WHEN PORT HYSTERIA COMES HOME TO ROOST:

Indiana Is Open for Business: Mitch “the Blade” Daniels is putting the state on the free-market cutting edge. (Bret Swanson, 3/28/06, National Review)

The chief architect of the boom is the state’s decisive Governor Mitch Daniels, President Bush’s former budget director. In Washington, Daniels drew scorn from congressional big spenders, acquiring the nickname “the blade” for his cost-cutting and privatizing ways. (The moniker could just as easily apply to his sharp wit and intellect.) The spenders in Washington, however, won those battles — big time — swallowing the blade and earning today’s enmity from the Republican base. But now Daniels is back home and in charge, and he is engineering a turnaround of an entire state with sophistication.

In the state’s short legislative session, just completed, Daniels achieved two sweeping victories. The first is the nation’s most aggressive telecommunications deregulation, which will spur hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in invisible infrastructure — the “fibers and frequencies” of the digital age, as Daniels describes it. The second is a $4 billion privatization lease of the Indiana Toll Road and the new I-69 interstate. This will fund the largest-ever upgrade of Indiana’s visible infrastructure: its antique roads and bridges. [...]

Ironically, Daniels’ “Major Moves” plan to lease the Indiana Toll Road, the seemingly more tame and obvious measure, turned out to be far more controversial. It passed by a single vote with just 15 minutes remaining in this year’s legislative session. Weeks before anyone had heard of Dubai Ports World, the bid by Australian-Spanish consortium Macquarie-Cintra to manage Indiana’s 157-mile stretch of I-80/90 had already ignited a xenophobic melee in the heartland. But unlike the DP World roll-out, Daniels had actually sought bidders for the Toll Road. His proposition was simple: The winning contractor will pay Indiana $4 billion for an asset that has never been profitable in government hands; the state gets to keep that asset; the contractor upgrades the asset with new technology and an additional $4 billion in improvements; and the state gets to fund a decade’s worth of other major infrastructure projects, some of which have been on the drawing board for twenty years. (Just last year Chicago leased its “Skyway” to Macquarie-Cintra for $1.8 billion. The Skyway connects Indiana’s Toll Road to Chicago, thus yielding a seamlessly managed road from Ohio to the Windy City.)

The day after this deal squeaked through the legislature, the Indianapolis Star concluded that “the protectionist, xenophobic rhetoric … used to fight the lease was an embarrassment to the entire state.” But Daniels won the day, sending a loud message to foreign investors that Indiana is indeed open for business.

A nice illustration of how the far Right's xenophobic temper tantrums play into the hands of the Left.

MORE (via Kevin Whited):
Lenovo caught up in US security panic (Janice Fioravante, 4/05/06, Asia Times)

A US advisory commission has raised a red flag over a deal for 16,000 computers for the State Department manufactured by China's Lenovo Group. The hangup is security - specifically, the fear that the Chinese could equip the machines with chips that could spy on State Department dealings.

It seems that the same national-security worries that fueled the hubbub surrounding the Dubai ports deal in the US - that allowing an Arab-owned firm to operate six key ports could facilitate terrorist access to them - are bubbling up again. The incident is also reminiscent of energy-security fears surrounding the attempted purchase of Unocal Oil by the China National Offshore Oil Corp (CNOOC) last year, which ultimately killed that deal.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 8, 2006 6:07 AM