culprit

The freight industry is a huge source of the problems in the US rail system. It should not be able to run trains longer than the passing sections, but it does it anyway because "it reduces labor costs". Running longer trains is terrible from an engineering perspective.

This passing problem was solved a long time ago, it's just that the freight rail corps in the US have "optimized" for trains that are longer than the passing rail sections. It's extremely bad for the entire rail industry and the cause of many of the derailments and accidents, but because capital always gets its way in the US, nothing significantly has changed to resolve the issue.

It's very frustrating how often there are perfectly workable solutions to making the world better, but if it doesn't have a fat profit margin, it just gets strangled to death by capital interests in this country.

“African countries seem to increasingly prefer loans from China mainly to avoid the very constricting neoliberal conditionality that goes with loans from the IMF,” says Chibuzo Nwoke, professor of international relations and vice chancellor of Oduduwa University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria.

It's almost like treating global south countries as partners is preferred to being treated as vassals. IMF loans require a relinquishment of economic sovereignty that is not preferable to the terms China offers. Structural Adjustment Programs are a major issue for these countries, and China does not require such fealty to capital interests.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260218215732/https://hir.harvard.edu/crippling-conditions-an-exploration-of-imf-loans-in-latin-america/

Crippling Conditions: The IMF and Global Inequality

When a country is on the brink of defaulting on its debt or plunging into economic catastrophe, to whom does it turn? Although it can try to get a loan from a regional bank or aid from a large power like the United States, those options often fail. Ultimately, many countries turn to the lender of last resort: the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Dozens of countries every year receive IMF loans after exhausting other options, and as of April 2024, over 90 countries still need to pay the IMF back for the loans they received. Given that countries often lack alternatives and that the IMF is under no contractual obligation to provide a loan to any country, it holds immense power in deciding who gets money and how that money is used.

After West African countries were forced to follow the IMF’s structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s, spending on education decreased by 25 percent and spending on healthcare decreased by 50 percent. This reduction in important social services spending caused an estimated 500,000 deaths of children in Africa. More broadly, education is a prerequisite for long-term economic growth and a flourishing society. In an uneducated society, people are less able to contribute to the economy and participate politically as informed voters, causing worse policies in the long-term. Without healthy and educated children, these countries often return to the IMF years later when the economy again fails after the initial increase in liquidity gained from cutting social programs. Notably, a study of 81 developing countries from 1986 to 2016 demonstrated that IMF structural reforms attached to loan agreements have trapped more individuals in cycles of poverty. This perpetuation of global inequalities fosters dependency on the IMF.

The new African aphorism goes: "Every time China visits we get a hospital, every time the West visits, we get a lecture."

https://gga.org/china-vs-the-imf/

Experts say that the shift is largely due to China’s funding model, which provides multi-billion dollar credits at more flexible terms, even to countries otherwise restricted from big money by the IMF. “African countries seem to increasingly prefer loans from China mainly to avoid the very constricting neoliberal conditionality that goes with loans from the IMF,” says Chibuzo Nwoke, professor of international relations and vice chancellor of Oduduwa University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria. For years the IMF prevented low-income countries from taking up non-concessional, large-size commercial loans. And as other Western lenders often rely on the international financial organisation’s assessment of countries’ macroeconomic policies and readiness for reforms, African countries are increasingly looking elsewhere for finance.

The IMF’s required reforms included open markets, scrapping government subsidies, deregulating key sectors, privatisation and debt management. For the IMF, low-income countries must seek debt relief before they look for new loans, and countries must abide by a debt limit framework to benefit from debt relief.

Martin Uhomoibhi, president of the Pan African Institute for Global Affairs and Strategy in Abuja, says that the “so-called Washington Consensus or IMF ‘prescriptions’”, were perhaps the greatest factor that undermined Africa’s take-off in the early 1980s. In Nigeria, for example, “the harshly iniquitous IMF conditions undermined industrialisation projects, unrealistically devalued the national currency and halted growth”, he wrote in a 2016 analysis in Africa Policy Review. The Chinese lending model in Africa, on the other hand, allows low-income countries to access large-size loans for infrastructure if reimbursement can be guaranteed by lucrative commercial projects such as oil or mines, or export revenues. The infrastructure is then developed as long as the commercial project remains profitable. Experts call it a “mixed-funding” model.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/02/china-debt-trap-diplomacy/617953/

https://web.archive.org/web/20260310202300/https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/02/china-debt-trap-diplomacy/617953/

Even the extremely liberal "The Atlantic" seems to disagree with your mythology.

The Chinese ‘Debt Trap’ Is a Myth

The narrative wrongfully portrays both Beijing and the developing countries it deals with.

The notion of “debt-trap diplomacy” casts China as a conniving creditor and countries such as Sri Lanka as its credulous victims. On a closer look, however, the situation is far more complex. China’s march outward, like its domestic development, is probing and experimental, a learning process marked by frequent adjustment. After the construction of the port in Hambantota, for example, Chinese firms and banks learned that strongmen fall and that they’d better have strategies for dealing with political risk. They’re now developing these strategies, getting better at discerning business opportunities and withdrawing where they know they can’t win. Still, American leaders and thinkers from both sides of the aisle give speeches about China’s “modern-day colonialism.”

Over the past 20 years, Chinese firms have learned a lot about how to play in an international construction business that remains dominated by Europe: Whereas China has 27 firms among the top 100 global contractors, up from nine in 2000, Europe has 37, down from 41. The U.S. has seven, compared to 19 two decades ago.

Chinese firms are not the only companies to benefit from Chinese-financed projects. Perhaps no country was more alarmed by Hambantota than India, the regional giant that several times rebuffed Sri Lanka’s appeals for investment, aid, and equity partnerships. Yet an Indian-led business, Meghraj, joined the U.K.-based engineering firm Atkins Limited in an international consortium to write the long-term plan for Hambantota Port and for the development of a new business zone. The French firms Bolloré and CMA-CGM have partnered with China Merchants and China Harbor in port developments in Nigeria, Cameroon, and elsewhere.

The other side of the debt-trap myth involves debtor countries. Places such as Sri Lanka—or, for that matter, Kenya, Zambia, or Malaysia—are no stranger to geopolitical games. And they’re irked by American views that they’ve been so easily swindled. As one Malaysian politician remarked to us, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss how Chinese finance featured in that country’s political drama, “Can’t the U.S. State Department tell the difference between campaign rhetoric that our opponents are slaves to China and actually being slaves to China?”

The events that led to a Chinese company’s acquisition of a majority stake in a Sri Lankan port reveal a great deal about how our world is changing. China and other countries are becoming more sophisticated in bargaining with one another. And it would be a shame if the U.S. fails to learn alongside them.

bombing campaigns and infrastructure construction with reasonable loan terms and often forgiveness, these are the same thing in my liberal brain.

It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.

~ Henry Kissinger

Hitler was inspired by the US mostly successful genocide of native peoples.

Not sure I'd characterize Dwayne that way. He's basically a muscled-up Ed Sheeran.

https://www.reversecanarymission.org/person/dwayne-johnson-the-rock

Why the ‘national socialists’ came for the communists and socialists first.

Do you actually think nazis were on the left? Because that's what horseshoe theory you are defending is all about. The centrist social democrats are the ones that facilitated the nazis rise to power because they didn't want to side with the communists and socialists.