Posted on 03/09/2006 10:42:42 AM PST by navysealdad
Dubai Ports Worls to divest itself of all American interests
Maybe it ought to be we're only with you until it's politically expedient to be against you.
I am forcibly reminded of Hanoi John accusing the president of "insulting our allies" during the last election run, and of Senate Dems backing him up ad nauseum.
Do our congress critters think they just COMPLIMENTED anyone in Dubai?
The fear of DPW is totally irrational. DPW operates in 30 countries on 5 continents. If anyone takes the time to think about this, he or she would realize that whether DPW operates in U.S. ports, or not, is of little consequence regarding risk of terrorist strikes.
Besides, does anyone think they are in business for the purpose of blowing up their own facilities? Terrorists don't need to buy their targets.
Aside from COSCO, other Chinese companies seem involved in running terminals on our West Coast.
Even among those companies that aren't outright owned by the Red Chinese, I'm sure that Beijing has the final word in their dealings.
For sure...for sure. But that support of course came after the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. And I do remember reading once that the British Admiralty in the 1920's had drawn up plans for war with the United States over trade issues.
Many of things that are cited against the UAE occurred before September 11, 2001.
ping.
subsequent posts have been interesting, also.
Just goes to prove that muslims are the most sensitive people in the world. Their feelings are easily hurt. We should strive to be more sensitive.
...And we all know what a staunch military ally China is.
And terrorists hijack their weapons and weapons transporters, when possible. It's cheaper (and sneakier) than buying them
Exactly. The Democratarians around here seem to think DPW is a country in and of itself. People of all different nationalities live in Dubai. And the boycott of Israel excuse is TOTAL BS. EU countries participate in the same boycott. The EU has monetarily supported Pali terrorists for years. Is anyone proposing we ban all EU countries from managing shipping containers?? NO. These people don't even know enough about the subject to be consistant in their b*tching.
Not one Einstein on this thread has once questioned the validity of congress setting foreign and/military policy - in this case both - or the wisdom of allowing a communist country which wants to take us over run our ports.
Why have a commander and chief, Defense Department or cabinet of people whose CAREER is to create military and foreign policy which benefits this country? Fire tham all and let congress rule by consensus.
I can "hear" the sarcasm in your tone. :-)
Chinese general warns of nuclear risk to US , July 16, 2005
A senior Chinese general has warned that his country could destroy hundreds of American cities with nuclear weapons if the two nations clashed over Taiwan. [snip]Although Mr Zhu said war was unlikely, his proposal that China should adopt a first-strike nuclear option against the US will alarm the Pentagon.
PBR=Pabst Blue Ribbon brewski : ) I'm cheap...we drink Natty Ice. Port is nice, and it's good for you!
No, this just reinforces what the rest of the world tends to think about Americans - way to overwrought emotionally, and not much gray matter in the skullbox.
Congress has proven once and for all that they have overstayed their freshness date.
But what about a 45 Ft sloop sailing from anywhere into NY with a nuke onboard and detonation planned by the suicidal muslims for mid-stream on the Hudson? No concern there I suppose....Our friends are a bigger threat.....Oh yes.
But what about a 45 Ft sloop sailing from anywhere into NY with a nuke onboard and detonation planned by the suicidal muslims for mid-stream on the Hudson? No concern there I suppose....Our friends are a bigger threat.....Oh yes.
Interesting point.
This is what Hillary wants--
a true democracy,
run by voters sitting at their computers at home,
quickly "voting (polling) on issues" (through their scared politicians)
after being brainwashed by lying Democrats.
Sounds messy and dangerous. Especially when the politicians decide to make judgements before the investigations are finished.
I thought that Roberts or Alito said that Congress can give gravitas to its influence by doing research.
Where are the research results? (Hint: Check under the rugs in the Senate and the House).
Unfortunately...When the next polls come out, asking the peoples' opinions of Congress, I doubt that the poll questions will try to clarify who hates Congress for what reason.
Hey thanks. I'm adding PBR to my glossary of FR terms, hehe. I even remember Rheingold beer; they had a Miss Rheingold contest every year. :)
Singapore was the next highest bidder for P & O.
Saudi Arabia ,China & Singapore already operate terminals here,so why not one of them?
I'd rather we attracted the investment here in the US to continue to build our economy rather than having people investing in China. However, our high taxes, inefficient and expensive manufacturing, and to some extent protectionism is making investing elsewhere more attractive.
I'm not suggesting that our workers should work for $2 an hour. However, as long as labor unions keep fighting companies efforts to improve efficiency, we aren't going to be able to be competitive without breaking the unions.
Honda can make cars in the US and make money doing it. Ford and GM can't.
All of which can be done without extensive dependency upon foreign nations, like was done during the first 170 years of this nation's existence.
The United States started out from British Colonies. The US was originally one big British foreign investment. We didn't go our first 170 years without foreign investment. We were a foreign investment that rebelled because we were treated unfairly.
Even after that rebellion and we became the United States, we benefited from foreign investment. A lot of it was simply people from European countries coming here. Some brought with them their life savings, others got money from family or business ties they still had in Europe.
American has ALWAYS benefited greatly from foreign investments.
Sorry, but the majority of that is funded through the purchasing power of US dollars obtained through free trade policies.
You're missing the point. We have done so much trade for a number of reasons. One is we definitely have abundant natural resources. However, in addition to that we invested in being able to harvest those resources efficiently. We built the infrastructure to be able to move those resources where they needed to go quickly and efficiently.
Many, many important inventions have come from the United States because we learned to invest in technology and invest in the people and the resources we needed to continue to improve how we do things.
Much of that investment came from domestic sources. Much came from reinvestment by companies here. However, much also came from foreign investment, and as that foreign investment produced a good return, those foreign investors reinvested their profits in us companies or US branches of foreign companies because we had the world's fastest growing economy.
Without that investment we couldn't have grown nearly as quickly.
The other important point is people with money are going to invest it to make more money. If we tell them they can't invest it in the US, they are going to invest it somewhere else. That money is going to go towards making some other nation's economy strong. It's going to fund advances at other companies in other places.
Correct, they are a major problem since they have become corporations themselves, selling their members to the highest bidder.
They are considerably worse than that. They are artificial and abusive monopolies. They are exactly what they accuse the evil corporations of being.
Isolationism and protectionism are entirely separate entities. This country has been heavily involved internationally during even some of it's most heavily protectionist periods.
They are definitely not entirely separate.
At least after a point the more protectionism you implement the more isolated you will become.
Isolationism also produces protectionism.
They are definitely related.
You can be protectionist in some aspects of your policies while being active internationally in other aspects of your policies.
The results of protectionist policies often take a while to come into play. If you do too much to protect your markets, other countries will do business elsewhere. They will make ties elsewhere, and your ties with those countries will suffer. The end result is similar to being more isolationist even if that isn't the original intent.
And most of that is being etched away by foreign militaries that are feeding on American free trade policies. US trade dollars and technological investments funds most of the military gap closure between the US and China, which most defense groups are in agreement is closing by at least 2 years for every calendar year that passes. Imagine in 15-20 years a Chinese military with equal capbilities in most of it's military (and numerical superiority) and that'll be end result of penny-wise pound-foolish American free trade policies.
So how would you change those trade policies?
Would you impose large tariffs on cheap imported goods so we all pay more for most of what we buy? That means we also need to pay our employees more for them to have the same standard of living.
That means our exports are even less competitively priced. That means we have less to invest in our own economy. This means it costs us more to develop our own advancements.
It costs us more than it helps us. It slows our economy so others can catch up faster. It makes our people effectively poorer because everything costs us more. You can't fix slow economic growth by creating inflation.
If we want to remain on top and preserve our standard of living we need to increase our productivity. We need to reduce the tax burdens that are dragging us down. We need to encourage trade and investments.
That is incorrect. Before 1960 no more than 5% of the US economy was dependent upon foreign trade, and most of that consisted of raw materials and luxury good imports and exports of surplus finished goods.
The US went through isolationist and protectionist cycles. We industrialized our nation faster and more efficiently that most of the world. We built up our infrastructure of roads and railroads. We modernized our manufacturing. You can look at short periods of time and say we didn't rely on trade much during that time. If we scale back military spending and don't choke our economy bu growing the government, we can fund a lot of expansion short term.
However, long term you're either relying on someone else to deal with the problems of fascists and communists. You're assuming that someone else will keep those who would control others through force in check.
A isolationist government can't be a superpower. A protectionist government can be one, but they can't hold onto it unless their competitors are also protectionists and you have more resources than they do.
The basic long-term ability for a nation to remain a world power is industrial infrastructure.
We definitely became a world power because of our industrial power and infrastructure.
For a nation to survive in the long term it has to have a heavy industry base capable of prolonged use for warfare, and as free as possible from enemy interference.
For a prolonged military engagement you must have the heavy industry to support it. Do you have to have it domestically? There's definitely a huge risk if you don't. You'd be relying on manufacturing elsewhere to survive, and that's not reliable unless you're willing to make it reliable by protecting it, or possibly taking control of it.
Our heavy industry is definitely an important strategic asset. However, I want to point out that allowing DB Ports world doesn't take that asset away from us with regards to the ports. The asset is still in our country. The people doing the work are still almost all US citizens. The equipment DB Ports World would be investing in to modernize our ports would be here in the US.
China is playing it smart, they practice protectionism at home while encouraging free trade policies by the United States.
So how are those Chinese policies different than us maintaining ownership of the ports themselves, but having a foreign company invest in modernizing their operation and using their proven expertise to make them run more efficiently?
That's exactly the kind of thing that China is doing to grow their economy. They're being protectionist where they need to be. They're keeping control of assets either by ownership, or by simple location. They are maintaining security. However, they're encouraging foreign investment to modernize their businesses, and not just heavy industry.
I'm not saying that some protectionism isn't necessary. However, killing the BD Ports deal is pure stupidity because it's being done for the wrong reasons.
It's not being blocked for national security reasons. That should be abundantly clear to anyone who's paying attention to the details and who's watching how Congress is not trying to block the deal for things other than national security because the deal is passing muster on issues of security.
With the ports deal we are getting someone else to make our ports more efficient and more valuable while still using US citizens for most of the work. Yet are allowing it to be blocked because of a combination of the labor unions fighting it and what appears to be basically racist fears.
I'm not making claims that racism is playing a role lightly either. There are good reasons to be concerned about Muslims and Arabs when you look those groups as a whole, there are a lot of reasons to be concerned. That's why we need to look closer and see if that concern is really justified. We have looked closer. The treasury department has investigated. Their concerns have been addressed.
However if people are unwilling to look at the facts and continue to hang on to their fears without reason, that's when it goes from being reasonably cautious to being racist.
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