Now for something not election related. Yeah!

We often talk about the National part of National Socialism: the community, the race, the Volk; White heritage and culture. What often gets neglected, however, is the Socialist part of the equation.

This is understandable.

As Americans, we have an inherent distrust of the Socialism. We’ve been taught it is akin to Communism where everything is taken from the masses and given to an elite few; it evokes images of ass-hats like Bernie Sanders who talk of equality while jetting between one of his three houses; it is seen as the antithesis of the American Dream® (BlackRock Investments, all rights reserved).

It’s more acceptable in Europe, of course, where they have a long tradition of Socialism in various forms and are more accepting of centralized government control of industry and commerce. But here in ‘Merica, we worship “Independence” and “Rugged Individualism”, the lone cowboy riding over the mesa toward the setting sun. We nod knowingly when someone quotes Reagan from a 1986 news conference when he says: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” It is the American story. Go west young man. And at one point in time, a person really could pack-up and ride off to chase the dream on their own terms (never mind the Comanches and other life-threatening challenges). Outliers aside, those days are long gone.

The facts give lie to the myth. Over two-thirds of the material wealth in this country is controlled by an elite class making up less than ten-percent of the population. Let that sink in for a minute and try to grasp some of the implications.

In our so-called “free”capitalist society, we all experience some token of socialism. To name just a few: welfare, social security, medicare, medicaid, public schools, public water companies, public infrastructure spending, public transportation, public parks, and, of course, the military (although this last is debatable).

However, whereas true socialism is concerned with “the greater good”, putting the welfare of all above the selfish interests of the few, American socialism is backwards, consisting of top-down crumbs from the table of the ruling elite. Just enough socialism sprinkled into the American cake to keep the masses alive, but perpetually impoverished. A sop to ward off the spectre of revolt.

In short, socialism in America doesn’t go far enough.

A recent article in Washington Monthly by Phillip Longman called “Train Drain” offers a telling example. He explains in detail how the deregulation of the rail system in 1980 has, over time, destroyed the industrial capacity of this nation while providing vast profits for hedge funds and modern-day robber barons. I recommend reading the article in full. But for our purposes, it serves to touch on some of its key points to illustrate why National Socialism, emphasis here on the Socialism, might be the best answer to an increasingly dangerous problem.

We take trains for granted. We see them running parallel to the freeway while we’re driving, or blocking our intersections from time to time, and don’t give them a second thought. But for industries large and small, rail is vital. In order to produce goods, manufacturers require raw materials.

Once manufactured, these goods have to get to markets both domestic and overseas. Ranchers, too, rely on rail to bring the feed they need for their livestock. Farmers have to get their crops to national and international markets.

Many of these materials and goods are simply too heavy, or shipped in too great a volume, to be efficiently transported by anything other than train. Because of this dependence on rail transport, whoever controls the trains ultimately controls the industrial capacity of this nation, directly impacting the American worker. No product to produce, no job.

As railroads spread across the nation in the 19th century, so too did American prosperity. Many other countries eventually had rail systems, but in America in particular, it developed in such a way as to link small and mid-sized towns together, giving independent farmers and ranchers access to larger or more distant markets.

But the nature of railroads, with it’s capital requirements, is such that it has always lent itself to control by big money. According to the article: “By the late 19th century, even proponents of laissez-faire had come to realize that without regulation railroads threatened to distort the workings of the free enterprise system. In most places, a single railroad held a local monopoly, which it used to extract wealth from the community and retard its economic development. Meanwhile, in places served by more than one railroad, typically large mid-Atlantic cities, the competing carriers often engaged in price wars, giving those places an unfair and unearned economic advantage over rural America and midsize heartland cities.”

To address this problem, states began regulating the railroads as early as the 1860s, and in 1887, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act which served to level the playing field between rail customers by preventing price gouging and other monopolistic practices. “Shippers, regardless of their market power, had to pay roughly the same price per ton and per mile for transporting the same kinds of goods for the same distance. Where railroads lost money on low-volume and high-cost services, such as serving a grain mill at the end of a branch line used by local farmers only at harvest time or running local passenger trains, they were expected to make up the difference from their high-profit routes and lines of business.”

It wasn’t a perfect system by any means, but “…this regulatory structure was nonetheless critical to ensuring fair terms of competition between different businesses and different places and thereby helped launch America as a broadly prosperous economic powerhouse.” This process was called “common carriage” and it more or less worked.

Then it all got tossed out the window in 1980.

In the midst of an energy crisis and a precipitous decline in American manufacturing, and no doubt at the insistence of lobbyists, President Carter signed the Staggers Rail Act, essentially gutting the power of the Interstate Commerce Commission and the provisions of the Interstate Commerce Act.

It is a classic example of the road to Hell being paved with good intentions: the manufacturing decline was putting strain on many railroads. Congress feared having to take them over and lawmakers hoped that deregulation would forestall this and improve their viability.

It worked only too well. Large railroads gobbled up under-performing or bankrupt rail lines, creating monopolies, which then became highly profitable by shutting off access to smaller markets and price gouging.

Where there’s money to made it doesn’t take long for the financial vultures to circle, and ““activist” investors … gained effective control over most rail management. Their first order of business was to install new managers who would drive up short-term profits through ruthless cost cutting and downsizing.

The most notorious of these was the hard-charging railroad executive E. Hunter Harrison, who pioneered a new business model called “precision-scheduled railroading,” or PSR, that has now been almost universally adopted by the nation’s major railroads. Despite its label, PSR has little to do with running trains on time. Instead, it mostly involves the common private-equity playbook of driving up share prices by downsizing workforces, selling off assets, and degrading services while raising prices. It is estimated that Harrison, who was affectionately known as the “trains whisperer” by Wall Street, created $50 billion in increased returns to shareholders during his tenure as CEO of four major North American railroads.” He’s also proof that greed and avarice are not the exclusive province of Jews.

By raising shipping prices thirty-percent faster than the rate of inflation, reducing their workforce by another thirty-percent, and reducing the number of freight cars used and branch lines served, railroads have become cash-cows for hedge-fund managers focused on profits to shareholders over the needs of the communities they once served. Examples include livestock feed sitting at large distribution centers, waiting on rail cars to carry it to farming communities that are delayed or that never arrive; lumber from family farms forced to rot in the yard because a rail line like CSX has decided they will no longer service a smaller branch line.

And of course, the most egregious recent example being the derailment in East Palestine: “…from 2016 to 2023, Norfolk Southern, which along with CSX controls most rail infrastructure east of the Mississippi, spent $8.4 billion more on dividends and stock buyback than its cash flow provided [which can only by done by selling-off assets and downsizing]. The money likely would have been better spent on safety and operational maintenance. After the 2023 wreck of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio, that sent a mushroom cloud of toxic chemicals across 16 states, federal investigators laid blame on the company’s insufficient investment in wayside sensors that could have detected a failing roller bearing.” (As an aside, I’ll give you three guess who the second largest shareholder of Norfolk Southern is, but you’ll only need one: BlackRock. If you guessed Vanguard or State Street, you weren’t far off: they’re the first and fourth largest shareholders.)

What, you may ask, does this have to do with National Socialism?

Simply put, this state of affairs would not be allowed to happen under a National Socialist system. The rail system is too important to the well-being of the public good to be left in the hands of multi-national corporations and hedge-fund managers whose sole motivation is profit above all else. Under National Socialism, railroads would be controlled by the State to serve the greater good, the needs of the Volk, over the profit motives of a select few. This was the case with the Deutsche Reichsbahn in National Socialist Germany, and a watered down version of it is still to be found throughout most of Europe.

The people, the Volk, need trains. For our nation to thrive, and for individuals to be free from unnecessary financial burden, we need a strong economy founded on the principal of a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work. This, in turn, requires a fair and just transport infrastructure so that the fruits of our labor can find a home. I like to think of it in terms of the relationship of the fingers to the hand. Individuals are the fingers. The Volk, our community, is the hand. They are inextricably linked, and the importance and functionality of one is dependent on the other. What good is one without the other?

Because of the misapplication of the term Socialism and its conflation with Communism, most Americans believe National Socialists want to take your “stuff” and tell you what to do. Nothing could be further from the truth. We don’t want to take your car, we want to make sure you have good roads to drive it on. We want to help the company that is employing the American worker by ensuring it can obtain the raw materials it needs to build it at fair and reasonable price so that you can, in turn, buy the car for a fair and reasonable price. We want to help the American farmer, who cannot otherwise compete with Conagra, get his crops to market by guaranteeing access to small-line rail. When the greater good is served, so too are the individuals which comprise it. As the ANP says, it’s What We Stand For.

To quote Gottfried Feder*:

Common good before self-interest.

Only in the service of the community, only as a serving member within the framework of the nation as a whole, does the individual awaken to a higher life…Only under the rule of this basic idea will the individual gain the feeling of security and recognize that only under this dominant idea can a richly structured, organic national economy emerge from today’s predatory economy, for the benefit of the whole – and thus also for the benefit of each individual.”

Amerika Erwache!

*”Gemeinwohl vor Eigennutz.
Nur im Dienste der Gemeinschaft, nur als dienendes Glied im Rahmen der Gesamtnation erwacht der einzelne zu einem höheren Leben…Nur unter der Herrschaft dieses Grundgedankens wird der einzelne das Gefühl der Geborgenheit gewinnen und erkennen, dass nur unter diesem herrschenden Gedanken aus der heutigen Raubwirtschaft eine reich gegliederte, organische Volkswirtschaft entstehen kann, zum Wohle des Ganzen – und damit auch zum Wohle jedes einzelnen.“ – The Program of the NSDAP and its General Conceptions, 1932