The Daily Background
| [Ports] What this issue REALLY is
by Arlen Parsa
Yesterday, I tackled the ports issue. I closed that post with the following:
I think our government should be protecting our ports. Instead of hiring another government to protect our ports. What a novel concept. More updates as the story develops.
I’ve been doing some thinking. At the end of the day, I don’t believe that if our port security is handed over to this UAE company, a terrorist attack will be more likely. Faiz of ThinkProgress lays out facts about the company, and says they have a clean record (even if their country doesn’t).
The point to me is, there are many things that we shouldn’t be outsourcing. We shouldn’t have contracted Halliburton in Iraq to charge us 22 dollars for icetrays (which they certainly did, and more). We shouldn’t have outsourced the task of capturing bin Laden back at Tora Bora (where he escaped, after we backed off and sent in contracted warlords to do the job).
And we shouldn’t be outsourcing the control over security to foriegn states. And it doesn’t matter if those foreign states are our allies, or not. It just shouldn’t be done. It’s not about trusting them or not trusting them, it’s about something that’s not right. Just like somebody who is not an American cannot become President of our country, we shouldn’t be giving government jobs to other governments. Our tax money spent on these things should stay within our borders. And these port jobs should be federal or state jobs. Not private ones.
And so what happened here? Port security has been criticized for years in the United States. I think the Administration saw that they needed to strengthen port security (or at least appear to), and so they thought about it. They chose between doing the job of creating a new federal department to handle ports– or hiring some company to do it. And they chose the easier one. Like usual with this Administration.
And who did the Administration pick? A foriegn company. Is the Administration saying by this choice that Dubai Port Company can do a better job protecting our ports than any U.S. company could? Possible. They probably didn’t think about it too much. There are all sorts of connections business and otherwise that go from the President to the UAE.
The White House says the President wasn’t briefed until right before it went public (meaning he had no say in choosing who would protect us). Lie? Certainly possible. I’ve written before, and I’ll write again– we can’t trust this Administration to tell us the truth.
The point is this. Rabid, racist Republicans are getting their panties in a bunch about outsourcing the job of protecting American ports to a “bunch of Arabs.” Fine. That’s their angle. We can’t stop them from having a racist reaction about this. But we should be above this. And we should see this issue for what it really is. A government that’s outsourcing government jobs, period. Not just outsourcing government jobs to a “bunch of Arabs”.
Let’s hope that if nothing else this wakes people up to the precarious position our ports are in security-wise. Perhaps people will realize how little has been done since 9-11.
This is great, look forward to looking into every area. Thanks for being there.