The dangers of war by remote control

Johann Hari has written a valuable piece on the dangers of drone warfare in Afgha-Pakistan called Obama's Escalating Robot War in Pakistan Is Making a Terror Attack More Likely.

Imagine if, an hour from now, a robot plane swooped over your house and blasted it to pieces. The plane has no pilot. It is controlled with a joystick from 7,000 miles away, sent by the Pakistani military to kill you. It blows up all the houses on your street, and so barbecues your family and your neighbors until there is nothing left to bury but a few charred slops. Why? They refuse to comment. They don't even admit the robot planes belong to them. But they tell the Pakistani newspapers back home it is because one of you was planning to attack Pakistan. How do they know? Somebody told them. Who? You don't know, and there are no appeals against the robot.

Now imagine it doesn't end there: These attacks are happening every week somewhere in your country. They blow up funerals and family dinners and children. The number of robot planes in the sky is increasing every week. You discover they are named "Predators," or "Reapers" -- after the Grim Reaper. No matter how much you plead, no matter how much you make it clear you are a peaceful civilian getting on with your life, it won't stop. What do you do? If there were a group arguing that Pakistan was an evil nation that deserved to be violently attacked, would you now start to listen?

This sounds like a sketch for the next James Cameron movie -- but it is in fact an accurate description of life in much of Pakistan today, with the sides flipped. The Predators and Reapers are being sent by Barack Obama's CIA, with the support of other Western governments, and they killed more than 700 civilians in 2009 alone -- fourteen times more than the 7/7 attacks in London. Last month there was the largest number of robot plane bombings ever: 21. Over the next decade, spending on drones is set to increase by 700 percent.

This supposedly 'safe' (for the Americans) warfare is likely to breed greater antagonism to the US than has existed beforehand.

I have long thought that the argument that the US is making the world safe from terrorism by fighting the Taliban was a furphy. The reasons why the US are there are complex, but Al Qaida is a franchise and can simply shift to somewhere else disillusioned with the US in the Islamic world (e.g. Yemen).

Like Lyndon Johnson before him, Obama has some great ideas for American society, but he continues to be a war President, prosecuting outrageous acts against civilians.  

United States Debt: Who Buys It?

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US debt purchases have become an important story in the world political economy and a symbol of supposed US powerlessness in the face of a relentless Chinese ascendancy. I think this equation is overdone and instead think that the fact that the Chinese feel obliged to buy US debt as a sign of continued Chinese weakness in their economic structure rather than strength. But it undoubtedly is a complicated debate.

But let us at least get a few facts on the table.

The first is to look at figures for the purchases of US Treasury Securities from an article by Floyd Norris of the NY Times: "For a Change, U.S. Debt Is Staying in the U.S."

The most interesting fact is that Americans themselves are now buying most of this debt. This is not unusual. Most of Japan's debt for example is bought by the Japanese themselves. This amounts to what Hugh Stretton calls "borrowing from ourselves" and therefore removes foreign risk. It also helps to keep interest rates lower.

According to Norris:

Before the financial crisis struck in 2008, neither Americans nor private foreign investors showed much eagerness to finance Washington’s deficits.

In calendar year 2007, the Treasury borrowed a net $237 billion. Of that, 81 percent came from foreign governments, mostly from central banks. Private foreign investors took up the rest, as American companies, banks and individuals reduced their combined Treasury holdings by $13 billion.

In the first six months of this year, the Treasury numbers indicate that foreign governments reduced their holdings of Treasury securities by $10 billion. Not since 2000 — when the United States government was running a surplus and did not need additional funds — have foreign governments been net sellers for a full calendar year.

But then again in a globalising financial world, Norris notes also that often it is not exactly clear who the buyers may be:

The figures are estimates by the Treasury and are subject to substantial revision. And they need to be interpreted with caution, because they do not necessarily reflect the ultimate ownership of securities. Holdings of a London-based money manager are attributed to Britain, even though that manager’s clients could live in New York, Hong Kong or Paris.

The trend, however, is clear:

Over all, domestic investors purchased more Treasuries than did overseas ones — including foreign governments — in 2009 and again in the first half of this year. Those purchases came as government borrowing rose to pay for bailouts and recession-related spending.

By contrast, during the six years from 2002 — the first year that the United States ran a significant deficit after the years of surpluses — through 2007, three-quarters of the $1.7 trillion in new borrowing came from abroad, with $1 trillion of that coming from foreign governments.

In the two and a half years since the end of 2007, the Treasury has raised twice that amount in new money, $3.5 trillion. More than half of that came from American companies and individuals, double the proportion they contributed in the earlier period.

Still more than 46 per cent of debt is held by foreigners, down from 46 per cent in 2008:

Even with those increased domestic purchases, 46 percent of the publicly issued Treasury debt is held overseas. That is down from 49 percent in early 2008, just before the financial crisis began, but it is way above the 31 percent proportion at the end of 2001.

The figures also don't include debt bought by the Federal Reserve itself, which involves a notion called quantitative easing, colloquially known as "printing money"

The figures exclude Treasury securities owned by the Federal Reserve or other United States government agencies. As a result, Fed purchases and sales are not counted.

Military spending in pictures

The following is from David McCandless's informationisbeautiful.net and a blog he contributes to run by The Guardian called Datablog. Some of the graphics that McCandless produces are simply magnificent.

The following graphics of miltary spending are typically stunning and revealing as well.
They show just how dominant the United States is in the military arena, but how (relatively) easily it maintains this spending compared to other militarised countries.

As you may know from earlier posts I think that US 'declinism' is overdone by the popular media, the more sensationalists elements of academia, anti-American commentators of the left, and isolationalist US nationalists of the right.

The Future of American Power?

The future of US power has been a major topic of discussion recently. The global economic crisis, which for once affected the US as much as any other country in the world and the rise of China and the s

It often seems that 'declinists' mistake one possible future for present reality. Other writers correctly acknowledge that US power remains preponderant, but suggest that the US could soon be rapidly overtaken by China or somewhat peculiarly by something called 'Asia', which assumes some sort of Huntingtonian 'civilizational' assault on the Western and US power.

Others seem to be saying that the US shift to deficits will undermine future US power as taxes need to be raised to drawn down the deficit.

This latter view is evident in a piece by Thomas Barlow in which he argues that the innovative capacities of the US are in danger. The 'self-made man' is under threat! He ignores the fact that US innovation has often been the result of a fairly typical mix of state and private initiative. Think the Internet! Indeed as Fred Block controversially argues the US has long had a "hidden developmental state".

Barlow points out that the US is on top when it comes to the knowledge intensive economy. Californian businesses, he points out spend more money on R&D than Germany. "If US states were countries ... 12 of them would be ranked among the top 25 nations globally by total business R&D expenditures."

My gut feeling is that the US is a long way from being seriously challenged by the great Asian powers and its dominant position will once again become clear in the light of (the albeit) slow recovery.

Contrary to Barlow, I think that if the US ever got its state intervention right by developing a comprehensive public health system and extending educational opportunities across the poorer sections of US society, its strength would be fundamentally renewed. In other words, if the US developed a fairer, more egalitarian society it would become an even more productive economy.

The greatest danger for the US and the world is a shift towards a reactionary aggressive isolationism caused by deepening economic problems and misguided interpretations of their causes.