(03-29-2019 10:41 AM)Captain Bearcat Wrote: (03-08-2019 08:27 PM)JRsec Wrote: (03-08-2019 08:08 PM)georgia_tech_swagger Wrote: ... it states (loosely paraphrased) that you cannot ship water based freight between the states unless the entirety of the crew, the parent company, the pilot, and the boat are American. I see this policy as being squarely in an increasingly large number of crosshairs seemingly all out of nowhere. Zeihan and CATO have both talked about it in the last week.
Word is that perhaps the US canal system would get a modernization overhaul after this as well.
Leave it alone. The issues for a foreign flagged ship getting a cargo into the heartland is too great of a security risk for this law to be changed. We need all foreign flagged carriers stopped and searched at POE's. The next thing you would find is a hold full of illegals jumping ship at ports along the Mississippi or the St. Lawrence, or even up the Savannah, Broad, and Trout/St John's rivers. No Thanks.
Why is a foreign-owned & operated ship more likely to offload drugs, WMDs, or illegals if we change the law to allow them to haul cargo from Honolulu to the mainland? Isn't the crime risk almost 100% due to them coming from a foreign port (which is legal under the Jones Act)?
Any ship at sea is subject to surreptitious exchanges at sea. Just because a cargo is shipped from Hawaii doesn't mean that a nefarious captain can't take contraband aboard between destinations. And contraband can include people, substances or devices.
That said my primary concern is still about foreign flagged ships being able to sail up rivers to internal ports of destination. This is a fundamental risk to internal security and given the relatively narrow waterways would provide easy access to the interior for smuggled persons, and would absolutely damage commerce and endanger lives if a ship chose to scuttle or if it carried a device.
And then there is the risk of pandemic. If their crew is not confined to coastlines and monitored it would be much easier to expose our populace. Just look at what is happening with the mumps and measles outbreak. Illegals are bringing back many diseases we had eradicated. In Muscogee County Georgia about a decade ago a middle school suffered a case of small pox. It was traced to illegal immigrants. Thankfully the small pox vaccinations were still sufficient to limit it's impact to just one student.
It's been 18 years since the homeland was hit. Our enemies are constantly probing for a way to hit us which would be hard to trace. Why, simply for the bucks for corporations, are we dismantling procedures that have protected us for decades? Screw the corporations and their desires. Protection of the homeland and its citizens is the primary responsibility of any government.
And it's a damned insane disgrace that we aren't controlling our borders.
So given the current lack of desire to do so the last damned thing I want to see are our internal waterways opened to incursion where inspections would not occur until an internal port destination was reached.
Here in my region it is possible for a ship to enter the St. John's river near Jacksonville Florida and to proceed up the Chattahoochee to Columbus. In my preretirement life I had to work against a group that wanted to open it. What the local folks didn't realize is that those seeking political influence in Southern port cities were working for a rival cartel to the Columbians. They were in fact working for Cubans looking to utilize narcotics trafficking to fund their activities of destabilization in Central and South America. So they wanted to bring political pressure to bear upon law enforcement to effectively take out their competition and open the port and waterways for easier access in trafficking than the use of mules and the highway system.
The intersection into my life was they were mobilizing non profits and citizens against drugs and using their money and political influence to push the elimination of their Columbian rivals and pushing the open ports issue with a different group posing as business men with the chamber of commerce.
So the good will of the people to do the right thing regarding illegal drug trade was being used against them to set up another drug trade which posed a much bigger threat in that its proceeds were being used against the nation as a whole in addition to being a threat to our kids.
So until this nation shows the capacity to not be deaf, blind and stupid with regard to what corporations posing as legitimate businesses claim they want, I simply don't trust our political leadership to ask enough questions, investigate the parties well enough, and think of the public and national interest first. Greed and ease of trade will be the Trojan Horse that allows our enemies within our gates. And we all know how it ended for Priam.