I’ve written before that Public-Private Partnerships (P3s) for financing infrastructure projects are a way for sociopathic Baby Boomers to dump an impossible-to-pay liability on Millennials, and are a fire sale of our roads and bridges to multinational foreign mega-corporations that are laughing all the way to the banks they already own.

There is no other group that loves to bang the P3 drum as the silver bullet to our infrastructure needs than LIBERTARIANS. …

Chris Christie has had a tough time getting traction for his pet project before he’s out of office: opioid addiction. His former buddy in the White House hasn’t helped him much:

BEDMINSTER — Ignoring the advice of a presidential commission on fighting drug addiction chaired by Gov. Chris Christie, President Donald Trump Tuesday opted against declaring a national emergency in response to the surge in opioid addiction.

I guess Trump didn’t like the way Christie was delivering the message, because it was only after sensationalizing it in terms Trump and his base could understand…:

“The deaths in 2016 (nationally) are…

Multinational corporations are banking on America’s short-sighted approach to infrastructure

My last post laid out that public-private partnerships are going to be an immense liability on next generations. While I rightly threw Goldman Sachs under the bus, there are other “management consulting” firms like McKinsey & Co. publishing articles praising P3s for saving DOTs and other transportation agencies significant amounts of time and money. It conveniently leaves out the economic disasters that P3s have already wrought on the US, which IBTimes continues to highlight.

In particular, the multinational corporations that are writing and negotiating these contracts with DOTs that have much less experience and resources are putting in things like…

Public-Private Partnerships are not a silver bullet to our transportation crisis; they’re a liability on Millennials

“P3” has become a buzzword at this point when you hear politicians talking about infrastructure funding. The problem is that Public Private Partnerships are not about FUNDING, they’re about FINANCING, and the Public is hardly an equal partner in these financing schemes.

P3s have been around for decades, but they’ve been pushed by neoliberal think tanks like the Heritage Foundation in more recent years because their mega-donors are most likely to benefit from windfall gains at public expense.

IBTimes just laid out the details on how Mike “Mr. Insecurity” Pence has essentially sold off Indiana’s roadways to private investors around…

Thank god for the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that allowed for unlimited amounts of dark money to be poured into Super PACs and essentially place a death knell on our democracy. Otherwise, the Koch Brothers wouldn’t have become such a household name. Jane Meyer of the New Yorker wrote an excellent book about them; she explains:

This has been a 40-year project that Charles and David Koch have been funding with their vast fortunes to try to change the way Americans think. …

Construction contracts and the social contract are being eroded by neoliberal cherry-picking

Whatever flawed and inconsistent logic Antonin Scalia used over his long judicial career, it led to the reinforcement of a legal ideology called “textualism” or “originalism”, the idea that if it’s not explicitly written in the Constitution, then something is unconstitutional. This interpretation has been taken to its illogical extreme when it comes to laws themselves. Just look at the last legal challenge to Obamacare. It made it all the way to the Supreme Court because of six words. SIX. WORDS.

“An Exchange established by the State.”

Because of this extremist cherry-picking ideology, millions of dollars of legal fees (and…

New Jersey’s Helmets to Hardhats program fills construction positions with vets… unless you’re gay?

Or LGBTQ, for that matter. Helmets to Hardhats is an admirable program, and as William Mullen, the President of the NJ Building and Construction Trades Council says, these trade jobs are “not for everybody.”

In fact, it’s “not for everybody” because it’s written into every single public construction contract. N.J.S.A. 10:5–31 et seq. mandates that Equal Employment Opportunity language is included in every public contract:

During the performance of this contract, the contractor agrees as follows: The contractor or subcontractor, where applicable, will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of age, race, creed, color, national origin…

Corruption is a cancer, a cancer that eats away at a citizen’s faith in democracy, diminishes the instinct for innovation and creativity. — Joe Biden

While Phil “Goldman Sachs” Murphy has snagged all NJ county chair and union endorsements, the only thing transparent to me about the establishment Democratic endorsement process is how much it parallels the 2016 Presidential Democratic primary.

1. Impact of Early, Institutional Coverage

Name recognition is huge, especially in a race in which two months before Primary Day, most NJ voters didn’t know who was running:

Not many people know who’s running for governor, according to recent polls. …