By Prince Kapone, Weaponized Information | April 21, 2025
The Fast Train That Never Came
It’s been twelve years, forty billion dollars, and countless press conferences. And yet America still doesn’t have a single mile of functional high-speed rail. According to a recent investigation, the only thing America’s high-speed rail project has moved with any speed is public money—into the pockets of contractors, consultants, and political cronies.
Forty billion dollars. That’s more than the GDP of some small nations. Enough to cancel every student loan in multiple states. But instead of trains, what do Americans have? Ghost construction sites, derailed projects, and mountains of red tape. In any other country, this would be a scandal. In the U.S. empire, it’s business as usual.
Capitalism Without Trains
The United States is the only industrialized nation on earth that has spent tens of billions on a high-speed rail system and still has nothing to show for it. France, Japan, and China have national rail networks that stretch across continents, gliding passengers from city to city in comfort and speed. But in America, rail investment doesn’t build infrastructure—it builds wealth for middlemen.
Here, the transportation system isn’t designed for movement—it’s designed for extraction. Every contract is a backroom deal. Every delay is an opportunity to renegotiate. Every failure is a way to justify more funding. This is the American model: infinite grift without delivery.
Technofascism and the Logistics of Decay
The U.S. can coordinate a drone strike in Yemen in 60 seconds. It can build military bases overnight in Africa. But it can’t build a train line between L.A. and San Francisco. Why? Because the American state is no longer organized around public good—it’s organized around corporate plunder.
Technofascism isn’t just about censorship and surveillance—it’s about logistics. The empire has perfected the ability to move capital, data, and weaponry around the globe. But move a working-class person from one city to another without a car? Suddenly the system stalls. Because movement for the masses is a threat. Infrastructure that empowers the public is seen as an act of subversion. And so it’s sabotaged—by endless permitting, political sabotage, or privatization.
The Empire Always Gets Its Cut
So where did the $40 billion go? Into engineering firms, consultancy groups, bureaucratic agencies, and “public-private partnerships” that operate like legal money laundries. Every year, another feasibility study. Another legal review. Another political obstacle. Behind each step is a contract, a budget, and a cut. This isn’t dysfunction. It’s design.
The U.S. government doesn’t fail to build infrastructure. It builds failure as infrastructure. It funds the performance of development, not the substance. It creates ghost projects that generate real profits. The purpose is not to deliver trains—it’s to deliver payouts.
Why They Fear the Train
A real high-speed rail system would revolutionize life in America. It would free people from cars, cut emissions, reduce housing inequality, and empower working-class mobility. It would threaten the airline monopolies, the fossil fuel lobby, the car industry, and the suburban real estate market—all of which feed the American capitalist machine.
That’s why it’s never going to happen—not under this system. Because true public infrastructure is socialist in spirit. It assumes people have a right to mobility. A right to time. A right to a life beyond the commute. And that’s unacceptable to a ruling class that profits off congestion, dependency, and delay.
The Train Is a Mirror
The story of high-speed rail in the U.S. is a story about empire itself. It promises everything. It delivers nothing. It demands money. It creates crisis. It blames the poor. And it repeats.
Forty billion dollars. Zero trains. And still they call it freedom.
Weaponized Information 
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