Free Republic

Joseph A. Muldoon Jr., who died March 16 of prostate cancer at his home in Poolesville, knew practically everything about the arcane field of savings and loan regulation, but he knew even more about horses. Mr. Muldoon, 76, was a lawyer who helped his clients sort out the regulatory mess resulting from the 1980s savings and loan debacle. Two years ago, he came out of retirement to help alert Congress and the media to the potential takeover of operations at 22 U.S. ports by a company from the United Arab Emirates. The resulting uproar forced congressional reassessment of security rules...

...[The building of the Trans-Texas Corridor] is all too sinister for Jerome Corsi, the Vietnam War veteran who helped lead the Swift Boat charge against John Kerry. Corsi has knitted disparate strands of each of these separate road projects to help convince fellow xenophobes such as Pat Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly, Lou Dobbs and the John Birch Society that the corridor is the first leg of a secret federal project called the NAFTA Superhighway, a four-football-field wide monstrosity that would run from Mexico's Yucatan to Canada's Yukon... Yet even Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican candidate for president, has fallen...

North American Union to Get Firmed Up in Secrecy at Meeting in Canada "Information is the currency of democracy." Thomas Jefferson American citizens have learned of some secretive groups in the country which are given great autonomy. Some are authorized by our government, but have little oversight, and some have not been authorized by our government, but seize authority just because they can. One example of this is the secretive CFIUS, Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States. When the plans to turn over operation of six ports to Dubai Ports World became public, (with no thanks to the...

Former Inside the Ring co-author Rowan Scarborough has written a new book revealing a key reason the Bush administration pressed hard for the 2006 deal for the United Arab Emirates-based Dubai Ports World to take over management of several U.S. ports. According to Mr. Scarborough, the administration wanted the deal to go through because the UAE government had agreed to let the United States post agents inside its global port network who could report on world shipping... ... "Dubai Ports, in essence, was going to become an agent of CIA," Mr. Scarborough said in an interview. "The arrangement is helping...

MIAMI - The Port of Miami was hit by its second terrorism scare in two days Monday when a package that was to be loaded onto a cruise ship tested positive for plastic explosives. Authorities later determined it was harmless. The package was initially tested six times, and each time it came back positive for the military-grade explosive known as C4, the Coast Guard said. The package was then destroyed, and a Miami-Dade County police bomb squad determined it contained sprinkler parts, said Zach Mann, a spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Miami.

WASHINGTON - The Dubai company operating six U.S. ports sold the assets yesterday to a New York insurance giant, months after bowing to pressure stemming from terror fears. The United Arab Emirates-owned firm Dubai Ports World sold its U.S. holdings - including in New York City and New Jersey - to the investment division of American International Group for an undisclosed sum, officials announced. "This is an appropriate final chapter to the book on the Dubai Ports World deal," Sen. Chuck Schumer said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An executive with Dubai Ports World, the Arab-owned firm whose purchase of American port facilities caused an uproar this year, on Tuesday said a new U.S. port security law was fundamentally inadequate. "There's a fundamental shortcoming in the SAFE Port Act," said David Sanborn, Dubai Ports World's managing director of the Americas. "It's not ambitious enough." Dubai Ports, owned by the United Arab Emirates, became the center of a bitter debate in Congress after buying assets at six U.S. ports within its $6.8 billion purchase of Britain's Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. in February. The Bush...

Amtrak service on both north and southbound tracks has come to a halt after a bridge support was damaged in Rocky Mount Wednesday evening. -- Until the repairs are made, no rail traffic north or southbound can happen south of Rocky Mount. All trains between Florida and Rocky Mount will be cancelled as a result, as well as any trains in northern areas headed south of Rocky Mount. There is no current estimate on the number of trains affected.

“Who is Karl Rove?” the puzzled fellow from Dubai inquired, on hearing he had a phone call waiting from the White House. He found out. Karl was sorry to inform the sheiks that the 68-2 vote against the port deal in the House appropriations committee meant they would not be managing our East Coast terminals, and it would probably be wise to cut their losses and get out. Thus the embarrassing episode ends in the best possible way for Dubai and Bush. But the firestorm was instructive for what it revealed. Middle America did indeed react viscerally to news that—after...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. We at GLOBALIZATION FOLLIES are sorry that Washington Post reporter Steven Pearlstein got up on the wrong side of the bed earlier this week, but did he have to take it out on his readers? How else can you explain his March 1 hissy fit against critics of the Dubai ports deal? It must have made Pearlstein feel great to lash out against "the racist hypocrisy on the part of Democrats who are morally outraged by racial profiling of airline passengers but not of port investors" and against "the political hypocrisy...

Dubai-Bye-Bye Baby - Thursday, March 02, 2006 @ 9:13:22 AM As we reported last week, the Financial Times is reporting this morning that former President Clinton was involved in steering the Dubai port operations firm on wrapping up its deal. Where our reports differs with the Financial Times is the timing. Our sources tell us that Clinton's assistance -- and payment of his fees -- came much earlier than two weeks ago. Likewise, so did the fees paid to the Albright Group. Now, more Clintonista names are being floated: former White House press secretary Joe Lockhart was apparently being floated...

One of the good things about this Dubai Ports World deal: The country is examining its feelings about putting people with hidden agendas in charge of businesses that might impact our lives in a negative way. And while the Dubai Ports World company will not be in charge of the security of six of our ports, we still must calmly assess the potential harm if they are not playing it straight with us. Do they have an agenda other than professionally and efficiently running our ports? Can they be trusted? Like putting a hardened liberal in charge of a news...

The hubbub over terrorism isn't the biggest problem with the Dubai flap... The real absurdity here is that Congress doesn't seem to realize that an Arab-owned company's management of America's ports is just a taste of what is coming. Greater foreign ownership of U.S. assets is an inevitable consequence of the reckless tax-cutting, deficit-ballooning fiscal policies that Congress and the White House have pursued. By encouraging the United States to consume more than it produces, these fiscal policies have sucked in imports so fast that the nation is nearing a trillion-dollar annual trade deficit. Those are IOUs on America's future,...

A few words on the Dubai Ports World imbroglio, written without pause or editing, which is probably just as well. Short version: the administration may have thought it was helping a Valuable Ally and probably a pal, end of story. But it plays like Bush defending eminent domain to condemn a neighborhood to build a mosque. I don’t make predictions, because – well, who cares? You either repeat the conventional wisdom and hide with the herd when you’re wrong, or buck the prevailing opinions and get a reputation as a “maverick” when you’re wrong, again. Works for some. But if...