Selling The Infrastructure Out From Under Us

First, some more good news from the election a couple days ago. NumbersUSA tracks Congress members on their immigration stance; one way they "sort" is by whether the member is pro-high-immigration or pro-low-immigration. We were able to replace 24 high-immigration-proponents in the House and 6 high-immigration-proponents in the Senate with Republicans that are proponents of low-immigration quotas. FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) has a breakdown of a Pew Hispanic Center survey of unemployement percentages in their newsletter from Tuesday. Between June 2009 and June 2010, the unemployment rate for immigrants dropped by 0.6%, while during that same period unemployment for Americans rose 0.5%. Within the ethnic group of Hispanics, the unemployment rate for immigrant Hispanics dropped from 11 % to 10.1% while the unemployment rate for American Hispanics rose from 12.9% to 14%. The Pew Research Center is a non-partisan, non-biased research "think tank". Their research is completely above-board, and shows that illegal immigrants are taking jobs away from American citizens.

The television program "60 Minutes' did an episode recently on the unemployment situation in America. While the "official" unemployement rate is 9.5%, the "real" unemployment rate which includes those not getting unemployment checks or working part time, is actually about 17%. There is a group called 99er's that are unemployed Americans who have been out of work longer than the 99 weeks covered by unemployment compensation. Fox did coverage on them a couple of weeks ago; they are getting organized and unionized with the help of SEIU so that they can lobby Congress to extend unemployment benefits even longer than 99 weeks. The current number of 99er's is 1.6 million and growing daily, costing us tax payers over $100 billion so far. One of the ways Obama came up with to put Americans back to work was with "shovel ready" infrastructure jobs; i.e. jobs building highways, bridges, railways, runways, etc. According to Wikipedia, $105.3 billion in the Stimulus Act was designated for infrastructure jobs. According to the Wall Street Journal, only 1/3 of the stimulus money for infrastructure has been spent; $8 billion of the stimulus money for infrastructure was to be dedicated to the railroad system and only 7% of it has been spent. Yet, according to the Washington Examiner on 9/9/10 Obama went back to Congress and asked for an addition $50 million infrastructure stimulus fund to "overhaul America's transportation networks". Yet, our government is selling our infrastructure to foreign countries. Our oil assets, our natural gas assets, our manufacturing assets, our uranium assets, and now our infrastructure assets. America, itself, is being sold out from under us.

I found an article on The Economic Collapse blog, citing an article in Rolling Stone magazine, that lays out how our money is going to foreign nations such as Saudi Arabia, China, Kuwait, Libya, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, to purchase oil or goods or in the form of aid; and that money is being used by those "sovereign wealth funds" to buy up American infrastructure assets. We are being screwed coming and going. Every month, tens of billions of our tax dollars are going to other countries, who are then using that money to buy our infrastructure assets that we paid to build with our tax dollars in the first place. Obama has doubled the rate and value of major acquisitions of American infrastructure by foreign nations in just the first 6 months of this year alone. Here are some of the examples given in the Rolling Stone article: a toll highway in Indiana, the Chicago Skyway (elevated system), a stretch of highway in Florida, parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, etc; and a large number of California public infrastructure projects. A whole array of infrastructure assets, from highways to airports to parking garages to toll roads to parking meters, anything that can be considered infrastructure, is being sold or long-term leased (50 to 75 years) right out from under us. We are making the rest of the world wealthy enough that they can come back and buy our country away from us with our own money.

In the Market for a Runway, Railway, or Highway?

A lot of these projects have already been completed; those that are not could provide jobs for Americans and profits for American companies that could then grow and provide more jobs for Americans. The assets that are completed, likewise, could provide jobs for more Americans. How many Americans dearly need work, need an income, and would gladly work for a construction company, or even a parking garage? And the proceeds and profits from all the infrastructure jobs could be going into growing American companies instead of lining the pockets of foreigners we've already made rich by buying their oil and goods. Which in turn could help creat more jobs for more Americans. Oh but wait; I've got it wrong. It's the government that's going to create jobs for Americans. So it doesn't really matter that our own government is selling America out from under us. And Obama faster than any president so far. So we don't really need our country; Uncle Sugar will make it all better by spreading the wealth brought in by selling America to the highest bidders. Right? Dead wrong. America, wake up and smell the bridges burning.