Vanity Fair's current article on Giuliani's business dealings since 9/11 deals with many schemes already noted in prior posts here.
But one story about building new toll roads up through the heart of the US is new. It involves Rick Perry, Governor of Texas and vocal Giuliani supporter, a Spanish construction company, Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte, which is a client of Bracewell Giuliani, Giuliani's Texas law firm, and an Australian bank, the Macquarie Group, which purchased a division of Giuliani Partners, Giuliani Capital Advisors, last year.
The scheme involves a huge $184 billion foreign-built-and-foreign-owned 4000-mile toll-charging transportation corridor from Texas to Canada. In essence, Giuliani is helping a foreign country scoop up American land via eminent domain in order to build private roads that Americans will have to pay to use.
Rick Perry has been pushing a plan that appalls many of his constituents—except, apparently, the most powerful ones—to outsource a spider’s web of new and improved state highways to Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte, S.A. To ease Texans’ fears that the state is putting its future roads in the hands of a foreign-owned company, Cintra is now partnered with a San Antonio construction company called Zachry. The roads envisioned in this $184 billion, 4,000-mile project are no mere superhighways. They’re three football fields wide. They will include not only a rail line but also pipelines that can carry oil, gasoline, or liquefied natural gas. Alongside the roads will be distribution centers. Cintra-Zachry will lease the roads and levy whatever tolls it likes. And it will also control the distribution hubs, and charge what it likes there too.
The Giuliani connections are numerous:
Cintra is a client in Texas of Bracewell & Giuliani. The company it’s most likely to work with to extend the corridor north is Macquarie, which already operates its Indiana toll road in partnership with Cintra. In early 2007, Macquarie bought a chain of some 40 local Texas and Oklahoma newspapers. Might it have bought those papers to control public opinion in advance of plans to build more controversial toll roads? Might it potentially have in Giuliani not only a legal partner for future toll roads but a political ally?
Those oil and gas pipelines that are part of the plan are surely of interest to Bracewell Giuliani's energy clients. It is...:
..the go-to law firm for major polluters: oil and gas as well as coal companies. Among its significant clients are Chevron/Texaco, Pacific Gas & Electric, Dynegy, Southern Company, Valero Energy, and Shell Oil.
The article concludes:
In the businesses that Giuliani built and bought these last six years, more deals have yet to be examined, more dots connected in the picture of his great financial success. But enough are there already, with lines between them, for a shape to have clearly emerged. It’s a picture of a politician leading a parade, as Mayor Giuliani so often did. Only the marchers behind him aren’t drum majorettes or wartime veterans or firefighters or police. They’re a ragtag band of Texas lawyers and energy lobbyists, penny-stock sharpies and security-industry entrepreneurs, agog with visions of the ultimate pay-to-play presidency.
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