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December 9, 2003
Chris White
A Glitch
in the Matrix
Abu Spinoza
The Occupation Concertina: Pentagon Punishes Iraqis Israeli Style
Josh Frank
Politicians as Usual: Gore Dean and the Greens
Ron Jacobs
Remembering
John Lennon
December 8, 2003
Newton Garver
Bolivia
at a Crossroads
John Borowski
The
Fall of a Forest Defender: the Exemplary Life of Craig Beneville
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Revised Inspirations for War
Tess Harper
When Christians Kill
Thom Rutledge
My Next Step
Carol Wolman, MD
Nuclear
Terror and Psychic Numbing
Michael Neumann
Ignatieff:
Apostle of He-manitariansim
Website of the Day
Bust Bob Novak
December 6 / 7, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
December 5, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
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
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
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
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
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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
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December
9, 2003
Process and Profits
The
California Bullet Train, Then and Now
By RICHARD TRAINOR
A high-speed train project and a
new Bay Bridge might not appear to have much in common except
for the fact that both are multi-billion dollar transportation
projects that have yet to be built. But like the Bay Bridge,
which many stock market analysts say helped produced such fantastic
paper profits for politically-connected businesses, the bullet
train bill of 1982 was also the vehicle from which a number of
companies benefited.
These companies, many of them Japanese
corporations, saw their stocks soar during a perception-driven
process that all but named them in the bullet train legislation.
Now a new $35 billion high-speed train is being promoted in California,
and it has also produced profits during the legislative processes
of both the federal and state legislation enabling it.
The three different projects, the bullet
train of 1981-83, the Bay Bridge of 1996-2002, and the high-speed
train of 1998-2001, are separated by a 20 year span but they
have a great deal in common.
First, let's examine the bullet train
of the early eighties.
Twenty-two years ago, on April Fools
Day of 1981, a pair of articles were published in the business
section of The New York Times that didn't seem in the
least bit related. The first story gave an overview of the Japanese
economy. In it, the Times correspondent asserted that the economy
was in the midst of a recession due to inflation and economic
stagnation. The article suggested that Japanese industries would
need to export hard goods if the economy was going to bounce
back.
Reporter Agis Salpukas wrote the other
Times story. Salpukis described how a new bullet train was being
considered between Los Angeles and San Diego. The article also
mentioned that the California bullet train project had the backing
of a Japanese billionaire by the name of Ryoichi Sasagawa, who
said he willing to help to finance the project by providing the
backers with a $5 million grant for preliminary marketing studies.
The bullet train was one of Jerry Brown's
dream projects during his two term stint as governor of California.
When Adriana Gianturco became Brown's chief of Caltrans, she
soon began pushing for a California bullet train. In 1978, Gianturco
commissioned a San Diego-Los Angeles corridor study and produced
some preliminary high-speed rail work-ups.
But the project was going nowhere. Gianturco
was despised by the powerful state senator from San Jose, Alfred
Alquist, then chairman of the Senate Appropriations committee.
During one of her bullet train presentations Alquist told Gianturco
that if he heard the words "bullet train" come out
of her mouth again he would cut off all of Caltrans legislative
funding. Gianturco did as she was told and gave up on the idea
of a California bullet train.
But Jerry Brown didn't want to let go
of his bullet train dream, and when his former Secretary of Business,
Transportation and Housing, Richard Silberman, became chief-of-staff
after Gray Davis left in 1981, the bullet train crusade commenced
again.
Besides Brown's obsession with bullet
trains, there was keen interest in the project coming from Washington,
D.C. There, the president and vice-president of AMTRAK, Alan
Boyd and Larry Gilson respectively, were leading the effort to
bring high-speed rail to California.
What Boyd and Gilson did was either shrewd
or cynical, depending on how you define loaning yourself money
from a public corporation to start your own private, for-profit
corporation. Boyd and Gilson did just that, engineering a $750,000
from AMTRAK to form their new corporation, American High Speed
Rail Corporation. When the loan was made, Boyd and Gilson were
still drawing AMTRAK salaries. Most of the money that from the
loan was paid to the Arthur D. Little Company of Boston to fund
the first bullet train marketing study.
Boyd and Gilson had by then formed an
alliance with Sasagawa, the controversial Japanese billionaire.
The bullet train now began building up steam. Sasagawa was a
close associate of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and was a prime supporter
of Moon's World Anti-Communist League. Sasagawa's fortune was
largely derived from his interests in speedboat racing-a sport
long tarred by ties to organized crime enterprise.
After the story in The New York Times,
Sasagawa invited a number of California state legislators to
Japan to look at bullet trains. Among those who made the trip
were Senators Alfred Alquist and John Foran. Foran was then the
Senate Transportation Committee chairman; he is currently a senior
partner with Nossaman, Guthner, Knox and Elliott. Foran is also
the man who founded the Metropolitan Transportation Commission
in 1969-the Bay Area regional planning organization that made
the decision to select the new Bay Bridge in 1998- and he is
still the MTC's chief lobbyist.
Among the Assembly members to make the
trip to Japan was Bruce Young, then the Assembly Transportation
Committee chairman. Also along for one of those bullet train
rides to Japan was Mike Roos, the Assembly Majority Leader.
In the spring of 1982, Gilson and Boyd
came out west to pitch legislators on the wonders of the bullet
train. They met with key legislators like Foran, Alquist and
Roos and (then-Assemblyman, now Senator) Lou Papan to tout their
project. They also announced that they thought they had secured
the support of The Los Angeles Times and the Copley newspaper
chain.
The legislative action on the bullet train in 1982 was a mirror
image of what later occurred on the Bay Bridge in 1997 with Senate
Bill 60, authored by then Senator Quentin Kopp, an independent
from San Francisco. Kopp is now a San Mateo Superior Court Judge.
First, Bruce Young introduced a spot
bill. The bill, AB 3647, was purely regulatory in nature and
had nothing to do with bullet trains. This "nothing"
bill floated through the respective committees and legislative
houses until August of 1982 when it was "hijacked"
and amended with legislation that all but named a number of Japanese
companies as contractors for the project.
A source at the State Treasurer's office
under the legendary Jesse "Big Daddy" Unruh told me
what happened on AB 3647. "I got a call on a Friday from
someone who said that there were some people here in town (the
AHSRC backers) and that they had a piece of legislation that
we might want to take a look at because it involved state bonds."
This person was then summoned to a Friday
meeting with Mehdi and Linda Morshed. The Morsheds were then
the chief transportation committee consultants in the California
State Legislature. Mehdi worked in the Senate for John Foran,
while Linda worked in the Assembly for Bruce Young.
The Morsheds presented my source with
a sample draft of the bill. He saw that the state had a potential
liability if the bonds failed. He then asked if he could look
it over more carefully. The Morsheds asked if he could make his
changes to it by the end of day. The source said he would need
the whole weekend. On Monday, August 23, he gave the Morsheds
his amended version of their draft language. On Wednesday, August
25, the bill was sent to the joint legislative conference committee.
The legislature had passed all of its
legislation by then, and the only thing left for them to do was
to resolve the differences between the Senate and Assembly versions
of the bills in the conference committee. Suddenly AB 3647 was
hijacked and amended with the addition of the new paragraph that
called for "$1.25 billion in tax exempt California state
revenue bonds for a Shinkansen-type bullet train" that would
be operated by a private company for profit. AB 3647 also exempted
the bullet train from having to be approved by the California
Coastal Commission and with having to comply with the California
Environmental Quality Act. Both the CCC and CEQA were environmentally-conscious
pieces of legislation that Jerry Brown had put forward during
his reformer period of the early seventies,
AB 3647 was passed out of conference
committee, and after only five minutes of floor debate it was
approved by the legislature. A month later, on September 29,
1982, Jerry Brown signed the bill into law, saying "the
bullet train is controversial because the technology is not a
way of life in California or in the nation." On October
12, 1982, AB 3647 became law.
Shortly thereafter, a number of Japanese
companies associated with bullet train production experienced
sharp increases in their stock prices. The firms were Ishi Shiba,
Kawasaki Heavy Industries and Mitsubishi, and they all rose upwards
of 40%.
The passage of AB 3647 stunned many observers,
including Adriana Gianturco, who had been led to believe that
a bullet train would fall under the aegis of Caltrans. In fact,
she claimed Boyd and Gilson had promised her that when they met
with her in the spring of 1982. Now Gianturco discovered that
Caltrans was cut out of the process, and the American High Speed
Rail Corporation would build the bullet train in partnership
with private engineering and design and construction firms like
the Irvine Company and the Fluor Corporation. Moreover, AHSRC
was supposedly on the hook if the system failed to perform as
advertised or if the tax-exempt revenue bonds failed.
At a Senate Transportation Committee
hearing, on February 12, 1983, one of the chief bullet train
critics came forward to give testimony. Jonathan Richmond was
a Fullbright scholar who specialized in transportation and he
had questioned the ridership projections in the Arthur D. Little
report, which until then had never been made public.
Richmond was then an employee of the
Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), and before
he took the stand, the committee chairman, John Foran, read a
letter that said that Richmond was "appearing here on his
own and does not represent SCAG." Then, after being all
but discredited by Foran as a credible witness, Richmond presented
the committee with the theretofore-secret Arthur D. Little study
and tore its ridership projections to shreds.
Five months later, the city of Tustin
released a "white paper" detailing the politics behind
the passage of AB 3647 and exposing the murky Japanese connections.
This reporter was the author of that report. American High Speed
Rail Corporation then folded its tent and a California bullet
train faded into memory.
But, in 1996, the bullet train began
gathering steam for another run in the Golden State.
This time around, one of the new high-speed
wonder trains initially being promoted by the California High
Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) was a magnetic levitation or "mag
lev" train. And many of the principal players in the new
train system had hovered around the 1982-83 campaign. Mehdi Morshed,
the legislative wizard who wrote AB 3647 and SB 60 (the Bay Bridge
bill), is now the California High Speed Rail Authority's executive
director. Morshed's former Senate boss, John Foran is also working
for the new high-speed train with Nossaman, Guthner, Knox and
Elliott. This limited law partnership is stocked with former
state legislators and is probably the most powerful transportation
lobbyist firm in the nation. They, too, are veterans of the bullet
train of 1982-83, having been its main lobbyist advocates back
then.
The new high-speed train being promoted
is a statewide system that will connect San Diego to the San
Francisco Bay Area and continue to a final stop in Sacramento.
The price tag for this new system is pegged at $25-35 billion.
The business plan of CHSRA contains projected ridership figures
that are robust and travel times that are rapid, and it sings
the praises of mag-lev and other high-speed train systems.
As a matter of fact, the former Secretary
of Business, Transportation and Housing in the Pete Wilson administration
thought that the promoters of mag-lev were a bit too zealous
in their promotion of it. After a trip to Germany, where the
experimental mag-lev train was shown off, some members of the
CHSRA began lobbying for an application for mag-lev. In a December
9 1998 letter he wrote to Michael Tannenbaum of the CHSRA, Dean
Dunphy, then-Secretary of BTH in the Wilson administration, had
this to say: about an application for mag-lev. "Neither
the Governor, any part of his administration, nor I support the
California application that commits the state to build a multi-billion
dollar high-speed train with technology that is not in revenue
service and has no record of reliability." Dunphy went on
to say that the application would "benefit one vendor- Transrapid
International" and that he found "such underhanded
and meddling behavior reprehensible."
But as soon as Wilson left office, the
push began again for mag-lev. At the six or so meetings I attended
of the California High Speed Rail Authority in the summer of
1999, the first item up on the agenda was mag-lev. When the California
high-speed rail bill was going through in 2002, mag-lev was still
being considered as one of the possible train systems.
The drive for a new high-speed train
system is also backed by congressional legislation that was passed
in the fall of 2001. Some of the federal legislation provided
for $970 million in start-up funds to consider seven possible
mag-lev pilot programs in the United States, including two in
California--one of which would connect the Los Angeles basin
to a system that would eventually connect all the way through
to Sacramento. The company that Congress chose for the mag-lev
system is Transrapid International, a German company that was
acquired by Lockheed-Martin in 2000.
In the 2002 session of the California
State legislature a new high-speed rail bill was introduced to
provide $10 billion in general obligation bonds to begin planning
the routing of the high-speed train. This bill was SB 1856 authored
by Fresno Senator Jim Costa. The bond issue will be presented
to California voters in the November 2004 general election.
What is most interesting about SB 1856
was the precise language of the bill. The bill specified that
the system must be one capable of "revenue operating speeds
of 200 mph." There are, at present, only two such train
systems capable of these speeds: mag-lev and the French TGV system.
The bill also specifies that the bonds are "for display
purposes only". This is precisely the kind of language
that allows companies to make profits off of the planning process.
In other words, the bill creates a perception that the train
is in the works, which could have an effect on the companies
who could provide such a system. One of these companies is Lockheed-Martin.
Another is URS Greiner, the engineering and design firm managed
by Richard C. Blum, Senator Dianne Feinstein's husband. URS is
involved in the project, but only as a subcontractor to the project
manager.
Lockheed-Martin stock shot up in price
during the time that the new federal and state high-speed rail
bills were moving through the respective legislative processes.
A look at the insider index for Lockheed-Martin during the fall
of 2001- just as the final version of the federal bill was being
approved- shows that insiders at Lockheed-Martin were just as
savvy as some of the board members at URS Greiner were during
the Bay Bridge design competition in 1997; just as savvy as the
Japanese investors were in 1982 on the bullet train.
Between October 29 2001 and early 2002,
Lockheed-Martin insiders traded almost 3,000,000 shares of self-issued
penny stock for over $158 million. Then, in early 2002 as Senator
Costa's high-speed rail bill was gaining speed in the California
state legislature, the same kind of self-issued penny shares
deal began with URS Greiner. This corporation is one of the high-speed
rail systems projected vendors in California, and is currently
a subcontractor to Parsons-Brinkerhoff, the high-speed train
system's project manager. Insiders at URS issued and sold close
to 1,700,000 shares of penny stock and made somewhere over $48
million while the high-speed rail bill was going through. Of
that amount, Richard Blum's company, Blum Capital Partners, cashed
in over 1.3 million shares for close to $37 million
Perhaps this is only coincidental, as
perhaps is the fact that Lockheed-Martin skyrocketed from $53
a share to $71 a share while the state and federal legislation
was proceeding through the federal and state legislative processes.
Perhaps, there were other factors involved in the stock spikes.
David Townsend, a longtime political
campaign consultant and former legislative staff member, is handling
the public outreach for the high-speed rail project. I asked
him whether he thought that such a system had a chance of ever
coming into being given California's perpetual budget shortfalls.
Townsend said that it could "but it would have to be a public-private
partnership." (Sure, the public funds the process while
the privateers play the market and profit.) Townsend couldn't
imagine all the particulars of the scenario he was outlining
and said: "You should talk to Mehdi. He'll have some ideas,
I'm sure. You'll like him, Richard; he's a straight-shooter."
If by straight shooting, Townsend meant unerring, I couldn't
have agreed more fully.
When I contacted Morshed with my findings
about the stocks and questioned him about his hand in drafting
the legislation, Morshed wouldn't comment. Neither would Oakland
Mayor Jerry Brown, former Governor Gray Davis, or lobbyist John
Foran. Governor Schwarzenegger was busy with his emergency bond
measure and his flacks referred me to his website when I asked
about his transportation policies.
In the back of the California High Speed
Rail Authority's final Business Plan, under the Board of Advisors
and Financial Plan sections, all the usual players are present.
On the Board of Advisors is Norman Mineta, former vice-president
of special projects for Lockheed-Martin, the company who acquired
Transrapid International in the fall of 2000. Mineta is currently
the U.S. Secretary of Transportation. Among the subcontractors
for the Financial Plan is Nossaman, Guthner, Knox and Elliott,
the lobbying group headed by John Foran.
At present, the high-speed rail project
is awaiting the release of its draft EIR/EIS statement, said
to be arriving in January, which then must be approved by the
Federal Railroad Administration. In addition, the federal funding
base must be approved with a reauthorization by Congress, which
is currently considering it.
Whether or not this high-speed train
ever rolls down a track in California seems hardly the issue.
The political process attending it has produced some stunning
multi-million dollar profits, and as Bill Wiggins, Jerry Brown's
former labor advisor told me, "The profit is never in the
solution, it's always in the process. Show me a good process,
and I'll show you a money maker."
Evidently so.
Richard Trainor
is an investigative reporter living in Eugene, Oregon. He can
be reached at: richardtrainor@hotmail.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
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