Since the 1920s, when some U.S. cruise ships decided to fly a Panamanian flag to avoid Prohibition regulations, ships have commonly flown the flag of countries foreign to their owners. The benefits are obvious: lower taxes, laxer labor and safety laws.
Ships are a strange kind of commodity because they're very lumpy, very big individual units, but they're commodities.
I understand the challenge with student loans. But what about the labor force, the enlisted men and women, so to speak, of ships. Those who work with their hands and their minds. We need to do what we do in the military, is we train and retrain.
After working as a charter boat captain and dive master in the Caribbean for a number of years, I decided it was time for a change.
The Netherlands and the UK are both seafaring nations and so our ability to create jobs and to generate future growth is built on the free market.
I've been in tankers for 50 years, and I like it. For me, it's still fun.
My mother is a teacher, and my father is a chief marine engineer.
The days of languorous shore leave are long gone. Overnight stays are unheard of and sailor towns a distant memory. In better ports, seafarers head for a seamen's mission.
A ship is always referred to as 'she' because it costs so much to keep one in paint and powder.
I am just a bit player, a seaman doing his part like all the seamen out there.
It is a national humiliation that we are now compelled to pay from twenty to thirty million dollars annually to foreigners for doing the work which should be done by American vessels, American built, American owned, and American manned. This is a direct drain upon the resources of the country of just so much money; equal to casting it into the sea, so far as this nation is concerned.
Seafaring can be lucrative - the elite, such as gas-tanker captains, can earn $100,000 for six months' work - but the isolation is a heavy price to pay.
We see the sea as this place of leisure and this place, you know, a blue patch on the map to fly over because we all go by plane these days, mostly. And we don't really see it as a place of industry anymore.
We Shall Build Good Ships Here; At A Profit If We Can, At A Loss If We Must, But Always Good Ships.
My father was a welder on the second-highest sail, so the Opera House has a special place in my heart.
In my home State of Texas, the Port of Houston operates as the United States' top port for foreign tonnage and our second largest for total tonnage, so I know how important this bill is for the protection of the American people.
The combination of funding for our ports, airports, and highways is a really significant investment in our infrastructure.
Our Great Lakes, harbors, ports, and rivers provide not only vital resources for us to live, but an entire maritime way of life for so many people. The least we can do is protect it, and the way of life it provides for so many.
No state can match the beauty of the Chesapeake Bay, our beaches and farms, or the mountains of Western Maryland, the Port of Baltimore, or the historic charm of every corner of our state.
London is the headquarters of the International Maritime Organisation, the location of the largest insurance market, and houses a significant ship-broking community, apart from the many other professional services related to shipping.
I hope to be the go-to person on international trade and industry. I think no one before me or after me will ever have so much knowledge about America's ports.
Who cares about the men who steered your breakfast cereal through winter storms? How ironic that the more ships have grown in size and consequence, the less space they take up in our imagination.
People run away from the name subsidy. It is a subsidy. I am not afraid to call it so. It is paid for the purpose of giving a merchant marine to the whole country so that the trade of the whole country will be benefitted thereby, and the men running the ships will of course make a reasonable profit.... Unless we have a merchant marine, our navy if called upon for offensive or defensive work is going to be most defective.
let it be considered that the plantations employ many hundreds of shipping and many thousands of seamen, which must be in diverse respects an advantage to England, being an island, and by nature fitted for navigation above any country in Europe
Shipping has a great oversupply of vessels that came from over-ordering a few years back. We think 2014 may be when it turns around.
