Privatization of Port Security

Marketplace
March 1, 2006

Missing from the outcry over who controls our ports is privatization's role. The issue isn't whether a firm that wins an outsourcing contract is based in London, Dubai, or New York. The issue is whether a function so intimately associated with sovereignty is to be outsourced at all, or should remain in Washington where the constitution put it.

Privatization erodes our own sovereignty in areas that shouldn't ever be yielded, transportation, infrastructure and national security. We exercise our sovereignty over the public good when we manage our own ports and guarantee their security. But this administration fails to notice that, when contracts related to transportation, infrastructure and port security are privatized, passed around from one firm to another the way your mortgage is sold from one bank to another without you even knowing about it.

Ports are just a piece of the privatization puzzle. One out of every 6 American prisoners is today incarcerated in for profit private prisons. Privatization threatens Social Security and Medicare, defining sovereign functions of the state. And national security itself, the old defense of the realm that was sovereignty's indelible signature,is being farmed out to private firms like Halliburton and Blackwater. These companies operate beyond the surveillance of the government that nowadays watches it own citizens far more closely than it watches it mercenaries or its ports.

So let's stop worrying about which global firm in this new flat world without borders is running our ports. Let's ask ourselves why even as we bow at sovereignty's alter, we continue to outsource the sovereignty that defines our commonwealth. Why we allow our government the hypocrisy of preaching democracy abroad even as it steals from us our democratic capacity to guarantee our nation's security here at home. As long as this remains true, it's besides the point whether the private players would control our ports are American or Arab. It matters only that they are private, not public, profit driven rather than animated by the public good, attentive not to the security interest of citizens, but to the portfolio interests of shareholders.

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