Opposition to port deal seen as weird overseas

NY Times:

The tempest over Dubai's takeover of some United States port operations has surprised and puzzled shipping officials and experts outside America, who called the criticism misguided and contrary to global trade.

With its $6.8 billion purchase of the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company, Dubai Ports World, which is owned by the emirate of Dubai, would acquire terminals not just in the United States, but in 18 other countries, among them Britain, Belgium, France, India and China.

Yet nowhere else has the deal for P.& O., as the company is known, drawn much anxiety. Instead, the call from American politicians to review the purchase, and some of the talk surrounding the discussion, has cast the United States in a negative light to outsiders.

"We've been shocked by the level of animosity and xenophobia leveled at D.P. World," said Nick Savvides, the editor of CI Online, a research company for the shipping container industry with headquarters in London. The reaction is particularly galling because under the deal "port security remains firmly in United States hands," Mr. Savvides said.

...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t
Read more