I saw this in the Vanity Fair story in about Giuliani's business practices. He apparently sold a company to an Australian company that is currently doing business in the U.S. This diary is about what that company, Macquarie Group. What does this company do?? You aren't going to believe this..I didn't.
what they do below the fold...
The Macquarie Group leases state roads in the U.S. and then operates them as toll roads. That's right, they lease roads built by taxpayer's money, and then charge those same taxpayers a fee to travel on them. Here is what the article says about it..it's not much, but it's a start.
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.
The Macquarie Group bought a failing investment bank owned by Giuliani's company.
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.
This dairy isn't about Giuliani's business dealings, shady as they are. It's about why OUR roads are being leased to businesses so that they can make money off the tolls. I would really like someone who knows how to find these things out to dig out why and how roads that I and the rest of you(well, mostly!) paid for are being leased to foreigners for their profit. Do they pay for the maintenance on the roads, or does that come out of our pocket too? How much, if any, of that money goes back into the coffers of the states who built the roads in the first place and who maintain them?
And finally, why is our infrastructure, which is crumbling fast, being leased out instead of repaired and upgraded? I know that many roads have tolls for a good reason, some of them are still being paid for, and on others the tolls cover repair and maintenance costs on heavily traveled roads. But once the road is paid for, the tolls usually stop. Unless someone leases it and keeps charging tolls.
Does anybody on DKos know about this?? If so, please explain to me why it's legal for states to lease out roads so that someone can charge the taxpayers that paid for it to drive over it? Someone?? Anyone??