Free Republic

Route 66 has been forgotten. The once-vital artery connecting Chicago and Los Angeles—and hundreds of towns in between—was America’s Main Street. John Steinbeck famously dubbed it “the Mother Road.” Passing through and bringing life to towns and cities across the heartland, Route 66 captured the imagination, delivering tourists, families, and misbegotten souls from one end of the country to the other. Even its rosy past has a dark undercurrent. Those diners, motels, and other roadside establishments played played host to rampant segregation. For black Americans, the Mother Road was rife with danger.

Roads and bridges built by U.S. taxpayers are starting to be sold off, and so far foreign-owned companies are doing the buying. On a single day in June, an Australian-Spanish partnership paid $3.8 billion to lease the Indiana Toll Road. An Australian company bought a 99-year lease on Virginia's Pocahontas Parkway, and Texas officials decided to let a Spanish-American partnership build and run a toll road from Austin to Seguin for 50 years. Few people know that the tolls from the U.S. side of the tunnel between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, go to a subsidiary of an Australian company —...