Fascist Schwarzenegger Killing High Speed Rail; Promotes PPP Swindle

May 8, (EIRNS)--California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, yet again, has proposed to kill the plan to lighten up California's highways by building a high-speed rail (HSR) corridor from San Diego to San Francisco. Wielding his budget axe, the Govenator, has called for slashing funds for the California High-Speed Rail Authority (Ca-HSR) which has coordinated the decade-long planning for a 700-mile HSR corridor. Arnie also seeks to indefinitely postpone the $9.95 billion rail bond initiative for public funding from the November 2008 ballot.

Schwarzenegger did this just as a delegation of California legislators was returning from a visit to France where they witnessed the TGV's V150 record-breaking test speed of 357 mph in early April. The Associated Press quotes California state Sen. Dean Florez saying the Governor "wants to quietly kill this -- and not to go out and tell the people that high-speed rail isn't in the future."

In fact, Arnie lied, in an op-ed appearing in the May 7 Fresno Bee , that he wants high-speed rail, but he wants it the way former Lazard banker Felix Rohatyn wants such infrastructure built in the U.S.: "By using a public-private partnership approach," Arnie tells us. So despite Ca-HSR's readiness to proceed to begin engineering and rights-of-way acquisition and financial planning, he pulled the plug on the funding.

Arnie is killing the only truly HSR plan in the U.S., while the rest of the world is not only building HSR corridors using steel-on-steel trains and track like the Japanese bullet train, but is rapidly moving to full scale development of MagLev trains using magnetic levitation.