Re: WSJ: how to sound like a hawk without being one
Nathan Newman wrote:
You really don’t see any difference between an argument for security based on actual defensive measures — like checking cargo coming into the country — and insane warmongering based on “preemptive wars”?
Checking cargo is fine, as is securing chemical plants, but this is about the ownership of a management firm by those crafty, devious Arabs. Curiously, as the article below shows, the US can’t run a proper port anymore.
The issue in this case is not out-toughing Bush, but destroying his credibility. The less tough he is seen, the less tough the Dems have to be to beat him.
But he’s not running again. If you mean on Congressional votes, the Republicans have a majority of both houses, and they’re also beating up on the admin, so the advantage is unclear. And don’t you think Bush is going to have to do something tough & anti-Arab as a consequence of this silly tempest?
Doug
Financial Times - February 22, 2006
Dubai backlash sends danger signal to US ports sector By Robert Wright, Transport Correspondent
When US opposition started mounting last week to the planned purchase by Dubai’s DP World of P&O’s US container ports, it was not the first time a campaign had blown up in the US against foreign ownership of port assets.
However, efforts by a number of US senators to stop the deal could, observers believe, have far wider implications than the last such campaign, when Congress prevented China’s state-owned Cosco container shipping line from taking control of a container terminal in Long Beach, California, in 1998.
While Cosco was able simply to switch its port calls to nearby Los Angeles and use a terminal there, legislation proposed by US senators now could affect a number of companies that already operate container terminals in the US, possibly forcing them to sell.
The dispute could also put at risk the US’s reputation in the maritime industry as a safe, predictable place to do business, observers believe.
The ultimate effect may be to divorce practice in the US’s relatively protected, inefficient container ports sector further from that elsewhere in the industrialised world, where large international companies have generally developed more efficient businesses.
Neil Davidson, a container ports analyst at London-based Drewry Shipping Consultants, says the US container port industry would be unworkable without companies controlled by foreign governments. Proposed emergency legislation by senators Hillary Clinton and Robert Menendez would prevent foreign governments from controlling US container port assets.
Among key companies that could be barred from operating US container terminals are China Shipping, the state-owned Chinese line, which has a terminal at the Port of Los Angeles, and APL, a line based in Oakland, California, and owned by Singapore’s state-owned NOL.
“There are a number of major state-owned shipping lines that have terminals in the US,” Mr Davidson says.
The law would prevent DP World, which is owned by the emirate of Dubai, from making any future investments but also lock out permanently Singapore’s PSA, the world number three container port operator by capacity, owned by the Singaporean government. DP World will become the world number four through the P&O takeover but will be only just behind PSA and Denmark’s APM Terminals.
Without DP World and PSA, the US would be further cut off from the influence of the world’s largest, most efficient container port operators. Hong Kong’s Hutchison Ports, the world number one, already refuses to invest in the US because its executives are sceptical of how the container ports industry is organised.
Yet that may suit the mainly small family-owned companies that lease container terminals at many US ports from the publicly owned port authorities controlling nearly all of themSuch small companies dominate the sector in the US, along with shipping lines, which lease dedicated terminals for their ships at many ports, especially on the west coast.
Although the restrictive practices at union-dominated US ports mean profits are not as high as in other parts of the world, business for such family-controlled companies has generally been good, according to Mr Davidson. Few have chosen to sell out in the same way as the owners of ITO, the small terminal operator that sold P&O its north American assets in June 1999.
US politicians well beyond Washington might also benefit if the deal were to fall apart. Many local port authorities are run by political appointees, who might benefit from attacking Arab interests if P&O North America’s terminal leases were surrendered and could be relet.
“The US ports business is a pretty political animal,” says Mr Davidson.