Ran Prieur has some worthwhile observations about his recent Amtrak travels. Of particular interest to me was this passage:

The American right is trying to kill Amtrak, using the excuse that it requires a government subsidy to survive. Nobody mentions that the airlines enjoy much larger subsidies, not to mention the meat industry, the oil industry, the weapons industry, and so on. The right only wants to subsidize the most wasteful and destructive things, because they hate life and want to destroy everything. I can already see the plan: Kill the train lines, then the bus lines, so that the only way to travel between cities is by owning a car, which is highly regulated and unaffordable without a full-time labor assignment, or by flying, which is impossible for dissidents and requires humiliating rituals of submission. Then gas prices will make car travel harder, and when airline prices finally rise to realistic levels, only the rich will be able to travel between regions.

This is a more concrete form of what happened in a dream of mine several weeks ago. Sections of the country in this dream were sealed off from one another, and no travel was possible. Admittedly, the excuse they were using was that (space) aliens had taken over certain parts of the country. But hey, it was a dream, so there.