Opposition overthrows Kyrgyz government

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What initially looked like a massacre of opposition protests in Kyrgyzstan today quickly evolved into an apparently spontaneous (and violent) revolution. Protestors stormed and seized several key government buildings after police opened fire — they claim in self-defense — in the capital city, while other cities reported unrest. The ruling government appears to have collapsed suddenly. Here’s the account from Voice of America (the US government’s global propaganda media arm, so take with salt):

The political opposition in Kyrgyzstan says it has seized power, after a day of clashes in several cities that killed at least 40 people and wounded more than 400.

Opposition leaders said late Wednesday they were forming a provisional government with former Foreign Minister Roza Otunbayeva as its head. They said the current prime minister, Daniyar Usenov, had agreed to resign, but there has been no confirmation of the opposition’s claims.

The exact whereabouts of Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev are not known. Some opposition members say he has left the capital for the southern city of Osh, where he has a strong power base.

Sporadic gunfire continued overnight in the capital, Bishkek. Reuters news agency reports many buildings remain ablaze. Looters also reportedly ransacked a house belonging to Mr. Bakiev’s family.

Authorities confirmed 40 deaths, while the opposition says at least 100 people were killed.

 
This revolution somewhat mirrors the previous one in 2005 (the “Tulip Revolution”) that brought the ruling government to power. Since then, the country has been racked with sporadic violence from discontent under the new regime, which was seen as just as authoritarian and undemocratic and corrupt as its predecessor.

The Pentagon announced temporary closure of the controversial airbase in Kyrgyzstan, while they await the results of today’s unrest, which could result in a more anti-American government coming to power that would not be amenable to continued US presence.

This post originally appeared at Starboard Broadside.

Republicans splinter on $50 bill

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A couple weeks ago, I looked at a proposal by a southern Republican representative to replace Grant with Reagan on the $50. Students of (northern) history will recall that Grant is reviled in the South for a) winning the civil war, b) enforcing strong Reconstruction policies with martial law and c) wiping out the original KKK. Reagan, on the other hand, used dogwhistle campaign tactics to win the South in his presidential campaigns, emphasizing pro-segregation code words like “states’ rights.”

While Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) insists that this is a pro-Reagan move, not an anti-Grant one, and notes that he chose one Republican to replace another, I think it’s pretty obvious why most his 17 co-sponsors hail from the South.

Now Republicans outside the South are splitting over the proposal, despite their love of Ronald Reagan. Ohio Republicans are particularly annoyed because Grant was a native son:

State Representative Danny R. Bubp, a Republican from the [Ohio] district that includes Mr. Grant’s birthplace in Point Pleasant and childhood home in Brown County, is preparing a resolution that would oppose the currency change.

“The Union may not have won the Civil War had President Lincoln not had the wisdom to put Grant in charge,” Mr. Bubp said. “He was just the kind of guy who needed to be there at that time, and we should not diminish his place in history.”

 
Oh snap.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

North Carolina Republican wants Reagan on the 50

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When you’re a relatively new Republican representative from the South, there are lots of proposals you could make to burnish your credentials as a southern conservative. But some are more stupid and transparently reactionary than others. Case in point, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) is proposing that President Ulysses S. Grant be removed from the $50 bill, in favor of President Ronald Reagan. Now, we all know why Reagan: he’s the mythologized hero of the Right who don’t or won’t remember what they thought of him at the time. (For the record, McHenry was barely a teenager when Reagan left the White House, which explains a good deal.)

But why did he decide to go with the $50? His official (weak) reasoning:

President Reagan would be replacing President Ulysses S. Grant on the bill. In polls of presidential scholars, President Reagan consistently outranks President Grant. In 2005, The Wall Street Journal conducted one such poll of bipartisan scholars which ranked President Reagan 6th and President Grant 29th.

 
I’m deeply skeptical that this is the true reason… If you don’t remember your American History of the 1860s and 1870s, President Grant was the United States Army General who kicked Confederate butt all over the map and finally finished the Civil War in the Union’s favor… and then when he was elected President in 1868, he proceeded to implement a strong Federal Reconstruction policy in the South that protected the rights of liberated Blacks, cracked down and wiped out the original Ku Klux Klan, and implemented martial law in several Southern states until order was restored. Once Grant left office, most of his policies were immediately reversed by President Hayes as a result of the Compromise of 1877 that selected him as the winner on condition that he pull Federal troops out, which was the only force ensuring the policy’s implementation. Because of that policy, the Southern states in the post-Reconstruction period voted en masse for Democrats and against Republicans all the way until the 1960s, nearly a century later, when the Democratic hold began to slip as the national party began pushing for desegregation.

In the ensuing decades from the 1960s to the present, Republicans gradually reposition themselves as the more establishment-friendly/states’ rights party, and many Southern Democrats switched parties eventually to become Republicans. In many places, the lingering anti-Republican sentiment has continued to this day at a local level, with party switches being the only thing that finally turns a district to Republicans from conservadem/dixiecrat control. Ronald Reagan was a big factor in continuing Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” to flip the South into a solid Republican bastion — that it is today — at the presidential level. So, this proposal is a win-win for reactionary Republicans stuck in the past down South: it dumps Reconstructionist Grant in favor of states’ rights Reagan.

Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton who has actually even written a supportive book on Reagan, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times vigorously protesting McHenry’s proposal, giving many reasons why Grant deserves to remain on the fifty, instead of Reagan. He includes a lot of reasons I didn’t go over that were unrelated to Reconstruction and the Civil War, but I tend to think those are why McHenry wants to replace Grant. Wilentz makes a compelling case, additionally, that Grant’s reputation — which McHenry cites as reason for replacement — is the unjust result of extended character assassination after his death by pro-Confederate historians.

Fortunately, I don’t think McHenry has enough pull to make this go any place. Nevertheless, I think we should remain vigilant, since the Republicans did manage to use their majority a few years ago to quietly remove the Lincoln Memorial from the back of the penny.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

Niger junta taking steps to restore democracy

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As previously pledged, the military regime that suddenly seized power in Niger from the democratically-elected president just over a week ago in a violent coup d’état has begun taking steps to restore democratic rule:

As its promised transition to democratic rule begins, the military junta that overthrew Nigerien president Mamadou Tandja on February 18 has named a former information minister, Mahamadou Danda, as the new prime minister while retaining legislative and executive powers for itself.

Danda, 59, is seen as unaffiliated to any political party, was appointed on Feb. 23 by the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy (known by its French acronym, CSRD).

In a declaration broadcast nationally the previous day, CSRD head Djibo Salou was announced as head of state and the government; the junta will, for the moment, have the final word in governing the country.

Marou Amadou, president of a coalition of groups opposed to the ousted president known as the United Front To Safeguard Democratic Gains (FUSAD, after its French acronym) believes this first decree provides further guarantees of the junta’s intention to return power to civilians.

“The length of this transition will be decided after the consultations with all political and social stakeholders in the country announced by the junta,” Amadou told IPS. He hopes the transition will be neither too slow, nor overly hasty.

 
Because of the falling popularity of the democratic administration — due to it’s consolidation of power and the famine conditions nationwide — the coup has been met with generally positive reactions within Niger, though some expressed concern of a repeat of the breakdown of bureaucratic function seen in the months after the more violent 1999 coup.

Outside Niger, there were mixed reactions as most major power diplomatic corps struggled to decide whether to condemn the coup, encourage the rapid reintroduction of democratic norms, or help the average Nigerien get critical food supplies. Since sanctions placed on the democratic regime were already aggravating a food crisis, further sanctions would have been damaging and entirely unproductive. The United Nations pledged food aid, while the United States cautiously urged the junta to continue steps toward democracy and lightly condemned the illegal seizure of power (which involved heavy exchanges of fire right near the US embassy in Niamey). An interview about the coup with the Deputy Secretary of State for African Affairs, William Fitzgerald, can be read here.

As I previously examined, Niger is a major uranium-producing country, so there is a good reason for the world to be paying attention to its politics.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

A day later, Niger is calm

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Following yesterday’s sudden, violent military coup in the West African nation of Niger, reports suggest all has returned to calm today:

The military junta that overthrew the president of Niger began asserting its authority on Friday, amid signs of public support within the country and condemnation from abroad.

Tanks continued to be posted at strategic locations in the capital, Niamey, a day after an assault on the presidential palace ended in the removal of President Mamadou Tandja, whose turn toward autocracy in the last year had made him widely unpopular in the nation’s cities.

Local journalists said that Mr. Tandja was imprisoned in a military barracks, as supporters of his ouster marched in the capital. “The situation is calm,” said Moussa Kaka, who runs radio station Saraounia and had been jailed by the Tandja government. Mr. Kaka said he and hundreds of others went into the streets of Niamey on Friday in a show of support for the coup. Another demonstration is planned for Saturday.

 
There is some confusion outside the country as to who is in charge of the military regime. Reports I read earlier today say a “squadron leader” was heading the new junta, but the NY Times currently says a major in the army is head of the “Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy,” the junta’s official title. Many past coups in Africa have been led by junior officers (e.g. Army Captain Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso), while most coups in Asia and Latin America have been led by generals, but a squadron leader seemed a bit too junior, so this makes more sense. Earlier today, the military announced that it would be keeping civilian ministers and bureaucrats in office, to keep the government running as smoothly as possible under the circumstances. Several briefly jailed ministers have been released.

UPDATE @ 9:31 PM: I’ve been looking up some stuff about Niger in the CIA World Factbook because I wanted to know more about the uranium deposits. Most of the country is a desert (it’s in the Sahara) and the remaining savanna zone is rapidly being swallowed into the desert by a combination of water depletion by overuse and global warming. Uranium mining is the biggest industry in the country, which is one of the poorest in the world. Uranium is the biggest export, since the salt trade has lots its preeminence over the past several centuries, and Niger probably has the biggest uranium supply worldwide. This unfortunately makes Niger a major chess piece in the modern geopolitical “game.” President Obama just announced yesterday major support for investment in nuclear energy, which due to US laws against repeated enrichment probably means the US needs even more uranium soon, assuming the projects go forward. And I think China is also expanding its nuclear energy program. Basically, this coup will change very little, and the people of Niger will continue to get screwed over by great powers and moneyed interests, as well as by geography.

UPDATE II @ 9:43: I’m also curious about how this coup played out yesterday. I wonder if it was intended to be a bloodless coup or not (it was not). That’s been the more modern trend in military coups. This was pretty violent, by all accounts, with the nearby American embassy staff reporting heavy gunfire and even shelling for several hours, apparently between the presidential guards and the attacking troops. However, the coup leaders notably did not assassinate the president, according to what we know right now, but they merely arrested him and are holding him captive somewhere. This suggests the violence may not have been part of the plan, but it’s also conceivable they would plan on attacking the presidential palace first before making arrests as a scare tactic or a way of eliminating armed opposition quickly… either way, now that they have him in custody, they can spin this to the people and the world as a political intervention to protect democracy, rather than a naked power-grab. It’s also a useful insurance policy if anything goes wrong, much like the Russians during their revolution held the family of the Tsar captive for a while and was rumored to have kept one member alive significantly longer (this has since been disproven). The world these days tends to be much more tolerant of coups that leave the civilian leaders alive than coups that involve bloody, cold-blooded purges of senior officials. They’re not happy with this coup right now, but they’ll be more likely to get over it if the president remains alive.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

Military coup in Niger

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It’s unclear what’s going on, but apparently there’s been a military coup d’état in the West African nation of Niger:

Soldiers in Niger assaulted the presidential palace in a coup attempt on Thursday while the government was meeting inside, according to officials and diplomats.

After a day of gunfire, explosions and nonstop military music on the radio in Niger’s capital, Niamey, the whereabouts of the president, Mamadou Tandja, remained unknown.

“There’s been a coup d’état,” said Boureima Soumana Sory Diallo, a high official at the state media regulatory agency under Mr. Tandja.

“I don’t know where he is,” Mr. Diallo said of the president. “They told us he has been taken by the soldiers.”

A spokesman for the American Embassy in Niamey, Robert Tate, said, “We’ve gotten several unconfirmed reports that he is in the custody of the insurgents.”

Late Thursday, a colonel who claimed to represent the coup leaders said on state media that they had decided to suspend the Constitution and dissolve the nation’s institutions, news agencies reported.

 
The president had allegedly been taking unpopular anti-democratic actions of late, so the military may claim to be protecting democracy. Food shortages due to US and regional sanctions had destabilized the government, along with opposition protests. It’s unclear how this development might affect the security of the country’s large uranium deposits, if at all.

We have to be careful here in analyzing the situation because as we saw with the 2009 Honduras coup, the pro-coup people tend to spin the situation to claim the democratically-elected leader was going to become a dictator without military intervention. I don’t know if there’s a possibility that some foreign powers might be backing this coup to gain control over the uranium mines, but there are often allegations of that sort of thing when military coups occur. I’ll look into it more.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

The problem with GDP

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Gross Domestic Product (or GDP for short) has been a good blunt instrument since the 1930s for getting a quick reading of economic growth in an country. However, with every passing year, it has become waved around more and more as an accurate measurement of the economy, even as criticisms of its flaws mount. It’s become used for way more than it was ever intended, and that causes policy problems. David Moberg wrote a good piece last week for the newspaper In These Times, in which he laid out some of the major criticisms of GDP as a measurement and looked at some of the possible solutions people are developing. Here are some of the main problems:

Before the crash, GDP reports were just as out of sync with people’s experiences [as they are now with GDP growing again and jobs stagnating]. GDP rose throughout the Bush era, but people were largely unhappy with the economy. Most people’s real incomes weren’t growing, just those of the rich. It became clear that much of the GDP boom was an illusion. It was composed of a bubble of housing assets and funny-money financial derivatives. And since current growth is creating a climate crisis, it is also environmentally unsustainable.

One of the key problems with GDP as a measure of national welfare is that it treats “bad goods (and services)” the same as “good goods.” If it costs $100 million to clean up a toxic waste dump but only $1 million to avoid it, the clean-up directly contributes 100 times as much to the GDP as the prevention, making the country “wealthier.”

In other words, waste and inefficiency can make GDP bigger but leave people worse off. For example, healthcare expenditures rose rapidly in recent years, but overall care and health outcomes did not keep pace. A single-payer system could have provided better health at lower cost, but the GDP would have been smaller in the short term.

Also, the GDP does not distinguish between the long-term significance of different types of economic activity. (That fact didn’t bother Michael J. Boskin, chairman of President George H. W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, who said that “it doesn’t make any difference whether a country makes potato chips or computer chips.”) Likewise, the GDP does not recognize the loss of value when a dead-end job replaces one with more meaning. And it does not distinguish between egalitarian societies and those, like the United States, where the rich have recently captured most of the GDP growth.

 
It’s a serious issue because policymakers need something simple and easy to understand when writing legislation… and GDP is both, but wildly inaccurate. The fact that — and this is hypothetical, though I’ve heard it proposed — knocking down and rebuilding a foreclosed neighborhood has more GDP value than trying to help people adjust their mortgages so they can stay and improve the neighborhood is deeply troubling to me. The similar example above about pollution cleanup having more GDP value than preventing the pollution is a classic scenario among critics.

Fortunately, according to the article, some big politicians (e.g. French President Nicolas Sarkozy) are pushing for a change, and there are some big name economists (Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz) out there drafting alternatives to Gross Domestic Product. There are already some ideas floating around that haven’t caught on, including the Index of Sustainable Welfare:

Ecological economists Herman Daly and John Cobb developed an Index of Sustainable Welfare, which expanded the GDP to include indicators such as income distribution, natural resource depletion, environmental damage and the values of leisure. Their index showed that “sustainable welfare” tracked the GDP fairly closely in the United States until the late 1960s, then was flat or declined through the late 1980s, even as GDP grew.

 
There’s also the oft-mentioned “Gross National Happiness” measurement in use in Bhutan, but it wouldn’t export well. In any case, it’s unsustainable to keep using GDP, so there needs to be something better put into place fast if we want to operate a good society.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

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