Toll roads are sign of selling America
Published 9:00 pm Sunday, August 20, 2006
We’re being sold out. It’s called “privatization.” Big-money interests try to get windfalls from government investments.
The latest is in Indiana where its statewide toll road, I-80/I-90, was sold (actually a 75-year lease) to a Spanish/Australian consortium. Sound unbelievable? It happened in spite of overwhelming public opposition. This same consortium purchased the 407 Express Toll Route in the Canadian province of Ontario and then raised the tolls so outrageously that the Ontario government fought them in court – and lost. They had foolishly sold themselves out.
Bush’s new administrator of the Federal Highway Administration, Richard Capka, is quietly pushing for more toll roads and privatization of the nation’s highways. He argued in an interview with our largest independent trucking association (O.O.I.D.A.) that profit companies can do better than non-profit government agencies because they are less hamstrung by regulations. No doubt he means that they can hire illegal aliens with low pay and no health-vacation-retirement benefits. But you know they will still demand more money.
If the billions Sen. Lieberman fought to give Dick Cheney’s Halliburton and subsidiaries on no-bid contracts for transportation in Iraq are an example of their kind of efficiency, we’re in deep trouble. Bush’s war is a diversion tactic to allow the most obscene pilfering of public funds in the nation’s history.
We have as much to fear from domestic conspiracies as from foreign terrorists. Toll roads are the first step down the slippery slope into the morass of economic servitude. It’s the selling of America, our independence and our freedoms. As bad as our government is, it beats slavery. Freedom on our highways is the key to all freedoms. Let’s not lose it. If we do, we’ll lose the rest quickly.
Al Williams
Oak Harbor
* astronomy
