Bush Administration also wants to allow foreign ownership of airlines

With the wall-to-wall coverage and outrage by the mainstream media and political pundits of all ideological stripes over the UAE ports deal, no one seems to be up in arms about a similiar long-standing push by the Bush Administration's Department of Transportation to change the "Open Skies" legislation barring foreign ownership of US airlines. Such a move is being contemplated as a way to effectively bail out this country's airline industry, which has hemmoraged tens of billions of dollars since the September 11th attacks (NB: these huge losses are also due to non-terrorism issues like the collapse of high-yielding business travel demand).

From the conservative MichNews:

Currently, U.S. law requires that U.S. airlines must be under the “actual control” of U.S. citizens in order to be licensed for operation. And for corporations, 75% of the voting interest must be held by U.S. citizens and 66% of its board of directors and officers must also be U.S. citizens. But Secretary of Transportation, Norman Mineta, in a statement in November 2005 said that the rule change would be an “historic opportunity to increase travel, reduce fares, expand commerce and bring two continents closer together than ever before. It provides new opportunities for U.S. and European airlines, healthier competition for a growing travel market and greater connection between cities and towns of all sizes on both sides of the Atlantic.”

A statement, with a link to a full report ( .pdf), was posted on the Department of Transportation's Website on November 4, 2005. It essentially frames the issue in terms of economic efficiency, completely sidestepping any sort of security concerns.

So the question remains: is any type of foreign ownership (specifically state-ownership in the UAE port case) a legitimate security concern? Or is the concern about a Middle Eastern country owning part of our ports? If the country in question is not recognized by the Department of State as a sponsor of terror, should that be enough, or is there a different criteria we should rely upon?

I don't know where I come down on this yet, but the issue of foreign ownership of our infrastructure is obviously a pretty big deal.

By the way, to get a critique of this foreign-ownership policy in terms of its implications for labor, see this old report from the AFL-CIO.