Foxes in the Henhouse: Selling Our Transportation Networks to the Highest Bidder

Anyone need an arabian horse judge? Political appointments are nothing new.  The fact is though that the Bush administration's blatant cronyism is going to end up selling us down the river, literally.  In an article in the Washington Post on Monday, there was a profile on two Bush appointees to the DOT that showed how badly we need a democratic president.  

One Tyler Duval had no transportation experience whatsoever, yet a few years after his appointment through a friend of a friend he is setting the agenda at the Department of Transportation with another named DJ Gibbin.  Mr. Gibbin's father was an associate of Dick Cheney at Halliburton, which is how he got the appointment at DOT.

He had no transportation experience when he was plucked from his job handling corporate mergers and acquisitions at Hogan & Hartson and was offered a political appointment at the DOT in 2002. "It was a friend of a friend of a friend sort of thing," he said. Within four years, he was setting national policy.  

Their goal, drown it in the bathtub like Grover.  In effect, they are trying to take this nation's transportation system and privatize it, selling the pieces to the highest bidders.

They and other political appointees have spent the latter part of President Bush's two terms laboring behind the scenes to shrink the federal role in road-building and public transportation. They have also sought to turn highways into commodities that can be sold or leased to private firms and used by motorists for a price.

But transit, much more a public good and not easily privatized since its destruction at the hand of oil and auto after the Second World War, is worthless to them.  At a time when gas prices are skyrocketing, these folks are turning their backs on alternatives that can save Americans money and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.  Obviously, this has the effect of enriching their friends in the oil industry.

Even if the next president reverses its policies, the Bush administration will leave a legacy of new toll roads across the country, a growing number of public roads leased to private companies, and dozens of stalled commuter rail, streetcar and subway projects -- including the $5 billion extension of Metro to Dulles International Airport.

Instead, they want to suck money out of us. They are unapologetic, even about taking away money from ADA required transit programs for a congestion pricing lottery they staged last year.  And not all transportation as evidenced below, has to do with congestion, it's about mobility for those who don't have access to cars.  But like most Republican actions these days, they don't seem to care about those who don't have the means.

"I couldn't believe they could get away with this, to just take that money away," said Mark Munson, director of the Regional Transit Authority in Dubuque, which has been frequently forced to deny trips to the elderly and disabled because there are not enough buses and volunteers can't fill all the gaps.

Duvall is unapologetic, saying the traditional pork-barrel process of divvying up transportation dollars is bad policy. The proof, he said, is the fact that increased government spending on transportation has not slowed congestion.  

In fact, they killed rail to Dulles because the Carlyle Group wasn't going to get a piece of the action!

For Macquarie, the Dulles Toll Road has enormous appeal. The company approached Virginia in 2005 about leasing the road, pocketing motorist fees and financing the rail extension to the airport. But Virginia officials had other ideas. They wanted to keep the road in the hands of a public entity -- the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority -- and let it build the rail line.

According to four former senior DOT officials, Virginia's decision upset Duvall and then-DOT chief of staff John A. Flaherty. "They went ballistic," one of the officials said. "[They] wanted that to be their pet project in the nation's capital. Tyler would mention that frequently . . . that it would be better for the project to go to Macquarie."

Duvall said the DOT is not trying to steer Virginia toward a public-private partnership for Dulles rail and that Flaherty was angered because the state did not notify the department, not by the substance of its decision. "My interest in this was solely to make sure the taxpayer was getting the right deal," he said.

When the DOT said in January that it would not fund the rail project, Macquarie repeated its interest to Virginia officials, as did another private equity firm, the Carlyle Group, which created a $1.5 billion fund to invest in U.S. infrastructure and has hired Flaherty to head it.

I'm surprised that this article wasn't discussed on Kos, but here it is...we need a new president and the first order of business should be to get rid of these hacks.