Record pull-out of foreign investors

[Moses]

Another negative sign for Wall Street came yesterday with the report from the Treasury that foreign investors sold $13.4 billion of American stocks in March, a record amount on a net basis. Although it is not known if foreigners are still selling American stocks, the selling could reflect a significant decline in foreign investors' appetite for American stocks.

www.nytimes.com/2004/05/18/business/18stox.html?th

[dev0ra]

Could it be the beginnings of an international boycott of America? Just wondering... It would be one way of bringing us down.

[calabi-yau]

dev0ra said:

Could it be the beginnings of an international boycott of America? Just wondering... It would be one way of bringing us down.

I've been thinking the same. How long before investors decide Amerika is not 'worth' it anymore ?
Trending will soon tell us if it's happening.

Bring America down, that it would. But its going down would also have repercussions on the world's economy. This is a tough ball to (power) play.
Which ball is America playing ?

[dev0ra]

Well, I was thinking since we are the ONLY superpower (in terms of military strength... hmm... what about China?)
what other recourse do the other nations have? Their only viable weapon is MONEY, since the bu$h regime doesn't
give a d**n about world opinion. Maybe they don't necessarily want to bring us down, but merely send us a
STRONG message that even his w-ness could understand.

Just thinkin' out loud...

[Moses]

www.blackcommentator.com/71/71_cover_redlining_pf.html



The breathtaking saga of victory and defeat that has shaped Black America since Mississippi marked its first majority white census in 1950 has unfolded entirely within the context of relentless expansion of global U.S. power. The uneven yet generally ascendant trajectory of African American mobility – geographic, social and economic – was predicated on a never before imagined fluidity within U.S. society as a whole. This national dynamic opened more spaces, more quickly, than Jim Crow could possibly restrict, revealing portals to freedom through which heroic Black men and women marched.  Today’s Atlanta, for example, could not have been possible under Jim Crow; however, absent the explosion of economic growth, Jim Crow might have stood his ground a lot longer.

The conditions that allowed Black people to stand on their feet were hitched to a larger reality: much of the globe lay at the feet of America, the post-World War Two superpower. Believing themselves to be super-smart but actually made invincible by super-weaponry and the super-dollar, which had become the world currency by default, American corporations penetrated every non-socialist region of the planet. A considerable portion of the riches gained through superpower advantage were repatriated to the home country, creating for a time the highest national living standard in all of human history. In the presence of such grand domestic possibilities, was it any wonder that African Americans would rise up to demand a piece of “The Dream” – or that white folks would grudgingly back off and allow Blacks room to breathe? After all, imperial prosperity had created lots more space for white people; they could afford it.

Never having really been more than cosmetically patriotic, corporate America put on world-classclothes and eventually began playing against the vibrant domestic economy that had given it birth. The old military-industrial/energy complex combined with predatory finance capital – now the controlling faces in corporate boardrooms – men who create nothing and hold allegiance to no nation, but rather, seek the ultimate advantage of world monopoly. In 2000 these Pirates captured Washington, DC with the plainly stated goal of subduing the globe by military force and intimidation.

It is at this point that the Dream Period ended, definitively, for Black America. There will be no return in the foreseeable future to the times of robust and general domestic growth. Instead, the era of American decline is well underway, and is likely to be punctuated by abrupt, dramatic, and extremely dangerous social dislocations, during which we will learn the fuller meaning of living “in the belly of the beast.”

Global Public Enemy

As history will tell, and as events daily demonstrate, the piratical decision to upset the global game board in order to impose a New American Century without rules, has united the world in revulsion against the United States. Like a strange name called out in the bedroom, the specter of American madness cannot be erased from planetary memory; even if George Bush is ejected from the White House in November, this society has shown its horrific ass to the rest of the species. America writhes in flagrante (literally, “in blazing crime”) in Iraq, caught in the global gaze like a rutting dog unable to disengage itself from the object of its lust. (Those who are offended by such images are simply unaware of how the U.S. appears to people outside the American corporate communications bubble that envelops the nation in narcissistic, racist delusions.)

Polls show that majorities of Europeans believe the U.S. is roughly as great a danger to world peace as North Korea and Israel – an astounding result in the historical heartland of colonialism, among people who one would think had become inured to imperial excesses as practiced by some of their own governments.  Much more ominous are the clear signals that global elites are quietly drawing red lines around the United States. These are the people who convene and attend the innumerable meetings on countless trade and finance issues that keep a wired planet in some semblance of stability. A general consensus has been reached that the U.S. is the primary source of global instability.

The world’s elites are seeking to position their institutions and nations as far from the American axis as is feasible, while carefully avoiding economic catastrophe in the process. It is like planning a divorce from an insane, violent spouse who also has a key to the safety deposit box. The divorce will unfold in stages – or, under further provocation from the U.S., in earth-shaking spasms. But there is now no doubt that the U.S. is fated to shrink as the world withdraws from successive layers of entanglements with the madman. Black America must therefore prepare to marshal its collective assets for a long period of retrenchment.

(rest at link, above)

[karpomrx]

In terms of classic military strategy, the US is very safe. No nation in the world possesses the sealift capacity to invade North America with any hope of victory .
This could change quickly if the people of the state being invaded were to lose their sense of alliegance to the central government.
Given the power of the "corporate communications bubble" that defines popular wisdom ,a shift of this type seems far in the future.
The support of the US may erode as the bill comes due for deficit spending, environmental degradation, a collapsing health system, and an exponentially increasing growth in real poverty as we settle to the norm of a "global" economy.
How long the image makers will be able to keep clothes on the Emperor is hard to say, most people don't like to face up to a terminal disease.
It seems to me that these madmen will choose to destroy the world rather than strike any sort of compromise with the future. Like Hitler, cut off from reality in a bunker that may well be physical as well as psychological, they will kill and blame others for all the failures of their twisted, hate-filled ideology.

[Moses]

Yes. It looks increasingly like they are building up to a nuclear strike (by Israel) against Iran.