I just finished reading Booman’s excellent post about how the spin on the Dubai thing is to make it a racist issue. We don’t like Arabs, but the Brit’s were okay. Sadly, this defense is echoed on Kos in this diary.
IT’S THE PRIVATIZATION, STUPID.
That has to be our mantra. I mean seriously. How much of America should be sold to private corporations? Why not just sell the Statue of Liberty back to the French? They seem to have a bit more respect for the concept than we do these days.
The reason there was no outrage over the British ownership of the ports is that the majority of Americans didn’t know. Yeah, New York and New Jersey blew the whistle when the control was to pass to the Arabs, but I hope and pray that a lot of my fellow citizens were just as upset to find that our border security (ports are huge holes in our borders as it is) had been outsourced at all!
This while people in New Orleand and along the Gulf have no jobs. Why can’t we hire our own to guard our borders? I mean, what will we outsource next? I speculated about that, I HOPE in jest, over at Kos earlier.
So the next time someone in the media starts whining about the poor Arabs, remind them this isn’t abuot that.
IT’S THE PRIVATIZATION, STUPID.
And let’s not pretend this isn’t about blackmail by oil, either. That’s why the Bush administration is both feigning innocence while fighting hard to push the deal through. If they piss off the UAE, they could potentially upset the delicate balance between oil and the dollar. What if the UAE and others wanted to move to the Euro? They have us by the balls and we’re too afraid to fight back. But this, really, this is just beyond the pale, to an extraordinary measure. Why not put up a “Welcome, Smugglers” sign too? The Dubai ports are known as smuggler havens. That’s the expertise we hope to leverage??
Were the nation’s ports ever publicly owned?
Foreign ownership doesn’t mean american longshoremanm won’t be hired? What are you talking about “hiring”
Umm, last I checked, port security is the responsibility of the US gov’t, not the port owners. Not doing a very good job from what I read.
It’s going to take some time for people to realize that the gov’t’s primary purpose now is to make the world safe for the economic expansion of trans-national corporations. That would be worth discussing, if it weren’t dismissed as one of the unelectable ‘big questions’ to be avoided . .