Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Bill White blasts Rick Perry's scheme of selling Texas roads to private, foreign toll operators

White says ‘No’ to private toll contracts

Not in favor of selling Texas roads to private, foreign toll operators


Bill White

10/20/10

Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom (TURF)
Copyright 2010

(Austin, TX ) Though the “official” transportation question at Tuesday’s gubernatorial debate never got asked by the Star Telegram’s Dave Montgomery (they ran out of time), TURF Director Terri Hall asked her most burning question to the former Mayor of Houston Bill White directly afterwards: “What do you think of these contracts that sell Texas highways to foreign companies?” White didn’t hesitate to answer, “No, I don’t support that.”

Governor Rick Perry’s no show gave the candidates vying for his job the opportunity to spend an hour telling voters why Perry needs to go.

Libertarian candidate Kathie Glass had the best zingers like this one when asked if there is anything positive Perry has done for Texas: “Since Perry supposedly only works 7 hours a week on state business, I can’t imagine the shape we’d be in if he actually worked full time.”

Perry’s about ‘theater instead of management’

White offered the most practical approach to governing, focusing on building consensus. He, too, criticized Perry’s light work schedule and said he’s “more about theater instead of management.”

White repeatedly leveled criticism of Perry for the onslaught of revelations about how he’s steered public money, contracts, and plum political appointments to campaign donors and for the revolving door between the Governor’s office and lobbyists.

TxDOT blunders must be fixed

Both White and Glass took swipes at the mismanagement of TxDOT with White condemning the $1 billion accounting error and Glass using the accounting error to call for cleaning up and cutting jobs at the embattled highway department, “TxDOT misplaces a billion dollars like I misplace my car keys.”

Each candidate gave a two minute closing. Again, White was pragmatic and spoke of policy initiatives like college tuition being too high while Glass addressed the “wasted vote” perception that third party candidates find difficult to overcome.

“The two top guys spent $40 million trying to convince you the other guy is not fit for office. I agree with both of them,” quipped Glass. Then she went on to say that Perry has taken the conservative base for granted and still “won’t respect you in the morning” come November 3 if he’s re-elected.

© 2010 TURF: www.texasturf.org

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To view the Trans-Texas Corridor Blog click HERE

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"The governor’s office installed a crony chairman to invest Teacher's Retirement System funds in toll roads as a means to pump money into TxDOT."

The Teacher's Retirement System internal investigation

10/20/10

Paul Burka
Texas Monthly
Copyright 2010

Perry’s comment about the TRS internal investigation involving charges in the whistleblower memo by Michael Green was, “That has been fully investigated by an outside group and by the TRS and it was forwarded on to the appropriate audit committee and there is no ‘there’ there.”

Perry is right: There is no “there” there. The reason why there is no “there” there is that the investigator’s report is pablum.

To describe it as a “report” is a generous description. It makes no effort to deal with the details of Green’s memo, which lays out specific instances of questionable management decisions and conduct. Whatever went on at TRS is dealt with only in generalities by the investigator.

For example, Michael Green alleges in his memo that Mr. [Britt] Harris, TRS’s CIO [chief investment officer], pressured the investment staff and adviser to change their recommendation to decline investments with EnCap Energy Capital Fund. The staff’s initial recommendation was to decline the investment. The advisor, a company by the name of Hamilton Lane, likewise recommended that the investment be declined. But the revised recommendation was that the staff approved the recommendation and the advisor made a “limited prudent investor” recommendation.

The investigator wrote that CIO Harris, in his interview with the investigator, provided reasonable explanations for the investment decisions questioned by TRS employees. “In many instances, for example, the CIO explained his decisions by pointing out that as senior investment officer, it was his ultimate decision and that he had the experience and knowledge of the investment world that subordinates did not….In sum, the investigation uncovered no definitive evidence that any Trustee improperly influenced the CIO with respect to any investment decisions.”

In other words, the boss is the boss and gets to call the shots. No one would disagree with that. The question is whether the decisions had political overtones. The AP story about the TRS investment flap mentioned two potential instances that Mr. Green included in his memo:

  • The chief investment officer at the retirement system, Britt Harris, “pressured TRS’ staff and adviser to change their recommendations to decline investments with” at least two EnCap funds, according to the memo. EnCap is led by senior managing partner Gary Petersen, who has given Perry more than $300,000, according to electronically available records at the Texas Ethics Commission.
  • Another firm that was initially turned down but later approved by the retirement system include HM Capital Partners, formerly known as Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, the memo said. Executives associated with the firm also have given large sums to Perry, including Tom Hicks, a billionaire and former chairman of the University of Texas Investment Management Company.

* * * *

My concern goes beyond the specifics of the Green memo to the ultimate question of whether Governor Perry and his appointees are good stewards of $100+ billion in trust funds. In particular, I worry that Perry’s ultimate goal is to dip deeply into TRS and its sister fund, ERS, to build toll roads.

Remember this story from 2009?

Governor Perry is removing Linus Wright, a former Dallas school superintendent, as chair of the board that oversees the $88 billion Teacher Retirement System and will replace him with a current board member who is also a member of Perry’s campaign finance team, Dallas real estate investor R. David Kelly. (Wright succeeded Jim Lee, who was one of three co-chairs of the Perry fundraising apparatus; Lee had resigned in the wake of news reports that he had run up gambling debts in Las Vegas.)

The removal of Wright occurred just a few days after Perry had announced the death of the Trans-Texas Corridor. The juxtaposition of events reminds me of the old Mark Twain line: “Reports of my death were greatly exaggerated.” The concern is that the governor’s office has installed a crony as chairman who will urge the board to invest retirement system funds in toll roads as a means to pump money into funding-starved TxDOT. Perry appointees who don’t go along –as we have learned in the case of boards of regents and the Forensic Science Commission — are likely to find themselves replaced.

I’m not just being an alarmist here. Remember, in the summer of 2008, Perry, Dewhurst, and Craddick signed a letter agreeing to work together to find a way to pay for new roads. An earlier Statesman story about the agreement said:

One prong of the plan would create a Transportation Finance Corporation to allow state investment funds — including the state employee and teacher retirement systems, among others — to directly invest in state transportation projects. Combined, the two state systems manage $135 billion in assets.

But TRS and ERS officials “took a cautious view of investing in state projects in testimony this year before the Senate Finance Committee, saying a mandate to invest in Texas infrastructure could conflict with their duty to find the best return on investment for retirees.”

Toll roads are highly questionable investments. Their success depends on the accuracy of traffic forecasts, which can be influenced by consultants who tell roadbuilders (and pension funds) what they want to hear. Their success also depends upon population growth and a healthy homebuilding climate, which we do not currently have. Toll roads are high-risk investments, the last kind of activity that pension funds should be invested in.




© 2010 Texas Monthly: www.texasmonthly.com

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To view the Trans-Texas Corridor Blog click HERE

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More social engineering projects at FHWA push the conversion of freeways into toll roads

Federal Agency Pushes States to Toll Existing Roads

Administration spends $10.5 million in taxpayer funds encouraging conversion of free roads into toll routes.

Related Link: Toll Roads Mean Billions in Extra Costs for Motorists

10/20/2010

theNewspaper.com
Copyright 2010

Federal Highway Administration yesterday held out $10.5 million to bribe states into turning freeways into toll roads through fiscal 2011.

As part of the so-called Value Pricing Program, which Congress introduced in 1991, the agency will take taxes paid by drivers at the pump and underwrite projects designed to charge motorists more for driving on existing roads or increase other fees imposed on drivers.

"These projects show that states are developing new ways of thinking about how to manage congestion," Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in a statement on projects selected in August.

Under the program, FHWA will select fifteen project proposals submitted by state departments of transportation and underwrite up to 80 percent of the cost of feasibility studies and implementation reporting.

In August's funding round, for example, the Virginia Department of Transportation and Washington Council of Governments received $320,000 in taxpayer funds for a study of the "advancement of regional pricing in DC including pricing existing facilities."

The Texas Department of Transportation received $2 million to promote a pay-per-mile insurance pilot programs designed to ease the public into acceptance of the concept of pay-per-mile road pricing.

Of the total amount of money allocated, $2.6 million is set aside for "non-tolling" projects such as the use of congestion pricing at parking meters, a system that allows local authorities to charge higher rates for car owners during peak times.

Tolling of roads, especially of "existing facilities," is frequently criticized as creating so-called Lexus Lanes that force poor commuters to drive in traffic while the wealthy can pay for a quicker journey. To address this problem, the FHWA program will support the diversion of even more money from state and federal gas taxes toward complicated rebate systems or mass transit.

"The potential financial effects of value pricing projects on low-income drivers shall be considered," FHWA's Federal Register notice explained. "Where such effects are expected to be both negative and significant, possible mitigation measures should be identified, such as providing new or expanded transit service as an integral part of the value pricing project, toll discounts or credits for low-income motorists who do not have viable transit options, or fare or toll credits earned by motorists by use of regular lanes which can be used to pay for tolls on priced lanes. Additional measures include methods to facilitate convenient cash payment by those who do not have bank accounts or credit cards, or who choose not to tie their toll accounts to their bank accounts or credit cards."

Applications for the federal funding must be received by January 18, 2011.


© 2010 TheNewspaper.com: www.thenewspaper.com

To search TTC News Archives click HERE

To view the Trans-Texas Corridor Blog click HERE

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Monday, October 18, 2010

"The question is, Where will Perry stand on Nov. 3 – the day after the election?"

Perry knows Texans don't like the Trans-Texas Corridor

undead

10/18/10

by William Lutz
Dallas Blog
Copyright 2010

Smack dab in the middle of an expensive re-election campaign, Gov. Rick Perry pronounced the Trans-Texas Corridor “dead.” That means he has to attend the funeral.

Perry never managed to sell Texans on his vision for our state’s highway system. Everybody has a different reason not to like his idea for a massive expansion of privatized toll roads. But the bottom line, is few Texans have bought into his vision.

Even Perry understands this. The Dallas Morning News quoted Perry Oct. 13 opposing putting toll booths on SH 161 through Irving, because it is an existing free highway.

This may be a first – Perry’s debut at opposing the slapping of a toll booth on a stretch of concrete.

Of course, Perry has had a notoriously icy relationship with both the North Texas Tollway Authority (which proposed tolling the Irving section of SH 161) and the Harris County Toll Road Authority. Still, Perry is opposing a toll road.

The remaining question is, Where will Perry stand on Nov. 3 – the day after the election?

In my view, Perry dug the grave for the corridor; he can’t exhume and resurrect the body. (That work is reserved for God Almighty.)

And will Perry try to resurrect the financing mechanism for the Trans-Texas Corridor – Comprehensive Development Agreements (CDAs)?

Perry isn’t campaigning on CDAs and doesn’t want them mentioned in this campaign – for good reason. For one thing, they are negotiated behind closed doors. The public doesn’t get to see these agreements – which bind the taxpayers for 50 years – until after the Texas Transportation Commission has approved them. This is a serious attack on the public’s right to know, and one the Legislature rightly curtailed in 2007.

There’s also the question of whether it’s appropriate to use toll roads as a back-door tax, with the toll set above the cost to build, maintain, and finance a given stretch of highway. And, of course, there are the attacks on private property rights that justifiably have the Farm Bureau upset.

The Legislature will consider transportation again in 2011, when it takes up the Sunset bill for the Texas Department of Transportation. Given that Perry has completely jettisoned toll roads and CDAs from his campaign, he’s made an implicit promise, if re-elected, not to try to resurrect the corridor or its financing mechanism. If Perry wants to make CDAs the cornerstone of his administration as he did in 2007, Texans have a right to know now.

There is need for a more comprehensive discussion about exactly how the state, moving forward, will fund roads to adapt to population growth. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Roads cost money. Sen. John Carona (R-Dallas) appropriately started that conversation in 2007 and correctly presumed that action on such a conversation is unlikely to occur in 2011, when the state is facing a very difficult budget situation.

That said, while the public hasn’t bought Perry’s vision, there is a need to do something. One place to start would be the promises made to legislators when they expanded the Texas Department of Transportation’s powers in 2003.

Maybe I’m a hopeless optimist, but I believe it is possible to find a way to meet the state’s transportation needs that is honest and transparent, honors local control and local tolling authorities, and respects private property rights.

But the Trans-Texas Corridor is none of those things, which is why Perry is wise to commit its body to the ground.

Earth to Earth. Ashes to Ashes. Dust to Dust. Amen.

© 2010 Dallas Blog: www.dallasblog.com

To search TTC News Archives click HERE

To view the Trans-Texas Corridor Blog click HERE

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"An almost frictionless machine for stripping wealth out of the heart of the country, one that perfectly encapsulates where we are as a nation."

America on Sale

Our cash-strapped country is auctioning off its highways, ports and even parking meters, finding eager buyers in the Middle East


10/18/10

From the Book, GRIFTOPIA by Matt
Rolling Stone Magazine
Copyright 2010

In the summer of 2009 I got a call from an acquaintance who worked in the Middle East. He was a young American who worked for something called a sovereign wealth fund, a giant state-owned pile of money that swims around the world in search of things to buy.

Sovereign wealth funds, or SWFs, are huge in the Middle East. Most of the bigger oil-producing states have massive SWFs that act as cash repositories (with holdings often kept in dollars) for the revenues generated by, for instance, state-owned oil companies. Unlike the central banks of most Western countries, whose main function is to accumulate reserves in an attempt to stabilize the domestic currency, most SWFs have a mission to invest aggressively and generate huge long-term returns. Imagine the biggest and most aggressive hedge fund on Wall Street, then imagine that that same fund is fifty or sixty times bigger and outside the reach of the SEC or any other major regulatory authority, and you've got a pretty good idea of what an SWF is.

My buddy was a young guy who'd come up working on the derivatives desk of one of the more dastardly American investment banks. After a few years of that he decided to take a step up morally and flee to the Middle East to go to work advising a bunch of sheiks on how to spend their oil billions.

Aside from the hot weather, it wasn't such a bad gig. But on one of his trips home, we met in a restaurant and he mentioned that the work had gotten a little, well, weird.

"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.

Here's yet another diabolic cycle for ordinary Americans, engineered by the grifter class. A Pennsylvanian like Robert Lukens sees his business decline thanks to soaring oil prices that have been jacked up by a handful of banks that paid off a few politicians to hand them the right to manipulate the market. Lukens has no say in this; he pays what he has to pay. Some of that money of his goes into the pockets of the banks that disenfranchise him politically, and the rest of it goes increasingly into the pockets of Middle Eastern oil companies. And since he's making less money now, Lukens is paying less in taxes to the state of Pennsylvania, leaving the state in a budget shortfall. Next thing you know, Governor Ed Rendell is traveling to the Middle East, trying to sell the Pennsylvania Turnpike to the same oil states who've been pocketing Bob Lukens's gas dollars. It's an almost frictionless machine for stripping wealth out of the heart of the country, one that perfectly encapsulates where we are as a nation.

When you're trying to sell a highway that was once considered one of your nation's great engineering marvels — 532 miles of hard-built road that required tons of dynamite, wood, and steel and the labor of thousands to bore seven mighty tunnels through the Allegheny Mountains — when you're offering that up to petro-despots just so you can fight off a single-year budget shortfall, just so you can keep the lights on in the state house into the next fiscal year, you've entered a new stage in your societal development.

You know how you used to have a job, and a house, and a car, and a wife and a family, and there was food in the fridge — and now you're six months into a drug habit and you're carrying toasters and TVs out the front door every morning just to raise the cash to make it through that day? That's where we are. While a lot of this book is about how American banks used bubble schemes to strip the last meat off the bones of America's postwar golden years, the cruelest joke is that American banks now don't even have the buying power needed to finish the job of stripping the country completely clean.

For that last stage we have to look overseas, to more cash-rich countries we now literally have to beg to take our national monuments off our hands at huge discounts, just so that our states don't fall one by one in a domino rush of defaults and bankruptcies. In other words, we're being colonized — of course it's happening in a clever way, with very careful paperwork, so we have the option of pretending that it's not actually happening, right up until the bitter end.

Let's go back in time, to the early seventies. It's 1973, and Richard Nixon's White House makes the fateful decision to resupply the Israelis with military equipment during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

This pisses off most of the oil-producing Arab states, and as a result, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC — a cartel that at the time included Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Libya, Iraq, and Iran, among others — decided to make a move.

For the second time in six years, they instituted an embargo of oil to the United States, and eventually to any country that supported Israel. The embargo included not only bans of exports to the targeted countries, but an overall cut in oil production.

The effect of the 1973 oil embargo was dramatic. OPEC effectively quadrupled prices in a very short period of time, from around three dollars a barrel in October 1973 (the beginning of the boycott) to more than twelve dollars by early 1974. The United States was in the middle of its own stock market disaster at the time, caused in part by the dissolution of the Bretton Woods agreement (the core of which was Nixon's decision to abandon the gold standard, an interesting story in its own right). In retrospect we ought to have known we were in trouble earlier that year because on January 7, 1973, then–private economist Alan Greenspan told the New York Times, "It is very rare that you can be as unqualifiedly bullish as you can be now." Four days later, on January 11, the stock market crash of 1973–74 began. Over the course of the next two years or so, the NYSE would lose about 45 percent of its value.

So we're in this bad spot anyway, in the middle of a long period of decline, when on October 6 Egypt and Syria launch an attack on the territories Israel had captured in the 1967 Six-Day War. The attack takes place on the Yom Kippur holiday and the war would become known as the Yom Kippur War.

Six days later, on October 12, Nixon institutes Operation Nickel Grass, a series of airlifts of weapons and other supplies into Israel. This naturally pisses off the Arab nations, which retort with the start of the oil embargo on October 17.

Oil prices skyrocketed, and without making a judgment about who was right or wrong in the Yom Kippur War, it's important to point out that it only took about two months from the start of the embargo for Nixon and Kissinger to go from bluster and escalation to almost-total surrender.

On January 18, 1974, Kissinger negotiated an Israeli withdrawal from parts of the Sinai. By May, Israel agreed to withdraw from the Golan Heights.

This is from the U.S. State Department's own write-up of the episode:

Implementation of the embargo, and the changing nature of oil contracts, set off an upward spiral in oil prices that had global implications. The price of oil per barrel doubled, then quadrupled, leading to increased costs for consumers world-wide and to the potential for budgetary collapse in less stable economies . . . The United States, which faced growing oil consumption and dwindling domestic reserves and was more reliant on imported oil than ever before, had to negotiate an end to the embargo from a weaker international position. To complicate the situation, Arab oil producers had linked an end to the embargo to successful U.S. efforts to create peace in the Middle East.

Hilariously, the OPEC states didn't drop the prices back to old levels after the American surrender in the Yom Kippur episode, but just kept them flat at a now escalated price. Prices skyrocketed again during the Carter administration and the turmoil of the deposition of the shah of Iran, leading to the infamous "energy crisis" with its long gas lines that some of us are old enough to remember very well.

Then, after that period, the United States and the Arab world negotiated an uneasy détente that left oil prices at a relatively steady rate for most of the next twenty-five years or so.

So now it's 2004. The United States and George W. Bush have just done an interesting thing, going off the map to launch a lunatic invasion of Iraq in a move that destabilizes the entire region, again pissing off pretty much all the oil-rich Arab nationalist regimes in the Middle East, including the Saudi despots — although, on the other hand, fuck them.

The price of oil pushes above forty dollars a barrel that year and begins a steep ascent. It's also around then that the phenomenon of the sovereign wealth fund began to evolve rapidly. According to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute:

Since 2005, at least 17 sovereign wealth funds have been created. As other countries grow their currency reserves, they will seek greater returns. Their growth has also been skyrocketed by rising commodity prices, especially oil and gas, especially between the years 2003–2008.

Dr. Gal Luft, director of a think tank called the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, would later testify before the House Foreign Affairs Committee about the rise of the SWFs. This is what he told the committee on May 21, 2008:

The rise of sovereign wealth funds (SWF) as new power brokers in the world economy should not be looked at as a singular phenomenon but rather as part of what can be defined a new economic world order. This new order has been enabled by several megatrends which operate in a self-reinforcing manner, among them the meteoric rise of developing Asia, accelerated globalization, the rapid flow of information and the sharp increase in the price of oil by a delta of over $100 per barrel in just six years which has enabled Russia and OPEC members to accumulate unprecedented wealth and elevate themselves to the position of supreme economic powers. Oil-rich countries of OPEC and Russia have more than quadrupled their revenues, raking some $1.2 trillion in revenues last year alone. At $125 a barrel oil they are expected to earn close to $2 trillion in 2008.

In fact, oil would go up to $149 that summer. Luft went on:

SWF are pouring billions into hedge funds, private equity funds, real estate, natural resources and other nodes of the West's economy. No one knows precisely how much money is held by SWFs but it is estimated that they currently own $3.5 trillion in assets, and within one decade they could balloon to $10–15 trillion, equivalent to America's gross domestic product.

Luft's analysis would square with a paper written by the San Francisco branch of the Federal Reserve Bank in 2007, which concluded that "analysts put current sovereign wealth fund assets in the range of $1.5 to 2.5 trillion. This amount is projected to grow sevenfold to $15 trillion in the next ten years, an amount larger than the current global stock of foreign reserves of about $5 trillion."

The San Francisco paper noted that most SWFs avoid anything like full disclosure, and there is little information available about what they may have invested in. One source I know who works at a Middle Eastern SWF explains that this is very much part of their investment strategy.

"They don't want publicity," he says. "They just want to make the money. That's one reason why you almost always see them buying minority stakes, as majority stakes would cause some countries to make issue of foreign ownership of investments. Sometimes it's multiple SWFs buying minority stakes in the same investment. But it's always thirty percent, twenty-five percent, and so on."

We've seen how banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley helped engineer an artificial run-up in commodity prices, among other things by pushing big institutional investors like pension funds into the commodities market. Because of this lack of transparency, we can't know exactly how much the SWFs also participated in this bubble by pouring their own money into energy commodities through hedge funds and other avenues.

The CFTC's own analysis in 2008 put the amount of SWF money in commodity index investing at 9 percent overall, but was careful to note that none of them appeared to be Arab-based funds. The oddly specific insistence in the report that all the SWF money is "Western" and not Arab is particularly amusing because it wasn't like the question of Arab ownership was even mentioned in the report — this was just the Bush administration enthusiastically volunteering that info on its own.

Adam White, director of research at White Knight Research and Trading, says not to put too much stock in the CFTC analysis, however.

"I am doubting that result because I think it would be easy for an SWF to set up another company, say in Switzerland, or work through a broker or fund of funds and therefore not have a swap on directly with a bank but through an intermediary," he says. "I think that the banks in complying with the CFTC request followed the letter of the law and not the spirit of the law."

He goes on: "So if a sovereign wealth fund has an investment in a hedge fund — which they have a bunch — and that hedge fund was then invested in commodities, I expect that a bank would report that as a hedge fund to the CFTC and not a sovereign wealth fund. And their argument would be, 'How can we know who the hedge fund's investors are?' — even if they know darn well.

"I think that this is very much a national security issue because the Arab states might be pumping up oil prices and siphoning off huge amounts of money from our economy," he adds. "A rogue state like Iran or Venezuela could use their petrodollars to keep us weak economically."

We know some things about what happened between the start of the Iraq war and 2008 in the commodities market. We know the amount of speculative money in commodities exploded, that between 2003 and 2008 the amount of money in commodities overall went from $13 billion to $317 billion, and that because virtually all investment in commodities is long investment, that nearly twenty-five-fold increase necessarily drove oil prices up around the world, putting great gobs of money into the coffers of the SWFs.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with oil-producing Arab states accumulating money, particularly money from the production of oil, a resource that naturally belongs to those countries and ought rightly to contribute to those states' prosperity. But for a variety of reasons the United States's relationship to many Arab countries is complicated and at times hostile, and the phenomenon of the wealth funds of these states buying up American infrastructure is something that should probably not happen in secret.

But more to the point, the origin of these SWFs is not even relevant, necessarily. What is relevant is that these funds are foreign and that thanks to a remarkable series of events in the middle part of the last decade, they rapidly became owners of big chunks of American infrastructure. This is a process of a country systematically divesting itself of bits and pieces of its own sovereignty, and it's taking place without really anyone noticing it happening — often not even the people asked to vote formally on the issue.

What was that process?

The explosion of energy prices — thanks to a bubble that Western banks and perhaps some foreign SWFs had a big hand in creating — led to Americans everywhere feeling increased financial strain. Tax revenue went down in virtually every state in the country. In fact, the correlation between the rising prices from the commodities bubble and declining tax revenues is remarkable.

According to the Rockefeller Institute, which tracks state revenue collection, the rate of growth for state taxes hit its lowest point in five years in the first quarter of 2008, which is when oil began its surge from around $75 to $149 a barrel.

In the second quarter the institute reported continued slowdowns, and in the third quarter, the quarter in which oil reached that high of $149, overall tax growth was more or less flat, at 0.1 percent, the lowest rate since the bursting of the tech bubble in 2001–2.

Obviously the collapse of the housing market around that time was a major factor in all of this, but surging energy prices impacting the entire economy — forcing business and consumer spending alike to retract — also had to be crucial.

Around this time, state and municipal executives began putting their infrastructure assets up to lease — essentially for sale, since the proposed leases in some cases were seventy-five years or longer. And in virtually every case that I've been able to find, the local legislature was never informed who the true owners of these leases were. Probably the best example of this is the notorious Chicago parking meter deal, a deal that would have been a hideous betrayal even without the foreign ownership angle. It was a blitzkrieg rip-off that would provide the blueprint for increasingly broke-ass America to carry lots of these prized toasters to the proverbial pawnshop.

"I was in my office on a Monday," says Rey Colon, an alderman from Chicago's Thirty-fifth Ward, "when I got a call that there was going to be a special meeting of the Finance Committee. I didn't know what it was about."

It was December 1, 2008. That morning would be the first time that the Chicago City Council would be formally notified that Mayor Richard Daley had struck a deal with Morgan Stanley to lease all of Chicago's parking meters for seventy-five years. The final amount of the bid was $1,156,500,000, a lump sum to be paid to the city of Chicago for seventy-five years' worth of parking meter revenue.

Finance Committee chairman Ed Burke had the job of informing the other aldermen about the timetable of the deal. Early that morning he called for a special meeting of the Finance Committee that Wednesday, to discuss the deal. That afternoon the mayor's office submitted paperwork calling for a meeting of the whole City Council the day after the Finance Committee meeting, on December 4, "for the sole purpose" of approving the agreement.

"I mean, they told us about this on a Monday, and it's like we had to vote on a Wednesday or a Thursday," says Colon.

"We basically had three days to consider the deal," says fellow alderman Leslie Hairston.

On that Tuesday, December 2, Daley held a press conference and said the deal was happening "just at the right time" because the city was in a budget crunch and needed to pay for social services.

He then gave them the details: he had arranged a lease deal with Morgan Stanley, which put together a consortium of investors which in turn put a newly created company called Chicago Parking Meters LLC in charge of the city's meters. There was no mention of who the investors were or who the other bidders might have been.

The next day the Finance Committee met to review the deal, and ten minutes into the meeting some aldermen began to protest that they hadn't even seen copies of the agreement. Copies were hastily made of a very short document giving almost nothing in the way of detail.

"It was like an eight-page paper," says Colon.

The Chicago Reader's write-up of the meeting describes the commotion that followed:

"We're rushing through this," says Alderman Robert Fioretti. "Why?"
"We've been working on this for the better part of a year, so we haven't been hasty," [city chief financial officer Paul] Volpe insists.
"You had a year, but you're giving us two days," says Alderman Ike Carothers.
To help aldermen understand some of the terms, Jim McDonald, a lawyer for the city, reads some legalese from the proposed agreement.
[Alderman Billy] Ocasio bellows: "What does that all mean?"

The aldermen are told by CFO Volpe that the reason the deal has to be rushed is that a sudden change in interest rates could cost the city later on, which makes one wonder about Volpe's qualifications for the CFO job — this was in the wake of the financial crash, and interest rates were at rock bottom, meaning the city stood only to lose money by hurrying. Higher interest rates would have allowed them to use the interest on the lump payment to fill their budget gaps, rather than the principal of the payment itself.

"I hear that excuse a lot whenever the mayor wants to pass something fast," says Colon. "As far as I'm concerned, I'll take that risk."

Again, the council at this time has no idea who's actually behind the deal. "We were never informed," says Hairston. "Not even later."

Nonetheless, the measure ended up passing 40–5, with Hairston and Colon being among the votes against. I contacted virtually all of the aldermen who voted yes on the deal, and none of them would speak with me.

Mayor Daley, who had already signed similar lease deals for the Chicago Skyway and a series of city-owned parking garages, had been working on this deal for more than a year. He approached a series of investment banks and companies and invited them to submit bids on seventy-five years' worth of revenue on the city's 36,000 parking meters. Morgan Stanley was one of those companies.

Here's where it gets interesting. What Morgan Stanley has to do from there is two things. One, it has to raise a shitload of money. And two, it has to find a public face for those investors, a "management company" that will be presented to the public as the lessee in the deal.

Part one of that process involved the bank's Infrastructure group going on a road tour to ask people with lots of cash to pony up. It was these guys from Morgan's Infrastructure desk who took their presentation to the Middle East and pitched Chicago's parking meters to a room full of bankers and analysts in Abu Dhabi, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, who ultimately agreed to purchase a large stake.

Here's how they pulled off the paperwork in this deal. It's really brilliant.

At the time the deal was voted on in December 2008, an "Abu Dhabi entity," according to the mayor's office, had just a 6 percent stake in the deal. Spokesman Peter Scales of the Chicago mayor's office has declined to date to identify which entity that was, but by sifting through the disclosure documents, we can find a few possibilities, including a group called Cavendish Limited that is headquartered in Abu Dhabi.

Apart from that, most of the investors in the parking meter deal at the time it was voted on look like they were either American or from nations with relatively uncomplicated relationships with America. The Teacher Retirement System of Texas had a significant stake in one of the Morgan Stanley funds at the time of the sale, as did the Victorian Funds Management Corporation of Australia and Morgan Stanley itself. A Mitsubishi fund called Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group also had a stake. There were a variety of other German and Australian investors.

All of these companies together put up the $1.2 billion or so to win the bid, and once they secured the deal, they created Chicago Parking Meters LLC, a new entity, which in turn hired an existing parking management company called LAZ to run the meter system in place of city run parking police. The press stories about the deal invariably reported only that the city of Chicago had leased its parking meters to some combination of Morgan Stanley, Chicago Parking Meters LLC, and LAZ. A Chicago Sun-Times piece at the time read:

Under questioning from Finance Committee Chairman Edward M. Burke (14th), top mayoral aides acknowledged that the partnership that includes Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners and LAZ Parking recently formed a limited liability corporation in Delaware, but never bothered to register in Illinois.

But two months after the deal, in February 2009, the ownership structure completely changed. According to Scales in the mayor's press office:

In this case, after the Morgan Stanley investor group's $1.15 billion bid was accepted and approved by the City in December 2008, Morgan Stanley sought new investors to provide additional capital and reduce their investment exposure — again, not an unusual move.
So, while a group of several Morgan Stanley infrastructure funds owned 100% of Chicago Parking Meters, LLC in December 2008, by February 2009, they had located a minority investor — Deeside Investments, Inc. — to accept 49.9% ownership. Tannadice Investments, a subsidiary of the government-owned Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, owns a 49.9% interest in Deeside.

So basically Morgan Stanley found a bunch of investors, including themselves, to put up over a billion dollars in December 2008; a big chunk of those investors then bailed out to make way in February 2009 for this Deeside Investments, which was 49.9 percent owned by Abu Dhabi and 50.1 percent owned by a company called Redoma SARL, about which nothing was known except that it had an address in Luxembourg.

Scales added that after this bait and switch, the original 6 percent Abu Dhabi "entity" reduced its stake by roughly half after Tannadice got involved. According to my math, that still makes Abu Dhabi– based investors at least 30 percent owners of Chicago's parking meters. God knows who the other real owners are.

Now comes the really fun part — how crappy the deal was for other reasons.

To start with something simple, it changed some basic traditions of local Chicago politics. Aldermen who used to have the power to close streets for fairs and festivals or change meter schedules now cannot — or if they do, they have to compensate Chicago Parking Meters LLC for its loss of revenue.

So, for example, when the new ownership told Alderman Scott Waguespack that it wanted to change the meter schedule from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday to 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week, the alderman balked and said he'd rather keep the old schedule, at least for 270 of his meters. Chicago Parking Meters then informed him that if he wanted to do that, he would have to pay the company $608,000 over three years.

The bigger problem was that Chicago sold out way too cheap. Daley and Co. got roughly $1.2 billion for seventy-five years' worth of revenue from 36,000 parking meters. But by hook or crook various aldermen began to find out that Daley had vastly undervalued the meter revenue.

When Waguespack did the math on that $608,000 he was going to be charged, he discovered that the company valued the meters at about 39¢ an hour, which for 36,000 meters works out to $66 million a year, or about $5 billion over the life of the contract.

"When it comes to finding a figure for the citizens of Chicago, they say the meters are worth $1.16 billion," Waguespack said shortly after the deal. "But when it comes to finding a figure to cover Morgan Stanley, they say they're worth, what, $5 billion? Who are they looking out for, the residents or Morgan Stanley?"

The city inspector at the time, David Hoffman, subsequently did a study of the meter deal and concluded that Daley sold the meters for at least $974 million too little. "The city failed to make a calculation of what the value of the parking meter system was to the city," Hoffman said.

What's even worse is this — if they really needed the up-front cash, why sell the meters at all? Why not just issue a bond to borrow money against future revenue collection, so that the city can maintain possession of the rights to park on its own streets?

"There's no reason they had to do it this way," says Clint Krislov, who's suing the city and the state on the grounds that the deal is unconstitutional.

When they asked why the city didn't just do a bond issue, some of the aldermen say they never got an answer.

"You'd have to ask the mayor that," says Colon.

But the most obnoxious part of the deal is that the city is now forced to cede control of their streets to a virtually unaccountable private and at least partially foreign-owned company. Written into the original deal were drastic price increases. In Hairston's and Colon's neighborhoods, meter rates went from 25¢ an hour to $1.00 an hour the first year, and to $1.20 an hour the year after that. And again, the city has no power to close streets, remove or move meters, or really do anything without asking the permission of Chicago Parking Meters LLC.

Colon, whose neighborhood had an arts festival last year, will probably avoid festivals in the future that involve street closings.

"It's just something that's going to be hard from now on," he says.

In the first year of the deal, Alderman Hairston went to a dinner on Wacker Drive near the Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower, renamed after a London-based insurer), parked her car, and pressed the "max" button on a meter, indicating she wanted to stay until the end of that night's meter period. She got a bill for $32.50, as Chicago Parking Meters LLC charged her for parking overnight.

"There are so many problems — I've had so many problems with them," says Hairston. "It tells you you've got eight minutes left, you get back in seven, and it charges you for the extra hour. Or you don't get a receipt. It's crazy."

But to me, the absolute best detail in this whole deal is the end of holidays. No more free parking on Sunday. No more free parking on Christmas or Easter. And even in Illinois, no free parking on days celebrating, let's say, a certain local hero.

"Not even on Lincoln's birthday," laughs Krislov.

"Not even on Lincoln's birthday," sighs Colon.

Wanna take Lincoln's birthday off? Sorry, America — fuck you, pay me! And here's the last very funny detail in this whole business. It was the grand plan of CFO Volpe to patch the budget hole with the interest earned on that big pile of cash. But interest rates stayed in the tank, and so the city was forced to raid the actual principal. In a few years, the money will probably be gone.

"We did have a big hole in the budget," admits Colon. "But this didn't fix the problem. We might still have the same hole next year, and then where will the money come from?"

Bizarrely, a month and a half or so after this deal was done, a gloating Mayor Daley decided to offer some advice to the newly inaugurated President Obama, also an Illinois native. He told Obama he needed to "think outside the box" to solve the country's revenue problems.

"If they start leasing public assets — every city, every county, every state, and the federal government — you would not have to raise any taxes whatsoever," he says. "You would have more infrastructure money that way than any other way in the nation."

And America is taking Daley's advice. At this writing Nashville and Pittsburgh are speeding ahead with their own parking meter deals, as is L.A. New York has considered it, and the city of Miami just announced its own plans for a leasing deal. There are now highways, airports, parking garages, toll roads — almost everything you can think of that isn't nailed down and some things that are — for sale, to bidders unknown, around the world.

When I told Pennsylvania state representative Joseph Markosek that someone had been pitching the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Middle Eastern investors, he laughed.

"No kidding," he said. "That's interesting."

Markosek was one of the leading figures in killing Governor Ed Rendell's deal to sell off the turnpike, but even he didn't know who the buyers were going to be. He knew that Morgan Stanley was involved, but that was about it. Mostly he just thought it was a bad idea on general principle. "It would have been a bad deal for Pennsylvania," says Markosek. "There's a lot of speculation that the governor would have just taken that lump sum and used it to balance the budget this year, because he has a significant problem with the budget this year. But that would have left us with seventy-four more years on the lease."

The reason these lease deals happen is the same reason the investment banks made bad investments in mortgage-backed crap that was sure to blow up later, but provided big bonuses today — because the politicians making these deals, the Rendells and Daleys, are going to be long gone into retirement by the time the real bill comes due.

Welcome to life in the Grifter Archipelago.

Copyright © 2010 by Matt Taibbi. www.rollingstone.com

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“If all 180 of us stood up to raise the gas tax, Rick Perry would still veto it.”

Raising gas tax off the table this campaign season

10/18/10

by Andy Hogue
Dallas Blog
Copyright 2010

A tax increase by any other name is still the same -- at least during campaign season.

Hopes of increasing the state’s gas tax as a means of triage-ing a projected shortfall in highway funding were raised during the 81st legislative session.

But at the current time, any tax increase proposal -- even to offset something as controversial as tolling existing roadways -- is looked on the same way as any other tax increase is in Texas. That is, as potentially damning to a campaign.

Based on what we heard during recent weeks on the campaign trail, both Gov. Rick Perry and Bill White oppose raising the motor fuels tax to fund transportation projects.

And, based on an before a meeting of the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security committee on Oct. 12, a sudden increase in pro-gas-tax-increase courage may not be enough to ward off the veto of a governor dead-set against a tax increase of any kind.

So is a motor fuels tax increase still on the table at all? We look at that below.

Perry, White say ‘no taxes’

Democratic gubernatorial nominee White has (without referencing last session’s Local Option Transportation Plan specifically) called for “more local options” during several speeches, and ending diversions from the state’s transportation fund. White also called for more federal highway dollars for Texas.

But raising the gas tax? Not a word about it.

Republican incumbent Perry also has called for ending diversions. As we know, he has been a fan of public-private partnerships via CDAs as an option, a la Trans-Texas Corridor. And Perry has in the past said Texas should get a better return from its investment into the federal highway system, as right now the state gets back about 70 cents for every dollar paid to the federal government.

But no calls for raising the gasoline tax come from the Perry camp, either.

The Texas Highway Fund is expected to dry up in 2012 without more revenues.

A plan to index the gasoline tax to the rate of inflation was proposed in the 81st Session -- the motor fuels tax hasn’t been increased since 1991 and stands at 20 cents per gallon. This proposal never took off amid other transportation-related concerns, including the Texas Department of Transportation’s Sunset review.

A more popular call is for ending diversions from the state’s transportation fund (Fund 6 -- about $1.2 billion of which is diverted to Department of Public Safety programs), but that also has fallen flat.

Then there was the ill-fated Local Option Transportation Act (SB 855, known by insiders as “TLOTA”), which called for allowing counties to raise or lower the gas tax to pay for local and regional transportation projects -- a plan championed by Sen. John Carona (R-Dallas) and Rep. Vicki Truitt (R-Southlake).

The plan was narrowly defeated in the waning hours of the session, amid cries from its strongest supporters that something ought to be done about the coming transportation funding nightmare.

With that, a slow trickle of legislators came forward in favor of raising the gas tax as a means of bringing peace to a divided Legislature. Earlier this year, House Transportation Committee Chairman Rep. Joe Pickett (R-El Paso) became a proponent.

“I’ll go on record -- I’m for a gas tax increase,” Pickett said to the Fifth Annual Transportation Forum in Austin last January. “If I were king for a day, I’d raise the gas tax to a rate that’s not hurting, but I’d have to explain it to the public.”

But that was nearly a year ago. More recently, he told the Houston Chronicle (Oct. 4) that a gas tax, even after the election, wouldn’t be looked at any more favorably than in 2009.

“I’m trying to make small changes that over time could make a difference,” Pickett said, via the Chronicle, “… because I can tell you right now, Pickett trots out there with a gas-tax bill, I think we’ll get 160 votes against it.”

Prospects of a veto override

So what if, somehow, the Legislature gets up enough support to push for a gas tax increase? Could it get around a governor pledged not to raise taxes at all?

“If all 180 of us stood up to raise the gas tax, he would still veto it,” said Sen. Jeff Wentworth (R-San Antonio).

Wentworth was answering a challenge from a citizen testifying at the hearing to raise the gas tax, Mel Borel of San Antonio. Borel, a member of the anti-toll road group Texas United for Reform and Freedom (TURF), came to oppose reauthorization of confidential Comprehensive Development Agreements (CDAs) and public-private partnerships in road-building projects, as CDAs were an interim charge for the committee to consider.

Borel, along with TURF president Terri Hall, who spoke previously, mentioned a Bexar County Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) meeting recently at which 900 people showed up -- about 90 percent of them opposed tolling State Highway 281 north of Loop 1604.

The MPO voted to recommend tolling that portion of 281. Hall characterized the move as ignoring the voters.

“I represent every square inch of 281 north of 1604,” Wentworth responded. “I’m for reducing congestion and increasing mobility … and it was not a matter of arrogance, or that we said we enjoy ignoring the voters.

“What we did was very carefully weigh our options. It wasn’t a close vote. An overwhelming number of the members of that MPO voted to keep tolling as a viable option, not because we want tolling. As a matter of fact, Mr. Borel, I prefer an increase in the gas tax!”

“Let’s go for it!” Borel replied, only to be told such a move would not be politically expedient.

“ It’s kind of refreshing to have a politician run a campaign promising he would veto any tax increase,” Wentworth retorted, “and keep his word once he’s sworn into office. I think we should raise the gas tax, but the Governor doesn’t. I don’t run the state. The Governor doesn’t either. But we’ve got to work together, and we won’t see this governor signing any tax increase bills. So we’ve got to find another way of doing it.”

Wentworth noted that there has been only one successful veto in the last 30 years -- one that occurred after the Legislature was immediately brought back in at the end of the Governor’s veto period.

“The way it works here,” Wentworth said to Borel, “is that all the bills are signed in the waning days of May. And then we all go home.”

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Sunday, October 17, 2010

Rick Perry's transportation legacy: Tens of billions of dollars in toll road debt

Perry built roads, and road debt

10/17/10

Ben Wear
Austin American-Statesman
Copyright 2010

I went to rickperry.org last week to see just how prominent a place transportation has among the many pressing concerns of our governor as he runs for re-election.

Very prominent, it turns out. Well, kind of. Last week, anyway.

The pull-down menu choices across the top of Perry's campaign home page included among 11 items one focusing on vehicles and long-distance travel. "NASCAR," it said.

I clicked on it and was treated to a series of photos of Perry appearing at the Texas Motor Speedway near Fort Worth, where Bobby Labonte drove the Perry-for-governor No. 71 car in April. Labonte came in 23rd.

Perry, on the other hand, has an unblemished record of taking the checkered flag, and it absolutely has nothing to do with left turns — on transportation or any other issue. (Sadly, NASCAR had been banished from the home page by Sunday, for some

And that's for what he has done and how he did it (toll roads and debt), and for what he wanted to do but backed away from after the public and its elected representatives said no thanks.

Under Perry, if you adjust for inflation, the Texas Department of Transportation has spent almost 50 percent more each year to build new roads and repair roads than it did under George W. Bush: an average of $4.9 billion a year in constant 2010 dollars for Perry versus $3.35 billion in the Bush years.

And that doesn't count much of what the various regional mobility authorities — local toll road agencies created under Perry-backed legislation — have and will spend on new roads.

Or the billions that private toll road operators are spending on the extension of Texas 130 southeast of Austin and on several projects in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Or much of the $3.2 billion stockpiled for more Metroplex road projects after the North Texas Tollway Authority outbid a private company for the right to build a lucrative toll road in Collin County.

Or the hundreds of millions of dollars city and county governments have spent on new roads based on promises from TxDOT to pay them back under yet another Perry program.

Despite all the talk of a road funding crisis during the Perry years, the reality is that there has been a dramatic increase in such spending. And a lot of new roads.

What most of that spending has in common, however, is that it came from borrowed money. TxDOT and the state's general fund currently are on the hook for more than $13 billion in transportation bonds (including $2.2 billion for three of the five toll roads here in Austin), and that number is likely to reach $20 billion within the next three or four years. TxDOT will be making debt payments of about $300 million a year over the next 20 years — about 10 percent of what it takes in from the state gas tax — for just one of the several road-debt programs set up under Perry.

And then there's the late, unlamented Trans-Texas Corridor. White, at least, has been talking about it some on the campaign trail, trying to remind voters of Perry's 2002 plan to build 4,000 miles of toll roads, railroads and utility lines crisscrossing the state. In its original 1,200-foot-wide incarnation, that plan would have consumed more than a half-million acres of Texas farm and ranch land.

I could find no mention of the corridor plan on Perry's website, including on the transportation issues page. The word "toll" appears only once in the paragraphs written by Perry's staff.

Even in the 2006 governor's race, when his corridor vision was fully alive and generating considerable umbrage in rural counties, Perry comfortably prevailed over a troika of legitimate candidates all trying to make electoral hay out of it. Now the plan is dead, killed by legislative opposition in 2007 that was fueled by the earlier tumbleweed rebellion.

That, too, will be part of Perry's transportation legacy.

For questions, tips or story ideas, contact Getting There at 445-3698 or bwear@statesman.com.

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