Brief note and commentary of something I observed at CityLabs.
Laura Bliss at CityLabs writes:
A lawsuit filed Tuesday against President Trump alleges that his infrastructure advisory council—tasked with hammering out the details of his $1 trillion plan to rebuild roads, bridges, and waterways—was convened illegally, in violation of federal disclosure law.
It’s another reason for skepticism around Trump’s much-touted, little seen “great national infrastructure program,” marketed as a jobs-creating New Deal for 2017
Everything this regime does is a mean-spirited scam. The bones of this particular scam are a bunch of managementese gobble-te-gook: “we’re going to spend $200 billion over 10 years to leverage $800 billion in private money” and some odd bullshit—things that don’t mean anything (oh, and we’ll return to the $200 billion in just a second). The other parts of the scam are “asset recycling”, which is its own scam---basically if a government wants to build something and get money for it, they have to sell something it owns off to pay for it. This is practiced in parts of Australia (which seems to have a weird relationship with its infrastructure---they rejected asset recycling in 2014 only to bring it back---they seem to have killed it again according to this opinion article in the Guardian from early June). Here’s a glowing report on how it allegedly works and I link this particular site not as approval of the concept—I might believe infrastructure doesn’t need to be the money-pit that the US treats it as, but I certainly don’t believe we should be selling everything off like some kind of yard sale. I link as a “know your enemy” type of thing.
The regime seems to think this is some new-fangled thing for the US. Spoiler alert: it’s not. When Pennsylvania attempted to lease the Turnpike some years ago, it hoped to raise $30 billion, which it’d use for transportation related causes. The legislature at the time rejected the plan. Chicago selling off its parking meters, Indiana selling off its turnpike—these are good examples of “asset recycling.” We also know how well they’ve turned out (spoiler: they haven’t turned out well at all.)
As for spending $200 billion over 10 years in infrastructure spending—that’s far, far BELOW what we spend right now—as Naked Capitalism notes, it’s fricking peanuts.
Back to this alleged council: it only just got seated. Laura Bliss again:
“To date, the Infrastructure Council has operated in private—meeting, suggesting policy proposals, and rendering advice,” the court filing states. “Taxpayers and potentially affected communities have no insight into whether and how the council is considering or is prepared to consider key aspects of infrastructure development”—such as addressing a national lead-in-water crisis or funding urgent transit projects.
The Federal Advisory Committee Act requires that the members and meetings of presidential advisory panels be made public. Trump assembled his infrastructure council to hammer out the details of the $1 trillion package in January, days before Inauguration. But it was only last week that this council was formally established, according to a notice in the federal register.
it’s also full of people who are going to get rich doing it. The New York Times:
Days before his inauguration, the president announced that he was naming the real estate developers Richard LeFrak and Steven Roth to lead the infrastructure group. He has since added two people from the world of private equity: Joshua Harris, a founder of Apollo Global Management, and William E. Ford, the chief executive of General Atlantic. But while Mr. Trump has solicited policy advice from the infrastructure council, the group was not formally established by the White House until last week.
One gets the feeling these people consider real estate “infrastructure” too. Gosh, tax credits for builders and developers? Wonder where that will lead.
I’d hoped by now we'd have something to dig into. I had a whole diary series planned where we’d dig into each of these “projects” they’d offer up---but I learned quickly that these people and their administration are basically the personification of “Joanne the Scammer”, except much more objectively-pro Nazi.
(This is also one of the many reasons I’m particularly hard about techbros like Elon Musk. At some point some of y’all will realize his aims, when they aren’t a scam like hype(r)loop, are a soft-privatization of our infrastructure on the ground, under the ground, and in orbit. Musk is not an altruist. SpaceX is certainly great and has done great things---but it’s kept afloat via its US government contracts and its aim is to get rich. Hype(r)loop’s vactrain concept has not been proven to work! But I digress.)
Lastly, that man’s budget cuts the US Department of Transportation’s budget by more than 10%---and similar cuts are seen for the Army Corps of Engineers and anyone else responsible for our nations vast infrastructure inventory. The Senate seems to have restored some of the cuts, especially to Amtrak, but we’ll see what happens.