Free Republic

The rapid deterioration of our economy is attributable to the wholesale liquidation of our best companies to foreign interests. The U.S. has sold more than 16,000 of our best companies in the last 30 years to these foreign interests. This trend erodes our ability to generate earnings, and tax revenues to sustain our current standard of living – resulting in our reliance on imports thus creating uncontrolled and escalating foreign debt. Holding our debt our jobs and the production of our goods, foreign countries have ultimate leverage over our policies and our future. If we allow this to continue, it...

AUSTIN — The Texas Senate on Thursday approved a bill placing a two-year moratorium on private toll road contracts and creating a panel to review the terms of those agreements. Gov. Rick Perry had urged the Legislature not to act on the bill. He said the state's current transportation system, which involves public-private partnerships to build toll roads, needs to continue if Texas is to keep attracting big companies and jobs. Critics of Perry's proposed Trans-Texas Corridor and the state's contract with Spanish-American consortium Cintra-Zachry have made some lawmakers nervous about the project. Sen. Robert Nichols supported the corridor as...

On Saturday, October 7, 2006, CorridorWatch.org will host their second Toll & Corridor Summit in Austin, Texas. CorridorWatch.org is pleased to announce Dr. Pat Choate as the featured lunch keynote speaker during the daylong Summit II meeting in Austin. A native of Maypearl, Texas, Pat Choate is an independent thinker unafraid to ruffle establishment feathers. With a doctorate in economics focused on the role of government and industries in economic development, Choate has made waves challenging the benefit of free trade. In 1993, he co-authored with H. Ross Perot the best-selling book "Save Your Job, Save Our Country: Why NAFTA...

Washington CHINA is the global epicenter of pirating and counterfeiting. By its government's own estimate, China's domestic trade in bogus goods accounts for $19 billion to $24 billion annually. That is undoubtedly a significant understatement, and it doesn't even include the stolen technologies and phony brands China exports to the rest of the world. Since welcoming China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, the United States has had a historic opportunity to stop the Chinese piracy trade. So far, the Bush administration has failed to seize it. I opposed bringing China into the trade organization, and I don't like...