NEWS - Port whine

Well, the infamous port deal--the one that seemed to scare the everloving daylights out of everyone despite the fact that it would result in little meaningful change to Americans who don't routinely ship containers into or out of New York--has been effectively torpedoed.

I suppose it's possible that Dubai Ports World's divestiture of its American interests is a ploy of some sort (i.e., nothing's changed save for a paper-only corporation being set up in between the layers--hence Schumer's oft-quoted "the devil's in the details" comment). My gut instinct, however, is that the deal is really dead--that the company took a look at how Congress and the local governments were acting, what most of the press was saying, and what the polls seemed to indicate about the public's response, and said "to hell with this!"

What has been lost with the deal?

Well, as I pointed out before, property rights have been harmed. Maybe I'm being too emotional and not rational enough, but I can't get that worked up by a sale of a government contract to another government being scuttled--now that it's over, I don't feel as bad as I did when I heard about Kelo or when we invaded Iraq, for instance. With eminent domain abuse and unjust, unconstitutional asset forfeiture laws endangering literally everything that every American owns, Dubai Ports World's problems on this front just aren't THAT important to me. This is no Kelo decision. However, property rights are property rights, and this is an unpleasant part of a really ugly picture.

We harmed our international relations when we killed the deal. The U.A.E. was perhaps not everything we could have hoped for, but they largely decided they were with us. When the rubber met the road, however, we, as a country, pretty much treated them as terrorist barnacles. One wonders if our navy ships will be quite as welcome in Dubai in the future. Beyond our specific relationship with the U.A.E., Nicholas von Hoffman made the observation in The Nation, "Free trade is based on the free use of money, and that means people we may not like or trust buy things dear to us that we would rather they did not have." Though he was more skeptical of Dubai Ports World than I, he made a good point I wish I'd thought of: what will killing deals like China National Offshore Oil Corporation's attempt to buy Unocal and this deal do to foreign investment? This is no small concern--pullout of foreign investment (because of a tariff in that case) was a major cause of the 1929 stock market crash and Great Depression. With India's and China's economies growing much more robustly than ours, we're not the only land of opportunity in the world these days.

What has been gained?

Pretty much nothing. People have been focused on problems with port security, but the net result appears to be that nothing will change on that front.

Also, Bush will have a slightly harder time advancing his agenda. Since my impression is that about 95% of his agenda is bad for America, anything that impedes it can't be all bad. That silver lining contains an ugly stormcloud, however. While Bush usually would deserve the sort of treatment he got on this issue, in my judgment, he DIDN'T deserve it THIS TIME, and I do hate to see him lose on one of the few times he's right. Also, many politicians who are every bit as bad as Bush (read: Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, and Hillary Clinton for three examples) have managed to gain points with the public when they were typically wrong.

The end of the Dubai Ports World deal isn't the end of American Civilization, but it's not progress, either.