a plot by the Clinton administration to turn over a naval port facility to a Chinese military-owned shipping company called COSCO
COSCO: A COMMUNIST CHINESE-OWNED COMPANY (House of Representatives - April 15, 1997)
Several officers in the Marine Corps have raised questions about why the Clinton administration favored turning over a military base in Long Beach, CA to the Chinese ocean shipping company, Cosco, over the protest of marine reserve battalion made homeless by the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Briefings on the firm fail to convince many of its members. The CIA, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Coast Guard reinforced the view that Cosco's strong link with the Chinese Government is a fatal flaw in its proposal to deliver the base to a company.
The chairman of one of these two Chinese arms companies implicated in the scheme to smuggle the 2,000 illegal Chinese-made weapons into Oakland aboard COSCO's ship had coffee in the White House in an affair associated with D.C. fundraising. Officials of the weapons company were indicted for shipping those arms.
On the campaign trail last year and in a White House meeting in 1995, President Clinton endorsed the proposal to transfer land of the Long Beach Naval shipyard to COSCO, but it was this March, 1995, the White House radio address that had critics talking. A COSCO advisor was among the Chinese businessmen invited to hear the President in the oval office just two days after a California businessman, Johnny Chung, made a $50,000 donation to the DNC and hand-delivered it to Mrs. Clinton's chief of staff Margaret Williams, CBS Evening News, March 11, 1997.
Shortly after the Long Beach Naval shipyard land transfer was arranged, the Clinton administration helped arrange, listen to this, Mr. Speaker, in the President's budget that he submitted, he gave free, no strings, gave to Communist China $50 million to burn a coal burning plant, after these meetings and after these DNC fund-raisers from the Chinese. He can cut impact aid for education, but he can also give $50 million to Communist China in the name of trade and just give it. That is not fair trade.
He also gave a multimillion dollar loan to build 5 Communist Chinese ships, COSCO ships, in a nonrecourse loan. What that means, Mr. Speaker, this is a loan of some $137 million, which may not be much to many Members around this body, but you ask the American people, $137 million of their taxpayers' dollars back up a nonrecourse loan to Communist China, a state-controlled company by Communist China, and if they forfeit, who is left holding the bag? The United States taxpayers. Our own ship builders do not have access to this type of loan, Mr. Speaker. Incredible. But yet the administration gives Communist China.
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