Dubai, Dubai-do...
Posted on 04/28/2006 8:14:38 PM PDT by sinkspur
By Susan Cornwell
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers from both parties warned on Thursday against overreacting to a failed effort by a Dubai company to purchase U.S. port terminals, saying laws that discourage foreign investment in the United States could result.
"If Congress makes it too onerous to invest in this country, why would anyone in their right mind do business here?" said Mike Oxley, chairman of the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee.
"Labor is cheap in China, resources are cheap in South America, markets are huge in Europe," the Ohio Republican told a subcommittee hearing on overhauling the way the U.S. government reviews foreign acquisitions.
House lawmakers are working on legislation to correct flaws in the way foreign takeovers are examined for national security concerns, following the recent uproar over the Bush administration's approval of the state-owned Dubai company's purchase of terminal operations in six U.S. ports. The furor over the acquisition caused the Dubai company to announce last month that it would drop the purchase.
The White House is expected to decide this week whether to approve another Dubai-owned company's $1.24 billion plan to buy Doncasters, a British engineering company with U.S. plants that supply military parts to the Pentagon. The inter-agency Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS) sent its confidential recommendation on the Dubai takeover of Doncasters to Bush on April 13.
The Senate Banking Committee already has produced a bill to make the CFIUS rules on reviews of foreign takeovers more stringent. Rep. Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican, said on Thursday he would produce a House bill by the end of May.
But comments at the subcommittee hearing, chaired by Ohio Republican Deborah Pryce, suggested the House mood favored something more moderate than the Senate version, which was watered down after protests from the business community.
Oxley said U.S. investment in other countries was at stake, too, and asked members to think about what would happen if China, for example, shut out U.S. companies.
Already, with the talk of making investment here more difficult, the parliaments in Russia, India, Mexico and elsewhere have begun debating new retaliatory moves," he said.
The subcommittee's ranking Democrat, Barney Frank of Massachusetts, said drastic change was not needed to laws on
CFIUS.
"I do think people on my side have to be aware of the danger that we will overreact every time this (Bush) administration messes something up," Frank said.
One of lawmakers' complaints about the Dubai ports deal is that no one in Congress was notified by the White House. Frank said that did not mean legislation should allow a long list of lawmakers to be notified of takeover reviews.
Former Commerce Secretary Don Evans testified that he opposed requiring the government to spend an extra 45 days examining deals with state-owned companies for national security concerns, a provision that is in the Senate bill.
Evidence emerged Thursday that foreign firms did not yet think the U.S. welcome mat had been pulled up.
The Organization of International Investment released a survey of top-level executives at major U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies. Eighty-eight percent of them said they planned to increase or maintain their companies' investments in the United States over the next year.
A real brain surgeon here.
Idiot congressmen realize they overreacted in the ports deal.
This is actually the payoff to Thursdays deal about the green cards. Bush told the Dims to back off of the Dubai deal, and in return he would give the the vote for the next 50 years. You can challenge this assumption, but it is a true assessment.
It took them HOW long? Idiots, nearly all of them. In possibly even worse condition are the Congressional staffs. They're supposed to catch on to this stuff for their boss.
Sometimes I wish Katrina had hit Capitol Hill.
Yes, and they are undereacting with the need for border security. Bush can't win arguments with "Trust me."
Here we go again. The media didn't seem to learn on the last go-around that they weren't buying port terminals.
j
This is a thread about investing in America, not borders.
They didn't drop the purchase, they completed the purchase.
The did say that they would sell the american operations if and when they found a suitable purchaser who offered a fair price.
However, that deal was rejected by lawmakers who pushed forward with laws to stop the purchase.
I presume they will still honor their offer, but so far as I can tell no papers were signed, no law was passed, and NOTHING at all has actually been done on the matter.
In other words, other than knocking a few points off the Bush approval rating, nobody acheived anything on that issue, nor does anything seem to have changed -- the issue just dropped from the radar screen, to be replaced by the NEXT issue the democrats raised to beat Bush over the head with.
The Democrats are good at this, they've been doing it for 5 years.
The last year they've had a lot of help from republicans.
I really thought this alarmist overreaction to the Dubai deal died when the deal did. This legislation could cause problems from inflation, higher prices, to flat out trade wars. Only Buchanan would endorse such a dumb idea. Ask any economist about the wiseness of such reaction, I'd bet most of them would say this is a horrid idea that goes against all the ideals of capitalism.
They still don't get it, do they?
These are Republicans. They are supposed to represent conservative, patriotic, pro-American thinking.
And here they are - shilling for an Islamic Shiekdom in one of the most unstable, anti-American areas of the world.
And here they are again, preaching internationalism and globalism.
Their base doesn't want it.
Most independents don't want it.
Even a lot of Democrats don't want it.
The Republican Party may very well become the first political coalition in history to commit mass suicide - poilitically.
Maybe we DO need "protectionism" - at least the kind of protectionism which will permit the American worker to do what he or she can do best - compete on a n equal footing with other countries.
We can't compete with slave labor.
We can't compete shackled by environmentalist wackos, idiot gender based, and affirmative action programs.
But we can compete as we did in the 19th Century - in a free and unregulated economic climate at home under a government which looks after OUR best interests abroad.
How many weeks after they overreacted? What next, Sean Vannity admitting that he was wrong the whole time?
Moments like these makes me hate politics, as I agree with basically no one here, and yet in another argument, I'll be on there side 100 percent. It's like every issue has its own factions, and no one person is in the exact same factions you are.
Does the word compromise ever come to mind?
That word could get you shot around here.
Patriots never compromise.
True believers never compromise.
The elect realize that the hoi-polloi never have anything of value to contribute
God cries when we compromise. Don't you know that????
ROFLMAO!!!!
I always thought that was rain.
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