Andrew Ross Sorkin and John Gapper have done an excellent job of fisking the idiotic rantings of Lou Dobbs, who seems to think that because 1% of the investors in Chris Hohn’s TCI are sovereign wealth funds, it should never have any influence over something as critical to national security as – wait for it – a railroad.
But of course the combined readership of Sorkin and Gapper includes essentially zero swing or undecided voters, while Dobbs’s rhetoric can really change the way that a large number of his viewers vote. Which explains why otherwise sensible senators are so willing to go onto his show and complain about foreigners buying up strategic US assets. For shame, Evan Bayh and Robert Menendez. But it always has been true and it always will be: when politics meets economics, politics wins.