Where's the outrage?

Last year, everyone's knickers seemed to be in a twist over the idea that a company controlled by Dubai, one of the few strongly pro-American parts of the Arab world, was not fit to safely manage US port operations with arguably one of the most patriotic sectors of the US workforce: members of US labor organizations who unload ships in our nation's ports.

No one seems to be at all upset that General Electric just sold its plastics division to a company controlled by Saudi Arabia, and there hasn't been a squeak of opposition to the just announced injection of Chinese government money into the Blackstone private equity firm for a 10% stake in a company that's about to go public and give its partners a $5 billion payday. This is a successful company that's buying up and taking other companies private, and moving the jobs in those companies out of the US.

You can't move US port jobs to a less-developed country. They have to unload the ships here. But you can make plastics and cars without American workers. And if you control those industrial platforms (plastics factories and heavy machinery manufacturing facilities) you have a lot of say in whether the US can build equipment it needs or may need to defend itself in the future.

Where's the outrage?