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Tuesday, July 24, 2007 |
AlterNet: "In these weird times of privatization fever, selling off bridges, toll roads and airports is no longer considered preposterous - for the billionaires who can afford them it's good business.
The Brooklyn span has yet to be sold off, but similar public assets all across the country have been, and many more are up for grabs - an estimated $100 billion worth of highways, bridges, airports, and other public properties could be transferred into corporate hands in just the next two years. Among those already gone or actively being considered for privatization are Chicago's Skyway commuter route, the city's entire downtown parking system, and Midway Airport; in Indiana, three major throughways (a 157-mile toll road across the state, a new Illiana Expressway, and a section of the I-69 NAFTA highway) and the state lottery; Virginia's Pocahontas Parkway and Dulles Greenway; the 537-mile Pennsylvania Turnpike and Philadelphia International Airport; New York's Tappan Zee Bridge; a vast 4,000-mile network of toll roads across Texas; Colorado's Northwest Parkway; Alabama's Foley Beach Expressway bridge; the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel; and, in New Jersey, the NJ Turnpike, Garden State Parkway, and Atlantic City Expressway.
What's at work here is a convergence of gutless politicians, right-wing ideological fantasizers, conniving investment bankers, and raw corporate greed. What has drawn them together is the incandescent, transformative, blinding, neon-green force that rules American society: money."
From an e-mail I received:
"Howdy!
I'm floating on air right now, as I just finished having all the documents notarized that complete my purchase of the perpetual rights to over one million gallons of water a year! Here in Colorado water is bought and sold separately from land, and it has become an increasingly precious resource. With Colorado's population booming, water-hungry municipalities have been purchasing agricultural water rights for rapidly escalating prices, and diverting the water into their reservoirs. As a result, the few remaining senior water rights still in the hands of farmers have become almost unattainable.
Shortages of water have been especially severe during the past couple of years, because a huge number of acres (100,000+) in Northeastern Colorado were 'dried up' as a result of Colorado losing a major lawsuit brought by the State of Nebraska. The Platte River (which is where all the water remaining in Boulder Creek eventually ends up going...) was going completely dry in Nebraska as a result of excessive irrigation usage in Colorado. When the Federal Appeals Court ruled that Colorado was taking too much water, the Colorado State Engineer's Office was forced to tell hundreds of farmers with junior water rights (mostly for water that was filed upon after 1940) that they had to shut down all of their wells and ditches. The only way that they could ever again irrigate was if they located a senior source of supply somewhere upstream to either purchase, or long term lease.
To make a long story short, the Boulder Creek water rights that I was just able to purchase were filed upon on Oct. 1st, 1862, which makes them just about as senior as you can get. That means that I will receive the majority of my new million gallon allocation even in years of severe drought, as my ditch will only run dry when the creek is darn near empty. These water rights are so strong that any one of the hundreds of farmers who was shut down the entire length of the Platte drainage could have used them to bring their now desiccated land back to life. Suffice it to say, it was an incredibly fortuitous bit of good fortune that allowed me to find this great deal before anyone else!"
11:36:23 AM 
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DailyMail: "This week the 64th British soldier to die in Afghanistan, Corporal Mike Gilyeat, was buried. All the right things were said about this brave soldier, just as, on current trends, they will be said about one or more of his colleagues who follow him next week.
The alarming escalation of the casualty rate among British soldiers in Afghanistan - up to ten per cent - led to discussion this week on whether it could be fairly compared to casualty rates in the Second World War.
Few seem to turn a hair at the officially expressed view that our occupation of Iraq may last for decades.
In six years, the occupation has wrought one massive transformation in Afghanistan, a development so huge that it has increased Afghan GDP by 66 per cent and constitutes 40 per cent of the entire economy. That is a startling achievement, by any standards. Yet we are not trumpeting it. Why not?
The answer is this. The achievement is the highest harvests of opium the world has ever seen.
The Taliban had reduced the opium crop to precisely nil. I would not advocate their methods for doing this, which involved lopping bits, often vital bits, off people. The Taliban were a bunch of mad and deeply unpleasant religious fanatics. But one of the things they were vehemently against was opium.
That is an inconvenient truth that our spin has managed to obscure. Nobody has denied the sincerity of the Taliban's crazy religious zeal, and they were as unlikely to sell you heroin as a bottle of Johnnie Walker.
Our economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and 'value-added' operations.
It now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.
How can this have happened, and on this scale? The answer is simple. The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government - the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.
Our presence in Afghanistan and Iraq is the greatest recruiting sergeant for Islamic militants. Our only real achievement to date is falling street prices for heroin in London."
10:59:11 AM
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AlterNet (with video): "Even the man who wrote the articles of impeachment against President Clinton admits Bush has committed impeachable offenses."
News: "The US dollar touched a new record low against the euro in Asian trade today, hit by jitters about the US housing market troubles and recent falls in global share prices, dealers said."
LATimes: "Huge, expensive and dogged by controversy, the new U.S. Embassy compound nearing completion here epitomizes to many Iraqis the worst of the U.S. tenure in Iraq.
Militants have fired shells into the compound in the fortified Green Zone, where more than 85 rocket and mortar strikes have killed at least 16 people since February, according to a United Nations report last month. Five more people died in fierce barrages this month."
10:48:32 AM
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