How financial sharks steal your bus money

The perfect financial crime – almost | PublicSource: "Such a plan worked for eight years and one of the entities defrauded was the Port Authority of Allegheny County. This spring the authority was one of the patsies featured in a New York City trial.

That trial was part of a six-year federal probe that has exposed political corruption, predatory practices and crooked financing that have diverted billions of dollars from building schools, roads and bridges in almost every state."

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Pittsburghers for Public Transit: Transit Bill of Rights

Pittsburghers for Public Transit: Transit Bill of Rights: "At the last general membership meeting on October 20th, Pittsburghers for Public Transit voted on a Transit Bill of Rights:

Members of our community need public mass transit for basic mobility and access to work, school, hospitals, shopping areas, recreational facilities, polling places, places of worship, and families and friends. Public mass transit is a vital part of any healthy metropolitan area. It is essential infrastructure—just like roads, bridges, tunnels, airports, and utilities—that is crucial to the economic, social, and environmental wellbeing of our region.

We have a right to a public mass transit system that includes:
1. Safe, reliable, environmentally-sustainable, and affordable transit that is accessible to all
2. Living wages, benefits, safe working conditions, and union rights for transit workers
3. Dedicated and sustainable funding for public transit
4. Equitable distribution of public transit costs with corporations paying their fair share
5. Transit that meets the needs of each community with no communities left out

Join Pittsburghers for Public Transit in affirming this Transit Bill of Rights."

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1% holds mobility hostage to break unions

Port Authority Transit union OKs concessions - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Port Authority union employees on Sunday ratified a contract calling for $60 million in givebacks over four years, clearing the way for a vote to reverse the historic transit service cuts and layoffs that were scheduled to take effect Sept. 2."

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Pittsburghers for Public Transit: Transportation is Our Need – and Our Right

Pittsburghers for Public Transit: Transportation is Our Need – and Our Right: "Government environmental agencies warn of dramatically increased air pollution with 10,000 more cars stuck in traffic on the parkways and streets, with their engines idling, but say there’s nothing they can do about it.
Clearly, we are heading for disaster unless we start to realize that mass public transit meets vital needs in our society, and that it must be supported and subsidized at a level that will increase its availability and make it cheaper, not more expensive, for people to use."

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What Fracking has done to people in Butler

Keep jobs downtown. Its more efficient. Sprawl is wasteful.

Anything but the car: My comments on the P-G article on the June 8 transit protest: If you live in a house built since 1950 or so, on a street that was built since 1950 or so, YOU are the problem. Since you moved 15 to 30 miles out, instead of staying in the city where your (great-)grandparents lived, you are expecting the taxpayer to fund the cost of both transit *and* all those wide, suburban thoroughfares for your cars to travel on. The state cannot afford to fix roads and bridges OR fund transit. Something has to give, and really both are (raising taxes to fix roads is a different argument, though intimately related), but transit is getting the headlines.

Read the whole post here 

1% uses fake fiscal "crisis" to steal workers' pensions

Port Authority votes to cut jobs, routes in fall | TribLIVE: "Bland said state officials have indicated they won’t move to increase funding to the cash-strapped agency until it obtains major concessions from the union — including savings on future retirees’ health-care and pension costs, which make up about one-fifth of the budget. The state provides about 45 percent of the agency’s operating money."

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