The Collapse of the Russian Economy?

The fate of the Russian economy in 2015 and the possible repercussions from a continued rapid diminution in the international exchange value of the ruble on domestic political stability in the Russian Federation remain open questions.  Significantly, it appears improbable, in the near term, that existing levels of shale oil production from already operational North American wells is going to abate in any way that will place upward pressure on global commodity prices for crude oil.  With the fracturing of OPEC unity on limiting output levels to increase prices and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states committed to high levels of production in order to maintain market shares, it is likely that daily crude oil prices will remain below $70 per barrel in major commodity markets for at least another three months and perhaps longer.  Moreover, given the continued effect of U.S. and European economic sanctions in response to Russian involvement in Ukraine, neither the Russian government nor financial sector firms possess ready access to Western monetary capital resources.  Under these circumstances, Russia will experience a significant contraction of economic activity and a substantial price inflation as the ruble's value continues to disintegrate. 
            Several conclusions from the present Russian economic trajectory appear somewhat clear:
1.  Russian governmental and monetary authorities are incapable of alleviating the current foreign exchange market stress on the ruble in the absence of an appreciation in crude oil prices:  The source of the current economic crisis is intimately related to the present dive in crude oil prices, which is exaccerbating the effects of punitive U.S. and European capital market restrictions against Russia.  Neither Russian Central Bank President Elvira Nabiullina nor Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov possess effective policy tools to contest the global supply glut in crude oil markets arising from the combined impact of increased North American shale oil production and rising output from the Gulf states.  The most that Russian monetary authorities can accomplish through utilization of domestic monetary tools is to sharply increase interest rates in an effort to stave off conversion of rubles into foreign currency and protect the Russian banking system.  So far, efforts in this direction appear to have been only moderately effective in preventing the extraction of funds from Russian banks and capital flight.  As ruble-denominated assets become increasingly illiquid, the financial system will continue to bleed capital at an accelerating rate.  Ultimately, the prime lever in determining the fate of the Russian financial system will be the relationship between global pricing of crude oil and the production price of North American shale oil, as the control mechanism for new investments in shale oil production capacity.  This relationship can only manifest a long term effect, however.  In the immediate future, Russian monetary and financial authorities will continue to manage the negative effects of depressed oil prices without an adequate means of stabilizing the value of the ruble. 
2.  The Russian economy is too rigidly dependent on extractive revenues from petroleum and other natural resources - in the aftermath of the current crisis, efforts must be made to diversify domestic production in order to generate the capacity for a more diversified export portfolio, driven by a more diverse, flexible, and entrepreneurial private sector.
A portrait of Russia's export portfolio to the world demonstrates the depth of the pain that its economy is currently enduring with a decline in crude oil prices.  Crude oil constituted precisely thirty-three percent of Russian exports in 2013 and the combination of crude oil, refined pretroleum products, and gaseous hydrocarbons/natural gas constituted sixty-eight percent of Russian exports for the same year (see United Nations, International Merchandise Trade Statistics, Yearbook 2013: Russian Federation, at: http://comtrade.un.org/pb/FileFetch.aspx?docID=5347&type=country pages).  Emphatically, the Russian economy is very highly dependent on exports of petroleum products and especially dependent on the sale of unrefined petroleum in ways that make the economy hyper-sensitive to price fluctuations in global petroleum markets.  Moreover, the remainder of Russia's export portfolio is dominated by extracted raw and minimally processed minerals, including raw aluminum, pig iron, and raw nickle (see Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), "Learn More About Trade in Russia," at: http://atlas.media.mit.edu/profile/country/rus/).  Each of these commodity markets is liable to exhibit sensitivities to global macroeconomic fluctuations, impacting their uses in progressive stages of manufacturing operations.  In particular, the recent slowdown in Chinese manufacturing is likely to produce a constriction in demand for a range of Russian extractive commodity inputs, generating a decline in economic activitiy partly independent of the effects of negative fluctuations in petroleum markets.  Such patterns reinforce the larger problems inherent in the evolution of the Russian economy since the breakup of the Soviet Union.  The rapid privatization of highly centralized state capitalist enterprises and their subsequent consolidation into the hands of a small number of oligopolistic private capitalist firms in the extractive sectors, intimately tied to state agencies and oligarchic administrative patrons, promoted particular patterns of specialization, driven by global market pricing, to the detriment of a broader diversification of productive activities for export markets. 
             Approaching the transformation of the Russian economy in the aftermath of the Soviet system as an overdeterminist, I have to concede that it might have been difficult for other outcomes to have obtained in the absence of some significant foreign intervention in the political transition to electoral democracy (i.e. support for the development of a legitimate multi-party, pluralist democratic model) and capital investment in non-extractive manufacturing and services.  In point of fact, the radically deregulated, market orientation of the economic transition in post-Soviet Russia, combined with the stiffling of political democracy as ethnic Russian nationalists like Putin moved to crush incipient drives for autonomy by non-Russian minorities, enabled olipolistic firms dominating the extractive sectors to steer the economy's development into a course wholly consistent with the frozen logic of Ricardian comparative advantage.  In the end, high level private sector players and political oligarchs alike tied their hopes to the continued appreciation of petroleum prices on global markets, and they now suffer a fate driven by the rapid course of technological change (i.e. hydraulic fracturing) that they could not otherwise have foreseen.
            In the near term, high-level domestic stakeholders in Russian economic health will continue to frantically hope for a leveling off of global crude oil supplies to drive price increases and restore petroleum revenues, even as Russian suppliers produce and market every last drop of oil that they can produce at maximized output capacity.  What else can they do but keep digging their own graves?  In the long run, the commodity market events of the last two months make it clear that the Russian economy needs to gradually restructure itself from the ground up to accentuate production across a range of diverse markets for goods and services destined for domestic consumption, by smaller, more nimble, flexible, and entrepreneurial firms.  In the process, maybe some such producers will, over a prolonged gestation period, accumulate the expertise in production and marketing savy necessary to enter export markets with a more diverse range of higher stage commodities and, as such, elevate Russia's stature as a legitimate home for an active, advanced, innovative, and fully integrated base for domestic demand and export-driven growth.  Meanwhile, maybe an incipient strata of free-thinking, entrepreneurial, and outward looking Russian economic players can collectively steer the government of the Russian Federation away from its seemingly endless, militarized inward orientation, transfixed on the domination of Eurasia and the reconstruction/reconstitution of Russian imperial space.       
3.  The Russian government is investing too heavily in defense spending, by virtue of United Russia's aggressive policies against internal ethnic and sectarian minorities (e.g. Muslim ethnic groups in the North Caucasus) and its muscular interventions in neighboring states (e.g. Georgian South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Crimea, Ukrainian Donetsk and Lugansk) - the government needs to reduce defense expenditures and invest more heavily in non-defense infrastructures, education, and other areas more amenable to long term economic growth. 
This conclusion is not entirely original: Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov has been making this argument at least since early autumn of 2014 (see Lidia Kelly, "Finance minister warns Russia can't afford military spending plan," Reuters News Agency (7 Oct. 2014), at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/07/us-russia-economy-spending-defence-idUSKCN0HW1H420141007).  Under pre-existing plans for a thorough upgrading of Russian military technologies, the Russian Federation apparently had planned to budget 23 trillion rubles through 2020 for military spending.  Under present circumstances, with the collapse of the value of the ruble in international exchange markets and restrictions on the export of technologies to Russian military contractors in response to Russian involvement in eastern Ukraine, it appears improbable that such a scheduled upgrading will take place in the absence of a major reconfiguration of other governmental budget priorities.  In other words, aggressive military spending will only come at the expense of virtually every other domestic line item in the budget of the Russian Federation. 
             Taking for granted that the capacity of the Russian Federation to make significant military investments is being presently compromised, it is still worth asking why such military upgrades might be deemed essential within the Kremlin - what is at stake in the current vision of Russia's place in the world, focused critically on the country's military prowess?  In my view, we are witnessing the final breakdown of a political culture with its roots in pre-Romanov Tsarist Russia and the struggle to expand Muscovite hegemony across an expanding geographic sphere against diverse non-Russian Eurasian ethnic groups, most critically Muslim "Tatars" of various ethnic and linguistic origins.  As an historical matter, non-Russians (i.e. non-Muscovites) are not, at least from the time of Ivan "the Terrible" in the late Sixteenth century, incorporated as coequal subjects under the domination of the Muscovite tyranny.  This pattern of ethnic and sectarian exclusion, not palpably challenged within the Soviet period beyond the first decade of Bolshevik rule, sets up an insurmountable ideology of managing ethnic differences through "Russification."  That is to say, Russians have spread across Eurasian space, in turn disseminating both language and cultural norms, supported by military supremacy over outlying ethnic groups.  This internal pattern, enforcing the need for the military supremacy of the Russian state against subjected ethnic groupings, compounds Russia's ongoing antagonism with the West, with the Europe of the Enlightenment, the egalitarian humanism and liberties of the French Revolution, and the march of free market capitalism in the advanced industrial economies of Western Europe.  Emphatically, Russia's military strength counteracts its perceived economic backwardness, its latent cultural hyper-conservatism, and its adamant embrace of political autocracy against the potential chaos of a robust democracy. 
                 At this point, the Russian Federation appears to have little choice - it will embark on a reduction of its military expenditures and withdraw from certain of its current military commitments or it will face a potential default on its international financial obligations at a time in which its avenues for financing current expenditures of the state are being constricted in response to its overly aggressive relations with certain of its neighbors. 
4.  A reconfiguration of Russian governmental spending will necessarily involve a transformation in domestic policies toward insurgent movements within the Russian Federation and toward neighboring former Soviet states - emphatically, United Russia's vision of a militarily muscular Russian hegemony over Eurasia has to meet its demise. 
With the economic facts on the ground in mind, we need to resituate Russia's role, as the preeminent military power in Eurasia, against the reality that Russia cannot, at present, afford financially to play policeman against its neighbors when the grandiose visions of Putin and United Russia for a return to empire get violated by the autonomous visions of Chechens, Dagestanis, Georgians, or Ukrainians for a future liberated of domination from the Kremlin. Most significantly, a liberatory window is opening for non-Russians within the boundaries of the Russian Federation that may not remain perpetually open. If the Chechens, Dagestani, and Ingush in the Northern Caucasus could ever succeed in breaking free from Putin's grip, now is probably the time for these Muslim minorities to aggressively act. To be clear, the collapse of global crude oil prices may signal the start of a brutal new war for control of the North Caucasus, pitting Sunni Muslims from the region and from multifarious other places against the military forces of the Russian Federation and their pro-Russian Orthodox neighbors (e.g. the Ossetians).  If this occurs, moreover, it seems likely that Putin will be forced to take his foot off Kiev's throat in the struggle for Donetsk and Lugansk, though probably will not alter the situation with Crimea.  Emphatically, the capacity of the Russian Federation to maintain control within its present military investments is being critically compromised by the degeneration of Russia's fiscal capacity.
            Against this situation, the U.S. and EU need to tread exceptionally carefully to ensure that the Russia's military position, particularly in its struggle against militant Salafist movements in the Caucasus, is not so damaged to the point that Western security is, simultaneously, threatened.  On the one hand, NATO must rigorously enforce its defense commitments to the Eastern European and Baltic states that now count themselves as coequal members - as the Russian Federation loses its grip on internal political stability, its neighbors need to be insulated as much as possible from efforts by Russia to lash out against neighboring independent sovereign states.  On the other hand, NATO cannot intervene militarily to either hasten or forestall the breakup of the Russian Federation.  However, it is certain that the process through which the current Russian Federation is transformed will have ongoing repercussions for the EU and the U.S.  It might be in the long term best interests of Sunni Muslim populations in  the North Caucasus region to achieve greater autonomy if not full blown sovereignty (i.e. secession from the Russian Federation), but, if such a transformation comes through a war against Putin's government, drawing in multifarious foreign Salafist forces under the aegis of Al Qaeda or, now, the Islamic State, then the long term interests of the U.S. and EU in the maintenance of peace in the Caucasus and the neutralization of sources for the growth of militant Salafism internationally will be impacted.  Succinctly, it is in the long term interests of the West to disarm the current context in the North Caucasus of a standoff between dogmatic Russian nationalists and militant Salafist Sunni Muslims.  It may be too late to avoid the confrontation that will be coming to this region and to Russia as a whole, but we need, as much as possible, to persue a middle ground and seek to restore peace to the region and procure autonomy for non-Russian groups to the exclusion of Islamist militants (again, assuming and hoping that such an outcome is still possible).
           In these terms, the West will need to manage a breakdown of the current Russian Federation through tactful diplomacy and craftsmanship in the selective introduction and lifting of economic sanctions and trade/capitalization agreements.  Such a task can only be conceived as a long term initiative, framing Western strategies in confrontation with the Russian Federation and pursuing a deepening democratization of Russian constitutional institutions and a thoroughgoing mass liberalization in Russian culture.  Perhaps we will know that such a reframing of Western relations with Russian has borne fruit if at some point, say fifty years from now, we will no longer conceive of how the government of Russia could ever have been ruled over by someone like Putin.   

Normalizing Relations with Cuba and the American Politics of Anti-Communist Retributions

This topic should be right up my alley, as an American Marxist at least ostensibly in solidarity with the government of Cuba.  In fact, I am quite pleased with the idea of normalizing diplomatic relations and with the prospects of ending the embargo against Cuba, and I am simultaneously hopeful that Cuba will undertake a rethinking of its political structures, not to undermine the government's substantial efforts to enhance the quality of life of its citizens but to open up the larger direction of the government and its policy mechanisms to a wider spectrum within the Cuban polity.  Succinctly, as a Western Marxist, indebted to a long tradition in the development of civic republican thinking, I think that Cuba needs to more forcefully democratize itself so that its citizens who have indisputably benefited from the socialist revolution will be able, through their personal involvement, to take ownership of the products of the revolution by some greater means than proxy ownership of the proletarian dictatorship. 
         Emphatically, for its limited successes, particularly in health care, Cuba deserves significant praise.  On the other hand, as one of the discrete holdovers of the Cold War in the Soviet-socialist/Stalinist mode, I just cannot look at Cuba without jaundiced eyes, seeking to intellectually dismantle, from a Marxist perspective, what went wrong with the revolution and what needs to be changed to make it right!  Succinctly, state socialism (a.k.a. state capitalism) deserves a serious reconsideration to determine where the actual collective appropriation of surplus labor (i.e. in Marx's sense, communism) actually takes place, how existing communist class structures (probably in clandestine private spaces and at the margins of the state economy) can be enhanced and multiplied (this is a project in which we might also benefit from an engagement in Massachusetts!).  Perhaps a normalization of relations with the U.S. can aid in such a process.  At the very least, the creeping presence of the market that such a normalization foretells might at least multiple the spaces within which economic development on entrepreneurial terms escapes the ruthless logic of the state, and, as such, maybe we will see increasing numbers of Cubans, unencumbered by state control, coming together to make better lives for themselves through collective appropriation and distribution of their surplus labor.  Such a progression of market liberties might, as well, spill over into political life to introduce the legal expressions of view in contradiction to the political attitudes of the Castros, and into cultural life to introduce a new era of serious inquiry in Cuba into the nature of man, religion and the understanding of immateriality, spirit, and faith, and the importance of racial and sexual/gender equality.  All such transformations would reinforce Cuba's place as a center and source of the progressive, socialistic, communist impulse in North America, for which all Western Marxists might simultaneously contribute and be perpetually indebted!
               Moving past the possible/hopeful implications of normalization for Cuba, the past week has reintroduced, in distinctly visible expressions, the ubiquitous disfavor of a rabidly anti-Communist Cuban-American community in South Florida and other places.  To be clear, I understand the position advocated by such individuals as U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (Republican-Florida) and by individuals situated within the first generation of Cuban emigres, many of whom had lost significant personal/familial assets and experienced imprisonment/exile since the revolution.  To paraphrase Lenin in regard to revolution, "you cannot make an omelette without breaking some eggs" - revolutionary transformations are always messy and uncomfortable, especially when your family stands with the old order.  In 1959, those individuals who benefited from the dictatorship of Batista were up-ended and driven from prominence into poverty if not imprisonment and, eventually, exile.  The same individuals or their descendants now stand as a significant Republican Party voting block in South Florida.  That said, it stands to reason that Obama would decide to normalize relations now - he has nothing to lose from this group and, for that matter, neither does Hillary Clinton in 2016.  Even as the first generation Cuban emigres rally against Obama's normalization of relations, their children, born Americans with the hope of reconnecting with the home of their ancestors, stand hopeful for the prospects of a reintegration with Cuba, particularly if such a normalization means that political change/liberalization in Cuba might accelerate.  To a significant extent, Republican like Rubio have hashed their bets that the defeat of the Castros could never be realized by an extended coming out party for Cuba to the world as a new zone for capital investment and new, progressive political experiments - they appear to continue to hold out hope for some sort of successful Bay of Pigs transformation with the Castros in chains and capitalism striding victoriously in Havana.  As an American Marxist, at least somewhat in sympathy and solidarity with the things that the Castros stood for, I hope that Rubio and his ilk are wrong, but, one way or another, I am confident that Obama has made them irrelevant, both in Miami and in Havana! 
          

Sony Pictures, North Korean Cyber-terrorism, and the Liberty of Americans to Produce and Disseminate Political Art

There are a number of issues that I really want to comment on today, but this one is doubtless the most easy to digest into a quick post before I head down to my father's house to bake Christmas cookies.  I had managed to see previews for "The Interview," a comedy about an assassination attempt against North Korean President Kim Jung-Un, but I had had no intention of investing even five dollars on a discount movie Tuesday at my local Cinemark theater to see the film because I just don't get into this kind of farcical, amateurish, slap-stick comedy, even to the extent that it deploys clandestine satirical undertones.  Emphatically, if the movie ever does see the light of day, I'm still not likely to waste two hours of my free time to watch it.  The problem here with Sony Picture's decision to withdraw the movie from circulation and with the decisions of several major theater corporations not to air the movie is, precisely, as Obama and the Republican National Committee independently have argued this week, that these actions amount to the censorship of political art and political speech exercised by a foreign state under the threat of violence against Americans.  It would have been one thing for North Korean hackers to compromise the internal networks of Sony Pictures to divulge information embarrassing to the corporation and its executive officers and to cause financial damages through the theft of internal materials as a reprisal to the release of "The Interview."  If this were simply the case, then the actions undertaken against Sony by the North Korean government or by affiliated individuals would have been a relatively private matter, concerning the failure of an American corporation to adequately safeguard its internal networks to ensure that hackers, either under the employment or assistance of a foreign government or strictly private individuals (e.g. "Anonymous"), could not compromise internal information.  The character of the attack this week was different insofar as it threatened physical violence against individual employees at Sony and threatened terrorist actions on American soil against wider numbers of American citizens if "The Interview" was released.  Expressed in these terms, such a threat, leveled against the U.S. by a "shadow" entity linked to the North Korean government might have solicited an aggressive reaction by the U.S. government in the absence of any connection to the release of a motion picture.  The fact that such threats were made explicitly in connection to the release of a motion picture, with particular satirical elements addressed toward the North Korean regime, and that these threats motivate self-censorship by a broad spectrum of the motion picture and cinematic industries, however, implicates the Constitutional artistic liberties of the movie's producers and screenwriters.  What, precisely, are American screenwriters, producers, directors, and other motion picture professionals at liberty to produce if they have to pass the muster of censors half-way around the world?!  There is something odious in the notion that American artists should be forced by the motion picture and cinematic industries out of fear that their work will offend parties in a foreign state to such an extent that they would be compelled to commit physically, lethally violent acts against persons and property in the U.S. if their art was publicly displayed! 
         My reaction to this event should be reasonably plain and consistent with that of the Obama administration.  Sony Pictures and the cinematic corporations with which it contracts for first-run distribution of its movies should not have backed down on distribution of "The Interview."  If terrorist actions against Americans were legitimately at issue, then the issue is wholly within the province of the U.S. government and its authorities, not private corporations who are vested with the authority to defend neither the life nor the property of American citizens.  Respecting the sensible and realistic response from Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton that his company cannot be expected to release a motion picture that a large number of cinematic distributors have refused to present to their customers, the response from both the motion picture and cinematic industries to cyber-threats related to "The Interview" seems to imply that private, for-profit corporations have a responsibility to their shareholders to act in defense of their property in lieu of directing such concerns for the protection of property and for the protection the lives of employees and customers to governmental authorities.  A response of this nature might be analogous to the conclusion that an American corporation should take personal, private responsibility for the recovery of property seized by a foreign state or by private parties in a foreign country in lieu of diplomatic and/or military operations by the U.S. government.  Even if Sony has generously compensated the producers and screenwriters of "The Interview" for their work and, thus, stands to lose a potentially large stream of revenue from its actions in squashing the film, neither Sony nor its cinematic partners had any right, emanating from their roles as for-profit capitalist corporations, to simultaneously usurp the authority of the U.S. government to act in defense of U.S. citizens, their property, and their Constitutional liberties and to subvert the artistic liberties of its screenwriters, producers, and other contracted motion picture professionals in the creation of "The Interview" and other prospective films referencing North Korea.  In this respect, acknowledging that the U.S. government lacks the authority to compel a private corporation to release an artistic product for general distribution, I wish that there were some available means for the Obama administration to enforce punitive ramifications against the motion picture and cinematic industries for their behavior, against the best interests of the larger American public, in this incident. 
        Beyond this, acknowledging that the protection of the lives, property, and liberties of American citizens against threats issued by foreign states and their representatives remains wholly within the province of the U.S. government, to the extent that the North Korean government can be convincingly linked to the hacking of Sony Pictures and, more importantly, to the issuance of threats of physical violence against the U.S., the North Korean government needs to be explicitly and firmly punished for its behavior!  As such, I don't know how much more the U.S. government can do to impose economic sanctions against North Korea.  Something more needs to be done.  Succinctly, we need to seriously investigate the means of the North Korean government to engage in cyber-warfare of this kind and determine how we can use available military, civil intelligence/counter-intelligence (i.e. NSA, CIA), and information warfare assets (i.e. U.S. government hackers) to definitively cripple the capacity of the North Korean government to engage in new cyber-warfare activities.  I am not going to advance such a proposition with the notion that such a counter-offensive (within cyberspace and outside of it) would be easy or entirely uncomplicated by our need to cooperate with other governments, but such actions are absolutely indispensable if we intend to defend the artistic liberties of Americans against the capacity of a foreign government to censor the works of American citizens out of fear that the production of some satirical work will, through the global dissemination of ideas, undermine its capacity to exercise tyranny against its people. 

The Battle of Ferguson II - Envisioning Alternatives in Law Enforcement Practices

3. Any resolution of the issues raised by the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson must respond with changes to the theories and practices of police organization and operations within communities with large numbers of African-Americans and other, especially low-income, minority groups. Such changes must involve a significant expansion of formalized cooperation with community leaders (especially clergy), increased recourse to non-traditional methods in responding to a range of domestic disputes and non-violent criminal activity, and enhanced specialization by departmental sections to manage the intelligence capabilities of local departments and better respond to chronic sources of violent crime. More emphatically, such transformations in the organization and operations of police require a revolutionary transformation to democratize local control over police forces and create an overriding conformity between the interests of citizens and the mission of their police forces.

Over the last two weeks, since the decision of a Missouri grand jury to not indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for his actions in the killing the Michael Brown, we have seen a brief and punctuated return to violence in Ferguson, followed by a more subdued continuity of more or less non-violent protests, including a march to the state capital at Jefferson City.  More significantly, protests have arisen across the country in response to the failure of a New York City grand jury to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo for his role in the death of Eric Garner, who died from cardiac arrest induced by asphyxiation after Officer Pantaleo used a chokehold to subdued him.  In addition to the ubiquitous "hands up, don't shoot" chants of the Ferguson-inspired protests, the "I can't breath" uttered by Eric Garner, with his head shoved to the ground by officers, appears to be reappearing in new protests.  Likewise, protests against the grand jury non-indictment in the Garner case have featured the appearance, in public places and often blocking traffic in major urban thoroughfairs and highways, of the "die-in" (i.e. lots of protesters lying down and playing dead in the middle of the road).  A criminal investigation may be forthcoming but, as in these previous cases, an indictment is unlikely to be issued in the case of Cleveland, Ohio police officer Timothy Loehmann, who fatally shot 12-year old Tamir Rice, in the possession of an air gun suspected to be an actual firearm.  Finally, and conversely, a White former police chief in Eutawville, Orangeburg County, South Carolina, Richard Combs, has just been indicted by a grand jury for the murder of an African-American male, Bernard Bailey, in May 2011, who had apparently become agitated at the Eutawville Town Hall where he was protesting a traffic violation against his daughter. 
          As a summary of progress or non-progress over the last few weeks within the legal system, responding to violence by police officers against African-American men, these events suggest to me that the larger problem of antagonistic relations between law enforcement officers and racial minority communities in the U.S. is not going to be resolved through recourse to the criminal justice system, if only because we are running squarely against a racial divergence in the conception of what constitutes justice and, moreover, a fundamental denial on the part of most White Americans that such a divergence either exists or that a rational basis exists for African-Americans to believe that the use of lethal violence by the law enforcement community has disproportionately and wrongly targeted African-American men.  To assume that presumptive concerns of excessive use of violence by police against African-American men could be adequately addressed by the prosecution of a spattering of officers involved in certain cases across the country would tend to reduce such concerns to the problem of "a few bad/racist cops," and, in my opinion, this does not adequately address either the scale or the nature/origins of the problem.  These origins are to be located at a foundational level in American cultural/ideological processes and can only be addressed by systematically bringing into question the nature of race in the U.S.  As such, in the case of law enforcement and criminal justice, we need to approach current theory and practice with an expressed admission that race shapes and determines how we go about policing communities and how we go about incarcerating and/or rehabilitating/reintegrating criminals - it will not do to approach these questions from a race-neutral perspective because our culture is emphatically not race-neutral. 

(For the alternative view, see (or listen to) the interview by National Public Radio's Rachel Martin with Dallas Deputy Police Chief Malik Aziz, the Chairman of the National Black Police Association in "Police in Other Communities are Consumed by Ferguson," NPR, 7 Dec. 2014, at: http://www.npr.org/2014/12/07/369108503/police-in-other-communities-are-consumed-by-ferguson.  Succinctly, Deputy Chief Aziz not only suggests that the problem can be reduced, in part, to the presence of a tiny handful of racist police officers in the larger law enforcement community, but also argues that the civilian population bears responsibility for a "cultural disconnect," arising when individuals stopped by police do not fully comply with the direction of officers. Conceding that Deputy Chief Aziz is quite correct in arguing that it might pose adverse effects on an individual's health to resist arrest or otherwise challenge a police officer in his/her duties, his perspective demonstrates of a limitation of the perspective of police professionals in relation to the political processes through which they are conferred responsibility to maintain the peace and order.  We need to recognize the subjective positionality of such perspectives and acknowledge that law enforcement practices are a subject of continuous political contestation within any democratic social formation.  That is to say, while I can't fault Aziz for his steadfast professionalism and objectivity, there is something about its disconnection from the culture and politics of racialism that I both find distasteful as an ardent democrat and, ultimately, at the root of the racialist problem that we are awakening to!)

          This section of my comments seeks to briefly address one particular set of questions involved in what needs to be a broad, revolutionary transformation of law enforcement and criminal justice theory and practice.  Specifically, how must law enforcement change in order to accomodate a continuous engagement with racialism and, in so doing, embody a stronger commitment to democratization in the organization and direction/oversight of law enforcement, particularly in communities with large numbers of African-Americans, other racial minorities, and, more broadly, low-income groupings (insofar as the dynamic of race is intermingled in questions of income-based stratification and the continuous rise of income inequality since the 1970s)?  In true Marxist form, I do not have any all-encompassing, universal solutions to this inquiry.  Moreover, at this point in U.S. history, it seems that, notwithstanding the possible benefits that could manifest themselves in a federal Justice Department investigation of local police departments to evaluate the systematic nature of police practices against African-American and other racial minority communities, the federal government has little to add to the conversation on how local police departments need to change in order to address racial disparities in law enforcement practices.  We are not necessarily dealing with an inadequacy of good laws/statutory standards on the national/federal level but with a divergence in the commitment at the local/municipal level to engage with racialism and to stop denying the reality of race as an underlying and, to some degree, unconscious factor in local law enforcement practices.
        First, police departments in communities like Ferguson need to incorporate formalized connections to individuals within the larger community that can function to both facilitate enhanced cooperation in particular law enforcement initiatives and enhance the general level of trust conferred on the police department by the community as a function of its embedded character within the community.  Such connections, of course, rely on the existence of individuals capable of acting as leaders within the larger community, exerting a degree of moral force over the community transcending legal authority.  For that matter, it demands that the community exists as a cohesive entity or a network of associations, with or without leaders.  Talking about the "African-American community" in Ferguson, Missouri or in other places takes for granted that such an entity actually exists, that individuals within it embody a sense of belonging to the community, and that the community can be marshalled by leaders to respect the authoritative direction of such individuals.  Such considerations are foundational to what I am arguing here, and it is by no means clear that the African-American community of Ferguson actually exists as something other than a rhetorical device in the machinations of the American mass media!  We might argue that, as a result of the events since the Michael Brown shooting, an African-American community in Ferguson has congealed around the broader sentiment of discontent toward police brutality.  On the other hand, it remains to be seen whether such a community would remain intact in the absence of collective discontent or, rather, whether a community could be forged to act permanently in Ferguson on its own behalf as a discrete segment of the democratic sovereign, acting, in part, over the municipal government and the police.  In a more broadly democractic sense, I am asking whether a collective body, among the residents of Ferguson, exists to take permanent ownership over the government and police department in a way that they can both command the organization and operations of law enforcement authorities and accept ownership of its practices by virtue of consent to their outcomes (i.e. everyone recognizes that when a police officer tells someone to stop, they stop, because, in the end, that officer is just enacting the will of the community, demanded by the community, to maintain the peace and order of the community).
         Realizing, to some extent, that this initial argument unpacks a demand on the police and municipal government of Ferguson to find ways to interact cooperatively with residents, it more critically makes a enormous demand on the residents of Ferguson and, especially, on its African-American "community" - that they have to start acting collectively like a democratic sovereign and demand that their government act on their behalf.  That is to say, any real transformation of the relationship between the African-American community and law enforcement in Ferguson and elsewhere is going to be a multi-dimensional process, involving the reassertion of democratic will by a disempowered and apathetic or otherwise frustrated African-American community, the willingness of local government and law enforcement to cooperate with newly self-empowered citizens, and the openness of White neighbors to engage in a broader cultural and political conversation on race in a manner that supports the larger transformative process and recognizes the equality and interconnectedness of all citizens as a requisite to democracy and justice for all members of the community, Black and White. 
           Dispensing, for the moment, with the larger question of mass organization to promote political transformations and returning to the limited concern of how police departments like that of Ferguson need to change, such police departments need to "deputize" (for lack of a better term) community leaders and influential individuals within the community to undertake a range of law enforcement duties unlikely to result in the need to subdue, arrest/detain, or otherwise employ repressive violence against individuals.  In this regard, I have in mind a range of activities that might be characterized as "community interventions," intended to manifest a profylactic impact on individuals who might otherwise subsequently become involved in criminal activities.  Domestic household disturbances and youth involvement in "gang" activity would certainly fall within this range of police interventions.  The idea of introducing such a formal role for individuals who would, by expectation, not be vested with the authority to detain/arrest individuals or to carry firearms or other lethal or non-lethal means of physical violence is to create a division of labor within the formal apparatus of state repressive processes between activities that axiomatically demand the use of police detention/arrest (with or without subsequent recourse to the criminal justice system) and possible recourse to means of lethal violence and activities that strictly demand intervention, mediation of disputes, surveillance, and/or prolonged contact/mentoring/direction of individuals (without any expectation of recourse to the criminal justice system). 
            Moreover, by formalizing such a role by non-uniformed individuals within the community, direct consultation and joint consultation with uniformed police officials on individual cases would tend to reinforce a cooperative ethos between the community as a whole and uniformed law enforcement authorities, lending further weight to community education through non-uniformed consultants around broader law enforcement issues, like drug control.  Finally, the establishment of networks of non-uniformed community consultants might serve as a building block to the development of further community policing networks.  An introductory conception of my meaning here might be constituted by neighborhood watch programs, but community policing networking must go further to incorporate broader intervention on a range of individual and community development issues, recognizing a range of cultural and economic processes at the local level contribute to the creation of individuals "at risk" for criminal activity. 
             Investing a significant weight behind the notion of formalized community involvement in policing, certain questions remain.  Notably, if community leaders are to be deputized as non-uniformed consultants and direct intervening authorities in place of uniformed law enforcement authorities, should such individuals be compensated by municipalities for their official duties and, if so, what impact would such processes have on municipal police budgets?  Offering a short answer, I do think non-uniformed consultants/authorities need to be compensated for their involvement with law enforcment insofar as their activities represent a formal substitution of uniformed officers for non-uniformed conflict mediators, educators, and community organizers.  Developing a formula for such compensation involves more complicated issues that need to be approached on a case by case basis.  As suggested, however, the introduction of an alternative, community-based model of policing with a division of labor between non-uniformed and uniformed law enforcement components will certainly mandate a reconsideration of fiscal management by municipalities, if only because greater involvement in day-to-day law enforcement by non-uniformed individuals will make particular activities by uniformed officers redundant and, thus, maintenance of more extensive numbers of uniformed officers in certain municipalities would be both unnecessary and fiscally prohibitive.  Again, if the idea is to partially substitute one kind of law enforcement by uniformed officers for another form, undertaken by non-uniformed community mediators and organizers, then we need to play out the ramifications for municipal fiscal management in order to recognize that municipalities would have to reorganize their law enforcement budgets, possibly in ways that might save municipal tax revenues relative to models of law enforcement restricted to utilization of professional uniformed officers in traditionally organized departments.  On the other hand, the merit involved a major rethinking in the organization of law enforcement cannot be limited to the potential fiscal benefits of a reduction in the size of police budgets - if application of alternative models actually raised expenditures on law enforcement because the range of activities with which community consultants/mediators/organizers concerned themselves expanded significantly in relation to traditional law enforcement, such a transformation would still be worthwhile for the fact that it achieves of more fundamental regrounding of law enforcement at the level of the community. 
             Another obvious question to be approached here concerns the sort of individuals that might be integrated as non-uniformed consultants/mediators/organizers.  The immediate thought that enters my mind, to these ends, especially in regard to African-American communities, is that cooperation with pastors/clergy and highly involved lay church members, as the primary moral pillars of local communities, is critical.  Beyond the churches, educators within both public and private schools, especially at schools located within the community, would significantly aid community intervention activities related to the individual development of children and young adults and the identification of households in need of intervention and support by social service professionals.  We should also consider individuals involved in diverse ranges of community organizing activity (e.g. anti-poverty organizations, labor organizers, etc.), as individuals invested with a certain degree of locally-specific knowledge and abilities consistent with the sort of network building that a successful transition to a community-based model of law enforcement would require.  Finally, I would be amiss if I did not also include local entrepreneurs and other individuals within the business community capable of exerting some moral force in their interactions with others in the community. 
           Beyond the integration of a more community centric, non-uniformed law enforcement model, we have to consider how uniformed components in law enforcement have to change, per se.  To the extent that what I am arguing for is a new division of labor between non-uniformed, deputized community consultants/mediators/organizers and uniformed police, it stands to reason that uniformed law enforcement officials would become much more specialized in a range of practices that will require highly trained, professional officers, handling lethal and non-lethal means to subdue, detain/arrest suspects and operate in cooperation in non-uniformed consultants to deal with public disturbances that cannot be adequately addressed by non-uniformed personnel.  Moreover, cooperation with non-uniformed consultants will offer to uniformed police new and better resources for surveillance and collection of intelligence on criminal activities within neighborhoods, better enabling police to handle organized crime and other endemic problems.  Finally, uniformed law enforcement components would constitute a logical point of contact and coordination between upper level law enforcement authorities (e.g. state police, FBI and other federal authorities) and non-uniformed community consultants to manage larger law enforcement strategies and effectively ensure a flow of information/intelligence.  Succintly, the point is not to eliminate traditional police forces in the present-day conception but to truncate the range of things that traditional uniformed police do in order to enhance their effectiveness in a law enforcement model that places new stress on the role of non-uniformed community mediators. 
             As an organizational and fiscal matter, if traditional uniformed police were to become more specialized in a range of duties that did not require continuous day-to-day involvement/interaction with the community outside of contact with non-uniformed consultants, then I would expect that the scale of uniformed components within local police departments would be diminished.  Again, if we are replacing the "beat patrolman" with a non-uniformed, unarmed community mediator, then we would be replacing existing patrolman positions with a smaller number of detective positions, specialized "SWAT"-type units (assuming a role would still exist for the latter and local forces cannot be substituted for, say, state-level resources), and available responders to a diminished range of situations in which armed officers would be indispensible (e.g. addressing organized criminal activity).     
           To conclude this section, the realization of such changes to law enforcement is fundamentally predicated on the transformation/democratization of local government and control/direction over law enforcement authorities.  If local communities do not possess the substantive electoral means to legislate the character of municipal government, including the organization and doctrinal policies of police departments, then we will never realize a transition to new law enforcement models of a more community-centric form.  Emphatically, enhancement of the democratic process is at the heart of what I have offered in this section, and, in communities like Ferguson, it seems that a deficit in democratic control by the African-American community over the direction and organization of the municipal government coincides with its mismatch against a police department whose organization is ill suited to the needs of the community.  In the end, beyond asserting the need for an alternative, community-centric model of policing, the deeper problem for Ferguson remains in articulating the meaning and purpose of community and translating this articulation into the demand for a revolutionary democratic transformation of municipal government and law enforcement consistent with its needs. 
            
             

Sadly Trapped Again on a Theme: Failure to Indict New York Police Officers Involved in the Death of Eric Garner

For the second time in two weeks, a grand jury failed to serve an indictment against police officers involved in the death of an unarmed African-American man.  On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner, a 43 year old African-American male who had been previously arrested and charged with selling untaxed cigarettes among other charges, was approached by a plain-clothes New York police officer in front of a private business in Garner's neighborhood on Staten Island, New York City.  On being approached, Garner became hostile, swatting at the arms of officers attempting to subdue him and demanding that they leave him alone.  One officer, Daniel Pantaleo, got behind Garner and attempted to subdue him by applying a chokehold around Garner's neck.  Together with the other officers on scene, Pantaleo managed to force Garner onto the ground, face down, enabling other officers to force his arms behind his back to apply handcuffs, while Garner pleaded to the officers that he could not breath.  Garner's asphyxiation at the hands of Pantaleo, aggravating an underlying asthmatic respiratory condition and heart problems complicated by obesity, induced cardiac arrest, leading to Garner's death.  The entire incident, moreover, was video taped and the video was publicized online (see "(Full) Black Man KILLED After NYPD Cop Puts Him in a CHOKEHOLD For Breaking Up a FIGHT," at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1ka4oKu1jo). 
         One issue appears critical in regard to this incident: the New York Police Department has apparently maintained a policy since 1993 banning the use of chokeholds by officers attempting to subdue suspects resisting arrest.  Under the particular circumstances of the incidents, it seems likely that Officer Pantaleo evaluated the situation, including the physical size of Mr. Garner, at 6'3'' and 350 lbs., and concluded that some measure to incapacitate Mr. Garner would be required if he was going to be apprehended without bringing physical harm to either his fellow officers or Garner.  On its face, it seems improbable that Pantaleo was attempting to create a set of circumstances in which Garner might suffer cardiac arrest.  On the other hand, whether or not Pantaleo's intentions were innocuous, the fact remains that he employed a incapacitation technique that was prohibited by the New York Police Department, I presume, for the very reason that its use might lead to precisely the sort of situation in which asphyxiation of a suspect under a chokehold might lead to the suspect's death, as it did here.  At the very least, Officer Pantaleo must face departmental reprimand, if not outright dismissal, for grossly violating operating instructions mandated by the New York Police Department and, as a result, contributing to the death of a suspect in his custody.
        On the other hand, a violation of departmental operating instructions is not equivalent to a criminal violation, subject to indictment and prosecution.  If, to some extent, police officers deserve some greater deference against criminal prosecution for their actions if their actions lead to the involuntary death of a suspect, then the grand jury should have attached some significance on the fact that the use of a chokehold violated departmental procedures intended to protect the lives of unarmed suspects subdued by officers.  It would seem that the grand jury must have concluded that any effort to subdue Mr. Garner would have endangered his life in view of his underlying health conditions, even if Pantaleo and his colleagues had strictly followed departmental procedures.  As such, the critical consideration for the grand jury was the fact that Mr. Garner was asthmatic and suffered from various precipitating conditions for heart disease.  Had the onus been placed on Officer Pantaleo's use of a prohibited incapacitation technique, then, I presume, it would have been much more likely that he would have been indicted for involuntary manslaughter, against which New York prosecutors would have been compelled to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Office Pantaleo inadvertently and negligently created circumstances in which Mr. Garner's life would have been placed in danger. 
        Again, however, the larger issue here, as in the case of Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri, concerns the particular methodologies used by law enforcement authorities in interacting with minority communities.  A broader reconsideration of the organization and operations of police forces, as they relate to African-American, Hispanic, and other communities is needed here.  That is to say, if, at a facial level, grand juries in St. Louis and New York City made the right calls in adjudicating the circumstances involved in the deaths of two African-American suspects, then it reveals the extent to which the larger problem evident in the relationships between majority White police forces and majority Black neighborhood communities transcends individual incidents.  It demands revolutionary change that will, first, transform the resources that police forces can utilize to interact with non-White communities in enforcing law and, second, transform the nature of democratic control utilized by local communities over police departments to ensure that the use of police power will continuously support and advance the interests of community as a whole, not to the exclusion of low income or racially defined groups.     

The Rams Should NOT Apologize to the St. Louis County Police Department

I still have to complete the larger argument in my previous post (see "The Battle of Ferguson" at: http://boycottcorporatemedia.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-battle-of-ferguson.html), but this very brief post simply stands to make the argument that the St. Louis Rams organization need not apologize for the actions of certain of its players, standing in solidarity with the African-American community of nearby Ferguson by emerging from their locker room conveying the same "hands up, don't shoot" protest against police uttered in Ferguson.  More emphatically, many, many more professional athletes in the U.S. should, I hope, stand in solidarity with the local communities around which they stand, afflicted by violence inflicted by civil law enforcement authorities.  Rather than concede that violence against African-American, Hispanic, and other minority communities at the hands of overwhelmingly White police forces is simply a matter of fact, a handful of Rams players on Sunday declared that it was a matter of political debate and deliberation.  This is as it should be and, should the Rams' organization choose to make an example of the players who acted in solidarity with Ferguson, then they should be boycotted!  It is critical, at this volatile moment in U.S. history, that we, as a population, enter into debate on the status of non-White minority groups, particularly in relation to criminal justice/law enforcement practices.  To this extent, I stand with those members of the Rams and with all other professional athletes that choose to make the argument that what is happening in Ferguson and in many other communities in the U.S. is not right and needs desperately to be remedied in the name of democracy and justice for non-White minorities against the racial prejudices of those in power and those who have conferred on them the authority to legislate and administer laws in a manner that disproportionately impacts minority communities. 

The Battle of Ferguson I

This post seeks to address what I consider to be the inevitable consequences of the development of racially driven animosities between the African-American community in Ferguson, Missouri and municipal authorities within the St. Louis suburb, originating with the shooting death of Michael Brown, an African-American teenager, by a police officer, Darren Wilson, on August 9, 2014.  In the past week, the governor of Missouri has mobilized National Guard forces to deal with potential violence arising in the aftermath of an expected grand jury decision on the possible indictment of Officer Wilson on charges related to the shooting of Mr. Brown.  Emphatically, I would consider a violent reaction in Ferguson to the legal process in this case to be entirely inevitable (and completely tragic), hence the title of this post.  Such a reaction will reflect not merely the relative disempowerment of a majority African-American community in Ferguson in regard to the organization and operations of the municipality's police force but also a broader sensibility of racial disempowerment in regard to the criminal justice process, as it impacts African-Americans, across the U.S.  The array of issues involved here is far too broad for me to adequately address in a single post.  However, I want to advance a short set of propositions here that I hope will convey both my limited understanding of the stakes involved in the battle of Ferguson, my disappointment with the direction that this struggle between a community and its police force has taken since August, and my hopes that something truly revolutionary will emerge from what is currently taking place.  Succinctly, it is my position that the underlying issues in the conflict over Michael Brown's death at the hands of a police officer can only be adequately resolved through a radical transformation in the organizational and procedural theories governing law enforcement processes in the U.S., in particular, on the professionalization of police departments.

1.  The grand jury deliberations on the actions of Officer Wilson need to adhere rigorously to legal standards for the state of Missouri on the criminal culpability of police officers in relation to the use of deadly force while on duty, accounting for the potential threat posed to Officer Wilson's life at the hands of Mr. Brown.  As such, it is critical that the potential for violent reaction within the African-American community of Ferguson not enter into these deliberations, in order to prejudicially bias the findings of the grand jury against a decision that Officer Wilson was not criminally liable for the death of Mr. Brown.
The point here is that Officer Wilson needs to be accorded the full Constitutional privilege, as a U.S. citizen, of an impartial hearing to determine whether his actions were both proper in relation to police procedures on the use of deadly force and, assuming they were not, whether his actions satisfy conditions for the issuance of an indictment for manslaughter, murder, or some other criminal offense for pursuit by prosecutors in St. Louis County.  At stake here are the procedural due process privileges enjoyed by Officer Wilson, against which the eventual reactions that might occur in Ferguson have absolutely no bearing.  This conclusion subsumes two separate arguments.  First, legal inquiries into possible criminal violations of the law must rigorously adhere, on the one hand, to the outlines of the law and its definitive conditions for identifying the commission of a crime and, on the other hand, the detailed evidence regarding the particular act under consideration for the issuance of a criminal indictment.  In these circumstances, ex ante considerations on the potential outcomes of a criminal indictment or the failure to issue a criminal indictment are emphatically not pertinent.  Second, the issues inciting civil disturbances in Ferguson since August are strictly irreducible to the actions committed by Officer Wilson on August 9.  Whatever actually happened to Michael Brown at the hands of Officer Wilson, it seems clear that a problem exists in the relationship between African-American communities across the U.S. and the American law enforcement community that will not be resolved by a criminal indictment against Officer Wilson.  The death of Michael Brown, an African-American teenager in a majority African-American community at the hands of a White police officer in a majority White police department, is symptomatic of a much larger problem demanding a radical solution that cannot emerge from the deliberations of a grand jury.  Acknowledging these arguments does not suggest, one way or the other, that Officer Wilson meticulously followed proper police procedures in the use of deadly force in defense of his life.  Rather, it suggests that nothing will be solved, one way or the other, if the deliberations on the fate of Officer Wilson are not perfectly fair and unbiased by considerations on the maintenance of the peace in Ferguson. 

2.  Accounting for not only the outcome of grand jury deliberations but also the potential outcome of the full criminal justice process (trial, determination of guilt, sentencing) for Officer Wilson and the likelihood that, at any stage, the hopes of the African-American community in Ferguson for justice/retribution will be derailed, it is inevitable that, at some point, a violent reaction will again occur in Ferguson and, possible, in other African-American communities elsewhere in the U.S. 
How many generations of Americans have to witness at least one major outburst of extreme urban racial violence before we recognize that, in all its complexity, we have not resolved the problem of racialism, as a foundational attribute in American culture?  As a nation, we have a long history of race riots, not limited to the extreme incidents of urban violence occurring in the late 1960s (e.g. the Newark riots of 1967) or the Los Angeles riots of 1992 after the Rodney King beatings by Los Angeles police.  Both the Newark riots of 1967 and the 1992 Los Angeles riots arose in response to actions by police.  It might, thus, be easy to generalize the source of urban violence as a response to the repressive actions of the state against African-Americans.  In my opinion, such a generalization would be inadequate in representing the broader significance of racialism, as a culturally-propagated reduction of social differentiations to intra-species genotypic diversities, to the entire course of U.S. history.  In certain respects, we need to approach the progress of American racialism with a degree of Hegelian sophistication in comprehending the extent to which our sensibilities toward race have transformed themselves into a conviction that we, as a nation, should divorce ourselves from racialism, developing a consciousness that recognizes itself in opposition/negation of race.  In this manner, identifications with a racially blind society obscure identifications with unambiguous racial groupings as the same racial groupings unconsciously determine diverse economic and political policy decisions within government and everyday life.  (That is, we have convinced ourselves not to see our noses as plainly as our faces in recognizing that racial differentiations determine political and economic outcomes on a wide scale within the U.S. even as we try to convince ourselves that race does not matter because we've passed a few pieces of legislation to deal with it.) 
              There will be new riots in Ferguson, and the rest of the country will continue to ask why, if only because, like a continuously suppressed/forgotten nightmare, we continue to fail to recognize the unbearable consequences of our racially defined national origins.  Fundamentally, these new riots will continue to seek to address an undiscovered realization that African-Americans in the U.S. are being subjected to an endless reiteration of second-class citizenship, intertwined, since the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, in a perception that the success of Blacks depends on governmental assistance/affirmative action/quotas.  Thus, African-Americans have gone from a state of active discrimination to a state of perpetual dependency on the state against discrimination, accompanied by a conviction among White Americans that such protections constitute excessive and unnecessary protective measures operating to their detriment (i.e. "reverse discrimination"!).  I succinctly question the possibilities for emergence from this fatal loop of characterizations as long as we continue to regard racial differentiations as a subject for necessary state remediation.  That is to say, the fact that the state must remediate racially based discriminatory actions creates a sensibility that the state will remediate racial discrimination, generating new manifestations of racial discrimination that the state must remediate. 
             In the context of criminal justice practices, this interprets itself as a continuous reiteration of discriminatory policies that must be remediated by judicial precedence, only to be recreated under the particular specifications of new adjudical policy, to be once again challenged by defenders of judicial equality, accounting for race.  Thus, criminal "profiling" by police based on the racial characteristics of individuals, as a maligned standard practice in law enforcment, has raised legal and Constitutional issues in relation to individual protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by police under the Fourth and (through selective incorporation) Fourteenth Amendments.  And yet, to the extent that the particular circumstances involved in certain actions by police have supported the use of racial characteristics as a tool in mitigating criminal activities, particularly in regard to gang activity in association with the drug trade, the Federal judiciary has carved holes into individual protections in order to preserve the ability of local police departments to stop and detain particular individuals without warrant or evidence of criminal activity based on characterizations with emphatic racial components (see Jody Feder, "Racial Profiling: Legal and Constitutional Issues," Congressional Research Service, 16 April 2012, at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL31130.pdf).
           Concluding, the larger problem here is that police practices, emerging from a national cultural context that is immersed in racialism, contain explicit racial components that can only be meaningfully challenged through a foundational reexamination of racialism in American culture.  The validity of racial profiling as a tool in law enforcement, thus, can only be adequately evaluated when we have acknowledged that the racially-reductive common-sense of American culture is an insurmountable frame of reference.   When African-American residents of Ferguson plead for an indictment of Officer Wilson as a prerequisite in the state's recognition of Michael Brown's humanity and the expectation that Michael Brown should have been afforded basic liberties and privileges as an American citizen against the arbitrary actions of law enforcment officials, they are invariably issuing arguments in a cultural millieux in which their racial positionalities, that of Michael Brown, and that of Officer Wilson assume an exaggerated importance.  Implictly, to the extent that justice for the African-American community of Ferguson (and elsewhere) would only be served by Officer Wilson's indictment and criminal prosecution, what we are confronting here is a differentiation between "Black justice" and "White justice" (i.e. the exoneration of a (White) police office who properly exercised the use of deadly force when his life was endangered in the course of exercising his legally prescribed duties).  The fact that these two conceptions are distinct, separable, and incommensurably at odds in a zero-sum manner reflects the manner in which American racialism overdetermines the terms of the confrontation and the necessity that racialist conceptions are obscured by an ideological commitment to racial neutrality.  In this sense, the recurrance of urban violence in Ferguson reflects the deeper frustration of the community and of African-Americans in general that racialism is not being actively confronted in American culture. 


           
            

More on the November Elections in the Massachusetts Commonwealth

My previous post on this subject constituted, in part, a prediction of the electoral results on November 4, but it was getting late when I wrote it, so I never got very far (although my predictions proved true).  Writing now on certain of the other results, now that we have a complete portrait of what passed (as far as ballot referenda) and what didn't, I can make some much more definitive statements:

1.  The passage of ballot question 1, invalidating automatic increases of the gasoline tax in the Commonwealth against the rate of inflation, measured (I presume) by the Consumer Price Index, will be detrimental to public investments in transportation infrastructure.  As a long term matter in the relationship between private capital investment and maintenance of transportation infrastructure conforming to the needs of industry in the Commonwealth, the passage of question 1 will no doubt negatively impact economic growth in Massachusetts in ways that will not be offset by any savings to consumers and businesses from maintaining the potential for lower gasoline taxes.  It is important to note just what ballot referendum question 1 actually means now that it is law.  It does not change the current gas tax in the Commonwealth (approximately 42 cents per gallon of gasoline).  Nor does it mandate that the General Court of the Commonwealth (i.e. our bicameral state legislature) shall not pass new increases in the gasoline tax.  Rather, it invalidates a process, previously passed by the legislature, intended to increase the absolute value of the tax per gallon of gasoline automatically as a function of changes in price inflation, measured, I believe, by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index.  With this in mind, the Commonwealth has a significant backlog of transportation infrastructure projects requiring the attention of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation (DOT).  Each of these projects will strain the resources available to the Mass. DOT, from the gas tax and from distributions out of the General Fund of the Commonwealth not otherwise earmarked for transportation expenditures.  Apparently the Patrick administration entered in 2009 facing over 600 bridges with significant structure deficiencies requiring the attention of state transportation officials.  Over its time in office, the administration successfully remediated approximately 150 of these structurally deficient bridges, including the Pearl Harbor Veterans Memorial Bridge over the mouth of the Connecticut River Oxbow separating Northampton from Easthampton that I ride over at least four times a week by bus.  At present, at least one bridge over the Connecticut down river in Holyoke (connecting the Holyoke Flats to the Chicopee neighborhood of Willamansett along route 116) remains closed by catastrophic structural deficiencies and an apparent paucity of state funds necessary to effect a repair/reconstruction of the bridge.  In this manner, over 450 structurally deficient bridges remain in Massachusetts, a bluer than blue Democratic state frequently (and erroneously) labeled "Taxachusetts."  This situation should be unacceptable, except to individuals who do not live in either of the low income neighborhoods that frequently utilized the bridge in Holyoke and, as such, who would prefer to pay less in taxes every time they go to the pump to fill up on what remains, on a global scale, relatively inexpensive gasoline.  Acknowledging that expressed legislative increases in the gasoline tax by the General Court remains an option to restore necessary funds that might have been generated through automatic gas tax increases, several problems arise from an incremental legislative approach.  Most notably, the Democratic majority legislature is now confronting an incoming Republican gubernatorial administration, committed to restraining the legislature in its efforts to raise new revenues for the Commonwealth through taxation.  It is likely that any effort to incrementally increase the gasoline tax to pay for road repairs would have to overcome a veto from Governor Baker by means of a two-thirds majority in both houses.  Even before we arrive at this point, however, it is certain that legislative initiatives to raise the gasoline tax would be met by challenges by consumer and business lobby groups, seeking to maintain an atmosphere conducive to robust contemporary consumer spending, even at the expense of passing on massive bills for transportation repairs to future administrations.  It goes without saying, I think the passage of question 1, a referendum question that I felt certain would pass, represents another episode in the irresponsibility of a short-sighted electorate in directing the government of the Commonwealth on fiscal policy - if we want roads and if roads are important to future economic development when the absence of good roads becomes a hindrance to investment in the manufacture and transhipment of goods, then, as citizens, we have to develop mechanisms to pay for their construction, repair, and general maintenance!  In this respect, we, citizens of the Commonwealth, collectively dropped the ball in approving this referendum question rather than permitting a thoroughly sensible policy on the regulation of gasoline taxes in the Commonwealth to stand. 

2.  I remain indifferent on the failure to pass ballot question 2, instituting a 5 cent deposit on plastic bottled water and juice containers, notwithstanding the fact that I voted in favor of passage.  The proponents of the question, in my view, made a compelling argument that large proportions of these classes of plastic containers continue to make it into the non-recycled waste stream even with the availability of curbside recycling in most Massachusetts communities.  On the other hand, as someone employed in retail trade, the complications that an expansion of the range of products carrying a deposit requirement might have produced seem to suggest that it would be better to devise solutions to the problem of plastic bottle disposal into the waste stream through the management of recycling processes by municipalities.  Emphatically, I truly did not care one way or the other as to whether this question had passed or not.  I voted in favor simply because arguments made by supporters of the question that a majority of plastic containers for bottled water continues to find its way into the waste stream, terminating at landfills, seemed compelling to me.  I am not a strong environmentalist - environmental maintenance is not my main issue in walking into a voting booth.  However, I can understand the motivations behind supporters of the proposal and the passion with which they advocate for changes in the law that might succeed in making even small changes to the management of wastes and recyclable materials.  The other side on this question, represented most strongly by major retailers who did not want to see the impact of increasing the cost of bottled water and juices on their sales of these products, made a compelling and well financed case to voters that the passage of the question would increase the costs to consumers for purchasing bottled water and juice and that it might conceivably open the door to inclusion of other recyclable containers under the bottle bill.  In the end, as with question 1, cost considerations to consumers won the day.  The other piece in this debate over the expansion of the Massachusetts bottle bill involved the availability of curbside recycling in most municipalities in the state.  It is, likewise, the case that municipalities derive a small quantity of revenues from the sale of recyclable materials to processers, who thereafter convert used plastic bottles into synthetic fleece and other products.  Fundamentally, the debate over question 2 could have resolved itself into a choice in public policy between two distinct models of recycling of a discrete range of plastic containers.  If curbside recycling is failing to recover a significant percentage of the plastic water and juice containers in the Commonwealth, then maybe there are things that can be done to increase the utilization of curbside recycling to shift more plastic out of the waste stream.  Moreover, maybe more can be done at progressive stages in waste processing to ensure that recyclables get extracted - private waste processers like Waste Management seem to be enhancing their own profits by extracting wastes that can be renewed in other supply chains.  As such, I am not highly concerned with the failure to pass question 2.  Environmentalists in the Commonwealth are right to pursue this existing problem of inadequacies in recycling of plastic containers, but we need a more innovative and, perhaps, a profit/revenue generating approach to realize a solution. 

3.  In the intermediate term, the failure to pass question 3, banning casino gaming in the Commonwealth, will be an unmitigated disaster for Massachusetts.  Casino gaming will, above all, promote a redistribution of gambling dollars away from the Massachusetts state lottery, an important source of local funding for municipalities, and toward corporations located outside of the Commonwealth - a redistribution that will absolutely not be counterbalanced by mandatory payments from casino operators to the state government and municipalities, at least in the intermediate term.  In the long term, however, such a redistribution may not matter, once casino operators in Massachusetts succumb to the inadequate scale of the New England market for gambling - I find it difficult to believe that a majority of the Massachusetts gaming facilities heretofore licensed by the Massachusetts Gaming Commission will survive a decade in operation within the New England market.  The casino question in Massachusetts is far too complicated for me to encapsulate the terms of the debate that raged until November 4, when a majority of the electorate that cast votes chose to maintain an expanded gaming law, passed by the General Court in 2010, that provided for the licensing of three resort casinos (one for metropolitan Boston, one for Western Massachusetts, one for Southeastern Massachusetts) and one slot parlor.  Question 3, if it had been passed, would have invalidated the extended gaming law, after a range of potential casino operators had paid fees of $400,000 apiece to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission for initial consideration of their proposals and after three casino licenses had been granted by the Gaming Commission (to MGM Resorts International for development of a resort casino in the south end neighborhood of Springfield, to Penn National Gaming Inc. for a slot parlor (no table games) in Plainville, and to Wynn Resorts for development of a resort casino on a brownfield industrial site in Everett in the Boston suburbs).  It is worth noting that the supporters of question 3 undertook a significant struggle just to get the referendum included on the ballot in which Massachusetts Attorney General and unsuccessful Democratic gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley had ruled that the question could not even appear on the ballot because its provisions would constitute an illegal uncompensated seizure of the property of potential casino operators if it had passed.  I will save comments on this challenge and the legal process that supporters had to go through in order to get question 3 on the ballot for a subsequent elaboration on this post.  It suffices to say that supporters, in the run up to the election, expended $650,000 in support of the invalidation of the Expanded Gaming Act, while potential casino operators and their supporters expended over $14 million to explain, in television commercials that bombarded voters across the Commonwealth, how the passage of question 3 would cost Massachusetts communities thousands of jobs anticipated in the construction process and in the subsequent staffing of casinos, stiffling the hopes of the communities hosting a potential casino operator.  Thus, a majority (59 percent) of Massachusetts voters were sold on the idea that casino gaming was the best possible scheme to achieve rapid and sustained job growth in a handful of communities ravaged by unemployment and, in Everett's case, ecological devastation (Wynn has pledged to spend millions of dollars to rehabilitate the industrially polluted land on which it has been permitted to construct its casino resort(!?)). 
           The consequences of question 3's failure are worth significant consideration.  Being the sort of economist who wants to mount an inquiry on multiple timeframes to ponder the particular ways in which a given economic policy or development is going to impact a macroeconomic system over time, it seems likely that all of the communities that have been granted casino licenses will enjoy strong near term (1-3 years) job growth by virtue of employment growth in the construction trades.  Likewise, the government of the Commonwealth, the specific communities within which casinos are to be located, and certain surrounding communities that have negotiated future compensatory payments from casino operators or have been granted compensatory payments through arbitration will enjoy a stream of payments from future casino operators as agreed upon under the terms of the Expanded Gaming Law and the particular terms of licenses granted by the Gaming Commission.  Finally, until the casinos and slot parlors actually go on line, Massachusetts is not going to witness any effect on revenues generated by the state lottery, the distributions from which go overwhelmingly to municipalities as local funding.  In the near term, I, therefore, accept that this is going to be an economic boon for the Commonwealth.
            The part that concerns me regards what I am going to label the intermediate term (4-10 years).  Once the casinos come on line, the state lottery will, indisputably, begin to take a hit that it has not sustained from the Connecticut tribal casinos that have operated since the early 1990s for the simple reason that these casinos have not been here.  Proximity to potential patrons, especially low income ones, that have heretofore been less likely to spend money on a sustained frequency in Connecticut casinos will immediately place a strain on lottery revenues in casino communities, because casino gaming and lottery gambling are certainly substitute goods when the casino is in your immediate vicinity.  There is no way that lottery revenues as a whole, throughout the Commonwealth, are not going to be diminished, and this diminution is going to impact every community in the Commonwealth by virtue of the particular distributional formulas for local funding from the lottery.  As a result, the presence of casinos will place a strain on municipal budgets throughout the Commonwealth, not specifically for the reasons cited by casino opponents (e.g. increases in criminal activity and public expenditures to deal with compulsive gambling) but simply because municipalities are not going to see the same level of locally earmarked lottery funding.  The reductions in local funding that this will entail will certainly be felt in educational assistance to offset deficiencies in property tax revenues in municipalities like Springfield, which, not incidentally, will enjoy the prospect of revenues to be paid by MGM contingent to host community agreement (see "Concise Summary of Host Community Agreement," at: http://www3.springfield-ma.gov/planning/fileadmin/Planning_files/CONCISE_SUMMARY_OF_HCA_FOR_VOTERS_EMP__5_16_13_FINAL2.pdf)
with the city. 
          On the other hand, revenues paid by casino operators, like every other form of governmental revenue extracted from the revenues of private enterprise, is contingent on the profitability of the enterprises.  If the casino that MGM plans to construct in Springfield is not profitable, then how is it possible that Springfield and surrounding communities with whom MGM has reached agreement on payments for mitigation of the negative impacts from casino development will see the millions of dollars promised by MGM?  The host community agreement approved by voters in Springfield in 2013, for example, includes calculations for variable projected annual payments to the city from estimated "gross gaming revenues (GGR)" by the MGM resort casino of $479,500,000(?!).  If a figure like this does not raise at least an eyebrow, then it should!  The only thing Springfield can absolutely be certain of is that MGM is going to bleed low income populations in the North End, South End, Mason Square, Pine Point, McKnight, and Forest Park neighborhoods white and then go looking for easy pickings from low income populations in West Springfield, Chicopee, and Holyoke on the promise of easy money for the taking from populations that have no business whatsoever throwing whatever incomes they have away to billionaires from Las Vegas!  Beyond its first year in operation, I find it distinctly unlikely that a Springfield casino will draw heavily from Vermont and/or New Hampshire.  Nor do I think it is likely that it will draw heavily for very long from either northern Connecticut or Worcester County.  The patrons of a Springfield casino will come overwhelmingly from the Massachusetts I-91 corridor (Hamden, Hampshire, Franklin Counties) and secondarily from Berkshire County.  In the event that New York begins licensing casino operators for the Catskills or Taconic Parkway areas, the patronage of Berkshire County gamblers may, further, become contested.  Such a population is not adequate to make Springfield a vibrant, exciting casino resort destination.  In fact, I think it is still open to question whether MGM ever actually opens up a casino in Springfield, provided the tepid economic recovery currently happening in the U.S. sputters to a halt with some major international financial slowdown or shock in the next two years, something that I think is quite possible. 
             Whatever actually happens in Springfield and in the rest of Massachusetts over the next three to five years, I think that it is certain that opening up two to three resort casinos (a third casino resort, possibly to be operated by the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe if it can maintain a federal claim to tribal status and the right to operate a gaming facility in southeastern Massachusetts may also be licensed as well by the Gaming Commission, but I am not entirely clear on the status of the Commonwealth's negotiations with the tribe) plus a large slot parlor in Massachusetts is going to place extreme stress on the base of demand for gaming facilities in New England.  As it stands, I find it improbable that the Narragansett Twin River Casino in Rhode Island (which is, if memory serves, just a slot parlor plus non-gaming attractions and shopping) will survive more than two years of competition with the Penn National slot parlor located strategically on the I-95/I-495 corridor between Boston and Providence, to say nothing of the Wynn casino in Everett.  Succinctly, either the Penn National slot parlor or the Narragansett slot parlor will disappear very rapidly, because the presence of both guarantees that neither will be profitable, whether either facility survives the operation of the Wynn casino in metropolitan Boston.  In the past week, moreover, the Mohegan tribal commission (i.e. the Mohegan Sun Casino) has apparently begun discussions with both the state of Connecticut and the Mashantucket Pequot tribal commission (i.e. the Foxwoods Casino) to solicit approval and cooperation, respectively, in construction of a new gaming facility for northern Connecticut, targeting the same I-91 corridor that MGM is counting on for patrons.  In short, southern New England is succumbing to a feeding frenzy(!) among casino operators, all seeking to gobble up as much market share as they can from a regional market that is admittedly growing but that will forever remain finite and smaller than any of the casino operators might hope.
             In such an environment, is it even possible that all of the Massachusetts casino operators will remain in operation long enough to see a positive rate of return on their investments?  Pursuing the contours of my larger argument in this short set of comments, my answer is no.  MGM, most certainly, is not going to survive a decade in Springfield - its potential market area is too small and not wealthy enough to enable MGM to capitalize on an overly exuberant initial investment.  Both Penn National and Twin River will succumb to the combined force of competition with Wynn and the southeastern Connecticut tribal casino complex (the only reason up until now that Twin River has not been competed out of business by Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun is its relatively proximity to both the Providence and Boston markets - when Wynn goes in, Twin River goes down!).  The Connecticut tribal casinos will certainly lose market share, but their relative proximity to Hartford and New Haven, to say nothing of the New York metropolitan region, will help them preserve a diminished first mover advantage into the New England market.  If they construct a facility in northern Connecticut, however, they will create pointless competition for their existing facilities that will never generate a meaningful rate of return, even after MGM finally throws in the towel on Springfield.  In this environment, I cannot see what would be gained for the Mashpee Wampanoags if they were to get approval from the Commonwealth to build a casino resort facility in Taunton.  Such a market area would draw a tiny clientele that would never generate meaningful returns for the tribe in relation to the necessary investment to create a facility that would command at least some attention from gamblers in Boston and Providence.  In the end, the only prospective casino project that would appear to be of any value and genuinely profitable is that of the Wynn corporation in Everett.      
            With all these considerations in mind, in the long run (10+ years), maybe lottery revenues in certain parts of the Commonwealth, like Springfield, will begin to recover somewhat from the mess that supporters of casino gaming and casino operators will have placed them in.  In any case, I am confident that another empty big glass building will decorate the Springfield skyline where once stood the hope and dream of 3,000 jobs for local residents and $26 million in annual revenues flowing into the coffers of the city and its neighbors.  The coming casino debacle in Massachusetts will leave communities like Springfield once more with the interminable quandry of how to achieve durable economic development.  Perhaps, after the casino is gone, they will come up with the answer!    

4.  Of all the ballot questions, the passage of question 4, mandating paid sick leave of up to forty hours per year for paid employees of businesses with more than eleven full-time-equivalent employees in the Commonwealth, was most heartening to me.  While other conceivable mechanisms exist to make the imposition of a sick leave requirement on small businesses less onerous, the basic introduction of a paid sick leave privileges for workers represents a step forward in the maintenance of public health standards, especially in medical, food service, and retail food industries.  I work at a business that sells food products, particular meats.  Until the passage of question 4, I have never had paid sick leave at my job.  While the details on the enforcement of question 4 remain somewhat open, in my understanding, I am hopeful that, for those two or three days out of the year when I am feeling like death warmed over, I may have the opportunity to call in sick with the expectation that I will still be paid for the day.  The passage of this ballot initiative struck me, more than for any of the other questions, as a matter of common sense (not that, given my pedegree as a post-structuralist/post-modernist Marxian theorist, I should believe in common sense) - if only for reasons of public health, it is a bad thing to place workers in industries like retail food trades, food services, and medical services (especially personal care assistants and other low skilled medical aids that often lack such benefits) in a position where they must work even if they are sick and possibly contagious from an infection like influenza.  Having said this, there are obvious problems with a mandate of paid sick leave for workers in many small businesses.  Any intervention by government into the workings of labor markets to create costly new benefits for employees places stress on the revenues of small businesses, particularly in industries with relatively small margins of profitability.  To articulate the argument from a Marxian perspective, the law will create new mandatory distributive claims on the mass of surplus values appropriated by small capitalist entrepreneurs, not compensated by the labor of sick employees.  In view of this circumstance, it is certain that at least some small and medium scale employers will seek diverse legal avenues to divest themselves of the need to provide paid sick leave.  Chief among such approaches is the reclassification of employees as independent contractors, ineligible for mandatory benefits otherwise available to employees.  On the other hand, in cases where employers have done their best to follow the letter of the law in providing paid sick leave, there will certainly be cases of abuse by employees, taking days off after nights of heavy drinking or other irresponsible jestures, committed in the knowledge that paid sick leave is a mandatory benefit.  When I first started discussing question 4 with my coworkers at the store (to say nothing about my employers), their reaction was to reiterate the argument that too many people would abuse paid sick leave at the expense of employers trying to do their best to survive an endless stream of onerous and costly labor market mandates by the Commonwealth. 
             These arguments deserve serious appraisal.  In general, it is worth considering how a benefit like paid sick leave can be confered on employees in the Commonwealth without placing the cost entirely on the backs of employers, thus making Massachusetts a still less "business friendly" environment.  I do not personally have a complete answer for this question, but it would seem worthwhile to consider methods to compensate businesses of a certain scale of operation (i.e. based on annual revenues) for provision of paid sick leave through the tax code.  Until such a remedial measure is implemented, the margin of support for question 4 (61 percent in favor of paid sick leave) suggests that the public health benefits of enabling employees to claim sick days as a privilege of employment in the Commonwealth seems to strike a chord for fairness with the electorate, however imperfect any effort by the state to intervene in labor market institutions actual is. 

5.  The struggle by supporters of ballot question 3 to satisfy the requirements for consideration by voters highlights the fact that Massachusetts needs a more open process for certification of ballot referenda in order to facilitate a wider range of legislative and constitutional initiatives by direct approval by the electorate as a sovereign democratic polity.  In this sense, I adamantly oppose the perspective that the presence of ballot referenda, per se, to augment or directly oppose legislative or constitutional enactments of the state legislature represents a failure of the democratic process in the Commonwealth.  The issue at stake here is the definition of democracy and its relationship to governmental institutions and, in particular, the exercise of the legislative capacity of representative government.  Emphatically, in my view, democracy is simply not a form of government per se, in the sense of an organizational framework and a formalized set of relationships between private individuals/citizens and governmental entities.  Democracy is a philosophy of collective self-governance, bound up with a continuous active sense of belonging between individual citizens in the collectivity within which they are sovereign.  To whatever extent it may be favorable for democratic citizens to establish a government, as a dependent intermediary continuously subject to the will of the sovereign, such an institution is grafted onto the existence of a democratic sovereign.  That is to say, governments are established to accomplish administrative and legislative functions that might be onerous for the democratic sovereign to accomplish insofar as the sovereign is the collectivity (i.e. all of the citizens, committed to the recognition that their collective will to self-government, in the absence of any institution of the state, is the highest law), and it may be difficult to convene the sovereign every time we need to ask what the schedule will be for garbage collection or whether peanuts should be excluded from school lunches in deference to the existence of peanut allergies among school children.  The fact that delegating everyday tasks and even more complex matters with long term consequences for citizens is convenient never transforms the institution of formal government into a delegation of sovereignty by which citizens become subjects of a sovereign government.  That is to say, just because we elect legislators to enact legislation is our best interest, that does not mean that a legislature ever enjoys a status of sovereign - it exists at the pleasure of the collective body of citizens who retain the right, as sovereign, to amend or abolish the actions undertaken by government or even to abolish the government per se.  The sovereign continuously stands over government. 
              Having taken a detour into classic Rousseauean civic republican thought, if the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is to maintain its existence as a democracy, constituted not by the institution of its government but by the continuously renewed collectivity of its citizens as a sovereign body underlying the government and conferring legitimacy on its actions, then, beyond the basic requisite of representative government through electoral processes, democracy demands that citizens retain a collective mechanism to act as the sovereign over government in relation to particular areas of policy.  The citizens of the Commonwealth need particular formal mechanisms through which we, as a collective body, can issue commands to the government on particular policies and expect to be obeyed.  Succinctly, this is my rationale for arguing the legitimacy of the referendum process and, further, for arguing that the process needs to be amended in order to make it easier for groups of citizens in the Commonwealth to place referenda on the ballot and to, effectively, govern over the government on particular designated areas of policy.  If we could not do so, then Massachusetts would cease to be a democracy and the government of the Commonwealth would cease to command its particular rationale for existence through its connection to the collective body of citizens as sovereign.  To argue, thus, that the referendum process is, in some way, a mere remedial instrument, on the books only to correct gross failures on the part of the General Court to legislate in the interests of citizens on a particular area of policy, amounts to an impoverishment in the conception of the democratic process in Massachusetts (for an example of this perspective, see: "Editorial: A "no" vote is best on Question 4," Springfield Republican (30 Oct. 2014), at: http://www.masslive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/10/editorial_a_no_vote_is_the_bes.html). 
           There are legitimate critiques that can and should be made in regard to the referendum process in the Commonwealth, as well as the representative electoral process.  It might be true that the drafting of referendum questions fails to adequately respect the complexity of various policy questions.  It is certainly difficult to approach particular complex issues with truncated proposals, of a circumscribed length to fit on an electoral ballot.  Likewise, the referendum process is certainly subject to all of the abuses evident in the interjection of monied interests into politics.  It is worth asking what social benefit accrued to the expenditure of $14 million by the casino gaming industry to defeat question 3.  On the other hand, the same criticism can be made about electoral politics in general - candidates for governmental offices expend steadily increasing masses of monetary resources to get elected.  The only remedies for such abuses exist in truncating the free speech privileges of individuals and corporate entities with regard to the democratic process, something that the U.S. Surpreme Court (for good or for ill) currently appears committed to preventing.  As such, I prefer to live with massive expenditures of money for and against referenda than to dispense with the referendum process altogether or subject it to even the current constraints on the use of ballot referenda as a means of enacting legislation. 
             Concluding, the struggle by the group Repeal the Casino Deal to place question 3 on the ballot is evocative of the problems that I have with the limited role exercised by ballot referenda in Massachusetts.  Specifically, having collected a threshold quantity of signatures to place a referendum on the repeal of the Expanded Gaming Act of 2010 on the 2014 ballot, Repeal the Casino Deal was forced to file a judicial appeal with the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth against the decision by Attorney General Martha Coakley that the passage of repeal to the Expanded Gaming Act would amount to an illegal taking of the property of prospective casino operators without compensation.  It succeeded in its efforts to have this decision overruled, but the fact that ballot referenda must stand up to the constitutional scrutiny of the Attorney General's office or that of the General Court implies that the very means afforded under the Massachusetts Constitution for citizens, as a collective sovereign, to legislate over their government, must submit to the sovereign authority of the Constitution itself.  Either the citizens of Massachusetts are sovereign or our Constitution is - it cannot be both.  If for no other reason, the referendum process in Massachusetts needs to be revised in order to remove such Constitutional blockages to expressions of the sovereign will of the voters.