Over the weekend, The Washington Post brought us another true tale of what a scam "public-private partnerships" can turn out to be, and how it's usually the "public" half of these enterprises that takes it in the neck.

State officials had been sending the company multimillion-dollar installments each month to build the road. But the state lacked federal construction permits, so the road wasn't built.And now the commonwealth is out about $256 million.

We have pointed out several times that corporate America no longer has an ethical compass worth relying upon. The people raised within it see a pile of money and they grab for that pile of money. That goes for the Social Security trust fund, and it certainly goes for the taxpayer money they can con out of gullible pols like the late governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell who, prior to going to the federal sneezer for grifting above and beyond the call of simple greed, was a devout acolyte of the faith-based notion that private enterprise can always do things better, and an even more fervent adherent to the idea that taxes should not be raised on anyone for anything ever.

Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne said this month that the I-66 project should not be ceded to private investors for "ideological" reasons, as might have happened in the past. Keeping the construction of toll and carpool lanes under state control could generate hundreds of millions of dollars for additional transportation projects, he said, and avoid a repeat of cases in which the state was left "holding the bag."

McDonnell's faith was whole. It was completely. It was quite charming in its own, child-like way.

Virginia officials governed the project using the state's Public-Private Transportation Act, which went into effect 20 years ago and gave officials extraordinary flexibility in pairing public projects with private firms. The idea was to try to tap the construction expertise, business acumen and cost-consciousness of private companies, with the benefits flowing to shareholders and state taxpayers. If Virginia officials didn't have the stomach to set aside large sums to add long stretches of highway, they could lure private investors to put up much of the money. Companies would cover project costs and company profits with the decades of toll revenues they collected.

Handing what we used to call The Commons over to private enterprises -- especially private enterprises operating in the ethical wasteland of modern American corporations -- doesn't work. It is an invitation for the wolverines who run such enterprises to steal as much of the public treasury as they can and then stick us with the bill when they inevitably fail, because these corporations are not about building things. They're about abetting the transfer of money upwards, to a stockholder class. They are vehicles for the financial services industry.

More than $83 million was transferred to the company for construction "mobilization" as of February 2014, even though the road was far from ready for construction, Layne said. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had not granted the needed permits, so construction could not move forward, but the funds kept flowing, he said."That's the perplexing part. Payments continued to go to the contractor for things they knew couldn't possibly be accomplished, because they didn't even have a permit," Layne said. "A large part of that, in my mind, was not earned."

The only surprise is that anyone is surprised.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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