Racist Response to Profit Prompted Port Deal

Tweet "Also critics of the deal, fail to support their opposition with facts. Their opposition is glaringly politically motivated, with an eye toward November elections." Al Jazeera article

Locally, as the linked article explains, Jim McDermott jumped on the zenophobic, flagwaving election-year bandwagon, addressing longshore workers who rallied to show their disapproval of foreign port ownership.

A Canadian commenter on the article has interesting information on Bush connections to Dubai Ports World, which points out the corporate global reasons why Bush won't back down on this and what the Dems should be talking about instead of "port security." In America, any security comes second to corporate profits.

dp world [Dubai Ports World], by the way, is only a year old, the result of a bush-fostered merger that made it the world's sixth largest port operator. sound farfetched? not at all. david sanborn, whom bush named of u.s. maritime administration less than a month ago, runs dp world's european and latin american operations. and in january of last year, dp world acquired an international terminal business known as csx, a company chaired by john snow, who resigned just in time to become bush's secretary of the treasury and a federal panel that helped seal the merger. ha s. tu .pid americans

I haven't confirmed his/her assertions, but there are many interesting commenters from around the world who view this dust-up as American racism. And at least one Republican (who could be politically motivated against the Dems knee-jerk flag waiving) agrees:

Sen. Pete Domenici R-N.M., said much of the criticism against the deal has an anti-Arab bias.
"We are at war against terrorists, not any religion or ethnicity. Some politicians seem to have forgotten that. ... Such alarm, verging almost on hysteria, harms our efforts to have the broadest coalition possible against worldwide terrorism," The Associated Press quoted Domenici as saying.