Thread: Rick Perry's Campaign Donations (Bribes) = Million$

Perry & his cronies: The Shelley-Cintra-Giuliani connection

Terri Hall, San Antonio Transportation Policy Examiner
September 21, 2011
many links on this post

With the pay-to-play Solyndra scandal rocking the White House, presidential hopeful Rick Perry is embroiled in a mountain of crony capitalism controversy all his own. During the September 12 GOP presidential debate, Michelle Bachmann exposed the money trail behind Perry’s Executive Order mandating all 6th grade girls in Texas receive the Gardasil HPV vaccine made by the drug company, Merck, the employer of Perry’s former Chief of Staff, Mike Toomey, at the time. Merck funneled money to Perry, initially $5,000, but eventually adding up to the tidy sum of closer to $400,000, sparking outrage across Texas and now the nation.

Toomey’s just the tip of the ice berg.

A recent bill pushed through the Texas Legislature benefited the company Waste Control Specialists, owned by #2 donor to Gov. Rick Perry, Harold Simmons. Just days after the bill was signed into law, Mr. Simmons wrote a $100,000 check to Americans for Rick Perry, the super PAC supporting Gov. Perry's candidacy for president notes Debra Medina of We Texans.

Janet Ahmad, President of Homeowners for Better Building, pointed to similar problems in the construction industry. Top Rick Perry donor, Bob Perry, paid nearly $8 million in campaign contributions and sought and received his own regulatory agency called the Texas Residential Construction Commission in 2003. Gov. Perry appointed industry-connected people to that agency, including Perry Homes VP, corporate counsel John Krugh. “The resulting agency was so anti-consumer and so counter-productive that the Texas Legislature later decided to abolish it,â€

RELATED

Rick Perry tied to Agenda 21: Selling Texas to foreigners, jabs Obama for same

Terri Hall
San Antonio Transportation Policy Examiner
August 15, 2011

Rick Perry may be good at invoking states rights and property rights, while disavowing ‘foreign creditors,’ but his actions as Texas’ longest serving governor tell a different story. Public private partnerships (or P3s) are part and parcel of the United Nations’ Agenda 21. Two of the purposes of Agenda 21 are to abolish private property and restrict mobility and P3s act as the vehicle to do it. Perry made P3s a centerpiece of his transportation policy since he stepped in as governor.

It started with the Trans Texas Corridor, known at the federal level as high priority corridors, corridors of the future, or the NAFTA superhighways. Just in Texas, it was to be a 4,000 mile multi-modal network of toll roads, rail lines, power transmission lines, pipelines, telecommunications lines and more. It was going to be financed, operated, and controlled by a foreign company granted massive swaths of land 1,200 feet (4 football fields) wide taken forcibly through eminent domain.

Called the biggest land grab in Texas history, it was going to gobble up 580,000 acres of private Texas land (the first corridor alone was to displace 1 million Texans) and hand it over to well-connected global players using P3s, who would gain exclusive rights to determine the route and what hotels, restaurants, and gas stations were along the corridor in a government-sanctioned monopoly for a half century. It was the worst case of eminent domain for private gain ever conceived.

Property rights shredded
The Trans Texas Corridor, and P3s in general, represent an imminent threat to private property rights. While lawmakers repealed the Trans Texas Corridor from state statute only months ago due to the public backlash, the re-named corridor (‘Innovative Connectivity Plan’) and its threat to property rights lives on through P3s. Two such projects underway by a Spanish developer, Cintra, will charge Texans 75 cents per mile in tolls (nearly $13 a day while Perry claims he hasn’t raised taxes or indebted Texans to foreign creditors) to access lanes on two public interstates -- I-635 and I-820. A third project being developed by the same company for two segments on SH 130 is, perhaps, the only leg of the Trans Texas Corridor TTC-35 project that will ever be built.

While Perry distracted Texans and tea partiers with ‘emergency’ resolutions on state sovereignty during the 82nd legislature, P3s spread from transportation projects to virtually every other type of public infrastructure in a bill, SB 1048, passed by the Texas legislature which he signed into law June 17. Now all public infrastructure, including public buildings, schools, nursing homes, ports, mass transit, etc. can be auctioned-off to private interests in long-term sweetheart deals with taxpayer subsidies and profit guarantees using P3s.

P3s give a private corporation the power to tax the public, whether through charging tolls or other so-called ‘user fees,’ to access their own public infrastructure, and, perhaps more insidious, allowing well-connected private entities to profit from concessions on land taken through eminent domain.

Why shouldn’t the original landowner be able to profit from developing his/her land instead of having the government take it in the name of a “public useâ€