In another stunning admission, David Casteel of TxDOT concedes they have the money to fix our freeways (ie – 281), but would rather indebt us for our lifetimes to foreign companies so that they can have more “play money.” He went into the usual bureaucratic gobbly-gook straining for a reason to possibly justify tolling us for what’s already paid for.

His answer: they WANT more of your money thereby leaving all of us with less. Haven’t we heard this sad little song over and over again from government? We can do so much more if we just raise your taxes. Sorry, Mr. Casteel, that tired ol’ song doesn’t come close to being sufficient justification for DOUBLE TAXATION and selling off control of our public infrastructure to foreign companies all so government can make a quick buck! TxDOT and other monopolistic government bureaucracies are like spoiled children who always want more no matter how much you give them. It’s the parent’s job to teach them self-control and mastery over their whims. TxDOT and BIG GOVERNMENT won’t EVER restrain themselves unless we do it for them.

Remember the famous dig on Bush, 41, “it’s the economy, _______!” Well, our government bureaucrats and politicians don’t seem to get it that it’s the principle here that’s sinking their ship with the taxpayers. We really don’t care that they can build endless amounts of highways ad nauseum forever if we’d only pony up a WHOLE NEW TAX ON DRIVING. It’s totally immoral to charge us twice for what we’ve already bought and paid for. It’s highway robbery to charge us a toll when they have the money to fix 281 right now, today. It’s immoral that they have withheld vital safety enhancements to Borgfeld Rd on 281, for instance (people have DIED at that intersection and they’ve had the money to fix it since 2003), simply so they turn our FREEway into a tollway and indebt us to foreign companies for generations!

Casteel and the pro-toll callers would rather shoot the messenger and make personal attacks for simply scrutinizing their plans (which we the taxpayers have to pay for) than to actually stick to the issues. This is how BIG government treats citizens who dare step out of place to redress our government for grievances. The government has the power to forcibly take our money for taxes, and all the credentials we need to demand accountability is the fact that we’re TAXPAYERS!

TxDOT and their cronies are out of control, folks, and the ONLY way to shrink a bureaucracy and save us from punitive taxation and to wrest our public infrastructure from control by foreign companies is to VOTE OUT EVERY LAST TOLLER, starting with Rick Perry, and to demand accountability for how government spends our hard-earned money. If they’re forcibly taking our money (which is what taxation is), we have EVERY RIGHT to demand they use it wisely.

CASTEEL ESSENTIALLY CALLS PERRY A LIAR
Rick Perry himself, who appoints the Transportation Commission, admitted that the figures they’re using to come up with their mythical “funding gap” (in other words their whole justification for saying they need to toll every highway they can get their hands on) are from transportation planners wish lists “if money were no object,” (Austin American Statesman article, August 20, 2006). Casteel basically called his boss a liar on the air when he tried to say I was wrong in calling their “needs” a wish list when his own boss, Rick Perry, is who said it! All I did was repeat it. These guys can’t get any more comical at this point!

Out of one side of their mouths they try to justify this whole new tax as a “user tax,” then admit they’re tolling 281 (in spite of the fact they have the money to pay for it) in order to pay for projects on another highway elsewhere. They also admit the tolls are never coming off the road, so it can’t be a user tax no matter how you look at it since once road A is paid for, they’ll continue to toll it to fund road B or C and so on. Also, they’re using some of our gas taxes to build these tollways since none of them are self-sustaining toll roads (Commissioner Lyle Larson even says so here). So again, all of us are paying for the toll roads, not just the “users,” plus we all pay the increase in our cost of goods since businesses will pass the cost of tolls onto us even if we don’t drive the toll roads.

They contradict themselves all day long and yet try to call our credibility into question asking if I’m an engineer. Isn’t it engineers who brought us the 410/281 mess (known around the state as the most embarrassing mess-up in the department’s history), the 1604/281 debacle and the list could go on? In fact, our band of concerned citizens does have civil engineers, lawyers, transportation planners, economists, and a host of well-informed citizens armed with the truth who know a raw deal when they see one.

But that’s really a side issue since this isn’t about engineering, it’s about government being accountable to the taxpayers who pay the bills. It’s about keeping what belongs to Texans under the control of Texans and not foreign companies. It’s about preserving our way of life and freedom of mobility without dividing us into two classes of people: those who can afford the tolls and those who will be priced off our own FREEways. It’s about putting the voters back in the drivers seat instead of multi-national companies and powerful foreign countries seeking to undermine our nation’s strength by exploiting free trade agreements. That’s what the pro-tollers just don’t get and they never will because their jobs depend on them not seeing it.

____________________________
Here’s my opening statement from the debate on KSLR AM 630 talk radio with Adam McManus today:

The bottom line: the push for tolls is about a whole new tax on driving to accommodate the anticipated influx in cheap foreign goods through the NAFTA Superhighway known as the Trans Texas Corridor in Texas. Plus, toll roads don’t solve congestion; they manipulate it for profit.

Anytime you increase government, increase taxes, and increase the cost of doing of business, it’s a recipe for economic disaster. It’s not a lack of money, but poor planning and misplaced priorities that have created this mess. Our politicians are gambling with these plans and they haven’t properly studied them by any relevant standards.

TxDOT is big business. It takes in more money than Southwest Airlines and Starbucks! If Southwest Airlines can keep people moving and stay in the black year after year TxDOT can, too. The trouble is TxDOT is a government monopoly with NO competition! It’s a bloated bureaucracy that needs to be reined in. Their budget has tripled since 1990 and state gas tax revenues have gone up 178% over the last 20 years at that’s adjusted for population and inflation. They have an amount nearly equal to doubling their current budget available in bonds RIGHT NOW. We can continue to build freeways without tolls. State Rep. Joe Pickett said (July 27, El Paso Times) “we can build 4 free roads for the cost of one toll road.”

It’s time TxDOT gets put on a diet and learns to manage its funds in a more fiscally responsible way that the public can trust. We’re all tightening our belts and driving less due to high gas prices, TxDOT needs to tighten their belt, too.

As an example, on Hwy 281, they plan to toll every single highway lane leaving only frontage roads as the non-toll with stop lights and reduced speed limits. TxDOT’s toll project manager Frank Holzman admitted on camera that what I drive on today will become a toll road. They’re negotiating a contract right now in SECRET to turn it over to a foreign company that would grant a 50 year monopoly and put those free lanes under the control of a private company allowing them to manipulate traffic onto the toll lanes. Mr. Casteel admitted on camera that there’s $100 million in your gas taxes identified for 281. When you look at the ORIGINAL TXDOT plan for 281, the cost is $100 million.

They have the money to fix it right now, but they’ve decided to toll you for your lifetime instead for a highway that’s already built and paid for and even the improvements are already paid for. This isn’t about accelerating projects or not having enough money, this is about tapping the vein of your wallet…you may as well call it a “pain tax” because in order for a toll road to work, the surrounding free lanes have to remain congested (otherwise no one would pay to use a toll lane).

Gas tax equals pennies a day; tolls equal dollars day. Pro-tollers are putting lipstick on a pig…but it’s still a pig and taxpayers and businesses alike know a lousy deal when they see one. The taxpayers will not stand idly by and allow our government and private special interests to hold Texas families’ hostage to pay a toll just to drive to work, school, or shop without our consent! Our government has lost touch with those whom it is paid to serve.

Please go to SA Toll Party.com to see it for yourself. The primary sources for our information are TxDOT’s own documents, state sponsored studies and reports, and national data from transportation think tanks.

We also encourage you to sign our online petition and to join our taxpayer revolt at SA Toll Party.com.

Link to article here.

NAFTA superhighway to mean Mexican drivers, say Teamsters
Union warns of drug-taking truckers, unsafe rigs on planned trade routes
World Net Daily
August 28, 2006

WASHINGTON – The NAFTA superhighway, a north-south interstate trade corridor linking Mexico, Canada and the U.S., would mean U.S. truckers replaced by Mexicans, more unsafe rigs on American roads and more drivers relying on drugs for their long hauls, charges the International Brotherhood of Teamsters – the latest group to weigh in against the Bush administration plan.

The August issue of Teamster magazine features a cover story on the plan for an enlarged I-35 that will reach north from the drug capital border town of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, 1,600 miles to Canada through San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Kansas City, Minneapolis and Duluth, while I-69 originating at the same crossing will shoot north to Michigan and across the Canadian border.

Public proposals for the superhighway calls for each corridor to be 1,200 feet wide with six lanes devoted to cars, four to trucks, with a rail line and utilities in the middle. Most of the goods will come from new Mexican ports being built on the Pacific Coast – ports being run by Chinese state-controlled shipping companies.

“Tens of thousands of unregulated, unsafe Mexican trucks will flow unchecked through out border – a very real threat to the safety of our highways, homeland security and good-paying American jobs,” writes Teamster President Jim Hoffa. “The Bush administration hasn’t given up on its ridiculous quest to open our border to unsafe Mexican trucking companies. In fact, Bush is quietly moving forward with plans to build the massive network of highways from the Mexican border north through Detroit into Canada that would make cross-border trucking effortless.”

So incensed was the union over the plan for the NAFTA superhighway that it sent investigative reporter Charles Bowden to Mexico for its August magazine report on the problems affecting Mexican drivers – problems that could soon come home to Americans with the plans for the new intercontinental highways.

Drivers interviewed for the magazine report say they are exploited by companies that force them to drive 4,500 kilometers alone over the course of five or six nights without sleep. How do they stay awake on such long hauls?

One driver says, “professional secret.” Another laughs, “magic dust.” Others mention “special chemicals.”

“And then they are off, a torrent of words and quips and smiles, and a knowing discussion of that jolt when a line of cocaine locks in,” writes Bowden. “They are all family men who run the highways at least 25 days a month and they are adamant about two things – that nobody can run these long hauls without cocaine and crystal meth, and now and then some marijuana to level out the rush. And the biggest danger on their endless runs comes from addicted Mexican truck drivers, which means all truck drivers.”

Mexican drivers, of course, earn considerably less than their U.S. counterparts – about $1,100 a month. Hoffa says the NAFTA superhighway plan would “allow global conglomerates to capitalize by exploiting cheap labor and non-existent work rules and avoiding potential security enhancements at U.S. ports.”

The drivers interviewed for Teamster magazine say they are completely at the mercy of their employers, the Mexican government and police – who are the first to rob them. All of those interviewed said they have killed people with their trucks on the highways and fled the accident sites.

Hoffa calls NAFTA an “unqualified disaster” up to now – and wonders why the nation continues to pursue the “free trade” agenda. Instead of creating new jobs, he said, it has cost 3 million in manufacturing alone. Instead of creating trade surpluses, America’s trade deficit is the worst ever, he says.

“If there’s a positive side to the disastrous legacy of NAFTA, it’s that it has made it a little harder for the free trade cabal to wrap their lies around subsequent job-killing deals,” says Hoffa. “While the White House and Senate still have a majority who continue to support the free trade agenda, their ranks have shrunk over the years – sometimes due to members of Congress changing their minds and sometimes due to voters changing their member of Congress.”

He adds: “If the Bush administration succeeds (with the NAFTA superhighway), American drivers and their families will be forced to share the roads with unsafe, uninsured trucks and millions of good-paying American jobs will be lost. And just one weapon of mass destruction in an unchecked container will be too many.”

Link to article here.

The NAFTA superhighway: Coming soon
Commentary By Pat Buchanan
World Net Daily
August 29, 2006

This is a “mind-boggling concept,” exploded Lou Dobbs. It must cause Americans to think our political and academic elites have “gone utterly mad.” What had detonated the mild-mannered CNN anchor?

Robert Pastor, vice chair of the Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on North America, had just appeared before a panel of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations to call for erasing all U.S. borders and a merger of the United States, Mexico and Canada in a North American union stretching from Prudhoe Bay to Guatemala. Under the Pastor-CFR plan, the illegal alien invasion would be solved by eliminating America’s borders and legalizing the invasion. We would no longer defend the Rio Grande.

“What we need to do,” Pastor instructed, “is forge a new North American Community. … Instead of stopping North Americans on the borders, we ought to provide them with a secure, biometric border pass that would ease transit across the border like an E-Z pass permits our cars to speed through tolls.”

The Pastor-CFR project for “economic integration” of Mexamerica is on the drawing board. North-south highways and railways would be built to weld us together as the American Union was welded together by the Northern Pacific, Union Pacific and Southern Pacific, and Ike’s Interstate Highway System.

Speaking in Madrid in 2002, Mexican President Vicente Fox declared: “Our long-range objective is to establish with the United States … an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union, with the goal of attending to future themes as important as … the freedom of movement of capital, goods, services and persons. The new framework we wish to construct is inspired in the example of the European Union.”

Critical element of the Fox post-NAFTA agenda: absolute freedom of movement for persons between Mexico and the United States – a merger of the nations. Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Debrez put it succinctly in April 2005. What Mexico is about is “complete integration” of the two nations.

To appreciate what Fox, Debrez, Pastor and the CFR wish America to merge with, consider a few excerpts from the State Department information sheet on Mexico.

While hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens marched beneath Mexican flags in U.S. cities on May Day to demand amnesty, Mexico’s constitution “prohibits political activities by foreigners, and such actions may result in detentions and deportations.”

“Crime in Mexico continues at high levels, and it is often violent, especially in Mexico City, Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, Nuevo Laredo (and) Acapulco,” State warns U.S. travelers. “Low apprehension rates and conviction rates of criminals contribute to the high crime rate.”

“Women traveling alone are especially vulnerable. … Victims … have been raped, robbed of personal property or abducted and then held while their credit cards are used at various businesses and automatic teller machines. … Kidnapping, including the kidnapping of non-Mexicans, continues at alarming rates.”

When Fox proposed his merger of America and Mexico in a North American Union, Robert Bartley, for 30 years editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, declared him a “visionary” and pledged solidarity: “He (Fox) can rest assured that there is one voice north of the Rio Grande that supports his vision … this newspaper.”

The American people never supported NAFTA, and they are angry over Bush’s failure to secure the border – but a shotgun marriage between our two nations appears prearranged. Central feature: a ten-lane, 400-yard-wide NAFTA superhighway from the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, up to and across the U.S. border, all the way to Canada. Within the median strip dividing the north and south car and truck lanes would be rail lines for both passengers and freight traffic, and oil and gas pipelines.

As author Jerome Corsi describes this Fox-Bush autobahn, container ships from China would unload at Lazaro Cardenas, a port named for the Mexican president who nationalized all U.S. oil companies in 1938. From there, trucks with Mexican drivers would run fast lines into the United States, hauling their cargo to a U.S. customs inspection terminal – in Kansas City, Mo. From there, the trucks would fan out across America or roll on into Canada. Similar superhighways from Mexico through the United States into Canada are planned.

According to Corsi, construction of the Trans-Texas Corridor, the first leg of the NAFTA superhighway, is to begin next year.

The beneficiaries of this NAFTA superhighway project would be the contractors who build it and the importers and outlet stores for the Chinese-manufactured goods that would come flooding in. The losers would be U.S. longshoremen, truckers, manufacturers and taxpayers.

The latter would pay the cost of building the highway in Mexico and the United States, both in dollars and in the lost sovereignty of our once-independent American republic.

Link to article here.

How NAFTA superhighway is built under radar screen
Officials say they see no budget ‘earmarks,’ because they don’t know where to look
World Net Daily
August 29, 2006

WASHINGTON – Ask some members of Congress about plans to build a “NAFTA superhighway” connecting Mexico and Canada via the U.S. and you might hear snickers. Some officials will tell you they have seen no “earmarks” for such a plan and question whether it even exists.

But the plan does exist and the NAFTA superhighway is being built – under the radar screen. One need look no further than the $286 billion highway bill signed into law earlier this month by President Bush for some of the “earmarks.” The measure gave the state of Tennessee more than $111 million to help plan and build Interstate 69, called “one of the most significant transportation projects in the region’s history” by the Commercial Appeal.

No one in Tennessee has any doubts about plans for the NAFTA superhighway. It is being built now with federal taxpayer dollars. And the plan calls for I-69 to extend from Michigan to Texas, linking the Canadian and Mexican borders. Those supporting the plan, like Transportation Secretary Mario Cino, say it will bring an unprecedented windfall not only to the regions it traverses but for all Americans, Mexicans and Canadians.

Tennessee Department of Transportation Commissioner Gerald Nicely said I-69 “could help position the western part of the state as one of the world’s new economic centers of power in the global marketplace.”

The entire I-69 project is expected to cost $8.8 billion in current dollars, with states picking up 10 percent of the tab. So where is the money hidden? It’s not really. But nowhere in any highway bill is the project referred to as the “NAFTA superhighway.” Since the money is doled out to states to spend on their portion of the project, the allocations look like any other highway spending.

Ultimately, the Tennessee portion of the I-69 project is expected to cost $1 billion. It will shadow the present route of U.S. 51, connecting towns like Union City, Troy, Dyersburg, Ripley, Covington and Millington before following what is now I-40/240 through Midtown, according to the Commercial Appeal. The new highway bill focuses on the portion of I-69 through Northwest Tennessee about 80-110 miles north of Memphis. A 20-mile section of that segment – a four-lane stretch of U.S. 51 between Dyersburg and Troy – already is completed. Signs label it as part of the “Future I-69 Corridor.” That leaves a 19-mile section to be built from Troy to the Kentucky line before one-third of the I-69 route through Tennessee is completed.

“The route’s already been laid out, with survey markers planted in fields and cryptic benchmarks painted on the pavement of country roads,” reports the Commercial Appeal. Detailed drawings are expected to be finished next February. Right-of-way acquisition could begin early next year. Crews could start moving earth as early as 2008. So why are some officials still questioning whether the project is real? Last week, in Kansas, Sen. Pat Roberts, a Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, seemed like he was short on domestic, backyard intelligence when he was asked in Saline about the NAFTA superhighway project – again, prompted by reports in WND.

“There’s nothing I’m aware of in any authorization bill,” Roberts said with derision. “I don’t know where these things get started. This is one of those blogosphere things that makes you wonder what’s going on.”

When the Duluth News Tribune followed up WND reports about the project by turning to a local congressman for help, Mary Kerr, an aide to Rep.Jim Oberstar, said: “There are no earmarks for a superhighway like that.”

But you can’t hide for long a superhighway, in some places, according to plans, four football fields wide.

High gas prices and consumer resistance to toll increase nets Denver toll road $10 million loss

Colorado government seeks private investors for ailing toll road

Financially troubled toll road exploring private lease as bail-out

Toll road looks for debt help

Editorial on how to bail out failed toll road; answer – private firm to take on longer debt term

Grammatical errors left in for effect.

The Texas Department of Transportation is hosting a open house for all small business September 20-21st at the Omni South Hotel . TxDOT offers a wide array of contracting opportunities for which we need businesses such as yours to fulfill ours needs. We are looking for business to contract in:

1. Engineering
(civil/concrete/drainage//geological/environmental/surveyor services/traffic & transportation)
2. Real Estate Professionals
3. Printing
4. Construction (airport runway/curb & gutter/highway and road/parking lots/sidewalk and driveway/utility & underground
projects/bridge
5. Maintenance (mowing/guardrail repair/lighting/excavation service/demolition/tree trimming/flooring maintenance/glass replacement/carpet cleaning/roofing/pest control)
6. All good/services (office supplies/staffing/personnel firms/HVAC/Plumbing/builders/painting/signs/material suppliers/safety equipment/fencing/janitorial supplies & services/office furniture/office equipment/radio and telecommunication equipment

TxDOT spends annually upwards of 5 billion dollars and consist of 25 districts, 20 divisions and 15,000 employees. These districts, divisions and employees are supported by your business to help sustain our operations in fulfilling our contract needs. Several major reasons we are having this small business briefing is to introduce you to our purchasing department, engineers and all of our areas of contract opportunities. By personally introducing you to these personnel, it is our intention for you to understand everything we contact for and the processes by which we contract. So that you may have a greater opportunity to be awarded business with us.

Also, as a bonus feature we will be introducing the 50 billion dollar toll project with the Cintra-Zachary team. You will meet there representative and they will make a presentation of the 5 billion dollars of sub contracting opportunities that will be available for all types do businesses.

We look forward to you joining us Austin at the Omni South Hotel.

For more information call TxDOT’s, Business Opportunity Programs Office
at 1-866-480-2518

We look forward to doing business with you.

TxDOT will host Small Business Briefings around the state: Houston – July 25-26, Dallas – August 2-3, Lubbock – August 16-17 , El Paso – September 13-14, Austin – September 20-21. For more information and registration call: 1-866-480-2518 or 512-486-5500.