News fairly unbalanced. We report. You decipher.
The rash of piracy incidents off the coast of Africa in recent years has spurred the Obama administration to reach out to the other G-20 nations to build consensus around a “gradual drawdown of cargo vessels in global sea lanes.”
Although administration officials have been working behind the scenes on a multilateral cargo-ship reduction treaty, the White House decided to go public with the plan after this week’s pirate attack on the U.S.-flagged Maersk Alabama.
“The United States is the number-one consumer and producer of cargo-shipped goods,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, “so it only makes sense that, if we’re going to stop these attacks, and restore peace to the high seas, then the U.S. should take a prominent, and disproportionately-large role in marine freight-vessel cuts.”
“We need to get rid of the old trans-oceanic M.A.D. doctrine of Mutual Assured Delivery,” said Gibbs, “and look toward a safer future, where piracy no longer looms over the world as an ever-present threat. As everyone knows, President Obama is a visionary, and he can see the day when we’ll have a world without nukes, and a world without cargo ships.”
A spokesman for the AFL-CIO, representing the nation’s trade unions, immediately hailed the measure saying it would not only reduce piracy, “but also cut U.S. imports of foreign, sweatshop-made goods, and it might even prevent our high-paying jobs from being shipped overseas.”
Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and former vice president Al Gore joined the chorus of praise in a joint news release celebrating the reduction in carbon emissions by eliminating fossil-fuel burning vessels, and tanker shipments of petroleum.
“President Obama is once again ahead of the curve,” said Gore. “The inconvenient truth of the matter is that in just a few years, there will be no place to dock cargo ships anyway, since the coastal cities and their ports will all be inundated in brine.”
Examiner columnist Scott Ott is editor-in-chief of ScrappleFace.com, the family-friendly news satire site, and anchor of ScrappleFace Network News (SNN), seen on YouTube.
