TruthNews Commentary, February 24, 2006

In 1814, the British tried to capture the port of Baltimore. After bombarding Fort McHenry for 25 hours with rockets and bombs, the British withdrew in failure, inspiring Francis Scott Key to write "The Star Spangled Banner." Then, nearly 200 years later, the Baltimore port authority sold the port to the British. Now the British want to sell the port to the Arabs. This, of course, has created a furor because the Arabs destroyed the World Trade Center.

Well, that's the short version of the story. The longer version is that the Baltimore Port Authority leased two of its six terminals to the London-based Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company, otherwise known as P&O. P&O is the terminal operator and stevedore provider for container cargo at Baltimore's Seagirt and Dundalk marine terminals, where it has about 65 employees. P&O also leases terminals at five other east coast ports (New York, New Jersey, New Orleans, Miami, and Philadelphia) and provides some port services at various other U.S. ports. Now, P&O has decided to sell itself to Dubai Ports World for $6.8 billion. DP World is owned by the Dubai government. Dubai is part of the United Arab Emirates, a somewhat friendly government in the Persian Gulf. Er, make that next to the Persian Gulf.

O.K., so what? Some Arab-owned company is going to operate terminals at several U.S. ports. What's the big deal?

We haven't figured this one out ourselves. Critics of the deal have pointed out that one of the 19 9/11 hijackers came from the UAE. Well, Richard Reid, a.k.a., the shoe bomber, came from England, and no one got upset that a Limey company was operating the terminals. Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 ringleader, lived in Germany, and Daimler Benz, a German company, operates one of the terminals at Baltimore. We'd suspect that the ports hysteria is motivated by racism, except much of the hysteria is being generated by the Democrats, and we know they'd never be guilty of racism. Maybe the Democrats mistook Dubai for Dubya.

Support for the deal came from an unlikely source. Israel's largest shipping firm, Zim Integrated Shipping Services, came out in support of the deal. CEO, Idon Ofer issued a statement saying, "During our long association with DP World, we have not experienced a single security issue in these ports or in any of the terminals operated by DP World... We are proud to be associated with DP World and look forward to working with them into the future." The U.S. government has said that security would continue to be performed by the Coast Guard and Customs Service. And if you can't trust the government, who can you trust? Well, actually, that's a good point. You can't trust the government.

The ports controversy raises another question about why we're giving contracts for port operations to foreign companies. However, this is only part of a larger globalization trend in which all sorts of work and jobs are going out of the country to foreign companies. In the case of the ports, it was the local port authorities who decided to contract out the operations of their terminals to foreign companies. Now they're looking at Washington and saying, "Save us from ourselves."

There's one key difference between P&O and DP World. P&O is a privately owned company. DP World is owned by the UAE government. Selling the terminal contracts to DP World would be almost as bad as selling them to a company owned by China.

Actually, that's already happened. In 1998, then-President Clinton allowed a communist Chinese company to take over operations of a terminal at Long Beach, California. There was no Democratic opposition to that move. Interestingly, Bill Clinton is a paid advisor to Dubai on the takeover of the U.S. ports. His wife, Senator Hillary Clinton, opposes it. Hypocrisy or principled disagreement? Who knows? We all know the Clintons would never be so crass as to take a position just because it was popular.

There's another problem with foreign government ownership. The oil company Citgo was sold to the Venezuelan national oil company in 1990. No problem, Venezuela was friendly, we even sold them F-16s. Nowadays, the government of Venezuela is not so friendly, and president/dictator Hugo Chavez is using Citgo to score political points.