Perry turns TxDOT into Wall Street clearinghouse

Perry’s ‘Wall Street-ification’ of TxDOT

By Terri Hall
Examiner.com
November 3, 2011

Rick Perry and the GOP-dominated Texas Legislature are presiding over the most fundamental transformation of the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) in its history.  Gone are the days of Dewitt Greer, who led the Department in its glory days when it was lean, super-efficient, and projects were well-managed and cost effective. Greer was known for eschewing debt and nixing anything that wasn’t a good deal for the taxpayer.

Now, under Perry, he’s left professional certified engineers behind and chosen political hacks, bankers, and campaign donors to run TxDOT, recently installing Jeff Austin III, a banker, as a Transportation Commissioner and Phil Wilson, former Perry aide and lobbyist for an energy company who donated over $1 million to Perry through the Republican Governor’s Association, as the new Executive Director.  Even before Wilson spent a single day on the job, Perry and the Legislature bumped-up his salary by $100,000 in a down economy when every other state agency has experienced cuts. Perry’s Transportation Commission just authorized Wilson to expand his executive officers up to five, bringing the total for annual salaries of the entire executive team to more than $1.5 million.

Why? Because Perry and the Legislature think they can run TxDOT like a private, Fortune 500 company, with their big six figure salaries, and more importantly, make it a major player in the Wall Street bankster club. They think charging motorists’ tolls are akin to a ‘user fee’ like the free market. Well, TxDOT’s ‘product’ isn’t like potato chips or an iPhone. It’s tasked with building and maintaining our PUBLIC highway system -- and public safety and efficiency, not private profits, should remain its primary mission.

We already know what happened to public safety under these new design-build ‘innovative financing’ contracts that are not competitively bid...ten pillars on the US 290 interchange had to be torn down and re-built.  We already know what happened when Perry and the Legislature launched TxDOT headlong from a pay-as-you-go cash system into a complex matrix of debt instruments, it had a $1.1 billion ‘accounting error’ (counting bond proceeds twice). Prior to Perry, TxDOT had ZERO debt. Now it’s racked up over $31 billion.
Our public roads are monopolies where ‘free market’ principles don’t apply. Tolls aren’t true ‘user fees’ when boatloads of public money, like gas taxes, are used to build the road and then TxDOT or worse, a private corporation, charges taxpayers again to drive on it.

Efficiency has been replaced with a new layer of bureaucracy (Regional Mobility Authorities) and a massive network of inefficient toll projects, toll collection nightmares, and doing anything and everything to cover the debt propping-up unsustainable toll roads that aren’t financially viable. Public safety has been replaced with profit-driven initiatives like increasing speed limits to 80 MPH in order to drive more traffic to corporate-run toll roads (See Exhibit 7).

TxDOT has become putty in the hands of private interests at the expense of taxpayers and property rights. It’s not uncommon to see the likes of Goldman Sachs slithering around the Dewitt Greer building pimping its ‘innovative financing’ techniques while positioned to profit handsomely from them.  After all, a trader finally said on BBC what we all know is true: “Goldman Sachs rules the world." Innovative financing simply put is building roads with a complex series of taxpayer-backed credit cards. These techniques include monetization of debt, multi-leveraged debt (using borrowed money to secure more borrowed money), ‘creative’ accounting and contracting, and public subsidies for private profits. The same sort of tricks that caused the financial collapse in Greece (and subsequently the Euro) and the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the United States.

Boy, does Texas need a new Dewitt Greer to recapture the highway department that once was the envy of the nation. But it’s clear by Perry’s recent appointments, that he has no intention of doing so. His cronyism is too ingrained for him to resist the temptation to steer billions in public road contracts to potential donors for his struggling presidential campaign. Not while he can have his cake and eat it, too -- to say he’s making TxDOT run more like a private company, while, in reality, he's hijacking the highway department and turning it into a tool to grease Wall Street bankers.

The downward spiral at TxDOT will continue as it clings to these ‘innovative financing’ tools that prime our public infrastructure for massive taxpayer bailouts. So much for Perry’s claim that he’s fiscally responsible and has balanced budgets. His Wall Street-ification of TxDOT will surely fail as it did with Fannie Mae, the housing crisis, and financial crisis in Europe. Rest assured, Perry and state lawmakers will tap Texas taxpayers to bail them out.

HOT lanes manipulate traffic for profit

Commuters HOT over HOT lanes

By Terri Hall
Examiner.com
November 4, 2011

Get ready to pay a hefty pricetag to escape congestion. Houston’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (Metro) is in the process of converting 83 miles of HOV lanes into HOT lanes or High Occupancy Toll lanes where single occupancy vehicles can access the HOV lane if they pay a toll. It’s a trend taking the country by storm and commuters are none too happy about it. Houston’s HOT lanes will cost solo drivers a premium - up to $10 per trip! The first such lanes will open on I-45 South in January.

Harris County Toll Authority operates Houston’s other HOT lanes on the Katy Freeway (I-10). Very few cars opt to use them and they charge much lower toll rates (ranging from 30 cents to $1.60 in peak hours) than Metro’s rates (between $1 - $10 depending on the time of day and level of traffic using the lanes). No one should have to pay to use the Katy HOT lanes in the first place since they’re 100% paid for with gas taxes.

This anti-car, Agenda 21-style grand experiment in government manipulation of motorists’ behavior is an abject failure. For instance, HOT lanes just opened along 15 miles of I-85 in Atlanta charging commuters up $5.40 to access the lanes. They had more traffic use the HOV lanes BEFORE they opened them as HOT lanes than they did with single occupancy vehicles paying a toll, in part because now carpoolers had to have 3 people in the car to use the HOV /HOT lanes for free.

The public outrage was so radioactive Georgia’s Governor Nathan Deal lowered the toll rates from 34 cents a mile down to 11 cents a mile after just the first week in operation! Commuters reported commute times in the free lanes jumping from 40 minutes to 90 minutes. Ultimately, HOT lanes don’t relieve congestion. They manipulate congestion for profit.

This government social engineering is inefficient and unworkable for most, considering commuters have to navigate across multiple lanes of bumper-to-bumper gridlock (on I-85 it’s 5 lanes) in order to access the lanes, then do it all over again when they need to exit. Drivers cannot cross the double white line of the HOT lanes which limits entrance and egress to the lanes except where specifically authorized. So if a motorist can fit into the government-managed box and make it workable, drivers still have to pay anywhere from 10 times to 100 times more per mile than a gas tax funded lane for the hassle.

In addition, HOT lanes that utilize ‘congestion pricing’ are specifically designed to manipulate or ‘manage’ the level of congestion on the lanes by increasing the price if the government deems too much traffic is using the lane and hence slowing speeds. They use the term ‘pricing’ to try to hide what they’re actually doing which is charging a toll - but they’re not fooling anybody. Ultimately, the goal is to price motorists off certain public roads and to profit from the scarcity of capacity, rather than provide actual mobility for the majority of commuters.

HOT lanes or ‘managed’ lanes are yet another case of the government picking the winners and losers, primarily based on income level. In this case, the wealthy are the winners. So who’s guilty of fomenting class warfare here? Certainly not the average Joe, it’s the government, and even worse, private corporations who gain a foothold on this power to tax and to manipulate drivers through public private partnership (or P3) contracts.

In an even more provocative move, on I-95 from the border of North Carolina into Virginia, officials plan to slap tolls on existing general purpose free lanes that aren’t currently HOV lanes - they’re presently open to ALL vehicles. Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell got a special waiver from the Obama Administration for the privilege of DOUBLE TAXING its citizens to use what they’ve already paid for. Then from Fredericksburg, Virginia, heading south, motorists will be charged tolls to access the HOV/HOT lanes.

Northern Virginians are already hit with HOT lane tolls on the beltway and more are planned on I-66. It won’t be long before motorists can’t move an inch without big government digging deep into our pockets for the privilege of using our public roads. The same is true in Texas where Texas Governor Rick Perry’s highway department is contemplating over 500 toll projects across the state including the sale of Texas roadways to private entities using P3s, despite significant public opposition. The conversion of HOV lanes into HOT lanes is a price-gouging tax grab, plain and simple.

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, and many times private corporations through P3s, who've been granted monopolies over our public roadways -- our lifeline for daily living. Implementing this new toll tax regime is Perry, Deal, and McDonnell’s idea of congestion relief -- all three Republicans. Their brand of so-called conservatism doesn’t square with genuine fiscal responsibility, low taxes, nor limited government. It’s high time voters held them to account for what will amount to, all told, the largest tax increase in our lifetimes.


Continue reading on Examiner.com Commuters HOT over HOT lanes - San Antonio Transportation Policy | Examiner.com http://www.examiner.com/transportation-policy-in-san-antonio/commuters-hot-over-hot-lanes#ixzz1cl5z5Tsp
 

'Intellistreets' spy on citizens on public streets

Link to article here.

This technology tucked into street lights has cameras that spy on the average Joe, can record conversations, and even do a naked body scan on our citizens all while strolling down a public street! This should make every one of us shudder at the very thought that this technology was ever conceived, much less that it was developed and will be installed and used to spy on our citizens this way -- a TOTAL violation of our 4th Amendment Rights. The slippery slope has begun!

New Street Lights To Have “Homeland Security” Applications

High-tech system to include speakers, video surveillance, emergency alerts

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Wednesday, October 26, 2011

UPDATE: Presumably in response to this article being linked on the Drudge Report, the company behind ‘Intellistreets’, Illuminating Concepts, has now pulled the video from You Tube entirely, presumably nervous about the negative publicity that could be generated from concerns about street lights being used for “Homeland Security” purposes – their words, not ours. We have added an alternative version of the clip below, but it may be subject to removal at any time. The video is still available on the company’s website.

RELATED: Promo Video For DHS-Backed ‘Spy Street Lights’ Pulled From You Tube

New street lights that include “Homeland Security” applications including speaker systems, motion sensors and video surveillance are now being rolled out with the aid of government funding.

The Intellistreets system comprises of a wireless digital infrastructure that allows street lights to be controlled remotely by means of a ubiquitous wi-fi link and a miniature computer housed inside each street light, allowing for “security, energy management, data harvesting and digital media,” according to the Illuminating Concepts website.

According to the company’s You Tube video of the concept, the primary capabilities of the devices include “energy conservation, homeland security, public safety, traffic control, advertising, video surveillance.”

In terms of Homeland Security applications, each of the light poles contains a speaker system that can be used to broadcast emergency alerts, as well as a display that transmits “security levels” (presumably a similar system to the DHS’ much maligned color-coded terror alert designation), in addition to showing instructions by way of its LED video screen.

The lights also include proximity sensors that can record both pedestrian and road traffic. The video display and speaker system will also be used to transmit Minority Report-style advertising, as well as Amber Alerts and other “civic announcements”.

With the aid of grant money from the federal government, the company is about to launch the first concept installation of the system in the city of Farmington Hills, Michigan.

Using street lights as surveillance tools has already been advanced by several European countries. In 2007, leaked documents out of the UK Home Office revealed that British authorities were working on proposals to fit lamp posts with CCTV cameras that would X-ray scan passers-by and “undress them” in order to “trap terror suspects”.

Dutch police also announced last year that they are developing a mobile scanner that will “see through people’s clothing and look for concealed weapons”.

So-called ‘talking surveillance cameras’ that use a speaker system similar to the Intellistreets model are already being used in UK cities like Middlesborough to bark orders and reprimand people for dropping litter and other minor offenses. According to reports, one of the most common phrases used to shame people into obeying instructions is to broadcast the message, “We are watching you.”

The transformation of street lights into surveillance tools for Homeland Security purposes will only serve to heighten concerns that the United States is fast on the way to becoming a high-tech police state, with TSA agents being empowered to oversee that control grid, most recently with the announcement that TSA screeners would be manning highway checkpoints, a further indication that security measures we currently see in airports are rapidly spilling out onto the streets.

The ability of the government to use street lights to transmit “emergency alerts” also dovetails with the ongoing efforts to hijack radio and television broadcasts for the same purpose, via FEMA’s Emergency Alert System.

The federal government is keen to implement a centralized system of control over all communications, with the recent announcement that all new cell phones will be required to comply with the PLAN program (Personal Localized Alerting Network), which will broadcast emergency alert messages directly to Americans’ cell phones using a special chip embedded in the receiver. The system will be operational by the end of the year in New York and Washington, with the rest of the country set to follow in 2012.

The notion of using the street lights as communication tools to broadcast “alerts” directly from the federal government is also consistent with Homeland Security’s program to install Orwellian ‘telescreens’ that play messages by Janet Napolitano and other DHS officials in Wal-Mart stores across the country.

The fact that the federal government is funding the implementation of ‘Intellistreets’ comes as no surprise given that the nation’s expanding networks of surveillance cameras are also being paid for with Department of Homeland Security grants.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.

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.

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