Posted on 03/10/2006 12:33:17 PM PST by groanup
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The New Protectionists - How to create a real security crisis.
Friday, March 10, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
Dubai Ports World finally threw in the kaffiyah on its American operations yesterday, agreeing to sell them "to a U.S. entity." We hope that entity turns out to be Halliburton, if only for the torment that would cause certain eminences on Capitol Hill.
Dubai Ports was susceptible to this political stampede because it was an Arab-owned company buying port operations, which Democrats have played up as uniquely vulnerable. But this is also the second such mugging of a foreign investor in recent months, following last year's demagoguery against a Chinese company's bid to buy Unocal, a middling American oil company. If Members of Congress want a real security crisis--a financial security crisis--they'll keep this up.
What's especially dangerous here is that we're seeing the re-emergence of the "national security" protectionists. They were last seen in the late 1980s, when Japan in particular was the target of a political foreign-investment panic. The Japanese were buying Pebble Beach and Rockefeller Center, and so America was soon going to be a colony of Tokyo. A Japanese bid for Fairchild Semiconductor of Silicon Valley was seen as a threat to American defense. Those fears seem laughable now. But here we go again, with new targets of anxiety.
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(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
I think it's probably easier to call the British Empire "globalist" in nature than the other way around.
They've already turned in their dollars for Treasury bonds. If they go to sell, they put selling pressure on these bonds, lowering the price of their remaining assets and raising the yield on the bonds being sold and any bonds that will be issued in the future...this further erodes the value of their currently owned bonds because any new money going to purchase bonds will go to buy the newer, higher yielding ones. They'd be taking a bath because the terms on their currently held bonds do not change with the conditions of the market. Nice try though for someone with little understanding of the process. At least you knew that interest rates would rise but you probably did not really know why they would.
I don't think increasing foreign control of our economy is a good thing.
Well, there is one thing that you pro labor types might like about foreign ownership of production plants and the like: they generally pay wages above that which American owned firms do.
Myth #6: Outsourcing is a one-way street.
Fact: Outsourcing is a two-way street.
There are currently 6.4 million jobs in the U.S. in which the employer is a foreign company. The rate at which these insourced jobs are growing is faster that the rate at which jobs in general are being lost. According to the Organisation for International Investment (OFII), Over the last 15 years, manufacturing insourced jobs grew by 82%at an annual rate of 5.5%; and manufacturing outsourced jobs grew by 23 percentat an annual rate of 1.5%.[18]
Moreover, insourced jobs are often higher paying than those that are outsourcede.g., the 4,300 workers at the BMW factory in South Carolina and the more than 14,000 employed at Honda plants in Ohio. Senator Mitch McConnell (RKY) brought these facts to the Senate floor on March 4, citing data from the OFII and pointing out that every state has thousands of insourced workers. Michigan has 244,200. Ohio has 242,200. Even Idaho has 13,900 insourced jobs.[19] ~ Source, the Heritage Foundation (hint: not at all liberal today's 'progressive' sense)
Indeed, the sky is falling.
Do you people even think about things before you write them down for the rest to see?
Hey, did you read the second link that I provided in that earlier post? I can help you with some of the bigger words and concept...all you have to do is just ask.
You're right, I certainly did!
I disagree with you that nationalism is cheesy. Are you not proud to be an American? Our original Patriots and Minutemen made their sacrifice so that we could have a nation. There's more to our Contitution than just economic freedom.
If you really believe that nationalism is that cheesy, why did you join the Armed Services of America? The very reason for the existence of the United States Marine Corps is to defend this nation and its allies.
I'm not an isolationist. Isolationism is unrealistic. I AM a nationalist. We'd better be playing this game to win. If we allow one of our enemies out there the means and opportunity to take us down, they'll do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, we don't get to choose our enemies. As long as there are men, there will be men who choose to be tyrants, or lord over their fellows as kings. If we leave ourselves at their mercy, we're done for.
Why is it that your countrymen, who you swore to defend with your life, if necessary, are not worthy of defending economically from predatory trade practices by other countries, or from invasion by foreign nationals?
I'm not trying to pick a fight. I'm just wondering what your rationale is.
I do admire you signing back up in the reserves. I'd re-enlist myself, but they'd probably turn me down as physically unfit for service at this point in life.
My rationale is this: I do not subscribe to what you wrote here. "Why is it that your countrymen, who you swore to defend with your life, if necessary, are not worthy of defending economically from predatory trade practices by other countries, or from invasion by foreign nationals?" I do not believe in the so-called predatory trade practices. There are always two sides for every coin. If foreign entities (be them businesses or governments) decide to undercut other domestic businesses by accepting less than the 'going rate' for their goods or services, the domestic consumer is the one who wins. In the end, the consumers savings - in the aggregate - will outweigh the temporary dislocation of the worker. The worker will retrain or change jobs, and a new allocation of resources will result in growth.
Funny that the Alien Act was passed in Congress was mostly aimed at the french, and was meant to curtail activities of aliens and prevent subversion. In fact, restricting aliens in time of war has been a popular and easy to accomplish security measure that is very effective. Since we are in a war with "terrorists", curtailing their access to our ports seems like an extremely logical thing to do. Since the terrorism we are fighting is not home grown, but the product of an international movement, harboring extreme prejudice against nations that give money or other support to the terrorists is also logical.
Great line! :-)
Thank you very much .
I thought I was one of the few left who remembered when we where a self sufficient independent country and the world need us instead us needing the world.
What you said along very fact that we have so many free traders and dollar worshipers terrified at the thought that we have angered a bunch of desert Arab states, proves what happens to a country when it invests it's future inside the countries of those who envy or hate it.
Especially when they invest to the point to a point that the economic well being of our nation is in their hands.
Because of the no borders, free trade, anything for a dollar crowd, we have and are continuing to place the economic security of our country in the hands of those that would change or destroy America.
Now we have a large part of the people in the world's supposedly only superpower wailing in financial fear from the threat of a few Arab states with people in them who's dream is to take the world back to the seventh century.
It ain't just our military security that a lot of American companies have sold to the highest bidder but our economic security.
It is now a race to see which one goes off inside what's left of our borders first. The nuclear or financial bomb.
You don't have to believe in them for them to exist. They work really well. Hence the reason China's economic power is growing in relation to ours. US companies (and, hence US citizzens) do not get an equal chance to compete in certain foreign markets.
"The worker will retrain or change jobs, and a new allocation of resources will result in growth."
The worker? Sounds like a page out of some totalitarian manifesto. You do understand you're talking about your own neighbors, and future generations of Americans like cattle, rather than citizens of a free nation, Joe?
How nice. We all used to ride horses too. How many F-16's should I put you down for?
Is that what they are talking about in the article? The part about Japan buying up real estate in the US prior to the Japanese economy tanking for ten straight years while ours soared?
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