Our cash-strapped country is auctioning off its highways, ports and even parking meters, finding eager buyers in the Middle East "I was in a meeting where a bunch of American investment bankers were trying to sell us the Pennsylvania Turnpike," he said. "They even had a slide show. They were showing these Arabs what a nice highway we had for sale, what the toll booths looked like . . ." I dropped my fork. "The Pennsylvania Turnpike is for sale?" He nodded. "Yeah," he said. "We didn't do the deal, though. But, you know, there are some other deals that have gotten done. Or didn't you know about this?" As it turns out, the Pennsylvania Turnpike deal almost went through, only to be killed by the state legislature, but there were others just like it that did go through, most notably the sale of all the parking meters in Chicago to a consortium that included the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, from the United Arab Emirates. There were others: A toll highway in Indiana. The Chicago Skyway. A stretch of highway in Florida. Parking meters in Nashville, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other cities. A port in Virginia. And a whole bevy of Californian public infrastructure projects, all either already leased or set to be leased for fifty or seventy-five years or more in exchange for one-off lump sum payments of a few billion bucks at best, usually just to help patch a hole or two in a single budget year. America is quite literally for sale, at rock-bottom prices, and the buyers increasingly are the very people who scored big in the oil bubble. Thanks to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other investment banks that artificially jacked up the price of gasoline over the course of the last decade, Americans delivered a lot of their excess cash into the coffers of sovereign wealth funds like the Qatar Investment Authority, the Libyan Investment Authority, Saudi Arabia's SAMA Foreign Holdings, and the UAE's Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/222206?RS_show_page=0
All the more reason we should be developing our own natural gas resource as a transportation fuel. The hundreds of $Billions squandered in stimulus could have gone to nat gas infrastructure and engine conversions... could have put perhaps MILLIONS of unemployed to work. Eventually, we could significantly reduce sending $700Billion/year to the ME for oil.
so the meters would produce 5B in revenue @ their rate of 25 cents before sale(i'm pretty sure nobody have a brain to imply "some" inflation into those numbers),but they sold it for 1.1B and then this arab's LLC hike the rate 4-5 times...nice..chicagoans should be proud..USA! USA! USA!