“And Rick Perry (R-TX) planned to sell off our toll roads for a quick cash fix (to a company in Spain, with non-compete clauses to prevent construction of free feeder roads or alternate routes).”
Yep, it all seems like a bad dream now, but at the time, he wasn’t hiding his plans, and I was freaking out. The state legislature reaction to this plan to toll people thousands of dollars to use what today are freeways was “Duh, ok, if you want it, no problem, as long as you don’t raise taxes.”
It got so bad, that I started voting Democrat at the state level, even against Perry, hoping that people would start to wake up. They didn’t.
So he continued to move out with the plan, but then, when it came time to start seizing the millions of acres from landowners needed and handing it over to foreign companies, people started noticing his horrific plans, and they were pretty much trashed before the real damage was done.
The level of corruption regarding the whole scheme was never exposed, but was horrible - such as having a state Transportation Director who first sat on the board of Cintra (Perry’s favorite foreign toll road company), then became the state Transportation Director and pushed through this crap, and then went right back to Cintra. Thankfully he dropped dead not long after.
Governor Perry’s other brilliant plan was to sterilize young girls by forcing them to get the HPV Vaccine (the sterilization ‘feature’ of the vaccine was finally disclosed a week ago under the more polite term of ‘lowering fertility’). Luckily that plan didn’t get too far either - but the damage from the vaccine, even without Perry pushing it, is just starting to show up now.
You are not required to drive on toll roads
Texas is because of entrapraneurs that built toll roads, ferrys and bridges
Good Ol’ Rick never met a crony capitalist he didn’t like and do business with. He left behind a comptroller’s nightmare of slush funds.