My dad told me there are different kinds of smarts, book learning and common sense. This may considered a self-serving analysis since he only had a high school diploma, but I guess the prime example of the truth of this statement is that even if you have an MBA from Yale, you could exhibit an amazing lack common sense.
The US has a bunch of ports that need operations expertise and supervision. This is necessary so that they work like well oiled machines. I always thought that our ports were operated by governments or quasi-governmental agencies (like the Port of New York Authority), evidently not. Since the average Americans that work in our ports could not possibly carry on operations without direction and coordination, I assumed that there was some governmental agency running the show. After all, a port is like a city. A complex entity or organism composed of thousands of people, machinery, warehouses, offices, railroad hubs, paved streets, cranes, container handlers and what-not that moves all manner of goods and products in from abroad, and out to our customers and trading partners. Envision humongous generators and sophisticated machines transported in the holds of ships, millions of imported cars and containers filled with everything from raw materials to novelty crap imported from China for little kids' birthday parties to tons of Chiquita bananas. There are containers loaded with food, consumer goods, electronics, medicine, toxins and anti-toxins, all manner of stuff. It comes in and it goes out, like corpuscles pumped through the circulatory system, but some imports are invisible like air through our lungs. Passing through the ports are people, good guys and bad guys, with visas (not the credit card variety) and those without any real identification, I bet. I remember a ship filled with Chinese illegal immigrants not too long ago running aground in the New York area, with those poor people jumping into the sea to take their chances to get into the "promised land." How many of those cargoes pull in every day?
Since 9/11, the "experts" have been saying our ports are vulnerable to terrorists. I guess no one knows what really is in the false bottom or hidden compartment of a container labeled "oranges." I bet a lot of what comes into the ports ain't exactly what US Customs thinks it is. So what is the risk of having a company owned by the United Arab Emirates operating the ports that handle a big percentage of our trade? And what is an Emir anyway? A duke, count, or marquis, Capo de Famiglia, caliph, or is he like an Abbott or perhaps a mullah? And how do you get to be one? Is there an application process, an election, or was your great, great, great grandfather the guy with the only water well in the desert for a hundred miles around? Probably the latter, and the good news for him was that when they dug deeper one dry season there was lots of oil (a sort of Jihad Clampett, eh Jethro.)
But I digress - the experts, well schooled, no doubt having plenty of book knowledge and common sense, are right when they say we still will control port security. And, I trust that we (the US taxpayers) have spent plenty studying this situation. The fact that four plus years after airplanes became missiles we still fail to grasp that ships can become floating bombs shows a lack of common sense or imagination. And these things don't have to off-load to explode biological, chemical or nuclear weapons and kill or maim thousands (or millions if they get a good wind). Maybe this lack of American common sense is why we have to go outside our borders to retain a company to manage our ports. We should object to this even if the company were owned by a reliable ally. Why hire any company to run our ports? How about airport security? There must be some recently unemployed Taliban that we could put to work taking nail clippers away from infrequent fliers. Too stupid, right? Of course we set up the TSA to screen passengers at the airport, but while it's watching the airport, someone floats in a container filled with anthrax or a ton (or ten) of plastique explosives shaped like souvenir Empire State Buildings or Statues of Liberty (ever see the Lavender Hill Mob with Alec Guinness?)
In the mortgage business, we have the Federal National Mortgage Association, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, the Government National Mortgage Association and all kinds of federal and state agencies regulating home loans because providing money for housing is important enough to motivate the congress and state legislatures to charter Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE's) and draft thousands of pages of regulations to ensure that money is available for home owners. We have a National Park Service to administer that national resource, because maintaining these sites is a national priority. We don't out source it to Disney because it knows how to run parks at a profit. How about a National Port Service? Maybe our governmental agency can't run as efficiently or as profitably as let’s say a foreign government owned enterprise, but at least it can be scrutinized by the people it serves, not a board of directors made up of Emirs (who are those guys?). Are the ports a less important natural resource than our National Parks?
Or we could just let the Danes run our ports. They have plenty of ports, I bet they know how ports work, and we can trust them more than any Emirate; and they could use the business. The Islamic countries won't eat their cheese because some Danish cartoonists had the nerve to exercise the freedom to express their ideas in their free press. Better yet, maybe we should run the ports in the Emirates and other countries that we deem less than friendly. That way we could stop the smuggling and bombs on the other side of the pond. Let's run that up the flag pole and see which Emir salutes it.
