I don’t want to see a company owned by the government of Dubai running vital U.S. seaports. I don’t want to see a British company running them, either. I don’t want to see foreign companies controlling any of our nation’s vital infrastructure. I also worry about the fact that we no longer make our own clothes, consumer electronics or, really, much of anything any more. Call me old-fashioned. Call me silly. Call me unrealistic. Or call me a Patriot, which is an old-fashioned, silly, unrealistic thing to be these days.

If you’re much over 30, you’ll remember worries about third-world countries taking on more debt than they could pay back without ruining their economies. Guess what, kids? The U.S. is in a serious and growing debt hole as bad as some in the third world.

Excuse me. We call them “developing countries” these days. Fine. So let’s call the U.S. an undeveloping or, better, a “degenerating country.” Our government goes deeper in debt every year, while friends of our leaders rake in billions of dollars and opposition politicians are shouted down and called nasty names, especially those who complain about government corruption or incompetence. All we’d need to do to invite comparisons with equatorial oligarchies is to start holding prisoners in secret and making it so our tax burden falls harder on working families than on rich people who inherit wealth or derive their income from investments instead of through their own, direct efforts. Oh, wait…

Another feature of “developing countries” operating under corrupt governments is foreign control of things like ports both air and sea, public utilties like electricity, water and — now — telecomnmunications. This foreign ownership is often regarded as “exploitation” by people in those countries who aren’t close enough to the regime to share in the bribes and other bounty the foreigners hand over to the dicatators and their cronies to keep their valuable franchises intact; that is, to go on exploiting those countries the same way European colonialists did before the 20th Century.

Back when small countries were busily throwing off the yoke of colonialism, some of their more enlightened leaders tried to build local industries and support local agriculture in order to bring prosperity to their people. There was also a national security aspect; concerned national leaders didn’t want their country’s economy to be at the mercy of fickle allies who might cut off supplies of parts or food or oil. The idea was that the more self-sufficient a country was, the more independent it could be.

Now let’s come back to the U.S. in the 21st Century. We’re dependent on volatile countries for oil, semi-friendly (at the moment) China for a growing percentage of our manufactured goods, on other Asian countries for most of our critical electronic componenents, on Mexico for much of our low-end labor force, and on capital (money) from all over the world to keep our “buy now, pay someday” spending policies going.

We have lost the idea that all Americans are in this together. We no longer have any problem selling our birthright. We have no more “American companies” the way we used to; our largest ones are multinationals that happen to have facilities here but shift their profits to wherever they are taxed the least and they can get away with paying the lowest wages, even if that means dealing with governments that treat their population as little better than property (i.e. China).

We have become a grasping, selfish mob of people who claim to be “One nation, under God,” but those words have lost any practical meaning (with or without the false piety).

I watch the partisan stupidity our “leaders” show, and it seems to me that we certainly are not “Indivisible” any more.

And we have changed the meaning of the pledge’s last line, too. It should now be, “With liberty and justice for all (who can afford it).”

Letting a terrorist-sympathizing nation control our major ports is wrong. But it is just one wrong among many, and an inevitable one in a country where greed trumps any notion of human decency, honor or — here’s that obsolete word again — Patriotism.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.