My first award of 2006 cuts across both parties and both houses of Congress. Chuck Schumer, Democrat, New York, is the nominal recipient but the award has to be shared with Hillary Clinton, Peter King, Bill Frist, all of the members of the House Foreign intelligence Committee, Lou Dobbs and the mass media. They are recipients of this prestigious award for the work that they did to kill the Dubai Ports World deal.
Dubai Ports World, one of the largest operators of ports worldwide, acquired the British company, P&O, in a transaction valued at about $6B. P&O also operates ports throughout the world including 5 high profile ports in the US: New York/New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia. Dubai Ports World is owned by the Government of the United Arab Emirates. Soon after the acquisition was announced Lou Dobbs, the CNN anchor, reported in his usual biased way that a UAE company will be in charge of operating five important US ports and he went on to report that two of the 9/11 hijackers were citizens of the UAE. He left his viewers to make the connection: UAE = 9/11 hijacker or selling these ports to Dubai Ports World = more 9/11 like events.
Step in Chuck Schumer the loudmouth senator from New York. For two weeks Schumer and his band of liars, trashed the deal between Dubai Ports World and P&O, the President's approval of the deal and anyone who stepped up in favor of the deal. They relentlessly argued that Dubai is unsafe, the home of terrorists and a deal with them will mean that terrorists will be able to get into the US and do more damage. They pointed the finger at Bush claiming that he is soft on terrorists, he doesn't have a plan and that he mishandled the approval of the deal. They so dominated the news cycle with their message that nobody was able to argue the other side.
Not once did they mention that the deal was approved by the non-partisan body which approves all major foreign investments in the US. Not once did they mention that Dubai Ports World is not taking over the coast guard or the INS - the bureaucracies that are responsible for the safety of our ports. Not once did they think about the damage that this could do to foreign investment in the United States. Not once did they consider that the US economy is surviving in large part because of investments in the US' debt by China, Japan and the Middle East and that the US would quickly slip into a recession without this foreign financing. Not once did they think that they were behaving just like the French who they so love to pillory. Not cone did they think that they were being racist.
This was the worst case of election year posturing and lies that I have seen in a long time. Absolutely reprehensible.
4 comments:
well that's all really interesting but you're forgetting about one thing: terrorism.
Joking aside, I just listened to a really interesting documentary on BBC1 called The New Rules of the Game. It was an analysis of globalism and concluded by suggesting that the world was actually moving more and more towards a situation similar to the 19th century, where the Great Powers competed amongst each other. Several academics referred to it as another Great Game. Sounds interesting!
I think the analysis is reasonable. In the economic realm the Great Powers are competing with each other by errecting barriers to the free flow of capital. France is the most high profile practitioner of what it calls 'economic patriotism.' However, Italy, Germany, Spain, the US and Luxembourg are all so front runners.
In contrast, Canada and, to a lessser degree, Britain are the opposite of economic nationalists. I predict that if things don't change the latter countries will emerge much stronger than the former.
Well said, Buzby.
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