Hogging the Road

That's the title of a brand new article about the Traffic.com scam that appeared this afternoon in MotherJones.com. The subtitle of this piece is: How a company called Traffic.com landed an exclusive government contract worth millions to gather data on the nation's highways—and then sold the information back to us.

I knew that Jim Ridgeway was working on this piece, but had no idea as to when it would appear. I originally met with Jim and told him about this scandal last January, during my trip to Washington, DC. It's truly amazing how long it takes for things to happen sometime, but I think he did a good job in explaining the importance of this scandal.

I'm quoted in Ridgeway's piece as saying "Local participants are increasingly aware that this program is a scam." That's true, of course, and I'm even more out of the closet now.

However, what is truly the "big story" here -- the explicit involvement of former USDOT Secretary Mineta, now former DHS Deputy Secretary Jackson, former Special Assistant to the President Holman, and current USDOT Secretary Peters -- has not been told... yet. Stay tuned -- at least three other investigative reporters are actively looking into this scandal, including a major new-age, Internet only publication.

This scam has gotten a lot of press in the past five months or so. The real question is whether or not the USDOT Inspector General or Congressman DeFazio (who chairs the House Highways and Transit Subcommittee) will fully investigate this scandal and expose its details to the light of day, or just sweep it under the rug.

If this scandal involved all Republicans the Democrats would jump all over it (and vice versa), but because it involves Mineta, the Democrats seem unwilling to pursue the truth. As it turns out, it was a brilliant strategy for Shuster and his associates to recruit Mineta for their team early-on. Sadly, he's just as crooked as the rest of them.

Jerry