By Terri Hall

Rick Perry may be good at invoking states rights and prop­erty rights, while dis­avowing ‘for­eign cred­i­tors,’ but his actions as Texas’ longest serving gov­ernor tell a dif­ferent story. Public pri­vate part­ner­ships (or P3s) are part and parcel of the United Nations’ Agenda 21. Two of the pur­poses of Agenda 21 are to abolish pri­vate prop­erty and restrict mobility and P3s act as the vehicle to do it. Perry made P3s a cen­ter­piece of his trans­porta­tion policy since he stepped in as governor.

It started with the Trans Texas Cor­ridor, known at the fed­eral level as high pri­ority cor­ri­dors, cor­ri­dors of the future, or the NAFTA super­high­ways. Just in Texas, it was to be a 4,000 mile multi-modal net­work of toll roads, rail lines, power trans­mis­sion lines, pipelines, telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions lines and more. It was going to be financed, oper­ated, and con­trolled by a for­eign com­pany granted mas­sive swaths of land 1,200 feet (4 foot­ball fields) wide taken forcibly through emi­nent domain.

Called the biggest land grab in Texas his­tory, it was going to gobble up 580,000 acres of pri­vate Texas land (the first cor­ridor alone was to dis­place 1 mil­lion Texans) and hand it over to well-connected global players using P3s, who would gain exclu­sive rights to deter­mine the route and what hotels, restau­rants, and gas sta­tions were along the cor­ridor in a government-sanctioned monopoly for a half cen­tury. It was the worst case of emi­nent domain for pri­vate gain ever conceived.

Prop­erty rights shredded

The Trans Texas Cor­ridor, and P3s in gen­eral, rep­re­sent an immi­nent threat to pri­vate prop­erty rights. While law­makers repealed the Trans Texas Cor­ridor from state statute only months ago due to the public back­lash, the re-named cor­ridor (‘Inno­v­a­tive Con­nec­tivity Plan’) and its threat to prop­erty rights lives on through P3s. Two such projects underway by a Spanish devel­oper, Cintra, will charge Texans 75 cents per mile in tolls (nearly $13 a day while Perry claims he hasn’t raised taxes or indebted Texans to for­eign cred­i­tors) to access lanes on two public inter­states — I-635 and I-820. A third project being devel­oped by the same com­pany for two seg­ments on SH 130 is, per­haps, the only leg of the Trans Texas Cor­ridor TTC-35 project that will ever be built.

While Perry dis­tracted Texans and tea partiers with ‘emer­gency’ res­o­lu­tions on state sov­er­eignty during the 82nd leg­is­la­ture, P3s spread from trans­porta­tion projects to vir­tu­ally every other type of public infra­struc­ture in a bill, SB 1048, passed by the Texas leg­is­la­ture which he signed into law June 17. Now all public infra­struc­ture, including public build­ings, schools, nursing homes, ports, mass transit, etc. can be auctioned-off to pri­vate inter­ests in long-term sweet­heart deals with tax­payer sub­si­dies and profit guar­an­tees using P3s.

P3s give a pri­vate cor­po­ra­tion the power to tax the public, whether through charging tolls or other so-called ‘user fees,’ to access their own public infra­struc­ture, and, per­haps more insid­ious,  allowing well-connected pri­vate enti­ties to profit from con­ces­sions on land taken through emi­nent domain.

Why shouldn’t the orig­inal landowner be able to profit from devel­oping his/her land instead of having the gov­ern­ment take it in the name of a “public use” and give it to another devel­oper, one with gov­ern­ment con­nec­tions? Perry’s admin­is­tra­tion of P3s is like his admin­is­tra­tion of his Emerging Tech­nology Fund that’s been highly crit­i­cized for steering tax­payer money to Perry’s cam­paign donors — a case in point, Dan Shelley.

Shelley worked for Cintra, who had its sites set on devel­oping the Trans Texas Cor­ridor. Shelley lands a job as Perry’s aide, steers the $7 bil­lion cor­ridor P3 to his former employer Cintra, then goes back to work for Cintra. That’s how Perry does busi­ness — pay to play.

Texas “Open for Business”

While Perry is staking his cam­paign on Texas being the top net jobs cre­ator, Perry’s ver­sion of Texas being “Open for Busi­ness” isn’t about low taxes and less reg­u­la­tion as much as it is about doing busi­ness with for­eign com­pa­nies, including selling off Texas’ sov­er­eign land and public assets to for­eign cred­i­tors, an issue which Perry’s first tele­vi­sion ad uses to take aim at Pres­i­dent Obama.

Aside from the P3s, Texas has 20 active deals going with the Chi­nese and has 32 for­eign trade zones (FTZs), a vehicle to ease the flow of for­eign goods into the United States that are chalk full of tax breaks for importers. Perry’s office pro­moted these FTZs in a doc­u­ment enti­tled For­eign Trade Zones: Texas Wide Open for Busi­ness and even ded­i­cates a web site for Texas FTZs, www.TexasWideOpenForBusiness.com.

A recent Wash­ington Post article doc­u­ments Perry’s work to get Chi­nese government-owned telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pany Huawei, to base its U.S. oper­a­tions in Texas, a com­pany that the U.S. gov­ern­ment has deemed a threat to national secu­rity noting that “three times since 2008, a U.S. gov­ern­ment secu­rity panel has blocked Huawei from acquiring or part­nering with U.S. com­pa­nies because of con­cerns that secrets could be leaked to China’s gov­ern­ment or military.”

Perry’s cozi­ness with the Chi­nese and for­eign investors exposes a huge weak­ness in his right flank — illegal immi­gra­tion and open bor­ders. The Trans Texas Cor­ridor has been linked to the global plan to eco­nom­i­cally inte­grate North America, with the even­tual goal of a common secu­rity perimeter mod­eled after the Euro­pean Union. Perry ush­ered in in-state tuition for ille­gals and has long been an obstacle to immi­gra­tion reform or any Arizona-style immi­gra­tion law.

Perry’s record paints a much dif­ferent pic­ture than what can­di­date Perry would have us believe — that he’s a states rights, Con­sti­tu­tion­ally lim­ited gov­ern­ment con­ser­v­a­tive that’s respon­sible for the “Texas mir­acle.” In reality, he’s more like an Agenda 21 glob­alist willing to sell America to the highest bidder.

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Terri Hall is a home­school mother of eight chil­dren and the Founder of Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom or TURF. TURF is a non-partisan, grass­roots, all-volunteer group defending cit­i­zens’ con­cerns with Agenda 21, toll road policy, public pri­vate part­ner­ships, and emi­nent domain abuses. TURF pro­motes non-toll trans­porta­tion solutions.

by Patrick Wood, Editor

Do we have a respon­si­bility to shell out some $8 bil­lion per year in tax­payer money to edu­cate over 60,000 com­mu­nist Chi­nese stu­dents in Amer­ican uni­ver­si­ties? That is, the very stu­dents who return to China to take jobs, fac­to­ries and even entire indus­tries away from Amer­ican workers?

Appar­ently so, according to the U.S. State Depart­ment divi­sion that pan­ders to wannabe Chi­nese students.

In a 2005 speech given by Donald Bishop, attached to the U.S. Embassy in Bei­jing, China, Bishop eagerly told prospec­tive stu­dents how to game the Amer­ican edu­ca­tional system for an essen­tially free edu­ca­tion at tax­payer expense. He told them how to secure stu­dent visas, which pro­grams to apply for, and how to get addi­tional money to main­tain them­selves while in the United States.

Each year, over 20,000 new com­mu­nist Chi­nese stu­dents join the other 40,000 stu­dents already present at Amer­ican uni­ver­si­ties.  Eighty-two per­cent (almost 50,000) of these are grad­uate stu­dents in math­e­matics, sci­ences and engi­neering. Those stu­dents who get Teaching or Research Assis­tant jobs find that tuitions are fur­ther reduced, in some cases to zero.  Such oppor­tu­ni­ties are not avail­able to undergrads.

At public insti­tu­tions in the United States, According to Bishop,

“… a stu­dent receives a dollar’s worth of edu­ca­tion for per­haps twenty-five cents. The university’s other costs are sup­ported by the tax­payers, which means the farmers and fac­tory workers and busi­ness people of one of the fifty states.”

At pri­vate uni­ver­si­ties, half of the tuition is sub­si­dized by endow­ments and foun­da­tions.
Bishop summed up the finan­cial angle by stating,

“Another way to look at this is that every stu­dent admitted to an Amer­ican uni­ver­sity receives an (unstated) schol­ar­ship, or per­haps a sub­sidy, from Amer­ican society. Every state debates the amount of money allo­cated for higher edu­ca­tion each year. Every state wants to keep edu­ca­tion fees low to ben­efit its own low-income stu­dents. But every year, states agree to use tens or hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars to sub­si­dize the stu­dents that come from for­eign nations. These bil­lions of dol­lars demon­strate a true Amer­ican com­mit­ment to diver­sity and inter­na­tional understanding.”

Do Amer­i­cans know about this “true Amer­ican com­mit­ment” to edu­cate com­mu­nists on how to make nooses from our own rope to hang us with?

Have we for­gotten that between 1949 – 1975, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) mur­dered an esti­mated 45 – 50 mil­lion of its own cit­i­zens? The PRC is still pounding on Tibet, where some 600,000 have died since 1950.

Have we for­gotten that per­se­cu­tion of Chris­tians is leg­endary in China? Even as China pre­pares to host the 2008 Summer Olympic games, they have for­bidden for­eign ath­letes to pub­li­cally or pri­vately share their Chris­tian faith with Chi­nese cit­i­zens.  Even after the cur­rent earth­quake that killed at least 34,000 people, the PRC ordered a new crack­down on under­ground house churches that might have oth­er­wise been a great source of relief to refugees of that ter­rible disaster.

Have we for­gotten that the PRC ruth­lessly enforces a policy of forced abor­tion for women who would seek to have more than one child? Untold mil­lions of young women have been vio­lated under this brutal policy.

Have we for­gotten that China is the number one source of cyber-warfare against the United States in recent years? Just one year ago, the Depart­ment of Defense pub­li­cally admitted that “The PLA (People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army) has estab­lished infor­ma­tion war­fare units to develop viruses to attack enemy com­puter sys­tems and networks.”

Per­haps Mr. Bishop of the State Depart­ment doesn’t remember such things. How­ever, a more likely sce­nario is that he does remember and yet chooses to ignore them, to our own expense and peril.

That would mean, of course, that Bishop vio­lated his oath of employ­ment: “I will sup­port and defend the Con­sti­tu­tion of the United States against all ene­mies, for­eign and domestic and I will bear true faith and alle­giance to the same.”

In all fair­ness to Mr. Bishop, we should acknowl­edge that he is acting in accor­dance with offi­cial State Depart­ment poli­cies, under the lead­er­ship of the Admin­is­tra­tion of George W. Bush.

The global elite who opened up China to for­eign invest­ment and man­u­fac­turing in the early 1970’s are the very same people who are backing Chi­nese edu­ca­tion in America today. After all, why should the elite spend their own money to edu­cate their Chi­nese work­force when bun­dles of tax­payer money is avail­able to do it for them?

Per­son­ally, this writer wants no part of China or the Chi­nese polit­ical system, and nei­ther should you.

In the mean­time, we owe them absolutely nothing and espe­cially not a free edu­ca­tion at tax­payer expense.