Kenneth Crowe

(THE CONTEXT: Foreign investment in the United States is burgeoning, while public consciousness of this perennial phenomenon has been raised by the prospect of Middle Eastern oil money buying large pieces of American corporations and real estate. The traditional investors in the U.S. have been the Europeans, but in recent years, nouveau investors … the Japanese, the Arabs, the Iranians … have appeared on the American horizon. An understanding of the impact of foreign money and foreign ownership is obscured by a lack of knowledge. The following is an autopsy of a single investment from a European nation.) Without exaggeration, the most important foreign investment in the United States is the British Petroleum Company Ltd.’s Alaskan holdings involving the ownership of almost half of the Trans Alaska Pipeline and more than half of the oil in the rich Prudhoe Bay field containing upwards of 40 percent of the entire nation’s proven oil reserves. And, the British government owns roughly 70 percent of British Petroleum. Philosophically, the presence of a foreign government in the role of

Even before there was a Constitution, there was foreign investment in the United States. At the very beginning, like any new and emerging nation, this was a land of great potential and little cash. The men on Wall Street, then as now, were hungry for capital to flow so that they could slice off a piece of the action for themselves. And even then, there was a vague, ill-defined suspicion of foreign money — a fear of the absentee landlord, of alien influence on our government. To the first Congress, the first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton is urging the encouragement of manufacturing in a primarily agrarian nation wrote in 1791 his often-quoted words on the goodness of foreign investment: “It is not impossible, that there may be persons disposed to look with a jealous eye on the introduction of foreign capital, as if it were an instrument to deprive our own citizens of the profits of our own industry; but perhaps there never could be a more unreasonable jealousy. Instead of being viewed