Continuous Cronyism Update: Pretend the Ports Were Private

Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Government, Private Property, The State

DP World is owned by the government of Dubai, which is, in turn, “one of seven emirates that form the federation known as the United Arab Emirates.” This state-owned corporation will soon be operating port facilities in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, New Orleans and Newark, N.J. The deal embroils politicians—ours and theirs—in the usual tangled and tainted interests.

For instance, after Katrina struck, the UAE gave the U.S. government 100 million for disaster relief. Talks about the ports began shortly afterwards. Quid pro quo? CorpWatch alludes to an intricate web of war profiteers. Like Halliburton and other well-connected American companies, the Dubai conglomerate “does brisk war business.”

Tracing the slimy trail of the Bush administration and its corporate cronies reveals that Treasury Secretary John Snow “was chairman of the CSX rail firm that sold its own international port operations to DP World for $1.15 billion in 2004.” Another edifying tidbit from the New York Daily News has it that “David Sanborn, who runs DP World’s European and Latin American operations…was tapped by Bush last month to head the U.S. Maritime Administration.”

Also, former Congressman Vin Weber, a Minnesota Republican, is a consultant to the United Arab Emirates; and former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole is a “fixture” at Alston & Bird LLP—a company that’ll be consulting and lobbying privately for DP World. Bling-bling (as in the sound of a cash register, not a rapper’s accoutrements)!

If U.S. ports were private, and not state run; if the deal were devoid of the cupidity and corruption that comes with government “enterprise”—all those politicized paybacks—then it is more than likely that the private property owners involved would react just as Americans have reacted to the involvement of a Middle-Eastern, state-owned company in the management of their ports. Most Americans are against this deal; only 17 percent approve.

If ports were privately owned, their proprietors would have to underwrite the endeavor and would thus be extra cautious, since it would fall to them—and not to taxpayers—to cover the costs of an attack. There’s no doubt that port owners would then express the same trepidations most Americans are now voicing over who manages—and has easy access to—their ports. Why, in a free market, even the perception of insecurity would cause insurance costs to skyrocket. Fairness doesn’t factor into this.

In all likelihood, if ports were privatized, we’d be witnessing a similar reaction. Right or wrong, the UAE would probably not be doing a rip-roaring trade in managing ports. So, to the extent that popular response to the Dubai deal mirrors what would transpire under private property, it’s neither unethical nor unreasonable; it is what it is.

When the issue at stake is near and dear to their hearts, people become propertarians.

* Related Reading: Whose Property is it Anyway?

Dick and the (Media) Dickheads

Media, The Zeitgeist

My WorldNetDaily Colum today, “The ‘Presstitutes’ Vs. The VP,” elaborates on this post. Append your comments to this entry.

No wonder the [media] went crazy after learning of the shooting accident from a Texas paper…Cheney is telling the men and women assigned to cover the White House that they are irrelevant.

With these vainglorious and vapid words, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek excused his colleagues’ latest mindless fit of pique. For over a week now we’ve been subjected to media grand mals over Cheney’s accident. Or, rather, over the delay and circuitous way in which they found out about the shooting.

As longtime readers of this space know, I’m no fan of the Vice President or his boss. I’m even less enamored of the media, liberal and illiberal. They are, for the most, enablers of power. So long as they’re being treated as the demigods they think they are, they act like lap dogs to the Big Dogs. Did not the “presstitutes” enable the invaders of Iraq? You bet they did.

Members of mainstream media have no allegiance to the truth; only to their perches. Alter openly admits that Cheney and his handlers messed with his colleagues’ (read: ME, ME, ME) collective sense of importance by releasing the information to a local newspaper, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

This is not to say the incident was handled efficiently or even forthrightly. What I’m saying is that this private tragedy is almost immaterial in the grand scheme of things—Iraq, the debt, Darfur, and the Islamic conniption over the Danish cartoons, which the bums failed to publish or process.

Any half-wit with a vaguely normal range of affect, moreover, has to know that Cheney’s mishap, not uncommon among hunters (our shooting instructor, who lives to popularize guns, told us he never goes hunting and advised the same), must have devastated all involved, including the VP.

Alter added this patronizing bit of pomposity:

The media often focus on relatively unimportant, easy-to-understand stories as metaphors for shortcomings that the normal conventions of the business (and the inattentiveness of the audience) make hard to convey.

Oh, the condescension!

Yes, the sages who slept with their sources at the onset of the extravaganza known as “Operation Iraqi Freedom”; the same sorts who subjected their readers and viewers to a perspective as monochromatic as the green of night-vision optics, and who regularly privilege spectacle over substance—these stellar reporters are now, for our benefit, focusing their powers of observation on the symbolism of the accident.

Fiddlesticks! The media have not concentrated on this story as a service to the public or to the truth. Their coverage of the accidental shooting of Harry Whittington has been entirely self-referential and self reverential. This is about them, not Cheney.

I can think of many material, not metaphoric, stories that would benefit the mulcted and misled masses. This was not one of them.

More to the point, members of the media ought to be in the business of reporting about reality, not acting out on their immense egos by assigning “symbolic” meaning to relatively minor events.

Buchanan of Arabia

Islam, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

The following is an excerpt from my new column, Buchanan of Arabia. I’m sure readers will have plenty to say in response.

After conflating the Danes with the most off-putting exemplars of free expression—Larry Flynt the pornographer, the Nazis of Skokie, and the late Robert Mapplethorpe of the bullwhip-bedecked behind—Buchanan allows that we are all entitled to be contemptuous of “the beliefs and values the Islamic faith holds dear, and for the prophet.” “But if we wish to exercise our right to air [these views] in print or broadcast, we should expect to reap what we have sown.”
With these obligatory lines, Mr. Buchanan discharges his duty to the West and its puny freedoms. What follows is an ode to Islam. Buchanan’s paean to this faith’s brute force is crucial in divining why he demands the West’s capitulation, following the cartoon Jihad.

Christian Butterbach quotes my description of Israel in the column as:

…the Middle East’s only true democracy—a small spot of sanity in a sea of savagery, where enlightened Western law prevails, and where Christians, Jews and their holy places are safe.

He then adds the following important quip:

Are Muslim holy places in Israel not safe???

My response:

Muslims are always safe in liberal countries. You know that; look around. It’s inherent in the definition of “liberal.” Countries with a liberal tradition make it safe for all people to worship openly. Arabs living in Israel proper are as safe as you and I are in our neighborhoods and places of worship. And very active on Israeli campuses—alongside their fellow Jewish, radical-leftists—in anti-Zionist causes. No different to an American campus, really. It would have been a redundancy on my part to add “Muslims,” when it is Jews and Christians who are imperiled in Muslims countries.

In fact, some of the angry letter writers (I don’t mean Chris) should visit Israel (and I don’t mean rush to the PA and hire a “guide” to show them a staged stone throwing). Visit the suicidally liberal schools and homes of real Israelis. I actually grew up in Israel, and went to school with Israeli-Muslims. Yeah, visit Israel, won’t you, instead of writing propaganda, the only verification for which is Mr. Buchanan and other dedicated saboteurs.

Study George Reisman and Ayn Rand for College Credit!

Capitalism, Economy, Education

A note to undergraduate students: It’s not every day that we get the chance to seriously breach the left’s monopoly on higher education. But now, thanks to a collaboration between Professors George Reisman and Brian Simpson you can earn college credit for studying Dr. Reisman’s Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics and Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. More about this opportunity on Dr. Reisman’s blog, here.