"Lawmakers complained Thursday that they were not informed about confidential government investigations into sensitive U.S. investments by two more foreign companies, despite Bush administration pledges to be more forthcoming.i'd like to know a little more about the timing. Were they hoping to hide this issue too?
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Dubai International Capital LLC confirmed Thursday it faced investigation over its plans to buy a British precision-engineering company with plants in Georgia and Connecticut that make parts used in engines for military aircraft and tanks.
[snip]
In the newly disclosed investigation, Dubai International Capital has offered $1.2 billion to buy Doncasters Group Ltd. The Dubai company said it was pursuing all regulatory approvals "as is customary for international business transactions of this nature.""
How much money is Dubai funneling into the pockets of a select few repuglicans? And why arent they bribing the rest of congress? We already know how cheap they are, and it's not like Dubai is short of cash. An extra million or two to Livingston or someone and nobody would have noticed the transaction.... There's no hullabloo in the UK - perhaps Blair forgot to scare everyone sufficiently.
Here's David Corn in a reasonable article on portgate at TomPaine.
2 comments:
I'll be honest, I think both sides are making a bunch of political hay over portgate for nothing. As loathe as I am to admit it, a guy from P&O was on Hardball a couple of nights ago and explained that management of US ports, somewhat surprisingly, has ZERO say-so in container inspection and port security. That's all up to Customs & Border Protection and the USCG. In fact, most of the security checks are done at the ORIGINATING port, and mostly consist of merely scanning the electronic manifests to look for "suspicious" items. In other words, it doesn't really matter who owns the ports (unless they are able to provide bribes to make customs look the other way?).
What I think is going on with the "necessity" of the ports deal, and this is just wild-assed speculation, but I think we owe the UAE big-time, both in monetary terms (i.e. off-the-books debt) and political terms (for letting us use their ports to stage our naval vessels). They're the ones dictating the terms right now, when they say "jump" we say "How high?" The recent announcement of the sell-off of that British military contractor further supports this theory.
If I'm right, look for more US and British assets to be sold off to Dubai-controlled interests (which is really just Carlyle-controlled interests). The problem is, given the banking secrecy over there, we may never know the identity of who's behind the deals, as seemingly unconnected "fronts" based in Dubai may be the buyers.
That all being said, this is obviously a winning issue for Dems, even if it is a bunch of jingoistic nonsense. If it splits the Repug base, then....
viget - i totally agree that the portgate thing is stupid nonsense. you may have seen my other posts about it.
separately, sibel screams that nobody looks into the banking in dubai. that's some nice speculation that the port deal isn't the UAE diversifying outta petro-dollars, but rather its the cabal laundering their stash...
"That all being said, this is obviously a winning issue for Dems, even if it is a bunch of jingoistic nonsense. If it splits the Repug base, then...."
bingo.
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