"Dubai [is] an entity that, when they do things, they think of everything...And they don’t just develop a port. They develop a system. Its infrastructure, & ports, & its free trade zones, & its accommodation, and its transportation of people, and its energy..."
"Dubai may well be a “Disneyland” for capital, w/ its radical social order where workers & citizens are separate classes...w/ a labor force that is 90% noncitizen, Dubai ensures a “love it or leave it” approach for professionals & pitiful conditions of work & wages for the rest."
"The use of labor disruptions as “attacks” on the supply chain follows directly from positing global trade as vital to natl. security...A legal act asserting workplace democracy, when viewed through this lens, is not just like an attack—it is an attack on the integrity of flows."
"The Container Security Initiative, a program defined and administered by American authorities, posts Customs and Border Patrol agents in dozens of foreign ports to inspect U.S.-bound cargo." As of 6/2022, MENA ports in the CSI included Haifa, Aqaba, Ashdod, Dubai, & Salalah
"While...imaginaries of...labor...conjure scenes of manufacture...transportation has long been understood as...a form of production...Marx outlines how use value...may require a “change in location” & thus an “additional process of production, in the transport industry.”
In 2002, after worker deaths, the ILWU stressed for its members to strictly follow safety procedures. The maritime employers' association called this a slowdown, locked out the workers. Dell, Ford, Boeing complain. Bush II invokes Taft-Hartley against the workers at Port of LA.
"Noncitizens make up 99% of the private [UAE] workforce, making the very status of citizen exceptional...No place on earth matches the UAE in this regard. But it is precisely this emaciation of political rights in the face of trade flows that makes Dubai so appealing to the US."
"On Feb 8, 2011, 6k Suez Canal workers initiated a wildcat strike. Dock workers stopped work at the port of Ain Al Sokhna, disrupting Egypt’s sea links to the Far East. The NYT reported “Disastrous economic losses are expected if the strike continues." Mubarak was out on Feb 11.
"2000 years ago Cicero placed the pirate outside of normal law—in the complicated position of a criminal beyond criminality. Long predating any conception of human rights, Roman statesmen conceived the pirate outside of the human by virtue of the threat they posed to humanity."
Blackstone reiterates the exceptional status of the pirate, stating “[The pirate] has renounced all the benefits of society and government, & has reduced himself afresh to the savage state of nature, by declaring war against all mankind, all mankind must declare war against him."
The [Suez] Canal...currently draws more than 20,000 ships into the Gulf of Aden every year, [constituting] 95% of European member states’ trade by volume. [One scholar] asserts that the Gulf of Aden “is one of the most, if not the most, traveled sea routes in the world.”
"Central in growing [shipping] costs are the rising rates of insurance for ships In 2010...the cost of a binder for vessels transiting the Gulf of Aden reached $20,000 per voyage, excluding injury, liability, and ransom coverage... a 40-fold jump in cost from 2007-2008."