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Today's
Stories
November 29 / 30, 2003
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
November 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
November 11, 2003
David Lindorff
Bush's
War on Veterans
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
Earnest McBride
"His
Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?
Derek Seidman
Imperialism
Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff
David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide
Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War
Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns
Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top
John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day
Website of the Day
Left Hook
November 10, 2003
Robert Fisk
Looney
Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East
Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar
Laws Across Globe
James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss
Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy
Stew Albert
Call Him Al
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
Weekend
Edition
November 29 / 30, 2003
The Political Economy
of Earthquakes
A
Journey Across the Bay Bridge
By RICHARD TRAINOR
On a clear November morning I am approaching the
toll plaza of the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge. I pay the
$2 crossing toll and begin proceeding west. Of that $2, $1 is
a surcharge that was earmarked for the seismic retrofit of the
Bay Bridge. This surcharge was created with the 1997 passage
of SB 60, a bill authored by then-State Senator Quentin Kopp,
the Independent legislator from San Francisco. Kopp was then
chairman of the Senate Transportation committee. Now he's a San
Mateo County Superior Judge
SB 60 is easily the biggest juice bill
I've encounter since I first began covering the California state
legislature in 1981. Besides the more than $500 million in Bay
Bridge surcharges, which were extended for an additional seven
years by ousted Governor Gray Davis in 2001, SB 60 was also the
legislative vehicle from which a number of very savvy investors
made significant profits during The Bay Bridge selection process.
The Bay Bridge is the world's busiest
toll bridge, with over 280,000 cars crossing it per day. Unlike
The Golden Gate Bridge, its sister span to the west, The Bay
Bridge is not truly one bridge but, in fact, three. The most
graceful part is the suspension bridge connecting Yerba Buena
Island and San Francisco. The section between the toll plaza
on the Oakland mudflats and Yerba Buena Island is actually composed
of two bridges: the first is a viaduct section between the mud
flats and a pier of the bridge called E-9 where it is joined
to a cantilevered truss bridge. It was here, where the two different
bridge typologies join, that The Bay Bridge collapsed in 1989
during the Loma Prieta earthquake.
For eight years, from 1989 through 1997,
there was talk of rebuilding The Bay Bridge. But that's all it
was: talk. In 1995, a University of California, Berkeley engineering
professor named Dr. Abolhasan Astaneh-Asl prepared an estimate
for the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) that
said it would cost $250 million to do a complete steel retrofit
of The Bay Bridge.
But the California State Department of
Transportation, or Caltrans as it's known, does not like steel.
Caltrans prefers concrete. As Asatneh remembers it, "They
took my design and added what I call the Chernobyl effect."
They added massive concrete cladding to Dr. Astaneh's design,
and the estimated cost went up as well. The $250 million grew
to become a $700 million estimate, then that grew to $900 million.
In late 1996, Caltrans began considering replacing the eastern
span with a simple, unadorned viaduct on a straight southern
alignment between Oakland and Yerba Buena Island.
But in early 1997, a story was published
in The San Francisco Chronicle that altered all
such perceptions. The Chronicle story previewed a brand
new bridge that was far more attractive than the drab viaduct
Caltrans was then espousing.
In the January 9, 1997 Chronicle
story, co-authored by Eric Ingram and Greg Lucas, the
new bridge design was profiled. It was going to be a 650-foot
single-masted, cable-stayed bridge, built out of concrete. The
bridge had been the product of a $10 million Caltrans-funded
study by Ventry Engineering, and the Ventry team's chief bridge
designer was an engineer named Mark Ketchum, who worked for a
San Francisco-based design firm called OPAC.
Remarkably enough, the cable-stayed bridge
would be even cheaper to build than retrofitting the present
bridge. According to The Chronicle, the new bridge would
only cost $700 million. Apparently, the administration of then-Governor
Pete Wilson was so enamored of the new idea that in February
1997, Wilson announced that the retrofit option for the Bay Bridge
was over; now Wilson wanted a new bridge.
On March 10, 1997, a front-page story
was published in The San Francisco Chronicle. The story
was by Alan Temko, The Chronicle's Pulitzer Prize-winning
architecture critic. Temko's story profiled a bridge "designed"
by his friend, T.Y. Lin, the U.C. Berkeley professor emeritus
of engineering. This bridge was also a concrete structure, a
700-foot single-masted, cable-stayed bridge that seemed a mirror
image of the Ventry bridge profiled in the story published in
The Chronicle just two months before. T.Y. Lin
was Mark Ketchum's professor at Berkeley, and Lin's firm, Lin
Tung-Yen China Inc., also owns OPAC. Ketchum himself admits:
"I designed the bridge but then T.Y. added some aesthetic
improvements to it." These aesthetic improvements must have
been significant for the estimated price had now grown to $1.2
billion, a half billion-dollar increase in only two months.
At any rate, The Chronicle's lobbying
for a new signature span that could compare with The Golden Gate
Bridge was effective. Following publication of the Temko story,
Governor Wilson took the decision-making power over The Bay Bridge
away from Caltrans and handed it to the Metropolitan Transportation
Commission. The MTC is the Regional Planning Organization in
charge of all transportation decisions in the nine-county San
Francisco Bay Area. The MTC's chief lobbyist is John Foran, who
is also its founder. Foran was formerly a state Senator from
San Francisco, and was the Senate Transportation Committee chairman
before he retired to become a lobbyist and senior partner in
Nossaman, Guthner, Knox and Elliott.
Nossaman, Guthner is one of the most
powerful lobbying firms in California. Besides transportation
clients like the MTC, BART and the LA Metro, they also represent
a number of Indian tribes and deal with Indian gaming issues.
They were also the lobbing firm for a powerful development company
called Catellus Development in the spring of 1997, right when
the new Bay Bridge design "competition" was taking
place.
Back on the bridge, we are approaching
pier E-9, otherwise known as "The Angle." This is where
the bridge failed in 1989, and where most engineers interviewed
for this story say it was most vulnerable because that is where
the two bridge typologies join.
While it took eight years for Caltrans
and the MTC to get around to fixing it, the Bay Bridge selection
process proved to be a profitable one for a number of individuals
and groups associated with the firm URS Greiner.
URS is a San Francisco-based corporation
that is the nation's fifth largest engineering and design firm.
URS' chief mover-and-shaker is self-described "money manager"
Richard Blum, the husband of California's U.S. Senator Dianne
Feinstein. URS' stock performance during The Bay Bridge selection
process was fairly dramatic. In late 1996, URS was trading at
$6 a share. Then, in early 1997, the stock price began climbing.
In spring 1997, it had reached $10 a share; by the summer, after
SB 60 was amended with language that all but named the bridge
being chosen by the MTC, it had climbed to $13 a share. By June
1998, when a new bridge design had been selected, URS was trading
at $18.50 a share.
What makes the URS stock price increases
most remarkable is how the stock rises mirror public perceptions
that URS stood to profit from the retrofit contract on The Bay
Bridge. According to URS' own literature: "The company derives
more than 80% of its revenues from local, state and government
programs that are created in response to public concerns with
re-building and expanding the nation's infrastructure. More than
80% of the company's current and anticipated work is related
to government contracts."
On The Bay Bridge contract, #59N770,
URS was first in line to become project manager if the project
was "contracted out." In other words, if a private
company other than Caltrans was given the contract. This process
is one which has been in place since 1986 and was the subject
of a long and bitter court battle that was finally decided in
1998, which resulted in the ban of contracting out. There was
one multi-billion dollar exception to the prohibition against
contracting out: The Bay Bridge contract.
In the summer of 1998, when the contracting
issue was still being resolved in court, URS stock flucuated.
When contracting out was banned in by Sacramento Superior Court
Judge James Ford in early July, URS dipped to $12 a share. When
the Bay Bridge contract was exempted from the ban, URS spiked
upwards to $24.50 a share by late August.
What makes the URS stock price rises
even more curious is that a number of Selling Shareholders amendments
were filed with the Securities Exchange Commission and how their
timing fits in with the chronology of the Bay Bridge selection
process.
On March 25, 1997, URS held its annual
stockholders meeting in San Francisco and announced they were
first in line for the contract. After the meeting, a Selling
Shareholders amendment was filed with the SEC. The selling shareholders
amendment was for over 3.6 million shares of URS stock whose
par value was one penny a share. The amendment allowed the selling
shareholders to sell the stock at the going market rate and pocket
all the profits without having to share any of it with the company.
Of the 3.6 million shares of stock, over 2.9 million shares went
to four companies tied to Richard Blum.
The four companies were BK Capital Partners
I, II, III, and IV, and they listed that they intended to sell
all of the newly issued shares. Blum's partners in the BK groups
were the Bass Brothers, the Fort Worth oil billionaires who once
attempted a hostile takeover of Texaco in 1985 by using pension
funds from the California State Teachers Retirement System. By
August of 1998, those 2.9 million shares of URS stock were worth
almost $100 million.
Just three days after the amendments
were filed, the MTC announced it had selected a chairman of the
Engineering and Design Advisory Panel who would be choosing the
new Bay Bridge. The MTC's choice for EDAP chair was Joseph Nicoletti,
an engineer with URS Greiner, Blum's company.
Blum's money managing was just short
of wizardry. But a number of other URS insiders profited even
quicker than BK Capital Partners did. Between March 27, 1998
and June 25, 1998, after a selling shareholders amendment was
filed for 1.1 million shares of stock a la the previous 3.6 million
shares filed on behalf of the BK Capital groups, a number of
URS insiders showed they knew how to play the booming market.
URS insiders made over $24.5 million in paper profits from their
penny stocks. No wonder there was such a bull market.
So, the new Bay Bridge still hasn't been
built, but who cares when profits like this can be gotten just
through the process? But there are other fascinating things to
look at as we travel across the three-and-a-half mile Bay Bridge
span.
As we approach Yerba Buena Island, off
to our right is aptly named Treasure Island, the crown jewel
in San Francisco's future development. This is where the signing
party of SB 60 took place. Treasure Island is very important
to Mayor Willie Brown's future development plans, and the reason
that Mayor Brown told me he had taken up opposition to the bridge
selected by the MTC was that "it would reduce the value
of the property at Treasure Island by 20-40%."
Treasure Island was originally intended
as the site of San Francisco's airport before the present location
was adopted. Then, in 1939, to commemorate the building of the
two new bridges, The Golden Gate and The Bay Bridge, Treasure
Island hosted the Golden Gate Exposition, a world's fair. After
that, the U.S. Navy got hold of it and turned it into a naval
base. From then until 1992, when it was hit by the Clinton administration's
base closure program, Treasure Island was a navy base. Now it
might become the site of Indian gaming casinos, which is one
of California's most lucrative economic engines for the future.
Although Willie Brown told me he has
no intention of turning Treasure Island into Atlantic City West,
he did float the idea of Indian gambling casinos locating there
when he first ran for Mayor of San Francisco in 1995.
If you read between the lines of the
Treasure Island Reuse Plan, the idea of Indian gaming casinos
doesn't seem that remote. Citing directly from this document,
the plan is for anything that has to do with theme parks, hotels,
public attractions, entertainment features and resort. In their
own words "the emphasis in the Draft Reuse Plan is on the
range of a number of publicly oriented uses that will attract
large numbers of people to both public spaces and paid attractions."
In short, Indian gaming casinos might fit the bill rather nicely.
Lurking beneath the bay below us, somewhere
below the bridge and trailing off towards Treasure Island is
the Temescal formation, an ancient underwater river canyon. When
the ubiquitous Dr. Astaneh called attention to the Temescal formation,
in late 1997, the new bridge alignment was shifted further south.
This shift removed the new bridge tower's anchorage on Yerba
Buena Island and caused it to be relocated in caissons going
down into the mud. While this decreased the angle, some think
that it might have increased the bridge's seismic vulnerability.
This new, more southward-pointing alignment is what Mayor Brown
says will reduce the property values on Treasure Island.
But what's curious is that Mayor Willie
Brown didn't say boo when the Temescal formation was pointed
out by Dr. Astaneh, even though his representatives were holding
regular meetings on the new Bay Bridge with representatives from
Caltrans, Indian tribes, the MTC, the Coast Guard, and the US
Navy. That seems very strange, but this entire journey around
the Bay is a very strange one indeed.
Now we are entering the tunnel through
Yerba Buena Island. On the other side of it we have emerged onto
the twin towered suspension span leading into San Francisco.
Off to our left, and far to the south, is San Francisco Airport,
which is undergoing a new, $3 billion dollar expansion on the
Cargill Salt Flats. Blum's company, URS Greiner is doing the
engineering and design work for the airport, and there is talk
of a new bullet train stopping at SFO on its way to the Oakland
airport and its final northern terminus of Sacramento.
The new bullet train is another huge
pork barrel transportation project, a $35 billion state system
that will connect Sacramento and the Bay Area to Los Angeles
and continue down to San Diego. Nobody is quite sure where it
will stop in San Francisco. One plan is for it to stop at the
airport; another plan has it continuing to the present Transbay
terminal right at the foot of the present bridge, and there are
plans for a brand new $500 million terminal.
Closer in, just beyond Pac Bell Park,
the new Giants baseball stadium, is where the other prime San
Francisco development jewel is located. The long-stalled Mission
Bay Project is finally underway. This is a $4 billion project
of Catellus Development, the real estate development giant that
was once the Southern-Pacific Realty Company. And now there's
even talk of a new bridge across the bay, a Southern Crossing
Bridge. Senator Dianne Feinstein's in favor of it and has been
promoting the idea. The MTC is presently studying it. And T.Y.
Lin designed a bridge for it back in 1991 when the MTC first
looked into it.
A new, Mid-Bay Crossing Bridge would
make sense to some. The Bay Area's transportation infrastructure
is maxed out and needs expansion. A Mid-Bay span could result
in an expanded BART and carry a high-speed train from SFO to
Oakland Airport- another optional route for high-speed trains.
Both of the Mayors Brown- Willie of San Francisco and Jerry of
Oakland- have said that they want high-speed train stations at
their respective airports, and if a Mid Bay Crossing Bridge was
contracted out like the Bay Bridge was, it could provide another
opportunity for the stock market bulls to keep charging.
The wheels for such a scenario are already
in motion. In 2000, two new juice bills were passed by the California
state legislature and signed into law by then-Governor Gray Davis.
And in the November 2000 election, California voters approved
Proposition 35, which allows contracting out again. These new
pieces of legislation could provide the opportunity for three
publicly traded transportation stocks to achieve windfall profits.
And this can happen without a nut or a bolt being turned. All
you need is a process to drives a perception that a new bridge
or train is coming.
Richard Trainor
is an investigative reporter living in Eugene, Oregon. He can
be reached at: richardtrainor@hotmail.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
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