the "Dubai Ports World" thing is not as bad as congress is making it out to be...

[acroyear]

I 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.:

• 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)
  

So really, there's just a lot of smoke-blowing with very little in the way of fact, and a lot in the way of unnecessary fear, from the nay-sayers.  Congress needs to back down on this, as its just making them look stupid, in both the international community, and to President Bush who will win any fight with them on this matter (they won't be able to override a veto, I think).

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.

Comments

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

the point is we *do* "monitor" the stuff. all this sale does is change who owns the company that actually loads and unloads the stuff.

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.