This is from Matt Taibbi’s latest article in Rolling Stone.
“I was in a meeting where a bunch of American investment bankers were trying to sell us the Pennsylvania Turnpike,” he said. “They even had a slide show. They were showing these Arabs what a nice highway we had for sale, what the toll booths looked like . . .”
I dropped my fork. “The Pennsylvania Turnpike is for sale?”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “We didn’t do the deal, though. But, you know, there are some other deals that have gotten done. Or didn’t you know about this?”
As it turns out, the Pennsylvania Turnpike deal almost went through, only to be killed by the state legislature, but there were others just like it that did go through, most notably the sale of all the parking meters in Chicago to a consortium that included the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, from the United Arab Emirates.
There were others: A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year.
America is quite literally for sale, at rock-bottom prices, and the buyers increasingly are the very people who scored big in the oil bubble. Thanks to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that artificially jacked up the price of gasoline over the course of the last decade, Americans delivered a lot of their excess cash into the coffers of sovereign wealth funds like the Qatar Investment Authority, the Libyan Investment Authority, Saudi Arabia’s SAMA Foreign Holdings, and the UAE’s Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
Strange things have been happening in Pennsylvania….An Israeli company was given a no-bid contract to spy on the citizens of Pa.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/19-1
The Pennsylvania Turnpike was also going to be leased to a Spanish Company several years ago…http://www.publicvalues.ca/ViewArticle.cfm?Ref=0077
No, they didn’t want the government helping black people. C Massey.
Even if they personally have to get gangrene.
Dontcha think it’ll get really interesting when say, the Arabs own Chicago and Chna owns Texas and little financial skirmishes ensue? When they were selling all those versions of Monopoly a couple Christmas Seasons ago I kept looking for the one called “Foreign Investments in America”.
and then here’s a wee-peek at the Public Debt situation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt
Yep, for those of us who don’t know by now that we don’t own us, time to wake up. The American Dream is due for another awakening – something else we need to see and change.
This is what America looks like under the notion of so-called “Privatization.” Doesn’t seem to matter which private entity runs something, so long as Americans’ taxes aren’t raised. And I blame the Dems for this. For the past 20+ years, the Dems have been rather silent (some might even say complicit) on the GOP demonization of the role of government in American life. So, now we live in a country where virtually anything is up for grabs and there’s very little dissent from congresspeople (on the Right or Left) on why government should run certain things.
It’s like last summer when the teabaggers came out in full force against Health Insurance Reform. When some of these people (and I’m using the ‘people’ loosely) were asked if they had health insurance at the present, many of them said they didn’t. When asked how they thought they could get health coverage aside from federal assistance or Doctors Without Borders treating them in animal stalls, very few had alternatives. However, they were adamant that government should NOT be in the position of helping its citizens heath and welfare.
Because as everyone knows, the government can’t do anything right. (Although, those Medicaid funded electric scooters come pretty close…)