What's really behind the Dubai/port security dust-up...

Could it be "free trade?"

Well, of course it can. Probably is, as a matter of fact.

Simple, really: there has been a two year push for a free trade pact with the UAE. Big money (of the corporate type) is for it. Therefore who can be against it. Certainly Junior cannot resist it.

At the end of 2004, Robert Zoellick, of all people and Bush's Trade Rep. was reportedly boasting of his trip to the UAE to begin negotiating the new trade accord.

A rejection of the port deal might well set back the trade pact, while getting the dealk through quickly and without much ado, may have the effect of greasing the wheels.

According to the Inter Press Service, the U.S. trade relationship with the UAE is the third largest in the middle east, with Israel and Saudi Arabia being 1 and 2. (Where the hell are the poorer countries like Egypt and Jordan? Never mind. With BusCo in charge, they are probably better off left out of it.)

Just last year, over objections of some in Congress, the free-traders in Congress and the Bushites pushed a loan to a Brittish company to help build nuclear technology in Communist China, thus keeping the U.S./China free trade relationship, which is allowing law-makers to get campaign contributions for allowing corporations to export American jobs to China.

All thee kinds of deals, it seems to me, come out of a mixture of the Right-wing's devoutly held desire to privatize all government services (including, apparently, the security of America's ports, in that famous post 9/11 world we hear about in damn near every administration speech), with the political establishment's desire to make sure that free trade orthodoxy supersedes eveything else in importance.

We might be seeing the fight of the century; the culture of corruption vs. National Security.

No matter who wins, it won't be the American people, that is for sure, because it is obvious to everyone with more than three neurons firing that corporations are calling the shots, in the U.S., yes, but everywhere else too.

"When things just don't make any logical, rational sense, look for the money."

Always good advice....



....and the truth shall set you free.