Texan challenges bogus red light camera tickets

Link to article here.

Texas Resident Calls for Investigation Over Bogus Red Light Camera Tickets
Port Lavaca, Texas hides records regarding intersection where red light camera ticket issued on a green light.
The Newspaper.com

Byron SchirmbeckPort Lavaca, Texas is refusing to release documents that might reveal whether additional motorists have received automated tickets for running a green light. Yesterday, Byron Schirmbeck, director of saferbaytown.com, filed a formal complaint with Calhoun County District Attorney Dan Heard over the city's refusal to comply with the terms of the state open records statute that generally requires the disclosure of public documents within ten days.

On September 12, Port Lavaca Police Sergeant Kelly Flood signed a ticket accusing motorist Dale Price of running a red light at the intersection of US 35 and Travis Street. Video evidence clearly shows Price's vehicle entered on a steady green light (view video). On September 23, Schirmbeck filed a public records request seeking all red light camera tickets issued around the date the camera generated Price's bogus citation. The city responded on October 6.

"The information you're requesting regarding number 1, you will have to contact red light camera," wrote Tiffany Butcher with the Port Lavaca Police Department's records division.

Other Texas cities have turned over copies of photo citations without issue. Redflex Traffic Systems, the Australian company in charge of Port Lavaca ticketing, refused to provide the records, claiming an exemption, according to an email provided to Schirmbeck yesterday. Neither Redflex nor any city attorney has the authority to decide whether such records are exempt.

"Unless the governmental body has a previous determination from a court or the attorney general regarding the precise information requested, a governmental body cannot determine on its own to withhold information," the attorney general's website explains.

The deadline for the city to ask for an attorney general ruling has lapsed. Schirmbeck believes the city's lack of respect for the open records law fits a pattern of lawlessness. Port Lavaca has failed to submit the required annual reports to the state about its red light camera system. Photo tickets in the city do not include the notice required under Section 707.019 of the state code explaining that failure to pay the citation cannot result in an arrest warrant or a penalty on the owner's driving record. It ignored state law that required the city council to place a vote on an anti-camera referendum on the November ballot.

"They deliberately and consistently violate the law but then try and penalize other people saying they broke the law and have to pay up," Schirmbeck told TheNewspaper. "When does their bill come in, that's what I want to know."

Port Lavaca Citizens Against Red Light Cameras is currently gathering signatures on a second attempt to let voters decide whether to keep or reject the automated ticketing machines. Schirmbeck intends to file a formal complaint against Port Lavaca with Attorney General Greg Abbott.

New 'Horseshoe' toll project in DFW is a DOUBLE TAX

Link to article here.

It's a total OUTRAGE to build this road 100% with federal and state tax money and then charge drivers a toll, a second tax, to use it! This is a tax grab, plain & simple.

Transportation Texas Transpo Commission Gives OK to Move Ahead With $700-Mil Redo Of IH-30, IH-35E

By Robert Wilonsky
Oct. 27 2011
Dallas Observer

 horseshoemap.jpg

Moments ago, Ed Pensock, the interim director of the Texas Turnpike Authority, explained to the Texas Transportation Commission down in Austin why Dallas so desperately needs the so-called Horseshoe Project -- otherwise known as the redo of IH-30 and IH-35E over the Trinity River, once part of Project Pegasus. Long story short, Pensock said, that stretch of road carries 350,000 vehicles per day, and it's among the "top 20 most-congested roadways in the state." Even worse, he said, "The structures out there are aging, they're old, there's a lot of rapid deterioration going on," and the cost of maintaining those bridges is piling up.

But he didn't need to make much of a case; as Michael Morris, the head of transportation for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, and TxDOT and city officials explained earlier this week, the Horseshoe Project is a slam-dunk. The $700 million is there, courtesy the state Legislature and myriad other funding sources that will pay for the bridges -- the other two Calatravas the city so desperately wants running over the Trinity River, for which there's $92 million in federal funds. (Pensock did say, at one point, that the project will more than likely cost closer to $800 million when it's wrapped in five years, fingers crossed.)

Pensock's presentation didn't take long -- 10, 15 minutes tops, all of which you peek at in this PowerPoint, which provides the time line for construction scheduled to begin in January 2013 and end at the end of 2016, all things go according to plan. There are, of course, a few issues to deal with before the traffic jam, including finishing a design and getting a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, since, as Pensock said, the bridges go over the levees, which presents "a particularly sticky issue due to flooding."

So, that's that. Now, I leave you with these words from Pensock, taken not entirely out of context: "I don't know if we'll ever be able to truly solve congestion in Dallas."

Georgia HOT lanes create congestion

Link to article here.

Georgia HOT Lanes Create Congestion, Disappointment
Federally funded Georgia tolling project creates congestion so significant that governor intervenes.
The Newspaper.com

I-85 HOT lanesGeorgia's introduction of high occupancy toll (HOT) lanes on Interstate 85 at the beginning of the month has already turned into a public relations disaster. During rush hour, motorists found themselves stranded in the general purpose lanes as the adjacent HOT lane -- constructed and maintained with their tax dollars -- were essentially unused. Drivers balked at paying the stiff $5.40 entrance tax for permission to enter, leaving the existing lane space to go to waste. Governor Nathan Deal (R) intervened swiftly on October 6 to order the State Road and Tollway Authority (SRTA) to lower the cost of using the toll lane.

"Looking at what we've learned from our first four work days with the HOT lanes, I've asked SRTA to improve utilization of the express lanes," Deal said in a statement. "In the short term, the toll rate will lower -- starting with Thursday afternoon's commute -- but the effective rate will continue to change to regulate speed and volume."

The HOT lanes idea was hailed from the start as an important advance in the region's transportation network. Using $110 million in federal gas tax dollars, a system of gantries was set up requiring drivers to install an electronic transponder, called the Peach Pass, if they wished to pay to use a 15-mile stretch of the freeway that previously had been set aside as a high-occupancy vehicle (HOV), free for the use of anyone carrying an extra passenger in his vehicle. The change to the HOT format was hailed as a proven concept.

"The opening of the I-85 Express Lanes will represent a new era in transportation innovation," SRTA Executive Director Gena L. Evans, said on September 16.

After the project actually opened for business, motorist Howard Rodgers quickly racked up more than 1500 electronic and hardcopy signatures on a petition calling for a halt to the HOT lanes.

"By removing the existing HOV lane for use as a toll lane the state has created daily traffic jams and backlogs causing greater pollution, increased travel times, and an extra tax on the citizens of Gwinnett County and points north during times of economic decline," the petition states. "The adjustable toll system amounts to a monopoly on the travel lane requiring customer to pay a higher surcharge (price gouging) for the ability to arrive to or from work in a timely manner."

Deal forced state officials to ask the Federal Highway Administration for permission to allow vehicles with two, as opposed to three, people on board to use the express lanes for free. I-85 is not the only HOT lane to fail. In Washington State, the State Route 167 HOT lanes are on their third year in operation. According to the third-quarter financial results, it cost $173,939 more in toll collection expenses to operate the lanes than was generated in revenue in fiscal 2011.

CA toll contest offers $500 in free tolls

Link to article here.

Toll Road Contest Offers $500 Payouts
Two FasTrak users will be selected each month to win $500 in free tolls.
By Nisha Gutierrez-Jaime
San Juan Capistrano Patch
October 28, 2011

If you drive on Orange County toll roads, there could be a pot of gold at the end of the next off-ramp.

Beginning this month, two drivers who pay with FasTrak on the 73, 133, 241 or 261 toll roads will be randomly selected to win $500 in free tolls, according to the Transportation Corridor Agencies. Winners will be selected at the end of each month and their accounts credited with $500.

The contest continues through Sept. 30.

To be eligible, FasTrak account holders need to log in online or go to thetollroads.com/500 to register. Once registered, drivers will be automatically entered to win every time they drive the 73, 133, 241 or 261.

“The more trips they take, the better their odds of winning,” said Joyce Hill, deputy director of customer service for the Toll Roads.

Each time a driver takes a trip, their account number will be entered into that month's drawing. TCA officials say only the account holder is eligible to win, not the person driving during the selected trip.

This isn't the first time the TCA has held this type of contest. From November 2010 through June, TCA awarded $1,000 in free tolls to one winner each month. More than 100,000 account holders registered to make their trips eligible and $9,000 in free tolls were awarded.

Drivers who do not have a TCA FasTrak account can sign up for one at TheTollRoads.com, or in person at the FasTrak Service Center at 125 Pacifica in Irvine. According to TCA officials, FasTrak drivers can save money at every pay point on The Toll Roads, usually $.40 to $.80 compared to the cash toll, saving about $100 or more a year for the average user.

Public funds tight, states seek road privatization as bailout

Link to article here.

Apparently the establishment hasn't learned from our mistakes. These privatized toll roads are heavily subsidized with taxpayer money (socialize the losses and privatize profits -- a big RIP-OFF) and are failing across the nation (San Diego's South Bay Expressway & Indiana Toll Road flirting with bankruptcy despite doubling toll rates). The grand privatization experiment is failing and no one in government is listening. Well, here's a little reality check. Americans' disposable income is GONE. There aren't enough people who can afford to pay 25-100 times more per mile to drive our highways. So privatized toll roads are NOT going to fill the supposed 'funding gap.'

With U.S. infrastructure aging, public funds scant, more projects going private

By Cezary Podkul,  Saturday, October 22, 2011

WASHINGTON POST

When the city of Chesapeake, Va., considered closing a crumbling, 80-year-old bridge over the Elizabeth River in 2008, local officials knew that neither the state nor the federal government would pay for a replacement. Just tearing down the old one would cost millions of dollars. So they sold it.

“We paid them $10,” said Bob Hellman, one of the investors, but “what we gave them wasn’t just $10.”

Hellman’s investors group, American Bridge Partners, agreed to remove the old bridge — and to build a brand-new one, solely with private money. Tolls of about $2 a trip, up from the old 75-cent fee, will pay back the company’s $130 million investment in the new South Norfolk Jordan Bridge, due to open in the spring.

“This is a Christmas gift for the city,” said Chesapeake Mayor Alan Krasnoff.

It’s a gift cities and states are asking for more than ever. The goal is not to raise cash by selling public infrastructure but to tap into the private sector for money to build new bridges, roads or tunnels — possibly faster and cheaper than the government otherwise could.

There are at least 70 privately funded and managed infrastructure projects across the United States in various stages of development, according to a list compiled by the law firm Allen & Overy. These are part of a vast network of roads, bridges and tunnels — to say nothing of the subways, ports, airports and water systems — crying out for attention. Consider this: Over the past 60 years, the United States has built a 46,876-mile federal highway system that is now in dire need of repair. As a result, states have had to pour more of their transportation dollars into fixing aging highways and even in good times have little or nothing left over for new construction.

The Great Recession made that harder. In many cases, financially strapped states and cities have little choice but to turn to the private sector, even if it means giving up revenue and selling off an asset normally seen as belonging to the public.
In Chesapeake, “they were looking at our bridge versus no bridge,” said Hellman, who previously invested in pipelines, coal, landfills and even cemeteries. “That’s ultimately what you’re looking at in many of these circumstances.”

Funding ‘crisis’

“States are facing a transportation funding crisis,” said Jaime Rall, transportation policy specialist at the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). But she does not pin the blame for the crisis on the recession alone. She also points to the “political reluctance to raise the gas tax,” she said.

The gasoline tax, which feeds into the National Highway Trust Fund for highway projects, has stood at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993. Adjusted for inflation, it would need to be 29 cents a gallon just to buy what it did then, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But Congress and the White House oppose any increase.

As a result, federal transportation finances are in even worse shape than many states’. The highway trust fund ran out of cash and had to be rescued in 2008, 2009 and 2010 at a total cost to taxpayers of $34.5 billion. It is expected run out of cash again next year.

“There is no public money,” said D.J. Gribbin, a former chief counsel to the Federal Highway Administration who works at Macquarie Capital, a large Australian investment bank.

While public coffers have been running dry, a cottage industry has been built around the concept of investing private money in infrastructure. It has grown exponentially over the past decade thanks largely to the world’s largest pensions, which have come to view infrastructure as a separate investment category, much like a stock or a bond.

Precise estimates are hard to pin down, but in the past five years, the 30 biggest investors in infrastructure have channeled as much as $180 billion into these types of investments, according to Infrastructure Investor magazine. These investors include Macquarie, as well as some of the largest pension plans in Europe, Australia and Canada.

More capital is on the way. There are 100 private funds seeking to raise $95 billion for infrastructure investments globally, according to a tally by San Francisco-based fund adviser Probitas Partners, though not all of them will succeed. Of that, about $11.5 billion would be targeted for the United States, with fund sizes ranging from $100 million to $3 billion.

“In 2003, nobody in the U.S. talked about infrastructure,” said Kelly DePonte, a partner at Probitas. “We really have seen a sea change in interest.”

The main draw for investors, DePonte said, is the steady, predictable income that infrastructure assets can provide. People need to get to work, use electricity and flush toilets, so a toll road, an electric utility or a water utility tends to deliver cash no matter what happens in the stock market on any given day. Recent research by Macquarie shows infrastructure has outperformed the global stock market by an average of about 0.5 percent per month in the past 10 years.

“Traffic on the road is highly insensitive to stock market levels,” said Chris Camarsh, head of investment process at Australian fund manager CP2. That makes infrastructure a good way to save for one’s nest egg, since “there is good predictability that the cash will be there when you’re older,” he said.

Camarsh, for example, holds shares in Transurban, an Australian toll road developer that owns an 85-year contract to build and operate an expansion of the Capital Beltway in Fairfax.

“It’s my retirement,” he said.

That has helped lure Canada’s $52 billion Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System, which provides retirement benefits to more than 400,000 members. It has devoted about $8.25 billion, or 16 percent, of its portfolio to infrastructure because it “matches the long-term returns that we need for the pension plan,” said Michael Nobrega, chief executive of OMERS. The pension fund bid — unsuccessfully — for the Chicago Skyway and the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Nobrega is putting together the $20 billion Global Strategic Investment Alliance with other large pensions around the world, including up to $5 billion from U.S. pension funds, to jointly buy some of the largest assets in the world.

“Any pension that does not have allocation to large-scale infrastructure assets . . . I think is missing a real opportunity,” he said.

In the United States, he sees a $1 trillion shortfall for infrastructure investment.

“But,” Nobrega said, “I think the government framework has to be there to encourage us to be there.”

‘Open for business’

States are increasingly rolling out the red carpet to attract big investors to their infrastructure projects. Thirty-one states and Puerto Rico have laws on their books authorizing private investment in infrastructure, according to the NCSL’s Rall.

But the laws vary so much from state to state that investors often refer to the United States as a patchwork of 50 separate countries. Nevada, for example, has approved private investment in one toll road, while Puerto Rico’s 2009 law created a menu of opportunities across water, energy, transportation and education sectors, as well as a separate office to administer them.

So far, Virginia has had the most success attracting private capital to its projects. The state was among the first to pass legislation enabling private investment for transportation in 1995. It has since built three projects with the help of private capital. Five more are under construction, and another four are in various stages of development.

One deal sealed in July is a $1.9 billion tunnel project directly north of Chesapeake’s new Jordan Bridge. It is what people in the business call “a public-private partnership.” A private consortium led by Macquarie will invest $1.2 billion, one quarter in direct equity, more than a third covered by commercial loans or bonds, and a third to be provided through a direct Transportation Department loan that has yet to be approved.

As in the privately financed Jordan Bridge, tolls from the Midtown Tunnel expansion will go to covering the finance costs and providing a return to the investors.

“You have to look at this from a business perspective,” said Tony Kinn, who heads up a new division for privately financed projects at the Virginia Department of Transportation. “If we could afford to do all these projects ourselves, we would do them.”

The state is also a partner in the Midtown Tunnel expansion. It will contribute a $395 million subsidy to the project. It gets two things: a new tunnel without laying out the extra $1.2 billion and a lower toll than the private investors would have demanded otherwise. But it gets no revenue unless certain revenue-sharing provisions kick in later in the 58-year contract. Under the deal, Virginia capped tolls initially at $1.84 and will let them rise at roughly the rate of inflation.

“We have to leverage the available state funds,” Kinn said.

That does not mean every new highway project in the state will be a toll road or involve private capital, said Dusty Holcombe, Kinn’s deputy. Where all-public financing makes sense, the state will do that.

But, where appropriate, the state will be “proactive, aggressive and active” in getting the private sector involved in building new infrastructure, Kinn said. “Virginia is open for business.”

Unexpected market

Initially, private investment in U.S. infrastructure took the form of buying or leasing rather than building projects.

Six years ago, Chicago got $1.8 billion for leasing its Skyway toll bridge. A year later, Indiana raised $3.8 billion by leasing a toll road.

“Following a couple of the catalyst transactions — the Skyway, the Indiana Toll Road — there was clearly an expectation in the private sector that the public sector couldn’t resist doing these transactions,” said Tom Lanctot, head of infrastructure investment banking at William Blair in Chicago.

Only a handful of the private funds were geared toward new-construction projects, said Ryan Orr, a professor at Stanford University who studies investment in infrastructure.

Large pensions and sovereign wealth are more inclined to buy existing assets rather than taking on the many risks of building new ones, Orr said. New-construction projects also take a long time to develop.

Sovereign wealth funds also like to bid for existing big-ticket assets. In 2009, when Chicago leased its parking meters for $1.15 billion, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, the investment arm of the oil-rich Abu Dhabi government, took a minority stake.

The sale or leasing of big visible infrastructure — especially to foreigners — has provoked resistance from the public.

“Do you really want to be selling off your assets?” Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi asked a New York audience in March. He had elicited laughs while recounting an anecdote about officials from a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund trying to decide whether to bid for the Pennsylvania Turnpike. “I think its absolutely nuts,” Taibbi said.

Orr dismisses such sentiments.

“We live in a globalized economy,” he said, and as a result Middle Eastern investors make all kinds of investments in American assets, such as U.S. Treasury bonds. “Why is a toll road any different? Has there ever been a case where we’ve ever had a problem with an Arab sheik interfering with the operation of one of our assets?”

Public officials have also questioned the financial wisdom of selling off the crown jewels of public infrastructure and of giving up, sometimes for decades, key revenue streams such as parking fees.

Proposals to lease toll roads in Pennsylvania and Florida died after public debate. A plan to lease Chicago’s Midway Airport fell apart, and proposed parking leases in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Pa., and Hartford and New Haven, Conn., were tabled or shot down by local politicians.

Some municipalities and states — such as Ohio, which is mulling whether to lease its turnpike — have come back to the private market with deals on existing infrastructure. But plans for new-construction projects are moving along, mostly at the state level.

Not ‘black and white’

Even when governments embrace deals, the math does not always add up for private investors. The classic example: a short California toll road called the South Bay Expressway.

The road made history in 2003 when it became the first privately backed toll road to secure a loan from a Transportation Department program designed to provide financing for innovation. The $140 million loan helped kick-start construction on the 9.2-mile road, which links the southern San Diego suburbs to an industrial area near the Mexican border.

But when the $658 million project opened to traffic in November 2007, things did not go as planned. The subprime-mortgage crisis roiled Southern California. Expected housing developments were canceled, and recession-battered motorists turned to neighboring freeways. Traffic was about half of what investors had expected, said Greg Hulsizer, the toll road’s chief executive.

To make things worse, the company got tied up in costly litigation with its contractors. By March 2010, with the economy still weak and the litigation draining its coffers, the South Bay Expressway filed for bankruptcy.

When the South Bay Expressway emerged from bankruptcy, the Transportation Department wrote down its loan to about $95 million, costing taxpayers $55 million. But it also received a one-third ownership stake in the road company, Hulsizer said.

To some analysts, it showed why taxpayer funds should not go to such projects.

“The public ends up taking the bath,” said Phineas Baxandall, policy analyst at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

To others, the Transportation Department made out well. Dale Bonner, who served as California’s highest transportation official during the bankruptcy process, said the whole episode was “a sign of the strength” of the private investment model. The initial investors were wiped out while the lenders, including the government, were compensated.

“I didn’t have one troubled night of sleep about having to explain to the legislature or the taxpayers that we are going to have to come up with extra money to bail anybody out of the project,” Bonner said.

Now the South Bay Expressway is going to be sold — to government. The San Diego Association of Governments recently decided it was worth it to just buy the expressway and lower the tolls, which have pushed droves of motorists onto a parallel, congested freeway. The association approved a $345 million buyout offer in late July, cheap compared with the initial development cost or what it would have cost to widen the neighboring freeway.

“These lanes are available now and at half the price, so it’s a smart play,” said Jerome Stocks, chairman of the governments association.

Once the local governments take over the expressway, Stocks hopes to cut tolls by half from the current $4 per trip.

“We don’t need to make a profit. We’re not in business to make a profit,” he said. “So our cost of doing business is quite a bit lower than the private sector.”

And what about the Transportation Department? It chose not to sell out to the local governments, opting to remain invested in the deal, according to a spokesman. The department also expects “to fully recover its investment in the toll road” and will continue to make similar loans in the future, the department spokesman said.

Stocks isn’t so sure.

“There is a very good possibility that they will be made whole completely,” he said. “There is also a very good possibility that they won’t.” Like the whole issue of private investing in infrastructure, he added, “it’s not black and white.”

New designation on I-10 hijacks freeway, steers cars to foreign tollway

Link to article here.

New designation on I-10 hijacks freeway, steers traffic to foreign-owned tollway

By Terri Hall, San Antonio Transportation Policy Examiner
Examiner.com

At its last meeting, the Texas Transportation Commission quietly passed a Minute Order authorizing the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) to implement a dual designation of I-10 in Seguin to I-410 in San Antonio and eventually to I-35 (53 miles total) as State Highway 130. The Minute Order is a pay-off to Spain-based Cintra whose tollway, which begins at I-10 in Seguin and connects up with the publicly-operated segments of SH 130 tollway that ends at I-35 in Georgetown, will greatly profit from the visibility as it seeks to entice drivers to its two segments of the tollway (segments 5 & 6).

Motorists who unwittingly think they’re going to continue on a freeway from the I-10/SH 130 leg will get a rude awakening when they’re stuck out in Seguin with no way north unless they proceed on Cintra’s privately operated toll road. The public private partnership (P3) contract awarded to Cintra and San Antonio-based Zachry in March of 2007 also gives the private corporations the ability to penalize TxDOT for the expansion of free routes surrounding its tollway through a non-compete clause (see Exhibit 17). Since TxDOT has a share in the toll revenues on SH 130,  if it sends more traffic to Cintra’s toll road, which the dual designation with free portions of interstates 10 and 410 are clearly designed to do, it will benefit from the move.

So now our highway department is making decisions, not based on safety or congestion relief, but based solely on increasing revenues to its own coffers and those of a private corporation at taxpayer expense. Highways are a monopoly by their very nature, privately-owned tollways even more so given the non-compete clauses. So TxDOT’s move, announced on a day when it knew all the attention would be on the announcement of its new Executive Director, Phil Wilson, slipped in this controversial, profit-driven, monopolistic designation under the radar.

Well, now it’s officially ‘on the radar.’

SH 130 so empty a plane used it for emergency landing!
SH 130 is the only portion of Trans Texas Corridor TTC-35 that will ever be built. So this tollway has been under a shroud of controversy from day one. TxDOT’s portion of SH 130 (roughly 49 miles called known as segments 1-4) is also presently a net loser for the state. It has required $100 million taxpayer bailout to date, nearly 70% more than originally planned. That’s right, TxDOT PLANNED for a net loss on this road for the entire life of the debt, and they’ve been dipping into gas taxes to subsidize it since its opening. It’s so empty, a distressed plane landed on it during RUSH HOUR. It’s become the poster child of Rick Perry’s failed toll road policy in Texas.

Cintra is manipulating the main north-south route through our state, I-35, for its own personal profiteering -- and our highway department that has a fiduciary duty to the public is complicit in it, especially since TxDOT is in a sea of red ink on its portion of SH 130.

Just when you think things couldn’t get more outrageous... TxDOT’s I-35 Advisory Committee that issued a report to be unveiled at tomorrow’s monthly Commission meeting, proposes converting existing I-35 into the SH 130 tollway and designating existing SH 130 as the new I-35. Such a move would require a change to both federal and state law, but that’s never stopped TxDOT’s raw ambition for sucking as money out of Texas motorists as possible. This is why an UN-elected board of appointees ought NEVER to have the ability to impose taxes. It’s this taxation without representation that precipitated the American Revolution and now the subsequent toll tax revolt in Texas.

Most state lawmakers that have caught wind of this Minute Order and dual designation of I-10 as SH 130 are shocked but not surprised. One quipped, “Will this nonsense at TxDOT ever end? I’ll answer my own question. Not until Rick Perry is no longer the Governor.” Until then, expect an endless, unaccountable runaway toll tax gravy train to continue at Perry’s highway department.

Rolling Stone eviscerates Perry for selling off TX to highest bidder

Link to article here.

WARNING: This article contains foul language and some vulgarity. Content inappropriate for children. However, it is well-researched and factual account of Rick Perry's crony capitalism and penchant for selling off Texas to the highest bidder, especially to campaign donors.

Rick Perry: The Best Little Whore In Texas

The Texas governor has one driving passion: selling off government to the highest bidder

by: Matt Taibbi


Early morning in a nearly filled corporate ballroom at the Cobb Energy Centre, a second-tier event stadium on the outskirts of Atlanta. It's late September, and a local conservative think tank is hosting a get-together with Rick Perry, whose front-runner comet at the time is still just slightly visible in the bottom of the sky. I've put away five cups of coffee trying to stay awake through a series of monotonous speeches about Georgia highway and port reform, waiting for my chance to lay eyes on the Next Big Thing in person.

By the time Perry shows up, I'm jazzed and ready for history. You always want to remember the first time you see the possible next president in person. But as every young person knows, the first time is not always a pleasant experience. Perry lumbers onstage looking exceedingly well-groomed, but also ashen and exhausted, like a funeral director with a hangover.

In a voice so subdued and halting that I think he must be sick, he launches into his speech, which consists of the following elements: a halfhearted football joke about Texas A&M that would have embarrassed a true fan like George W. Bush, worn bromides about liberals creating a nanny state, a few lines about jobs in Texas, and a promise to repeal "as much of Obamacare as I can" on his first day in the White House.

"I will try," he says, "to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can."

Then he waves and walks offstage. The whole thing has taken barely 10 minutes.

I can't believe it, and neither can the assembled crowd of Georgia conservatives, who hesitate before breaking into polite applause. I feel like a high school cheerleader who just had her leg jizzed on in the back of a convertible. That's it? It's over? That was Rick Perry's stump speech?

"Low energy, low substance," sighs Justin Ryan, one of the conference attendees. "That's sort of the candidate in general."

But this is America, remember, where one should never underestimate shallow. And Rick Perry brings shallow to a new level. He is very gifted in that regard. He could be the Adolf Hitler of shallow.
Perry's campaign is still struggling to recover from the kind of spectacular, submarine-at-crush-depth collapse seldom seen before in the history of presidential politics. The governor went from presumptive front-runner to stammering talk-show punch line seemingly in the speed of a single tweet, rightly blasted for being too incompetent even to hold his own in televised debates with a half-bright pizza salesman like Herman Cain and a goggle-eyed megachurch Joan of Arc like Michele Bachmann. But such superficial criticisms of his weirdly erratic campaign demeanor don't even begin to get at the root of why we should all be terrified of Perry and what he represents. After all, you have to go pretty far to stand out as a whore and a sellout when you come from a state that has produced such luminaries in the history of political corruption as LBJ, Karl Rove and George W. Bush. But Rick Perry has managed to set a scary new low in the annals of opportunism, turning Texas into a swamp of political incest and backroom dealing on a scale not often seen this side of the Congo or Sierra Leone.

In an era when there's exponentially more money in politics than we've ever seen before, Perry is the candidate who is exponentially more willing than we've ever seen before to whore himself out for that money. On the human level he is a nonpersonality, an almost perfect cipher – a man whose only discernible passion is his extreme willingness to be whatever someone will pay him to be, or vote for him to be. Even scarier, the religious community around which he has chosen to pull his human chameleon act features some of the most extreme end-is-nigh nutcases in America, the last people you want influencing the man with the nuclear football. Perry is a human price tag – Being There meets Left Behind. And sometimes there's nothing more dangerous than nothing at all.

Perry shot into the race for the Republican presidential nomination like a rocket, which is to say, he jumped late into a historically underwhelming contest of bumblers, second-raters, extremists and religious loonies, and became the top dog by default simply by virtue of not looking obviously demented at first blush to the national media. At the time, the GOP's Tea Party base was splitting right down the middle, divided between the intellectual libertarians headed by fellow Texan and original Tea Partier Ron Paul, and the "values"-oriented sect steered by the Bible-thumping likes of Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. Despite Barack Obama's plummeting approval ratings, Republicans seemed to have little chance of success in 2012 unless someone emerged from the pack with the goods to pull off a seemingly impossible demographic trifecta: capturing enough of these two increasingly insurrectionary camps within the Tea Party to win the primary, while still retaining enough moderate cred to steal the middle from Obama in the general election.

Into this morass stepped Perry, a tall, perma-tanned, Bible-clutching Southerner with front-runner hair and the build of a retired underwear model, boasting 10 years of executive experience and a furious anti-government bestseller (Fed Up!) still sizzling on the nation's bookshelves. This was the magic-bullet candidate, with the End Times connections and born-again beatitude to out-Jesus Michele Bachmann, the CV full of arch-libertarian, anti-Fed ramblings pretentious enough to have been written by Ron Paul, and the eelish good looks to outshine robotic front-runner Mitt Romney. Perry just looked like the inevitable nominee, and it wasn't long before he was sitting atop the polls.

But as a presidential candidate, Perry has mainly distinguished himself with a kind of bipolar wildness in the debates: sullen and reserved one moment, strident and inarticulate the next. He sweats profusely. He can't stand still. When he does manage to get off a zinger, he cracks a smug grin, looking like he's just sewn up the blue ribbon in a frat-house dong-measuring contest. Parts of his record drive the Tea Party nuts, like his decision to pay for the kids of illegal immigrants to attend state colleges just like other students, or his executive order requiring all sixth-grade girls in Texas to be vaccinated against HPV, the human papillomavirus that causes cervical cancer in women.

Liliana Ros, a party committeewoman in Florida, shook Perry's hand during a commercial break at the Orlando debate and promptly finked on him to reporters, offering a pervy description that was missing only the open raincoat and the raging boner. "He grabbed my hand and held on to it," Ros said. "His hand was so cold, like ice. And he was sweating. He didn't seem well, like he was in pain or he was sick or something. I don't know what it was, but something was definitely wrong."

As soon as Perry became that most fragile of early-campaign life-forms, the "presumptive front-runner," opponents and reporters began scrambling to find the skeletons in his closet. The journalism world is abuzz with salacious whispers about his private life, while liberals have focused on his ties to the New Apostolic Reformation, an apocalyptic sect of loopy Christian fundamentalists who think Jesus is coming back soon to blow up the planet. But voters who want to know who Rick Perry really is would do well to remember the advice of noted political analyst Hannibal Lecter, who instructed Jodie Foster about the serial killer she was tracking in The Silence of the Lambs. What does he do, Lecter asked, this man you seek? He kills women? No, that is incidental. Don't look at what the man does, look at what he is.

It's the same with Rick Perry.

Yes, Perry has deployed some of the campaign's most extreme anti-government rhetoric, denouncing Social Security as an "illegal Ponzi scheme," calling for the repeal of the federal income tax, even seeming to threaten Ben Bernanke with mob violence if he came to Texas. And yes, he hangs out with some of the weirdest religious nuts in America, keeping as allies a Texas evangelical who believes the Democrats are literally controlled by a Satanic demon called Jezebel, and another who believes that a recent Perry-led religious rally helped break an ancient curse laid down on Texas soil by Native American cannibals. And sure, yes, he promises to be a more-than-unusually obnoxious belligerent in the culture wars, having appointed three consecutive creationists to head the Texas State Board of Education, signed a law mandating that every woman who wants to get an abortion must first be forced Clockwork Orange-style to stare at a sonogram of the fetus, and executed more prisoners than any governor in modern times.

Yes, he has done all of those things, and more. But it's all incidental. When you ask what Perry's true nature is – the first and principal thing that defines him – there's just one answer: favors.

Favors are the one consistent thread running through Perry's political career. Throughout his time as governor, whenever his ideology or his religion comes into conflict with the need to give a handout to a major campaign donor, ideology and religion lose every single time.

Though 94 percent of schools in Texas teach a sex-ed curriculum based on abstinence-only – an approach that led one watchdog group to conclude that "shaming and fear-based instruction are the standard means of teaching students about sexuality" in Texas – Perry nonetheless signed an executive order mandating that those same girls subjected to those abstinence-only classes receive an STD vaccine. You can't talk about STDs to sixth-grade girls, but if it's worth $120 a shot to a pharmaceutical company like Merck, you can jam the birds-and-the-bees lesson right into their arms.

Those in Texas who have followed Perry most closely over the years have all come to the same conclusion about him. "He's a cash-and-carry governor," says Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice, a group that monitors campaign contributions in the state. "He has an extremely strong stomach for holding his nose and doing really dirty favors."

"He'll be whatever you want him to be," says one longtime political opponent. "He's all about greed."

"There's no line he won't cross," says another.

"This guy doesn't believe in one damn thing," says a third.

As for how this classic, big-government, machine politician – a man who made massive government stimulus routine at a time when Barack Obama was still shooting baskets in the Senate gymnasium – could run as a small-market conservative and Tea Party champion, many in Texas express bewilderment.

"If you tell a lie often enough, people believe it," says Debra Medina, a Tea Party Republican who ran against Perry in the gubernatorial primary last year. "That's Rick Perry."

It's just after midday, a Monday afternoon, and I'm barreling down a stretch of State Highway 176 in the deadest, hottest part of the Texas desert, a few miles shy of the New Mexico border and about an hour west of the rusted oil wells and Friday night lights of Odessa-Permian. Just before I get to New Mexico, I slow down, hang a right and roll down a dirt road, out of America and into a different country. Rick Perry Country. This is a land neither capitalist nor socialist, but somehow boasting the worst aspects of both systems.

The specific spot I'm looking for is a giant hole in the ground – one of the nation's largest repositories of nuclear waste. The facility is run by a company called Waste Control Specialists, the creature of a shadowy billionaire named Harold Simmons, who was one of the single largest financial backers of the Swift-boat campaign against John Kerry, donating more than $3 million.

Chew on that for a moment: The Kerry smear campaign was powered in large part by radioactive waste – or, more specifically, by the fat government contracts to store such waste that were swallowed up by Simmons, a supposedly "anti-government" extremist who, naturally, is one of Rick Perry's biggest supporters.

The Perry-Simmons nuclear landfill is surrounded by giant piles of red clay rising up out of the desert, flanked by huge manmade chasms designed to hold sand-covered drums of sizzling waste. A person entering its gates feels an irresistible urge to wear lead underpants. It's a terrifying sight, but it's even more disturbing as a symbol of Rick Perry's style of government. In Perry's Texas, state regulation doesn't work because regulatory seats can be bought, and the free market doesn't work because connections and influence matter more than competition and performance. The landfill run by Perry's pals at Waste Control Specialists represents an extreme example of both dysfunctional ends of the governor's approach to government, a taxpayer-financed hole in the ground that is as extremely unsafe as it is woefully uneconomic. "The WCS plant," says Lon Burnam, a Texas state representative, "is the ultimate example of Perry's crony capitalism."

Perry's great triumph as governor has been the construction of an elaborate political machine, one that operates according to its own separate dynamic, using donations, appointments and favors as currency. In fact, Texas is run much like a Soviet protectorate, with a party boss (Perry) and a Politburo of superconnected advisers to the governor who shuffle back and forth between the public and private spheres (Perry's chief of staff, Mike "The Knife" Toomey, for instance, jumped from the governor's office to a job lobbying for Merck prior to the HPV vaccination order), all backed by a somewhat larger Central Committee of big financial donors who are the real "representative" power in the state, much more than the actual state legislature.

Who's on that Central Committee? It's not that hard to figure out. Texas has no limit on individual donations to political candidates, which means the governor's best friends don't have to hide behind soft money and other back-door channels. In Texas, you can pay your tribute right out in the open.

"The total of hard-money donations to Perry's three gubernatorial campaigns is $102 million," says McDonald, who tracks the state's pay-for-play system on behalf of Texans for Public Justice. "Half of that, $51 million plus, came from just 204 donors."

Simmons, the billionaire owner of WCS, is near the top of that list of Perry's 204 super-insiders, having personally donated more than $1 million to Perry's three gubernatorial campaigns. If you add in his donations to the Republican Governors Association, which Perry was elected to lead last year, then Simmons and his company have donated $3 million to Perry-friendly causes in the past 10 years. That makes Simmons the second-biggest donor in Perry's camp, behind the homebuilding magnate Bob Perry (no relation), who has handed over an astonishing $13.7 million to Perry and the governors association.

The system of uncapped donations means that Perry's superinsiders effectively operate as mobsters who hold a chit on the state's government. "These are obscenely huge amounts," says McDonald. "You can give a politician $100 or $1,000 because you like his ideology. But when you start giving him $250,000 or $500,000, you gotta think you are getting something in return."

So what did Harold Simmons get for his money? A lot.

For starters, a group of Perry appointees on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality gave Simmons a license to build his hazardous nuke dump, even after the TCEQ's own team of scientists agreed that the project was too risky, given how dangerously close it lies to the Ogalalla aquifer, which provides drinking water for seven states.

When I visit the site in September, it has just rained in the area for the first time in a year – really – and there is water all over the place. Rod Baltzer, the president of WCS, insists that the wastewater is being contained and disposed of in a safe, orderly fashion. But it's hard not to look beyond the dump to nearby Eunice, New Mexico, visible just a few miles away, and wonder about the wisdom of taking a private company's word that there is no contaminated water running underground to the nearby town. Especially since another of Simmons' companies, NL Industries, has already been caught leaking radioactive waste into an aquifer in Ohio. In a supremely ironic demonstration of how the modern system of payola capitalism works, Simmons is now being paid millions by taxpayers, via the federal Energy Department, to clean up his own mess, moving radioactive waste from his dump in Ohio to the one in Texas.

All of this is key to understanding Perry, because the WCS landfill so perfectly fits the business model of his key donors. The company leases the land for the dump, meaning that WCS keeps the lion's share of the profits, while the liability mostly stays with the state. There's no real regulation to speak of, and many of the state's decisions appear to have been greased by massive campaign contributions or other favors: The executive director of the state's environmental commission, for instance, received a job as a lobbyist for WCS not long after helping the firm get its license.

What's more, the company even got the government to pay for the landfill, lobbying the town of Andrews to float a $75 million bond issue to finance the construction of two new dump sites on the property. And in a final insult, WCS managed to negotiate a loophole exempting it from having to pay school taxes in Andrews. Instead, it offers a few small scholarships a year.

"When I was a kid, our high school was the first one in Texas to have carpets," says Melodye Pryor, a local resident and longtime opponent of the dump. "Now, our schools are falling apart."

Andrews is little more than a few crisscrossed roads in the middle of the desert, wrapped around a couple of gas stations and Mexican restaurants and populated by tough blue-collar workers hunkered down in modest little sun-cooked houses. If you can grasp this little working-class neck of Texas lending a Dallas billionaire $75 million so that he can keep 90 percent of the revenue from a dangerous nuclear-waste dump that runs without any real regulatory oversight, all while paying no school taxes, then you've begun to understand what Rick Perry's America might look like.

"It's the worst possible hybridization," says Medina, the Tea Party candidate who ran against Perry. "A private entity keeps the receipts. The state and the taxpayer own all the liability."

The descriptions of Perry's early political career all sound like the early chapters of true-crime books about serial killers, where nobody notices anything special about the protagonist until the bodies start piling up along the local riverbank. In Perry's case, those bodies didn't start showing up until 2000, when Bush became president and Perry assumed his seat as governor, turning the state government into a factory of obscene backroom deals. At first, like many of today's would-be Tea Party leaders, Perry started off trying to milk big government rather than dismantle it. In the late Eighties, when Michele Bachmann was training for her future as an anti-tax crusader by working for the IRS, Perry – who like Bush had a military pilot's background, but unlike Bush flew in the real Air Force for five years – was serving in the Texas state legislature, representing Haskell County, a dry little pocket of nowhere just north of Abilene and west of Dallas.

While Bush made a great political career pretending to be a hick Texas rancher, Perry started out as the real thing, a cotton farmer and cattle rancher who spent his early adulthood looking for a way out of life on his dad's farm. "He was ranching with his family," says Fred McClure, a former aide to Sen. John Tower who met Perry in 1978. Perry had come to Washington to observe the American Agricultural Movement, a grassroots campaign launched by farmers to get the federal government to raise farm subsidies. Though the movement was the ideological opposite of the Tea Party, begging for government handouts, Perry knew a political opportunity when he saw it. "This was an early indicator of his ability to evaluate politically what was going on," says McClure, who remains friends with Perry today. "The grassroots nature of the American Agricultural Movement was not unlike the grassroots nature of the Tea Party. He developed the skill set to read the political tea leaves." It was after watching the angry farmers descend on Washington that Perry decided to run for the state legislature. "I think part of it was that he was bored farming in Haskell," McClure says.

Perry's early political career was marked most particularly by a seeming lack of ambition to accomplish anything specific. After being elected to the Texas House in 1984, he told a newspaper in Abilene, "I had not one piece of legislation I planned to carry." When the state land commissioner asked him to sponsor a bill, Perry told the commissioner not to bother explaining it. "I wouldn't understand it anyway," Perry said.

Back then, the future global-warming denier was a Democrat, and even supported Al Gore for the presidency in 1988. But with Texas moving to the right, Perry switched parties the following year – not for ideological reasons, it appears, but because he could sense the wind shifting. "Perry is a really, really good politician," one Republican strategist later explained. "He understood where the state of Texas was going." The move also enabled Perry to defeat Jim Hightower, a popular Democrat, as agricultural commissioner, a powerful post in America's second-biggest farm state. During his two terms in the office, Perry demonstrated little ideological bent, even expressing support for Hillary Clinton's health care plan in the early Nineties. In 1998, Perry was elected lieutenant governor alongside George W. Bush, serving with the kind of distinction that made his boss look like Winston Churchill. Perry reportedly zoned out during a series of breakfast meetings that Bush held with top Texas politicians. "Sometimes, to pass the time, he would file his nails," The New Republic reported.

Bush and Perry reportedly had a chilly relationship, thanks in part to Bush's refusal to let Perry test the limits of political nepotism. In 1995, Perry wanted to nominate his brother-in-law, Joseph Thigpen, to the 11th Court of Appeals. Bush blocked the move, and legend has it that Perry blamed Karl Rove for the incident and never forgave either of them. This might help explain in part why Perry was so eager to start packing the state offices with cronies the moment Bush left for Washington.

Perry's prowess in building his political machine at the expense of taxpayers can be tied directly to his administration's almost mathematical precision in making government handouts match the campaign contribution. "There are a couple of things you need to do if you want to raise obscene amounts of money," says Andrew Wheat, research director at Texans for Public Justice. "One, you need to send the message that you're carefully counting who's giving how much, to create a competitive atmosphere. And two, you want to send not-so-subtle signals that there's going to be a return on the investment. And this governor has been a master of sending those signals."

How masterful has he been? According to Texans for Public Justice, Perry appointed 921 of his donors and their spouses to government posts over the past decade. All told, those appointees gave a staggering $17 million to his campaigns – 21 percent of the entire amount he raised during that time. To give an indication of just how completely for-sale public appointments became during his administration, Perry collected $6.1 million from the 155 people he appointed to be regents of state universities in Texas.

You can get a fairly decent summary of Perry's track record as governor just by going down the list of political favors that were granted to the 204 "Central Committee" members who collectively contributed half of his campaign money. Start at the top: Perry's biggest single donor, the homebuilder Bob Perry, was rewarded with his very own regulatory agency.

Back in the Nineties, Bob Perry made a fortune building cheap homes, and he had enormous success in circumventing regulation, taking advantage of arbitration clauses that prevented homeowners from suing in the event of leaks or faulty construction or other problems. But after he lost a high-profile arbitration case, he and other builders decided to go straight to the top. In 2003, his company's general counsel, John Krugh, served on a task force established to craft new legislation. The result was a bill creating the Texas Residential Construction Commission, which Gov. Perry signed into law that year. Not long after getting a $100,000 check from Bob Perry, the governor appointed Krugh to serve on the new nine-member commission.

The commission, which initially included four builders and not a single consumer advocate, was a masterpiece of deregulation – actually a kind of deregulation from within, in which builders created and ran a toothless regulatory agency to non-police themselves. The body forced homeowners to pay, at minimum, hundreds of dollars for an inspection fee before making any complaint against a builder. And though the commission frequently ruled in favor of ripped-off homeowners, it had no enforcement power at all – meaning homeowners rarely got their homes fixed.

Perry's entire career as governor is marked by a history of similar handouts to his top donors. In 2005, he signed an executive order to speed approval for 17 new coal-fired power plants that would drive the state's carbon footprint past that of Florida, California and New York combined. Eleven of the plants were slated to be built by TXU, a million-dollar donor. Then there was the chicken-farming king Lonnie Pilgrim, who once handed out $10,000 checks on the floor of the Texas legislature in advance of a bill; he gave more than $600,000 to the governor and his causes, and Perry repaid the favor by petitioning the EPA for a waiver of federal ethanol mandates, which had jacked up the price of corn feed for Pilgrim's business.

Perhaps the single most interesting favor that Perry doled out is one that directly violated his supposedly "conservative" Tea Party principles. One of his first big moves as governor was to back the Trans-Texas Corridor, a $175 billion project to privatize the state's highways. This was to be the mother of all public-works projects, a 4,000-mile highway network, at some points four football fields wide, that would also include commuter rails, freight rails and telecom pipelines. The TTC, in essence, was the ultimate Tea Party nightmare, a massive public boondoggle that would have created a huge network of new tolls and required a nearly unprecedented use of eminent domain to help the state seize nearly 500,000 acres of land from ranchers and farmers.

Though most of the project was shot down by the state legislature, Perry did manage to push through several parts of it, most notably a few stretches of new highway construction around Houston and Dallas. Some of the beneficiaries of those projects were American firms that had donated lots of money to Perry and the governors association, like Williams Brothers Construction ($621,000), Parsons Corporation ($410,000) and JP Morgan Chase ($191,000). But another beneficiary was a Spanish firm called Cintra, part of a consortium that won the development rights for the original TTC project.

Cintra's involvement was an obvious case of revolving-door politics. A Cintra consultant named Dan Shelley left private practice in 2004 and joined the Perry Politburo that same year, working as the governor's legislative liaison during the time Cintra was in line to win the multibillion-dollar project. A year later, Shelley went back to private practice, earning more than $50,000 in consulting fees from Cintra once he left "public" office.

Cintra ultimately received about $5 billion in contracts from the state to develop three major highway projects, one of which, a toll road in central Texas, is one of the few surviving remnants of the hated TTC. On another Cintra highway, the North Tarrant Express near Fort Worth, the state ponied up $570 million to subsidize the project and permitted Cintra to recoup its investment by building toll lanes for drivers who want to bypass the free lanes. That means future generations of Texans who are in a hurry to get somewhere will have the pleasure of being able to jump on a toll lane they already paid taxes to help build. It turns out you can mess with Texas after all.

That's if the road ever gets finished. Cintra received a similar contract to run a toll road in Indiana, but it soon ran into financial problems and had to jack up tolls to pay for the $3.8 billion project. In Texas, Cintra will have some latitude to raise rates on its roads, and if you don't like it, well, fuck you. "What are we going to do – go complain to a board in Spain?" says Terri Hall, founder of an advocacy group called Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom that fought the highway deal.

In addition to the highway contract with Cintra, Perry this year signed a bill written in part by a lobbyist for a British firm called Balfour Beatty, paving the way for the state to sell virtually everything that isn't nailed down to anyone – foreigners included. The bill, Hall says, allows "all public buildings, nursing homes, hospitals, schools, ports, mass transit projects, telecommunications, etc. to be sold off to corporations." Even more incredibly, the bill authorizes companies to borrow money from the state, which will also help secure their debt. In other words, Perry passed a bill under which a foreign company could theoretically borrow money from Texas taxpayers to buy the taxpayer's own state property back from him, at a discount!

But the most treasonous Perry deal of all came when he tried to do a macabre favor for his political hero, former senator Phil Gramm. Gramm gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to Perry's campaign, essentially emptying the remnants of his own campaign war chest into Perry's when he left public office and went to work for the Swiss bank UBS. In 2002, Gramm came to Perry's administration with a proposal that would allow the bank to take out life insurance policies on retired Texas teachers. Under the deal, UBS would collect on the policies of the teachers when they died, and reward the state with a small cut for arranging the wagers. Teachers who balked at letting UBS profit from their death were reportedly to be paid $100 to sign on the dotted line. The state insurance commissioner, a Perry appointee, approved a special waiver to allow the deal to go through, but the project collapsed after a media backlash.

To recap: Rick Perry sold the right to tax Texas highway drivers to Spanish billionaires, let a British firm write a law authorizing the sale of virtually all Texas state property to foreign corporations, and tried to literally sell the lives of retired Texas schoolteachers to a Swiss bank. Yet he's somehow built a reputation in the national media as a fist-shaking America-first nativist, with a Tea Partier's passion for small government. How Perry has managed to sell this fictional version of himself is a testament to the extraordinary power of marketing over reality in our modern political system. In fact, his entire career is a profound testament to our nagging collective inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to distinguish between what a politician says and what he actually does.

"People are like, 'He wears a red shirt, he must think like I do,'" says Medina, Perry's Tea Party opponent. "It's 'you're Christian, I'm Christian, we must believe the same.'"

For a long time, perry masterfully exploited this basic weakness of the American voter. As he prepared his run for the White House, he took loud and drastic steps to plant flags in both of the main camps of the Republican Party base, making sure there was an extensive record of Tea Party-friendly remarks attached to his name, as well as lots of file footage of him cozying up to prominent evangelicals. He accomplished the former task mainly through his book, Fed Up!, an impressively shameless volume of avalanching self-congratulatory horseshit that lays the indignant Tea Partyisms on so thick, one imagines Perry wearing a tricorner hat as he dictates to his ghost writer. "We are tired of being told how much salt we can put on our food, what windows we can buy for our house, what kind of cars we can drive," Perry writes. "We are fed up with bailout after bailout and stimulus after stimulus... the government picking winners and losers based on circumstance and luck."

Nowhere in the book, of course, does it mention that Perry, who famously refused Obama's stimulus money and blasted the administration for reckless borrowing and creating "zero jobs," greenlighted two gigantic stimulus programs of his own. Both the $200 million Emerging Technology Fund and the $363 million Texas Enterprise Fund were little more than crude vehicles for repaying campaign donors with state aid. The state has also given millions in handouts through the Texas Film Commission, paying for TV commercials for Fortune 500 firms like Walmart.

Perry, who consistently criticizes Obama for borrowing to pay for his stimulus, even paid for the Texas Enterprise Fund in part by borrowing $161 million from the state's unemployment insurance fund – meaning he took money from the paychecks of blue-collar workers and turned it into millions in welfare grants for companies like Lockheed Martin, Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard. Ironically, Texas is now running out of money to pay for unemployment claims – including those laid off by companies receiving grants from the Texas Enterprise Fund.

But despite the fact that Perry does a lot of exactly what he decries in his book, there are still plenty of Tea Partiers who profess fierce loyalty to him. The odd thing is that while being uncompromising and morally absolutist is normally one of the key features of the entire Tea Party movement, some of the same true believers who were willing to risk a national default rather than borrow one single dollar over the debt limit suddenly become long-view-taking pragmatists when it comes to Perry. "Ideology is wonderful in principle," says Toby Marie Walker, a Tea Party leader in Waco, sounding more like Barack Obama than John Birch. "But it's not practical in politics."

Walker says she gives Perry credit for changing course when there was a public outcry over some of his less-than-classically-conservative policies – including his use of eminent domain (he later signed a bill restricting it) and his HPV vaccine order (which he has since renounced as a "mistake"). Admitting your mistakes, says Walker, is "valuable to have in a leader."

When I point out that Perry essentially repeated the same "mistake" this year, signing a bill mandating shots of a meningitis vaccine (made by Novartis, a $700,000 donor) for every college freshman in the state, Walker suddenly changes tack and defends the move as good policy. "You can opt out of a shot – you cannot opt out of meningitis," says Walker, joking that I'm giving the governor a hard time for forcing people to avoid cancer. When I ask how that is any different from Obama forcing people to buy health insurance, she again points to the "optional" nature of Perry's executive orders. "I can't opt out of Barack Obama's health care plan," she says.

In point of fact, students can "opt out" of Perry's vaccines only if they obtain a conscientious-objection form from the Texas Department of State Health Services, and renew it every two years – which, if nothing else, is an entertainingly surrealist take on the Tea Party doctrine of limited government.

In any case, my discussion with Walker is predictably pointless. When I ask about Perry selling stretches of already-paid-for highway to foreigners, Walker replies, "We need another road." When I ask about Perry trying to force Texans to pay tolls to an unaccountable Spanish corporation, the answer is, "I don't have a problem paying for upkeep."

When you start hearing Tea Partiers say they don't mind paying taxes, you know the matter has exited the realm of the logical. Medina, who took an impressive 18 percent of the vote in her primary race against Perry, says some Republican voters are so focused on beating Barack Obama that they can't see the truth about a big-government machine politician like Perry.

"You have to want to know," she says. "And it's easier not to."

As befits any Texas politician, Perry has always been at least superficially religious, growing up in the same Methodist tradition as George W. Bush. But like his relatively late conversion to extreme anti-tax/Tea Party rhetoric, Perry's decision to throw in with the truly loony sect of evangelicals only came very recently, after a prayer meeting with two crazy-ass pastors, Tom Schlueter of Arlington and Bob Long of San Marcos, in his office in 2009. According to The Texas Observer, Schlueter had received a "prophetic message" the day before this visit from a local Christian soothsayer named Chuck Pierce, instructing him to "pray by lifting the hand of the one I show you that is in the place of civil rule." Meaning Perry, apparently.

The governor bought the act, paving the way for his impressive slate of primary-season pandering to evangelicals this year. The big ploy was an early-August stadium God-tacular called "The Response," in which Perry invited Christian leaders – featuring a heavy concentration of Rapture merchants and End Timers – to pack into Reliant Stadium in Houston to read the Good Book and "respond" to wayward America's departure from proper Christian values. Perry surely scored points with evangelicals everywhere by brazenly using state resources to promote the event, which his office unironically described as "a nondenominational, apolitical Christian prayer meeting." And his performance in front of the crowd of 30,000 evangelicals was strong stuff. He smiled through his perfect tan and repeatedly clasped his hands together for rhetorical emphasis as he read from the Book of Joel: "Return to me with all your heart, with fasting, weeping and mourning!"

The choice of reading was no accident, as the Book of Joel is very popular with the two preachers who shared the stage with Perry that night, Alice Patterson and C.J. Jackson, both bigwigs in the extremist movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation. In fact, followers of NAR sometimes refer to themselves as "Joel's Army." They believe Joel describes how God is coming back to set up a "kingdom on Earth" with a church that will be "organized more as a military force with an army, navy and air force," to dispense justice and set shit straight with all of us nonbelievers before the second coming of Jesus.

NAR literature dwells endlessly on the need to conquer the so-called "seven mountains" of earthly culture, including the media, Hollywood and Congress, so all the Democrats and relativist comics and other satanic forces can be purged on time before the Great End. These people are completely nuts, and quite obviously expect Perry to start filling the cattle cars for them as soon as he gets elected.

Watching Perry addressing the crowd, several questions naturally came to mind. One was, "Does he really believe this stuff?" But another one was, "Would it matter if he did?" After all, there are times in life when insanity is indistinguishable from cynicism. A man who will take money to greenlight a dangerous nuclear-waste dump that might blow up 30 years from now is not much different from the guy who doesn't balance his checkbook because he thinks Armageddon is coming before the end of the quarter. In both cases, the long view doesn't matter.

That is why Rick Perry is so dangerous. He represents the ultimate merger of nihilistic short-term corporate calculation and rightist apocalyptic extremism. He is a politician willing to do absolutely anything for a buck today, playing to a demographic of millions willing to walk off a cliff en masse tomorrow. In a Rick Perry White House, there will not be much planning for a rainy-day future.

Perry's run for the White House as a small-government Tea Party conservative is one of the all-time great marketing scams, a breathtaking high-wire act by a man who if nothing else certainly has the gigantic balls required for the most powerful job in the world. But it's an act that should have ended after just a few steps down the rope, when he slipped up in the Orlando debate and told the truth.

Among other attacks that night, Perry was taking criticism for his decision back in 2007 to order all sixth-grade girls in Texas to be inoculated against HPV – specifically, with three shots of Gardasil vaccine, a Merck product that sells for a tidy $120 a shot. Michele Bachmann, who not only hates the move as an intrusive use of state power but probably also because it interferes with God's ability to administer punitive cancers to dabblers in extramarital sex, blasted Perry for delivering such a blatant favor to his corporate buddies at Merck. "We cannot forget that in the midst of this executive order, there is a big drug company that made millions of dollars because of this mandate," she said, pointing out that Perry's former chief of staff was the chief lobbyist for Merck.

Perry's response was telling. "It was a $5,000 contribution that I had received from them," he said. "I raised about $30 million. And if you're saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I'm offended."

The Orlando crowd applauded nervously, not quite grasping what Perry had just said. Had the debate taken place in Austin, however, the crowd would have erupted in knowing laughter. Rick Perry, as any Texan knows, does not roll over for 5,000 measly dollars. He charges a hell of a lot more than that. The price tag varies, of course, depending on the favor. Based on the donations Perry has collected, it costs an average of $39,354 to buy a seat on the board of a state university. Landing a state road project runs about half a million, while creating an entire government commission specifically designed to protect your business interests will run you more than $13 million.

We thought Bush was the worst thing Texas ever gave to America. But if Rick Perry wins the White House, it won't be long before we're all remembering crazy-ass W. and his loony Iraq crusade with something like fondness. Bush, for all his flaws, actually believed in something, and was filled with humanity – negative humanity, mostly, but it was there all the same. Good ol' George, the ex-drunk who loved football, couldn't speak English, choked on his pretzels and sincerely wanted to save Iraq from itself!

There were lines even George Bush wouldn't cross, but we don't know any that exist for Rick Perry. Imagine what he could charge for abolishing the EPA, or selling Mount Rushmore to the Sultan of Brunei. And while he may have slipped in the polls, he's far from done. In this country, you never count out the lowest common denominator, especially when it knows how to raise money.

This story is from the November 10, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone.

Mica blasts nation toll road bank, but okay with state banks

Link to article here.

We agree that there should be NO federal infrastructure bank, however we vehemently oppose any STATE infrastructure banks (which Mica promotes). Both amount to loans of taxpayer money to private corporations granted government-sanctioned monopolies.


US House Committee Blasts National Toll Road Bank Proposal
Presidential toll road bank hits roadblock in US House committee of jurisdiction.

Rep. John MicaA top congressional leader on Wednesday made clear his opposition to President Obama's idea of spending $10 billion to create a national infrastructure bank (view details). The bank, part of the White House jobs bill, would offer public subsidy for the financing of "public private partnerships" -- which most often would take the form of a toll road. The chairman of the US House Transportation Committee said at a hearing the president's plan would not advance.

"A national infrastructure bank is dead on arrival in the House of Representatives," Chairman John Mica (R-Florida) said. "If you want a recipe to put off job creation, adopt that national infrastructure bank proposal."

Opponents called the proposal a "distraction" from the issue of a long-term highway program reauthorization bill which would include funding for state-level toll road banks. Already, thirty-two states have their own infrastructure banks which have financed $6.3 billion in loan agreements along the same lines as the proposed federal bank.

"Many people are skeptical that bureaucrats in Washington would have any idea which transportation projects are most deserving of receiving a federal loan," Highways and Transit subcommittee Chairman John J. Duncan, Jr (R-Tennessee) said. "This skepticism is why Congress has already established the state infrastructure bank program in SAFETEA-LU."

In addition, the US Department of Transportation already provides federal credit for transportation projects under the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA), which has offered $8.4 billion in project finance. Dozens of other financing mechanisms are offered by the Federal Highway Administration.

"Why build one when you could build two for twice the price?" Representative Howard Coble (R-North Carolina) said sarcastically.

Democrats offered the only backing for the bank idea.

"Before Wall Street destroyed the economy, I had said, 'Well, I really don't see the need for an infrastructure bank -- most of the states have good credit and they can go out and borrow on their own at very good rates," said subcommittee Ranking Member Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon). "But that isn't the case any more. The states need guarantees, they need help, many are against their borrowing limits, and most of the banks generously bailed out by Congress -- not by me, I didn't vote for it -- aren't lending. Credit and bond markets are tight."

DeFazio only supports the use of the bank only for water, sewer and energy projects. He does not support tolls on existing interstates.

Note to Kasich: Don't privatize Ohio turnpike

Link to article here.

Privatizing the Ohio Turnpike: Learn from Indiana

By Matt Lundy

Avon Lake Patch

September 23, 2011

Recently I wrote about how Lake Erie is one of our greatest resources in Ohio. Other states would love to have a fresh water supply like Lake Erie. I also believe that another one of our great resources is The Ohio Turnpike.

Many of us have utilized and have invested in the turnpike over the years. I often travel the road over to I-71 for my weekly trips to and from Columbus. The toll road is kept in good shape and plowed very well in the winter making it a safe driving experience.

I hate to report that Governor Kasich is still moving forward with plans to sell or lease the turnpike. I strongly oppose this plan and offered several amendments to the budget bill to stop any such action from taking place. Unfortunately, my amendments to stop the sale or lease were voted down in committee and on the floor of the legislature along party lines. The governor is moving forward by hiring a consultant to determine a price for the state to seek in the deal.

Indiana, where the state privatized its turnpike, has seen tolls double. Also, the foreign company that paid more than $3 billion for the 157-mile toll road is now struggling to pay its loans. We can learn a lot from Indiana. I am also very concerned that as tolls increase, heavy trucks will use I-90 and surrounding roads causing more problems and repairs paid for by you and other taxpayers.

Finally, any money made by Ohio on the deal is one-time money and a shortsighted move without any regard for our economic future. This is an uphill fight to stop, but I will continue to do all that I can to keep and protect our Ohio Turnpike.

I want to thank the many residents who attended our last “Lundy Listens” town hall in North Ridgeville. I hope you will make plans to join me for my next town hall on Oct. 20 at 7 p.m. at the Sheffield Village Municipal Complex. I work for you and want to hear your concerns on state issues. You can always reach me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or 614-644-5076.

I look forward to serving you.  

About this column: Matt Lundy (D-57) represents Avon Lake and sections of Lorain County in the Ohio House of Representatives. Elected in 2006, the Avon Lake native recently earned his bid at re-election. Lundy’s column, Eye on Columbus, will appear monthly.

TSA exempts officials of terror states from 'invasive' searches

Link to article here.

So if officials from terrorist-sponsored nations are being exempted from the new invasive searches by TSA, then why are they subjecting millions of innocent American travelers to them? After this revelation, it certainly can't be for security reasons...this is big daddy government violating our 4th Amendment rights, our freedom to travel, and conditioning us to accept government overreach and the fondling of women and children as an accepted form of abuse as a condition of travel.

Officials From Terror-Sponsoring State ‘Exempted From Enhanced Screening’ by TSA

By Fred Lucas
November 1, 2011
Subscribe to Fred Lucas's posts
   
(CNSNews.com) – While six-year-old girls and retired school teachers with bladder cancer were subjected to intrusive pat-downs by Transportation Security Administration officials at U.S. airports after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate his underwear on a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas 2009, officials from Sudan--one of just four countries the State Department lists as a state sponsor of terrorism--were “exempted from enhanced screening” at airports, according to a State Department cable obtained by CNSNews.com.

The cable indicates that Sudan, upset that its citizens traveling to the United States would be subjected to increased scrutiny--as were those from 13 other countries--threatened to subject U.S. passengers traveling to Sudan to the same stepped-up body pat-downs, bag checks and other security measures.

“We will have to accord you the same treatment,” it quotes a Sudanese official telling a U.S. diplomat in early 2010.

In response to the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound aircraft, the TSA on Jan. 3, 2010 announced new security measures.
People headed for the U.S. holding passports issued by countries deemed to harbor people who were terror risks, as well as anyone traveling to the U.S. from or through those countries, were to face “enhanced screening” before boarding their flights.

The countries listed were Sudan, Cuba, Iran and Syria – all designated state sponsors of terror – as well as Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen.

According to the State Department cable dated Jan. 13, 2010, Robert Whitehead, charge d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, had met with a Sudanese foreign ministry official two days earlier. The Sudanese official, whose name was redacted, expressed outrage that Sudan was included among the 14 countries listed.

The cable said the Sudanese official “also expressed concern over whether official delegations or government ministers would be subjected to the new security procedures, given the upcoming trip to Washington for the consultations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by GOS [Government of Sudan] Finance Minister Awad Aljaz [REDACTED].”

“Asked whether Aljaz should be advised to cancel his trip, CDA [Whitehead] responded that while government ministers were exempted from enhanced screening under TSA guidelines, he could make no guarantee for treatment of Aljaz by security personnel in transit countries,” the memo said.

The cable to the Secretary of State’s office was written by the political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum, Alexander Tatsis, and marked “immediate.”

It is among several documents obtained by CNSNews.com through a Freedom of Information Act request for information relating to Abdulmutallab's Detroit bombing attempt.

TSA
The Transportation and Security Administration announced new security measures in early January 2010, following the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound aircraft. (Logo: TSA)

Asked about the policy of exempting officials from state sponsors of terror from enhanced screening at airports, TSA spokesman Kawika Riley said, “For security reasons, the specific details of our security directives are not public.”

“TSA uses multiple layers of security to reduce risk to aviation security and the traveling public,” Riley said in a written statement. “Physical screenings at the checkpoint are partnered with numerous other layers, such as intelligence gathering and analysis, checking passenger manifests against watch lists, federal air marshals and federal flight deck officers, and other security measures both seen and unseen.”

A State Department spokesman did not respond to inquiries from CNSNews.com.

On Christmas Day 2009, Abdulmutallab, a 23 year-old Nigerian, tried to blow up a passenger jet traveling from Amsterdam to Detroit. After he set alight his explosive-laden underwear, passengers and security personnel were able to stop him and put the fire out.

The TSA then announced the new security measures.

The State Department cable quotes the Sudanese foreign ministry official as saying, “It’s not clear to us what these new procedures are.”

The official also “argued that Sudan should not have been singled out, noting that GOS continues to cooperate closely with USG [U.S. government] on counterterrorism issues,” it said.

The official warned Whitehead that Khartoum may impose the same enhanced security measures on U.S. travelers to Sudan.

“We have been quite lenient in the past [toward Americans], but we will have to accord you the same treatment,” the official was quoted as saying.

The TSA measures have been controversial at home.

News stories surfaced this year of a six-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy facing pat-downs and other enhanced screening tactics before boarding flights.

In one reported incident, a retired school teacher and bladder cancer survivor was humiliated in the Detroit Metropolitan Airport after a pat-down burst his urostomy bag, leaving him covered in urine.

TSA sets-up highway checkpoints

Link to article here.

Ron Paul Calls TSA ‘Jack-Booted Thugs’ in Response to Highway Checkpoints

The Blaze Posted on October 25, 2011 at 10:21am by  Liz Klimas    Liz Klimas
A week ago, Tennessee became the first state to team up with the U.S. Transportation Security Administration to implement highway checkpoints for random searches in a move to counter terrorism.

Ron Paul’s response? That the Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR) program with its “sinister, military-style acronym“ is violating Fourth Amendment rights with random highway checkpoints by ”jack-booted thugs.” He writes on his website:

So first we are told by the U.S. Supreme Court that American citizens have no 4th amendment protections at border crossings, even when standing on U.S. soil. Now TSA takes the next logical step and simply detains and searches U.S. citizens at wholly internal checkpoints.

[...]

The real tragedy occurs when Americans incrementally become accustomed to this treatment on the roads just as they have become accustomed to it in the airports. We already accept arriving at the airport 2 or more hours before a flight to get through security; will we soon have to build in an extra 2 or 3 hours into our road trips to allow for checkpoint traffic?

VIPR was created in 2005 in response to the 2004 Madrid bombings to increase security at rail and mass transit systems in the United States. By 2007, VIPR had “augmented security” at transportation facilities in cities like New York, Buffalo, Los Angeles and Boston.

So why has VIPR moved to Tennessee highways? Channel 5 reports Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons as saying ”Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days on an airplane more likely on the interstate.”

The Examiner goes as far as to liken the checkpoints to “those used in Nazi Germany.” The report also states that these checkpoints were not established based on any specific threat.

TxDOT to pay its execs a million in salaries

The Wall Streetification of TxDOT begins....public service used to actually mean service before Rick Perry. Now it means hire lobbyists and pay them the equivalent of their former private sector salaries at taxpayer expense -- before they've even done one day on the job! All this is with the GOP-led Texas Legislature's blessing (no way one can call them fiscally conservative) in a down economy when every other state agency experienced cuts, TxDOT received 26% more than last biennium. It's all about enriching campaign donors and a Wall Street takeover of a department with access to BILLIONS in state contracts. And this is how TxDOT is spending their windfall...

Link to article here.

Texas Department of Transportation: Salary situation doesn't sit well

Editorial Board

Austin American Statesman
Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011

The Texas Transportation Commission got one right, and they got one very wrong.

Last week, the commission decided not to seek permission to increase the $292,500 annual salary of Phil Wilson, the new executive director of the Texas Department of Transportation, until he's had a chance to prove himself as leader of the state agency.

But then the commission gave Wilson the authority to hire five new managers and pay them at least $250,000 a year.

The commissioners' vote allows Wilson to pay up to $272,000 a year for a deputy executive director and up to $250,000 each for a chief financial officer, a chief planning and project officer, an "innovative financing/debt management" officer, and an unspecified fifth executive officer.

Once everyone is hired and in place, Wilson and his TxDOT executive team will cost state taxpayers more than $1.5 million a year if each new hire is paid the maximum salary allowed.

The executive director Wilson replaced, Amadeo Saenz, was a 33-year TxDOT veteran who was making $192,000 a year when he retired in August.

Other than Wilson, who began his new job Oct. 17, no one at the Transportation Department currently makes more than $200,000 a year.


The Legislature this year authorized TxDOT to pay its executive director and up to five assistants a maximum of $292,500 a year. The Legislature allowed the commission to seek permission from the governor and the Legislative Budget Board, a joint committee of the Legislature led by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Joe Straus, to pay TxDOT executives above the maximum. The commission asked Gov. Rick Perry and the board if they could pay Wilson $381,000 a year, but Perry rejected the commission's request Oct. 13.

Wilson, commission chairman Ted Houghton and the other members of the Transportation Commission say annual salaries of $250,000 or more are necessary to attract top talent from private companies. We're not sure the talent to manage a state agency or assist in its management is exclusive to the private sector.

At any rate, it's not an argument the commission persuasively could have made when it decided to hire Wilson.

Wilson, 44, was a political aide to former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm for about 10 years, was Perry's director of communications and deputy chief of staff until 2007 when the governor appointed him Texas secretary of state, an agency with about 200 employees. He has no experience running an agency as large as the Transportation Department, which has 12,000 employees. Unlike every one of his predecessors at TxDOT, he is not an engineer.

He resigned as secretary of state in 2008 to become a lobbyist and senior vice president for public affairs at Luminant Energy. That's his significant private-sector experience.

We accept the argument that the Department of Transportation, like any state agency, or any private business for that matter, could stand a shot of fresh blood and fresh ideas from time to time. Institutions find themselves bound by tradition and hemmed in by insular management all the time.

But as we said earlier this month when the commission sought permission to pay Wilson $381,000, in a period of steep budget cuts it's insensitive, to say the least, to pay a new, unproven executive director a salary way beyond what most other state agency directors make — $292,500 is a healthy state salary. To significantly increase the salaries for his assistants compounds the insensitivity.

If you want to pursue a salary that steps toward the mid-six figures in the private sector, be our guest.

Otherwise, don't try to spell "money" from "public service."

__________________________________________________________________

Link to article here.

TxDOT to pay new execs $250,000 or more

By Ben Wear
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Published: 8:48 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27, 2011

The Texas Transportation Commission, setting aside for now how much more to pay Phil Wilson to lead the Texas Department of Transportation, granted him authority Thursday to pay a quarter-million dollars or more to each of five managers.

At least two of the executive positions would be newly created, and any or all of them could be hired from outside TxDOT.

The salaries for two existing positions that will see pay bumps — chief financial officer and deputy executive director — are currently $165,600 and $192,500.

Wilson, who since becoming executive director Oct. 17 has been making $292,500 a year, said he hopes to name at least four of the subordinates by the end of the year. Their hiring will be part of a face-lift of the 94-year-old , 12,000-employee department that includes creating an "innovation and modernization office" and another new office focusing on the agency's most important projects, and giving TxDOT's 25 district offices more autonomy.

"It'll be a new complexion for this agency," said commission chairman Ted Houghton , presiding over his first meeting after almost eight years as a commission member. "The point is to bring in new talent and thinking." The higher salaries are meant to attract candidates from the private sector.

Change was the overriding theme of Thursday's monthly meeting of the commission. Aside from having Wilson at his first meeting and Houghton in a fresh role, newly appointed Commissioner Jeff Austin III of Tyler was on hand for the first time. And the commission, displaced from TxDOT's state headquarters on East 11th Street for the next year while the building is renovated, met in a large conference room in an agency building on East Riverside Drive.

The board voted 4-0 — Commissioner Ned Holmes , who was absent for the September vote on Wilson's hiring, was once again a no-show — to authorize Wilson to pay a deputy executive director/chief engineering officer up to $272,000 annually. And the board vote allows salaries of up to $250,000 for a chief planning and project officer, a chief financial officer and an "innovative financing/debt management" officer.

Wilson, 44, will also be able to hire a fifth executive, also for as much as $250,000 a year, for an as-yet unspecified position.

"You have to at least be in a conversation that's competitive" with potential hires already making substantial salaries with private companies, Wilson said. "Having those extra resources will allow us to go get the kind of people to manage a multibillion dollar portfolio."

All of those salaries would probably exceed the pay of anyone currently working at TxDOT, Wilson aside, by a considerable amount. Former Executive Director Amadeo Saenz , who retired in August, was making $192,000 .

The Legislature, in the two-year budget passed this spring, authorized TxDOT to pay "Group 8" salaries (which have a ceiling of $292,500 a year) to its executive director and up to five "senior leadership positions." However, that same legislation allows the commission to petition the governor and the Legislative Budget Board — which includes Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, House Speaker Joe Straus and eight other legislators — for salaries above that Group 8 maximum.

The commission, at the time led by Deirdre Delisi , a former Gov. Rick Perry political aide, voted in September to hire Wilson at the maximum $292,500 and later asked for authority to pay him $381,000 a year. Wilson, who was a Perry deputy chief of staff working for Delisi before the governor named him Texas secretary of state in 2007 , was a lobbyist and senior vice president at Luminant Energy beginning in 2008. He left there to join TxDOT.

Perry, in an Oct. 13 letter, rejected the $381,000 figure and suggested that the commission and Wilson agree on something between $292,500 and $381,000. A commission member said in August that Wilson was making "in the high 300s" at Luminant.

Houghton said Thursday that, at least for the time being, the commission will not make a second request to exceed the statutory maximum.

"We're going to be playing that by ear," Houghton said. "Let everyone get to know Phil, and let him roll out his program."

Houghton said the agency has been dominated for too long by managers who have spent their whole careers at the agency, and thus are too steeped in TxDOT's mores and traditions to perceive avenues for improvement. Fresh faces, he said, won't have that problem.

"They'll run it and lead it," he said. "You're going to see some new faces in some important positions."

Houston HOV lanes turned toll lanes cost up to $10!

Link to article here.

What are they thinking? This is runaway taxation without representation! Along I-85 in Atlanta, they had more traffic use the HOV lanes BEFORE they opened them as toll lanes than they do now with single occupancy vehicles paying a toll. Using toll taxes as a means to manipulate drivers' behavior is not only statist and abusive government, it's punitive taxation in the hands of unelected bureaucrats who've been granted monopolies over our public roadways -- our lifeline for daily living. This is Rick Perry's idea of congestion relief and his brand of so-called fiscal conservatism.

Tolls could range up to $10 on Metro's new HOT lanes

By CAROL CHRISTIAN, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Updated 08:21 p.m., Thursday, October 27, 2011

 
Motorists who want to buy their way out of congestion on several area freeways next year should be prepared to pay as much as $10 per trip.

The Metropolitan Transit Authority board Thursday set a range of tolls from $1 to $10, depending on the time of day, for its new high-occupancy toll lanes. The first such lanes are scheduled to open in January in the Gulf Freeway's existing high-occupancy vehicle lanes between Dixie Farm Road and Dowling Street.

Metro officials said they hadn't yet worked out a detailed schedule of tolls. They said it was unlikely that tolls would reach the maximum of $10 when the service begins, but the agency reserves the right to charge that much if necessary to manage traffic congestion.

Metro's maximum tolls will be significantly higher than those charged by the Harris County Toll Road Authority on its Katy Freeway managed lanes, which also charge solo drivers for access. The Katy Freeway tolls range from 30 cents on weekends to $1.60 at certain peak hours.

Metro's tolls will apply only to drivers with no passengers who opt to use the HOV lanes for a price. Single-occupant vehicles will enter the lane through a designated path that allows tolling.

Vehicles with at least two occupants will not be charged a toll.

Metro police will patrol the lanes, which Metro operates through an arrangement with the Texas Department of Transportation.

As first proposed, Metro's HOT lanes were to have "dynamic" tolling that would change throughout the day with the level of congestion, but President and CEO George Greanias said Thursday staff members decided this approach would introduce too much change at the outset. The board can opt to add that feature later.

Through agreements between Metro and other tolling agencies, any vehicle can use the lanes if it has a windshield sticker issued by Metro or by the Harris County Toll Road Authority, Texas Toll Authority, Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority or North Texas Tollway Authority.

Violators who evade the toll will be assessed a $75 fine, while "occupancy violators" (solo drivers who use the lanes when they are designated for HOV use only) will be issued a citation requiring a court appearance.

When complete, Metro's 83-mile HOT-lane system will include tolled lanes on U.S. 59 South, scheduled to open in April; I-45 North, opening in July; U.S. 290, October 2012; and U.S. 59 North, January 2013.

Texas racks up one of biggest debts in the nation


Link to article here.

Former Texas State Rep. Jim Dunnam has also exposed the $31 billion in road debt racked up under Rick Perry and Republican leadership in Texas. We are in crisis right here in Texas while Perry gallivants around the country bragging he's a fiscal conservative and has balanced budgets.

Texas has racked up one of the biggest debts in the nation, report says
Monday, Oct 24, 2011, 12:17PM CST

By Trent Seibert
Texas Watchdog
you

Texas has racked up $282 billion in debt -- one of the highest state debts in the nation -- according to a report released today by a D.C.-area nonprofit.

In total, the nonprofit State Budget Solutions found, the debt of the nation’s 50 states is more than $4 trillion.

“These deficit numbers are staggering and should be frightening to the American public. Due to budget gimmicks, many states fail to give an adequate picture of how much trouble they are really in,” said Bob Williams, president of State Budget Solutions. “This report makes it clear that if legislators in Texas don't act immediately and decisively, their state will be facing a budget crises that we have never seen before.”
 
The report looked at all state debt and future spending obligations. It found that California had the largest deficit with more than $612 billion. In addition to the Lone Star and the Golden states, other top state debtors include New York, New Jersey and Illinois.

Vermont, North Dakota and South Dakota were among the states with the smallest debts.

This report comes on the heels of a Fort Worth Star-Telegram story on budget gimmicks used by Texas lawmakers.

From the Star-Telegram story by Aman Batheja:

By delaying payments and effectively writing IOUs this year, lawmakers kicked billions of dollars in costs to the Legislature that will convene in 2013. At the same time, they arranged to collect hundreds of millions of dollars earlier than expected, preventing that money from being available in the next legislative session.

The financial maneuvers complicate assessments of the state's economic picture. While Gov. Rick Perry's presidential campaign has repeatedly touted him as having six balanced budgets under his belt, others don't agree, especially when looking at the current two-year budget.

"If he wants to say that, that's fine, but in all reality the budget is not balanced," said state Rep. Garnet Coleman of Houston, a Democratic leader in the House. "I believe it's disingenuous."

Talmadge Heflin, director of the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation's Center for Fiscal Policy and a former House member, is also critical of the one-time fixes and gimmicks lawmakers use to make budgets look good on paper. While this year's budget was technically balanced, Heflin said, "If you look at what will have to be spent in the biennium, you can certainly make the argument that from a practical standpoint ... it is not."

If there is some good news for Texas in the report, it’s that when you divide outstanding debt up per-person in the state, Texas is in the middle of the pack, at $1,568 per Texan, based on state-issued financial reports.

That’s lower than Rhode Island’s per-capita debt of $3,000 or Oregon’s $2,960.

States with the lowest per-capita debt include Nebraska at $21, Wyoming at $78 and Indiana at $196.
 
Read the full State Budget Soutions report here.
 
Editor's note: State Budget Solutions partners with the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, a nonprofit journalism group which has paid Texas Watchdog for training services.

FBI investigates Toll Authority

Link to article here.

NTTA: FBI investigating board members' conduct, possible conflicts of interest
Posted:  10/21/2011 8:53 PM
Michael Lindenberger/Reporter

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is investigating the conduct of some North Texas Tollway Authority board members, including possible conflicts of interest, the authority disclosed Friday.

NTTA disclosed the existence of the investigation in two paragraphs on page 59 and 60 of a 596-page statement issued Friday to investors concerning its nearly $700 million bond offering expected to close next month. It said the FBI is concerned about "conduct" of board members, including possible conflicts of interest pertaining to NTTA business.

A spokeswoman for the authority confirmed to a reporter late Friday that the NTTA was cooperating with the FBI and federal prosecutors.

"The NTTA has been made aware of an investigation involving one or more individuals and is cooperating with the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office in connection with that investigation," communications director Kimberly Jackson said in an emailed statement to the News. "We do not have  any additional information."

It's not clear what the FBI is asking about, and the disclosure in the bond documents offers a broad range of potential sources of its concern.

"The Federal Bureau of Investigation has recently interviewed several officials of the Authority regarding any knowledge the officials may have concerning the conduct of certain current and former Board members, including possible conflicts of interests pertaining to Authority business," the statement reads.

NTTA does not believe that its staff or the entity itself is involved in any of the conduct under investigation, or that the investigation's outcome will significantly impact its finances. Nevertheless, the investigation could subsequently broaden, the disclosure notes.

"The Authority is cooperating fully with the FBI," it says. "There can be no assurance that the investigation will be limited to the matters described above or that the Authority will not become a target at a later date."

NTTA board member Kent Cagle said he had officially been told of the investigation only this past week, but had heard about it informally prior to that. He said he has not been interviewed by the FBI, but said he understands the focus is on two current and at least one former board member.

A spokesman for the FBI would not comment on the investigation or say whether it was related to the ongoing investigation of Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price.

"You've probably heard this before, but I can neither conform nor deny the existence of an investigation," said Mark White, the FBI's Dallas spokesman.

Earlier this week, NTTA was urged to strengthen its conflict of interest policies in the wake of a months-long audit of its governance model, a recommendation chairman Ken Barr said would be considered carefully.

Dallas Judge Clay Jenkins, a frequent critic of NTTA's board, said the investigation only reinforces the audit's conclusions.

"Any time there is an investigation there is concern," he said. "But I am confident NTTA will cooperate fully."

Post: Neither more free roads nor public transit can solve congestion

Link to article here.

Ya gotta love economists who try to apply free market principles to government-sanctioned monopolies...highways are not commodities on the open market. They're paid for by forcible taxation. Now the Washington Post tries to make the case from a few studies that 'congestion pricing' (it's congestion tolling, folks) is the ONLY way to solve congestion. We contend even congestion tolling won't solve congestion. It simply displaces traffic to other areas, many times onto neighborhood streets where it's unsafe for high-speed thru traffic to traverse in hurry where they might mow over Grandma and schoolchildren crossing the street. People have to get to work and few can dictate their work schedules. So they're forced onto the road during peak hours. Many cannot switch to another mode of travel, they may have to drop-off their children at school and run errands on the way home taking routes mass transit likely doesn't go.

How dare the government punish workers for driving to work during hours their employers require it in order for them to keep their jobs! Government manipulation of people's speed and driving habits may be something economists in their ivory towers and Europeans are willing to choke down, but not Americans who love hitting the open road and who cherish their freedom to travel.

If you look at the grand experiment in London (which the article leaves out), the 'pricing' got so outrageous, the people revolted and fired their Mayor who proposed DOUBLING the already high toll rates to access downtown London. It killed business in the downtown area, too. How is this free market -- to have the government dictate who can access your business based on (discretionary) income level?


 
Even public transit can’t defeat congestion

By Brad Plumer, Published: October 19

Washington Post

When traffic congestion gets especially nasty, the first thing planners think to do is expand road capacity. More lanes should ease the pressure, right? Except, that doesn’t work. As Eric Jaffe points out over at Atlantic Cities, traffic tends to expand to fill capacity. He cites a new paper in the American Economic Review that finds that traffic “increases proportionately to roadway lane kilometers for interstate highways and probably slightly less rapidly for other types of roads.”

 

Why is this? The demand for space on the roads is high. More lanes just cause people to drive more. Habits shift, too: The guy who’d previously left work at 6 in the morning to beat the traffic now decides to leave a little later, closer to rush hour. Overall congestion stays roughly constant.
A second option for planners, of course, is to expand public transportation. If there are more buses and subways, that should free up space on the roads, right? No again. Here are the authors of the AER paper, Gilles Duranton and Matthew Turner: “We find no evidence that the provision of public transportation affects [vehicle miles traveled. We conclude that increased provision of roads or public transit is unlikely to relieve congestion.”

As it turns out, this is a common finding. A World Bank study by Antonio Bento found that better bus service has essentially zero effect on total vehicle travel. (Boosting rail service can decrease car travel, but only modestly.) A University of California-Davis study by David Heres Del Valle also found no link between the quality of transit options and driving, although it did find that certain land-use policies could cut down on car travel somewhat.

This shouldn’t be so shocking. Road space during rush hour, after all, is a valuable commodity. When a highly valuable commodity is offered for below-market prices (or for free), we should expect shortages and long queues. In this case, the shortages are traffic jams. That doesn’t mean expanding roads is entirely useless. After all, if it means more people can travel on the roads at the times they’d prefer, that’s a tangible benefit. But bigger highways or better public transit shouldn’t be sold as a means of eliminating gridlock. (And, for those keeping score, that means this analysis in my earlier post on the congestion benefits of transit is wrong.)
So is there any way to reduce traffic congestion? Jaffe argues that the only viable option is congestion pricing — charging people a fee to use the roads during peak hours. Stockholm experimented with this program in 2007, Jaffe notes, and the results have been dramatic: “Transit ridership is up, traffic is down some 18 percent, and in some cases rush-hour delays have been cut in half.”

On the other hand, Felix Salmon adds some additional complications. Not only is congestion pricing unpopular — it’s human nature to prefer hidden costs (traffic delays) to explicit costs (fees) — but, over time, the fee starts to lose its effectiveness. Drivers adjust to the rush-hour charge and start clogging the lanes again. The only way to really liberate the roads from congestion is to do what Singapore does and constantly adjust prices until you get the desired amount of traffic. And sometimes that means cranking the fee way up — to painful levels (especially for low-income commuters). Economists love this idea because it’s a genuine market solution, bringing supply and demand into balance. But that doesn’t mean it’s politically painless.

 
© The Washington Post Company

Toll tags that film you INSIDE your car!

Link to article here.

Could Your Freeway Pass Soon Be Used to Film You? You Might Be Surprised

October 14, 2011 by  Liz Klimas    Liz Klimas
The Blaze

Kapsch Traffic Com AG, a transponder (i.e., E-Z Pass and IPass) manufacturer, filed a patent for technology to include  an inward and outward pointing camera.

Technology is not necessarily going to be created.

If it were, it would be used to monitor HOV lanes.

Kapsch signed a 10 year contract to provide transponders for 22 toll systems in the United States.

Kapsch transponders can be found in 41 countries and 64 million cars worldwide.

ipassFirst, it was OnStar tracking users even after subscription to the service was canceled — which they since pulled back on. Now, there’s a patent filed for an in-car device that would be used for monitoring purposes.

MSNBC reports that Kapsch TrafficCom AG, an Austrian company that creates transponders like E-Z Pass, which allows cars to breeze through tolls, filed a patent for technology that would include cameras in such devices. Cameras would point inside the car as well as out:

The stated reason for an inward-pointing camera is to verify the number of occupants in the car for enforcement of HOV and HOT lanes. The outward-pointing camera could be used for the same purpose, helping authorities enforce minimum occupant rules against drivers who aren’t carrying transponders.

But it’s easy to imagine other uses.  The patent says the transponders would have the ability to store and transmit pictures, either at random intervals or on command from a central office. It would be tempting to use them as part of a search for a lost child, for example, and law enforcement officials might find the data treasure trove irresistible.  The gadget could also be instructed to take pictures when the acceleration of a car “exceeds a threshold,” or when accidents occur, so it could be used like an airplane cockpit flight recorder.


HOV
If a transponder including cameras were to be created, its said function would be to catch those violating HOV rules.

Right now, police officers wait at entrances and exits to highways with HOV lanes, pulling over violators. Monitoring these highways takes time and money.

Even still, the manufacturer, which just signed a 10-year contract to provide transponders to 22 toll collection systems, notes that this is just a patent stage protecting the idea, not that they will go through with making it. And MSNBC reports that P.J. Wilkins, executive director of the E-Z Pass Group consortium, as saying he didn‘t know of the company’s camera idea.

Although this may provide some consolation, MSNBC includes the not-so-comfortable snowball effect should similar devices be developed:

And while it’s possible cameras-in-cars technology would be a non-starter in America, that doesn‘t mean Americans shouldn’t be worried, said Lee Tien, a privacy expert with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“I think (drivers) should be pretty concerned,” he said. “You want to make sure any use of that technology is very carefully regulated. People should let the E-Z Pass folks know now what they think about any possible plans to introduce cameras in their cars, now, while it’s being developed, rather than before it’s already a fait accompli, and some agency says it‘s already spent millions on it and can’t turn back now.”

[...]

“You could imagine that they could limit the capacity of devices  — say the images would be destroyed after a very short period of time — so it would not be as powerful a surveillance device. But that’s not the general dynamic,” he said. “Once you have the device out there, someone says, ‘Why not use it for this, or that.‘ That’s usually where the battle between privacy and other social goals is lost.”

An actual IPass user on the Slashdot discussion board expresses his concerns about the patent and infringement of privacy:

“I received a form letter from the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority saying that my first-generation ‘IPASS’ transponder needs to be replaced because the battery is old. I called them for clarification since the first-generation transponders obviously have user-replaceable batteries, and I wanted to keep this version because it beeps when a toll is paid. (This notifies drivers that their battery is still good, unlike the silent second-generation version, which informs them of a dead battery by sending a ticket in the mail.) The woman on the phone explained that they were replacing them just because the electronics are old. This uninformed answer made me research the device. I found that the manufacturer has recently filed a patent application for a new transponder that has a camera in it — a camera pointed inward at the occupants. How long before they make it illegal to cover that camera with tape?”

E-Z Pass customers have been concerned with tracking before, even though the company says it doesn’t use the device for tracking purposes. But to help quell complaints it did release an anonymous version.

Wilkins states, according to MSNBC, that Americans shouldn’t be concerned about E-Z Pass tracking when cell phones companies already admit to tracking customers.

But maybe that means they should worry more.

Perry doesn't learn: Headed down same path that killed the TTC


Link to article here.

Rick Perry doesn't learn. He repeated the HPV vaccine mistake by mandating another vaccine tied to his campaign donors again in the 82nd legislative session, he signed another bill to sell-off Texas roads to foreign companies (SB 1420) and another to sell-off every other kind of public infrastructure to foreign entities (SB 1048), and now he's promoting a Koch Brothers energy plan to push a controversial, eminent domain abusing pipeline tied to the Kochs' to benefit yet another foreign company, TransCanada.

Perry banking on pro-drilling energy plan

By Christy Hoppe and ElizabethSouder  
The Dallas Morning News
First Posted: October 12, 2011

DALLAS — Rick Perry, looking to take the offensive on job creation and revive his struggling campaign, is poised to advance a “drill here, drill now” initiative with a heavy reliance on environmental deregulation and new pipelines.

Perry has been under pressure to release an economic blueprint and his campaign will fully unveil the energy plan Friday in Pennsylvania. He touted it in Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, without many details, as a way to create 1.2 million jobs and free the country from its foreign oil dependence.

Critics are already dismissing the underpinnings of the plan, saying that any president would lack the authority to implement it, that Perry underestimates the country’s affinity for environmental protections and that he will face the kind of fierce resistance to oil pipelines that dismantled his Trans Texas Corridor.

The plan, as previewed in a column Perry wrote this week in the New Hampshire Union Leader, would ostensibly require no congressional action and would include boosts for renewable energy. The emphasis is on opening oil and gas shale formations to drilling in the Alaska Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, offshore and throughout the continental U.S.

At the same time, Perry would shut off any new federal regulations on hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” or on drilling and toxic emissions, which he calls “job-killers.”

Jim Marston, director of the state’s Environmental Defense Fund, said most voters won’t want to replicate Perry’s Texas record.

“I don’t think Texans want us to be this dirty, and I’m very comfortable that the rest of the nation does not want to surpass us,” Marston said.

The Perry campaign declined to provide any further details of the plan, but many of the jobs Perry cited presumably would come from projected boosts in manufacturing and purchased goods from reduced energy costs.

“Economic growth and security should not be pit against environmental stewardship,” Perry wrote, saying he would create high-paying jobs at the same time continuing to protect the environment.

Texas Railroad Commissioner Barry Smitherman, who helped the governor craft the new energy policies, told The Dallas Morning News on Wednesday that new Environmental Protection Agency regulations on endangered species and drilling techniques create uncertainty for the industry and slow production.

He called for a “moratorium on new EPA regulations in traditional drilling areas.”

The drilling component doesn’t differ much from President Barack Obama’s decisions in office, said University of Texas professor Michael Webber.

“Perry wants to do the same thing Obama did, only he wants to do it dirtier,” said Webber, associate director for the university’s Center for International Energy&Environmental Policy. He pointed out that U.S. oil production has grown under Obama after decades of contraction.

Smitherman said new pipelines are key to Perry’s energy plan.

“It’s not just drill, drill, drill, because we’re drilling a lot now,” Smitherman said.

He pointed out that consumers are buying high-cost international oil because the country lacks the pipelines to bring U.S. oil to major refineries.

New lines almost always spark protests. Already, more than 800 have been arrested around the country over the massive 1,700-mile Canada-to-Texas proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

The high-pressure, underground pipeline, a $7 billion project that could produce thousands of jobs, is fraught with environmental risk, from extracting tar sand oil — one of the dirtiest sources of energy — to the pipeline crossing private property, aquifers and large populations.

The same private-property right groups that helped upend Perry’s signature transportation idea, the Trans Texas Corridor, have joined with environmentalists in Texas to fight the proposal.

Dave Carney, Perry’s chief political consultant, cast the governor’s plan as a bold one that he could act on immediately as president.

“His energy plan/jobs plan — this sort of a Declaration of Independence — is not just about foreign oil; it’s not just about American production,” said Dave Carney, Perry’s chief political consultant. “It’s things that the president can do in dealing with regulation.”

Marston, the Texas environmentalist, disagreed, noting that the federal lands in Alaska are protected by an act of Congress and can only be changed by Congress. Some of the mandates on lowering emissions have come from recent court orders, including a U.S. Supreme Court decision that says carbon dioxide regulation falls under the Clean Air Act.

“I’m sorry but we’re a country of laws, not one man,” Marston said.

Polls also show there is little public sentiment for rolling back environmental regulations.

And other experts challenge one of the underlying premises of Perry’s plan: the contention that pollution controls cost American jobs.

Bruce Bartlett, a former senior official with the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, has noted that according to federal statistics, just 2,971 jobs were lost in 2010 because of government regulations. Overall, the country lost 1.3 million jobs that year.

“Regulatory uncertainty is a canard invented by Republicans that allows them to use current economic problems to pursue an agenda supported by the business community,” Bartlett wrote this month in The New York Times.

———

(Staff writer Todd J. Gillman in Hanover, N.H., contributed to this report.)

Drop in standard of living means trouble for tolls


Link to article here.

With Americans' discretionary income shrinking, gas prices still well over $3/gallon, and some tollways experiencing a 15% drop in traffic, it spells trouble for toll roads. With tight state budgets and the feds eyeing tolls & selling our public roads to private corporations as the proposed solution, here's a newsflash. Tolls aren't going to solve the problem. There simply aren't enough people with the discretionary income levels to afford 25-100 times more per mile in new taxes to get to work. It ain't gonna work. If we let our politcos get away with this, the misery index will explode, folks. It'll be a TRIPLE hit when they come back to the taxpayer to bailout the failed toll roads on behalf of their Wall Street friends who never have to pay the price for their risky and often greedy schemes.

A Long, Steep Drop for Americans' Standard of Living

Wednesday, 19 Oct 2011
By: Ron Scherer
Christian Science Monitor - CNBC.com

Think life is not as good as it used to be, at least in terms of your wallet? You'd be right about that. The standard of living for Americans has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the US government began recording it five decades ago.
Bottom line: The average individual now has $1,315 less in disposable income than he or she did three years ago at the onset of the Great Recession – even though the recession ended, technically speaking, in mid-2009. That means less money to spend at the spa or the movies, less for vacations, new carpeting for the house, or dinner at a restaurant.

In short, it means a less vibrant economy, with more Americans spending primarily on necessities. The diminished standard of living, moreover, is squeezing the middle class, whose restlessness and discontent are evident in grass-roots movements such as the tea party and "Occupy Wall Street" and who may take out their frustrations on incumbent politicians in next year's election.

What has led to the most dramatic drop in the US standard of living since at least 1960? One factor is stagnant incomes: Real median income is down 9.8 percent since the start of the recession through this June, according to Sentier Research in Annapolis, Md., citing census bureau data. Another is falling net worth – think about the value of your home and, if you have one, your retirement portfolio. A third is rising consumer prices, with inflation eroding people's buying power by 3.25 percent since mid-2008.

"In a dynamic economy, one would expect Americans' disposable income to be growing, but it has flattened out at a low level," says economist Bob Brusca of Fact & Opinion Economics in New York.

To be sure, the recession has hit unevenly, with lower-skilled and less-educated Americans feeling the pinch the most, says Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com based in West Chester, Pa. Many found their jobs gone for good as companies moved production offshore or bought equipment that replaced manpower.


"The pace of change has been incredibly rapid and incredibly tough on the less educated," says Mr. Zandi, who calls this period the most difficult for American households since the 1930s. "If you don't have the education and you don't have the right skills, then you are getting creamed."

Per capita disposal personal income – a key indicator of the standard of living – peaked in the spring of 2008, at $33,794 (measured as after-tax income). As of the second quarter of 2011, it was $32,479 – almost a 4 percent drop. If per capita disposable income had continued to grow at its normal pace, it would have been more than $34,000 a year by now.

The so-called misery index, another measure of economic well-being of American households, echoes the finding on the slipping standard of living. The index, a combination of the unemployment rate and inflation, is now at its highest point since 1983, when the US economy was recovering from a short recession and from the energy price spikes after the Iranian revolution.


In Royal Oak, Mich., Adam Kowal knows exactly how the squeeze feels. After losing a warehouse job in Lansing, he, his wife, and their two children have had little recourse but to move in with his mother. Now working at a school cafeteria, Mr. Kowal earns 28 percent less than at his last job.
He and his wife now eat out once a month instead of once a week, do no socializing, and eat less expensive foods, such as ground chuck instead of ground sirloin. "My mom was hoping her kids would lead a better life than her, but so far that has not happened," says Kowal.


"We have quite a few grandparents who are raising their grandchildren on a fixed income, feeding them and buying clothes for them when they can't afford to do [that for] themselves" Yvonne Womack

Blessings Food Pantry

With disposable incomes falling, perhaps it's not surprising that 64 percent of Americans worry that they won't be able to pay their families' expenses at least some of the time, according to a survey completed in mid-September by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion. Among those, one-third say their financial problems are chronic.

"What we see is that very few are escaping the crunch," says Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Income loss is hitting the middle class hard, especially in communities where manufacturing facilities have closed. When those jobs are gone, many workers have ended up in service-sector jobs that pay less.

"Maybe it's the evolution of the economy, but it appears large segments of the workforce have moved permanently into lower-paying positions," says Joel Naroff of Naroff Economic Advisors in Holland, Pa. "The economy can't grow at 4 percent per year when the middle class becomes the lower middle class."


He would get no argument from Jeff Beatty of Richmond, Ky., who worked in the IT and telecommunications businesses for most of his career – until he hit a rough patch. He and his wife are living on his unemployment insurance benefits (which will run out in months), his early Social Security payments, and her disability payments from the Social Security Administration. Their total income comes to $30,000 a year.

"Our standard of living has probably declined threefold," he says.

Mr. Beatty, who used to make a comfortable income, now anticipates applying for food stamps. He and his wife have sold much of their furniture, which they no longer need because they have moved into a one-bedroom apartment owned by his sister-in-law.

Even people with college degrees are feeling the squeeze. On a fall day, Hunter College graduate and Brooklyn resident Paul Battis came to lower Manhattan to check out the Occupy Wall Street protest. He tells one of the protesters that America's problem is the various free-trade pacts it has approved.

Mr. Battis's angst over trade is rooted in the fact that two years ago he lost his data-entry job with a Wall Street firm that decided to outsource such jobs to India.

When he had the job, he made a comfortable income. Now his income is sporadic, from the occasional construction job he lands. He used to buy clothing from Macy's or other department stores. Now he goes to Goodwill or Salvation Army stores. He has even cut back on taking the city subways, instead riding his bicycle. Separated from his wife and his 15-year-old daughter, he says, "Try making child support payments when you don't have a regular income. I'm constantly catching up."

Even recently some Americans could tap the equity in their homes or their stock market accounts to make up for any shortfalls in income. Not anymore. Since 2007, Americans' collective net worth has fallen about $5.5 trillion, or more than 8.6 percent, according to the Federal Reserve.

The bulk of that decline is in real estate, which has lost $4.7 trillion in value, or 22 percent, since 2007. In Arizona, for example, more than half of homeowners live in houses that are worth less than their purchase prices, according to some reports.


Stock investments aren't any better. Since 1999, the Standard & Poor's index, on a price basis, is off 17 percent. It's up 3.2 percent when dividends are included, but that's a small return for that length of time.

"This is really a lost decade of affluence," says Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at Standard & Poor's in New York.

Among those who have watched their finances deteriorate are senior citizens.

"Given the stock market, they are very nervous," says Nancy LeaMond, executive vice president at AARP, the seniors' lobbying group. "They want to keep their savings."

But Ms. LeaMond also notes that about 2 in every 3 seniors are dependent not on Wall Street but on Social Security. The average annual income for those over 65 is $18,500 a year – almost all of it from Social Security, she says. "This is not a part of America that is rich," she says.

At the same time, seniors are getting pinched in their pocketbooks.

"Our members are watching all the things they have to buy, especially health-care products, go up in price," says LeaMond.


In Pompano, Fla., some stretched seniors end up at the Blessings Food Pantry, which is associated with Christ Church United Methodist.

"We have quite a few grandparents who are raising their grandchildren on a fixed income, feeding them and buying clothes for them when they can't afford to do [that for] themselves," says Yvonne Womack, the team leader.

Others, she says, are forgoing food to pay for their medical prescriptions. "And then there is your ordinary senior whose Social Security [check] has not gone up in the last several years, but food and gasoline [prices] have skyrocketed," she says. (However, Social Security checks will go up 3.6 percent in January.) The Blessings, she notes, is now feeding 42 percent more people than last year. "We also provide food you can eat out of a can," she says. "We do have seniors who are living on the streets."

Researcher Geoff Johnson contributed to this report.

This story originally appeared in the Christian Science Monitor

Safety concerns glossed over in rollout of naked body scanners

Link to article here.

U.S. Government Glossed Over Cancer Concerns As It Rolled Out Airport X-Ray Scanners

by Michael Grabell
ProPublica, Nov. 1, 2011, 1:06 p.m.inShare

 
Update (11/01): This story has been updated with a comment from The Chertoff Group, from which ProPublica had sought comment before publication.

Look for a PBS NewsHour story on X-ray body scanners, reported in conjunction with ProPublica, to air later this month.

On Sept. 23, 1998, a panel of radiation safety experts gathered at a Hilton hotel in Maryland to evaluate a new device that could detect hidden weapons and contraband. The machine, known as the Secure 1000, beamed X-rays at people to see underneath their clothing.

Related
New Army Study Says Radiation From Airport Body Scanners Is Minor

by Michael Grabell, ProPublica, July 14

TSA Airport Scanners Wouldn’t Catch an Implant Bomber

by Michael Grabell, ProPublica, July 6

Scientists Cast Doubt on TSA Tests of Full-Body Scanners

by Michael Grabell, ProPublica, May 16

One after another, the experts convened by the Food and Drug Administration raised questions about the machine because it violated a longstanding principle in radiation safety — that humans shouldn’t be X-rayed unless there is a medical benefit.

“I think this is really a slippery slope,” said Jill Lipoti, who was the director of New Jersey’s radiation protection program. The device was already deployed in prisons; what was next, she and others asked — courthouses, schools, airports? “I am concerned … with expanding this type of product for the traveling public,” said another panelist, Stanley Savic, the vice president for safety at a large electronics company. “I think that would take this thing to an entirely different level of public health risk.”

The machine’s inventor, Steven W. Smith, assured the panelists that it was highly unlikely that the device would see widespread use in the near future. At the time, only 20 machines were in operation in the entire country.
“The places I think you are not going to see these in the next five years is lower-security facilities, particularly power plants, embassies, courthouses, airports and governments,” Smith said. “I would be extremely surprised in the next five to 10 years if the Secure 1000 is sold to any of these.”

Today, the United States has begun marching millions of airline passengers through the X-ray body scanners, parting ways with countries in Europe and elsewhere that have concluded that such widespread use of even low-level radiation poses an unacceptable health risk. The government is rolling out the X-ray scanners despite having a safer alternative that the Transportation Security Administration says is also highly effective.

A ProPublica/PBS NewsHour investigation of how this decision was made shows that in post-9/11 America, security issues can trump even long-established medical conventions. The final call to deploy the X-ray machines was made not by the FDA, which regulates drugs and medical devices, but by the TSA, an agency whose primary mission is to prevent terrorist attacks.

Research suggests that anywhere from six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year could get cancer from the machines. Still, the TSA has repeatedly defined the scanners as “safe,” glossing over the accepted scientific view that even low doses of ionizing radiation — the kind beamed directly at the body by the X-ray scanners — increase the risk of cancer.

“Even though it’s a very small risk, when you expose that number of people, there’s a potential for some of them to get cancer,” said Kathleen Kaufman, the former radiation management director in Los Angeles County, who brought the prison X-rays to the FDA panel’s attention.

About 250 X-ray scanners are currently in U.S. airports, along with 264 body scanners that use a different technology, a form of low-energy radio waves known as millimeter waves.

Robin Kane, the TSA’s assistant administrator for security technology, said that no one would get cancer because the amount of radiation the X-ray scanners emit is minute. Having both technologies is important to create competition, he added.

“It’s a really, really small amount relative to the security benefit you’re going to get,” Kane said. “Keeping multiple technologies in play is very worthwhile for the U.S. in getting that cost-effective solution — and being able to increase the capabilities of technology because you keep everyone trying to get the better mousetrap.”

Determined to fill a critical hole in its ability to detect explosives, the TSA plans to have one or the other operating at nearly every security lane in America by 2014. The TSA has designated the scanners for “primary” screening: Officers will direct every passenger, including children, to go through either a metal detector or a body scanner, and the passenger’s only alternative will be to request a physical pat-down.

How did the United States swing from considering such X-rays taboo to deeming them safe enough to scan millions of people a year?

A new wave of terrorist attacks using explosives concealed on the body, coupled with the scanners’ low dose of radiation, certainly convinced many radiation experts that the risk was justified.

But other factors helped the machines gain acceptance.

Because of a regulatory Catch-22, the airport X-ray scanners have escaped the oversight required for X-ray machines used in doctors’ offices and hospitals. The reason is that the scanners do not have a medical purpose, so the FDA cannot subject them to the rigorous evaluation it applies to medical devices.

Still, the FDA has limited authority to oversee some non-medical products and can set mandatory safety regulations. But the agency let the scanners fall under voluntary standards set by a nonprofit group heavily influenced by industry.

As for the TSA, it skipped a public comment period required before deploying the scanners. Then, in defending them, it relied on a small body of unpublished research to insist the machines were safe, and ignored contrary opinions from U.S. and European authorities that recommended precautions, especially for pregnant women. Finally, the manufacturer, Rapiscan Systems, unleashed an intense and sophisticated lobbying campaign, ultimately winning large contracts.

Both the FDA and TSA say due diligence has been done to assure the scanners’ safety. Rapiscan says it won the contract because its technology is superior at detecting threats. While the TSA says X-ray and millimeter-wave scanners are both effective, Germany decided earlier this year not to roll out millimeter-wave machines after finding they produced too many false positives.

Most of the news coverage on body scanners has focused on privacy, because the machines can produce images showing breasts and buttocks. But the TSA has since installed software to make the images less graphic. While some accounts have raised the specter of radiation, this is the first report to trace the history of the scanners and document the gaps in regulation that allowed them to avoid rigorous safety evaluation.

Little research on cancer risk of body scanners

Humans are constantly exposed to ionizing radiation, a form of energy that has been shown to strip electrons from atoms, damage DNA and mutate genes, potentially leading to cancer. Most radiation comes from radon, a gas produced from naturally decaying elements in the ground. Another major source is cosmic radiation from outer space. Many common items, such as smoke detectors, contain tiny amounts of radioactive material, as do exit signs in schools and office buildings.

As a result, the cancer risk from any one source of radiation is often small. Outside of nuclear accidents, such as that at Japan's Fukushima plant, and medical errors, the health risk comes from cumulative exposure.

In Rapiscan’s Secure 1000 scanner, which uses ionizing radiation, a passenger stands between two large blue boxes and is scanned with a pencil X-ray beam that rapidly moves left to right and up and down the body. In the other machine, ProVision, made by defense contractor L-3 Communications, a passenger enters a chamber that looks like a round phone booth and is scanned with millimeter waves, a form of low-energy radio waves, which have not been shown to strip electrons from atoms or cause cancer.

Only a decade ago, many states prohibited X-raying a person for anything other than a medical exam. Even after 9/11, such non-medical X-raying remains taboo in most of the industrialized world. In July, the European Parliament passed a resolution that security “scanners using ionizing radiation should be prohibited” because of health risks. Although the United Kingdom uses the X-ray machine for limited purposes, such as when passengers trigger the metal detector, most developed countries have decided to forgo body scanners altogether or use only the millimeter-wave machines.

While the research on medical X-rays could fill many bookcases, the studies that have been done on the airport X-ray scanners, known as backscatters, fill a file no more than a few inches thick. None of the main studies cited by the TSA has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, the gold standard for scientific research.

Those tests show that the Secure 1000 delivers an extremely low dose of radiation, less than 10 microrems. The dose is roughly one-thousandth of a chest X-ray and equivalent to the cosmic radiation received in a few minutes of flying at typical cruising altitude. The TSA has used those measurements to say the machines are “safe.”

Most of what researchers know about the long-term health effects of low levels of radiation comes from studies of atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By charting exposure levels and cancer cases, researchers established a linear link that shows the higher the exposure, the greater risk of cancer.

Some scientists argue the danger is exaggerated. They claim low levels stimulate the repair mechanism in cells, meaning that a little radiation might actually be good for the body.

But in the authoritative report on low doses of ionizing radiation, published in 2006, the National Academy of Sciences reviewed the research and concluded that the preponderance of research supported the linear link. It found “no compelling evidence” that there is any level of radiation at which the risk of cancer is zero.

Radiation experts say the dose from the backscatter is negligible when compared to naturally occurring background radiation. Speaking to the 1998 FDA panel, Smith, the inventor, compared the increased risk to choosing to visit Denver instead of San Diego or the decision to wear a sweater versus a sport coat.

Using the linear model, even such trivial amounts increase the number of cancer cases. Rebecca Smith-Bindman, a radiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, estimated that the backscatters would lead to only six cancers over the course of a lifetime among the approximately 100 million people who fly every year. David Brenner, director of Columbia University’s Center for Radiological Research, reached a higher number — potentially 100 additional cancers every year.

“Why would we want to put ourselves in this uncertain situation where potentially we’re going to have some cancer cases?” Brenner asked. “It makes me think, really, why don’t we use millimeter waves when we don’t have so much uncertainty?”

But even without the machines, Smith-Bindman said, the same 100 million people would develop 40 million cancers over the course of their lifetimes. In this sea of cancer cases, it would be impossible to identify the patients whose cancer is linked to the backscatter machines.

How the scanners avoided strict oversight

Although they deliberately expose humans to radiation, the airport X-ray scanners are not medical devices, so they are not subject to the stringent regulations required for diagnostic X-ray machines.

If they were, the manufacturer would have to submit clinical data showing safety and effectiveness and be approved through a rigorous process by the FDA. If the machines contained radioactive material, they would have to report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

But because it didn’t fit into either category, the Secure 1000 was classified as an electronic product. The FDA does not review or approve the safety of such products. However, manufacturers must provide a brief radiation safety report explaining the dose and notify the agency if any overexposure is discovered. According to the FDA, no such incidents have been reported.

Under its limited oversight of electronic products, the FDA could issue mandatory safety regulations. But it didn’t do so, a decision that flows from its history of supervising electronics.

Regulation of electronic products in the United States began after a series of scandals. From the 1930s to the 1950s, it was common for a child to go to a shoe store and stand underneath an X-ray machine known as a fluoroscope to check whether a shoe was the right fit. But after cases arose of a shoe model’s leg being amputated and store clerks developing dermatitis from putting their hands in the beam to adjust the shoe, the practice ended.

In 1967, General Electric recalled 90,000 color televisions that had been sold without the proper shielding, potentially exposing viewers to dangerous levels of radiation. The scandal prompted the creation of the federal Bureau of Radiological Health.

“That ultimately led to a lot more aggressive program,” said John Villforth, who was the director of the bureau. Over the next decade, the bureau created federal safety standards for televisions, medical X-rays, microwaves, tanning beds, even laser light shows.

But in 1982, the FDA merged the radiological health bureau into its medical-device unit.

“I was concerned that if they were to combine the two centers into one, it would probably mean the ending of the radiation program because the demands for medical-device regulation were becoming increasingly great,” said Villforth, who was put in charge of the new Center for Devices and Radiological Health. “As I sort of guessed, the radiation program took a big hit.”

The new unit became stretched for scarce resources as it tried to deal with everything from tongue depressors to industrial lasers. The government used to have 500 people examining the safety of electronic products emitting radiation. It now has about 20 people. In fact, the FDA has not set a mandatory safety standard for an electronic product since 1985.

As a result, there is an FDA safety regulation for X-rays scanning baggage — but none for X-rays scanning people at airports.

Meanwhile, scientists began developing backscatter X-rays, in which the waves are reflected off an object to a detector, for the security industry.

The Secure 1000 people scanner was invented by Smith in 1991 and later sold to Rapiscan, then a small security firm based in southern California. The first major customer was the California prison system, which began scanning visitors to prevent drugs and weapons from getting in. But the state pulled the devices in 2001 after a group of inmates' wives filed a class-action lawsuit accusing the prisons of violating their civil liberties.

The U.S. Customs Service deployed backscatter machines for several years but in limited fashion and with strict supervision. Travelers suspected of carrying contraband had to sign a consent form, and Customs policy prohibited the scanning of pregnant women. The agency abandoned them in 2006, not for safety reasons but because smugglers had learned where the machines were installed and adapted their methods to avoid them, said Rick Whitman, the radiation safety officer for Customs until 2008.

Yet, even this limited application of X-ray scanning for security dismayed radiation safety experts. In 1999, the Conference of Radiation Control Program Directors, a nongovernmental organization, passed a resolution recommending that such screening be stopped immediately.

The backscatter machines had also caught the attention of the 1998 FDA advisory panel, which recommended that the FDA establish government safety regulations for people scanners. Instead, the FDA decided to go with a voluntary standard set by a trade group largely comprising manufacturers and government agencies that wanted to use the machines.

“Establishing a mandatory standard takes an enormous amount of resources and could take a decade to publish,” said Dan Kassiday, a longtime radiation safety engineer at the FDA.

In addition, since the mid-1990s, Congress has directed federal safety agencies to use industry standards wherever possible instead of creating their own.

The FDA delegated the task of establishing the voluntary standards to the American National Standards Institute. A private nonprofit that sets standards for many industries, ANSI convened a committee of the Health Physics Society, a trade group of radiation safety specialists. It was made up of 15 people, including six representatives of manufacturers of X-ray body scanners and five from U.S. Customs and the California prison system. There were few government regulators and no independent scientists.

In contrast, the FDA advisory panel was also made up of 15 people — five representatives from government regulatory agencies, four outside medical experts, one labor representative and five experts from the electronic products industry, but none from the scanner manufacturers themselves.

“I am more comfortable with having a regulatory agency — either federal or the states — develop the standards and enforce them,” Kaufman said. Such regulators, she added, “have only one priority, and that’s public health.”

A representative of the Health Physics Society committee said that was its main priority as well. Most of the committee’s evaluation was completed before 9/11. The standard was published in 2002 and updated with minor changes in 2009.

Ed Bailey, chief of California’s radiological health branch at the time, said he was the lone voice opposing the use of the machines. But after 9/11, his views changed about what was acceptable in pursuit of security.

“The whole climate of their use has changed,” Bailey said. “The consequence of something being smuggled on an airplane is far more serious than somebody getting drugs into a prison.”

Are Inspections Independent?

While the TSA doesn’t regulate the machines, it must seek public input before making major changes to security procedures. In July, a federal appeals court ruled that the agency failed to follow rule-making procedures and solicit public comment before installing body scanners at airports across the country. TSA spokesman Michael McCarthy said the agency couldn’t comment on ongoing litigation.

The TSA asserts there is no need to take additional precautions for sensitive populations, even pregnant women, following the guidance of the congressionally chartered National Council on Radiation Protection & Measurements.

But other authorities have come to the opposite conclusion. A report by France’s radiation safety agency specifically warned against screening pregnant women with the X-ray devices. In addition, the Federal Aviation Administration’s medical institute has advised pregnant pilots and flight attendants that the machine, coupled with their time in the air, could put them over their occupational limit for radiation exposure and that they might want to adjust their work schedules accordingly.

No similar warning has been issued for pregnant frequent fliers.

Even as people scanners became more widespread, government oversight actually weakened in some cases.

Inspections of X-ray equipment in hospitals and industry are the responsibility of state regulators — and before 9/11, many states also had the authority to randomly inspect machines in airports. But that ended when the TSA took over security checkpoints from the airlines.

Instead, annual inspections are done by Rapiscan, the scanners’ manufacturer.

“As a regulator, I think there’s a conflict of interest in having the manufacturer and the facility inspect themselves,” Kaufman said.

Last year, in reaction to public anger from members of Congress, passengers and advocates, the TSA contracted with the Army Public Health Command to do independent radiation surveys. But email messages obtained in a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil liberties group, raise questions about the independence of the Army surveys.

One email sent by TSA health and safety director Jill Segraves shows that local TSA officials were given advance notice and allowed to “pick and choose” which systems the Army could check.

That email also suggests that Segraves considered the Army inspectors a valuable public-relations asset: “They are our radiation myth busters,” she wrote to a local security director.

Some TSA screeners are concerned about their own radiation exposure from the backscatters, but the TSA has not allowed them to wear badges that could measure it, said Milly Rodriguez, health and safety specialist for the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents TSA officers.

“We have heard from members that sometimes the technicians tell them that the machines are emitting more radiation than is allowed,” she said.

McCarthy, the TSA spokesman, said the machines are physically incapable of producing radiation above the industry standard. On the email, he said, the inspections allow screeners to ask questions about radiation and address concerns about specific machines.

The company’s lobbying campaign

While the TSA maintains that the body scanners are essential to preventing attacks on airplanes, it only began rolling them out nine years after 9/11.

After the attempted shoe-bombing in December 2001, the federal government conducted a trial of a Rapiscan backscatter at the Orlando International Airport. But the revealing images drew protests that the machines amounted to a virtual strip search.

The TSA considered the scanners again after two Chechen women blew up Russian airliners in 2004. Facing a continued outcry over privacy, the TSA instead moved forward with a machine known as a “puffer” because it released several bursts of air on the passengers’ clothes and analyzed the dislodged particles for explosives. But after discovering the machines were ineffective in the field and difficult to maintain, the TSA canceled the program in 2006.

Around that time, Rapiscan began to beef up its lobbying on Capitol Hill. It opened a Washington, D.C., office and, according to required disclosures, more than tripled its lobbying expenditures in two years, from less than $130,000 in 2006 to nearly $420,000 in 2008. It hired former legislative aides to Rep. David Price, D-N.C., then chairman of the homeland security appropriations subcommittee, and to Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss.

It started a political action committee and began contributing heavily to Price; Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., then head of the homeland security committee; Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., also on that committee; and Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., the top Republican on the Senate appropriations committee.

In addition, it opened a new North Carolina plant in Price’s district and expanded its operations in Ocean Springs, Miss., and at its headquarters in Torrance, Calif., in Harman’s district.

“Less than a month after U.S. Senator Trent Lott and other local leaders helped officially open Rapiscan Systems’ new Ocean Springs factory,” Lott’s office announced in a news release in late 2006, “the company has won a $9.1 million Department of Defense contract.”

But Rapiscan still hadn’t landed a major contract to roll out its X-ray body scanners in commercial airports. Indeed, in 2007, with new privacy filters in place, the TSA began a trial of millimeter-wave and backscatter machines at several major airports, after which the agency opted to go with the millimeter-wave machines. The agency said health concerns weren’t a factor.

But with the 2009 federal stimulus package, which provided $300 million for checkpoint security machines, the TSA began deploying backscatters as well. Rapiscan won a $173 million, multiyear contract for the backscatters, with an initial $25 million order for 150 systems to be made in Mississippi.        

Three other companies — American Science & Engineering, Tek84 Engineering Group and Valley Forge Composite Technologies — make X-ray scanners, but none are used by the TSA.Peter Kant, executive vice president for Rapiscan, said the company expanded its lobbying because its business was increasingly affected by the government.

“There’s a lot of misinformation about the technology; there’s a lot of questions about how various inspection technologies work,” he said. “And we needed a way to be able to provide that information and explain the technology and how it works, and that’s what lobbying is.”

The lawmakers either declined to comment or said the lobbying, campaign contributions and local connections had nothing to do with the TSA’s decision to purchase Rapiscan machines. The TSA said the contract was bid competitively and that the winning machines had to undergo comprehensive research and testing phases before being deployed.

While the scanners were appearing in more and more airports, few passengers went through them, because they were used mostly for random screening or to resolve alarms from the metal detector.

That changed on Christmas Day 2009, when a Nigerian man flying to Detroit tried to ignite a pouch of explosives hidden in his underwear.

Following the foiled “Great Balls of Fire” suicide bombing, as the New York Postdubbed it, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ramped up plans to roll out body scanners nationwide. Members of Congress and aviation security experts also pushed heavily for the TSA to install more machines that could detect explosives on passengers.

Harman sent a letter to Napolitano, noting that Rapiscan was in her district.

“I urge you to expedite installation of scanning machines in key airports,” Harman wrote in the letter, which was first reported by the website CounterPunch. “If you need additional funds, I am ready to help.”

Michael Chertoff, who had supported body scanners while secretary of Homeland Security, appeared frequently on TV advocating their use. In one interview, he disclosed that his consulting firm, Chertoff Group, had done work for Rapiscan, sparking accusations that he was trying to profit from his time as a government servant.

Despite the criticism, little has been revealed about the relationship. Rapiscan dismissed it, asserting that the consulting work had to do with international cargo and port security issues — not aviation.

“There was nothing that was not above board,” Kant said. “His comments about passenger screening and these machines were simply his own and was nothing that we had engaged the Chertoff Group for.”

In a statement, the Chertoff Group said it “played no role in the sale of whole body imaging technology to TSA” and that Chertoff “was in no way compensated for his public statements.”

A public records request by ProPublica turned up empty: The Department of Homeland Security said it could not find any correspondence to or from Chertoff related to body scanners. DHS also said Chertoff did not use email.

The TSA plans to deploy 1,275 backscatter and millimeter-wave scanners covering more than half its security lanes by the end of 2012 and 1,800 covering nearly all the lanes by 2014.

According to annual reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, OSI Systems, the parent company of Rapiscan, has seen revenue from its security division more than double since 2006 to nearly $300 million in fiscal year 2011.

Miles O’Brien and Kate Tobin of PBS NewsHour contributed to this report.

Correction (11/1): An earlier version of this story said that an email in which the TSA health and safety director said inspectors were “radiation myth busters” incorrectly identified them as Rapiscan’s inspectors. The story should have said they were inspectors from the Army Public Health Command.

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