Link to article here.

Wonder how free trade, college, and jobs relate to toll roads? Our Nation’s so-called “free trade agreements” are the reason why the Trans Texas Corridor is being built and handed over to a foreign company (Cintra) to reap MEGA profits for the next 50 years. China and multi-national corporations want a new trade corridor to ship cheap Chinese goods into the U.S. at Texas taxpayers’ expense. The project requires 580,000 acres of private Texas land to benefit Cintra and China, not Texans. It’s the worst eminent domain abuse EVER to befall our country. So in the name of “free trade,” we’re now sending so many high paying jobs overseas, that the expensive college education you just mortgaged your home to pay for was for nothing. U.S. News and World Report is now suggesting those students take blue collar jobs. This election year we can this to the mantra: it’s the jobs, stupid!

College Not Necessary for Many New Careers
January 2, 2007
by Phyllis Schlafly, Eagle Forum

U.S. News & World Report, which has made a name for itself by ranking and announcing the Best Colleges every year, is now ranking and listing the Best Careers for young people. A comparison of the latest lists shows a shocking disconnect and makes for dispiriting holiday reading.

While the price of a college education has skyrocketed far faster than inflation, many careers for which colleges prepare their graduates are disappearing. U.S. News’ Best Careers guide concludes that “college grads might want to consider blue-collar careers” because B.A. diploma holders “are having trouble finding jobs that require college-graduate skills.”

Incredibly, U.S. News is telling college graduates to look for jobs that do not require a college diploma. Among the 31 best opportunities for 2008 are the careers of firefighter, hairstylist, cosmetologist, locksmith, and security system technician.

Where did the higher-skill jobs go? Both large and small companies are “quietly increasing offshoring efforts.”

Ten years ago we were told we really didn’t need manufacturing because it can be done more cheaply elsewhere, that auto workers and others should move to Information Age jobs. But now the information jobs are moving offshore, too, as well as marketing research and even many varieties of innovation.

The flight overseas includes professional as well as low-wage jobs, with engineering jobs offshored to India and China. Thousands of bright Asian engineers are willing to work for a fraction of American wages, which is why Boeing just signed a 10-year, $1-billion-a-year deal with an Indian government-run company.

Society has been telling high school students that college is the ticket to get a life, and politicians are pandering to parents’ desire for their children to be better educated and so have a higher standard of living. John Edwards wants the taxpayers to guarantee every kid a college education, and Mitt Romney says more education is the means for Americans to compete in a global economy.

But it doesn’t make sense for parents to mortgage their homes, or for students to saddle themselves with long-term debt, in order to pay overpriced college tuition to prepare for jobs that no longer exist. Tuition at public universities has risen an unprecedented 51 percent over the past five years.

President Bush calls the loss of U.S. jobs “the pinch some of you folks are feeling.” I guess his words are designed to show his “compassionate conservatism,” but the reality is far more than a pinch.

U.S. News offers this advice for the nerds who still spend five to six years earning an engineering degree despite increasingly grim prospects of a well-paid engineering career: “Look for government work.” Or maybe you can be an “Offshoring Manager” and be part of the process of shipping your fellow graduates’ jobs overseas.

A Duke University spokesman said that 40 percent of Duke’s engineering graduates cannot get engineering jobs. A Duke University publication suggests that the best prospect for good engineering jobs is for the U.S. government to start another major project like going to the moon.

U.S. News warns us that “government is becoming an employer of choice.” Corporations are getting leaner, but government can continue to pay good salaries, with lots of vacation days, sick leave, health insurance and retirement benefits, because government rakes in more tax revenue in good times and can raise taxes in bad times; and if the Democrats win in 2008, we can expect government to expand even more.

Presidential candidates have gotten the message from grassroots Americans that we want our borders closed to illegal aliens. Headlines now proclaim “Immigration Moves to Front and Center of G.O.P. Race” and “G.O.P. Candidates Hold Fast on Immigration at Debate.”

But G.O.P. candidates haven’t yet gotten the message that jobs are just as big a gut issue as immigration. The Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey conducted December 14-17 reports that, by 58 to 28 percent, Americans believe globalization is bad because it subjects U.S. companies and employees to unfair competition and cheap labor.

Where are the limited-government fiscal-conservatives when we need them to refute the notion that the best an engineering graduate can hope for is a job with the government? Are the fiscal-conservatives too busy chanting the failed mantra of “free trade” even though it has resulted in millions of good American jobs being shipped overseas?

When are we going to call a halt to the way globalism is destroying U.S. jobs by foreign currency manipulation, theft of our intellectual property, shipping us poisonous seafood and toys, and unfair trade agreements that allow foreign subsidies (through the so-called Value Added Tax) to massively discriminate against U.S. producers and workers?

It’s clear the current crop of transportation commissioners is committed to selling out the Texas taxpayers by hawking-up our PUBLIC FREEways to the highest bidder on Wall Street. This is the legacy Ric Williamson and Rick Perry will leave…pushing an agenda the Texas taxpayers have repeatedly rejected and representing private interests over the public good.

The Texas Transportation Institute study showed merely indexing the gas tax to inflation would meet our future transportation needs, de-bunking Commissioner Holmes’ claims of an unacceptably high gas tax increase below. It’s time for all of these bureaucrats to go. Replace the transportation commissioners, who are joined at the hip with the road lobby, with a single ELECTED commissioner! The sooner the better!

Texas transportation commission chairman’s death could upend toll-road debate
Monday, December 31, 2007
By MICHAEL A. LINDENBERGER / The Dallas Morning News
The death of Ric Williamson, the fiery, whip-smart chairman of the state transportation commission, could upend the still-roiling debate over toll roads in Texas in the New Year.

Mr. Williamson died Saturday of a heart attack at age 55, sending shock waves through the nearly 15,000-employee department he led as well as the political and policy circles where his combative style and pro-toll-road agenda had engendered enormous change – and criticism.

Always careful to credit Gov. Rick Perry, a close friend and former roommate, Mr. Williamson emerged as a lightning rod in recent years as he pushed to let private companies build and operate toll roads throughout Texas.

“We are [expletive] running out of money,” he told The News in a wide-ranging interview a week before his death, allowing his usual thoughtful, precise vocabulary to give way to frustration over continued resistance to the governor’s toll road policies. “It absolutely boggles my mind how men and women elected to make courageous decisions in leading this state cannot focus on the simple fact that our congestion is rapidly approaching an intolerable level.”

It was Mr. Williamson’s sometimes-abrasive approach that has those who clashed with him hoping his successor will take a more conciliatory tone and a balanced approach to the state’s problems. One of those critics, Sen. John Carona, D-Dallas, chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, said he is hoping that Mr. Williamson’s successor will support raising state gas taxes to help reduce the need for tolls.

Even Mr. Williamson’s supporters acknowledge that he often bruised feelings. Still, fellow members of the commission say he was indispensable.

“Ric was focused laser-like on the issues, well read and always researched things thoroughly,” said commissioner Ted Houghton of El Paso.

Mr. Williamson was focused on finding a way to pay for the new roads and added lanes that Texas’ booming metropolitan areas need – even as such traditional revenues as gas taxes failed to keep up with costs. In general, new roads in Texas will have to be toll roads, Mr. Williamson said often in recent months.

Plenty of powerful voices have disagreed, however.

Last session, the Texas Legislature passed a partial moratorium on a centerpiece of Mr. Perry’s strategy, slowing his plans to privatize toll roads. Mr. Williamson spent most of 2007 criticizing the moratorium as an example of fuzzy-headed legislative intrusiveness. But he also led a vigorous effort to work around the new rules, and within months of the session’s close unveiled a list of more than 80 highway projects eligible for toll roads.

Those stormy debates are expected to carry into 2008.

A new panel will study the concept of private toll roads this year and report to the Legislature. In addition, and perhaps far more significantly, an independent sunset review commission will begin the top-to-bottom examination of TxDOT that all state agencies must undergo every 12 years.

No one expects the latter process to be free of conflict.

Mr. Carona said a new chairman will give TxDOT a less abrasive style.

“I think it will moderate the case for toll roads,” Mr. Carona said. “Chairman Williamson was singular in his focus on the usage and expansion of toll roads. And as much as he will be missed, a change in leadership will undoubtedly result in a more multi-pronged approach.”

A spokesman for the governor said Monday that it’s far too early to comment on a replacement for Mr. Williamson, who was a close friend of Mr. Perry’s for more than 20 years. Whoever is selected can begin serving immediately but will have to be confirmed by the state Senate next year.

Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano and a member of the transportation committee, said the sunset review panel’s findings will help set the course for when the debate with the Legislature resumes in 2009.

“That commission is going to start meeting fairly quickly, and there will be some very creative and very innovative ideas that will come to the forefront,” she said.

But the toll road debate won’t be the same without Mr. Williamson, she and others said Monday.

“I think he was a very strong advocate for that [pro-toll-road] position,” Ms. Shapiro said. “We probably won’t have another chairman who will be as strong. But that doesn’t mean that position and those ideas about toll roads and privatization will go away.”

She’s right, Mr. Williamson’s fellow commissioners said Monday.

Mr. Houghton said Mr. Williamson and the governor had been pushing for private toll roads because they are a solution that works.

“All four of us are committed to this approach, and we understand the issues,” Mr. Houghton said. “The issues are this: We are out of money.”

Commissioner Ned Holmes of Houston agreed.

“We have to have a new methodology to fund our highway program,” Mr. Holmes said, speaking in support of private toll roads. “The traditional ways of funding are just not adequate, and they are not likely to be. I don’t believe those changes [embraced by TxDOT in recent years] will fall apart now.”

He said higher gas taxes – the most often touted alternative to tolls – won’t work, because rates would have to soar far beyond any acceptable level to provide the needed revenue. “That’s not going to happen.”

But Mr. Carona and others said more modest increases in the gas tax would greatly reduce, though not eliminate, the need for private toll roads in Texas.

Terri Hall, a grassroots activist who has led a citizens’ group to sue TxDOT over its toll road push, said Mr. Williamson sometimes embraced a with-us or against-us approach when communities resisted his push for toll roads.

“I think you always knew where you stood with Ric Williamson,” said Ms. Hall, whose group is called Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom. “You knew he was never going to back away from his position, no matter how many citizen concerns he heard. He’d stick to his gun no matter what.”

She said she hopes the sunset review will recommend doing away with the commission and replacing the body with a single elected commissioner.

In the meantime, though, the dynamics of the toll road debate will change without Mr. Williamson. How much they change could depend on how involved Mr. Perry decides to be in pushing the policies he relied on Mr. Williamson to champion.

Mr. Carona said the governor will have to step up his involvement in the discussions if he wants to see his side advocated as strenuously as it has been by Mr. Williamson.

Ms. Hall agreed.

“I truly think there was only one Ric Williamson,” Ms. Hall said. “How significantly his absence will affect the debate really is up to the governor. The governor has really leaned on Ric Williamson to take his hits for him.”

The state transportation commission’s next scheduled meeting is Jan. 31 in Victoria. Though chairman Ric Williamson died Saturday, the four remaining members can continue to act with full authority. Possible scenarios:

• The four members can elect a temporary chairman, who will preside until Gov. Rick Perry appoints a permanent chairman.

• The governor can appoint Mr. Williamson’s successor, who could begin serving immediately but would be subject to a Senate vote in the next legislative session in 2009.

• The new chairman could be one of the four existing members or the fifth to be named by Mr. Perry.

SOURCE: Dallas Morning News research

We started to send out word connecting the dots between Macquarie, Cintra, the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani and Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani last spring. Finally, the mainstream press is starting to look into Giuliani’s crooked deals that involve the Texas Governor and many of the special interests that dominate Texas. It’s clear Cintra and Macquarie are trying to buy themselves a U.S. President!

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Below is an excerpt from Vanity Fair, December 2007, on the Macquarie, Cintra, Bracewell & Giuliani, and Trans Texas Corridor connection – Link to full article here.

“Finally, last March, Giuliani managed to sell Giuliani Capital Advisors for an undisclosed sum to a fast-growing Australian bank called Macquarie Group. In a New York Times article, an analyst suggested that Macquarie might have paid as much as $76 million for it. Another analyst scoffs at that and says the price was closer to $10 million—essentially what Giuliani had paid for it. A source at Macquarie, while not confirming the lower figure, allows that the higher figure is “wildly” off. (Hess says, “We don’t comment on fees or compensation.”)

Why would an Australian colossus like Macquarie buy a money-losing U.S. investment bank? Perhaps because Macquarie is making inroads—literally—in the U.S., acquiring the leases on state highways and operating them as toll roads, in Indiana and Illinois, with more states to follow. The toll-road business is highly controversial and involves politics right up to the top. It can’t hurt to have helped out a man who might be the next president. (A Macquarie spokesperson says the only reason for the purchase of G.C.A. was “new sectors and new locations for us,” and that Giuliani “was not involved in discussions for acquisition of G.C.A. by Macquarie.”)

Even before the deal, there had been only one degree of separation between Macquarie and Giuliani. Macquarie’s partner in a $3.8 billion Indiana toll road is a Spanish company called Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte, S.A. Cintra, in turn, is represented by a Texas law firm once known as Bracewell & Patterson, now called Bracewell & Giuliani.

Legal Eagles

For Giuliani, a law firm was the third leg of the stool. Not only did it fit right in with his other businesses; for the former prosecutor, appending his name to a large, established firm was a dream come true. But one in Texas?

The business marriage worked for the reason marriages often do: each partner could help the other. At 64, Bracewell managing director Patrick Oxford had accomplished a lot. A genial Republican with close ties to Senators Kay Bailey Hutchinson and John Cornyn, among other Texas stalwarts, he prides himself on his role in heading up his party’s delegation of lawyers in Broward County, Florida, in the aftermath of the 2000 election. Four years later, he took his strike force to Ohio and helped keep the tipping-point state in the Republican column. Oxford, then, had done about as much as any individual in the United States to determine the outcomes of the last two presidential elections. Yet Bracewell was overshadowed by larger Texas firms such as Vinson & Elkins, alma mater of former U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales, and Baker Botts, where former secretary of state James Baker presides. Giuliani would boost Bracewell’s profile, especially if he ran for president—and won.

To all who asked, Giuliani said he hadn’t yet made up his mind about entering the race for 2008. But the alliance with Bracewell in early 2005 was a move made by a man who knew exactly what he needed to shore up his prospects: credibility in the Republican heartland. Also, the money was good. Oxford agreed to give Giuliani Partners $10 million, to be split among its three senior partners: Giuliani, Mike Hess, and Daniel Connolly, according to a story in The American Lawyer. In becoming Bracewell & Giuliani, the Texas firm would also commit $25 million to establish a New York office. As the head of that office, Giuliani would be guaranteed at least $1 million a year, plus 7.5 percent of all fees generated by the office. Yet his commitment to the law firm was less than half-time: Mondays and Fridays.

Politically so far, the move has paid off. By the middle of 2007, Giuliani had raised $4,788,168 in Texas, more than Hillary Clinton ($3,137,134), more even than the two closest Republican candidates combined (Mitt Romney’s $2,254,349 and John McCain’s $2,189,696). But in marrying into Bracewell, Giuliani has acquired a whole family of squirrelly relatives, from the firm’s own lobbyist-lawyers to the clients they represent.

Bracewell & Patterson has long been known for representing school districts. By the time Giuliani became part of it, in early 2005, it had also become the go-to law firm for major polluters: oil and gas as well as coal companies. Among its significant clients are Chevron/Texaco, Pacific Gas & Electric, Dynegy, Southern Company, Valero Energy, and Shell Oil.

Until recently, Citgo oil company was among those significant clients, but no longer. Last March, after a flurry of news stories, Giuliani was embarrassed: Citgo, since 1990, has been run by a state-owned Venezuelan petroleum company, and thus is currently controlled by the country’s president, Hugo Chávez. Giuliani had been knocking the virulently anti-American Chávez in speeches around the country. “We need a president who knows how to get things done, so we don’t have to be sending money to Chávez,” he declared in a speech in May. “Who would listen to Chávez if he didn’t have all this oil money?” In fact, Bracewell & Giuliani had been happy to take Chávez’s money: Bracewell had registered as a lobbyist for Citgo in April 2005, for $5,000 a month, right after Giuliani joined the firm. Bracewell finally ended its relationship with Citgo in June 2007.

Perhaps most unfortunately, Bracewell & Giuliani has supplied the legal and lobbying muscle to get new coal-fired power plants built all over the country. A dramatic example is the coal-fired plant called Desert Rock Energy Project, to be built by Sithe Global Power, a Bracewell client, on Navajo lands in Burnham, New Mexico. “To us, this is environmental injustice and economic exploitation,” declares Dailan Long, a Navajo activist. “We were never informed about this project thoroughly. The terms of the lease agreement have never been released to us.” Bracewell’s lobbyist Frank Maisano, the point man on Desert Rock, scoffs at that. “There have been more than 400 public meetings about the project over a four-year period,” he says. “They don’t have to disclose the terms of the lease. This is an agreement between Sithe Global and the Navajo Nation, and the lease is part of an ongoing process.” Maisano notes that the council of the Navajo Nation voted 66 to 7 for the plant. Long and other activists say the tribe’s elders have been misled about the environmental and financial impact on the community.

Howard Rubinstein, the well-known New York public-relations man who now represents Bracewell & Giuliani, has said that Giuliani “doesn’t lobby in any way” for the firm, and that lobbying makes up only about 2 percent of the firm’s earnings. So none of this really matters, nor do the contributions that the firm’s employees have made to Giuliani the candidate—at least $100,000 to date—or the contributions from the oil and gas companies: $545,058 as of mid-November 2007, way ahead of Mitt Romney ($309,933) and Hillary Clinton ($220,550). And, presumably, if Giuliani wins in November 2008, the firm would be known simply as Bracewell, not as Bracewell & President Giuliani.

The Road Through Texas Is Paved with Gold

Still, Giuliani’s presence at the firm may create some synergistic connections. Consider the Trans Texas Corridor debate.

For several years now, Texas governor Rick Perry has been pushing a plan that appalls many of his constituents—except, apparently, the most powerful ones—to outsource a spider’s web of new and improved state highways to Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte, S.A. To ease Texans’ fears that the state is putting its future roads in the hands of a foreign-owned company, Cintra is now partnered with a San Antonio construction company called Zachry. The roads envisioned in this $184 billion, 4,000-mile project are no mere superhighways. They’re three football fields wide. They will include not only a rail line but also pipelines that can carry oil, gasoline, or liquefied natural gas. Alongside the roads will be distribution centers. Cintra-Zachry will lease the roads and levy whatever tolls it likes. And it will also control the distribution hubs, and charge what it likes there too. “I don’t want to see transportation become another battle between the haves and have-nots,” says former Texas Democratic congressman Chris Bell. “And it could quickly become that.”

The roads of the Trans Texas Corridor, as currently envisioned, would cut wide swaths through hundreds of farms and ranches. “Eminent domain is a huge issue here,” says Democratic Texas state representative Garnet Coleman. “The biggest opposition has come from farmers and ranchers who are along the proposed roads.” Eventually, the corridor might be extended to Canada. Coleman calls it “a super-nafta corridor.”

The connections may be coincidence, but they’re striking. Cintra is a client in Texas of Bracewell & Giuliani. The company it’s most likely to work with to extend the corridor north is Macquarie, which already operates its Indiana toll road in partnership with Cintra. In early 2007, Macquarie bought a chain of some 40 local Texas and Oklahoma newspapers. Might it have bought those papers to control public opinion in advance of plans to build more controversial toll roads? Might it potentially have in Giuliani not only a legal partner for future toll roads but a political ally?

Bracewell spokesperson Melanie Hillis says that Giuliani has not worked on behalf of Cintra or Macquarie. A Macquarie spokesperson adds that Cintra used Bracewell before it became Bracewell & Giuliani. He says that Macquarie is as likely to compete with Cintra as to cooperate on any future toll roads. He also declares that the purchase of those newspapers was made by the Macquarie Media Group, a separate division with no connection to Macquarie’s toll-road business. “To suggest that the acquisition was made to control public opinion in advance of building toll roads is absurd and incorrect. The business continues to be run by the same management team, with the same editorial staff. No editorial influence has been exercised by the Macquarie Media Group.” Anyway, the spokesperson adds, “I don’t think it is correct to say that the building of more toll roads in the United States is ‘a highly controversial plan.’ ”

That might come as a surprise to the farmers and ranchers who face the prospective loss of their land through eminent domain, and the Texans who feel their taxes entitle them to state-built freeways, not foreign-run toll roads. At the least, they seem less likely to get a sympathetic hearing from a president whose law firm represents Cintra and whose investment bank was sold to an Australian bank that often partners with Cintra and wants to build more U.S. toll roads.

Perhaps Giuliani does have little or nothing to do with his law firm’s principal clients. With at least one smaller client, however, he clearly played a role, and that role appears, to say the least, unpresidential.

In early 2006, Bracewell & Giuliani reviewed a proposed bank purchase. The Spanish bank Santander wanted to buy 20 percent of Sovereign Bancorp of Philadelphia. Bracewell’s review recommended the deal, the New York Stock Exchange and the S.E.C. eventually approved it, and so Santander bought in for $2.4 billion. The story, however, was a bit more complicated than that.

The review, according to one Sovereign insider, was paid for by the Spanish bank and dismissed the concerns of shareholders opposed to the acquisition. As a result, says this source, Bracewell ignored dubious dealings by Santander, such as its donations to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez’s political campaigns and its connections to Cuba and Iran (Santander was fined by the U.S. in 2004 for doing business with Cuba and has come under scrutiny for trading with an Iranian bank blacklisted by the U.S. for links to terrorism), not to mention the fact that its C.E.O. had been investigated for corruption. “I questioned why Rudy stuck his neck out like that,” the insider says. “Obviously it was for a fee, but with his long-term aspirations there didn’t seem like a lot of upside.” (Bracewell says that the firm was hired by Santander to assess the proposed investment and found that the bank “had fully and completely complied with all laws relevant to the transaction.”)

“Cheer and Loathing in New York,” by Gail Sheehy (June 2000), about the showdown between Rudy and Hillary in that year’s Senate race—before Rudy bowed out

“Giuliani’s Princess Bride,” by Judy Bachrach (September 2007)

“Crazy for Rudy,” by Michael Wolff (June 2007)

Illustration by Risko.

Almost immediately after the buy-in, Sovereign’s chairman, Jay Sidhu, resigned with a $44 million parachute. In November of that year, Giuliani gave a speech, for $100,000, at the Jay S. Sidhu School of Business & Leadership at Wilkes University, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

When the Chicago Tribune asked Bracewell managing partner Daniel Connolly about the timing of these events, Connolly said that Giuliani’s speech had no connection to the Bracewell review, which in any case was completed nine months before the speech. But a Wilkes University spokeswoman told the Tribune that, in fact, the university had identified Giuliani as a potential speaker in April 2006, formally asked him to speak in May, and signed a contract with him on June l3—two weeks after the Santander-Sovereign deal closed. (Giuliani’s speeches were arranged by the Washington Speakers Bureau.)

In the businesses that Giuliani built and bought these last six years, more deals have yet to be examined, more dots connected in the picture of his great financial success. But enough are there already, with lines between them, for a shape to have clearly emerged. It’s a picture of a politician leading a parade, as Mayor Giuliani so often did. Only the marchers behind him aren’t drum majorettes or wartime veterans or firefighters or police. They’re a ragtag band of Texas lawyers and energy lobbyists, penny-stock sharpies and security-industry entrepreneurs, agog with visions of the ultimate pay-to-play presidency.”

With additional reporting by Christopher Bateman.

Michael Shnayerson is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.