The Highwaymen (privatization of roads) (MOTHER JONES)

[laststeamtrain]

The Highwaymen
Why you could soon be paying Wall Street investors, Australian bankers, and Spanish builders for the privilege of driving on American roads.

Daniel Schulman with James Ridgeway
January 01 , 2007

"the road is one succession of dust, ruts, pits, and holes." So wrote Dwight D. Eisenhower, then a young lieutenant colonel, in November 1919, after heading out on a cross-country trip with a convoy of Army vehicles in order to test the viability of the nation's highways in case of a military emergency. To this description of one major road across the west, Eisenhower added reports of impassable mud, unstable sand, and wooden bridges that cracked beneath the weight of the trucks. In Illinois, the convoy "started on dirt roads, and practically no more pavement was encountered until reaching California."

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Fifty years to the day after Ike put his pen to the Highway Act, another Republican signed off on another historic highway project. On June 29, 2006, Mitch Daniels, the former Bush administration official turned governor of Indiana, was greeted with a round of applause as he stepped into a conference room packed with reporters and state lawmakers. The last of eight wire transfers had landed in the state's account, making it official: Indiana had received $3.8 billion from a foreign consortium made up of the Spanish construction firm Cintra and the Macquarie Infrastructure Group (mig) of Australia, and in exchange the state would hand over operation of the 157-mile Indiana Toll Road for the next 75 years. The arrangement would yield hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks for the consortium, which also received immunity from most local and state taxes in its contract with Indiana. And, of course, the consortium would collect all the tolls, which it was allowed to raise to levels far beyond what Hoosiers had been used to. By one calculation, the Toll Road would generate more than $11 billion over the 75-year life of the contract, a nice return on mig-Cintra's $3.8 billion investment.

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DeFazio's take harkens back to Eisenhower and his vision of a national highway system as vital to economic development, commerce, and even national security. "It's a scam, basically," he says. "And you lose control of your transportation infrastructure. It means you fragment the system ultimately. It just does not make sense for an integrated national transportation system."

The transportation committee staffer echoes DeFazio's broad concerns. "You're replacing a federal-state partnership with a public-private partnership," he says, "and the whole idea of developing a national transportation system may go by the wayside." When asked whether private interests will begin to drive transportation decisions, including when and where roads are constructed, he responded, "Absolutely. They would definitely only go to where the profit is." Just as the creation of a National Highway System promised, in Eisenhower's words, to "change the face of America," so too could its demise.

Ralph Nader, too, has been vocal in opposing the privatization deals. Last February he wrote a scathing letter to Mitch Daniels, comparing the toll road lease to the Louisiana Purchase, "only Indiana is the France of this deal. You are taking a minuscule up-front payment in return for a large downstream private profit to a foreign company which is being handed a captive customer base." Nader says he and other consumer advocates were late to recognize the trend. "Who would have dreamed" that the nation would begin actually selling off its core assets, he told Mother Jones. "That's new. They caught everybody napping."

Some conservatives are also sounding the alarm. Phyllis Schlafly, writing for the conservative publication Human Events in September 2006, tore into the recent privatization deals under the colorful heading "Greedy Politicians Seduced by Siren Song of Filthy Foreign Lucre."

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http://www.motherjones.com/cgi-bin/print_article.pl?url=http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2007/01/highwaymen.html

Long,detailed & scary article that's hard to excerpt. Worth a read when you have the time.

[Sam1]

1. "Our bitch Mitch" has now proposed that we lease the

state lottery.

The state legislature lacked the political courage to raise the tolls to make the toll road self supporting. Thus the Governor had all that he needed to lease the toll road. He was thereby able to balance the state budget without increasing taxes.

As long as the legislature controlled the fees the toll road was going to be a drain of the state budget. Governments distribute largess rather then increase profits.

[PDJane]

2. OK, I have a major problem with this.

Not only does this sell an American asset, BUT it's going to cost more. Way more. Privatization always does. One gets less for more, and it's just ridiculous.

There must be something in the water down there........or the air. I mean, besides Hannity and O'Lielly et al.........