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acroyearI heard a bit of counter-criticism on the radio (WTOP, not some far-right punditacracy) about the U.A.E. owned Dubai Ports World company getting the contracts to manage parts of several ports in the U.S.:
Now the real flaw in all of this is why the American company (P & O) is in such a sorry state that this foreign company's buyout is (to their minds) necessary (and that the Brits were in such a state to go through the same takeover earlier). Of course, there's a degree of hypocracy in that sentiment, given how much we tend to encourage American ownership/leadership of foreign companies where-ever relevant and possible...
Correction: P&O was a London based company, so our port management has already not been in American hands for quite some time.
- This company would not be running "security" -- border patrol, immigration, customs, and the coast guard (all in DHS) will still be, 100%, in charge of port security at these locations as they are now.
- The company would only be managing the actual loading and unloading of cargo. They would not be in charge of screening, nor would they be in charge of deciding which packages get randomly selected for more intense screening.
- In reality, only about 5% of all ship cargo is actually screened (up from 2% pre-9/11). In fact, the shipping industry would go into a standstill if it got much above that, either in time taken to do it, or in manpower costing the government too much to do it in a time-efficient manner. [scroll to bottom of the linked article].
- The complaint that 2 of the 9/11 hijackers were from UAE is
- mostly irrelevant as they should not be considered typical of the population
- mostly irrelevant since just because Dubai owns it doesn't mean they'll be giving the jobs to immigrants or using their position to smuggle people and stuff into the country
- mostly irrelevant because this company would not be handling port security
- mostly irrelevant because the 2 hijackers had no relationship with Dubai at all, and
- a bad statistic in that the majority of the other 17 came from Saudi Arabia and yet we remain even more strongly "friends" with that government and its corporations (like their oil suppliers)
Now the real flaw in all of this is why the American company (P & O) is in such a sorry state that this foreign company's buyout is (to their minds) necessary (and that the Brits were in such a state to go through the same takeover earlier). Of course, there's a degree of hypocracy in that sentiment, given how much we tend to encourage American ownership/leadership of foreign companies where-ever relevant and possible...
Correction: P&O was a London based company, so our port management has already not been in American hands for quite some time.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-21 09:29 pm (UTC)ha
Date: 2006-02-21 09:44 pm (UTC)in short, extremely experienced geek.
i tend not to actually post my technical/computer related rants on here (i have an alternate blog at acroyear.blog-city.com for that, and even then i don't use it much), so what i post usually has nothing to do with my job or career. also, my LJ audience wouldn't get most of what i would talk about on those topics, so why bother?
Re: ha
Date: 2006-02-21 09:46 pm (UTC)Re: ha
Date: 2006-02-21 10:12 pm (UTC)Re: ha
Date: 2006-02-21 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-21 09:47 pm (UTC)"In reality, only about 5% of all ship cargo is actually screened (up from 2% pre-9/11)." could (and probably has been) translated, "More than double the percentage of ship cargo is screened since the days prior 9-11."
sorry, i digress.
i admit i had (and still have) a lot of those concerns when i heard about it this morning. why is the sale necessary in the first place, and why aren't we monitoring (loading/unloading) goods in our own ports? if we're so big on national security, doesn't it make sense that we should be doing this sort of job ourselves?
no subject
Date: 2006-02-21 10:11 pm (UTC)Only DHS (in the form of customs, border patrol, and the coast guard) has the right to monitor the content. the "security" fears have nothing to do with who actually does the "security" because that is unchanged from who it is now.
in fact, there probably won't be any change in how ANYTHING is operated at the ports because the same american company (P&O) is still going to be there, just with parent ownership that happens to be from a foreign company.
as i said, it would be prohibitively expensive to search much more than 5% - either it takes too much time (leading people to use alternate means or for some things like food to go bad; not that we import all that much food or anything) or it takes too much money to get enough people to do the work (since they would have to be federal employees and we already know how well the feds manage such work in TSA).
The sale is necessary, theoretically, because without some other company willing to handle the losses and/or manage the costs better, P&O will, like any industrial company, go broke and be unable to work at all, at which time the ports themselves would effectively shut down, taking even more jobs and more companies with it.
this is a typical industrial consolidation buyout, as had been done for most of the last century (the reason there are only 3 car makers in america). the only thing different is that the buying company is internatoinal (and from an arabic country). its no different from the amount of technical and industrial companies that have been bought out by the british-owned BAE Systems, only that's Britain, not UAE.
these kinds of buyouts, particularly for failing companies, are weekly occurances. most of the time, nobody notices except the shareholders.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 12:21 am (UTC)The Dubai firm that won Bush administration backing to run six U.S. ports has at least two ties to the White House.
One is Treasury Secretary John Snow, whose department heads the federal panel that signed off on the $6.8 billion sale of an English company to government-owned Dubai Ports World - giving it control of Manhattan's cruise ship terminal and Newark's container port.
Snow was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004, the year after Snow left for President Bush's cabinet.
The other connection is David Sanborn, who runs DP World's European and Latin American operations and who was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.
The ties raised more concerns about the decision to give port control to a company owned by a nation linked to the Sept. 11 hijackers.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 12:24 am (UTC)its just that the *security* concerns were unfounded.
and congress can bitch about it, but there isn't much they can do to stop the handouts anymore (like the great no-royalty oil profit giveaway revealed last week and already forgotten...). they've got their own damn problems...
no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 12:27 am (UTC)Has DHS been operating that efficiently in your opinion? I mean, come on! And if senior management come from Dubai, what's to say someone at that end couldn't shepherd something through.
Call me skeptical -- and the stakes are far too high.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 12:29 am (UTC)ok, that's an easy "no".
but DHS is doing it now. will they do it differently with this company in charge? i doubt they could afford to change and improve anything, given the rediculous cuts in the current proposed budget to pay for the tax cuts.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 01:03 am (UTC)Screeners Fail To Detect Smuggled Depleted Uranium At Ports.
And that was two years after 9/11...
no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 02:41 pm (UTC)That is to say, it's not about profitability, it's about stock value.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-22 02:43 pm (UTC)