Category Archives: Arsenal Analysis

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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Nigerian VP assumes control

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The National Assembly finally formally declared Nigeria’s Vice President Goodluck Jonathan the acting president, earlier this week, resolving the constitutional crisis of who was running the OPEC member nation that represents over 15% of Africa’s entire population, in the somewhat mysterious absence of President Umaru Yar’adua. Most of the American media had ignored the fact that the president had been in Saudi Arabia for medical treatment with no defined plans to return SINCE NOVEMBER. Nigeria’s Senate finally agreed to promote VP Jonathan after a BBC interview with President Yar’adua was released a month ago, in which he sounded very weak and again gave no indication of an imminent return. President Yar’adua repeatedly refused to issue a statement regarding a transfer of power for over 70 days.

The United States rushed to welcome him as Acting President because of the growing threat of instability as the political crisis continued. The US relies on Nigerian oil more and more every year.

I’m still baffled as to how this happened and why it wasn’t made into a big deal, as it should have been. In addition to an attempted major terrorist attack by a Nigerian, the country has faced some serious violence and rebel attacks, while the president has been gone.

Also, for the human interest angle, check out this article [dead link] on the amazing luck Acting President Goodluck Jonathan has had his whole life. He’s a zoologist and a hydrobiologist, who was an environmental minister briefly and fortuitously became governor after being chosen as a lieutenant governor in his state under a corrupt governor who resigned; then he was unexpectedly chosen as running mate by the outgoing president orchestrating the 2007 PDP ticket that won, and now he’s suddenly President. And what a boss hat he wears.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

Heavy fighting in Yemen

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Just days after President Obama said he had “no intention of sending U.S. boots on the ground” in Yemen or Somalia, US-supported and armed Saudi and Yemeni forces began heavily “cleansing” Yemeni villages of rebel forces.

Side note, added 11:57 PM US ET: I think cleansing is a surprising choice of words, especially since this is a Shia group with ethnotribal elements. So is Saudi Arabia admitting to ethnic cleansing? (Assuming this has been translated correctly.)

Two rebellions in rural, mountainous regions have grown in strength this year and pushed the Yemeni government’s attention away from terrorism and back to the rebellions, just when the United States expects the former to be a priority. Saudi Arabia, feeling threatened both by cross-border rebel attacks and by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (which has flourished in rebel-protected safe havens), launched a military offensive into Yemen in early November 2009.

Oddly, Yemen is still saying that they will not allow foreign troops into Yemen, despite the presence of Saudi Arabian troops right near Yemeni operations. The US has been sending arms and money to the Army, as well, and conducted missile strikes in mid-December on alleged al Qaeda sites. Yemen receives military training from US special forces advisers and the CIA is active in various covert or semi-cover operations there. Even before the Christmas Day bombing attempt was linked to Yemen, drawing renewed attention to the problem of terrorism there, Yemen had been (fairly successfully, if questionably) trying to cast the struggle against the rebels as part of the global war on terrorism, in an effort to secure funding.

Houthi rebels allege that the Yemeni Army has been bulldozing village houses to force rebels out. The central government of Yemen, which prematurely declared the war over in 2008, is insisting that they will wipe out the rebels once and for all.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

Somehow not good enough

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I still don’t understand why Republicans suddenly think that civilian court is not good enough for alleged terrorists, even though President Bush himself did that in quite a few cases and we’ve been prosecuting terrorists that way for decades now. What is especially preposterous here is that the Nigerian trust-fund terrorist case (Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab) is nearly identical to Richard Reid’s case with the December 2001 shoe-bombing, as Jon Stewart pointed out the other day. Both attempted bombings used the same kind of explosives, both made their attempts on transatlantic flights, both weren’t Arabs (or any other typically profiled race or nationality), both were stopped by passengers and subdued, and both attempts failed completely. The only difference was that Reid put the explosives in his shoe, and Abdulmutallab put them in his underwear.

Reid was convicted in US Federal Court and he’ll be in jail for quite a while. Problem solved, by the Bush Administration no less. And yet, the Republicans keep carrying on and on about how Abdulmutallab, in a virtually identical case, doesn’t deserve due process and civilian court and how we should have tortured him. He faces life in prison from his civilian indictment on six serious counts by a federal jury, but that’s somehow not good enough for Republicans.

Here’s the Republican version of reality, 2009/2010 Edition:

“We have learned the hard way that trying terrorists in federal court comes at a high price, from losing out on potentially lifesaving intelligence to compromising our sources and methods,” [Senator] Bond said. “We must treat these terrorists as what they are — not common criminals, but enemy combatants in a war.”
[…]
That theme was also amplified on Wednesday by Senator Jim DeMint, Republican of South Carolina who said in a statement, “If it had been bin Laden himself on that plane, would we read him his Miranda rights and try him in civilian court?”

 
Which is to say, their reality demonstrably doesn’t match anyone else’s reality:

But several administration officials said on Wednesday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not initially read Mr. Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights nor provide him with a lawyer when agents interrogated him.

Law enforcement officials had concluded that because they had a planeload of eyewitnesses who could testify against Mr. Abdulmutallab, they did not need to worry about the fact that if he made any self-incriminating statements before being read his rights, they would not be admissible in court.

The White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, has said Mr. Abdulmutallab provided “useable, actionable intelligence,” but declined to specify what it was. A law enforcement official said Mr. Abdulmutallab explained who gave him the bomb, where he received it and where he was trained to use it, among other things.

Eventually, Mr. Abdulmutallab stopped talking and asked for a lawyer, which he received about 30 hours after his arrest. It was not clear when in that timeline that the F.B.I. read him his Miranda rights.

 
The civilian court system that worked perfectly in very similar cases is somehow not good enough anymore. I wonder if it’s too soon to ask obnoxiously why Republicans hate our freedoms and the founding fathers… because that’s what they’ve been doing for several years now for us.

This post was originally published on Starboard Broadside.

Speaking of Nigeria…

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Nigeria has been in the news a bunch over the past week because the trust-fund terrorist was the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker and retired politician. But the world American media somehow failed to notice that Nigeria’s president has been out of the picture. One would expect a high-level response to something like this. One would also expect that the media would notice if the president of a nation, specifically one representing 15.4% of the population of all of Africa combined, hasn’t been running the place for over a month. Guess not.

Nigerian Vice President Goodluck Jonathan said on Friday he was hopeful that President Umaru Yar’Adua, who is in hospital in Saudi Arabia, would return soon and continue to govern Africa’s most populous nation.

Yar’Adua has been absent for more than a month and Jonathan has been presiding over cabinet meetings. But executive powers have not officially been transferred, leading to questions over the legality of government decisions.

Political analysts, senior lawyers and a former U.S. envoy have warned Nigeria is on the brink of a constitutional crisis. The Bar Association has brought legal action to try to compel Yar’Adua to temporarily hand over power.

 
Vice President Jonathan insists that the government is running smoothly, but opposition members have pointed out that some policies aren’t being executed and that President Yar’adua wasn’t present to swear in the new chief justice who would have to swear in a replacement president… and therefore he may not legally be the new chief justice. It’s a bit of a constitutional conundrum. The Vice President has, for all intents and purposes, assumed control of the cabinet anyhow. The government will be rolling out more stimulus plans for the country’s economy, he said.

But with ongoing instability problems, rebel groups, and the possibility of Muslim extremism heightened with the recent terrorist attempt by the Nigerian man, it’s important that whoever is making decisions has legitimacy to make them. Order could break down if people start challenging Vice President Jonathan’s legal authority to enforce the law, which is beginning in the courts and could easily spread to discontented areas of the country. While the last presidential election had serious flaws (a.k.a. blatant rigging), it was at least a relatively peaceful continuation of the new democracy – setting aside several bombings and assassination attempts – and was a stable, non-military transition of power from one president to the next. The last thing Nigeria (or its neighbors) needs right now is a collapse into civil war. I’m not saying this is very likely yet, but it’s a possibility given tensions and economic conditions at the moment. So it would be best to resolve this as quickly as possible.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

US ignoring Saudi link again

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Serious news about the “trust-fund terrorist” and the attempted Christmas Day bombing (NYT):

[…] the Saudi arm of Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the attempted attack and said it was in retaliation for recent American-backed attacks on its members in Yemen, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks militant Islamist Web sites.

In a statement issued on jihadist forums, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula boasts the success of the “Nigerian brother” in breaking through security barriers and of its own explosives technology, SITE reported, blaming a technical fault for the low-power detonation. The group has mounted attacks within Yemen and Saudi Arabia and in 2004, captured and beheaded a 49-year-old American engineer working in Riyadh, Paul M. Johnson Jr.

Government terror experts said the Qaeda claim was apparently legitimate.

 
This announcement comes on the heels of rising rhetoric and news attention to terrorists based in Yemen. President Obama himself today implied that the US would be increasing military action in Yemen in response to this attack:

We will continue to use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us, whether they are from Afghanistan or Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, or anywhere they are plotting attacks against the U.S. homeland.

 
We already have the CIA and special forces involved there. We conducted cruise missile strikes there ourselves, and we helped the Yemeni army’s attacks on terrorists. So this new bombing attempt looks like it will set in motion even more involvement.

However, this raises a more serious question about our priorities. Obama lists Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. But what about Saudi Arabia? Osama bin Laden and many of the leaders in and financiers of al Qaeda hail from Saudi Arabia. Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers were Saudi Arabian. These connections have long been known. Now the Saudi Arabian branch of al Qaeda (Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) is claiming responsibility for planning and nearly executing a large bombing in the US. Another attack plan, another Saudi link. At what point do we stop trying to solve everything with airstrikes on disorganized countries with much lower oil exports, which the group claims was the motivation here specifically, and face the facts that our oil-rich “ally” is a serious threat to our security?

Yes, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (a merger of Al Qaeda in Yemen and Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia) includes Yemen in its sphere of operations, but they’re primarily aimed at bringing down the Saudi monarchy, so that’s their big target and Yemen is just a base of operations. However, we’ve entangled ourselves by aiding Yemen and the Saudi regime, and thus we’ve drawn the terrorists’ attention back onto the United States. I can see how there’s an argument that we don’t want Salafist radicals to seize control of the Arabian Peninsula… but it still seems like we’re just in it for the oil, which is why we continue to prop up an unjust, undemocratic, unpopular regime in Saudi Arabia, rather than pressuring the government to make reforms that would undercut the radicals. Basically, we’re taking the most expensive and most dangerous route on dealing with radicalism in the Middle East by ignoring the Saudi problem. Bombing more of Yemen will just make things worse and won’t get to the root of the problem.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.

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Lieberman wants US into Yemen

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Yesterday I did a post on Yemen and terrorism, and I filled it with many links to recent news stories about that topic, which had been heating up even before the failed Christmas Day airline bomber (nicknamed the “trust fund bomber” because of his affluent background) was connected to Yemen. What I wrote yesterday was

The Yemen connection, however, is most interesting to me because of how much news there has been regarding terrorist and rebel activities in Yemen over the past few months.

 
What I was thinking, but decided not to write, was that this connection and all the news about Yemeni terrorists really interested me because I wondered how soon some hawk in the US government would start demanding war with Yemen. I chose not to write it because it sounded like a conspiracy theory to me. Well, it didn’t take even a day for me to realize I wasn’t being unreasonable, even if the people making that case are being unreasonable.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-CT), chair of the Homeland Security committee in the United States Senate, and always a super-hawk who wants to bomb anything that moves, has announced his support for direct, pre-emptive action in Yemen. Somehow, he is under the impression that this would prevent us being bogged down in a war there like we are in Afghanistan… I beg to differ, but that’s actually almost beside the point when you consider that the US is already providing logistical support to the Yemeni government against terrorists and has admitted to launching two recent cruise missile strikes in Yemen.

Lieberman also seems not to have noticed the longstanding Yemeni connection to terrorism until the past few weeks because he cited this attempted bombing and the Fort Hood attacks as justification enough for pre-emptive US action now. I wonder if he remembers that the USS Cole was bombed in the Port of Aden in Yemen in 2000? Incidentally, he also cited his position as deriving from a comment by someone in the administration, which is really odd since that person should have been able to tell him about the cruise missile strikes. However, as usual, Lieberman wants to take things that much farther and get the US more openly involved on the ground. I’m not sure how he thinks that will prevent war, since that’s kind of the definition of it.

Military force and enmeshing the US in foreign conflict zones are not the solutions to everything, no matter how excited and powerful they make Joe feel. I’m tempted to label the senator “Joe the Bomber,” but the reference is almost fading out of the political landscape fortunately.

UPDATE @ 10:30 PM: Actually, it sounds like he was even later to this parade than I’d realized myself:

In the midst of two unfinished major wars, the United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen.

A year ago, the Central Intelligence Agency sent many field operatives with counterterrorism experience to the country, according a former top agency official. At the same time, some of the most secretive Special Operations commandos have begun training Yemeni security forces in counterterrorism tactics, senior military officers said.

The Pentagon is spending more than $70 million over the next 18 months, and using teams of Special Forces, to train and equip Yemeni military, Interior Ministry and coast guard forces, more than doubling previous military aid levels.

 
However, he does seem to have been paying attention to the covert operations there, according to the article. So this makes it sound more like he’s just warmongering as usual and seizing on the new incidents to expand US operations in Yemen.

Unfortunately, I am now thinking that the writing is on the wall for serious US involvement there. Which is what I was really worrying about with yesterday’s post.

UPDATE II @ 5:40 PM on 12/28: See also my new post, “US ignoring Saudi link again,” now that Saudi-based al Qaeda operatives have claimed responsibility for this attempted bombing.

This post originally appeared on Starboard Broadside.