: Buttigieg dismisses Republican claims about Biden’s healthRead moreThe money is being – or will be – spent on rebuilding roads, bridges, ports and airports, upgrading public transit and rail systems, replacing lead pipes to provide clean water, cleaning up pollution, providing high-speed internet, delivering cheaper and cleaner energy – and creating thousands of jobs.One year in, the administration has announced more than $185bn (£154bn) in funding and more than 6,900 specific projects reaching more than 4,000 communities across the country. This includes 2,800 bridge repair and replacement projects and $3bn for 3,075 airport upgrades.The legislation handed the former “Mayor Pete” the biggest infusion of cash into the transport sector since the 1950s interstate highways. He understands how much is riding on it. “What’s at stake in this transportation legislation – and the president talks about it this way too – is more than just the nuts and bolts of it,” he says.“It really is a chance to vindicate the democratic system over some of the systems that are trying to challenge us right now in this century. It sounds a little bit cosmic but that really is part of what is on the table right now with our responsibility to deliver.”The bipartisan law allowed the White House to crow that while “infrastructure week” was a punchline under President Donald Trump, his successor is delivering an “infrastructure decade”. Buttigieg comments: “As you might imagine, I’m no fan of President Trump. I will say this is the one time I was fooled. I actually thought they were going to do it because he talked about it all the time.“It would have been good politics and everybody wanted it to happen, it would have benefited the economy, and they still couldn’t get it done. So after four years of chest thumping and big promises without results, this administration knew, this president knew, that it was long past time to do something and it turned out the public appetite was there, the deal space was there.”Even Republicans who voted against the law, branding it a “socialist wishlist”, are happy to reap the benefits. “It’s hard not to chuckle when I get a letter from some member of Congress, invariably a Republican member of Congress, who declared this legislation to be garbage or wasteful social spending or whatever now saying this is funding that really needs to come to my district for these needs. But at the end of the day, it vindicates our approach.”Buttigieg want to be “strategically shameless” in putting up signs on active projects to make sure that the law gets the credit it deserves. Infrastructure is not like tax policy where, at the stroke of a pen, people feel results instantly. “I often tell the team: part of what we’re doing is building cathedrals and the nature of cathedrals is the person who celebrates the opening may not have been there when the cornerstone was laid.“But because we’re doing so much at so many different scales and in so many different places, the truth is there’s a range of projects where we’ve already turned a spade, improvements that are going to be felt very quickly to some of the bigger cathedrals that will be years and years in the making.”Indeed, Democrats insist that some of the positive effects are being felt already. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia tweeted on 19 December: “Week after week, the infrastructure law is paying dividends. It’s expanding highways like I-64, upgrading airports, fixing crumbling bridges and building new bike paths. It’s revitalizing our communities and making every travel day better.The law’s provisions to tackle systemic racism have come under attack from Republicans and others on the right. Senator Ted Cruz tweeted with sarcasm: “The roads are racist. We must get rid of roads.” DeSantis remarked: “I heard some stuff, some weird stuff from the secretary of transportation trying to make this about social issues. To me, a road’s a road.”Buttigieg is ready to have that debate. He often notes that the phrase “on the wrong side of the tracks”, referring to the undesirable part of town, is indicative of how a railway or highway not only connects but also divides. “As I’ve had this conversation around the country, it’s striking how, wherever I am, I can see in the faces nodding when I bring this up that people are visualising their own community’s version of this.“I talk about this not to go around scolding anybody but precisely because we have the means to do better and that’s why it’s so perplexing to see the resistance to it, because, if you have a choice between having a place become more divided or less divided along racial lines through transportation infrastructure choices, why wouldn’t you want it to be less divided?”At least $1bn (£831m) will help reconnect cities and neighbourhoods that had been racially segregated or divided by road projects. But the legislation is also about including businesses and workers who have been left out in the past.“There’s some impressive – and sometimes moving – things taking place in the building trades, for example, that are in many places opening their doors to workers of colour and women who will make great skilled labourers and make good incomes to build their families around, who just never would have this opportunity in the last round of major infrastructure investment in this country.”Transport contributes more greenhouse gases to the US economy than any other sector; Buttigieg wants it to be part of the climate solution as the infrastructure law promises a national network of electric vehicle chargers. Road accidents kill about 40,000 people a year, comparable with gun violence and far worse than other countries; Buttigieg finds this unacceptable and hopes that self-driving cars might be part of the solution.The secretary, who speaks in paragraphs more polished than most people write, has been willing to make such arguments on Rupert Murdoch’s conservative Fox News network in a series of appearances that have gone viral. It is the kind of outreach to hostile territory that evokes comparisons with Biden’s spirit of bipartisanship – and fuels talk of a future White House run.He explains: “There are a lot of people who tune into ideological networks, as viewers in good faith who may never hear our administration’s perspective if we’re not out there. I’m not the only one doing it but I have been surprised to see it become something of a speciality.“You can’t blame somebody for rejecting our approach if they’ve literally never even heard us defend it, especially when it comes to transportation, where most of what we’re doing is actually broadly well-understood and popular but we’ve got to remind people of that.“It can be tough in a space – and Fox is an example – that tends to offer more coverage of some controversial angle around electric vehicles or racial justice than would offer any coverage of the thousands of specific projects that we’re investing in around the country. I’ve got to get out there and tell people. As long as they’ll have me, I’ll keep doing it.”Buttigieg recently moved from a red state, Indiana, to an increasingly blue one, Michigan, with his husband Chasten and their two young children. On 13 December the couple were on the White House south lawn to watch Biden sign the Respect for Marriage Act, which protects same-sex and interracial marriages under federal law.The secretary reflects: “To be sitting with Chasten and seeing the president make that into law was really moving and and reassuring. We shouldn’t have to depend on a one-vote margin on the supreme court to have something as important as millions of marriages be protected and I think Congress recognised that, and I think the American public recognised that.”The shift in public attitudes was illustrated in last month’s midterm elections, where for the first time LGBTQ+ candidates ran for election in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and where Oregon’s Tina Kotek and Massachusetts’ Maura Healey ensured that the US will have an out lesbian governor for the first time. Buttigieg himself was in demand as a campaign surrogate for various Democratic candidates.A New York Times article about him in June 2016 was headlined “The First Gay President?” So is America now ready? “I’m sure it’ll happen,” he says. “What we’re seeing right now is the good, the bad and the ugly. The good news is we have this progress on things like marriage and representation in senior leadership. The bad news is it’s coming in a climate of rights being withdrawn at the US supreme court, including potentially more of the hard-won rights of the LGBTQ+ community.“And the ugly is you see a level of targeting going on for political convenience, in my view, driven by a lot of figures who don’t want to talk about their lack of solutions on other issues, that can really be costly and even physically dangerous for vulnerable communities right now. You can connect the rhetoric we’ve seen, and some of the legislation we’ve seen in state legislatures, with the sometimes violent atmosphere -especially towards transgender youth but across the board for vulnerable people in this community.”The interview draws to a close in a meeting room where one wall is dominated by the faces of past transportation secretaries in neat rows. Biden’s Rooseveltian ambitions look set to make Buttigieg the most powerful holder of the office yet.“Good to see you – and different from the 14th floor in South Bend,” he says affably on his way out. “Who knows where I’ll see you next?”TopicsPete ButtigiegUS politicsInfrastructureBiden administrationUS domestic policyDemocratsinterviewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans who voted for Biden’s infrastructure bill threatened with retaliation

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      RepublicansRepublicans who voted for Biden’s infrastructure bill threatened with retaliationRightwingers in the party call for members who helped pass the bill to be stripped of their committee assignments Gloria Oladipo in New York@gaoladipoWed 10 Nov 2021 13.37 ESTLast modified on Wed 10 Nov 2021 14.03 ESTA group of congressional Republicans who helped pass the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill last Friday are facing calls for political punishment by their own party, including the threat of having their committee assignments stripped for supporting the president’s agenda, according to reports this week.Several hardline Republicans, including the Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert and former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, have publicly urged retaliation against party colleagues who voted for the $1tn bill. Some members who were among the GOP rank and file who helped the bill pass the House say they have received death threats.Many of the Republicans who backed the bipartisan bill have ranking positions on full committees or subcommittees, including the homeland security committee and the natural resources committee.The bill, which passed 228 to 206, would have failed if no Republicans voted for it in the House late last Friday, prompting widespread fury and intra-party threats, Punchbowl news reported.“That 13 House Republicans provided the votes needed to pass this is absurd,” the Texas representative Chip Roy said, and the Washington Post has reported.Florida’s Matt Gaetz had fumed early on Saturday, tweeting: “I can’t believe Republicans just gave the Democrats their socialism bill.”On Tuesday, Meadows said: “They stripped Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committees for not even voting against the Republican party.… These people voted for Joe Biden, for an infrastructure bill that will clear the way for more socialist spending that, quite frankly, gives Joe Biden a win.”Greene, a radical rightist from Georgia, was demoted earlier this year for promulgating conspiracy theories and untrue claims about issues including mass shootings. She has also been fined several times for refusing to wear a mask to help prevent the spread of coronavirus on Capitol Hill.Before the legislative vote, some Republicans threatened to mount primary challenges to any party members who supported the legislation, according to the Washington Post.“Vote for this infrastructure bill and I will primary the hell out of you,” said Representative Madison Hawthorn of North Carolina.Certain GOP divides in Washington have grown in recent weeks , especially in relation to the bipartisan committee investigating the Capitol insurrection of 6 January by extremist supporters of Donald Trump, and legislative battles on Biden’s agenda.On Tuesday evening, congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who is the leading Republican on that committee, gave a speech in New Hampshire, saying that the US was “confronting a domestic threat that we have never faced before” in the form of Donald Trump, who is “attempting to unravel the foundations of our constitutional republic” with his continued attempts to block the investigation of the insurrection and campaign to declare Biden’s 2020 victory fraudulent.Cheney added: “Political leaders who sit silent in the face of these false and dangerous claims are aiding the former president, who is at war with the rule of law, and the constitution.”She emphasized her Republican credentials by pointing out that she disagreed with almost everything Joe Biden has done since coming to power in January.But she added of her own party’s continued support of Trump that “when our constitutional order is threatened, as it is now, rising above partisanship is not simply an aspiration. It is an obligation.”Amid talk that her high-stakes strategy could break her career or set her on a path to run for the White House, observers noted the significance that she delivered her latest broadside in New Hampshire, the small New England state with outsize influence, as it holds the first primary contest in the country during presidential elections.TopicsRepublicansUS CongressInfrastructureUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Democrats’ divisions could still derail infrastructure bills

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      US politicsDemocrats’ divisions could still derail infrastructure bills Pelosi and Schumer pledging to follow two-track strategy to pass a $3.5tn reconciliation bill first Hugo Lowellin WashingtonSun 15 Aug 2021 05.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 15 Aug 2021 05.01 EDTJoe Biden’s economic vision has taken a major step toward becoming reality after the US Senate passed two infrastructure measures, but widening political divisions within the Democratic party could yet derail the entire legislative package.The Senate last week advanced a sprawling $3.5tn budget blueprint for “soft” infrastructure projects to tackle climate change and health care, a day after approving a $1tr bipartisan infrastructure bill to rebuild the nation’s crumbling roads and bridges.But even as Senate Democrats congratulated themselves on pushing through both measures, the fate of Biden’s economic priorities rests on House Democrats clearing several more looming hurdles as well as uniting the party’s left and right.The challenges facing the two infrastructure measures reflects the difficulty in trying to force bipartisan compromise in a deeply divided House and Senate where the Democrats possess only narrow majorities.Liberal Democrats who have bristled at seeing their top climate and social priorities jettisoned as Biden sought an elusive bipartisan compromise with moderate Senate Republicans may seek to change elements of the package, which could upend the delicate legislation.At a minimum, progressives have insisted the House delay considering the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the Senate passes a far larger climate and health bill – something not expected until the fall, and against the hopes of centrist House Democrats.In order to deliver the president’s agenda, Democrats are pursuing a two-track approach that involves Congress passing both measures, starting with the $1tn bipartisan compromise that funnels $550bn of new money into traditional infrastructure projects.The second half of the strategy involves the House and Senate passing the climate and health bill, crafted on the basis of the $3.5tn budget blueprint, and passed using reconciliation, a fast-track process that allows Democrats to bypass a Republican filibuster – a procedural convention that can derail legislation.The Democrats’ plan is backstopped by an ironclad commitment from the speaker, Nancy Pelosi, that the House will not take up the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the Senate first passes the reconciliation bill, which will take weeks to hammer out in the 50-50 Senate.The move by Pelosi is aimed at trying to balance the competing demands between progressives demanding maximum spending and more fiscally conservative centrists – all while ensuring that both measures are in the end enacted.When the speaker navigated through a similar two-track strategy to approve the Affordable Care Act under President Barack Obama in 2010, the bill passed notwithstanding the defections of three Democrats in the Senate and three dozen in the House.Pelosi now holds such a razor-thin majority in the House that she can afford only three Democratic defections to pass the bipartisan bill and the reconciliation bill if the votes are along party lines. Protest votes from either faction could sink the entire effort.But growing discontent about the legislation on both sides on Capitol Hill signals the prospect of an even more bitter and protracted intra-party fight over the future of the legislation in the coming weeks and months.The speaker on Wednesday reaffirmed her position to House Democrats during a closed-door caucus meeting that the Senate would have to first pass the $3.5tr reconciliation bill before the House would move to consider the bipartisan bill.“The votes in the House and Senate depend on us having both bills,” Pelosi told House Democrats, referencing the thin majorities in both chambers, according to a source familiar with the speaker’s remarks.That means the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, will need his committee chairs to finalize the language for the reconciliation bill and gain the approval of centrist Senate Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin before the House can proceed.In an added complication, both Sinema and Manchin have sounded the alarm in recent days over the cost of the $3.5tr budget blueprint that will guide the reconciliation bill, though they joined their colleagues in voting to allow the framework to pass.The possibility that Democrats could get both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the reconciliation bill has outraged Republicans, who have vowed to try to derail the $3.5tr package, which Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell likened to a “reckless tax-and-spending spree”.Challenges in the House also returned on Friday after a group of nine House Democratic moderates threatened in a letter to vote against the $3.5tn budget blueprint when the House returns the week of 23 August, if Pelosi didn’t pass the bipartisan bill first.The missive called on the speaker to abandon her two-track timetable so members vulnerable in 2022 could sell the bill to voters. “We will not consider voting for a budget resolution until the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passes the House and is signed into law,” the nine moderates wrote in a letter, which a House Democratic leadership aide described as “highly problematic”.Threats from moderates have infuriated progressive Democrats, who, emboldened by their successful effort to twist the Biden administration to introduce a new eviction moratorium, have repeatedly warned House Democratic leaders not to deviate from their original plan.In a letter to Pelosi on Tuesday, the leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said a poll of their 96 members confirmed a majority would withhold their support for the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the Senate passed the reconciliation bill.White House officials have said that they remain closely attuned to the growing tensions in the House and Senate. Pelosi and Biden speak regularly, and aides have started holding thrice-weekly conference calls, according to sources familiar with the matter.But top Democrats in Congress see no alternative to the path they are headed down and are hopeful that the two-track strategy will prove successful as in 2010. “I am very pleased to report that the two-track strategy is right on track,” Schumer said.TopicsUS politicsUS CongressInfrastructureDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans join Democrats to advance $1tn infrastructure bill – video

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      Chuck Schumer warned that coming to a bipartisan compromise could be ‘hard’ as Republicans joined Democrats to advance a $1tn infrastructure bill in the US Senate, remaining in session over the weekend.
      The bill represents the biggest spending in decades on American infrastructure including roads, bridges, airports and waterways, in what Joe Biden has called a ‘historic investment’ in public works.

      Senate to resume infrastructure debate as Trump threatens Republicans who back bill More

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      The US should nationalize the Greyhound bus company. Hear me out | Bhaskar Sunkara

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      Joe Biden’s love of trains is well known. “Amtrak Joe” has vowed to invest in America’s crumbling railways and encourage Americans to embrace clean and green mass transit over gas-guzzling automobiles. For decades, the American left has urged the government to make massive investments in rail travel for just these reasons. Yet there is another simple, cheap, and instant way to upgrade our public transit infrastructure, reduce carbon, alleviate traffic, and provide efficient and affordable intercity travel: the government should buy Greyhound.Greyhound Canada recently announced that the company plans to permanently cease operations there. The move was yet another sign that the financial woes of the inter-city motorcoach industry are not going away. Since the pandemic no transport industry has been more hurt than commercial bus lines. Nearly all schedules for the entire industry were shut down for months with no end in sight; Greyhound USA has recently been able to reopen most of its scheduled routes, but a continued depression in ridership means the company can’t keep all of its lines open. Greyhound has even resorted to selling stations in Chicago and Denver.Unlike most major transport industries, inter-city bus operators received very little help from the United States government during the pandemic. Commercial airlines got a whopping $60bn, Amtrak got $1.5bn, and public transit was awarded a much-needed $30bn to keep the trains, buses, and trolleys moving. Yet motorcoaches – which collectively make nearly 600 million passenger trips a year in the United States, and employ around 100,000 workers – received a paltry $100m.Despairing bus industry executives organized a “Rolling Rally” in Washington to demand more cash. While the sector has since received slightly greater attention it’s unlikely that the funds will be enough to make up for the loss in ridership, which dipped to historic lows.A cash handout is effectively a bet that the industry will recover to pre-Covid profits and grow after; right now that’s not a bet any private investor would make.Low-cost air travel and affordable car travel, have made things difficult for the intercity bus industry. Yet bus travel does maintain a great advantage over both rail and air competition: the sheer number of destinations a rider can choose. Using America’s already nationalized interstate system, Greyhound alone still services some 2,400 station stops. Unfortunately, this practical strength is also a business weakness.Greyhound is in trouble, which means the feds can buy the company for cheap … the federally owned bus system could pay for its own operating cost through faresA daily roundtrip from Newport News to Norfolk is significantly less profitable than hourly trips to and from a major hub such as New York City. Lacking extensive regulation and government subsidy, Greyhound executives are forced to focus their investments on the most profitable schedules while ditching small-town and rural communities. Yet this is another bind: while coastal schedules have the highest ridership they also face the stiffest competition from budget and Chinatown bus lines such as Megabus and from Amtrak and regional rail. The profit squeeze is tight and it will only get tighter.So the only way to save the intercity bus system as it exists is to greatly increase ridership to and from low-priority destinations while staying competitive on the highly profitable coastal corridors. In order to do both, you need to greatly reduce the price of fares – which have increased in recent years and are more expensive than comparable service in other countries.That’s where the US government comes in.Greyhound is in trouble, which means the feds can buy the company for cheap. Once purchased, the government could temporarily ignore the profit problem and focus on rescuing the fleet – providing affordable travel as a public good. Just as the US post office does not use a dime of taxpayer money, the federally owned Greyhound bus system could pay for its own operating cost through fares; without the burden of costly executives and grubby shareholders, the organization would likely save a great deal of money in overhead.The benefits of an old-fashioned nationalization scheme like this are enormous. It would simultaneously save the Greyhound bus system, which transports up to 17 million people a year, put it to good public use with positive impacts elsewhere in the economy, and protect thousands of stable union jobs. But there’s another, less obvious benefit.The British environmentalist George Monbiot raised eyebrows a few years ago when he argued that, as far as carbon emissions are concerned, our best bet is not just to rebuild and expand the railways but instead to provide nearly universal motorcoach transit.Switching from car to coach, Monbiot noted, cuts carbon by an astonishing 88%. And these efficiencies could be dramatically increased in a relatively short period of time by improving the bus fleet technology with all-electric vehicles and by some clever infrastructure tweaks.For one, let’s move bus stations out of city centers and to the edges of major hub cities, nearer to the interstate highways. By getting rid of the awful winding trips buses make in and out of city centers, motorcoaches would be free to hit the open road and speed off to their destination. Even better, let’s add dedicated motorcoach lanes to major highways to help speed bus travel. Highway bus lanes would not only provide speedier service for bus passengers but also greatly alleviate overall traffic. Each full coach would replace many cars’ worth of traffic. And, as Monbiot notes, the buses would effectively advertise themselves: individual motorists, watching buses zoom by them, will soon realize that if you want to get somewhere fast, the bus is the way to go.With a few small tweaks, a government-owned Greyhound system could go from clunky, expensive, and slow to efficient, affordable, and speedy. But such a transformation would require a state visionary enough to challenge the dogmas of private market competition. More

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      AstraZeneca’s boss is a boardroom superstar but a potential £2m cherry is pushing the point

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      A majority is a majority, but a rebellion of 40% against an executive pay policy is too large to be pinned solely on those brain-dead fund managers who outsource their thinking to proxy voting agencies.At AstraZeneca some serious institutions, with Aviva Investors and Standard Life Aberdeen to the fore, clearly thought the company was pushing things too far by adding a potential £2m cherry on top of their chief executive, Pascal Soriot’s, already substantial pay package. The rebels had a point.Yes, Soriot is a boardroom superstar thanks to AstraZeneca’s success in supercharging the development and production of the Oxford University vaccine for no profit. Communication with regulators went awry at times, and Soriot himself obviously wasn’t getting his hands dirty in the labs. But the boss, even when operating from Australia, is doing an excellent job of standing up to irritating and ungrateful EU commissioners, which is also part of the pandemic operation. And, amid it all, the company didn’t miss a beat on its day job and had time to spend $39bn buying the rare disease specialist Alexion, which looks a promising deal.Yet exceptional effort in an exceptional year is roughly what one expects from a chief executive on Soriot’s pay package. In the last three years, his incentives have performed wonderfully and he has earned £13m, £15m and £15m, so is firmly established in the £1m-a-month category, which very few chief executives of FTSE 100 companies can say. Even for an international hero, it feels a decent whack.The company’s claim was that “the world drastically changed in the last 12 months, and so did AstraZeneca”, and thus adjustments should be made outside the normal three-yearly cycle for tweaking pay.That argument would have felt stronger if AstraZeneca was not already at the adventurous end by UK standards. Last year, Soriot earned 197 times the median pay among his workforce. And, critically, the new arrangement will take his variable pay – annual bonus plus long-term incentives – to 900% of his £1.33m salary. A few years ago 500% was regarded as high by FTSE 100 standards.That precedent-setting detail helps to explain why the rebellion was so strong. Those fund managers who care about controlling boardroom pay inflation saw the risk of knock-on effects elsewhere. Loyalty to Soriot probably swayed a few doubters and helped AstraZeneca prevail, but the company did not need to pick a fight at this time – it gave Soriot a chunky rise a year ago.Some real pay shockers (think Cineworld) have slipped through in recent months. If the wider message in the AstraZeneca vote is that fund managers are not all asleep, that would be no bad thing.Seatbelts on for more stock market turbulenceLast Friday investors preferred to see a silver lining in a weak set of US unemployment numbers – only 266,000 jobs created in the month of April, against forecasts of 1m. If a lack of new jobs implied no inflationary wage pressures in the US economy, at least the stock market could take a few days off from worrying about rises in interest rates, ran the theory.Inflationary pressures, though, come in many forms, and here is a piece of data that spooked the stock market on Tuesday: China’s producer prices index rose at an annual rate of 6.8% in April, up from 4.4% in March.That is the highest level for three years and a sign, probably, that the boom in prices of raw copper, iron ore and other raw materials is finally feeding through to goods. The FTSE 100 index fell 175 points, or 2.5%, following other stock markets down.The benign view says a flurry of higher prices is almost to be expected as the global economy reopens. In that case, central banks’ mistake would be to move too early and choke off recovery. Yet it is clearly also possible that we could be at the start of a big move on prices, with the next leg delivered by the Biden’s administration’s huge infrastructure programme. If so, the mistake would be to delay rate rises.Do not expect quick or clear answers. Inflation data can give mixed messages for months. Do, though, anticipate more bumpy days for stock markets. Investors’ default assumption is to assume the US Federal Reserve will play nicely and look through the short-term signals. Life could quickly get ugly if there is any deviation from that assumed path. More